Archive of Our Own

There’s a method to growing rhubarb called “forcing”, where it’s raised in total darkness and tended to in brief intervals of candlelight. The plant thrives only because it’s looking for an absent sun, and extends so fast you can hear the growing pains. Forcing can weaken the crop, but if done correctly, it can yield a sweeter, more desirable result.

i.

arborescer | verb

from the latin arboresco

to become a tree

The fourth time Olruggio finds out, Qifrey’s heart splinters and cracks so painfully he thinks it might finally kill him. 

Perhaps he should go back. In retrospect, he has no way of knowing why the fourth, rather than any of the other times, became any more significant than the others that preceded or followed it. Of course, each and every time he has somewhat hoped it would be the last, which, in a way, makes all of them terrible in their own right. As the years have passed, he has only ever looked upon the very first time Olruggio discovered the secret in a half light of reminiscing; maybe because they were both so young, maybe because Qifrey is still baffled by the kindness Olruggio had offered him so unthinkingly. He was a child then, Qifrey reasons. He saw a friend hurting, and wanted him to not hurt anymore; he couldn’t have known how this would be a stain that would spread like a jar of spilled ink upon their lives, and Qifrey, as a child, saw no reason to stop him, because he had figured he would not live long enough for it to matter either way.

It’s a strange way to live, but he has known no other. At each dawn of a new year’s day, he finds himself startled by it — he hadn’t known his own birthday, nor what birthdays were, really, so Beldaruit had suggested he choose a special day from the calendar, so that he could mark his growth by. Qifrey remembers pouring over the calendar in his master’s office for hours on end, not feeling kinship with any particular season or holiday.

“Master,” he’d asked, off-handedly. In the early days, Beldaruit often called to him to study in his own office instead of at the library, and it wasn’t until years later that Qifrey would understand it had been for Beldaruit’s own peace of mind more so than for Qifrey’s own comfort as he adapted to the Great Hall. It took months, Beldaruit eventually told him, for me to be able to convince myself you were not as close to dying as you had been when I first found you.

“Master,” Qifrey had asked. “How old am I?”

Beldaruit hummed, peering over the scroll he’d been pretending to read from. “The healers said you are certainly over eleven summers of age,” he’d said. “You have no primary teeth anymore, which usually happens at around twelve. If you were born by New Year’s, then you would be thirteen, now. If you were born later in the year, then you are still twelve.”

“New Year’s,” Qifrey echoed. “Can my birthday be New Year’s day?”

“Of course.” Beldaruit tilted his head curiously at him. “For witches, it’s considered an auspicious sign to be born at the beginning of anything — the first day of the year, or the first day of a season. It’s an old witch’s tale, though, and I’ve never been very superstitious. Is there any particular reason why?”

Qifrey kept his gaze fixed onto the calendar in front of him, something fluttery and warm crawling up his stomach. “Olruggio’s birthday is New Year’s Eve,” he’d muttered. “I want… it sounds nice.”

I want to be close to him, he hadn’t said. Qifrey doesn’t even know if back then he’d been able to articulate it: it had been before Olruggio had ever found out for the first time, the first tentative weeks in which the world actually felt possible to him. Even then, it had started to become clear to all around them that wherever Olruggio went Qifrey followed, and wherever Qifrey ran off to, Olruggio was never far behind. It felt fitting, in a way, to have a birthday following his — where one ended, the other began. 

It was even worth all the teasing he’d eventually got for being the youngest out of the two, even if Qifrey kept reminding Olruggio that it wasn’t his real birthday, and for all they knew, Qifrey could be a year older than him instead. The healers said I’m small for my age, Qifrey explained. Too malnourished to tell.

That had made Olruggio look very sad. Qifrey had then purposefully drawn a longer stroke in the spell they were practicing, causing a huge soap bubble to float up towards the ceiling and then explode into a thousand tiny sprinkles above them, which had made Olruggio laugh so hard they’d gotten kicked out of the library. 

And so, every dawn of a New Year since, Qifrey has found himself startled by his own survival. Somehow, he has kept the silverwood tree at bay, and somehow, the heartache has not killed him. What would look like an incomprehensible contradiction to anyone else is exactly what keeps him alive — the more he hurts, the safer he is as well, and yet it’s a safety he can’t ever feel. He must be safe, but he must never feel safe. 

Once he’d thought it an easy task. Year after year has passed, and Olruggio has never stopped proving him wrong.

Olruggio hums, glancing over his shoulder at Qifrey, who’s walking a few steps behind. “What, enjoying the view of the back of my head?”

“Immensely,” Qifrey tells him, lighter than he feels. “You’re currently also at thirteen stumbles and counting, if you’re interested. It’s been riveting.”

“Oh, shut up,” Olruggio says. He makes a point to lift his cloak and carefully step over the next fallen branch they come upon, although Qifrey is sure he would’ve stumbled over that one too if it weren’t to make a point. “Like you’re any better. I wasn’t the one who nearly tumbled down that ravine twenty minutes ago, though if it weren’t for me—”

“Yes, you who seemingly forgot about the existence of floating glyphs,” Qifrey says, deadpan. “And almost went down the ravine yourself.”

Qifrey had been momentarily startled to lose his footing, but he’d already pressed his heels together to activate the glyph by the time he’d noticed Olruggio’s hand wrapped around his forearm, trying to keep him from falling. Qifrey’s sudden weightlessness and Olruggio’s momentum almost led to an unfortunate meeting with the shallow pond below them, but enough practice and training had given Qifrey enough presence of mind to simply grab Olruggio’s own forearm in turn and whip them both back to the edge of the ravine with a less than graceful twirl. He’d then had to endure three full minutes of Olruggio’s nagging about watching where he was going, which was just rich. 

“Well, your robes are filthy, you look like you’ve fought a round against a scalewolf lion and lost,” Olruggio says, because he turns to vague insults when he knows he’s lost the argument. “Why would you wear white robes knowing we’d be coming down to the marshlands? You’re all muddy. Aren’t you cold?”

Unseen, as Olruggio has just stumbled upon another fallen branch and started cursing up a storm, Qifrey hides a smile behind the collar of his robes. Olruggio tries to hide his care behind a veil of gruff annoyance, but it’s such a thin disguise he reckons anyone can see right through it. He’ll rant ceaselessly about the younger apprentices at the Great Hall not knowing how to pace themselves and falling asleep while studying in odd places, then gently shake them awake and ask what the matter is; he’ll spend the entirety of breakfast complaining about one of his roommate’s coughing keeping him up at night, then angrily ladle a bowl with warm broth to bring up to their room.

Olruggio often bemoans how lucky Qifrey is, as Beldaruit’s sole primary student, to not have to share a room with anyone at all. Qifrey agrees, distantly, for other people’s sake more than his own; he’s a restless sleeper, and though he doesn’t wake up every night terrified out of his mind and choking on his own breath anymore, it takes so much to make him feel well enough to fall asleep that he’d likely drive any roommate up the wall. He isn’t sure how Beldaruit has remained so patient, even four years down the line. 

He cannot sleep in the dark, and the door to his room cannot be closed; his blankets can’t wrap too tightly around him, and his back must be facing the wall at all times, so that his view is to the open window. It had been Beldaruit’s idea, one sleepless night in which Qifrey had barely been able to walk into his own room, feeling inexplicably claustrophobic. He’d transfigured a hand-held mirror into a glass pane on the wall, then drawn a glyph so that the window always showed the same open, star-dotted clearing in the woods, above ground. 

Qifrey had watched him, wide-eyed, until Beldaruit gently beckoned him inside, settling him down on the bed and tucking him in, which Qifrey could not remember anyone ever doing before. You can exhale now, Beldaruit had told him, gray eyes sad but soft. See how the moon shines. You’re not alone in the dark, and you won’t ever be again.

It’s too much. It’s always been too much, from Beldaruit, from Olruggio, from anyone. Qifrey has done nothing to deserve their kindness, but he’s greedy. It’s selfish of him, really, to let them love him without knowing what he really is, what’s always threatening to grow out of his bones.

The cruelty of this curse is that the guilt helps. He’s so guilty, at this point, that he doesn’t think he can ever be anything else.

“It’s bound to rain,” Olruggio is saying. He casts a wary glance at the darkening sky around them, a very pale gray in the horizon that’s been growing thicker the longer they’ve walked since splitting from their respective masters. “Did they say anything about that?”

As for most outings, apprentices are instructed to return to their masters if the weather takes a turn, following some unfortunate incident from years ago, which Qifrey has only heard of in passing — something about a snowstorm and a missing student and very angry parents. “We are here to help mitigate the levels of flooding that have affected the village nearby,” Qifrey points out. “That’s the whole point. That’s why I’m muddy.”

Honestly, he thinks it’s poor urban planning to construct a village in the literal wetlands, which are famously known for being flooded year round, but he’s a witch, so it’s not like he can voice his opinions on the matter. They’ve been trudging through damp, overturned soil and fallen branches this whole time, under orders to observe and annotate on a map the best spots to apply the transfer glyphs to, so that the water  can be returned back to the wetland’s main river each time the floods threaten to reach the village. 

It’s rotten work. They’ve been huge floods, if the mud patches are anything to go by; Beldaruit had told them to try and find the edge of it, to see if it would be possible at all to cast a sigil around the entire perimeter of the marsh. Qifrey’s fairly sure he might have to throw away his outer robes entirely, and curses himself for not having the foresight to cast a cleaning glyph on anything other than his shoes prior to leaving the Great Hall.

“It’ll be easier to see the area of the flooding if we’re not actively being carried away by a flood ourselves,” Olruggio hedges, which is fair. “We should head back. We’ve been walking so long we’ll be in trouble if we only turn around after it really starts pouring.”

Qifrey glances upward as well, uneasiness beginning to stir in his gut. He’s been mostly able to ignore being surrounded by water — the sky is so bright and cloudy that the wetlands reflect nothing but silver, almost solid and unmoving except for the odd buzzing dragonfly or falling leaf. He definitely doesn’t want to be here when the water level starts rising, and the sky looks darker by the minute.

“We should,” he agrees. This time, he looks over his shoulder, and is a bit startled to see just how far they’ve walked: the village they’d started out from is barely visible through the low-hanging fog in the damp air, mostly darker smudges against a light background. He squints his eye a bit, holding back a sigh. Or it could just be his sight.

Olruggio half-slips over a tiny broken branch, then throws an arm around Qifrey’s shoulders, which Qifrey bears with grace lest they both go tumbling down the mud. “Look at us, being responsible,” he teases, turning them around so they can head back the way they came. “We would’ve avoided some hours of line-writing if we’d done the same thing that one winter, instead of getting snowed in.”

“In a roof,” Qifrey comments, trying to sound reasonable even though the memory is one of his fondest. “Because I’d never seen snow, and someone neglected to inform me snow was just frozen water, so I didn’t draw an impermeability glyph on my shoes. And you were too afraid of dropping me on my head to try and float both of us down again. It took them two hours to find us, I’d reckon we deserved worse than writing down lines.”

“I could hardly risk dropping you on your head,” Olruggio exclaims, faux-scandalized. “You’ve already lost all of your memories once, who knows what could have happened?”

Qifrey laughs, in spite of himself. Olruggio had used the same explanation back then, in front of Beldaruit himself, who’d been less than impressed.  “Maybe it would’ve brought them back,” he says, trying to sound serious. “We should try that next time.”

“I can’t believe that never occurred to us,” Olruggio deadpans.

No one else, Qifrey thinks. No one else could speak of it so freely like this, no one else could stare down the ugliness of Qifrey’s past so unflinchingly; no one else could understand that those terrible things had happened to him, and so he was free to speak of them however the fuck he wanted. Even Beldaruit would hem and haw if Qifrey was too glib about it (I’d rather they put me back in the coffin as a response to being asked if he wanted to talk about one of his nightmares was not taken well at all), but Olruggio never minded it. 

In the beginning, it made him look sad, which in turn made Qifrey try his level best to pretend nothing terrible had ever happened to him, and in the early days, it was so difficult: his entire body was a wound. The world that once bloomed and ripened in things had been torn out of him with its roots, with his heart, it seemed. He didn’t know what was wrong, he just knew it hurt. He’d flinch at loud noises and freeze at the entrance of study rooms, feeling trapped, coiled, an animal in a trap. And yet when Olruggio asked, Qifrey could only say, I’m fine, I’m fine. Nothing is happening.

(I told you I’m here for you, Olruggio would tell him, soft at first and then angrier, the more Qifrey drew back. I’m never not going to be here for you, so you’d best get it into that thick head of yours.

Yes, Qifrey had bitten out. How could I ever forget?

Olruggio had stared at him, jaw slack, for a single moment. Then he let out a bark of laughter and immediately clamped a hand over his mouth, looking mortified, pink-cheeked and ruffle-haired and so utterly beautiful and familiar it was like Qifrey had known him his whole life.

Somewhere deep in the fruit of his heart, something began unfurling, blooming, even in the dark, reaching towards a sun. It hurts to become. And yet.)

When the worst thing that could possibly happen to you happens, you don’t feel much of anything. A hollowing, perhaps, a sense of living past what he was supposed to. He tries to picture the entire ocean and fails. Some day something worse will happen and he will not be ready.

Olruggio doesn’t know the darker details, of course, which perhaps makes it easier. To his knowledge, all that Qifrey has lost are his memories — he doesn’t know, now, about the buried-alive thing, or the forbidden magic, or the silverwood tree, and he has only ever asked about Qifrey’s eye once, a couple of years ago. 

Qifrey had swiftly redirected that line of questioning at the time, but it all had eventually festered into the second time Olruggio found out about the silverwood tree. By the time it all came to a head, Qifrey could barely cry through the growing branch of his eye socket anymore, tears solidifying into wood, and Olruggio, half-horrified and as stubborn as he’s ever been, had demanded, as though it were the first time, that Qifrey wipe his memory, or Olruggio would do it himself.

Qifrey had done so. Still, he’d known Olruggio too well, so afterwards, he’d… intentionally dropped some implications, that his eye had been badly damaged prior to being found by Beldaruit, that he could not see out of it, but that it was extremely sensitive to light, which is why one of the lenses of his glasses was darker. That way, Olruggio has something to believe in, and doesn’t question it further. No one other than Beldaruit knows about the fact that there is no eye at all, not anymore.

“Ah, there it goes,” Olruggio says glumly. Qifrey is about to ask when a fat drop of rain hit him squarely on the forehead, and then he’s groaning too, pulling Olruggio’s arm around him as if to use it as a shield for the oncoming rain. “Shit. Maybe it’s a slow starter?”

“With our luck?” Qifrey asks. “We might as well duck for cover and wait it out.”

They’ll surely be scolded about it, but that’s preferable to being caught in the middle of a storm. Qifrey hates the rain so much it makes him queasy to be this exposed, and only half of the queasiness is because he’s not sure if he’s ready for Olruggio to potentially find out just how much he hates it. 

“Duck for cover where?” Olruggio bites out. He lets go of Qifrey’s shoulder and begins pulling him forward quicker, as though they could possibly outrun the rain. “We’re in the middle of the fucking marsh! Low vegetation! Open fields!”

“Yes, I can see that,” Qifrey says flatly. “Ouch, ouch, stop pulling.”

“You’re not walking fast enough!”

“The rain cloud is above us, it doesn’t matter how fast we’re going. We could fly—”

“Yes, ever since I was a little boy I’ve dreamed of hanging in the air with soaking wet robes weighing a million pounds and pulling me down.”

“So you were lecturing me about muddy clothes, but you didn’t cast an impermeability spell on yourself, in the wetlands, so we could help with floods due to frequent storms?” Qifrey demands. “But heaven forbid I wear white robes, you know, my actual, literal uniform—”

“You know I’m no good at spells that have to do with water,” Olruggio says. “I’d get soaked through either way.”

“I bet ever since you were a little boy you’ve also always dreamed of getting walking pneumonia.”

“Surely it can’t be that bad,” Olruggio says, angrily wiping away from his face another splatter of raindrops that’s befallen them. “You’ve had it before and you’re clearly fine, and you have the constitution of a sickly toddler.”

“Yes, I’m clearly fine after I survived it nearly killing me,” Qifrey says flatly. To be very honest, he could be walking faster — he’s taller and wirier than Olruggio, and his legs are longer; if he picked up the pace then he’d be the one leading the way, so this is more for Olruggio’s comfort than his own. Olruggio gets to hold on to Qifrey’s hand and make sure they don’t stray from each other, and Qifrey gets to look at the back of Olruggio’s head and mostly fail not to choke on his own longing. 

“I’m not going to die,” Olruggio says, like the very idea is ridiculous. 

“What, ever?” Qifrey asks. “You want to watch the sun burn out?”

“It won’t, if I have anything to do with it,” Olruggio says, chest puffed out, and it’s at that moment that the sky cracks open and rain begins pouring upon them like the end of the world is near.

The roar of the rainfall is loud enough to drown out all other sounds, and it’s so violent and sudden that it stops both of them in their tracks. Already, what was once soil turns into mud and rises over the ankle-height grass, and the wind, which had been picking up for the past few minutes, blows strongly enough that the cattails ashore the lakes bend over the water, the flowering spikes kissing the surface. 

The rain falls in sheets, and a thin fog rises from the ground, still warm from the summer’s day.

It’s cold, is the first thing Qifrey manages to think, once the surprise begins to fade. Gooseflesh prickles his arms and the back of his neck immediately, regardless of the impermeability of his robes. It’s so cold.

Olruggio’s hands had risen to grasp both of Qifrey’s forearms at the first crack of thunder. He’s already soaked through to the bone, wet hair plastered on his forehead and blinking water out of his eyes; he’s the only thing Qifrey can see through the pouring rain, and his touch is almost searing through the sleeves of Qifrey’s robes. His eyes are wide, dark and startled.

“Qifrey,” he says, or yells, over the sound of the storm. “Qifrey?”

That’s me, Qifrey means to say, and really, they’re right in front of each other, but he quickly comes to the realization that he can’t say anything at all. It feels like someone has grabbed him by the throat, which has grown so tight he can scarcely breathe. It’s cold, is all he can think. It’s cold, it’s so cold, and the water won’t stop coming in.

Coming in where? He’s in the middle of a field — it’s wide and open, the sky right above him; even if water rises, he can just tap his shoes together and fly away. He’s not trapped. He’s not. 

But it’s so cold.

Olruggio’s hands leave his forearms, and for a moment, Qifrey thinks he might just lose his balance, as if that were the only thing holding him up. But then those hands are back, one cradling the back of his neck, fingers pressing against his thundering pulse, and the other cradling the left side of his face. They’re clammy, scared hands, and Qifrey would know the touch anywhere.

“Hey,” Olruggio says, and he’s so much closer than he was before, his voice warm as a bonfire, crackling a bit with youth, strong as a flame. “Hey, you’re fine. Don’t pass out on me, now, you look pale as a sheet. Hey — I can fix this. Don’t you trust me? I can fix this.”

“I thought you were no good at water magic,” Qifrey says, breathless. Despite himself, he leans a bit into Olruggio’s touch. It’s good. It’s fine. He’s so uncomfortable in his own skin right now that there’s no possible way for the silverwood to grow.

“For you, I can sure as hell figure something out,” Olruggio says, squeezing the back of Qifrey’s neck once. 

Oh no, Qifrey thinks. Oh, no.

“Hang on,” Olruggio says. He rubs a hand over his eyes to get rid of the water falling into them. It’s truly coming down so hard that it’s rendering the impermeability spell on Qifrey’s clothes quite useless, considering he can barely see a foot in front of him. “Hang on — give me one of your conjuring papers, mine are already gone.”

Qifrey tries to take a deep breath and ends up choking on a mouthful of water, which in turn makes his heart skip several beats, something colder than the storm flooding his veins. Heavens, he wishes he could cast an impermeability spell on his forehead, if only to not have the rainwater falling into his eyes, his tongue—

No. No he doesn’t. He doesn’t wish that. He simply… wishes he didn’t hate the rain quite so much. 

He wipes his hand on his dry robes and digs through his inner pockets for a piece of conjuring paper. Once he finds it, he simply raises his cloak to make enough space and nods his head at Olruggio.

“Get in here,” Qifrey says. 

Olruggio flushes so violently that Qifrey is worried he may pass out. He then very casually slaps himself on the face twice, on either side, shakes his head, and squares his shoulders. “Right,” he says, voice cracking in three places.

He huddles close so he can take the conjuring paper from Qifrey’s hand. Without saying a word, Qifrey turns so that Olruggio can use his back as a sturdy surface to place the paper on, and tries not to sound too curious as he hears the sound of a pen scratching on paper and says, “It’s a bit late for an impermeability spell when you’re already soaked through.”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he hears Olruggio say. “What I have in mind is much better than a dusty impermeability — ah, fuck, can you give me another paper? I messed it up. Thanks. Anyway, this is much better than a dusty impermeability spell, because what’s even the point of it if it keeps what’s around you dry but not yourself?”

Qifrey has thought the same, but he still makes it a point to say, “Certain people would say you sound like you’re suggesting something you shouldn’t.”

“Well, certain people are so scared to toe the line they’ll stay in the same place their whole lives,” Olruggio says, and Qifrey secretly smiles to himself, even if it makes his heart feel heavy. Olruggio’s heart has always been the same, and though he respects and understands the principles of forbidden magic as much as any other witch, he really isn’t the type to shy away from the murky waters of the in-between. If he can argue a point, he’ll talk until his voice is gone.

“There we go,” Olruggio exclaims. “A bit, I think — it’s wobblier than it should be but it should still work—”

It’s the strangest sensation, maybe because Olruggio is still underneath Qifrey’s cloak, but it feels as though a sudden gust of wind ripples everything around them, from the puddles of water at their feet to their clothes. It’s warm, almost toasty, and it ruffles the ends of Qifrey’s hair, almost pulling the strands away from his eye, so much that he quickly raises his hand to flatten it back down.

And he blinks at his hand, then back at Olruggio, still underneath his cloak, grinning like a madman. His robes, which had been dripping rainwater in rivulets onto the ground, are now completely dry. Qifrey’s own hair is also not soaked through anymore, and it feels fluffy and warm to the touch. 

“That’s… what spell is that?” Qifrey asks, baffled. He glances upward, and the rain is still falling quite heavily. It’s not as though it’s not reaching them anymore, because he can still feel the raindrops hitting him, but now they seem to dissipate as soon as they touch his skin, constantly being blown away by the same balmy, soft wind emanating from the glyph Olruggio now holds in his hands. “I don’t — it’s not impermeability, but—”

“It’s a drying spell!” Olruggio tells him, proudly turning the conjuring paper around so Qifrey can see the drawing. “It’s just a simple rainflinger, but if you add the wind sigil at its center, it doesn’t just repel rain, it actually dries the water as it falls.”

“Are those fire sigils?” Qifrey asks. He holds out an arm to further open his cloak, and then bends down to peer more closely at it. It still glows softly with the flow of magic, a light orange instead of the usual blue particular to water-related spells. 

“Modified, but yes,” Olruggio explains. “See, they’re inverted — I wanted to make the wind itself warm, but also have the spell itself warm things up. I had to really work to adjust the size of it, so it stayed warm and not hot, and I kept setting things on fire in the beginning…”

He looks a bit embarrassed at the end, but Qifrey feels nothing but astonishment when he looks up from the glyph at Olruggio’s face. “You invented this?” he asks. “A new spell?”

“It’s not new, technically, it’s an adapted rainflinger spell,” Olruggio says, squirming a bit in place. Red crawls up to his earlobes again, and Qifrey is pretty sure it has nothing to do with the warming up part of the glyph. “I’m still thinking about the practical uses — a set of rings, perhaps, one half in each, so it activates when you bring your hands together. I don’t know how no one had ever come up with it before, it’s really quite simple. ”

Qifrey reaches out and takes Olruggio’s wrist, squeezing once. “You did,” he states, still feeling wonder-struck. “You came up with it. That’s… this is amazing, Olly, most witches never invent spells of their own at all, nevermind at seventeen. You’re — you’re amazing. I’m so proud of you.”

“Oh, stop it, you,” Olruggio mutters, and the flush has risen high up on his cheeks by now. “It was nothing.”

Qifrey peeks through the gap of his cloak, where he can still see rain steadily falling. Despite that, where they are, it’s cozy and dry and safe, and the cold that had sunk down into Qifrey’s bones has begun to thaw. He looks back at Olruggio, who’s staring back at him just as intensely. “Looks like a whole lot more than nothing to me,” Qifrey says, softly.

Olruggio is quiet for a moment. “I’m no good at water spells,” he says, “but you’re specializing in them, even though you hate water so much. Which is great, and it makes sense to know you know how to deal with something that scares you. But it must be… heavy. All the time. To always be the one that handles it, because knowing you can control the thing that you fear doesn’t always mean you’re not scared of it anymore.”

Qifrey looks down at the glyph, at the fire sigils drawn with such care. The air sigil is wobblier, but Olruggio has spent hours upon hours upon years practicing fire spells and sigils at the library, with a grim, stubborn determination that Qifrey has only ever seen in his own reflection in the mirror. You have to do it until it’s perfect, so that it can’t hurt you anymore, but even so, your first fear will always be your greatest fear.

“I’m always going to be scared,” Qifrey says, more frank than he usually is. He’s scared all the time, but he doesn’t have to tell Olruggio that. “It’s only as heavy as I let it become. I’m better than I was.”

Olruggio watches his face, searching. “You don’t just have to be good all the time. You’re not alone. Other people can shoulder the weight, too, if you let it.”

I’m always alone, Qifrey thinks. Out loud, he says, “You won’t talk to me about fire.”

Olruggio pales a little. “That’s not fair.”

“You hide it better than I do,” Qifrey continues. He lowers his arm, noting that the wind from Olruggio’s glyph has it billowing softly around them even so. “It’s normal to be afraid of fire. It’s eye-catching and destructive, it burns, it catches. A death by water is a quiet one. Fire is loud.” He tilts his head. “I’ve no right to ask you for details of your past, not when I can offer so little myself. But if we get too close to water, you pull me back. You tell me I don’t have to put on a brave face. You already share my burden with me, Olly. But you stare at every bonfire like they make you feel sick, and you couldn’t stop crying after taking that advanced fire-spell class, and if I try to talk to you about it, you tell me to not worry about you. I’ll always worry. You’ve jumped into the ocean to save me from drowning. You know I would do the same.”

“I don’t want you following me into fire,” Olruggio whispers. His knuckles are white around his conjuring pen, and he won’t meet Qifrey’s eye anymore.

“Then don’t run into fire,” Qifrey says, simply. The look Olruggio gives him in turn is so torn-open and vulnerable it’s almost unbearable to look at. He can feel the pulse jack-rabbiting through his wrist, right under Qifrey’s fingertips.

Oh, Qifrey thinks. Oh, no.

Something flutters down his cheek, soft as the memory of a kiss. It takes him a long moment to place why the sensation feels so familiar, and it isn’t until Olruggio’s gaze shifts from quiet awe to confusion to horror that he notices what exactly is happening.

The warmth is gone. All color, soft or beautiful emanating from the glyph or Olruggio’s brown eyes, quickly drains in favor of the edges of his vision darkening with sheer panic. The momentum with which he reaches up to cover his face is such that he loses his balance and falls down on his backside, taking the cloak with him; the temporary cocoon of safety is gone, replaced by the stark reality of the pouring rain, the hopelessness of the open sky, the deep-rooted pain in his bones, and the quiet crackling noises of a silverwood branch uncoiling from the empty space of his eye.

For a moment, neither of them breathe. 

Terror keeps crashing through Qifrey’s body like waves, over and over again, almost indiscernible from the bursts of pain that accompany the growth of the silverwood. He cannot explain, cannot verbalize just how it feels to have something growing inside you that is not you, to feel something else move beneath your skin, the way the blood in his veins thickens, clears, giving way to the sap of the tree’s core. It hurts to become. It hurts.

He’s been here before, but he’s found it does not get easier. He scrambles to cover up his eye, chokes on his next breath or several, nicks his palm against a splinter of wood. Wishes so desperately that he could go back to just a few moments ago that he nearly sobs with pain.

Okay, he thinks, scrambling to reach for his cap. Okay, this is — third time’s the charm, four times is a pattern. Right? 

(It’s what Olruggio had said himself, last time, because for once Qifrey hadn’t been strong enough to not tell him this had happened before, and Olruggio had just smiled that stupid smile of his and said, Third time’s the charm, isn’t that what they say? It’s okay, Qifrey, it’s all okay.

Heavens. Heavens, heavens, it would have hurt less to just stay dead.)

He’s too much of a coward to face Olruggio, so he screams when he feels arms on him, pulling his wrists apart from each other. “No!”

If anything, Olruggio holds on tighter. “You’re bleeding,” he says, deathly serious, and the bark of laughter Qifrey lets out sounds almost like a wail. Of course, that would be what Olruggio is concerned about; of course, he won’t push or ask any questions at all until he’s made sure Qifrey is okay. Qifrey feels as small as a speck of dust. “You’ve got blood all over the — you’re staining your cap, Qifrey, please calm down. Please.” Olruggio’s voice is unsteady. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

That’s the problem, Qifrey wants to say, but he can’t find enough air to do so. His face feels numb, though his right side throbs with the pain of the growth, now stalled by the bone-deep misery that has settled upon him. Only now he can feel the distant sting of where he’d cut himself on his own branch, a slow trickle of blood, red handprints on the front of his robes. 

He looks at Olruggio. His friend’s face is pale, lips near bloodless, and there are fine trembles running through his fingers, even as they grip Qifrey’s wrists tight enough to ache. He’s knee-deep in the mud before Qifrey, the conjuring paper discarded somewhere behind him. When he notices Qifrey is meeting his gaze, his shoulders slowly unfurl.

It’ll sound nonsensical to him, Qifrey knows. But still.

Through cracked lips, Qifrey whispers, “I can’t do this again. Not with you. I can’t do it again.”

“Again,” Olruggio echoes. He sits back on his knees, but does not let go of Qifrey’s wrists. Instead, he settles both of their hands on his laps, together. “What do you mean, not again?”

His face is always the same. That’s one of the worst parts: he never once reacts with anger, never once looks disgusted. He’s always concerned, first and foremost, for Qifrey’s safety. Then he’s concerned about Qifrey’s tears, of which there are always many. And then the storm settles, and he waits for the explanation. Again and again, Qifrey gets to tell.

The fourth time in five years. It makes him feel disgusting to know that this has somehow become so frequent — after the first time Olruggio forgot, Qifrey had vowed to never let it happen ever again. The pain of knowing he was the cause of Olruggio’s missing memories was enough, would be enough for the rest of time; having to live and smile and look Olruggio in the eye knowing how he had hurt him so deeply was punishment enough to keep it all at bay. In some ways, that meant the second time around was the worst, because Qifrey had been trying so hard, he’d been so good. But Olruggio is the smarter out of the two of them, and Qifrey is the hopeful one. It hasn’t given him much in this lifetime.

“Your eye,” Olruggio starts. Pauses. Swallows, looking unmoored. “You don’t…”

“I must have had it, once,” Qifrey says, as he has in many ways before. He’s exhausted, suddenly; his mind is trying to gear up to do what he must do. “They took it from me.”

“The ones who took your memories,” Olruggio says, as if asking for confirmation. His hands tighten around Qifrey’s. “They… stole your eye.”

“Well, I sure hope they don’t have it floating in a jar somewhere,” Qifrey says. “But yes.”

The laugh Olruggio lets out is half desperate. “And you’ve never — you haven’t ever…” He trails off, eyes softening in confusion. “You said again. That you couldn’t do this again. Have we had this conversation before? Have you—” His gaze goes far away for a second, as if he’s trying to cast his mind back. Last time, he tried that hard enough to give himself a headache, and told Qifrey he could feel nothing but a strange sense of deja vu, like something he had seen in a dream. “You’ve told me about this before. We’ve — I know this.”

“You don’t,” Qifrey tells him. He’s cold, except for his hands, which are still tightly clasped between Olruggio’s own. “That’s the point. You don’t know. Again and again, you don’t know, and when you do, I—”

“Is it a curse?” Olruggio asks. His voice is dead serious now, eyes glimmering. “Each time you tell someone about it, they’re bound to forget it? Is that why you haven’t told Beldaruit — or you have, but he’s forgotten? Is that why you haven’t gotten help?”

It’s a nice thought. He could even use it as an excuse next time to soften it, given that Olruggio won’t remember forgetting anyway. But for now, he just smiles. “I wish,” Qifrey says, “it were that simple.”

“Don’t,” Olruggio says, roughly, and the smile falls off Qifrey’s face. “I hate when you smile like that. Like you’re trying to hide. Your eyes always give you away, and it’s — I hate when you smile like that. Don’t hide from me. I’m right here. How can I help?”

“You already have,” Qifrey says, and this, for once, is the truth. He untangles his hand from Olruggio’s, slowly reaching for his cap. It’s also streaked through with blood from his still-congealing wound, but only on the outer part. “You came up with a solution. We always do it this way. You just have to — you just have to trust me.”

He feels rotten. He feels like the single most unforgivable person to ever live on this earth. With Olruggio looking at him like this, with the rain still falling. Each time, he has let Olruggio come to his own conclusion, but this is so much worse. They’re out in the open, in broad daylight. At any moment, either of their masters could decide they’ve been gone for long enough and go searching for them. They wouldn’t be hard to find, with nothing to hide behind on the marsh, easily spotted from a mile away.

So he can’t wait. He needs Olruggio to forget, so the silverwood can recede. He needs enough time to come up with a story for when Olruggio wakes up, or an explanation for their masters in case they’re found before he does. The wounded hand is a nice bonus; he can see they slipped and Olruggio hit his head, and then they’ll both get scoldings for running instead of using one of the rainflinger glyphs they’re supposed to carry at all times. 

Qifrey feels so awful that the tree actually recoils on its own, for once. He watches Olruggio’s face as he watches it grow smaller, enough that Qifrey can’t see its shadow out of the corner of his eye. Like this, it hurts less, and his eyelid can finally move again. 

“Can you control it?” Olruggio asks, and he sounds genuinely curious. It’s so typical of him Qifrey can’t help but feel fond, but the second he feels it the branch sprouts another leaf, so he bites it down by reminding himself of what he’s about to do.

“In a manner of speaking,” Qifrey says. He picks up his glasses, which had been thrown off his face with the silverwood’s first spurt; the lenses are muddy, but thankfully not cracked. He has a small reinforcement glyph on it, but it isn’t unbreakable.

Olruggio watches him slip them back on. “The darkened lens,” he says, and Qifrey dips his head. “You’d told me your eye was badly damaged. You didn’t have to lie.”

“I did,” Qifrey says. He tries to rise to his knees and regain some resemblance of composure, but Olruggio doesn’t move. “Because when I didn’t, you kept asking. And when you kept asking, you figured it out. You always figure it out.”

“Why’s it so bad that I do?” Olruggio demands. “I can’t… I don’t understand, Qifrey. You’re my best friend. Why wouldn’t you want me to know?”

Qifrey smiles the smile that Olruggio hates so much. “I want you to know it so much,” he says, and his voice catches in the worst place. “That’s the problem.”

“I don’t understand,” Olruggio says, helplessly.

“I want so much,” Qifrey says. And then he begins to cry.

Olruggio says something else, but he can’t parse it out. There are arms around him, and he feels all the worse because part of him expected them to be, part of him knew, deep in his gut, that Olruggio could never stand to see him cry. He cries and cries as though he might never stop, until he feels dizzy, and all the time Olruggio holds him. He bears Qifrey’s weight the same way he has done so many times before, each and every time this secret has been brought to light. Each and every time, Qifrey watches his face as understanding sinks in, and each and every time, he wishes and wishes Olruggio would make a different choice.

“I’m sorry.” Qifrey chokes on his own breath. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Olruggio says, fiercely, tightening his hold around him. “I couldn’t see much, but that was a silverwood tree, wasn’t it? It feeds off hope. I get it now. You have nothing to apologize for, it’s not your fault. You wanted me to know. I believe you. Please don’t cry anymore.”

Of course I’m guilty, Qifrey wants to say, but finds that he can’t. He’s guilty of so many things he can scarcely put them into one coherent sentence. He feels guilty. It has hardened into a rock in his chest, where it sits and scrapes against his lungs, aching whenever he breathes too deeply, in tandem with the silverwood roots, the near-constant ebb and flow of pain.

“I wasn’t lying,” Qifrey manages, through the tears. “You did come up with a solution. I have it in my inner pocket. I always… carry it with me. Just in case.”

Olruggio pulls back a little, eyes narrowed.  “And how did I come about this solution?”

“The Tower of Tomes,” Qifrey tells him, which is the truth, once more. “Conjuring ink… diluted with tears.”

Understanding dawns on Olruggio’s face. It then does something very complicated, in which his lips tremble, eyes growing misty, before he clenches his hands into fists and shakes his head roughly, a dry laugh escaping his lips. “You asshole,” he croaks out. “And you would’ve just let me run with it, wouldn’t you? ‘Each time you tell someone, they’re bound to forget’. Yes, because I came up with a spell to make them forget. Didn’t I? That’s what you meant.”

Qifrey reaches into his inner pocket and takes out the vial of ink. He brings it up to his eye to collect some more teardrops; it works better if they’re fresh, he’s learned. “You’ve always been the inventor between the two of us,” he says.

Olruggio looks at the ink pot as though it’s a flaming ball of fire. “I was wondering where that one went. With the silver seal cap.”

“So you’ve said.”

The rain is slowing down now, pitter-pattering into puddles around them. The wind still chills him to the bone, but the sky is a clearer silver-gray now, all brightness hidden behind thin clouds. Muddy dew and petrichor are undercut with the distant smell of smoke, from the hearths of the homes in the village in the horizon. 

“Is there,” Olruggio tries.  He licks his lips, searchingly staring at Qifrey’s face.. “Is there no other way?”

This story has already ended, Qifrey thinks. The ending’s already told.

“You’re asking the wrong person for hope,” he says. The conjuring ink has grown warm in his hands. “I can’t have any to spare.”

Olruggio’s eyes are blazing. “I can have enough for both of us.”

“You don’t get it.” Qifrey shakes his head at the sky, at the world, at everything. Olruggio’s always so stubborn. “That’s enough. Don’t you know? There’s no difference between your hope and my own, because I don’t believe in anything other than you. If you have hope, then I have hope, and it will kill me. It will eat me alive from the inside. And I could — I have wanted — I have tried,” his voice grows strained, and the look Olruggio gives him is the worst thing he has ever seen. “But for some reason, I have to live. I can’t help it. I have to live knowing this is all there is, or I can’t live at all.” He’d thought he was all out of tears, but he never is. “And you can’t have that. I know you can’t.”

He’s hit the bull’s eye, because everything in Olruggio recoils at the thought of Qifrey’s death, and it’s visible to see. They’re both very selfish, he thinks, both impossibly greedy when it comes to each other. Qifrey can’t be brave enough to let himself die because that would mean never seeing Olruggio again, and Olruggio would never hurt Qifrey, not willingly, he’d die first.

What a pair they make, Qifrey thinks. It’s a shame. 

“You know,” Olruggio says, roughly. He doesn’t move to take Qifrey’s hand again. “You know. You can’t not know, Qifrey.”

Qifrey just looks at him. “I do.”

The rain continues falling.

(And so Olruggio forgets. And he inevitably figures it out again, because of course he does; and he inevitably chooses to forget again, and again, and again, because his heart is always the same. The story is always the same. Like a tale from under a silverwood tree, like a myth from the days of old, not so much tied by the constraints of the narrative so much as being narrative itself. Antigone must bury her brother. Iphigenia must be put to death. At a thousand turns, in a thousand ways, Orpheus must turn, and he must look, again, and again.

And Olruggio forgets.)

This time around, it takes a long, long while for Olruggio to figure it out again. Perhaps, Qifrey thinks, the tears of a broken heart were finally enough to seal the deal forever. Long enough that Qifrey’s hand almost unclenches, long enough that he thinks this is it; that he’ll just have to live with the singular aching wound of keeping this a secret from his best friend forever, instead of flaying himself open once every few months.

It doesn’t last. It takes three long years, some of the best and worst Qifrey’s ever had alongside Olruggio, the longest stretch of time they’ve ever had since the very first. 

But Olruggio’s heart has always been the same.

ii.

and the coldest night

of the coldest year

comes right before spring

the darkest hour 

of the darkest night

comes right before—

“Oh, shucks,” Tetia says. “Master Qifrey, Richeh’s gotten stuck in the ceiling again!”

“Oh dear,” Qifrey says, pausing in his stirring to try and peer through the gap to the sitting room. Tetia is hanging off the doorframe, a worried pout on her face. “Is she alright?”

“Yes, she’s just on the ceiling,” Tetia repeats, wandering into the kitchen proper. She’s a curious thing, and she takes two detours to scrutinize the leftover ingredients on the counter and squint at the labels on the seasoning jars before she makes her way to Qifrey’s side at the stove — standing just far enough away from the flames that he doesn’t quite have to scold her to be careful — and says, “Can I try some?”

“Of course,” Qifrey says. He takes a bit from the ladle and blows on it so it’s not so piping hot. “Here you go, you should always taste from the back of your hand, since the spoon is going back to stirring. More salt, do you reckon?”

Tetia hums appreciatively, doing the little dancing steps she does when she’s enjoying something. “It’s good for me, but Agott likes it salty.”

“Hey,” Olruggio says. He’s at the counter, in the middle of dicing some greens for a summer salad, though he’d paused at Tetia’s first yell. “Sorry to interrupt, but can we address the little girl on the ceiling?”

Qifrey and Tetia exchange a glance. She shrugs at him. 

“Was it the sticking spells you were practicing?” Qifrey asks, even though he’s sure it was; they’d just gone over it last night, and the girls had seemed strangely excited about it, in the way children are oftentimes excited about things that don’t make sense to grown ups anymore. He can’t remember finding such spells particularly elating, but maybe it’s a sign of the time. “Now, I do remember insisting you all practice with smaller things at first. Making entire surfaces sticky is a bit more advanced.”

“Richeh thought that was silly, and that we should have started bigger and moved on to smaller things instead,” Tetia explains. She walks around the kitchen counter and steals a piece of sliced cucumber from Olruggio’s hand, crunching on it immediately. Olruggio just sighs. “And I guess she was right, Master, because she got it on her first try. She said she wanted to make hers extra sticky, though.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Qifrey muses, turning back to the stew. “The smaller the object, the more refined the glyph must be — you can tell Richeh her method is just right, Tetia. I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear it.”

“Should we not be trying to get her off the ceiling?” Olruggio asks no one in particular. He’s half-turned toward the door as if ready to run, but seemingly unmoored by the lack of urgency in either of them, which makes Qifrey smile inwardly. 

“Don’t worry, Master Olly,” Tetia says, taking another piece of sliced cucumber from his hand. “She wanted it extra sticky,” she stresses, voice muffled by the crunching. “Like, very very sticky. I don’t think she could fall even if she tried.”

“This is also a perfect opportunity for you to practice your cloud spell, Tetia,” Qifrey reminds her, which makes her light up. “That way, Richeh doesn’t have to be concerned about the glyph being broken, or of falling when she’s ready to get down. Would you mind setting it up underneath her?”

“Yes!” Tetia exclaims, almost vibrating with excitement. Qifrey has been helping her develop this particular spell for the past few months, and it’s coming along nicely, if not as fluffy as she claims to want it. Still, it’ll do the job perfectly. “I’ll make it my best one yet!”

“I know you will,” Qifrey says, ruffling her hair as she rushes by him to steal just another taste, Master, for an extra boost, and then she’s skipping out the kitchen like a witch on a mission.

There’s a couple seconds of silence in which he strains to hear if there’s any indication of Richeh tumbling down before Tetia can get to her, but there’s only some distant murmuring that sounds like Agott, likely complaining about the disturbance. She prefers to study on her own, which Qifrey understands, but he also requests that she join the other girls for joint study sessions for at least an hour each day. Olruggio had called him a bit of a hypocrite at first, recalling just how much Qifrey had loathed studying with others, always squirreling himself away in some remote corner of the library. I wasn’t ever really alone, though, Qifrey reminded him. I had you. Agott needs people, too.

Olruggio still seems eager to make a run for the sitting room, but Qifrey just gently shakes his head at him. One of the rules of joint study time is that this is the apprentice’s time to study what they want, without feeling observed or judged; they practice together or sketch quietly, helping each other. During this time of the day, Qifrey always makes sure to make himself scarce, close enough that they can find him if needed, but distant enough so they know this time is their own.

“They know to get me if something goes really badly,” Qifrey assures him, finding the anxious look on Olruggio’s face amusing, considering he so often claims he’s just a Watchful Eye. “Tetia knows, if nothing else. The others are still learning.”

“To ask for help?” Olruggio smiles wryly. “Are you sure you’re qualified to teach them that?”

Qifrey flicks some stew at him. 

Olruggio has a point, of course, but Qifrey will never concede it out loud. He isn’t very good at asking for help, and by the time he musters up not the courage, but the sense that maybe he really can’t handle something on his own, it’s usually almost too late.

And sometimes it doesn’t even happen at all, like when he spent months ignoring the constant jabs and shoves and teasing from other apprentices at the Great Hall, who couldn’t seem to accept that a no-name outsider had been taken in by a Wise One, who grew all the more aggressive by Qifrey’s lack of reaction. Up until the point one of them had thought it funny to lock him inside a windowless broom cupboard in one of the less-frequented halls, and the ensuing panic had Qifrey all but blowing the door off its hinges, stumbling blindly back to his quarters, only to run into a very concerned Olruggio. At the time, Qifrey had been so relieved to see him his knees actually failed him, and Olruggio all but carried him back to his room, then made him sit through a very excruciating talk with Beldaruit about the importance of telling an adult if you’re hurting. 

Or the time he ignored the throbbing pain on the side of his jaw for months on end until an infection on his then-growing wisdom tooth led him to fainting halfway through a practical exam with Beldaruit, which caused his professor to nearly have a heart attack. This happens to every young witch! Beldaruit had chided him, quite harshly, once Qifrey woke up at the Healing Spire, already missing the tooth but sweating off a fever. Why did you not say anything? It doesn’t always need to become the most terrible thing!

The leading issue is that Qifrey can’t talk about pain. He also cannot tell anyone why he cannot talk about pain, which leads to an endless cycle of exasperation for the people in his life. He’d been terribly embarrassed under Beldaruit’s concerned gaze, and had only managed to haltingly explain he didn’t know what a wisdom tooth was, and burned even hotter with shame as that made his professor’s face soften immediately. It was true, he hadn’t known, but he also couldn’t tell Beldaruit he’d thought it was the silverwood, straining against his bones.

There are many gaps in Qifrey’s memory, but more than that, when he’d just arrived at the Great Hall, there were many gaps in his knowledge —  often so basic that his confusion and questions made all the healers look very sad, even if they always answered him kindly. What birthdays were, what hot chocolate was, what it meant to be given a gift, what an injury was, although he’d promptly understood when the healers clarified it meant to be hurt. Qifrey knew that word well.

(In his first week out of the Healing Spire, Beldaruit sets Qifrey down to sleep. “Let me tuck you in,” he says, and tries to ignore the pang in his heart at the boy’s small, confused frown, pulling at the wraps of bandages around his eye. Beldaruit has been cataloging his every expression since they’d found him, rare as they were, and he knows by now that the child needs to be prompted to confess he does not understand something, as if someone would berate him for asking questions.

Beldaruit tries not to think too much about what it means to have a child that does not know what it means to be tucked in. He tries not to let too much sadness seep into his eyes as he watches Qifrey melt under the pile of blankets, always made soft by the warmth, like it surprised him, because he knows Qifrey has spent the past weeks cataloging Beldaruit right back. 

It isn’t his first time taking in a child that has been badly hurt. It won’t be the last, he thinks, watching Qifrey’s gaze seek him in the dark. The others have never understood why he would go through such trouble, always taking in apprentices that need so much care, that need to be taught so much more than just magic itself —  but Beldaruit has no need to be understood. He is soft-hearted, which many say is not the best quality for a witch. He cannot bear to see children in pain, and yet here he always is; watching over them after a nightmare, standing still and gentle if they ever flinch away from him, which they inevitably will. Not leaving, even if they get angry or yell or do the wrong thing, which they also are wont to do, trying to see if he will break, if he will finally be driven into hurting them too.

And he will not.

He sets down a hand on Qifrey’s head. The boy shivers, but does not pull away, blinking owlishly up at him, very pale under the moonlight streaming in through the window. In spite of himself, and of what tells him to wait just a little longer, Beldaruit bends down and presses a kiss against Qifrey’s forehead, before smoothing away his hair. Qifrey’s eye somehow grows wider, and he looks at Beldaruit like he’s never seen him before. He’s quiet for a very long time, and Beldaruit just stays, because not leaving is an unspoken act of trust that is often deciphered by children, one that does more than any word or gentle touch that could ever be offered.

“Master,” Qifrey whispers. “Can you do that again?”

Nothing else, Beldaruit thinks. Nothing else has taught him more about magic.)

“Shouldn’t a master’s goal be to have their students become better than they ever were?” Qifrey asks lightly, dodging from the cherry tomato Olruggio throws at him in retaliation. 

“Do as you say, not as you do, is what you mean,” Olruggio grumbles, but it’s good-natured. This time he offers Qifrey another tomato in a much more civilized way, which Qifrey gladly accepts.

This isn’t a heavy day; it’s just gone past eleven in the morning, and the kitchen is tinged golden with the morning sun, which always streams in through the northern-facing window at this time of day. It’s unusually warm for this time of year, so both of them have ditched their heavier robes for shorter-sleeved tunics, an event so rare that it had Tetia loudly gasping when she stumbled downstairs for breakfast. Richeh stared at Qifrey’s arms for long enough he’d grown a tiny bit uncomfortable, but she’d just ended up saying he should sit under the sun more, because she could count all of his blood vessels, which he’s sure it’s just an exaggeration. 

Agott had said nothing, but Olruggio told him, when they’d gone out into the garden to pick some of the ingredients for today’s lunch, that she’d pulled him aside to ask if there was any chance they could go into town to purchase some new clothes for her. The Tower of Tomes is always chilly no matter the time of year, they hear. Agott had implied that her family had very particular opinions about what a witch should and shouldn’t wear, so she doesn’t quite own anything she’s particularly comfortable wearing, and nothing that she’d chosen herself.

He’s glad she’s finally asking for things, even if not to him directly. She’s been at the atelier for the better part of a year now, but time is a slow teacher, especially when you’ve been hurt in the past. He doesn’t hold it against her to sometimes still be reluctant to speak with him of anything other than her own studies or progress, although she has stopped swiftly leaving the room when she notices him already there, and has started speaking more and more during dinnertime, mostly influenced by the other girls.

They’re not very close, not yet, but Qifrey’s sure they will be. Olruggio still regularly corresponds with the witches he studied alongside, and while Qifrey knows it was for the best to have studied alone under Beldaruit, he still thinks, in another life, it would have been nice to be part of a big atelier: somewhere loud and bright, with other children to share his space with, to play with, to be with. That’s why he hadn’t hesitated for a second to take Richeh and Tetia in, even if it was slightly unusual to take on three brand-new apprentices in such a small window of time. Agott was a lonely child, like Qifrey had been, but she didn’t have to be.

From the living room, he can hear Tetia’s squeal of laughter, followed by an exclamation and an eep!, likely from Richeh. There’s a wooshing sound, like a gust of wind has just blown away a stack of paper, and Agott’s muffled voice, yelling out something indiscernible. The sun hits just the right pane of glass on their stained window to throw the kitchen into an array of colors, blue-orange-yellow on the tiles. Loud, bright. 

In another life, maybe. 

“I’ll set this up and put a cooling glyph on the lid,” Olruggio says, and Qifrey blinks away from the stew to watch him slide the vegetables from the cutting board into a large bowl. He’s been on a kick to make the girls eat more of their greens, which has only been met with mild success; Richeh will all but smash her plate on the floor if she catches sight of broccoli, and Agott thinks tomatoes are too slimy. Tetia will eat just about anything, as long as she can do the seasoning herself, which is the only reason Qifrey can consider it a success at all. “Otherwise it’ll get soggy, and we all know how Agott feels about that.”

“Well, we’re ahead on schedule,” Qifrey notes. “It’s too early to eat, but a little simmering never hurt a stew. Which is a healthy way to get children to eat more vegetables with minimal grumbling, if you even care. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Are those brussel sprouts? They’re twelve, Olly.”

Olruggio throws his hands up in exasperation. “What, was I the only one paying attention to the mandated child-health-and-safety lectures when you first started your atelier? They had an entire module about nutrition, and brussel sprouts are great for your health!”

“For starters, the healers were extremely confused about what you were doing at the mandated child-health-and-safety lectures, considering you weren’t the one starting an atelier,” Qifrey says, reducing the heat under the pot on the stove to let it simmer down. “And I did pay attention, but haven’t you been a child before? You were such a picky eater when we met, don’t even try to deny it. You’d look at a mushroom and make gagging noises like a toddler.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Olruggio grumbles. He whispers the curse word, even though none of the girls are around, which Qifrey finds endearing. “You weren’t much better. I think for the entire first year I knew you I never saw you eat anything other than rice and soup.”

“I wasn’t picky, I just didn’t think of food as something meant to be enjoyed,” Qifrey remarks. He crosses his arms over his chest, leaning against the counter of the kitchen sink. “It was just fuel to keep me going. There was this witch that taught me otherwise, but I can’t quite recall his name.”

“Oh, yeah?” Olruggio says, puffing his chest out slightly. “I think I remember him. I’ve heard he’s very handsome.”

“I’ve heard he nearly failed his final Watchful Eye examination because he overslept.”

“I should have never told you that,” Olruggio grumbles. He grabs one of the kitchen-purposed conjuring papers and slaps the seal upon the bowl’s lid with a bit too much aggression, closing the glyph with a flick of his wrist. “You’ll hold it against me forever. I’ve never known a moment’s peace around you.”

“Terribly sorry about that,” Qifrey says, trying and failing to not sound too amused. “But in my defence, I did tell you to leave me alone. You were just very stubborn.”

“Well, you were very stupid,” Olruggio tells him. “Talking about how you’d forget my name by the end of the day, gloomier than a cloudy sky but barely tall enough to reach the Great Hall’s windowsills. You should be glad I don’t like being told what to do.”

Qifrey turns around to grab some water from the sink’s vapor bubble, blinking down at the way the sun glistens against its surface. “Ah, those were the days when you were taller than me. Fifteen years ago, was it?”

“You’re barely taller than me,” Olruggio says immediately, like Qifrey knew he would. It’s a touchy subject.  “Five centimeters at most, not even that.”

“I’d likely be even taller, if it wasn’t for the childhood malnutrition.”

“And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a carriage.”

Qifrey has to bite down on his tongue so he doesn’t laugh out loud. Children, he’s learned —  and especially Tetia —  are drawn to adults’ laughter like a moth to a flame, always wondering what’s so funny, and moreover, it’s… nice. When it’s just the two of them, like this. Prior to Qifrey establishing his atelier, it was always so busy: he’d been preparing for his fifth trial, and Olruggio, training as a Watchful Eye, with all the traveling and meetings that required. Even though they’d been living together all the same, it was more like sharing a house with a live-in ghost instead of a housemate: he’d see trails of Olruggio’s presence in the form of drying robes in the clotheslines, food disappearing from the pantry, late-night clanging in the kitchen. 

Qifrey, always the morning bird between the two of them, more than once forced himself to stay awake long enough to see Olruggio come back from his training, and more than once failed, falling asleep at the kitchen table, on the couch, curled up on the carpet with his books and scrolls. There’s haze-tinged memories of gentle touches against his shoulder, murmurings of his name, and then something warm against his cheek, the feeling of gently swaying, a paper boat in a stream. They were always followed by mornings where Olruggio would inexplicably still be home by the time Qifrey woke up, setting down a large breakfast and muttering something about having made too much food. He’d watch Qifrey like a hawk until he was finished, and then make him have seconds. Once, he’d blurted out, “Are you sure you’re eating enough during the day? You’re so light.”

He reaches out his hand to the water and withdraws it at the same time. He’s only got half the memories he should have at this age, but still, most days, he can barely shoulder the weight of the ones he has. Each and every one so tender to the bone, how memory is so much like a bruise.

“Master Qifrey!”

He blinks out of his thoughts immediately, whirling around to catch sight of a panting Tetia at the door. 

“Richeh,” she manages, through heavy breaths, “is not on the ceiling anymore.”

There’s a pause, in which Olruggio and Qifrey exchange a look. “Okay,” Qifrey says, slowly. “And she’s not hurt, correct?”

“She’s not!” Tetia exclaims, just a tad too quickly. She’s holding her conjuring pen in one hand, Qifrey notes. “But I—”

There’s some clattering from the living room, and then a voice that’s decidedly Agott’s screams out, “Tetia, how in the world did you even manage this?”

He holds back a sigh, because he doesn’t want Tetia to think he’s mad. He isn’t; he just worries. Instead, he just crosses his arms and walks over to her, keeping his face still as he watches her squirm and wring her hands nervously. She’s been at the atelier the shortest time out of the girls, but she wears her heart on her sleeve in a way the others don’t, so he isn’t surprised when it takes her less than a second to blurt out, “So, to be clear, nobody’s hurt.”

Qifrey raises his brow, unimpressed. “That’s good to know,” he says. Behind them, he hears the clattering of Olruggio putting away the dishes; he doesn’t ever get involved with Qifrey’s teaching or disciplining unless asked. “But please tell me what happened, so that I may help.”

“I don’t know,” Tetia says, a bit despairing. Her knuckles are white against her conjuring pen. “I was drawing my cloud spell, like we’ve always practiced, but then it got really windy and the papers flew all around the living room just as Agott was finishing her own sticking spell, and her glyph fell on top of mine just as they both closed, so it —  they combined? I didn’t know, Master, I swear I didn’t know that was even possible!” Her face screws up, and the tip of her nose grows red. Oh no, Qifrey thinks, panicked, just as the tears start to fall. “The whole living room is,” she gasps, “it’s this huge sticky cloud, and Agott and Richeh are trapped in it, and I don’t know what to do!”

She hides her face behind her hands, shoulders shaking. 

Silently, Qifrey glances at Olruggio, who gives him a slight shake of the head. Qifrey gestures at him to go check on the girls, and Olruggio quietly takes the long way around to the other kitchen door, so Tetia doesn’t notice him leave; it’d do her no good to feel like someone’s rushing to clean up a mess of her own making. 

Qifrey crouches down so he’s at eye-level with her. “Alright,” he murmurs. He gently grabs both of her wrists, pulling them away from her face. “You’re alright, aren’t you? Take one deep breath for me. It only has to be one.”

Tetia inhales shakily. Her face is blotchy and red, and she looks a sight, messy-haired and tear-stained. It makes his heart ache to see all the more, because he doesn’t think he’s seen Tetia cry once in the months she’s been here. Clearly, it’s a longtime coming. He bets it’s not even about the spell gone wrong at all.

When she’s taken a deep breath, then two, then five, she finally looks up to meet his gaze. He squeezes her hands once, and she squeezes back, which makes him smile. It’s a little something of theirs, since Tetia’s first trial: one squeeze means I’m here, and squeezing back means, I know. 

“Hello,” he says, and she sniffs. “There we are. I’m glad you’re not hurt. I’m not mad at you, Tetia.”

Her lip trembles. “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure,” Qifrey answers easily. “How could I be mad, when you did exactly what I told you to do? That if you were ever scared or unsure, you could always come to me for help?”

“Master Qifrey is always going to be there to help you,” Tetia echoes. It’s something he’s been teaching the girls this whole time, and it gives him a pang to know they’ve not only been listening, but internalizing it. He could never quite do it himself with Beldaruit, though the circumstances were different. 

“That’s right,” Qifrey tells her. “Something went wrong, and you came to me immediately. I’m proud of you.” He smooths out the hair that’s fallen out of her pigtails. “And just so you know, yes, such a thing as combined spells exist, but they’re extremely advanced, which is why you didn’t know something like this could happen. But this wasn’t your fault. You said it yourself: the wind threw the conjuring papers askew just at the wrong time —  it wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. It was random chance. It won’t ever happen again, most likely, unless you’re attempting to do so.”

Tetia sniffs, using the sleeve of her robe to wipe her nose. “Agott said it was my fault.”

“Agott was probably just scared,” Qifrey tries to reason, although he knows Agott most likely meant it. She reminds him so much of himself as a child, so angry without tangible reason that he would aim it at anyone. 

“But I don’t want my spells to scare people,” Tetia whispers, staring down at their joined hands. “I don’t want my spells to hurt anyone. This time it didn’t, but what if it does?”

Qifrey is an organized person. He makes lists, takes inventory, writes out his lesson plans. He rehearses what he will tell his students ahead of time, prepares contingencies, back-up plans if anything goes awry. So he knew, and in a certain way, was prepared, for the fact that he’d need to talk to his students about difficult things. He knew his students would be young, and that childhood is a landscape one never walks out of, and at that age, everything feels so unfathomably big. 

An inventory is, by definition, a complete list of. Qifrey isn’t sure if this is the completeness of it, but his inventory of fear goes like this: Memory. The overturning of soil. The speed of blood when the skin is cut. Dark and damp. Holes, which are made of nothing, if anything is. An eyeball. The coiled branch of a tree, reaching for something as a hand would. The dark. The dark. The dark. 

Each and every time Olruggio has forgotten about the silverwood tree, he has agreed to do so. Suggested, even, the first time around and several times afterward. He’ll propose drawing the seal himself, then go still, for a moment, when Qifrey says he already has it. He’ll ask, Do you carry it around with you all the time? Sometimes Qifrey tells the truth. Others he thinks it doesn’t matter what he says. He will ask Olruggio if he is sure. Olruggio will say Qifrey cannot die. Qifrey collects his tears, draws the glyph. The second before he closes the circle, he will always see it, a tiny shadow in the back of Olruggio’s eye, almost unnoticeable, if you don’t know him very well. Just a glint of something caught, something animal, like he’s scared.

I don’t want my spells to hurt anyone. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to hurt anyone. 

Above all, tragedy’s restful. There’s no hope left either way; nothing to reach for. He knows he’s caught, a field mouse in a trap. He knows that there is nothing else he could do. His knowing changes nothing. He strains to remember, over and over, and always, when he thinks he might finally have it, it slips like a hand from his grasp.

“Magic,” Qifrey tells Tetia, very quietly, “is defined by three aspects. Technique, ideas and purpose. What do you yearn for? What do you aim to provide?” He tilts his head, searching for the correct words. “Of course, no witch should aim to bring harm. Intention matters just as much as anything when crafting a spell. It means more than you can imagine, Tetia, that you do not want to hurt anyone. You’re a good witch.”

She nods, tearfully. “I’m a good witch,” she whispers.

“Sometimes…” Qifrey trails off. He shifts slightly so he’s sitting back on his knees, making it so that Tetia is looking down at him instead. “Sometimes, adults don’t tell children the truth, because we think it’s the best thing we can do to protect them. The world can be very heavy, and children are supposed to be kept safe and grow and learn until they are strong enough to bear its weight. But children can’t be kept safe, not all the time. Not unless we cast a bubble spell around them their whole entire lives, and how could someone learn anything like that?”

“It’s like Master Olly says,” Tetia comments, nodding to herself. “Children need to know what’s safe and what isn’t so they can be smart. And they can’t know what’s dangerous and scary if they’re always safe. They can’t learn to not be scared if they’ve never been scared.”

Something warm unfurls in his chest, but Qifrey knows it’s just pride. “That’s right, Tetia. Just like Master Olly says.” He schools his expression into something more serious. “And as your Master, I don’t ever want to lie to you unless I have reason to believe it’s the only thing that will keep you safe. So I won’t lie to you now.” Qifrey squeezes Tetia’s hand once more. “You are going to hurt people in this life, and there’s very little you can do about it. Maybe it’s a spell gone wrong, or words said in the heat of the moment. You’re a good witch, Tetia. You’re a good person. But I can’t look you in the eyes and say that will never happen just because you’re good. Do you understand?”

Tetia looks at him with wide eyes, and he can see, in that gaze, that she’d hoped the answer would be different. But this isn’t what Qifrey aims to do as a teacher, and he wouldn’t betray his ideals for anything. The world is often awful, and most adults try to keep this from children; the world is often wonderful, and that’s what children always seem to make adults realize, as though for the first time. The sky and the birds and the sea. The colored drawings and sunny afternoons and the music. You could make this place beautiful. Look, a child will say, look at how everything sings. 

Perhaps it stems from what he’s learned from Beldaruit, who, for all his flamboyantness and easy smiles, never told Qifrey any platitudes or tried to shelter him from difficult things. Qifrey already knew how the world could be; Beldaruit had nothing to shelter him from. 

(He can remember being thirteen, or something of the sort, and sitting by the sidelines as wintertime celebrations spread along the Great Hall. Olruggio had come by, hopeful smile in hand, and asked if Qifrey wanted to grab some cotton-candy with him; Qifrey told him to leave him alone, and pretended the dejected glimmer in Olruggio’s eyes meant nothing to him.

“Why must you break the poor boy’s heart?” Beldaruit asked, once Olruggio scampered away. Qifrey had been trying to shake him off all night, but Beldaruit was extremely stubborn. “He clearly cares about you. That’s no way to treat a friend.”

“We’re not friends,” Qifrey responded, a line that was already growing tired. He’d glanced at his own pale hands, then at his shoes, then murmured, half-hoping he wouldn’t be heard, “It hurts. To care.”

Beldaruit’s hand was almost painfully warm against his shoulder. “You will have to make a choice one day, Qifrey,” he said, not unkindly. “Whatever the pain you harbor, whatever the secrets you keep. It ends, or it doesn’t; you live, or you don’t. And to live is to care, regardless of how much you try to convince yourself it doesn’t.” 

Damn the old man. Qifrey is his master’s apprentice, after all.)

“But I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Tetia repeats, looking down at their conjoined hands. “Magic is about intention, isn’t it? Doesn’t that count?”

Qifrey smooths out her hair again, carefully untangling one of her ponytails in order to tie back the falling strands. “Someone may have the best of intentions and still hurt you,” he tells her. “It doesn’t make them a bad person, or a good person. To live in this world means you are equally capable of hurting and being hurt. You must give yourself grace when that comes to be, because you cannot avoid it happening entirely. The fact you’re so worried about hurting others already shows how good you are, dear Tetia. There’ll come a day you might doubt that, but I never will. Okay?”

“Okay,” Tetia murmurs. Her eyes are still brighter than normal, but she’s stopped crying. Qifrey takes a handkerchief from his pocket and quickly draws a small water sigil on it, then makes quick work of cleaning up the tear tracks from her face. The damp cloth is cold, which makes her squirm. 

“Now, I believe we do have something that requires your assistance in the living room,” he says, standing up with a flourish. “Shall we?”

Tetia grabs the back of his tunic, trailing behind him as he leaves the kitchen. “I thought Master Olly went to fix my mess,” she says, glumly. 

“Ah, but as the inventor of the cloud spell, you’re the most qualified witch around to resolve this issue.” He glances over his shoulder and winks at her. “I’m sure there’s no one better to help out Master Olly.”

“If you say so.”

“I do,” he says, easily. “I have the utmost faith in my apprentices.”

Tetia still looks uncertain, but soon enough, a glint of determination burns in her eyes. With a spring in her step, she jumps down the two steps that lead down to the living room area, going on ahead as Qifrey trails just behind. She hesitates only for a moment, as if about to glance over her shoulder for reassurance, but her shoulders straighten again, and she marches on to the living room with her pen in hand like a witch on a mission. 

“Don’t worry!” She calls out. “Agott, Richeh, I’m coming! I’ll make sure you both are safe!”

She turns the corner to the living room, out of sight in just a second. He halts his steps, still lingering behind to see if she’ll check if he’s still following, but of course, she doesn’t. See? Qifrey wants to tell her. You’re already strong enough to not need me all the time. Can’t you see how much you’ve grown? How much you continue to grow?

There’s a sharp twinge in his chest, and he takes another step back, making sure nothing transpires in his face, though no one’s watching him. In the light of midday, the atelier feels like something pulled out of a dream, mismatched colorful carpets strewn about the floor, the gently rustling curtains; all the signs of life, like the girls’ shoes scattered near the entranceway, Olruggio’s heavy cloak on the back of the kitchen chair, which he can see from here; one of Richeh’s drawings, orange-blue streaks on sketch paper, proudly hanging on the wall next to Qifrey’s fifth trial certification. In the kitchen, the food simmers gently, the scent just starting to come down the hall, garlic and tomatoes and green onions, the aftertaste of chili oil from tasting the broth.

There is a dream he has, sometimes. He is sitting at the dinner table with Olruggio next to him. Across, the girls, maybe Beldaruit, in nights where Qifrey’s heart aches the most, because Olruggio is his best friend, but whenever Qifrey pictures family, Beldaruit’s face is the first one he sees. At the table, all are served, all are fed. On it, a bubbling pot of wonton soup, warm rice, wine and bread and tea, steamed vegetable dumplings, cold rice noodles. Chopsticks clink against bowls, the smell of food filling the air, warm. He loves, so much, and it doesn’t kill him.

It’s the last dream he ever wants to have. It keeps it at bay, somehow, to know he can sit each night at a table so similar, and yet never dream a whole dream, not even a little bit, not even at all.

Quietly, he slips back into the kitchen. 

“Oh,” Olruggio says. “There you are.”

Qifrey doesn’t tense at the words, nor does he show any outward reaction outside of tilting his head in acknowledgement, but something in his chest coils regardless, as it is wont to do when it comes to Olruggio’s voice. “There I am,” he replies, glancing over his shoulder as he finishes drying the last of the plates. “Did you have fun coordinating the living room cleanup?”

Olruggio huffs, settling down at the kitchen counter as though he’s spent the entire afternoon trekking outside in the wilderness. His hair is askew, sticking up in odd places, and his tunic is wrinkled in a manner Qifrey can easily recognize from being tugged around by his apprentices. He hides a smile behind his own soapy hand when Olruggio inhales, as if to speak, then chokes on his own breath and spits out something that looks suspiciously like cotton.

“When you and Tetia talked about a cloud spell, I didn’t expect it to be so… fluffy,” Olruggio grumbles, once he’s finished coughing. “Clouds are supposed to be made out of water and ice crystals. I thought I’d have to use a drying spell, not the one we use for cleaning up dust.”

“One can hardly rest peacefully and comfortably atop ice crystals,” Qifrey says, mock-seriously. “I’m sure Tetia informed you of that, because you surely went on about what clouds technically are to her as well, knowing you.”

“Yeah, yeah, and she sounded just like you, by the way. Do a worse job next time.”

“Duly noted.”

By now the sun has begun its tenuous climb down from the highest peak, and the shadows in the kitchen are growing darker, though not yet dark enough to justify lighting the floatglow lamps. Through the window, a smattering of clouds and some afternoon fog cast the entire sky in a gentle, buttery yellow, the sunrays dispelled into a skyful of light. It’s late autumn, which means daytimes have been growing shorter and shorter, and each sunny day is limpid and bright, as though it’s been dipped in the crystal-clear waters of a stream. Qifrey enjoys this time of the year most, with colder days and deep-blue skies, not yet dark as winter, nor stormy like summer tends to be.

He hears rather than sees Olruggio sit down at the counter, the rustling of pages like he’s pulled out a scroll. He’s in between jobs right now, or so he calls it, a window of time in which all of his commissions have been timely delivered, but he’s yet to receive any new requests. Known as he is, it’s rather rare, and Qifrey knows Olruggio is trying to make the best out of this free time before mail arrives at the door of his atelier. 

He’s attempting to plow through the editions of fire-glyphs periodicals he’d let pile up, which has thus far included a lot of muttering and scribbling annotations on his part, and some drafted letters of opinion pieces addressed to the authors of a specific research paper or other. He does it every other month whenever he has a spare moment’s time, like clockwork.

Qifrey has asked him why he doesn’t write his own papers to submit to the Great Hall’s periodical; he knows Olruggio has received offers and invites to do so, but he never accepts. Olruggio tends to just mumble something about the pretentiousness of academia, but Qifrey can hazard a guess. He’s never been one to let others dictate what he can and can’t say, and there’s likely too much editing on the side of the periodical’s publishers to make the idea palatable to Olruggio. 

Qifrey would know: once upon a time, prior to graduation, Beldaruit had guided him on the draft of an article about the sociological uses of the rainbringer spell , which he’d then submitted to one of the more well-known periodicals about water magic. The feedback he’d received contained so much heavy editing of his thesis that he’d elected not to go through with it at all. Beldaruit had been disappointed, though not at Qifrey. I’d thought they’d have grown a bit more open-minded than they were in my time, was all he’d said, but he’d still kept Qifrey’s draft amongst other important documents in his office.

“The days like this go by so fast,” Olruggio comments, and Qifrey turns away from the sink to watch him curiously. He’s on the counter with, as Qifrey had assumed, one of the periodical scrolls open in front of him, but he’s resting his chin on his hand, as though he’d been looking elsewhere instead before glancing away. “I feel like I’ve done nothing at all.”

“We cooked a hearty meal and you saved two little girls from a cloud,” Qifrey points out, bemused. Tetia had been the one to cast the spell itself, but it was Olruggio’s fast reflexes that kept Agott and Richeh from tumbling to the ground in a heap. “I’d say it’s all in a day’s work. Not every single day needs to be an adventure.”

“I suppose,” Olruggio says. He uses a hand to further flatten the scroll onto the counter, but still doesn’t look down at it, distracted. “But don’t you also feel, sometimes, that the days are too easy?”

Qifrey frowns slightly, wiping his hands on the front of his apron. They’re cold, and he has to resist the urge to run up to his room for his snugstone, warm them up. “How so?”

Olruggio looks a bit cowed at not being immediately understood, so Qifrey does his best to clear the frown and look as open as possible. It doesn’t happen as often between them anymore: as much as Qifrey has tried to hide of himself, Olruggio has still managed to know him the best anyone ever could, time and time again, even if the times he has known Qifrey in his entirety are few and far between. Qifrey, in turn, understands people very little, but he’s found, with the passing of time, that Olruggio makes perfect sense to him.

“I don’t know,” Olruggio mutters, and Qifrey wonders if this is what it feels like to be on the other side whenever Olruggio asks how he’s doing. “It just feels… too quiet. Don’t you ever? When I was younger, every day passed like a whirlwind, learning, practicing. Then the blizzard, everything, I’ve told you before and don’t need to tell it again. The fire, the smell — I’ve told you. Our years at the Great Hall, you giving me heart attacks every other week, the trials, the certifications, you know. How we were always racing towards something. And how the terrible thing never really happened again, but it never left my mind. And now everything’s still.” He drums his fingers on the counter, tap-tap-tap. “Sometimes there’s a luxurious amount of time before anything bad happens.”

The kitchen grows dimmer, a cloud going over the yellow sun. “Olly,” Qifrey says, unmoored, uncertain, as though it’s any kind of answer at all. 

The thing is he understands him so painfully it feels, for a moment, that he’s looking at Olruggio like one would a reflection in the mirror. He understands it down to the heart of him, the creeping, mounting uncertainty that something awful is about to happen, has just happened, has never stopped happening to him. Some days are bright, and they are sunny. Most times the food is warm and filling. Nights where he laughs, wine going down smooth, a warm bed. There is something within his body that is not his body. Trying to make sense of it is like trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something he only feels in his bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.

Olruggio doesn’t speak of it much, but Qifrey knows. It took a very long time for him to be able to speak of it at all, even longer than it took for Qifrey to tell him the truth about his stolen memories, about his missing eyes. Olruggio’s always been the most trusting out of the both of them, but as children, he bore a sort of quiet pain that unsettled Qifrey at each and every turn, because he could recognize himself in it. He was better than Qifrey at hiding it —  good enough, Qifrey thinks, that he eventually convinced himself there was nothing to hide.

Then one day they were drunk, not for the first time nor the second; hiding away from their masters, atop a hill a way’s away from the town square during a festival, Alaria having just stumbled away to grab them another bottle, a year older than them and the only one who could do so easily. Through blurred vision, the stars were scarcely more than lion’s teeth, the air heavy with bonfire smoke. Olruggio had sniffed, coughed a little, and said, You’d think it would smell better without the burning flesh, but really it’s just all the same.

“It can be difficult,” Qifrey says, choosing his words very carefully. He sits down at the counter across from Olruggio, unsure what to do with his hands, which he keeps tightly wound, resting atop his knees. “Adapting to an easy life once something terrible has happened. You feel as if it’s merely the calm before a storm. Something terrible will happen, or so you think, and you cannot become too at ease, or else you will not be prepared. You can’t afford to not be prepared.” He twists his fingers reflexively, giving Olruggio a half-smile. “Or so you think.”

Olruggio studies him knowingly, shoulders drooping from his previous tension. “I knew you’d understand best. But,” he adds, almost sheepish, “I hoped to not say too much. I don’t mean to bring up any old wounds. We’re both —  we’ll, we’re both better than we used to be, aren’t we?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Qifrey acquiesces, tilting his head. “We won’t ever be unharmed, but time sands away at things. It dulls what’s sharp, fades what’s stark in memory. You learn to live with it, or you don’t.”

“And the second thing is not an option,” Olruggio says, because this is something that Qifrey has told him before. Unbeknownst to him, in the most painful of ways, it was something that Olruggio had first told him himself, the second time he found out about the silverwood tree. I can’t live with this, Qifrey had said, or something of the sort, and Olruggio had answered, That’s not something you’re allowed to choose, as if it were that simple.

He has to phrase everything so carefully; he can’t bear to lie to Olruggio, not in moments as vulnerable as this, a vulnerability Olruggio so rarely offers. He can’t say nothing terrible will ever happen again; he can’t say time has eroded the sharpness of every wound, because every other year, branches tear out of his eye socket and he’s thirteen years old again. But he has learned to live with it, even if it’s not the best way to live. Even if he’s in pain all the time, even if he can’t ever have —  well, he can’t ever have — 

Wounds heal. Sometimes the skin is unmarred, like nothing ever happened at all. Sometimes it scars, thick and rough, a clear reminder. And other times the flesh caves in and the skin heals around an empty space, around an absence, and you often forget about it until you reach out for what used to be there; then it’s like missing a step in a staircase, a false note in a melody.

Some days it’s fine. If not for the dull pain of the parasite in his bones, Qifrey can get through without much thought to it, losing himself in routine, teaching, doing the laundry, picking up mail, making dinner, going into town for groceries, putting the kids to bed. He’s anxious by nurture, accustomed to working at a low-level of urgency each and every day. It’s enough to keep the silverwood at bay, especially when he sits down to eat each night alongside Olruggio, and Olruggio always looks, and Olruggio’s hands twitch at his sides, and Olruggio’s eyes always go just a little tight when he thinks Qifrey isn’t looking.

Why won’t you, he seems to ask. Why can’t you, why won’t you, how can I?

And it would be so easy. No one knows him best. No one ever could, again and again. It would be so easy, and Qifrey would never again be able to live with himself.

“I feel selfish for feeling this way, though,” Olruggio says, and Qifrey almost startles, the word selfish pulling him from his thoughts as if dousing him with cold water. “Or maybe selfish is not the word. It’s just unsettling. Everything’s alright, now. There’s the girls to watch out for, there’s work to do, there’s a house to keep. I keep waiting…”

He trails off. Qifrey watches another shadow fall as the sun goes down further, casting the kitchen in a soft orange-red glow. 

“You know I wish I could tell you nothing bad will ever happen to us,” Qifrey says, quietly. He looks at Olruggio’s hands, splayed out atop the scroll. “You deserve to live an easy life, Olly, even if sometimes you do make it difficult to yourself by pulling your all-nighters and skipping the meals I so thoughtfully set aside for you.”

He tried for levity, but Olruggio’s tone is decently serious when he replies, “Life is often not about what you deserve.”

Qifrey is quiet for a moment. “Right,” he murmurs. “It is not.”

Olruggio looks at him, searching, and Qifrey does his level best not to shrink under his gaze. The kitchen has grown dark enough that Olruggio’s eyes are the brightest things around, dark blue shadows throwing every feature of his into stark relief. In moments like this, each and every thing they have never said to each other is near tangible, and Qifrey finds it comforting, in a backwards sort of way. He knows Olruggio knows there are secrets he keeps, words he will not utter; it absolves him from the lie of keeping them in, if only in the most abstract of manners. 

And Olruggio has his own words that he will not speak, things he will not say. Qifrey knows this also. He pretends to not know what they are. He’s awfully good at pretending.

Then, as if he’s seen whatever he needed to see, Olruggio slides his gaze away and reaches for the nearest floatglow lamp, closing the circle with his conjuring pen. Immediately, the shadows recede, and the kitchen is once more somewhere familiar, cozy and still-warm, the windows tightly closed against the chilly night air, yellow light dousing the wooden floors golden. 

Olruggio smiles a squinty smile at him. “It’s no good for the eyes to be looking around in all that gloom. This is much better.”

Qifrey mechanically untenses his shoulders, and leans his chin against his hand. “Ah yes, the pair and a half of eyes we have between us.”

“Hush. This is not me changing the subject, by the way. I just couldn’t see you very well.”

“Mhm.” Qifrey watches Olruggio back, indulgent in a way he can only be when the light falls around them like this, as though the room were a nightlight, the rest of the world far away and unimportant. “You are trying to make it all feel less heavy, though, because you don’t like to bring other people down. You do this quite often. As long as I’ve known you, one might say.”

“You remember too much,” Olruggio says, terribly fond, and somehow Qifrey musters up the strength to not burst into tears.

“You’re tired,” he says instead, pointedly glancing down at the scroll, which he’s sure Olruggio hasn’t read a single word of. “You’ve just delivered two month-long commissions back to back; you should be resting, not frying what’s left of your brain trying to poke holes at other people’s inventions.”

“Well, they could certainly use the feedback,” Olruggio grumbles, frowning down at the periodical like it’s personally offended him. 

“They’ve spent two months without it so far, they survive another day,” Qifrey says, plucking the scroll straight from Olruggio’s hand and holding it aloft. “You should go draw yourself a bath. You still have cloud fluff on your hair.”

Olruggio bats away at his fringe, standing up from his seat. “Why the hell didn’t you say anything?” He ruffles his hair quite aggressively, and some small remnants of Tetia’s cloud spell flutter down to the floor. “Heavens, I must’ve looked ridiculous, talking all this time with —  are you laughing?”

“No,” Qifrey says, like a liar. “I am keeping this hostage, though,” he notes, nodding towards the scroll, “at least until I see you asleep for more than five hours straight. I’ll tuck you in if I have to.”

“You enjoy that too much,” Olruggio says, but he makes no move to argue further. “Agott’s always telling me she’s too old to be tucked in.”

“Agott’s twelve,” Qifrey deadpans. “Twelve year olds think they’re too grown up for everything. Now go, unless you need me to draw you a bath as well. That, at least, I know the girls are too grown up for.”?

“I’m going, I’m going.” Olruggio raises his hands in surrender. “I know when I’m beat.”

“We both know that’s not true, you stubborn git.”

“You seem to like me well enough.”

“Olly.”

“Alright. I can see you’re smiling, though.”

With those words, Qifrey’s left in the darkened kitchen, only the soft light of the floatglow lamp at his side. Out the window, the sun is barely a smudge of red against the deep blue above it, the fog still hanging low enough that it’s impossible to see the smattering of stars that tend to shine above the atelier. 

Qifrey clenches his hands tightly enough to hurt, nails digging into his skin. 

He thinks so many things and does not say a single one out loud. He chokes on such longing he cannot spit it out.

Then he stands swiftly, and goes around the kitchen, turning on the other floatglows with the conjuring pen Olruggio left behind. He has things to do, still; there’s supper to plan and then serve, and he has to make sure the girls have all taken their baths and finished their chores. He needs to check in with Agott about her new clothes, and then next time he’s in town, he needs to confirm the exact address of the new seamstress the grocer had recommended. He’s put it off long enough, and his cloak won’t mend itself.

Life is not about what you deserve, Qifrey thinks. If it were, he could never have something as utterly wonderful and terrible as this. If it were, he would be somewhere very cold, and very dark, and he would be well and utterly alone, in a way he has so often wished he could be, if only so he could make his pain something tangible, if only so he could not hurt anyone else.

The harm comes. It never doesn’t. Qifrey doesn’t believe in premonitions and foreshadowing, even though perhaps he should. Still, he thinks. Still, still. Everything is very still.

For a fraction of a second, he glances towards the window, feeling as if he’s being watched. Then it’s gone, and he’s left only with the quiet impression of being unsettled, like something has tilted slightly to the left. The air smells slightly of ozone, as if a storm’s approaching.

How rare it is, he thinks, as he exits the kitchen, a floatglow lamp in his hands. It scarcely ever rains during autumn.

(Picture it’s three days from now. Or a week. In time the exact distance will fade away, days blending into one another. Perhaps it’s two full weeks, or a month. Between one bout of the flu amongst the girls and a job that called him away from the atelier for the better part of a weekend, it takes a while before Qifrey makes it to the village again, and even longer before he makes his way down to the seamstress. More of a tailor, the grocer tells him, though she does repair clothes as well. Qifrey thanks the man, harried but really needing to finally get this one errand done with.

Sometimes there is a luxurious amount of time before anything bad happens.

The thundering sky, a flash of light, the rot of forbidden magic creeping through a field. It comes in and kills the lights, comes in through the hands of a child, comes in and renders the future impossible. The child screams and bites, scratches her nails down the sides of Qifrey’s face, yells for her mother, sobs, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, I didn’t mean to.

A mother gets turned into a pillar of stone. Qifrey, never one to know his myths, holds the child as she weeps, and foolishly looks back over his shoulder the entire way home.)

iii.

children run so fast

towards the future

from the past

The girls are all fast asleep. Qifrey’s made sure of it, walking around the perimeter of the clearing, ensuring they’re all properly covered up with their blankets and sleeping bags, readjusting the snugstones that had tumbled away from their grasp. They snuffle quietly, softly, hair clinging to the side of their mouths, tucked in up to their chins. Splayed out as children do, one leg sticking out here, another hand clenched into a fist there. It’s well into the night, and nothing moves.

Qifrey startles as a cup of tea is placed into his hands, chasing away the chill with a near sharp pain. Olruggio only glances at him, before turning back to the firelight and the kettle.

Well, almost nothing moves.

The woods are always anything but quiet, the breeze high up in the branches, odd creaks and rustlings from deep between the trees; if he strains over the crackling of the fire, he can hear the distant hooting of an owl or several. They wandered away enough from a passing creek to be out of the way of the water deer, but their clicking noises can still be heard if one is looking for it. Richeh mutters in her sleep. Agott sneezes twice without waking herself up somehow.

Heavy with sap, the wood from the fire snaps and cracks loudly every so often. Olruggio’s shoulders grow more and more taut each time, but he says nothing, and he doesn’t turn in Qifrey’s direction again. 

Yes, Qifrey thinks. It’s anything but quiet. Olruggio’s always at his loudest when he keeps his mouth shut. 

He sits. He tries to tilt his head back to look at the stars, but the right side of his face twinges with the movement, and he glances downward again as if burned. It’s nothing but sheer regret keeping the silverwood at bay at this point, and although he feels terrible for thinking it, his own pain is not enough on its own. If it were, Olruggio would have never found out a second time; if it were, leaving Olruggio behind wouldn’t have been enough to nearly kill him; if it were, Qifrey might have made it through, somehow, through the depths of his despair alone.

Or perhaps he’s being facetious. It isn’t as if he’s spent every second of his life so far drowning in sorrow, even if guilt has been the tinge that colors his every emotion since he can scarcely remember. There has been joy. There has been love. It would be a lie to claim otherwise, a lie he couldn’t very well explain as Coco stared at him, pale with horror. 

He should have. She knows, now, which he can still hardly fathom as he watches her sleep, mouth half-open and terribly young under a mountain of blankets and Tetia’s leg thrown over her hip. He hadn’t quite had the time to explain about all the times Olruggio had known, too: all the times Qifrey had bloomed and bloomed and bloomed because of him, the gentle hands, the childlike grin, the stubbornness, the quiet understanding. 

She likely thinks, because of that, that Qifrey has never truly felt loved his whole entire life, has never felt safe even for a single second, has never had a moment’s peace. It is true in parts, but so distant in others. Coco is young, and she is scared. She wanted her friend to feel safe, but saw what safety did to him; it is a nearly incomprehensible contradiction, and so Qifrey doesn’t blame her for each time today he has caught her staring at him like he’s already dead.

Of course he has been loved, he wants to tell her. Of course he knows he has been loved. How could he not know? 

That’s the worst thing, perhaps, in a truly endless list of worse things. 

“You should sleep,” he says, abruptly. Olruggio pretends not to startle, but lets out a curse as his hand comes to rest too close to the kettle settled atop the warming glyph, hissing as he shakes it out. Qifrey winces, but says again, “You should sleep. It’ll be a long day of travel tomorrow, still, and Heaven knows — well, at least I do — you’ve barely slept a wink since the day before Silver Eve.”

For a moment, it seems like Olruggio might not answer him at all, and something icy-cold starts to crawl up Qifrey’s stomach; in the past years, whenever Olruggio has found out about the silverwood, it has always been preceded by a calculating, contemplating silence, glances that last just a second too long.

Once, his first instinct when suspicion arose was to come directly to Qifrey, to question him openly. He doesn’t do that anymore, and Qifrey tries not to think too hard about why that might be, and mostly fails.

“You’re one to talk,” Olruggio mutters, sounding haggard and almost dazed with sleeplessness. He rubs his eyes with his hand, pressing down too hard in the way he does when he’s trying to fend off a headache. “The bruises under your eyes have bruises of their own.”

Something in Qifrey unfurls, and he curls his hands tighter around his cup of tea, trying to absorb some of the warmth after all. “You know I have a hard time sleeping away from home,” he says, which is no answer at all, but also isn’t a lie. In this life, he has only ever been able to sleep peacefully in two places: his old bedroom at the Great Hall, and at his atelier. Granted, he was only able to find enough solace in both after meeting Olruggio, but he doesn’t need to know that. It’d go straight to his head.

Olruggio huffs. “Sleep doesn’t come any easier with age, or so they tell me. Makes you wish you were like them again,” he says, inclining his head toward the girls. “How kids can sleep anywhere, I’ll never know. I swear Richeh was asleep before her head hit the pillow. I thought that was just a figure of speech.”

Qifrey smiles thinly. “They’ve had a rough few days.”

“I’d say,” Olruggio says flatly. He takes a long sip of his tea, slumping down as though he wishes it were something stronger. “They’ve been too quiet. I don’t like it.”

“They’re asleep, Olly.”

“You know what I mean. We traveled all day, and I don’t think I heard them exchange more than a few words between each other, and even fewer with us.” Olruggio shakes his head. “Nothing too out of the ordinary for Agott and even Richeh, but — come on, Qifrey, did you see Tetia today? Did you see Coco? She won’t let you out of her sight. She nearly cried when she woke up this morning and you weren’t there, until I told her you’d just gone to get yourself cleaned up. And Tetia isn’t usually this distracted, nor is she this silent. She looks just like you when you’ve got something heavy on your mind.” He raises an eyebrow. “As you so often do.” 

Qifrey sighs. He knows — knows what troubles Coco, at least, although it makes his heart ache to hear it so clearly said aloud. He’s heard the girl’s accounts of what happened while he was away, but none of it has been enough to explain why Tetia looks like her world is about to come crashing down in front of her eyes, and she’s just watching it happen.

What happened back in Ezrest?

“Children are sturdier than most people give them credit for,” Qifrey says. He watches the shadows that the firelight casts upon Olruggio’s face. “We must allow enough time to be put between them and everything that happened before they’re ready to talk about it. They might not be ready to talk about it for a very long time; they might not want to talk about it, even if they should.” He mock-winks at Olruggio — they’ve called it that since they were kids, since technically, for Qifrey, he’s just blinking. “Doesn’t that sound familiar?”

“Can’t believe I signed up for this,” Olruggio mumbles into his tea.

“You did, quite literally so. The documentation of your Watchful Eye contract with the atelier is somewhere in my study, I believe.”

Olruggio glares, but it’s half-hearted. “I don’t recall a clause about traumatized children.”

“You signed up to be the Watchful Eye to my atelier,” Qifrey says. “It was heavily implied, I think.”

“Heavens, you and your subtext.”

Qifrey smiles behind his cup, arms curled up around his knees as he drinks. It is such a cold night, and he’s sitting just far enough away from the fire that the night breeze catches the back of his neck, raises gooseflesh on his covered arms. He glances at the girls again to ensure they’re still all properly bundled up, as Richeh has the habit of kicking off all her blankets, but they’re still in the exact positions they fell asleep in, likely too tired to move.

The girls, the girls. He can scarcely think of anything else. He needs them to be home now, needs to see them safe and sound in their own beds, needs to watch them each clamber down the stairs for breakfast, sleep-mussed and cranky, needs to see them lazing about in the living room, needs to hear them laughing loudly in the other room and shushing each other when he peeks a head in, stifling giggles behind their hands. He needs to never see what terror looks like when it’s wearing Coco’s face. He needs to never see anything haunted in Tetia’s eyes. He needs to never think about how small Richeh looked as she stared up at the Knights, and needs to never again think about the trembling in Agott’s hands when she clutched his robes as they left Ezrest. He needs to see them just be children again.

He can hold a grudge like it’s a hand. He will never forgive some people for the events of that night, though more importantly, he might never forgive himself.

“Did the healers have nothing that could help with Coco’s scar?” Olruggio asks. He’s looking sadly at her sleeping form; the mark is visible even in the gloom, still-healing and stark. “It looks painful.”

“Everything hurts before it heals,” Qifrey says, quietly. “But no, not really. It’ll fade with time, but the healers said it will likely never fully go away.”

“Did they tell her that?” Olruggio frowns. “She’s just a kid. They could’ve been more gentle about it.”

Gentleness won’t unmake a wound, Qifrey wants to say, but he refrains. “It can be difficult to grasp permanence, when you’re young. That something might never go away. I don’t think it has dawned on her yet.” His throat feels tight all of a sudden. “I don’t — I didn’t want—”

“Qifrey,” Olruggio says, and Qifrey breathes. “You didn’t hurt her. It wasn’t your fault.”

He sounds mildly outraged, like the very thought of it is abhorrent. Qifrey is touched, still, by all the faith Olruggio somehow has in him, but it does little to quell the guilt.

Now, he wishes his own drink were something stronger. “I should have kept her safe,” he says, simply. “I did not. That puts me at fault.”

“You did everything you could,” Olruggio says, fiercely.

“It wasn’t enough.”

They just stare at each other, both unmovable. Fire in the rain, a stone sinking in a lake; even with Olruggio sitting right in front of him, Qifrey feels so uniquely and distinctly alone for a second that he almost screams. Please don’t believe in me like this, he wants to say. Please don’t tell me I tried. Please don’t tell me how good I am. 

Wounds heal. Sometimes the skin is unmarred, like nothing ever happened at all. Sometimes it scars, thick and rough, a clear reminder. And other times the flesh caves in and the skin heals around an empty space, around an absence, and you often forget about it until you reach out for what used to be there; then it’s like missing a step in a staircase, a false note in a melody. Qifrey so often gets lost in the fact he knows all of Olruggio that he forgets the same is not the truth the other way around, that Olruggio genuinely believes that he’s a good person, because he doesn’t know. 

He searches for forgiveness, even knowing he won’t find it, like poking at a wound just to see if it’ll still hurt.

The tension breaks as Olruggio untenses his shoulders first, slumping as if defeated. The look he gives Qifrey is older than his years, soft and sad and terrible in how gentle it is. “You treat yourself so cruelly, sometimes,” he says, tiredly. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Qifrey can’t tell him anything that wouldn’t be a blatant lie, so he stays quiet.

“You’re such a good teacher,” Olruggio continues, undeterred. “You were so scared after taking your fifth trial, but you love these kids so much, and you know they love you back. They look up to you. I look up to you, Qifrey. You’re an amazing witch. I hate the word despite so much, I won’t use it, but you know what I mean. You…” He sighs. “You were so angry when we were younger, and it took you to so many dark places you thought you wouldn’t come back from, couldn’t come back from. But you did. And you treated yourself so cruelly, then, for being angry, for being scared, for being resentful, as if all of that didn’t just make you human. As if that were something worthy of punishment.” 

Olruggio closes his eyes, like the words pain him. “You were so disgusted with yourself for wanting revenge against those who took your memories, but I was never any better. Memories or not, behavior is learned. How could he be ashamed of being human? That’s what I’d think to myself. And I wanted to kill whoever taught that to you.” He looks straight at Qifrey, then, his eyes bright. “Should I be as disgusted with myself, then? Am I as evil as you think yourself to be?”

“Olly,” Qifrey whispers.

“You’re not cruel,” Olruggio says, quiet but intently. “The fact it pains you so to believe that you are is telling enough.”

“Cruelty has little to do with what one is or isn’t,” Qifrey says.

“We’re made out of more than simply what we have done,” Olruggio says back. “Or what we have failed to do. Haven’t you told me that?”

Qifrey flounders, hand tightening against the front of his robes for purchase. “I—”

“You’re more than what you’ve done,” Olruggio says, firmly. He shifts forward so that their knees are nearly touching, the closest he’s gotten to Qifrey since they left the city, and his eyes are overwarm, fierce. “We’ve never been the type to tell each other everything; that’s fine. I have my own secrets too, which you don’t ask me about. I don’t know what it is that you find so unredeemable, but short of harming your apprentices yourself, I could think of nothing, Qifrey, nothing that I wouldn’t forgive you for in a heartbeat. I don’t care if you’re guilty.”

And good heavens, Qifrey knows this, because Olruggio has already forgiven him, again and again, even though he shouldn’t. He somehow manages to say, “I care if I’m guilty.”

“Tough luck,” Olruggio says, unshakable. “You’re stuck with my forgiveness even so.”

I don’t know how to carry it, Qifrey thinks to himself. He was always ashamed to take, and so he gave; it was never a virtue, always a disguise. He looks at Olruggio now, hand half extended to hold his, and feels very close to the edge of a cliff, stomach tightening like he’s about to go tumbling down, down to unknown depths.

Love ends, Qifrey thinks. Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?

“Look at you,” Olruggio says, his voice soft and sad. His fingers tug at the sleeve of Qifrey’s robes, where a tear has the thread coming undone. “Like you’ve been chosen to carry the heaviest thing.”

Qifrey closes his eye. Unseeing, he raises his hand and tangles his fingers with Olruggio’s, holding on as one would to a lifeline, as one would to a final breath, as one would to the last glimpse of sunlight they see before sinking underneath the waves, the waves, the waves. 

Olruggio’s hand is rough and calloused and near searing to the touch. They don’t do this much; there is an odd vulnerability to holding hands that Qifrey could never quite get behind, a strange thing he couldn’t ever explain to himself. He so often doesn’t know what to do with his hands, finding them too empty or too full, too cold and too brittle. He holds on, he lets go, he breaks. 

And Olruggio’s hand is so warm.

“Go to sleep, dear,” Qifrey murmurs, squeezing it tight. “By the time you wake — I’ll be here, still.”

He says nothing more, and neither does Olruggio, but for the first time in a very long time, the weight of all the unspoken words between them are nowhere to be found. There’s just them, the warm orange of the fire. The girls’ deep, steady breaths. Above them, there’s a skyful of stars, pinpricks of light against the dark, and it all shines so bright Qifrey can’t see anything else.

Olruggio sets out his sleeping mat right next to Qifrey, as close to the fire as he can get without burning himself. He looks younger in the gloom, bundled up to his chin. Half-turned towards the girls, his face is angled in Qifrey’s direction, bleary-eyed as he settles down, and Qifrey has to bite down the sudden rush of affection that rises within him. Olruggio’s blinks slow and then stop entirely, his eyes falling closed, though he valiantly fought against it.

“Goodnight,” Qifrey says, quietly. He’s still right where he was, though also turned towards Olruggio now, his face warmed by the fire, his hands playing with the edge of Olruggio’s blanket.

“Love you to death,” Olruggio murmurs, half-asleep, and the seed of Qifrey’s heart gnaws at his ribs.

Look up at the starlight in the darkness. / Even the dark stars get to shine awhile. / Come, then.

Come home again and lie with me. / Tell me we are not what we have done.

+

The light cuts through the gaps in the trees and falls upon the ground like shattered glass, tiny spiderwebs of shadow sprawling through the field as cracks on a surface. 

Coco almost staggers under the sun. For a moment, she can do nothing but stare at her own two hands, where red marks that will later grow into bruises distantly ache. There’s a cut on her palm, already crusted dry, and darker stains of conjuring ink on the sides of her fingers. She ignores the stinging as she bats away the sprinkles of rubble from the front of her robes, pinpricks of dull pain as tiny pieces of gravel come unlodged from her knees.

She glances upwards. The sun, through the gaps in the clouds, is watery and silver-bright, all light without any of the warmth, though she can still hear the distant screeches of cicadas, remnants of a summer gone by. There’s a dampness in the air, like an oncoming storm, and the perspiration and dirt still clinging to her skin make the still-healing scar on her cheek itch something awful. All in all, and it’s almost funny in the most terrible way, she’s had better days.

The problem is the heart of it, she thinks, as she stands in the sun, the grass rustling under her feet, the breeze caressing her robes as though the world hasn’t ended in the slightest. The problem is the heart of it, because she thinks something in her chest might have finally finished breaking, and something keeps spilling out of the wound inside her chest, and she can’t make it stop.

Coco pictures the pomegranate seeds that her mother used to buy as a treat in the marketplace every so often, the vibrant skin glistening around its core, the tart surprise of its sweetness. How a mere touch would stain the fingertips, so fragile its skin. How she once dropped the bowl that had taken her mother so much time to carefully fill up with each seed plucked from the pomegranate’s inside, the redness scattered on the kitchen floor, the bleeding crimson seeds, as if something had burst. She hears the echo of her mother’s voice — Coco, stay where you are, we’ll wash it all clean.

There’s all these echoes, all the time, but the echo of a person is not a person at all.

The fruit of her heart feels just as tender and bruised, and as a bruise, which aches the more you press against it, it throbs as she looks back at Master Qifrey, whose gaze has not left her once since she landed on the clearing, an indiscernible expression on his face, half-covered in shadow.

“Master Qifrey,” she says, and her voice is hoarse and thin, like she’s been screaming for hours. And then, feeling silly and helpless like a small child, she says, “You’re still here.”

Of course he is, she reasons. Where else would he have gone? She feels guilty for even thinking that he ever would, for letting it escape her lips, but Master Qifrey’s eye softens into something knowing, something pained, as he watches her approach until she’s looking down at him, still curled up against the city wall. His face is pale, shoulders tense, but then again, she thinks sadly, they rarely aren’t.

“I’m still here,” he agrees, quietly. His hands clutch at his robes like he’s stopping himself from reaching for her, and she notes all of this with the same suffocating sadness flooding into her chest. “You’re hurt.”

Coco looks down at her stained, rumpled clothes, and feels absurdly like laughing. “Not any more than I already was,” she says. Master Qifrey flinches at her words, and all the sadness she feels hardens into something sharper, less forgiving. “You’re here,” she says again, forcefully enough that her aching throat stings, “and you need to tell me the truth.”

She has been screaming for hours, she thinks, or she feels as though she has been screaming for hours; at Tartah, at the roots of Custa’s tree, at the brimhats, at the sky, at the whole entire world in which magic somehow exists. She screams. She screams, and her throat burns, metal coats her tongue, screams enough that her voice splinters into nothing, and yet the pressure doesn’t abate. She slams her fists against the ground, a soundless yell forcing its way out of her mouth, body trembling like a live nerve, red-hot. For a single, desperate moment, she hates herself so much she almost collapses inward with it, a star imploding into its own orbit.

Here, a shadow in a field, she’s quiet. She was never a very quiet child, well-behaved as she tried to be: just like her mother, she hummed and sang and talked to herself, to the birds and all animals alike. Her house was never quiet, with the store and office just below it, the chatter and exclamations, the snipping of fabric, the quiet thuds of the looms as her mother worked late into the night for a commission or other. 

Being a witch has taught her how to keep a secret, but all she knows of keeping her mouth shut is from Master Qifrey. All she knows of silence comes from him, of averted gazes, of quick lies that aren’t really lies but are never the whole truth. He isn’t a cruel man, Coco thinks, or at least, he has never been cruel to her or the other girls, but more and more, she’s learning that what someone is or isn’t has little to do with anything.

You can convince a person to do anything. People will cut off the hands of children. Children will do anything—

Coco heaves out a breath, hands clenching at the front of her robes. “Please,” she whispers, “don’t lie to me anymore.”

His exhale is shaky, like her words hurt him, but she knows better now. Master Qifrey is hurting, and has been hurting for as long as she has known him — even when he laughs, even with his shoulders relaxed in the kitchen of their atelier, even soothing Richeh to sleep after a nightmare, even holding Tetia up so she can grab something from the upper cabinets, even with Master Olly’s hand atop his knee, even bringing up a bowl of soup to Agott when she’s too many books deep into her studies. 

He must be in so much pain, all the time, and Coco has no idea how he’s still alive.

The sun fades as a cloud passes it by, and Coco thinks: adults are supposed to protect children. She has seen them do otherwise, and it makes her feel sick to her stomach. Master Qifrey has always told them that it’s an adult’s job to do the worrying, and that a child’s duty is to be a child and learn. When asked about what he was like as a child, something will flicker behind his eyes, just like this sun, and his voice will lilt just the slightest bit, which Coco has been learning means he’s picking and choosing the words to make up a truth.

He’d make a good seamstress, weaving and stitching everything together to create something cohesive. I’m not a liar, Coco, he’d told her, and she thinks he might even believe it himself.

Adults are supposed to protect children, and that means they tell lies sometimes. Or they soften the truth. Or they say nothing at all. If they’re good enough, like Master Qifrey, they make silence not sound like silence at all, and for all Coco has always somewhat suspected he’d been hiding something from her, it has taken her all this time to understand that she has no idea who he is, not really, perhaps not at all.

“Ah,” he says, and if this were any other moment, Coco would say he sounds fond. “You already know what I am, don’t you?”

Master Qifrey’s gaze is warm, and then heavy, almost griefstruck. He shifts, thin fingers threaded against each other almost painfully, and then his hand is pulling back his cap, pulling his glasses away from his face, and he tilts his head until the sun that fades and flickers, like he’s searching for something in the light. He looks down at Coco, then, and she looks back, and she sees.

His eye is very bright, is the first thing she notices. She hasn’t spent much time looking at his face, and his glasses tend to pull one’s attention away from what hides behind them, which, she supposes, must be their very purpose. Because there’s a thin, coiled branch peeking through the socket of his right eye, a seedling sprout, bright green and blooming, and as Coco watches, a small leaf trembles and falls to the ground between them like a tear.

“Master Qifrey,” she forces out. She feels like crying too, suddenly, and she wonders if it’s possible for him to cry out of that eye, or if the tears do not flow at all. Her entire body trembles, and she can’t help but reach for him, hands hovering almost close enough to touch, but not quite. The seedling sways as though moved by an invisible breeze. “Does it hurt?” she whispers.

He hums. “I have nothing to compare it to,” he says, carefully, like he doesn’t want to worry her. “I don’t know what it feels like otherwise. It’s all I remember.” When he blinks, only his left eye moves; the branches keep his left eyelid pried open, and Coco can’t imagine how that can not be agonizing.

Unbidden, she reaches out further, and her fingertip grazes the bud of a leaf. Master Qifrey freezes, jaw going slack, before recoiling just slightly, enough that his back thumps against the wall behind him. Coco feels frozen too, her stretched out hand hanging in the air, toward him. 

She wonders if he’s ever been touched there. A silverwood tree, she has learned, is not only a parasite but something that becomes its host — its branches are the person’s flesh, its sap, the blood. For however long Master Qifrey has been growing around a silverwood seed, has truly no one ever seen it curling towards the light like this? Has no one ever asked him how much it hurts? Surely — surely Master Olly must have. Surely he must have.

Coco grew up loving the water, so it’s always made sense to her, that love acted as such: like something one sinks into, runs out of, something that flows and keeps and waters, that helps grow; something that quenches, that keeps, that echoes, leaves wet prints on the soil. Master Olly loves Master Qifrey very much, like a flood, and she can’t fathom the thought that he’s not seen this part of Master Qifrey before. There’s no way he doesn’t know.

But only one out of the two of them is a good liar, and it’s the one looking at Coco’s bruised hands as though he’s seen a ghost.

“Does it hurt?” she asks again, because he hasn’t given her a satisfactory answer yet. His body is tense and coiled, and all she can hear echo in her ears are Custa’s screams as the tree burst out of his limbs, the gurgling cries as it crawled back under his skin. It grows and stretches, coils and uncoils; a tree ring tells how long a tree has been alive, and Master Qifrey surely has decades and decades of rings pulsing alongside his veins.

She’s trying to offer him a branch, as unfortunate as the metaphor is. She wants to give him something, anything, any word that will protect him from the pain at the center of him. Coco has yet to manage to save anyone in her lifetime, but she can’t — she refuses to fall into despair, she refuses to not try again. 

She’s angry, she finds, as she kneels before Master Qifrey. She’s so angry, the seeds of her chest are sprouting something that cannot bend. There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear, and when it does bear fruit, they are so heavy the branches crack anyway. But her own roots are solid, and they all stand upon the same foundation: she does not want to see anyone else hurt. She will not let anyone else hurt.

Coco takes Master Qifrey’s hand, which is as cold as it always is, thin and calloused against her rougher, smaller palm. She refuses to look away from him until he looks back, and whatever he sees in her gaze makes him smile, impossibly.

His smile is frayed and almost helpless, shoulders hunched as if to make himself smaller. And he looks small, Coco realizes, heart sinking down her stomach. He looks, for a moment, very, very small, and Coco is so suddenly terrified by the sum of their smallness that it makes her hands tremble. The world is too big. She cannot do anything to change it. 

No, she thinks. No, I will. If the world doesn’t change, I will change it. If there is a light then she is going to swallow it.

“I might know what you are,” Coco tells Master Qifrey, “but you’re still flinching away from the question, Master. I asked who you are, not what you are. I don’t care what you are, the same way you’ve never cared about what I am. I’m your apprentice, your responsibility, your student — but you don’t care about me only because of what I am, or what I’m made of. You care about me because you care, and who you are goes a lot deeper than what you’re made of.” She feels her eyes sting, but there’s no space for tears. She smiles, too, and it aches in all places. “Let’s start again. I’m Coco. I’m twelve, and I was born during the spring. I’m very stubborn.”

Master Qifrey laughs. It startles the world around them, clouds suddenly disappearing from over the sun, making everything a little brighter. “Hi, Coco,” he says, and his voice only trembles if you strain your ear to hear it. “I’m Qifrey. I need to tell you — I need to tell you a story about a witch, and a silverwood tree.”

Another leaf flutters to the ground, carried away by the breeze.

“Is it a sad story?” Coco whispers.

His hands spasm once, like he’s keeping himself from holding them out. He keeps them close to his stomach, as though protecting a wound. When his laughter settles into a smile, it is the saddest one Coco has ever seen. 

“It’s an old story,” he says. “I should tell it again.”