80. Seb
SEB
“Ithought you weren’t going to help me.”
Seb stood on Chant’s doorstep, coat over his pajamas.
In his glasses, his hair at its most boyishly floppy—which he hated—he felt like a weak reflection of the man in front of him.
Chant sighed, pushing his hand through his own untidy hair.
He held a small book in his other hand. He stepped back so Seb could enter.
“Someone has to keep you from getting caught,” Chant said, attempting lightheartedness and slouching against the back of his couch.
“I wouldn’t be much of…whatever it is you think I am if I left you to this alone.
” He gestured, ungenerously, at himself, then fixed Seb with a curious look and asked what he’d clearly wanted to ask for a while.
“What is it that you see in me, Sebastian? Why is this what you aspire to?”
“What do you mean?” Seb frowned as he draped his coat over the back of the chair.
“You could be so much more.” Chant frowned back. “You could be one of the top Cantrèa players in the world. Instead, you want to spend the next decade of your life training to become an underpaid junior professor, if you’re lucky.”
“I don’t want everything handed to me. Cantrèa is…”
“Too easy? Too enjoyable?”
“Yes. I have so much privilege, I just…I need to earn my life. As much of it as I can.”
Chant pursed his lips, working on what he wanted to say.
“You know you’re going to have privilege, massive amounts of it, no matter what you do, Sebastian—whether it comes easily, or enjoyably, or not. Privilege got you access to excellent training, it’s true. But you—your work and dedication—are what made you the player you are today.”
Seb bristled. “I thought you had something to help me with Lily’s curse. I didn’t realize you just wanted to tell me to play Cantrèa forever.”
“I’m sorry.” Chant looked it as he held up a hand. “That wasn’t my intention. I fully support your AEtheric studies; I only wanted to make sure you’re choosing that path for the right reasons.” He paused, his mouth open to say the next thing, then decided against it.
“What?”
“I feel I should tell you…the AEtheric studies program, teaching—that was never my aim when I was your age.”
“It wasn’t?”
“Not remotely. I wanted to be a Portalist, but turns out I didn’t have the constitution for it. I thought I would start the AEtheric program while I figured out my next move.”
He wasn’t quite sure what to do with that information; it shook up all the puzzle pieces inside of him. Mechanically, he accepted the book Chant offered.
“What is this?”
The thin hardcover was very old, maybe early 1900s, stamped in swirling colors. The title was in French, deeply stylized and illegible.
“It’s a fairy tale. Supposedly. I think it’s the closest one can come to an instructional pamphlet.”
“Where’d you find this?”
“I’ve had it.” He took Seb’s glare in stride. “I couldn’t give it to you before. It would have driven you mad. Without the identity of the caster, everything else is useless.”
Seb opened the book.
There was once a young maiden, good and fair, born the daughter of a king. Her father’s kingdom was well protected and fertile, and his keep sat on an isle in the middle of a glittering lake.
The king’s bounty was endless—air full of AEther, a beautiful heir, loyal and powerful Magicians—and above all, peace. For generations, the kingdom had known nothing of the blight of war that turned the rivers of other lands black with blood, that bloated fields with corpses and fouled the harvest.
For all the wonders laid at his feet, he was greedy for more—he sent mercenaries to neighboring lands, and in retaliation, the queen beyond the mountains sent her best and most agile assassin to end the problem.
The assassin stole into the kingdom under cover of night and rowed a black boat across the lake so skillfully that he left not even a single ripple in his wake.
With enchanted gloves and enchanted boots, he climbed the keep’s highest tower, where he was told he should find the king.
However, when he bent over the bed, dagger in hand, he found not a king, but a maiden.
Before he could recover from his shock, she opened her eyes.
Immediately, he was bewitched by her lively and intelligent gaze.
“You seek to kill my father,” she said simply.
The assassin, a skilled liar, found he could not do so in her presence, so he told her the truth. She nodded in understanding.
“My father has become deeply paranoid. These were his chambers, but now he sleeps deep in the heart of the castle, and only I know the way there.”
The young assassin’s stomach turned at the knowledge that a father would leave his daughter as a sacrifice in his stead.
“I cannot pretend to believe my father’s reign is just, but I also cannot give him up, so I shall offer you two options.
“The first option, of course, is that you may kill me—though I plan to fight you tooth and nail—and try your luck finding my father in the labyrinth he has built. Though I should tell you, many others have tried and failed, though those many others did not enter through my bedroom window.”
Her eyes danced cunningly in the moonlight. The assassin held his breath, hanging on her every word.
“What is the second option?”
“You may persuade me to help you. By moonrise, bring me something truly unique, unlike anything else in this world, and I will lead you to my father’s chambers.”
The moon, of course, pouring silver light into the tower, had already fully risen. The assassin pointed out this fact.
“Then—” she smiled. “I suggest you choose either the first option or come back tomorrow.”
He realized that this maiden, with no protection but her wits, possessed more bravery than any man—be they soldier, assassin, or Magician—that he had ever met. The choice was, of course, no choice at all.
Drinking in the sight of her once more, he vaulted out the window and climbed down the tower, already planning possible treasures to bestow upon her.
The next night, he returned bearing a flower that would never lose its bloom, but the maiden was unimpressed, having an entire such garden within the castle grounds.
Over the next month, the assassin brought her trinkets and treasures, searching for them further and further afield—slippers that would allow her to dance without tiring (her response: “But I have no partner with whom to dance), a bird whose song was so beautiful it caused all listeners to weep (her response: “I have had enough of tears”)—and each night the moon rose earlier and earlier.
The assassin knew, as he climbed the side of the tower in broad daylight, the outline of his body a shimmering patch in the air, that the tables had turned, and now he was the one playing a dangerous game for which he might pay with his life.
Finally, as the moon waned and became a dark spot against a darker sky, he climbed the tower empty-handed, ready to admit his defeat. The maiden looked surprised to see him as he landed softly on the stone floor.
“But there is no moonrise tonight,” she said. “The sky is empty.”
He hung his head. “I have come to say goodbye. I cannot kill you, and I cannot give you anything truly unique.”
To his embarrassment, she laughed.
“Men are all so silly. You think you must give me tokens and trifles, but the whole time you have had what I want. Each night I wait for you to bestow it, and each night you leave without doing so.”
The assassin was confused. “Then what do you want?”
“You have already brought it. You have it with you now.”
He looked around the room, now piled with rarities. The slippers lay discarded in the corner; the songbird perched, sleeping on the headboard. The maiden sighed haughtily.
“Must I do everything myself?” she said, taking his face in her hands and kissing him gently.
“A kiss?” He pulled away, bewildered. “What is unique about a kiss?”
“What isn’t unique?” she replied. His heart had already known it secretly, before his mind, that he loved her. “Every kiss is unique, and this one more so, because it is between us, and because it is the first.”
“The first?” he asked.
“You are not very bright,” she said, but she said it with a smile, and pulled him to her bed to show him what she meant.
Of course, like all beautiful things that spring from delicate roots, their love could not last the winter. One night, as the assassin climbed the tower and the moon carved a silver path over the frosted land, he was seen. By that time, desire was not the only seed that had grown from their love.
The king’s Magicians hurled him down from the tower with spells that shook the castle’s foundations. The maiden could only watch, horrified, as they fished him from the freezing water and bound him in iron.
The king brought both of them before his throne, kneeling in chains of enchanted silver. Neither of them begged forgiveness, as he so desired.
He thought it would be a simple matter, dispatching the former assassin, but his daughter hurled herself in front of the rogue, claiming that the king could not kill the father of her child. Since death would not do, he ordered his strongest Magicians to find something better—worse—to punish them.
His Magicians were clever and determined men, and they knew the cost of failure.
For months they tried many things as the seed inside the maiden grew.
It was that seed that gave the High Magician the idea for another.
He traveled to a remote moor containing the ruins of another castle.
The war that had felled this kingdom had been long and cruel.
None had prevailed, and the earth below the castle had gorged itself on the blood of many lives.
Where blood had spilled grew a blue flower—lovely, and strange, and wrong.
The moor around the castle and the ruins were carpeted in such blooms.
The Magician harvested many of these flowers.
In his laboratory he pulped the flowers and made paper speckled with the seeds.
He spoke the king’s intention to it day and night as he watered it with the blood of the princess and her lover until a shoot—black-stalked with vividly red leaves—twisted up through the dirt.
He
“Where’s the rest of it?”
Seb looked up from the book, its last pages messily torn from the spine, in dismay.
“I suspect it’s been ash for some time.”
He put his head in his hands, trying to calm himself. “When I was reading the Vallensberg you sent me, I thought the idea of a planted curse was metaphorical in nature, à la Blake.”
“Ah, ‘A Poison Tree’?”
“Exactly. You’re saying it’s literal?”
“I’d say if Hawthorn Bellarius has a crooked plant in his conservatory, it might be worth exploring.”
Seb considered. “Plant, paper, blood.”
“A trinity.”
“But how does any of this help me?” He wanted to throw Chant’s old book through his old windows.
“Sebastian, you can’t possibly tell me you’ve learned nothing in your five years at this school, in your entire lifetime of magic.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it alchemically; think about the AEtheric laws.”
Seb thought. “In all casting, find its undoing?” Chant nodded. “You think I should work it backward?”
“I think it’s your only option. You’re looking for obvious solutions, safe solutions, but there are none.”
“I feel like I’m as likely to blow myself up as save her.”
“Spoken like a true alchemist.” Chant sighed, proud and depressed.
“You’re standing where all the great material philosophers that have gone before you stood—staring clear-eyed at the impossible and diving in anyway.
This is the Work, Sebastian. This is your Work.
” He could hear the capitalization in Chant’s voice. When he said “work,” he meant Opus.
An invisible mantle settled around his shoulders, so heavy he thought he might collapse under its weight.