Spark

by Anna Holmes

  “Perhaps,” I answer. “I will review your proposals and seal them this evening. For now, I should see to the prince consort.”

  “Was your endeavor successful?” Jarven asks.

  “I think so. I hope so.” I look at the desk for a moment. He will hate it. I hate it. But with little other option while Kai undergoes treatment, my heart sinks a little. “Please send for Professor Thorn. We have need of his expertise.”

  Alain keeps a large jar of alchemist’s fire on his desk. It’s common enough, when you don’t want candle wax dripping on your papers, but his burns all night, just in case he wakes from one of those dreams. It gives him something else to focus on. When I enter, it’s dark, which just feels wrong. I warm the jar between my hands and bring the little red-orange blob at the bottom to life. It makes me feel better, at least. The Professor doesn’t seem to notice. He’s been looking very intently at Alain. “And what did you say he did?”

  “I’m still not entirely sure,” I elaborate. “But somehow he changed Sergeant Nuthatch’s, um, body type?”

  “The centaur?”

  “Yes, she’s a centaur.” I pause. “Was? Will be?”

  “Wait—” He whirls, black robes flying around him. “Not only has he managed some sort of full-body transformation for someone else—not easy for any will caster—but it is still active?”

  I understand Alain’s unease so well right now. I feel like I have to be uncomfortable about the Professor’s glee on his behalf. “Yeah,” I answer, leaning away a little. “You’re, uh, really interested in that, huh.”

  “Interested—Caelin, what would you say if I told you that one swordsman managed to fell an entire army while nursing a grievous wound?”

  “I get it. I’d say it’s a fairy story. But this fairy story was accomplished by a real person, and I’m worried about him, so… “ I hold out my hands at Alain's sleeping form and look at the Professor questioningly.

  He touches his forehead. “Aha. Yes, I suspect your doctor’s initial assessment is correct. There is an abundance of energy still yet to settle in him. Once it comes to an equilibrium, he will wake for more than a few moments at a time.” His eyes crease slightly. “What form that might take….”

  I frown. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a lot of power, Linnie.” He leans against the bookshelf. “Your father and I, many years ago, when we were about your age and in school, we would have these…debates, of a sort. Once, he proposed something of this nature. I assumed he was having one of these thought experiment debates with me, and little did I know—he was developing it.”

  Involuntarily, I take a step back, my fingers grasping by instinct for the sapphire crest at my neck. “What? Papa wasn’t power hungry. He didn’t even want to be king.”

  “No, indeed. I know that well. But he was terminally optimistic about the intentions of his fellow human beings. A person enhanced like this could do an enormous amount of good, yes. But only if he remained completely unimpressed by his own improvement.”

  No noise from the earring, but my face still burns. “And you don’t think he could have done that?”

  “My dear girl,” he laughs sadly. “I know he could have. But Soren didn’t write that formula for himself. He wrote it for me. And I knew I was corruptible. If someone gave me the power to level mountain ranges and pull up new ones in their place? I know I’d be tempted to do it. And magic wants to be used. It’s always pushing at casters like us. It would be so easy to give in.”

  I look down at Alain, his pillow-mussed hair, his sunken eyes, the half-smile even in his sleep. “He wouldn’t.”

  “You’re sure of that?” the Professor asks gravely. “He’s never once cast in rage, in grief, in terror? Even in joy?”

  My mind starts to wander to the many times I’ve watched him. Magic is a story we tell the world, he wrote, and I have seen how deeply he feels stories. And there’s the favor he’d asked in the tent. Killing him if he gets out of control. Guilt churns hot in my chest, rattles my rib cage. “Of course he has, but he—I know him. He’s been more afraid of himself than anyone.”

  The Professor folds his arms, wincing. “I’m sorry, Linnie. I didn’t mean to suggest. Everything I know of him commends him. I just—know you’ve your father’s optimism, that’s all.”

  I nod, a strange mixture of relief and lingering anxiety bubbling up behind my eyes. A knock at the door interrupts my thoughts. I clear my throat. “Enter.”

  Tressa wobbles into view, still particularly unsure of her bowing ankles. She glances at Professor Thorn. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “Not at all,” he answers, his eyes widening. “You’re—the centaur. May I examine you?”

  “Uh—no?” she answers, looking at me in bewilderment.

  “He means because of the spell,” I translate, looking up at the ceiling. “Professor, this is why people find this uncomfortable.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he amends hastily, then pauses, listening. “Hmm. That’s—hmm.”

  Uneasily, Tressa sways from side to side, eventually leaning up against one of the bookcases for support. “What does hmm mean?”

  “The resonance is strange.”

  Her mouth twitches. “It has always been my fondest dream to have an academic describe me as having a strange resonance.”

  Either he’s ignoring the sarcasm or he hasn’t noticed. He looks at her for a length of time just bordering on disconcerting before looking her in the eyes again. “You’re not truly human at all right now, are you?”

  “No.” She fidgets with the end of her braid, still the same coarse black. “Alain and I had discussed giving me this option, in case I needed to blend better somewhere, or fit, or just—in general. At first, he thought it would be too difficult, since he’d need to—what did he say?” She looks off into the air, thinking. “Magically articulate what it means to be human in the first place. Like when he fixed your shoulder. He had to think about everything that might go in a shoulder, which is why it’s not exactly perfect. If he got it wrong, there’d be a chance my body just wouldn’t work at all.”

  Thorn’s face lights up behind his glasses. “Yes, exactly . So how did he bypass the problem?”

  “So he started thinking about how it would be easier if he were trying to change his own body, since self-preservation wouldn’t let him turn himself into something that wouldn’t work. And then he started thinking about the thing he can do where he makes another mage cast for him.”

  “But you’re not a mage.”

  “I’m getting to it, Professor. That’s precisely what Alain said, until he started thinking about what he tells his sister.”

  He pauses. "Sister? He has no sister, does he?”

  “Yes, he does,” I answer slowly. “Why?”

  “He’s just never mentioned," the Professor says. “I’m sorry, I’m interrupting again. Go on, Sergeant.”

  Tressa sighs, then restarts. “His sister isn't a mage. She complains about not having any magic, and he tells her that it’s not true, because—”

  “All things on earth contain ether.”

  “Can I please—?”

  “Sorry, sorry. Carry on.”

  Visibly annoyed, she crosses her arms and finishes, “So he figured out that he could probably lend me his will, sort of, so I could contribute my ether to the spell. So that turned me into my concept of a human without having to be exactly right.”

  Thorn clasps his hands together over his mouth, exhaling in a voiceless oh. “That that is clever. That is marvelous. That is—boundary breaking, my gods. Do you realize what he’s done? He’s proven definitively that any person, given access to enough ether, could be a mage of any sort.”

  He’s off and running through his head in much the same way Alain can from time to time. “Of course it’s been done once before under spurious circumstances, but this is a legitimately verifiable instance of….”

  I look at Tressa. “Everything all right?”

&nbs
p; She looks over at Alain with a guilty wince. “All right as it can be.”

  “I know he doesn’t regret it,” I tell her firmly. “And neither do I.”

  She clears her throat slightly, turning from me and heading for the window. “I just came because—I thought you should know.” She loosens the casement and swings the window open.

  At first, all I notice is the sudden blast of cold air, but intermingled in it are faint notes of song. My throat clenches a little. The hymn to Elyssia. Usually it’s only sung when a member of the royal family is ill. It was sung to my father, my aunts. And someone is singing it for him. Tressa gestures me forward, and I step up to the window. A few dozen young people stand in the forecourt below, some holding balls of light within their hands. One of his favorite tricks. I step back again, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand. The Professor looks down. “His students,” he says, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “They do love him. Not for the same reasons I do, and certainly not for the same reasons you do, but I have to admit he’s captured their attention.”

  An honest prayer for his healing and his health. When so many wish him the opposite, or wish him those for the wrong reasons, this is so very welcome. Passersby start joining the students, a few townsfolk here and there. Finer dressed folk mill awkwardly about the edges, then join in once one or two have started to participate.

  I burst out with a watery laugh. “He’s never going to believe this,” I tell Tressa.

  She grins and throws and arm around my shoulder, giving my arm a squeeze as she pulls me into a hug. “Fancy folk falling over themselves to be seen doing the right thing while you’re looking? I think he might.”

  “Even so, this….” I lean my arm against the wall. “I think this one might be his largest miracle yet.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Alain

  The first thing that I’m really aware of is everything.

  My first breath leading into consciousness—lasting this time, unlike the flickers of awareness I sped through over the course of the last night—seems to move everything around me—air, the blankets, the nightclothes I wear, my own insides. I shut my eyes again for a moment. I think if I tried, I could trace that breath from my lungs to every part of my body. With it, a steady supply of magic surges and ebbs.

  I’m alive. Undeniably, exhilaratingly alive.

  I rise slowly, feel the covers slip away from me, the ripples that sends outward into the air, the crest and fall of the dust particles. This—this I remember. Those times I took ill, when I recovered again, I thought I could sense the world’s own breaths. At the time, I’d thought it was just the contrast between sickness and new health, but this—

  This is something more.

  It’s morning now, by the dim light pushing past my curtains. Late, possibly. I’m the only inhabitant of my bed, and I distinctly remember Caelin at my side all night, curled around me. She cried—quietly, nearly imperceptibly, but even then in those hazy moments, I could tell. And she noticed my noticing, and for once, didn’t bother forcing the tears away.

  She’s probably handling everything in the aftermath of our trip. I was still carefully tucked in when I rose, which I doubt she’d have done were things troubled. I set my hands to my knees, the pads of my fingers sinking into the weave of my sleep pants, which she helped me into last night. The texture—plain linen, softer than most, but not velvet—is decadent. It’s all I can do to stop running my hands over and over my knees and resolve to find her.

  I stand and think about putting on real clothes. The acuity will fade again, I’m fairly certain, but it’s making it a little hard to focus. Without even trying, I can feel the castle move around me—people flitting through the halls, the subtle shifts in the wind, the vibration of the stone underfoot.

  And then outside, the bells fill first the air, then the resonant space of my chest. At first, I think it’s the clock, but the chimes ring out in playful, sonorous leaps. Music. The bell tower is playing music.

  I reach for my robe—little-worn, but probably more acceptable than parading about in my sleep clothes. In the corner of the wardrobe sits a scarf, folded neatly into a pile of red wool. I grab that too, wind it around my neck, and move for the glass doors to the balcony.

  The second the doors squeak open on their hinges, I’m absolutely flooded. The bells, the fresh air—cold, to me, but not painful—and the snow. Oh, the snow—it surrounds me in flakes that must be falling, but seem suspended in midair. I reach out to touch it, watch it swirl around my hand.

  My hand. Still blue, but healthier, somehow. Not as stark as it was, not so raw. The snow plays over it, a few flakes sticking to the webbing between my fingers. Do I dare test myself?

  It’s not even really a spell, barely even a thought, but I am moving with the wind and the snow, sending the flakes on my hand mingling upward, spiraling ever higher to mix with its new siblings and the rise and fall of the bells. I can’t help an untamed laugh as I watch the flurries race one another and settle slowly back downward. The bells and the snow and the magic in me, all rising and falling together in a chorus of movement and sound and light and existence. I am alive.

  I lose myself in the rapture of it, pulling the snow toward me, sending it away again, arcing it and sweeping it back around myself. It’s only when someone calls my name that I too start to drift back down gently.

  Caelin appears at the door, smiling in confusion. “Alain? Love, what are you doing?”

  “It’s snowing,” is all I can think to say.

  She steps out onto the balcony with me, and my gods, I just want to shout until my voice intertwines with those bells. She’s beautiful this morning—well, she’s always beautiful—but that smile, the quickness to her step, the way the green velvet of her dress plays with the gold of her skin, the snow drifting to kiss her braid, tucked up under her crown. Even more than that, she’s happy. It comes off of her in waves that warm, her light neither competing with the cold nor succumbing to it. I grasp her hands and look out at the town below.

  There are people moving—hurrying, mostly, in a steady stream toward the cathedral. The bells are a call, I think. “What’s going on?" I ask, my voice still a little gravelly. “What’s today?”

  “Winters-meet,” she says, tilting her face up to the sky. “Weather’s cooperating for once.”

  Oh, that’s right. I haven’t been to a Winters-meet vigil in years. I thought the concept of giving thanks for the expanse of months in which nothing could be grown and the world froze over a bit strange, but now I think I understand there’s a rightness to it. That also explains the dress. It’s finer than most she wears on a regular basis, gold vines trailing around the wide hem, a panel of gold fabric splitting the middle of her skirt. “I’m making you late for the ceremony,” I say. “Go on. I’ll be here.”

  She shakes her head, pulling me close to her and resting her cheek to my chest. “Not now,” she murmurs.

  My hand runs over her shoulders, and she curls her fingers into the fabric of my robe. “I told you I’d come back,” I tell her softly. “I’ll always come back.”

  “I know,” she answers. “But you were starting to scare me.”

  “No more,” I answer.

  She pulls back, tucking my hands in hers. “No more,” she agrees. “Elle was able to change the script. You won’t need another infusion.”

  Such a strange feeling, this relief and grief rolling together. I’m free of the demands of the cryst, but I won’t have another moment like this one. Subdued, I nod. I have to be careful. That grief isn’t mine; not wholly. The magic in me isn’t, either, and it’s already turning my head. “Tell me you didn’t let her stay up all night.”

  “No,” she laughs. “She woke up earlier than anyone else to check on you, though. She’s at vigil now.”

  “Caelin—oh, hang it, there are too many questions.”

  “There’ll be time.” She gives my hands a squeeze, then smiles at the ground
. “My gods, I just realized there’ll be time.”

  I can feel her heart jump from here. She steps away from me to lean over the iron railing—for the briefest of moments, before stepping back and looking up. I do, too. The patterns of the snow’s descent look almost circular. I glance over and see her beaming over at me. I smile too. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she answers, still grinning. “Just—no, nothing.”

  “Hardly sounds like nothing, my love.”

  “It’s just— well, you’re all right, and more, you’re—” She pauses a moment, shakes her head, and says in wonderment, “Thorn told me that the power you have—that it could reshape the world, upend everything we know. You could make it hail down demonfire or fish or whatever the devils you want. You could melt it all away, start anew. But instead, I come out here, and you’re playing in the snow.”

  I look up again, consider the flakes. “Why would I, though? Even if I could, why should I meddle with all this? Nature knows what it’s doing. I should know. I’m a crime against it.”

  Caelin moves to me again and holds my face between her hands. “You are no such thing,” she tells me seriously.

  “Dearest, I was joking,” I say.

  “I know,” she replies. “But only because you think it might be a little true. It isn’t. Nature should be so lucky. You could be out shuffling around land features right now or making seafood precipitation.”

  “Sounds tiring and smelly,” I answer, pulling her to me. “That’s my secret. I don’t have self-restraint. Just a deep, abiding aversion to actual work.”

  “And a sense of humor, it seems.”

  “There is that,” I concede.

  She nestles in close. “And I love that, too.”

  The bells have finished calling people to vigil, and we’re in the middle of keeping our own, the snow muffling everything around us. Her ear is pressed to my chest, her eyes shut. I sweep the stray bit of her hair from her face. She’s still smiling, and despite everything I’ve felt this morning, this is the most wonderful. “Caelin,” I start.