by Kim Smejkal
She’d promised to save Griffin and everyone else on Diavala’s eternal revenge list. What she did here would matter.
She’d just start small.
Small and fuzzy.
First she concentrated on the wall in front of them: a bare expanse of stone with wood details. Instead of thinking a person’s name as it would be written on a Divine order, she memorized the new canvas. Its grain and texture. The light and color. She would command the tattoo to the wall like a shadow.
She pressed the quill to her arm and drew the rough outline of a bee: tiny wings, fuzzy body, stinger. Nothing more complicated than a child’s sketch, with big, bold, recognizable features.
She’d learned one thing during her travels and performances with the Rabble Mob: if you don’t know what you’re doing, at least fake it well. Every stroke of her drawing was embellished by grand movements. She hummed as she drew, marking her work with a song, giving the impression of ease.
When the image was done, she inhaled and focused on the wall in front of them. Halcyon’s face gave away nothing; whether he was amused by her ineptitude or impressed with her approach, she had no idea.
Instead of willing the image to transfer to another person, ink in her blood to ink on their skin, she willed the ink to the wall.
A brand-new thing would exist, coming from completely within herself.
“Just like our experiments, right?” she whispered to Anya. They’d poked at so many edges with manipulating the ink—in the temple and then with the Rabble Mob tattoos—this was simply another test to see what they could make the ink do. Despite their shared ability to think in detours and crooked, untraveled paths, it hadn’t occurred to either of them to try to manipulate the ink onto anything other than skin.
Halcyon, and perhaps Martina, were their more advanced predecessors. Perhaps they’d been inklings once, years ago, and had smuggled the ink out of Asura in a teenage act of defiance that Diavala hadn’t noticed until many years later. Surely, in all the time Profeta had existed, Celia and Anya weren’t the first to escape the temple.
With another ragged breath, Celia willed the bee on her arm to go to the wall. Like splattering paint, like casting a shadow, an imprint.
A dark splotch appeared, looking nothing like the bee on her arm. She gasped and took a step back, shaken. The lines on her arm disappeared one by one as usual as they transferred, but they weren’t being transferred the same way. They didn’t appear line by line on the wall. It was no-splotch and then splotch, so subtle she had to look twice to see whether it was a trick of the light.
It wasn’t a trick of the light. It was spreading, enveloping the wall like an oozing stain.
And when the last line disappeared from her arm, it kept on spreading down the wall to the floor, up the wall to the ceiling. As if Griffin’s favorite Bicklandian giant, Obi, had spilled his huge paint pot over the house.
Celia knew she needed to call it back, but she was frozen in place. Did she really want that stain back inside her? The thing deep inside her body was right in front of her, looming large, and the idea that she would summon that stain, that huge dark void, back into her was frightening.
She stepped back. I don’t want it.
She took another step back, banging into a table. I hate it.
What am I doing here?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Halcyon watching hungrily, his hands clasped in front of him, his fingers tight, his eyes wide open and swirling manically as they had the day before when she’d pissed him off trying to get into his secret room. In the growing darkness—or was she only imagining that the light was fading?—his eyes glowed a deeper black.
The shadow had marched its way across the ceiling, congregating above her head. It had crept over the floor, inching its way toward her toes.
The ink was still drawn to blood. To warmth. It needed a host.
Somehow that little bee Celia had drawn on her arm had morphed into something hungry. Spreading. Searching.
She closed her eyes and tried to force the ink back to the wall. I gave you a shape. Obey it.
She pushed it away with her thoughts, like sweeping it back with a broom, trying to contain it to the wall as she’d intended.
It didn’t drop down on her. It didn’t swarm up her legs, so, shaking from the concentration, she cracked her eyes open to see if it was working.
The creeping shadow had retreated to the wall. It looked vaguely like a bee, but only because Celia knew what it was supposed to be. The edges of the image flickered like black flames in a fire. It wanted to be fed, reaching out for more.
She glanced at Halcyon again, a wide smile on her face. It was nothing—a blob on a wall, moving slightly—but she’d put it there. She was holding it there. He didn’t look all that impressed, but he gave her a slight nod, as if saying, Okay, it’s not terrible.
Turning back to it, struggling to hold on, she commanded the bee to move its wings. Movement, she thought. For effect, she drew her own arms wide and moved them up and down, as if she herself would take flight with her creation.
Too intent on her bee blob to care, she ignored it when Halcyon began laughing at her.
Tentatively, the blob stretched out on one side like a fledgling testing a wing. Celia felt a surge of triumph. It was listening to her. Without any training beyond what the temple had given her and what she and Anya had discovered on their own, she was commanding it to obey her. What else could she make it do?
The black blob paused in its flickering, as if it were listening . . .
Just before it exploded.
Celia ducked to avoid the spray. Because that’s what she was expecting after that loud squelch of failure: a splatter of thick ink coating her, the table, the supplies, and, embarrassingly enough, Halcyon himself. For a moment she pictured herself picking thick strings of goo from his hair and off his fine coat, mumbling apologies and trying hard not to meet his eye.
But nothing hit her. Celia peeked out from under her arm. The ink had disappeared. Maybe she’d called it back into her without thinking, maybe Halcyon had dismissed it in some way, but all evidence of the bee blob was gone.
She dropped her arm. “I meant to do that,” she said.
“Of course you did.” Halcyon looked amused. His lips were curved into something that could have been a smile. “I admit I quite like you. There’s just as much hate inside you as love, like a perfectly balanced scale.” He inhaled, searching her eyes for something. “The trouble with such a balance, though, is that any little thing has the ability to tip it the wrong way.”
Which way would he consider wrong, she wondered. Tipping toward hate or love?
He strode over to her, planting his feet squarely in front of her, an arm’s breadth away. “It began well, but the most important thing is knowing the exact consistency of your canvas. You were almost there. You knew to study the wall, get its shape and texture, but you looked superficially, and you need to look deeper. In order for the ink to latch on to something, in order for you to control it, it needs a solid anchor.”
Was that her first lesson? It sure sounded like a lesson. “How do you make unsubstantial things like clouds, then?” she asked. “What are they latched on to?” For his illusions to extend over the entire town, there must have been thousands of anchor points. How did he know them all?
Celia’s heart sped up. This was a turning point.
Halcyon paused, as if considering how to answer her question, not whether he would bother to answer it. A big part of her had thought he would kick her out after seeing all the things she couldn’t do.
“You only need one anchor in the real world, and you can craft an entire painting around it. Even a floating cloud in the sky will be attached to another cloud, then to another cloud, then to a treetop, and on and on, the entire thing crafted together and interconnected. Think of it like a painting made of a thousand brushstrokes, or like a sweater knitted from one long strand of yarn. You need a starting point—the
first splash of paint, the first knot—but you can build everything from there.”
“It’s the weak spot,” Celia said.
Halcyon shook his head. “Depends on your perspective. I’ve always thought of it as the strongest spot.” He gestured at the now-blank wall. “Your bee got confused when you asked it to fly. It was attached to the wall, but in order for it to take off from the wall, you needed to give it something else to connect to. If your illusion is to move across distances, like a bird flying or a wolf attacking, it needs to be tethered to more illusion at every point across the spectrum of movement. The quickest way for the ink to die is if you rob it of its connection to itself.”
“Got it,” she said. But did she? “Wait. What was the tether point? Me?” Maybe that’s why it had wanted to get back to her so badly.
“No,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate.
Okay, so she didn’t get it after all.
He’d said the bee got confused when she’d told it to leave the wall . . .
As if the wall were something it had understood and accepted.
“The wall is part of your illusion,” she said slowly. She’d added another stitch to his sweater, she hadn’t created a new one at all. “That must be why I didn’t physically feel it leave me. That must be how you can do so much . . . this.”
Every inkling tattoo came with a side effect of fatigue, depending on how large the design was, but that was because they were literally giving part of themselves away. Ink to skin, then severing the tie between the two.
The way Halcyon worked didn’t ask the illusion to exist on its own, it simply connected itself to other bits, ink to ink.
They were exactly like the temporary messages Celia and Anya had sent to each other for years, which Dante still infuriatingly delivered on a regular basis.
Celia had already done this.
With Anya.
With each message, they’d commanded the ink to be a temporary illusion; there had never been any actual ink transferred between them. And it had been hard, impossible, to hold the ink in place for very long because they hadn’t thought to anchor it.
Inadvertently, and without understanding how it worked, they’d already done this.
Halcyon smiled at her and nodded. Even though she hadn’t said anything out loud, clearly he’d noticed that she was having some kind of grand revelation. “Practice more with your bee,” he said.
He moved in and out of the room all day as she practiced. At one point he came in with tea for her. “This might help your headaches,” he said, setting a mug down in front of her. “It’s only linden flowers and honey, but Rian and I swear by it for nearly every ailment.”
“Rian?”
“She’s the town’s healer,” he said brusquely.
Celia began yet another sketch on her arm but watched him from the corner of her eye. He was keen to talk about the ink, but if anything remotely personal came up, he shut right down.
As Halcyon leaned over the table, a pendant around his neck swung out. Celia caught only a glimpse of it, but the pattern etched in the top looked much like the swirls decorating his Chest Majestic. Just before he tucked it back into his shirt, he pressed his lips to it with a gentle kiss.
Celia’s heart fluttered madly, and she had a hard time reconciling the tender image. And so soon after bringing her tea, at that. “What is it?” she asked, gesturing at the pendant.
His gaze snapped up to hers, as if he’d forgotten she was even in the room. Instead of tender, he looked about ready to bolt her to the wall like a piece of macabre art. “It’s infinitely more precious to me than you are, Celia Sand. I’d keep your curiosity in check lest it wanders into unwelcome spaces.”
Point taken. The only space he wanted her in was ink-related.
Celia went back to work.
Chapter 9
After the initial debacle with the bee splotch, the day went well enough. Celia quickly learned how to fully cast visual illusions, and bolstered by a series of small successes throughout the morning, she tried to show off. She sketched a bat house on her arm, attaching it to the room via a long pole to the floor. Instead of glimmering, shimmering, and appearing slowly, the room was empty of bat homes one minute and had a bat house in it the next.
Her wee little bats took a bit of doing to get right, but she finally had the size and shape she wanted.
“Are the bats wearing tiny robes, Celia?” Lyric had asked, making Halcyon look up from his book.
“They sure are.” Celia gestured at the bat house, darting a quick look at Halcyon to gauge his reaction; it was a pretty good replica of the Profetan temple in Asura. “They’re misti-bats,” she said proudly.
Lyric, absolutely heaving with laughter, said, “You’re so ridiculous! How are bats with clothing going to help your case here, Celia?”
Celia saw Halcyon’s frown, then. Because Lyric had drawn such attention to it.
Celia bristled. “Maybe I’m nervous, all right? This is all new to me, I’m getting little guidance, and it doesn’t help that you’re so damn judgey.” Celia summoned the misti-bats back into herself in an effort to wipe away the evidence, what she’d thought had been clever attention to detail now looking like an infantile prank.
Halcyon snapped his book shut and stood. “More tomorrow,” he said before disappearing from the room. It was close to supper hour—family time. Celia didn’t know for sure, but she suspected that Halcyon went to his locked room with the sunflower doorknob and missed Martina, alone.
“Did you have to do that?” Celia said to Lyric through her teeth. It would have been nice to have an ally, but barring that, it would have been really nice if Lyric didn’t actively make her look dimwitted.
“Fine,” Lyric said, rolling their eyes. “Your bats were okay.” That was probably the only kind of apology Celia would ever get. “Come on then,” they said, standing abruptly and beginning to clean up the disaster of a studio, a playful smirk playing at their lips. “Let’s get this place tidy and then I’ll buy you a drink. We should celebrate the evolution of bat fashion.”
* * *
By the time they arrived at the Outside Inn pub, it was already lively and full of chatter, with a small three-piece band playing in the corner. As Lyric went to get their drinks, Celia collapsed into a chair across from Griffin and then sprawled on the sticky table, moaning.
“Sooooo, how did it go?” he asked.
Celia tapped the table and pointed toward the bar without looking up.
“Got it,” he said, chuckling. Sounded like he’d had a better day than she had.
Celia tried to enjoy Griffin’s good mood. He’d made new friends in town and had even spent some time that morning with Lyric, helping them run errands. “Lyric tolerates me now, don’t you?” he said with a wide grin as Lyric appeared with the drinks.
“Barely,” they said, passing out a round and sliding into the seat next to Celia.
“They hate everyone equally,” Celia mumbled. “Don’t take it personally.”
“Oh, come now,” Lyric said, waving a hand. “I said I was sorry.”
“Did you though?”
“What’s between you two?” Griffin asked.
“It’s hilarious—” Lyric started, jumping on the chance to relay Celia’s embarrassment.
“It was nothing,” Celia interrupted, sitting up and catching her error just in time. “I thought I found Halcyon near the bakery, but it turned out the person I was telling my life story to wasn’t him.” She poked Lyric in the shoulder. Hard. “Lyric thought my embarrassment was funny.”
Probably not the best idea to antagonize the one person Celia needed a favor from now, but Lyric only smiled a little wider, assessing her from the corner of their eye even as they nodded. “Yeah,” they drawled.
“If it softens the sting,” Griffin said to Celia, “they won’t tell me what Halcyon looks like either.”
Her stomach churning, Celia then told Griffin (and Diavala) that she’d spent
the day endlessly walking around the town, getting lost in the labyrinth that was Wisteria, and hadn’t spoken to Halcyon at all.
Halcyon wasn’t willing to talk, she said.
She couldn’t remember what he looked like all over again, she said.
And that part, at least, was true. Even after spending all day with him, she couldn’t call up any of his features.
Lyric listened patiently as Celia told her story, even batting their eyelashes when Celia accused them of being deliberately unhelpful when it came to tracking Halcyon down.
“Celia has a point,” Griffin said, treading carefully around Lyric, thrilled now that they “barely tolerated” him. “I understand you’re his assistant and your loyalties lie with him, but I’m sure there’s something you could do. Arrange another meeting, perhaps?”
Griffin was being willfully naive. They’d discovered that the reason they hadn’t seen Kids around was because Halcyon didn’t like children. Families with young ones lived in a separate area of town by choice, well away from where Halcyon would be likely to run into them.
Anyone with that much power wouldn’t be swayed unless he wanted to be, no matter how reasonably Lyric appealed to him.
But how would Lyric respond to Griffin’s question? With a fresh drink in hand and a wide smile on their face, Lyric shifted toward Griffin.
Celia stiffened. If she wasn’t so damn tired, maybe she could have sorted out her story beforehand. Now she was at the mercy of the thorniest person to ever draw breath, who could ruin everything with just a word.
“So how long do you think you’ll be here?” Lyric asked, ignoring Griffin’s comment entirely.
Griffin looked at Celia. Celia stared at Lyric. Lyric watched Griffin.
“Looks like we’ll be here forever if we can’t even find him again.” Celia tried to sound irritated, but her relief came out in a long sigh. Whatever Lyric’s deal, at least they took secret-keeping seriously.
But how long could she keep this up?
Celia and Griffin were keeping Diavala a secret from Halcyon and Lyric; Celia was keeping Halcyon a secret from Griffin and Diavala; and Lyric, Halcyon, and Diavala were all keeping secrets from her and Griffin. These alliances would crumble eventually, as all alliances did, but which one would go first?