by Tim Susman
“Unless you—“
Vendis was already gone. “Bring Coppy.” Kip’s shoulders sunk.
Max took a seat in the parlour. “You’ll at least see Coppy in January. I wish he could be here too, but if he’s working with Master Windsor…”
“I know, I know.” Kip put on a smile. “And I really am happy to see you. I have so much to tell you.”
He spent a good two hours telling them about Master Cott and about Abel. It wasn’t until he brought up the calyx that he remembered his anger that his father hadn’t told him. His narrative faltered and his gaze crept to his father’s exposed arm, but no scars were visible there. Max folded his ears down as he caught his son’s look, but if Ada noticed, she didn’t let on at all. So Kip moved on to talking about Coppy’s family and how delightful they were.
But later, while Ada was preparing dinner, Max took Kip aside in the parlor. “You know what it means to be a calyx now,” he said.
Kip nodded. “Master Odden had me summon a demon. I had to undergo the ritual.”
“You had to—“ Max set his ears back, eyes widening. “He took blood from you? No—ah, I see.” He rested a paw on Kip’s shoulder. “It must have been a shock.”
Kip didn’t move to acknowledge the gesture. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Max sighed and paced to the large front window, where flickering lamplight lined the street. “When you’ve kept a secret for so long, it can be hard to know when to let it go. I don’t have any other excuse than that. It is impressed on us from the moment we enter the sorcerer’s presence that this is a private, special moment. We are performing a service, in exchange for which they protect our community. And how would our community see it if they knew? Would they understand?”
“I was becoming a sorcerer. I had to understand.”
Max’s tail swished. He leaned against the window frame, still looking outside. “There wasn’t a good time to tell you. Please don’t be
Kip sat back in the wooden chair he’d sat in and played on all his life. It felt strange for it to be here, in this different house with the thicker air and strange scents. “So you’ve been bleeding for them for twenty years.”
His father exhaled. “When they needed me. Us. We helped win the war against Napoleon, and the tribes before that. We helped explore this new land.”
“I know about all that,” Kip said. “Who told you about it?”
“Jeremiah Stave.”
Kip shook his head. “I don’t remember him.”
“He was a polecat. He left New Cambridge after his sorcerer passed away, shortly after I began with Master Vendis.”
“Does every calyx only bleed for one sorcerer?”
His father’s ears stayed down. “Generally. I have visited two other sorcerers when their calyxes were indisposed. Kip, you knew that we served the sorcerers. Why does the manner of our service matter?”
“Because it’s—“ Kip stopped. He didn’t want to say that it was disgusting, that it was intimate, that it was a violation. It was all of those things, the Calatians literally exchanging blood for security.
“Disgusting?” His father eyed him. “Does it bother you that we must do it, or that you will have to do it as a sorcerer?”
“You could have prepared me.” Kip flushed, recalling the ritual the first time he’d summoned the demon. It had felt wrong, but he’d put it out of his head, only now it all came flooding back to him. He licked his lips against the memory of the taste in his mouth. “Master Odden made me drink it on the spot, no time to understand what was happening.”
“I’m sorry you weren’t prepared,” Max said. “If you’d been anticipating it for days, would it have been any easier?”
Kip sank back against the chair. “Probably not.” His father didn’t say anything, and after a moment, Kip said, “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have told me.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Max’s tail lashed against the wall. “But Kip…you are not a calyx. You’re a sorcerer. Our bargains are not yours, and maybe…maybe I didn’t want you to be bound by them. To have preconceptions.”
“You knew that I would have to…” He didn’t want to say “use,” so he changed what he was going to say. “That I’d meet calyxes. That I’d find out. And besides, didn’t you tell me that even if I’m a sorcerer, I’m still a Calatian?”
“Yes.” Max turned slowly to the window, looking outside. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
Kip thought about that conversation a great deal over the Christmas holiday, even as he was occupied with helping his mother prepare a few holiday dishes. The secret of the calyxes was a distasteful one, to be sure. But the more Kip thought about it, the more it felt to him that it would be worse for the sorcerers if it became known. The Calatians were offering of themselves to help the nation; the sorcerers were drinking blood. That wouldn’t be received well by the population. This, he grew certain, was the real reason the sorcerers talked about how “private and special” their ritual was. They didn’t want to be seen as a bunch of blood-drinkers. And the Calatians were too dependent on their protection to let their secret slip out.
He couldn’t confront his father about that, though, and besides, Max was hardly where the practice had begun or ended. So Kip stayed quiet, thinking about calyxes and his friends and the look on the face of Jacob the dormouse as he sat in front of Kip and Odden during Kip’s demon lesson. And he thought about Peter granting him power without him having to drink any blood.
After all, Kip reasoned, he had Calatian blood in him already. Why would he need to drink more to gain power? Could he just drink his own? That was disgusting too, but it was far better than drinking someone else’s.
He met many more residents of the town during his stay, including their distant relatives the Shantons and one other fox family, who had a teenaged daughter. They were very interested in Kip, even after he told them about his engagement to Alice Cartwright, which puzzled him until he found out he’d been mistaken about the reason for their interest. They were looking out not for their daughter, but for their grandchildren. “You and Alice should come live down here with your parents,” they said. “The more fox families, the better.”
Kip said that he would consider it, but that his job would likely dictate where he was allowed to live, and there was some talk of the rebuilt college. But as the conversation flowed on around him, he thought about the crowded Isle of Dogs and how many families could come live in Peachtree in comfort—if they wanted to. Only Coppy come from London to New Cambridge in the last few years, but certainly some London Calatians had settled in New York, where the Road ended, or Boston or Philadelphia. Travel was difficult if you weren’t a sorcerer, and there were already communities in those large cities ready to welcome immigrants, so there was little incentive to venture further south. Maybe when Emily was more trained, he could prevail upon her to bring some of the Isle’s residents around for a visit.
To be calyxes here instead of in London. That thought sobered him, and every time his spirits rose and he thought of Coppy’s family, for example, or Abel and his family coming to Peachtree, he ran up against that reality again.
On Christmas Day, the town gathered for a quiet celebration at the church, and then a communal supper afterwards to which everyone brought their favorite dishes. They tended to congregate in like groups, the humans on one side and the Calatians separated by species on the other, not because of friendships or enmities, but because each group made food tailored to their tastes. As the gathering went on, the groups mixed, and there was considerable laughter as humans tried some of the foxes’ dishes and thought them bland, where the foxes couldn’t eat more than a bite of the pudding the dormice had made for the sharp burn of rum in it.
His father had told him there were two London sorcerers supervising the rebuilding, but they did not join the festivities. Kip left his robes behind in his parents’ house, but they had already bragged about him to thei
r friends, so during the Christmas feast he was pressed to demonstrate a magic spell, and he obliged with the simple physical magic of carrying all the tables to the side of the large town square to leave more room for the post-feast gathering. His father asked why he chose not to create fire, and he repeated Cott’s words about how fire could scare people.
Late at night, every night, he did conjure fires for himself. They comforted him, and he was confident enough that even on his parents’ wood floor the fire did not leave so much as a trace. He tried again to hold a fire in his paw, but still could not overcome the pain in the leather of his pads. Even when he told the fire not to consume his flesh, even when he knew he wasn’t burning, he could not hold it longer than six seconds.
But on Christmas night, with his thoughts spinning around calyxes and sorcerers and rituals, he gazed into his fire and thought about Coppy, Emily, and Malcolm. He wanted to be practicing with them and talking with them and hearing how they were doing. He wanted them to laugh at Cott’s behavior, appreciate his progress with Gugin, commiserate over the plight of the Calatians. He wanted to give Coppy news of home and hear Malcolm’s stories of his family and even argue politics with Emily.
And it was amid those thoughts that he recalled the nearby ruins, remembered searching the New Cambridge ruins, and made a connection that he felt stupid for not having made previously. If he summoned Nikolon again, he could order the demon to go to Emily and Coppy, to relay what they said to him and to speak back to them. He could probably even order Nikolon to assume his shape. No, that might be too strange.
The idea excited him enough that the fire flared to reflect his mood. He knew the spell, could hear the words in his head and feel the magic around him. He could cast it, he knew. Or could he, without either Peter’s help or a calyx’s blood? It was the binding that was the hard part, Master Odden had said. Which meant that Kip might summon Nikolon only to be unable to bind it.
But he’d summoned and bound Nikolon without blood before, with only Peter’s help. Cott had been teaching him techniques to gather more power into himself, to control fire better and extend his range. He knew what that power felt like, and he could draw it into himself—at least enough to control a first-order demon, he thought.
So he seated himself and gathered magic. His paws flickered, then glowed, and he kept going, focusing his thoughts on his connection to the earth. The power rose in him, built, and then he felt the itch to cast a spell. At first easily ignorable, it grew with the power in him until it was all he could do to resist it.
He spoke the spell quickly, and finished the binding spell as Nikolon appeared before him, again in the guise of a naked vixen. “Make no move save on my order; speak no word save on my order; exert no power save on my order,” Kip said quickly.
The vixen straightened, then tilted her head. Kip should have dismissed her immediately at that. Instead he tested the binding spell with his mind. Normally he would be able to feel the aura of power between himself and the demon and recognize the spell. Now, though the power was there, something felt a little different.
He started the dismissal spell, but Nikolon raised a paw before he could get it all the way out. His throat dried up in a moment and the words choked off. Kip forced himself to keep going. A moment later the power vanished with the vixen in front of him.
That had been close. He rose and went to get a glass of water for his throat, scratching at his neck. By the time he got to the kitchen, the itch had spread to his chest and back, and it was all he could do to keep his tunic on as he worked his paws under it to relieve the sensation.
Nikolon had done this, obviously, and Kip had no idea how to undo it, so he would have to call the demon again. But this time he would do it by the book. He fetched one of his mother’s knives, the long one for carving small fowl. Returning to the room he’d been given, he held the knife in the fire to sterilize it, then extinguished the fire so there would be nothing drawing on his concentration. Quickly, before he could change his mind, he pressed the hot tip of the knife into his left arm.
Pain flared and then subsided. He pressed fingers around the wound until blood appeared, staining the fur, and then he put his mouth to it. There wouldn’t be a half goblet this time, nothing like, but the taste came strongly into his muzzle, coppery pressure on his sinuses. Again he gathered magic, and fancied it peaked more strongly this time. Still scratching his fur, he cast the summoning and then the binding.
Nikolon stood before him. Kip gave the order, and this time the vixen remained completely stationary. “All right,” Kip said. “First off, lift this curse or whatever it is you’ve done that’s making me itch.”
The demon didn’t move, but the itching stopped, leaving in its place sore skin where Kip’s claws had dragged. “Thank you,” Kip sighed, and exhaled. “Now, I want you to go to Prince George’s College of Sorcery in New Cambridge, where we searched ruins. Go to the basement of the White Tower and talk to Coppy the otter. Relay to me everything you see and hear, and relay my responses back to them. You may use that form when appearing to them. Do you have any questions?”
“Yes.” Nikolon remained perfectly still. “Am I to be punished?”
Kip tested the binding spell again, but it was secure this time. “Why would you be punished?”
“For inflicting Aberine’s Crawling Skin upon you.”
The fox’s eyebrows rose. “I knew the risks of the binding. It’s in your nature to test it and take advantage if I haven’t cast it properly. The fault is at least partly mine. Though,” he said, thinking it over, “you didn’t have to do anything. But I suppose you could have done worse as well.”
“Very well.” Nikolon’s words betrayed no emotion, but her expression, to Kip’s eye, was uncertain.
“Is there confusion over my order?” Kip asked.
“No.”
“Then depart.”
“Yes, sir.” And the demon was gone.
Kip focused, and a moment later saw great stone walls in his mind’s eye. The outside of the Tower through the iron bars of the gate, the great stones streaked with rain and moonlight. And then he saw himself sitting in a small room in his parents’ house in Georgia, and he opened his eyes to the vixen standing before him. “Why did you not enter the Tower?” he said.
“I was forbidden. When summoned inside the grounds of the college, I may come, and I may leave. But when summoned outside, I may not enter.”
“What prevents you?”
“There are wards I am bound not to pass.”
Was it Peter? Kip didn’t know how to ask that without revealing the presence of Peter to the demon, and who knew what mischief that might create? “All right,” Kip said, letting his shoulders slump. “Thank you, Nikolon.” And he spoke the words of the dismissal.
He’d hoped he would be able to talk to Coppy tonight, but it seemed that would have to wait another twelve days, an eternity during which he would have nothing to do but talk to his parents and the townspeople. He extinguished his fire and crawled into bed. Sleep would bring the next day sooner, and with it his return to New Cambridge.
14
Making Plans
The days passed more quickly than Kip had expected. In his spare time, he practiced with fire and searched Master Gugin’s memory for any other details he might have missed. Otherwise he spoke to his parents about the new construction in Peachtree, their hopes for a store, and about the revolutionaries.
His father was as cautious as Kip himself, but his mother, to his surprise, took up the cause of independence. “Why shouldn’t we hope for better circumstances?” she said over candlelight late one night.
They were seated around the dinner table with mugs of peach nectar, diluted to be less overpowering to the foxes’ palates, and Kip had just taken a drink when Ada spoke those words. He put his mug down quickly. “You didn’t want me to become a sorcerer,” he said. “But revolution is all right?”
“The system as it is does not favor us,” she s
aid. “To try to thwart it as you are doing is dangerous. If you’re to incur danger, why not replace the entire system?”
He knew in that moment who had been behind the move to Georgia and making it permanent. “The risk is so much greater.”
“Not to you.” She looked over her muzzle at him, and he thought how much she’d changed in just a few months. Her eyes had always been a haven, warm and safe. The warmth remained, but the fur around them was tinged with grey and her gaze was distant. “If you join the revolution and it fails, you’ll be hanged as a traitor. But if you anger the wrong sorcerer, you’ll be disgraced, thrown out without reason, maybe lose your magic—your father won’t tell me if that’s possible.”
“I don’t know,” Max said mildly.
“And in the worst case, killed. Or you’ll just disappear and I’ll never know. So the risk isn’t so much greater, and at least if you join the revolution you’ll be working towards something worthwhile. You’ll be standing with others.”
“And vulnerable to their mistakes as well,” Kip pointed out. “I’m making friends among the sorcerers.”
“Friends.” Ada shook her head. “Friends like the ones we had in New Cambridge? Friends who turn their back on you when you need them most?”
Kip shook his head, but he had no answer for that, and Ada went on. “These friends, have they been tested? Because testing is when you will know your friends.”
Whom, he thought, would he trust by his side? Coppy, of course. Emily. Malcolm. None of the sorcerers, that was certain. Master Odden had sent him to London and left him there; Master Vendis wouldn’t even choose him as an apprentice. The sorcerers at Prince George’s who were friendly to him were friendly because it was not inconvenient to be.
London was no better. Master Cott wanted to keep him under lock and key in his workshop. Master Albright’s motivations remained cloudy. Master Gugin would barely get off his couch without the incentive of ale. And Abel shared a bond of species, but Kip had only talked with him twice.