by T. J. Klune
“But what if it’s not enough?”
He slumped back into his chair. “You have to have hope.”
Gods, that sounded so fucking trite. “Do you?” I retorted.
“I have to,” he said tiredly. “It’s all I have left. This hope. This belief that one day, the mistakes that I have made as a man who loved another will be washed clean and forgiven. That the world will continue to exist in the light long after my own candle has been snuffed out and I am but a wisp of smoke. I have made mistakes, Sam. So many mistakes. I am sorry for them. That you and yours have to live with the actions of an old man who thought he was doing the right thing. If I could relieve you of this burden, I would. More than anything else, that is what I wish when I look upon the stars. That you would be free from all of this, able to live the life you deserve. I have been… harsh with you, only because I see myself in you. Your strength, your attitude, rough though it may be, reminds me of how I acted for a very long time. And that’s not to say that you’re doing anything wrong. You’re not; you are living your life just as well as you should. Or at least you were before all of this.”
“Did you know?” I asked him quietly. “When Kevin came. That all of this was beginning?”
He nodded slowly. “It was a sign.”
“And you said you didn’t know it would be Myrin.”
“No.”
“The bird.”
“What you’re really asking is if I planned on using you all this time.”
I stared straight at him. “Yes.”
“At first.”
I swallowed thickly. “What changed your mind?”
“You did. You were me. And even if you weren’t, Sam, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have done anything. When I say at first, I mean that it was the briefest of thoughts, done so in passing. Something considered in the dead of night when I couldn’t sleep. It was… dark. It was dark, but I am not.”
“How did you stop him the first time?”
“Containment. Compression.”
“Morgan.”
“Yes.”
“How is it that you can’t do that?”
“How is it that Morgan cannot travel as I can? How is it that I do not have a lightning-struck heart as you do? It’s…. Magic is a fingerprint, Sam. It’s unique to the person. You can do things that I have never thought possible. There are things that I can do that you might never achieve, but I can’t be sure of that. You are… different. Than all of us that have come before you.”
“But you said that we’re the same, you and I.”
His smile was a fragile thing. “We were.”
“But not anymore?”
“I am far too old to have the wonder you carry for the world. And I don’t want to see that wonder burned from you.”
He fell silent after that, allowing me to process everything that had been said. I didn’t know what to do with most of it. I didn’t know what to say. I was angry at him yet again, but the anger was muted by the fact that I understood. I couldn’t blame him too much if I thought I’d have done the same thing had I been in his shoes.
We were human. We breathed. We lived. We laughed. We broke. And in the end, we loved each other down to our very souls. We moved with a strange grace, the dance of life that pushed us together, and didn’t we just cling to each other? Didn’t we just hold on as tightly as we could in fear that at any possible moment, we’d be torn away?
We did.
Randall had danced his life. He had made his choices. And now he sat across from me, slouched and weary.
“I don’t want to live forever,” I finally said.
“You won’t.”
“I don’t want to live as long as you.”
“You won’t. My heart beats because I am forcing it to. Apparently I can be quite stubborn when I need to be.”
“Or as long as Morgan.”
He closed his eyes. “Sam—”
“I don’t want longevity. I want—”
“Your magic will keep you alive.”
“Then maybe I don’t want it.”
His eyes snapped open. “How can you—”
For the first time in my life, I said, “I want to be normal.”
“Sam, if there is one thing you are not, it is normal. Normal does not have its fate written in the stars.”
“I can’t leave him,” I said. “I won’t. If stone crumbles, then I want to crumble right along with it. If we… survive this. If we defeat Myrin, I want to age like a human. I want to live a normal life.”
“You are meant to be the King’s Wizard,” Randall said, sitting up higher. He squared his shoulders. “You have a duty to the people of Verania. To the Crown.”
“I will find a way,” I said. “I will help you with your mistakes, but I will find a way.”
“Why?” he breathed, shaking his head.
I threw his words back in his face. “I love him. Maybe more than I’ve ever loved anything in this world, before and after. He is this light. This beautiful light that I think I can be consumed by. That’s what he—”
“Stop.”
I did.
“Love,” Randall said after taking a deep breath, “can be an undoing. It can destroy a man.”
“It can,” I agreed. “Or it can lift him up and carry him when things go dark.”
There was a pause. Then, “You are, without a doubt, the biggest idiot that I’ve ever had the misfortune to have met.”
“Hey!”
“I’m being completely serious. How are you even still alive? Forget what I said about you and I being the same. You are this… this gushy—”
“I’m not gushy, what the hell—”
“—sappy little boy who is talking out his ass. You are going to get eaten by a dragon, mark my words. The mated pair is going to take one look at you and snap you in half like a little tenderloin.”
“If they do, the world will end so it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Randall sighed. “Why do I even bother?”
“I ask that about you all the time too,” I said. “Something else we have in common.”
“Can you please keep that I said that to yourself?”
“Absolutely not. I’m telling everyone. Even people I don’t know. I’m going to stop them in the streets and tell them that you basically said that you love me because I’m exactly like you.”
“I didn’t say anything like that—”
“We should probably hug now,” I demanded. “For at least three minutes.” I stood up.
“Don’t you dare,” he warned as he dropped his hands. His eyes narrowed. “If you even remotely think about—godsdammit.”
“Shh,” I whispered from where I was bent over, resting my head on his shoulder, arms wrapped around him, holding on tight. “Just let it happen. It feels so good if you just let it happen. And I know how that sounded, but I was just talking about a hug.”
“Are you done yet?”
“Everyone knows hugs should last at least a minute. It’s only been fifteen seconds. Just let me do this. Has anyone ever told you that you smell like mothballs and cherry-flavored hard candies? You’re my cherry-flavored mothball hard candy—”
“That’s it,” he snarled, shoving me away. He was surprisingly strong for being so old. I almost stumbled directly into the fire but was able to save myself from certain death.
“We should do that more,” I decided.
“We will never do that again,” he said. “You got one, Sam of Wilds. That was it. Try that again and I will magically castrate you.”
“My boys,” I whispered, taking a step back. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try and hug me again.”
I reached down and picked up the Grimoire. One of the pages was bent, and I smoothed it out. A few words caught my eye.
…you are not ready.
“You forgot one thing,” I said, feeling a headache coming on.
“What?” he asked from behind me, sounding grumpy.
&nb
sp; “The Great White.” I turned slowly. Randall was looking back at the fire. “It said I wasn’t ready.”
“Yes. That. I commend you for keeping it a secret for this long. However, if you do something like that again, you won’t like the consequences. Do we understand each other?”
Yikes. “Uh. Completely. Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He smoothed out his beard, which had gotten ruffled during our one and only hug (or so he thought). “As for the Great White, either it was speaking the truth or it wasn’t. Either the path has been set or it hasn’t. Stone crumbles, Sam. You need to prove to the Great White that you are ready. So when you stand before it, you are able to look it in the eye and be judged worthy. Having collected the other four dragons will go a long way toward convincing it. I believe in you. Above all things, I believe that if anyone can do it, it will be you.”
“Why?” I asked, swallowing past the strange lump in my throat. “Why do you believe in me? Because you have no other choice?”
For the second time, he smiled at me. “No, Sam. Because I know who you are and what you’re capable of. And I’m going to make sure that you’re ready.”
That wasn’t comforting in the slightest. “That sounded almost like a threat.”
The smile widened. I no longer liked the look of it. “Oh. It was.”
“Eep,” I said.
Chapter 11: Throwing Knight Delicious Face Off a Cliff
AND IT was a threat. In the days that followed, Randall came at me with everything he had. He’d been holding back on me before and, for someone who was over six centuries old and admittedly alive by sheer force of will, could move quicker than one would have expected. Almost quicker than I did.
Which, you know.
Was a huge fucking blow to the ol’ ego.
“Ow,” I said as I smashed into the wall. “Like, seriously. Ow.”
He was hopping from one foot to the other, light and quick. “That all you got? I know dead chickens who’ve got better moves than you.”
“What? How does that even make sense? Dead chickens don’t have moves. You really need to work on your insults.”
“Your nose is bleeding,” he pointed out. “I think that’s insulting enough. Why’d the chicken cross the road?”
I gaped at him.
“Because it got scared after it saw me kicking your ass!”
“What the fuck?” I asked, voice high-pitched. “What is with you?”
He cracked his knuckles and then his neck. “I feel alive. Ready to teach a young whippersnapper such as yourself to respect your elders.”
Whippersnapper, I mouthed to no one in particular. Then, “If I tell you I respect you, will you stop? God, even your skin tags are moist with sweat. That’s just terrible. At least put your robes back on so I don’t have to see sagging flesh anymore.”
“This is your future,” he said, motioning down at himself. He wore a pair of extremely tight shorts and a tank top, neither of which left anything to the imagination. “You won’t stay young forever. One day, you’ll look exactly like this.”
“Gross,” I muttered. “If that happened, I’ll at least have the common sense not to share it with the rest of the world. You look like a pile of old blankets left in a corner of a crumbling monastery for sixty years.”
“Fight me,” he demanded.
“Bro, you don’t even want to go there with me right now, I shit you not.”
“Oh, I am going there. In fact, I’ve already been there and back.”
It felt like my eyes were bulging. “Are you shit-talking me?”
He looked pleased with himself. “Is it working?”
“I’m gonna kick your ass, old man.” I wiped the blood from my nose and attacked.
I SPENT afternoons in the labs, poring over Grimoires and spell books, wincing at my sore muscles and trying not to show just how much they affected me. I thought Randall wasn’t feeling anything (which led me, briefly, to subscribe to the theory that he was actually a zombie and that I probably needed to chop off his head so he didn’t eat my brains) until I found out he iced his knees under the table. He glared at me as I laughed at him, and a heavy book from the shelf behind me flew out and hit me in the back of the head. I stopped laughing at him after that.
It wasn’t a crash course, per se, that he was trying to push me through. He wasn’t my mentor. That would always be Morgan. He was trying to teach me things I’d never thought of before, trying to expand my knowledge of how magic worked. There would have been a time that this would have occurred naturally, me transitioning from Morgan to him, but it would’ve been closer to the Trials where I’d attempt to move from an apprentice to a full-fledged wizard. I gave brief thought about asking him if that’s what we were doing, but I couldn’t get the words out. Maybe I was too scared to even think that I could be going that direction already. I had plans, yes. Plans to become the youngest wizard to ever pass the Trials. But I was twenty-one years old with dragons to collect and a villain who wanted to eat my magic.
I didn’t have time for anything else.
IT STARTED at the beginning of the fourth week.
Or maybe it’d been there all along. I couldn’t be sure.
When I’d first arrived at Castle Freesias, as we stood outside in the snow, I’d felt… something in the back of my mind. A whisper like a caress. Something tugging lightly. It wasn’t strong. I’d ignored it, because I was in a place of incredible magic. Things like that were expected. For all I knew, it could have been Randall, or the effects of having teleported a long distance.
But then it happened again in the middle of the night. I was tossing and turning, my brain too full of stupid thoughts for me to be able to close my eyes and sleep. It happened every now and then. Usually I had Ryan there to curl up around me. Before him, Tiggy and Gary.
Now I was all alone.
And apparently starting to sound like Zero.
“Ugh,” I said. “This is lame. Everything is lame.”
The firelight flickered across the icy walls and ceiling. I watched the shadows for a little while, trying to force all thoughts from my mind. Which, when one tries to clear one’s mind, inevitably, the mind is fuller than it has ever been before.
Clear your mind, I told myself.
Hey, my brain said. Remember that one time when you were sixteen and you tripped and fell in front of the Prince and all his friends and they laughed at you?
“Oh my gods,” I muttered aloud. “Whyyyyy would you do that?”
Suck my balls, my brain said.
I tried flipping over onto my other side, away from the fire. The shadows were thicker on the other side of the room. I closed my eyes, counting each breath I took. I relaxed, relaxed, relaxed, and two hundred sixty-seven, and two hundred sixty-eight—
I opened my eyes.
I was wide-awake.
“I am so going to get my ass kicked tomorrow,” I said with a sigh. “It’s going to—”
Wizard
“—fucking…? What the hell?”
I sat up in the bed.
The room was empty. The shadows flickered.
“Randall?”
Silence.
Then—
We see you, wizard
A chill went down my spine.
Soon, the whisper said, and then it was gone.
“Oh no,” I said.
I didn’t sleep that night.
“SO, FULL disclosure,” I said to Randall the next afternoon after he’d spent the morning kicking my ass. “Sometimes I hear dragons in my head.”
Randall had been scribbling in his own Grimoire, and the pen froze. For a moment he was statue-still, and then he laid the pen down, looked up at me with a furrowed brow, and said as flatly as possible, “What.”
“Inflection is a thing,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Sam.”
“Yes?”
“Say that again.”
“Inflection is a thing.”
He looked like
he was going to reach out and pimp-slap me. “Sam of Wilds.”
I sighed. “Look, it’s no big deal. I hear dragons in my head. Big whoop. Who cares. Let’s talk about something else. Have you seen the way Ryan’s thighs look when he wears that—”
“I have no interest in Ryan’s thighs—”
“You don’t?” I asked incredulously. “How can you not? I petitioned the King to make them a national treasure!” I frowned. “He said no because he thought that maybe I didn’t quite understand what a national treasure was, which, okay, that was sort of true. But then I told him that he’d understand what I was talking about the moment he felt them hooked up over his shoulders. Have you ever seen the King run away from a conversation before? Because I have.”
Randall pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are a disgrace to the Kingdom of Verania.”
“Eh,” I said. “Some people still think I’m awesome, so it all evens out. But if you really feel that way, I’m sure Lady Tina DeSilva will be your new best friend. Or you can stay here and be my new best friend and we’ll do cool stuff together like baking holiday cookies and getting into pillow fights.”
“Everything about that sounds terrible.”
“That’s because you’re old and grumpy.”
“Sam.”
“Randall.”
He was grinding his teeth. I thought I should point out that probably wasn’t healthy but decided to keep my mouth shut. “You said you hear dragons. In your head.”
“I did,” I said. “Though I don’t know why you look so shocked. I’m the only one they can speak around, so why shouldn’t I hear them in my head?”
“That… unfortunately makes sense.”
“I hear that a lot.”
He frowned. “Did the same thing happen with Kevin?”
I thought back to that first day in the training fields where Justin had been acting like a douchebag and had challenged me with a sword. Hadn’t I felt something then? I thought I had. A ripple along my magic, something that I hadn’t ever felt before.
“Not… not like Zero,” I admitted. “But it was there. Kevin didn’t speak to me, but then he’s far younger than any of the other dragons in Verania. I don’t know if that has anything to do with it. It’s become very apparent that I don’t know anything about dragons. Like, did you know they’re born from rocks?” I scrunched up my face. “Or something. I don’t remember what Kevin said because I was super tired.”