16. Seb
SEB
The realization that he was going to spend an entire academic year working with Lily Perkins dawned on Seb glacially, then all at once.
Seconds contracted, then crushed together, piling one on top of each other like an accordion wheezing out a nasal tune.
Tori stared at him, clutching his arm with sharply manicured nails.
He sat frozen as Chant tried, and failed, to regain his classroom before giving up.
Turn around, the better part of him ordered. Don’t move, hissed the other.
Dazedly, he stood as Chant dismissed them, shoving the slip of paper into his pocket and pivoting toward the back of the classroom.
He registered Lily’s dark aura pushing past him, clipping him in the shoulder and making him drop his books, only after it happened.
By the time he finished blinking she had already disappeared.
“You okay?” Asher said from the floor, handing Seb a book, watching him stare numbly down at his things.
“Let’s talk to Chant,” Tori said, her voice pitching frantically. “He’ll understand. There’s no way you can work with that pariah for a whole year. You’ll flunk.”
“No,” Seb said, already moving toward the door, the force of his voice surprising all of them.
“No way. I’ve got to…” he was unsure of what it was he needed to do, just knowing it was something.
“I’ll see you guys later.” He pushed his books into his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and jogged down the hallway and into the afternoon sun.
Outside, he slowed to a walk, his mind moving so fast that it hissed with static.
His feet thought for him, bringing him to the grove.
Gradually, his thoughts stilled as he walked between the trees, some of them just saplings, others ancient, with spreading golden canopies and deep-furrowed, rough bark.
He found his tree, sinking against it, letting the bark untuck his shirt and scrape his back as he slid down to sit between his favorite furrow in the roots.
They cradled him perfectly. It was one of the things that proved to him, with absolute surety, that this tree was a part of himself, made living, green, and vivid.
The tree had grown for him; he had grown the tree.
The effect of last weekend’s loss on the tree hadn’t been as bad as he feared. A few leaves had dropped, and some of them were tarnished to a papery yellow, but it was nothing a decent win wouldn’t reverse. He pulled up his knees and let his head fall into his hands.
It was only as he dipped his fingers into his jacket pocket for the slip of paper that bound him to Lily Perkins that he remembered the weight of his pocket’s other contents, acquired in smoke and flames four nights before.
He was astonished that he’d forgotten it, but the whole school year so far had been a whirlwind pushing him off course, or onto a nameless new one.
He hooked the ring with the tip of his finger and began to slide it out of his pocket.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Seb froze, gazing up through the fall of his hair at Conrad. He let the ring drop into the pocket.
“Conrad.” The name felt foreign on his lips, and the fact of it was a poison-tipped dagger in his spleen. His voice sounded like noise underwater. Seb swallowed, collecting himself, his thoughts, his will, his Words. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s all over campus already.” Conrad bit his lip, shook his head.
Seb wondered, momentarily, if it was sincere, and decided it wasn’t.
It was easier, he had found, to make Conrad a villain.
Easier to believe he’d been playing some long, twisted game than to allow him to have been someone who had ever loved Seb—who had blasphemed that fact as deeply as one possibly could.
“Leper Lily.” Conrad’s face wrenched into something ugly that Seb had seen plenty of times but previously chosen to ignore. “Rotten fucking luck.”
He didn’t respond. Words weren’t safe around him. The gash was reopened and now he could betray himself just as easily as Conrad had. Inside his neck his pulse thudded, and he clutched the ring in his pocket with suddenly clammy fingers.
Conrad was one of those people who hated, truly hated, the half-magic girl.
Seb hadn’t given much thought to it before; had given the whole sordid matter a wide berth, the way his mother had always instructed with distasteful or uncomfortable things.
Now, though, having seen the real Conrad, or at least a different Conrad than he thought he’d known, he understood—she was a threat.
Sitting with his back against the tree made Seb vulnerable.
He wanted to stand, square off against Conrad as if he were a Cantrèa opponent, but he didn’t trust his legs to hold him.
He tipped his head back against the bark instead, looking for another point of solidity, projecting an air of carelessness.
“What do you want?”
His Words rushed through his head, streaming together in a desperate torrent, I call the phantoms of a thousand hours; Each from his voiceless grave…
He imagined himself as a stream, flowing with swift purpose, dark with leaf tannins, reflecting its environment and belying nothing of the dangers below.
Magic pulled together, thickly, in his chest. Its richness settled on his tongue, flooding him with sudden warmth.
“Came to check on a friend. We said we would still be friends.” His voice, if anything, sounded hurt.
Conrad’s sculpted face looked the same as it always did, his blue eyes as soft as a cotton sky, which was the thing that threw Seb the most. It was the question that had kept him up night after night all summer, as larch pollen wafted through the windows and settled on his hard bed, making his throat ache in the morning.
It was the question he’d run ragged as he clutched the windowsill, staring at a sliver of the Oracle’s Moon in the pink-tinged August half-night as he turned twenty-two alone, once the midnight sun had passed.
Does he mean it? Does he know?
The answer, of course, was unknowable, at least without illegal spellwork that was decidedly not in his wheelhouse. There was simply no way—magical or otherwise—to know, so he’d sent it, and that part of himself, up in fire in a stone ring in the middle of the boreal forest.
Seb pushed himself up and walked away.