Archive of Our Own

The first thing Sinocia says to him upon opening the door is, "Well, you don't look hurt."

Because the last time Olruggio showed up at the Healing Spire, he'd managed to singe half the hair off his face. Occupational hazard, as it were. She'd taken one solemn look at him before she’d gathered a poultice of antiseptic herbs, asked if he had a good razor, and handed him a small pot of willow ash along with a brush.

"For your eyebrow," she'd said in response to his silent bewilderment. "This is all the rage right now in fashionable circles."

"Why would I need—"

And she'd held up a mirror to Olruggio's face to show him that he'd gone and burnt his left eyebrow off, too, which was how he spent several months clean-shaven and also how he came to be very, very good at drawing eyebrows.

But here, now, she opens the door wider and steps aside to let him in. She's known Olruggio long enough, has treated him from the time she was a healer's apprentice and he a young witch in training, and knows better than to assume that all magical mishaps are strictly visible.

"So," she says, crossing her arms when they're in the cool safety of the spire. "What ails you today?"

Soft, soothing sounds float through the infirmary. He pictures Ermile moving bed to bed, checking on patients, dressing wounds, taking down notes in files. He tries to imagine what his will look like after today—Olruggio's file is already thick as a fist and twice as heavy with the innumerable accidents he's sustained in his career.

He thinks about how today’s note will look different from the rest.

"I want your opinion on something."

Sinocia raises her eyebrows. "Oh?"

"I think I might have narcolepsy—"

"Not impossible—"

"—or early onset dementia."

Which draws her up short. Sinocia blinks at him, then says, "You're quite young for that, Olruggio. Are you sure?"

"No. That's why I said I wanted your opinion."

Sinocia's face is shadowed by the uneven throw of flame. She hasn't lost her easy smile—she who is not rocked by life-altering truths is made to be a healer—but her eyebrows have tightened.

"Why don't you come sit down," she says, holding a hand out towards the examination rooms. "And tell me everything from the beginning."

His official diagnosis is uncertain, and his take-home directive is to keep a diary.

"A symptom journal," Sinocia corrects. "I want you back here within the next week or two so we can monitor your symptoms. I know you work too much for your own good, but it would really be best if you can keep up daily entries. The more constant, the better, so you're able to pinpoint any patterns leading up to episodes of forgetfulness."

Olruggio sits on the edge of the examination table, unmoored. He has never been sent off from the Healing Spire without poultice ingredients, tinctures, brews, or coagulating powders. He knew, walking in, that Sinocia was unlikely to have some herb or root that would miraculously help—but he would be lying if he said he wasn't crushed.

"Something's dead wrong with me, isn't there?"

"Wrong is never the word I use," says Sinocia. "Our brains are no different from bodies. Sometimes they get hurt. We treat them with the same kindness and care that we do for a torn knee or a broken tooth." She looks at him hard, but not unkindly. "You are ever helpful to those around you, Olruggio. It would behoove you to practice that same kindness on yourself once every blue moon."

She does, at least, send him off with tincture for sleep, which she says he is not getting enough of.

The atelier is quiet when Olruggio gets back home. Qifrey has taken all three girls out for a lesson. He'd been hoping to catch him, but part of him is also relieved, because then he won't have to explain where he's been. Olruggio slouches through the kitchen, eats one single raw sword carrot for lunch, and then drags himself back into his workshop.

Only now does he run through the clockmark-long conversation he'd held with Sinocia. He had started from the beginning, as instructed—from that odd afternoon on the shore by the Tower of Tomes, after Qifrey had swapped their hat tips while he'd been sleeping; to the morning he'd marched to Qifrey's room, intent on asking him to have lunch in the observatory with him, only to wake up back in his own bunk; to the latest episode, when they'd been drinking together, Olruggio sitting with one knee drawn up, elbow resting on the rounded peak of it, chalice loose in his hand. His chin had been propped on his knuckles. He’d been watching Qifrey over the light of the hearth, the fire burnishing every strand of Qifrey's hair in threads of silver and gold. Olruggio had been awash in warmth, and he had opened his mouth to say something—and then he had woken alone in his hammock, blankets drawn up to his chin, mouth still tasting of willowgrapes and prism lemons.

According to Qifrey, Olruggio had drunk too much, but he knows without a shadow of a doubt that he hadn't. He knows, because he did not wake up to sheets of manically conceived blueprints for new contraptions and inscrutable notes scrawled in the margins. Drunkenness begets genius, with him. Olruggio had invented the glowstone path when he'd been buzzed off five too many chalices of liquor. He's been chasing that high ever since.

So, no. This is something else.

He extracts one notebook out of a towering pile of many. His terrible habit of starting them, getting a quarter of the way through them, only for them to get buried under his supplies and forcing him to start one afresh serves him well now. Olruggio flips through the notes that begin this one—scrapped ideas for perpetual image-casters, instant fluttergram senders, and airfree flotation devices—until he lands on a fresh page.

The spine crackles as he smooths his hand down the middle. His writing pen leans at a weary angle in its unmagical ink pot.

Olruggio takes it, wipes off the nib, and does as his doctor has ordered.

After turning the page on Olruggio's last, most current entry, Sinocia says something dreadful to hear from any doctor: "Now, that's odd."

Olruggio deflates. He's done his symptom journal all wrong. He's rambled too much. He hasn't tracked any relevant patterns—though he hasn't had anything to track. He'd briefly felt a flare of heat when Sinocia's eyes had skated across the many mentions of Qifrey's name, stylized to just the curling whorl of a Q in his slanted scrawl, but then Olruggio figures that she's literally seen him with only one eyebrow and half his beard burnt off, so.

"I'm done for."

"Hush," says Sinocia, flipping back to his first entry. "Not if I'm concerned. It's just…"

"Please be frank with me."

"You didn't leave out any mentions of feeling particularly sleepy, did you? Any instances while you were working at the Gerhman Estate when you were so overcome with drowsiness that you had to sit down and shut your eyes in the middle of work?"

"Not that I recall, no."

"You were in a new place, but did you ever find yourself unable to remember how you got to certain locations, or forgetting what task you were working on, while you were actively working on it?"

Olruggio thinks of wading through the upstream fountain, skirt hiked up around his hips, leggings rolled up to his knees, and disliking every second of it. "Not at all."

"Yes, and it doesn't seem that way in your entries, either." She points at a sketch in the margins of his last entry. "I have seen the Gehrman Estate fountains, as the Lord hosts nuptial ceremonies for socialite families. This is exactly what it looks like. I assume you sketched it from memory, if you drew it on a day when you'd already left?"

"I did."

"Your ability to recall detail is impressive. You also do not mention having had any trouble puzzling out the desiccating packet contraption for Lord Gehrman's library, which means your ability for reason and logic is more than sound."

"So—what, then?"

Sinocia shuts his journal with a snap. "So, according to your journal entries, I am of the opinion that it is unlikely you are suffering from either narcolepsy or early-onset dementia. Your episodes would be more frequent if either were the case—if not one instance a day, then one every few days. Certainly at least one such instance in the week you kept this journal."

"But the bad news is, you don't know what's wrong with me."

Through the Spire walls trickles the sound of a muffled sneeze and the blowing of a nose. Sinocia folds her hands one over the other on the worn, leatherbound cover of Olruggio's notebook and holds his gaze. The dancing sconce flames change the landscape of her face; she's choosing her next words carefully.

"I am a healer," she says. "My only jurisdiction is healingcraft—medicine, tincture-making, brewing, cultivating flora used in cures. So…you must forgive me if I overstep."

"How do you mean?"

"I am suggesting a line of thought. Ignore it, if you will. But have you ever offended any clients, or rendered services to any nobles that have rivals?"

A chill prickles at the crown of Olruggio's head, beneath the rim of his hat. Curiously, he has the sensation of an egg being cracked over his forehead, cold slime spreading outward from his scalp, down his face, his neck, towards his clavicles and chest. Dread, he figures, but he always feels his dread in his hands first—so what is this?

"I do not mean to alarm," says Sinocia. He's not sure what kind of expression she's seeing on his face, but she's standing, coming over to the examination table where Olruggio sits. "Again, you must forgive and stop me if I overstep. I will speak with Ermile and the others further to see if they have opinions different from my own—but I wonder if your predicament is not medical, Olruggio, but magical."

"You're saying—you're saying you think someone is casting spells on me?"

Sinocia nods.

"But why? For what?"

"That's why I ask if you've offended any high-ranking non-magic nobles or their rivals." She sighs and hands his notebook back to him, which Olruggio hugs to his chest like a shield. From what, he doesn't know. "In the absence of magic, their only playground is politics. Perhaps you rendered services that allowed one family to overtake another in power, influence, or gold. Perhaps the disadvantaged family commissioned another witch to hurt you. If you have gaps in your memory, perhaps you've forgotten important spells that you could have used for families locked in bitter rivalries."

"I have no interest in non-magic politics."

"Do any of us?" Sinocia has crossed the room to add fresh kindling to the sputtering sconce. "You are subject to the whims of the unknowing because political power is all they have against you. What are they left with when you take away their gilded staircases, their crystal chandeliers, and their marble ballrooms?"

Olruggio chuckles dryly. "If it's a witch I need to hunt down, then I have my work cut out for me."

"I must emphasize once more that my word is not gospel. You may do well to seek out other healers for their thoughts."

"I've been coming to you since we were teenagers. I think I trust you."

For a moment, Sinocia, too, looks defeated. She nods at the book in his arms. "You needn't maintain such detailed notes from here, but it may benefit you to chronicle them anyway, so that you can retrace your steps in the event of another episode. You might find details that you thought were harmless stand out after each instance of lost memory. Signs that point to who may be responsible, if they exist."

It isn't what he'd hoped for, but it isn't nothing.

"Aye," says Olruggio. "I'll do that."

"Are you very cold, Olly?"

Olruggio's hand stills beneath his cloak, sweat springing to his palms. He nearly drops his pen. "What's that, now?"

"You never go without your cloak these days, even inside the atelier. And you're shivering. I hope you haven't taken ill."

He thought he'd been more discreet. Olruggio swallows, slowly, affecting nonchalance. With the practiced hand of a witch who has worked under the keenest, most unknowing of eyes, Olruggio slips his palm quire and pen back into the pockets of his skirt.

"Just a spot of exhaustion," he grunts, picking up his spoon and scraping at his empty dinner plate so his hands have somewhere to expend their nervous energy. "As I was saying."

"Yes, you were." Qifrey props his chin up on a curled fist. "I'm sorry, I don't think we're allowed to know exactly how poor sleep affects us, but I imagine it does affect our memories. Whether to form or keep them. Why do you ask?"

Olruggio's throat is dry. He clears it. Will confessing that he knows he's forgetting things trigger Qifrey into casting the spell on him again? Is the simple implication enough? He's sitting across the table, both hands visible, their hats resting on the floor. Qifrey certainly isn't the one surreptitiously and feverishly writing beneath his cloak.

What is it that he can't let Olruggio remember? What cellar in his heart is so unspeakable that he can't even allow Olruggio shine a light down into that fathomless dark?

Stars, Olruggio's a monster to be thinking any of this at all. Qifrey is his best friend, his first snow, an undying spring. If there's something he can't confess, then who is Olruggio to exhume it from him by force?

"I just worry about forgetting my best ideas," Olruggio says, waving an airy hand. "Can you imagine? Coming up with something that could transform Zozah, only to forget it because I kept telling myself one more clockmark before I went to be? Maybe you're right. I should be getting more sleep."

"I'd be delighted to see the lantern off in your atelier in the evenings. As would the girls."

"Don't use the girls against me."

"Oh, but they're so much harder to disappoint, aren't they?"

"Do I disappoint you overmuch?"

Qifrey gives him a long-suffering smile, as if the shore had accused the ocean of hating it. "You are incapable of doing such a thing."

Olruggio grunts. He rises, stacking his own dinner plates. The danger seems to have passed; that sucking, endless chasm look has gone from Qifrey's gaze, and he allows himself to breathe again.

"You underestimate me, then." Olruggio pulls back his sleeves, fastens them away from the vapor bubble. "I hope there never comes a day when you ask me for—oh, I don't know, some dreadfully specific contraption, such as one to make dolls speak and dance. And I guess I'm just lucky that you've never asked me for something I can't—"

Olruggio balks at the sensation of being grabbed from behind—grabbed and restrained, and he shouts, "Hey, what—get off, I'm just washing the damn dishes—"

Until he squirms and he senses Qifrey's chin digging into his sore muscles, right where the curve of his neck meets the valley of his shoulder. The hold has pinned one of Olruggio's arms into his own chest.

Qifrey, against all reason, is hugging him.

"Oi."

Silence abound. Olruggio is going to lose his nerve and his voice if he doesn't say anything. He tries to turn his head, but Qifrey hugs him tighter, keeps him steady and trapped.

"Oi, Qifrey. What are you—"

He is so close. His chest is pressed to Olruggio's back, his heart pounding like a war drum—all of him is always wound up for some battle that Olruggio can't see or hear—and his whole body shakes like a leaf in the wind. Qifrey's hands are joined across Olruggio's chest, clutching at each other to keep him in a vice grip, and when he speaks his voice vibrates through Olruggio's head.

"I would never, ever ask you for anything."

Olruggio doesn't have the hands free to get his palm quire. He must note down this conversation. The smoke of the truth is thick and choking now; surely the fire of it is just around the corner. He has an awful, sinking feeling that Qifrey is only saying any of this because—

"Why not?"

He stalls for time. Very little of it is left, he is sure. Under it all—under the certainty, the grim realization—Olruggio mourns that he is in the circle of Qifrey's arms, a place he can only find his way to in dreams, and all he can think about is writing it all down.

It is no use, because what is human will against magic? Even still, Olruggio chants the words to himself inside the safety of his own mind, which he understands is not very safe at all. Something is wrong with Qifrey and he cannot tell me. He took me into his arms and promised he'd never ask me for anything. Something is wrong with Qifrey and he cannot tell me. He took me into his arms and promised he'd never ask me for anything. Something is wrong—

And then he wakes up on the lumpy couch, draped in his own cloak, beside a cold and darkened hearth.

Olruggio wastes no time. His atelier floods with warm light as he pulls open the halves of his lantern, and he tears out pages of his palm quire to arrange them across his worktable. He hasn't dated them—an oversight—but he spreads them in a row and rakes his eyes over the words. On one of the pages, in his cramped scrawl, his writing reads I think Q is erasing my mem—

He stares at the unfinished sentence. Truncated, terrible in its implication.

He cannot remember the circumstances in which he wrote it, cannot remember the glide of his hand over paper. I think Q is erasing my mem, it says, flashing baldly up at him. For all he knows, Qifrey might have erased his memory mid-sentence.

The rest of the note—and the others he's ripped from his quire—is helpful, but provides no answers. Qifrey, perhaps catching on to the fact that Olruggio is himself catching on, evidently said nothing when Olruggio had interrogated him about sleep deprivation and memory. Even broaching the topic, it seems, will drive Qifrey to erase the interaction from his memory.

Olruggio's back hits his chair. He knows better than to shuffle through his memories—he won't remember, obviously, what he's missing, but he does it anyway, panicking the way someone might while they check all their pockets for their gold.

What matters is that all the important things have gone untouched. The memory of Qifrey first passing him in the Great Hall, hair a snowdrift so far from home; that of their escapade into the wide open world above them; that of the stars and how cold the sky looked until Qifrey's laughter warmed it; that of the day Qifrey told him he'd be leaving to open his own atelier, leaving Olruggio to tread water in his formless grief until he asked for Olruggio to go with him, like they were running away together all over again; that of the day Qifrey had first pressed the lenses Olruggio had fired and sanded for him to his nose, exclaiming that he didn't have to worry about the wind baring his scar anymore; that of all the days since, every time Qifrey lets his gaze linger on Olruggio over the fire, over the heads of the girls, over the rocky moors, his cloak and ribbon—Olruggio's ribbon—flying behind him like a ship's sail.

Qifrey has left all of that untouched. Qifrey, mercifully, has not extinguished the glow in his chest when Olruggio looks and thinks of him, and even now his fist is tightening over his chest, pulling the fabric taut upon his skin.

And so it must stand to reason that Qifrey is not erasing Olruggio's love. That he is allowed, in some capacity, to feel this way forever, even if it's from the shore, watching his friend on the horizon.

Is it so bad, then? If it's something that Qifrey needs him to forget, is it so bad, so long as Qifrey stays happy? So long as he's safe and where Olruggio can see him, so long as Olruggio can keep his heart, then are a few holes in his memory really an issue?

The wood of his chair creaks as he sits back up. As always, he hasn't the time to stare at his ceiling as would a tortured teenager. He has long grown out of the age bracket where that's acceptable or productive.

Still, he leaves his journal open, and his quire notes spread over its pages, just in case.

The Tower of Tomes is only one Windowway stop from the atelier, but Olruggio suspects that he'll be in there for a while, and his body has the habit of simply putting him to sleep when he's hungry, so he alone is in the kitchen to make food to bring along.

It's past midnight. Olruggio works as quietly as he can. He's making extra of everything—Brushbuddy rolls, sandwich bread, baked carapace yams and fried eggs—so that the girls will have food for tomorrow. He himself needs at least a few clocksmarks of sleep if he's going to spend time in the Tower tomorrow, and he won't have additional days to spare if he doesn't make use of the time he has.

Problem is, he won't know what to look for. He only knows he has the missing memory of something important, and he doesn't expect that finding information that might fit into his theories will be easy or quick.

He reaches for his pen to draw the spell to bake the yam—but his pockets are empty, and he curses as he turns them inside out. It's still in his loft where he left it.

Olruggio is climbing the stairs, tiptoeing so that the wood doesn't rattle the floors outside the girls' rooms, when he notices that the door of Qifrey's room is ajar. Just barely, but it is, wide enough for a foot to slip through. He stares at the dark slice of unlit room, registering it slowly, then all at once, his heart hitting the roof of his mouth.

He runs.

Across the catwalk, his own door is open. He hadn't shut it. No one is ever awake at this hour, but his desk is covered in his work, and he'd never put his journal or quire notes away—

Olruggio bursts through his door, and there Qifrey is, pale hair a halo in the dark.

"Is nothing sacred anymore?" Olruggio demands. He swings a wild arm at his door. "Furthermore, does no one read? The sign says—"

"Goodness, Olly," says Qifrey, standing with a rustle of fabric. "I'm sorry. Is this a bad time?"

Olruggio breathes through his teeth, looking from Qifrey to the small chair and table by the kiln, where he's set a merrily gurgling pitcher of tea, back to Qifrey. He has a bewildered, almost crestfallen smile, like Olruggio had thrown a gift to the ground in disgust.

He'd been—waiting here. While Olruggio had been cooking lunch in preparation to go to the Tower of Tomes and search for answers about Qifrey's illness, if that's what it even is.

"It's." Olruggio forces himself, with everything he has, not to flick his gaze towards his loft, where his journal and all his quire notes are sitting out in the open. Did Qifrey go up there? Did he see them? Does he know that Olruggio is on his trail? "Of course not. I thought you were someone—never mind. Sorry. I came here to get my pen, I'm cooking."

Qifrey brightens. "Are you? Can I do it with you?"

Just like old days, neither of them say. Olruggio grunts in the shape of an agreement.

"I'll be right along," he says. "A spell came to me, I'm just going to write it down."

"Of course. Genius often strikes at the most inconvenient of times." Qifrey takes the vapor bubble full of tea with him as he goes. "Don't be too long!"

Olruggio waits until he's crossed the catwalk and is safely ensconced back on his side of the atelier before he tears his way up into the loft. His desk is untouched, it appears—his journal and quire notes haven't been disturbed. He slots all the loose, circular papers into the journal and slams it shut, whirling in place, searching for a good hiding spot. None of the shelves, those won't do. His desk is too visible to anyone who comes in here. He'd toss it in the kiln if it weren't in danger of catching fire when he tests spells.

Wait: his kiln. Several bricks at the center of his loft floor are loose, their shoulders jostling against each other every time a foot treads upon them. One particular spell testing mishap had blown through the kiln's ceiling, leaving a small hollow between the two brick layers.

He lifts them now, jiggling the loosest of them free, and sets his journal into the hollow. Then he lays the bricks back over his contraband. With some adjusting, they finally lie flat, if still loose. He'll retrieve the notes when the coast is clear again, when his atelier door is tightly locked.

Olruggio tamps it all down with the tip of his shoe, then, satisfied, sweeps back down to the kitchen.

"You must be hungry," says Qifrey when Olruggio returns. "It's not like you to want so much food until I'm getting up."

"I'm looking at a long night."

"You did say you came back from the Gehrman Estate with a lot of orders," says Qifrey, who has a lovely little flame dancing under two carapace yams. He will be eating too, apparently. "Anything of particular interest?"

"One family asked if I could find a way to fit ten books worth of text into one book's worth of physical pages." Olruggio hasn't figured that one out yet, but he'd like to solve this for his own benefit. "They say their daughter is an avid reader and that they are delighted to indulge her, but also that they are running out of room for texts in their residence."

"That sounds like it would help you first, her second!" Qifrey's agreement is muffled; he's in the pantry, searching through bags of chimegrass grain and badland beans. A bushel of prism lemons on the ground regurgitates its fruit when he accidentally kicks it. It's on his right side. He can't see it. Olly curses himself for not moving it out of the way.

"I thought the same."

"It would save you from lugging a dozen books across—stars, where is the mountain apple curd?"

Olruggio, from across the kitchen, looks into the pantry and spots it immediately. It's on a shelf around chest-level for Qifrey, who has missed it where it sits right in front of him.

He crosses the space, steps into the pantry, and leans around Qifrey to grab it. "Here." Olruggio gives it a shake, remixing the curds. "You still got an eye, use it."

"Oh!" Qifrey says through a laugh, turning, and—

Only then does Olruggio understand how closely they've drawn together, how far he's leaned into Qifrey's space. Qifrey, too, seems to realize at the same time, because he says, again, "Oh," in a much quieter voice, following it with, "Olly."

Time congeals around them. Olruggio's other hand, the one not holding the jar of mountain apple curd, is propped against the shelf behind Qifrey, and unless he moves, Qifrey is trapped between him and the door. A terrible thing, really, to be this close, to be able to make out the dark fan of Qifrey's eyelashes, and to hear the soft wet rush of breath in and out of his mouth. His lips are dry; he worries the bottom one between his teeth when he's concentrating.

Olruggio means to move away, out of the centripetal force that Qifrey exerts on him.

But he doesn't. Neither of them do.

Years have passed since the last time Qifrey has allowed Olruggio this close to him, and Olruggio has long since grown out of questioning it. Qifrey's aversion to proximity has become just another leyline of the world—time is constant, night follows day follows night, fire is as kind as it is cruel, and Qifrey loathes the closeness of another body, especially Olruggio's. As a teenager he'd still questioned it, hurt over it, but he was twice that age now, and the wonder only pains him if he presses on it.

So for another beat they share breath. And in the next Olruggio is drawing back, putting space between them again, ignoring the thundering of blood through his temples.

"Here," he repeats. When Qifrey doesn't take it, he thrusts it into his hands. "Your curd."

The kitchen is silent as he gets back to his cooking. The yams need extra time, the dough for the rolls and bread is still proofing, and so Olruggio busies himself with picking eggs with unnecessary attention to size and shape, weighing each one in his hand as he sets them on the work table.

Qifrey is hovering. He, too, moves with a careful slowness as he sets down the jar of curd, retrieves teacups and the vapor bubble, serves himself and Olruggio. If he has something more to say, he's not releasing it. Curiously, he's also brought his cap with him, despite the late hour—is he planning to go somewhere, at this time of night? Maybe he's trying to break it to Olruggio that he plans on running away again, for some idiotic, noble reason. The last time he'd cited holding Olruggio back, though from what, Olruggio still has no idea.

"You went into my atelier for more than just to share tea, I assume," Olruggio finally says, unable to endure the silence any longer. Warmth still simmers in his cheeks. "What's on your mind, Qifrey?"

Beneath his cloak, Olruggio reaches for his palm quire. He makes a show of checking on the dough, his back turned to the hearth, but he's positioning his pen over paper. Perhaps Qifrey has finally come round to telling Olruggio what ails him, and he must jot it down before Qifrey has any second thoughts.

"You've been taking an awful lot of notes lately, Olly."

Olruggio stills. He doesn't turn around, but he feels every muscle in his overworked body tense.

"I'm a spellworker," he mumbles. "You don't think those contraptions and devices spring out of me fully formed, do you?"

"You still never write nearly as much as you have lately."

"Lots of orders, lately."

He scribbles beneath his cloak,

"Olly," says Qifrey, and for a moment when Olruggio turns around, he nearly expects a much younger, much angrier boy to be sitting at the hearth, offering him a charming smile that he will make the mistake of falling for. "You know this is the end of the line, every time."

"Yes, and why must it be?" Olruggio is finally whirling, the palm quire's pages ruffled by his movement. "You're sick, Qifrey, aren't you? Is it something incurable, something awful? A wasting illness? Do you fear that I won't be able to bear it if I know the truth?"

"Do you think," Olruggio snarls, "that keeping me in the dark is some kind of heroic noble sacrifice—that there's some kind of prize at the end of it? Do you think I'll thank you when you're gone?"

Finally, Qifrey stands. Olruggio backs away, shoving his palm quire and pen deep into his skirts. Qifrey can't stand to touch him, so surely he won't go pawing through his clothes to burn the evidence.

The fire glances off his pearly left lens, and Qifrey balks. His hands are partly raised out of his cloak, like he'd been moving to take Olruggio by the shoulders. His expression is shattered. He watches as Olruggio puts as much space as he can between them because not yet, not yet, Qifrey, tell him what it is you cannot say.

And then—because the two of them feel a thousand years old and yet no older than the age they first met—Olruggio asks, without thinking, "What have I done that you cannot come to me when you feel like your world is ending?"

Rustling fills the kitchen. Olruggio believes it to be the swaying of trees outside until he hears thick, woody crackling, especially when Qifrey's hand darts to snatch his hat from the hearthside table. Even as he speaks, his voice is nearly eaten by the sound of green, mutant growth—and Olruggio stumbles back in shock as leaves worm their way out of Qifrey's face, stretching, prehensile, into the air between them, reaching for Olruggio.

"Nothing," says Qifrey, his body looming to block all firelight as he raises his hat over Olruggio's head. Viscous golden sap streams from his right eye, where there should be an empty socket, where there has always been an empty socket. Part human, part tree, all grief. "You've done nothing of the sort, Olly, you're the best there ever—"

(The stillness is not like any natural slumber, and no matter how many times Qifrey has done it, it never gets any easier.

It is more like death. Olruggio slumps every time, and as they've gotten older, Qifrey has learned which way he tends to fall, will always catch him before he hits the floor. As he does, a terrible squelch and a sticky, protesting squeal punctuates the fresh silence, and then the branches of the silverwood retreat back into his eye socket.

He bends and retrieves his lenses, though he doesn't put them back on immediately. It is easier to handle Olly when he can't see him too clearly.

Olruggio's hair musses when Qifrey removes his hat, and he smooths it down with his fingers. His hat goes back on the hearthside table, where he will need to redraw the spell. He hasn't had the time to figure out how to modify it, so that Olly will forget forgetting at all.

He's almost there, though. The next one should be it.

And the thought shouldn't hurt as much as it does—after all, Olruggio has been forgetting this every year of his life, but it feels wrong and awful to erase yet another part of him. How much more can Qifrey smother out of his brain before he is no longer Olruggio at all? How much penance is available to one person in one lifetime?

Qifrey puts it out of his mind. He suspects that Olruggio has already found a hiding place for his notes, and he will not have very much time until the next instance of erasing his memory. A day, maybe? Clockmarks, at most?

He bundles Olruggio into his arms. The floor is hard and cold, and he has to move him to their couch, where he will inevitably wake around the time the yams are tender, the bread and rolls golden and lovely. And Qifrey means to move him, he does. He has done it so many times now that he knows Olruggio has the slightest left-leaning sway in his upper spine.

But he just sits on the floor, Olruggio limp in the circle of his arms, and, knowing all the girls are asleep, tips forward until his face is pressed into Olruggio's chest and sobs.)

It's written in his own scrawl, so it must be true, but Olruggio has dragged his eyes over HE'S A SILVERW enough times that it's starting to lose meaning.

Maybe he'd been hallucinating? Maybe he was mistaken. He's been known to see spiders and shadow people that aren't there when he goes too many nights without sleep, so maybe he'd been seeing that, too, but a silverwood is such a specific thing to hallucinate. His handwriting is nearly illegible, panicked, the last part of it leaping off the edge of the page.

HE'S A SILVERW

He takes his pen and finishes the word. SILVERWOOD. Now, it glows luridly up at him, like a peal of laughter at a funeral.

A silverwood. How is that possible? Olruggio has pored over hundreds of books in his life, but he's never closely studied botany, especially not how to cultivate silverwood trees. He can't imagine how they'd be different from any other tree: planted in the dirt and watered until they germinated. Seeds simply passed through the digestive tracts of living things. That was how every fruiting tree survived, anyway.

But Qifrey? A silverwood?

And what good did it do for Olruggio to forget that?

He shakes his head. He feels distinctly more concussed than usual after waking from a memory wipe. In the back of his brain he has the feeling that he has more notes on the matter, but he can't remember taking them, and if he did, where they are.

As usual, his desk is an organized mess. He hadn't woken till dusk, this latest wipe wreaking havoc on his consciousness, and he's been working all evening. His desk is the most disastrous now, at night. Olruggio knows what everything before him is, but he searches through it half-heartedly anyway, rifling through blueprints, open notebooks, scraps of paper, and setting aside some half-dozen bottles of inks. Nothing jumps out at him. He locates no notes that he's taken on any past memory erasures.

Qifrey doesn't want him to know. Qifrey is a silverwood tree, and he doesn't want Olruggio to live with that knowledge, and he will go to extreme lengths to ensure that.

So be it, then. If it's what Qifrey needs to survive, if it makes him happy, if their undefined orbit around each other for however many decades is what he wishes, then—

A crash echoes through the dark.

Olruggio startles, straightening and listening in the direction of Qifrey's atelier, and then a soft rumble shakes his loft. Something is wrong.

Just to be safe, he tosses this latest note into the fire of his lantern. No doubt he will have new opportunities to arrive at the same realization. Another rumble hums through the land. He leaps over the brick railing, a terrible, brambled sensation enclosing his chest, and runs across the catwalk.

Something is more than wrong. Something irreparable is about to happen, and Olruggio's hands go numb with fear.

The kitchen is empty, as is the sitting area around the hearth. Olruggio's heart pounds wildly as he whirls in place, searching for Qifrey's shape in the dark. The rumbling does not stop, and now it's accompanied by the sound of rustling leaves, so close that it sounds like a tree is growing through the roof.

No—no, it can't be.

His shoes slap loudly across the ground as he runs outside, and he sees the shadow of the silverwood thrown like a corpse's arm over the grassy moors before he sees Qifrey.

The tree twists and gnarls around him. Their garden, perfectly tilled and planted, has been torn apart by roots as they tunnel into the earth with unnerving sentience. It is less plant and more animal, more beast, but Olruggio refuses to back away this time, running up towards the trunk where a slice of Qifrey's face is still visible, though wood is starting to consume him, eat him whole, a network of branches erupting from Qifrey's face, reaching up, up into the blue moonlight, and his face which is so peaceful is almost lifeless, and Olruggio cannot remember ever seeing this, not in his mind, not with his brain, but his body has kept the score, it knows, inexplicably, what to do, and Olruggio shouts in agony as he wedges his hands into a valley within the rapidly-growing branches, pulling Qifrey forth and to the surface like a body from the silt and mud of a riverbank.

"Hey!" he yells, but Qifrey's face simply lolls between his palms. "Hey, you're not dying on me now! Wake up! Wake up, you have to tell me how to help you! Qifrey!"

The girls all have silencing spells on their doors in order to filter out the noise of the atelier when Qifrey and Olruggio go bump in the night, but he knows their ignorance won't be infinite. Silencing spells cannot suppress the shaking of the earth.

The roughness of the silverwood bark tears wounds open on Olruggio's hands, and he ignores the pain—until his blood starts to run and drip onto the branches. Stark as blood on fresh snow.

Qifrey's eye flutters open.

"Qifrey!" Olruggio shouts. He adjusts his grip on Qifrey's cheeks, holds him out of the writhing grasp of the silverwood branches. "Please, you mustn't sleep—how do I—if you die, what will I tell—"

"What were you thinking?" Qifrey whispers, and before Olruggio can sputter, he goes on, "Just now, in the peace and quiet of your atelier, did I cross your mind?"

"What?" What does that even matter right now? "Qifrey, tell me what to do! Don't sleep, stay awake, stay with me—why is this happening? Why—ow!"

One of the silverwood's branches wraps around his arm and twists, hard, nearly wrenching his arm out of his shoulder and throwing Olruggio into the dirt where he goes tumbling. Every joint hurts. He scrambles onto all fours, wheezing, but Qifrey has been swallowed, drawn into the depths of the wood like flotsam into a raging sea, or kindling into a roaring fire.

"No!" Olruggio staggers back to his feet, then trips, and looks down with fury at what has hindered him. He expects a root. He sees, instead, the trampled fabric of Qifrey's hat, where the decorative flap of it has been pulled askew, the slight curve of a dark spell peeking out like a rogue bloody tongue from the edge.

That slimy cold, prickling sensation overcomes him. Olruggio bends and retrieves it, shaking the dirt from the linen, brushing clods of it from the ribbon.

Before him, the silverwood grows ever taller, moaning in the vile night.

And—

He thinks he understands. Not entirely, but he thinks he can make out the silhouette of Qifrey's grief. He recognizes it because it looks like him, and part of him is ashamed at how self-important that realization is, but a much bigger part of him aches with the revelation. Olruggio wants to throw the hat down and run again at the silverwood. He wants to cast flame upon the wood until it releases the only real home he's ever known. But more than anything, he understands that he is somehow part of this cycle. He just won't remember it.

And what's a few memories? That isn't where his love lives, anyway.

Olruggio places Qifrey's cap on his head, where a slight dusting of dirt rains over him. He reaches for his palm quire and pen, dashes something off, reads it once, twice, three times, and then raises his eyes back to the silverwood.

"Promise," he murmurs, for no one to hear, "you'll hold me to this, my love."

And then he pulls the flap of Qifrey's hat down over his eyes.

Ah, he'd fallen asleep again.

Olruggio sits up and rubs his eyes, his mouth feeling like sweet wool, a headache coursing through his temples like he's had too much to drink. Unlikely, as it is the middle of the week. He's certain he hadn't had any alcohol before bed, but he's been sleeping poorly recently, so maybe he drank some to pull himself under..

He sits up. The atelier is beset by an eerie stillness for morning, the birds mute, the wind shy in the windows. The sky is overcast. He climbs out of his hammock and crosses his loft to peer outside, but trips over the loose brick in the middle of the floor that he's never fixed.

Olruggio curses. He nabs the searneedle pen from his desk and hunkers down, holding the brick still as he traces a stabilizing spell into its surface. The circle flashes once when it completes, and then the brick budges no more.

He peers outside the window again, properly. Qifrey is bent over their garden this morning, arranging the plots of soil for their trellises and planters. The earth has been disturbed, torn up. Did something happen last night—a midnight visit from scale wolves, a tryst from hungry scavengers? If they'd fought on the atelier's land, Olruggio is amazed he hadn't woken.

Olruggio ought to go help. He gives the newly stabilized bricks in his floor one more kick test, and, happy with his work, tosses the searneedle pen back onto his desk, stretches, and never thinks upon them again.

At the earliest turn of winter into spring—during the first evening Olruggio doesn't heat the kiln twice just to warm his atelier—he receives a knock on his door in the middle of the night.

"What," he barks into the silence.

"Master Olly?"

He frowns. At this hour? He reaches for his lantern and leans over the brick loft.

"Coco?" She's standing at his doorway, framed in lonely moonlight, the night casting her hair silver. He nearly mistakes her for Qifrey in a different time, very long ago, under leagues and leagues of water. "What on earth are you doing awake?"

"I—I have to tell you something."

"Can't it wait till morning?"

"No. I need to tell you now, when—when I know Master Qifrey is asleep."

A strange, prickling cold starts at Olruggio's scalp, that invisible egg cracking over his hair. Odd. He's never experienced trepidation so strangely before. He stands and beckons her inside and up the loft stairs. Her hands are icy when he takes them. All she's wearing under her winter cloak are her nightclothes.

"If it's something serious, Coco, you're his apprentice, and he's your master. He has final say. We'll need to discuss with him."

"No! No, we can't! Especially not you!"

Olruggio scowls. "I don't follow."

"I must tell you something." And here, Coco takes a deep, fortifying breath. "But you must swear to me—you must swear on everything—that you don't let Master Qifrey catch on that you know."

"...I don't know, Coco. Everything is a lot to swear on." Olruggio puts down his lantern to set his hands on his hips. "What is it that could be so dire? I've known your master more years than I haven't. I know everything there is to know about him."

Coco glares at him. "No, you don't," she says, voice tiny.

He raises his eyebrows, unconvinced. Her fists are balled, her small jaw is clenched. Olruggio has never seen her this resolute, and he has seen her pull off many magnificent—and equally reckless—feats of bravery. Some small part of him is glad to know that the generation of witches that will come after him includes her.

"Very well," he sighs. "What is it that you mean to tell me?"

She chews on her lip. One last moment passes between them, and she waves her hand for Olruggio to bend and lean in close. So he crouches down on one knee, the way he has seen Qifrey do so many times, as she cups her hands around her mouth and seals them against his ear.

And then Coco, with her magnificent and reckless bravery, whispers his memory back into him.