TWENTY-TWO
They came across their first obstacle once they got to the staircase leading underground.
During his week in Cretea, Cyril had not laid eyes on a single mage, but now it seemed the entrance to the basement was teeming with them, going in and out in their drab, sepia clothing with scrolls and familiars under their arms. Cyril was confident he could take on a few mages, but not a full platoon of them.
“We are being stealthy, then?” Tigris said, more a polite command than an actual question.
Cyril nodded. “I’m just not sure how. If even a single one of those mages looks into the weave, they will spot us. Is there another way in?”
Tigris thought very hard about this. “It is a basement level, but there must be some sort of ventilation. In fact, I am sure I spotted some kind of iron grate while we were there.”
“You want to sneak in through a vent ?”
“Unless it does not agree with your delicate sensibilities.”
Cyril sucked in the air through his cheeks. It didn’t. It really didn’t. But he had no other choice.
It was surprisingly easy to find ingress through one of the openings to the palace’s ventilation on the upper level, and Cyril quickly strung together a compass that would lead them in the direction of the library, using the most concentrated source of magic – Atticus’s web – as an anchor. The only thing left to do was make the gruelling journey there on his hands and knees.
Tigris strolled ahead of him. Despite her large size for a cat, she still could fit perfectly into the network of tunnels and seemed to resent him for his human limitations.
“Hey, Cy,” she said after a while.
“If this is about your brother again – my husband, by the way, so I am allowed to–”
“I was actually trying very hard not to think about that .”
“Oh. Well, what is it then?”
Perhaps he was the one who was thinking too much about Eufrates, but he had been sick with worry from the moment the man left his line of vision. They needed to take care of the weave as soon as possible to reunite with him.
“Everyone… I mean, all you mages. They keep saying I’m a familiar, and that’s a good thing.”
“Well, that is an oversimplification. You are not really a familiar. You are not the manifestation of my soul, as far as I’m aware, but you possess all the qualities of one, being in a body that is tied to mine.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you will not die.”
“I’m indestructible, right. You’ve been saying that. Poison, curses. They won’t affect me.”
“And neither will physical damage, to be honest. You might get scuffed up, but as long as I am hale, it will not end in your death. And even if I die, it will just undo the spell keeping you trapped in that body. It is why this is the most secure form for you,” Cyril said this last part with a bit of impatience. He had grown used to her pleas for him to turn her back.
Tigris looked back at him and rolled her eyes. “I’ve given up begging for my body back, Cy. I know you are stubborn as a mule on this.”
“And I am correct.”
She sighed. Another beat passed between them until she finally said , “I am worried about him too.”
“…Yes.”
They seemed to move faster through the vents after that, Cyril’s knees bruising and scraping against the solid rock and metal lining. It was a blessing when they finally made it to the library.
The aperture they ended up in was several metres above ground level, and Cyril could sense the pattern, in all its foreboding silks and woven casting. He could also see about half a dozen mages parading around the room, doing research or simply idling by.
He was in luck. Six was exactly the number he set in his head of how many mages he could take on.
“I cannot wait to get at those freaks. When I am human again, I would like it if you could fashion claws for me. I will miss having them dearly.”
Cyril shot her a look. “Remember, we are not trying to kill anyone here.”
“But if we must…”
He swallowed convulsively. “You are the one who is queen. You make the call.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I could just tear at the pattern now… but I would be vulnerable to attacks.”
“I am a wonderful distraction if you need one, but… Cy, I have been wondering.”
“Mm?”
“You said destroying a pattern would cause a disaster. What do you intend to do when that happens?”
“I… thought I might figure it out along the way.”
To her credit, Tigris said nothing, but she looked very pensive.
He was not good at thinking on his feet, this was historically true, but with his and, more importantly, Tigris’s life on the line, he was compelled to come up with something. Perhaps he could give himself some kind of shield if he could weave it in time.
There were so many risk factors to take into consideration. For one, Tigris’s survival was tied to his. She could distract the mages on the ground as well as she could, but if even a single one of them was trained enough to strike him down from the precarious webbing of Atticus’s spell while he was tearing it apart, both their lives would be forfeit.
It was stupid to go in there without some kind of well-defined plan. And not even the good kind of stupid, like jumping off a seven-storey building into the arms of a man he currently had a complicated relationship with. This did not fill him with a warm, heady feeling of determination. This made his heart thunder in his chest.
He looked from one mage to the next, trying to identify any weaknesses, but he could not distinguish their specialised talents from this far away and with so little to go on. There had to be one alchemist in there, as that seemed to be Atticus’s modus operandi for anything that wasn’t manipulation, but they were all dressed so alike he could not make out any distinguishing traits. Especially not from a grate five metres up a rock wall.
And, most humiliating of all, he could not think straight, because he could not stop worrying about Eufrates. Every other moment he had to force a wave of nausea back down his throat because, even if by some twist of fate he had been lied to again and the prince was just humouring him with that kiss, using it as a quick way to get him to shut up. Even if after all this he was just as hated as he’d been before, the thought of Eufrates run through and pooled in blood made him want to tear himself inside out.
He could not possibly continue to dwell. He had to take action, for better or worse. Cyril leaned forward to push open the grate to the library and he felt a paw on his hand.
“Wait.”
Cyril glanced down at Tigris, stunned at the sudden interruption. “What… what is it?”
“Cyril, I think we are doing this backwards.”
He tilted his head towards her. “How do you mean?”
“You said before… in the tower, when you were explaining it to me. You said anyone could destroy a pattern as long as they can see it.”
“I… yes. It would not take an experienced mage. A child could do it.”
“But you did not say a mage.”
“Well, mages are the ones who can see pattern, generally.”
“Generally?”
“…What are you trying to say?”
“Can familiars see the pattern?”
Cyril’s eyes widened. “I… with the amount of judgement Shoestring has levelled at me throughout the years, I would guess they can.”
Tigris stiffened, suddenly very alert and stared out into the room, scanning it. “Help me see it! What does it look like?”
“Tig, what are you doing?”
“We have been thinking about this all wrong, Cy! I’m not going to distract those mages! You are!”
“ You want to go up there?”
“I am a cat. Cats destroy things by nature. Further, I am an indestructible cat.”
His instinct was to tell her no. That getting that close to a pattern was dangerous, suicidal, even, but that was exactly what he had been just about to do. And she was so much stronger and, frankly, leaps and bounds more athletic than him. In retrospect, if he had tried to hang onto that web, he might have just fallen off to his early demise anyway.
It was worth a shot.
Cyril pointed Tigris towards the centre of Atticus’s weave. “See there? It looks like a spider’s web. The strings on it are a dull white and shining. Can you picture it in your head? Are your eyes adjusting?”
He had no idea how familiars saw magic. He just assumed they did , being magical creatures themselves. Maybe the next time he saw one he would try and make time to ask, despite not really knowing exactly how he would manage to communicate with it.
“I… it’s a bit faint. I can’t make it out.” She tried rubbing her eyes with her paws, but it didn’t seem to help.
Cyril leaned in closer to her so he was at the same eye level. “Let me try something.”
He made the same diamond shape with his hands, thumbs and forefingers closing against one another, as the one he had made the first time he looked into the pattern, pried the material world apart to look at its inner workings. This time, though, he did it in front of Tigris’s eyes. They narrowed, then went wide as saucers. Her pupils dilated until her entire irises were black as night.
“Oh. That is very impressive.”
“You see it?!”
She nodded. “I don’t think I’d want to work in here, personally. It’d be very uncomfortable.”
“I think that’s the point…”
Tigris blinked, over and over again. She rubbed her eyes with her paws and shook her head, all to make sure the weave wasn’t a vanishing afterimage. Once she was positive it would not vanish while she was clawing at the damned thing, she prepared to leap at it.
“I just need to tear it apart, right? I can get up there from here easily!”
He nodded. “Yes. Give me some time to deal with the mages first, though.”
“Of course. Cyril, I want you to be very far away from this entire basement level when I start hacking up that thing.”
Cyril blinked. “What?”
“You said you’d no idea how you were going to protect yourself from the blast. Well, there is your solution. You are going to run from it.”
“…We will be separated.”
“Aw, Cy. It’s okay, I don’t want to be apart from you either.”
“That’s not my-–”
“If you try to feed me any more of your nonsense about needing to protect delicate flower Tigris Margrave, I will scratch you again, and I will do it somewhere much more visible.”
He immediately shielded his face. “I – Tig–”
“I will be fine . I trusted you to be right behind us when we ran from this palace, now you need to trust me.” She put a paw on his chest. “Will you do that? Please?”
Cyril’s shoulders slumped. They would be arguing for hours if he did not concede. And had she not proven to be his better multiple times over by this point? He did not say anything, but he let out a beleaguered sigh and nodded. A courtier indulging his queen.
“That’s my wizard.” She paused and her expression turned serious. “Besides… I know you want to get to him as soon as possible.”
He gave her a wry smile. “You think I’m pathetic, don’t you?”
“I do! But it’s because you can’t lift a simple sword without your arm trembling, not because of that .”
“That’s more than fair.” He gave her one last smile, broader this time, and opened the grate to make his descent down the wall of the library.
“Knock them dead out there, Cy.”
He used magic to slow his fall, and landed just behind a shelf densely packed with pickled ingredients for poultices. The stench of preserved insect and reptilian filled his nose, and he had to clap a hand over his mouth not to make a sound.
For all his talk of being able to take on an imaginary, random number of mages, Cyril had actually never been in a fight. One time, in his third year at the Academy, a girl in his class cursed him to have warts growing all over his skin and he immediately turned her into a frog. They were both sent to the headmistress and his aunt was called. She scared him so thoroughly away from picking stupid fights that for the remaining years of his academic career, he was ghosting the halls from how little he interacted with other students.
He had never excelled in combat. Not as a mage and especially not as a person . He was sure he did not have any muscle within his body, despite having enough anatomy lessons drilled into him to know this wasn’t physically possible. And magical combat relied on two things that did not come easy to him: good reaction time, and an ability to think fast. He did not have the kind of skill it took to disarm a mage, to bend the weave around them so that their hands would be bound, and they could not perform themselves. The spell itself was simple, childishly so, but it was like throwing a punch. If you were not trained in it, the only injured party would end up being yourself.
There was also the fact that he had to make sure these mages would not be left in the library to die . He wasn’t sure how many of them were ensorcelled and how many were here out of their own sick volition, but he was not comfortable taking that kind of risk with other peoples’ lives. Not after the miserable existence he led as grand mage to a corrupted Eufrates, aid and accessory to needless cullings and executions.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the mages get up from where they were seated to look for a book. Cyril panicked and hid further into the shelf, really breathing in the toxins of the preserving liquids. His face was near flush with a vial of beetles. Next to it, a great, big jar of…
Oh.
Cyril thought about that horrible little witch who had cursed him all those years ago. How easily transformation magic came to him. And, as he stared deep into the antennae of a jellied cockroach, how some creatures could survive almost anything.
Cyril darted to and fro in the library, hiding under shelves and desks wherever he saw them. It was all very theatrical, and he was sure if Tigris was watching him from up on that vent, she was laughing at him. But he would rather this than alert every single person in the room to his presence by just standing up and casting a spell.
The first three mages went down easy. They did not even see him. He hid in the shadows and shot his magic like a cutthroat wielding throwing knives (if said cutthroat was dressed to attend a harlequinade immediately afterwards). Each of his successes was indicated by the skittering of insect feet on stone floor.
He had to admit he could’ve handled the fourth mage onwards a bit more delicately. He realised he’d been spotted after he narrowly dodged being hit with a vial of some sort of acidic concoction that burned away a lock of his hair. Luckily, the mage who had seen him seemed to be a physician of some sort, so no expert in physical spellcasting. She did, however, very physically manage to hit Cyril in the side with a wooden chair before he managed to shift her successfully.
Number five, hearing the commotion, actually had the presence of mind to grab a knife and lunge at him. They made a very valiant effort, and it surely would have succeeded if Cyril wasn’t a coward who bobbed and weaved behind tables and chairs, and if transformation spells couldn’t be cast at a two-metre distance.
The sixth and final mage threw him for a loop completely. Not due to any particularly proficient fighting skills or magic, but because she was a small, round old woman with thick-rimmed glasses who reminded him very much of his aunt. Cyril blinked.
We’re entrapping old ladies now, Atticus?
She looked at him like she had no idea what to do. Cyril was sure she was somehow also enmeshed in Atticus’s weave, but it had not given her the desire to be particularly hostile. Honestly, he retracted his earlier thought. She didn’t remind him of Heléne. Heléne would have already stuck a sword in his vena cava.
He hesitated. He truly did not want to curse this woman minding her business and doing her job, but it was a necessary evil. He cringed as he hurled the spell at her and watched her scuttle into a secluded corner of the room.
He had put a timer on the spell. It would last twelve hours, then unfurl itself on its own. He did not enjoy the thought of having to search through the wreckage of a library for six roaches himself.
It was only after the final mage was well and truly hidden away that he realised he’d done it. His eyes grew wide with wonder, and he looked down at his hands, watching them spark and crackle with lingering magic.
It was only when he heard a low yowl from up on the vents that he realised he had become much too absorbed in self-adulation.
Cyril turned and looked at the orange blotch of colour contrasted against grey stone walls that he knew to be Tigris. He motioned to her that she could enter the room, and she immediately motioned back for him to leave .
Ah, right.
He ran out into the halls of the underground, cloaking himself in threads so fine they made him appear near invisible to the eye as he passed and ducked by one or two straggler servants and mages who were still around. The library was massive. He was sure whatever happened in there would take enough time to spread that anyone alerted to the sound would know to run away.
And, by now, he was feeling overtaxed.
His joints strained and his muscles ached, as if he’d performed some great feat of athleticism. He had never had to weave together this much magic – powerful magic at that – at once. The only thing keeping him together was a strong sense of duty and a shot of adrenaline that coursed unbidden through his veins, making him jitter and crackle with yet-unspent determination.
Cyril had not been alone with his thoughts for some time. He instantly missed the peppy, unafraid wit of Tigris echoing in his head and egging him on into increasingly more insane acts of heroism. He could not imagine returning to a world without her.
He could not imagine returning to where he came from at all . Not when he had come this far. Not when he had turned himself and everything he knew upside-down, solved all the mysteries that had haunted him for years, decades , and prevented the worst tragedies in his life. He had saved Tigris and he had saved Heléne.
For the coup-de-grace , he would save his husband.
All he had to do now was find him.
Cyril reached the top of the staircase to the ground level, slightly pink in the face and out of breath. Perhaps he would take Tigris up on her offer to train him. The sword at his side felt like it weighed a tonne, despite him knowing it was one of the slimmer models anyone could possibly find save for a rapier. Eufrates gave him far too much credit in thinking he would be able to wield it. He wanted to get rid of it., but at the same time, he knew that was a horrible idea.
He pressed his back against a wall, half-hidden within an alcove, and looked around, trying to suss out where he was meant to be going. Outside, he could hear the light patter of rain against marble, heralding worse yet to come.
Cyril reached into his shirt and tugged out his wedding band. He stared at it a while, brow furrowed in concentration.
If you’d like to prove to me that you’re not a curse, now would be the time.
He squeezed the ring so hard he thought he might dent the metal.
Somehow, that worked.
The ring glowed in his hand, a delicate sheen of golden, pulsating light. And almost as if it were trying to escape from Cyril’s brutalising hand, it began to pull away from him, hovering in the air until the string that held it to his neck stopped it from moving any further.
When Cyril took a step forward, to right it again, the ring simply floated on. Like a guide.
As a guide.
Cyril moved furtively through the halls, following his beacon as though he had blinders on, not even realising where it was taking him until he felt the droplets of rain hit his nose.
He was outside, in the garden. Eufrates and Atticus were fighting somewhere in here and he was going to find them and disarm the king of his charms. As soon as he stepped fully into the paved rock path, though, something distracted him from the purpose at hand.
There was a rumbling coming from somewhere to his left. Somewhere several metres away, but still within the palace. It made the foundation of the building itself shake and shudder, but it was only a prelude. Tigris had finally gotten her paws onto that weave.
The corners of Cyril’s mouth began to curl upwards, imagining her tangling with it like a cat with a fresh ball of yarn. But only a second later, when he heard a strange noise coming from ahead of him and snapped his gaze forward, the smile died on his lips.
He had found Eufrates. The ring had done his bidding and now rested, snug and contented, on his breast.
Eufrates, however, was not snug and he was not content. He lay sprawled over a patch of grass and wildflowers left for dead, with his sword a few steps away from him, bloodied, but disarmed. A pool of red bloomed around him and dyed the soil a thick, sludgy maroon as it mixed with the rainwater.
He looked like a master’s painting, laid out like this amidst the flowers and trees, but Cyril was at his side, dropped to his haunches next to him to disturb the scene immediately.