130. Seb
SEB
“Seb, do the thing, I can’t find my phone,” Tori said from the grass below him.
He obliged, dragging his fingers lazily through the humid air.
Small nebulas of magic followed in his wake—clouds of indigo and vapor pink, and gold, always gold.
Because his Magic looked like its own galaxy, he added a sun and planets, sending them spinning toward Lily, perched in the branches above him.
“God, you’re so stoned.” Tori laughed, dissolving into giggles of her own.
It was true. The Millay Tower crew wasn’t much for substances, but they’d finished their finals—their final finals, well, except for Seb, who had several more years of them to look forward to—and decided to celebrate properly.
Hence the orchard, with champagne, and weed, and Magic.
The weed had been Asher’s doing, mostly because Lily had never gotten high, and Tori had put it on her bucket list.
Seb floated in the high, basking in the leafy air and the pulse of Magic inside him.
In this moment, he was very happy. If he knew anything about horology, he would stop the clocks on this night, until just before he bored of it.
One tree over, Asher strummed his guitar and Seb felt it in his bones, his teeth, his scalp.
Tori, finding her phone, shone it up into the tree, illuminating Lily above him. The light rendered her ghostly and unreal, the leaves shadowing her face.
“How you doing up there, Lady Windermere?” she asked.
The tree quivered slightly as Lily shifted. “Fine.”
Tori nodded in satisfaction and shut off the light.
Carefully, Seb disengaged himself from his branch and climbed up to perch in the crook closest to Lily.
She barely turned her head to acknowledge him, but he could see the fall of her russet hair in the moonlight.
She looked at home in this tree, in her tree.
All of this is hers now, he reminded himself.
It made so much sense to him that she was Windermere’s heir.
She knew the school better than anyone. It felt like a natural balancing of wrongs for her to take this school that she loved so well, even though she never said it.
They wanted change, and they’d gotten it, even if it had just been sleeping, waiting for Lily Perkins to wake it up.
“I keep waiting for security to bust us,” Asher said between songs. “But then I remember. Can you just do whatever you want?” he asked Lily. “Can we?”
“Sure.” Her voice was heavy with weed. “I’ll get you the keys to all the roofs.” She repeated “roofs” several times for good measure, rolling it around in her mouth until it lost all meaning.
If anyone had planned on disciplining Lily for having a secret hideaway in the library tower, those plans had dissipated as soon as her bloodline had been confirmed. She was untouchable now. She was quiet now.
She’d been so quiet since her birthday, nearly mute since his acceptance to Oxford.
He understood, or at least as much as it was possible for him to understand something incomprehensible.
She’d run away, feigning meetings, after he’d opened his letter.
All he’d wanted was to wrap her up in love, to tell her it would be okay, but he couldn’t.
Even if he’d broken the curse—and for all his bravado with Chant, it gnawed at him constantly, starting with his guts and working its way to his heart—there was no such thing as “okay.” He wasn’t sure what would happen on the solstice, barely a week away now, but he knew there was no happy ending.
He’d rolled the dice, and now it was just a matter of how bad they’d come up.
After he’d opened his letter, he’d gone back to the suite, his breath coming shallow, the quiver before the collapse.
He’d wrapped himself up in his duvet, fisting it around his hands, shoving them into his mouth to stifle the sobs that choked out of him as his heart finally, truly shattered into too many pieces to ever reassemble.
He was supposed to be looking for flats, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
He’d gotten an email from the head of the program the other day.
She’d professed her delight with the sample of a work in progress on AEtheric theory through an alchemical lens he’d sent as part of his application and asked if he’d be interested in presenting at the program’s symposium in the fall.
He still hadn’t responded, even though she’d sent a cheery follow-up and a coolly polite second reminder.
Asher and Tori were summering in Europe before returning to the City for the fall, and they’d asked, discreetly, if he wanted to join, but every time they did, he could only stare as his entire brain fritzed out with static.
He reached out into the darkness for Lily, his hand ghostly in the night.
“C’mere,” he said, brushing her bare calf with his fingers.
“I can’t,” she protested, “I’m too messed up. I’ll fall.”
“You can’t fall,” he said, “I’m here to catch you.”