Page 41

The moment after the knock lasted an eternity, during which Sciona thought, God, why did I come here?

How is this a good idea? What was I planning to say?

In fact, she had done a lot of planning for this encounter.

But the words all spilled from her brain like sand from a sieve as the doorknob turned.

The door opened, and she experienced a surge of simultaneous relief and panic. Relief because Thomil looked alright. Panic because, if he wasn’t, it was all her fault.

His expression went cold. Without a word, he closed the door.

“No, wait!” Sciona pushed forward, and the door closed painfully on her shoulder, the edge banging into her head. “Ow!”

“Highmage Freynan, for gods’ sake!” He put a hand on her shoulder to shove her out, and she grabbed onto him in desperation.

“Thomil, wait! You were right! You were right, okay? You were right!”

Her fingers weren’t particularly strong, but she had managed to get them tangled in his shirt so that he had to stop. Suspicion creased his brow. “What do you mean?”

“I thought about everything you said when we argued. I tested, and you were right. About magic, and Blight, and all of it. I just—I need to talk to you. Please.”

“Last time we talked, you told me my family deserved to die in agony. You are not welcome in my home.”

“I know,” she said miserably. “I know. I shouldn’t have said any of that. Thomil, I was confused, and angry, and—”

“I don’t care,” he said, and it was like he had driven a shard of ice into her heart. But she pressed forward anyway, uncaring how deeply the ice drove into her. She had to do this.

“What I mean is, if you’re still angry, that’s fine.

If you never want to see me again after this is over, that’s fine.

I understand. But if we’ve found what we think we have, we need to get to the bottom of it.

I don’t know another Kwen immigrant, and you don’t have access to another highmage, so if we’re going to figure this out, we need to do it together.

Please. You can hate me the whole time. We just need to talk. ”

“You really want to talk about this?” There was that skeptical, scathing eyebrow.

“I really do.”

His expression was still hard and cold all the way through. “Well,”— he sighed—“you are bleeding.”

“I am?” Sciona touched her forehead, and her fingers came away wet. “Oh.”

Thomil muttered something in Kwen that Sciona could only take to be a curse, then stood back. “You’d better come in and let me look at that so I don’t get jailed for attacking a Tiranishwoman.”

“It’s not like I’m going to report—”

“Just come in, Highmage.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Sciona stepped into the apartment.

The first thing that hit her was the smell of herbs, and she found a ring of dried woody-stemmed plants nailed to the inside of the door.

Highmage Jurowyn had written of witches and hunters carefully braiding herbs into wreaths for their religious rituals.

Having never been inside a Kwen home, Sciona hadn’t realized that modern city-dwelling Kwen would still do this.

It certainly had the effect of cutting the vile smell of the Kwen Quarter with spring-like freshness.

“Sit where you like,” Thomil said.

There seemed to be just the one place to sit in the form of an impossibly ragged couch that looked like it had been green once upon a time.

Sinking down on the faded cushions, Sciona set her basket of scones on a tea table that, upon closer inspection, was not really a tea table but a pair of wooden crates with a board nailed over top.

The apartment was tiny, even for just one man.

A sink, a cupboard, and a sliver of countertop clung to the far wall by way of a kitchen, and a single door led off the main room.

Sciona supposed it was a bedroom, which meant that Thomil must share a washroom with other apartments in the complex—a grim prospect that made her wonder how he kept himself so clean.

“I am sorry I closed the door on your arm, ma’am,” Thomil said as he went to the minuscule kitchen area and wrestled with a sticking drawer.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sciona said, though she did feel a burgeoning bruise on her brow. “I know you didn’t mean to.”

“Still happened, though, didn’t it?” Thomil returned to the couch with a cloth and a bottle of clear alcohol.

“Should I have you thrown in jail, then?”

“I’d rather you didn’t, ma’am,” he said and leaned in to work on the cut, “but you’ll do what you want.”

Sciona fought a flinch, but those rough hands were shockingly gentle as they brushed her hair out of the way and put the cloth to her brow to protect her eye as he applied alcohol to the cut.

She pressed her lips together against the sting, but it wasn’t as bad as she’d anticipated.

And Thomil’s gray eyes were suddenly so close that she couldn’t see or think about anything else.

The silver threads of each iris moved subtly with the contractions of Thomil’s pupil as he focused on his work.

“You’re good at this,” she said to break the intensity of the silence.

“Practice, ma’am.”

“You get hurt a lot while mopping floors?”

“No, ma’am, but, like most Kwen, I’ve moved between a lot of different jobs over the years—and you wouldn’t believe the scrapes my clumsy daughter gets on the job.”

“Wait!” Sciona blinked up at him in shock, making him pull the cloth back and click his tongue in annoyance. “You have a daughter?”

“I do.”

“You never brought that up!”

“You never asked.”

“Oh.” Was that true? Sciona thought as Thomil withdrew from the couch again to dispose of the bloodied cloth. All these months working beside Thomil, had she really never asked about his family once?

When Thomil came back to the couch, he was bearing a cup on a saucer. “It’s mostly bruising. The cut should heal on its own as long as you leave it alone. No stress-picking.” He offered her the saucer. “Tea?”

Sciona eyed the slow curls of steam from the cup, feeling sick, and Thomil’s expression softened just slightly. “Heated over a fire, which I lit with a match, if that’s important to you. The noon shift knocks the stove conduits out at least every other day, so most of the time, I don’t bother.

“Oh.” Reserve spellograph shifts sometimes affected Sciona’s block, but she forgot that it was worst in the poorest parts of the city, where magical systems were rarely maintained correctly.

“Thank you.” She accepted the tea but set it down on the makeshift table before her.

“I just… I didn’t come here so you could wait on me.

I came to tell you what I looked into after you left and the conclusions I reached. ”

Thomil drew a long breath into his chest as if to steel himself, then dragged a kitchen chair up to the tea table to sit opposite her. “I’m listening, Highmage.”

Sciona had rehearsed this in her head, but it all came out in a disjointed jumble, broken up by tears. She pushed the words out anyway—because she had said she wanted to talk, and she owed Thomil the truth.

“I, uh…” She paused to wipe her eyes on her sleeve.

“I double-checked what you said about the Forbidden Coordinates against my maps at home, and it holds up—perfectly. The Forbidden Coordinates do line up with Tiran, and the Reserve siphoning zone numbers line up with the area two Leonic miles beyond Tiran’s barrier. ”

Thomil’s eyebrow twitched. “What does that mean?” It was the first he had interrupted to ask a question.

“You…” You know what it means, Thomil, but he was going to make her say it. She swallowed. “The Reserve is Tiran’s fallback energy pool, so Reserve coordinates represent a space of continuous automated siphoning.”

Thomil’s quiet, “Oh,” didn’t register any emotion, but he put his head down for a moment, hands clasped together and pressed to his forehead.

Sciona ached, knowing that her unfailingly clever assistant was putting the pieces together as she had. Those two miles around Tiran were what the Kwen called ‘the crossing.’ It was where Thomil had lost his sister.

“Are you alright?” Sciona whispered when she could bear the silence no longer.

“No.” Thomil lifted his head, his calm restored but for a watery shine in his eyes. “But continue.”

Thomil listened, expressionless, until Sciona had finished relaying everything she had seen and deduced.

When she got to the part where she had tested a siphoning spell on a girl, his clasped hands went white with pressure, and the furrow between his brows deepened, but he didn’t interject.

At last, she finished recounting her conversation with Archmage Bringham, which brought her to the end of what she had to say to Thomil.

He didn’t need to hear about her subsequent journey into madness and only partway back.

There was a terrible silence as Thomil digested her story.

Then, finally, he spoke. “So, Archmage Bringham said it was all a trick created by dead mages?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t believe him?”

“I can’t. I mean, I see where his claims come from and why he might be sure of them, but the evidence doesn’t bear them out.”

“So, you think he lied to you?”

“No, no. Archmage Bringham doesn’t lie to me. He just doesn’t have access to all of the information we do.”

“Really?” Thomil said. “He’s an archmage. Shouldn’t he have access to all the information we do and much more?”

“Well, yes, he has higher clearance than we do, but he’s not a mapping specialist, and, as we’ve discussed many times now, no mage has ever produced a mapping spell that actually showed the Otherrealm.

The Freynan Mirror we produced in that lab was a landmark revolution in magic.

No one—not even an archmage—has all the information that we do. ”

“Are you sure? They could all be using this Sabernyn curse story as a cover.”

“Keeping secrets isn’t Archmage Bringham’s forte,” Sciona said. “If I had a copper for all the things he’s told me that he wasn’t supposed to…”