Chapter 6 #2
He stopped there. The study was quiet around them, and he could hear the ocean waves through the walls, distant and rhythmic, along with the faint hum of the collection settling into its evening equilibrium.
Roslyn was watching him with the same steady attention he recognized from his healing sessions, and he had the uncomfortable sense that she was reading him the way she read his magic, noting the places where the structure was sound and the places where it was held together by sheer force of will.
“She banished me,” he said. “Formally and publicly, in front of the assembled clan. The ceremony, if one could call it that, took place in the main hall of the Van Horn estate on 77th Street, a room designed to impress visitors with the family’s wealth and consequence.
Victoria stood on the dais where her mother had stood before her, and she read the decree in a voice that carried to every corner of that hall, and every Van Horn in attendance — aunts, uncles, cousins, people I’d grown up with, people who’d sat at my mother’s dinner table — they all sat in their chairs and watched it happen.
” Again, he stopped, and wondered now if he’d said too much.
But by this point, it seemed better to keep going.
“I was twenty years old. I had no resources of my own, and I was informed that if I set foot in Van Horn territory again, I’d be dealt with as an intruder. ”
He considered his next words carefully. What came out was less careful than he’d intended.
“My mother was sitting in the third row. She didn’t speak on my behalf, and she didn’t look at me. I never saw her again.”
The silence that followed that statement was the kind he’d trained himself to fill.
Silence was vulnerability, and vulnerability was a gap in one’s defenses through which the world could reach in and take whatever it wanted.
He should be talking now, steering the conversation back toward more neutral topics and explaining the theoretical basis for his disagreement with Van Horn policy and the logical progression that had led from banishment to the collection.
Instead, he sat in there in silence.
“What happened after that?” Roslyn asked. Her voice was both careful and gentle, as though she understood the ground on which they both stood was more fragile than it seemed.
“I survived,” he said simply. “Which is a less dramatic story than it sounds, I suppose. I had very little money, no clan affiliation, no territory, and no allies. What I had was a considerable amount of raw magical talent and a disposition that made it difficult for me to ask for help, which, in retrospect, was probably a greater obstacle than my lack of resources.”
Once again, he picked up the spoon, then put it back down.
“I drifted,” he went on. “That’s an accurate enough word, although I preferred to think of it as traveling with purpose.
I came to the West Coast because it seemed a good idea to put a continent between the Van Horns and me.
I was in Portland for a while, and then in San Francisco and Seattle.
I spent a good deal of time in small towns where no one asked questions, or cities where a warlock without clan ties could find work if he was willing to operate in the margins.
” It felt better to summarize those seven years of his life in a few sentences, compressing them so they didn’t hold quite so much pain.
“I warded buildings for witches who needed extra security and didn’t have anyone in their own clans who could do the work for them.
I did magical pest control — minor hauntings, residual enchantments left behind in old houses, the kind of work that no respectable clan warlock would lower himself to do.
I was quite good at it, which I suppose made it marginally less humiliating. ”
Roslyn was still watching him, her gaze steady even though the sympathy in those clear eyes was now more obvious than ever. “For how long?”
“Seven years.”
It was a long time to be without a home.
Not street-homeless, of course, not in the way that term was usually understood.
He had always earned enough to rent a place to sleep, had always maintained his appearance, had always kept his waistcoat buttoned and his shoes polished, because it was always better if you couldn’t let the world see what it had done to you.
But he’d been homeless in the more fundamental sense of having no place where he belonged, no door he could open and know that what was on the other side would still be there when he returned.
“The worst of it wasn’t the instability,” he said.
He was mildly alarmed to hear himself make that admission, as it wasn’t part of the curated narrative he’d intended to give.
“The worst of it was the invisibility. A warlock without a clan is someone who shouldn’t exist. I found items that would shield my witch nature, so at least I didn’t have to worry about being attacked and driven out of another clan’s territory. But I also had nothing of my own.”
He stopped there, realizing he hadn’t intended to say any of that. The fact that he’d actually spoken of such things to Roslyn Campbell told him his control was eroding badly.
“During those seven years, I kept finding things,” he said.
“The first was almost by accident, a jade figurine in the basement of a house I was clearing of a residual enchantment in Portland. The owner had no idea what it was. I did, because my gift told me. It was a minor piece, a storage vessel designed to hold a single charge of kinetic energy, but it was old and it was real, and the woman who owned it had been using it as a doorstop.”
Despite himself, indignation colored the last word. A doorstop. The figurine had been crafted by a witch in the Song Dynasty, and this woman had been propping open her laundry room door with it.
“I bought it from her for fifty dollars,” he said.
“I told her it had sentimental value, which wasn’t entirely untrue.
Then I built a containment ward for it, the first one I’d ever designed from scratch.
The books I’d read in the Van Horn library had described the theory but not the practice, and no one had ever shown me how to translate one into the other. ”
“Self-taught,” Roslyn repeated. There was no real surprise in her tone, as if this was something she already understood, thanks to all the time she’d spent inside his magic.
“Entirely.” He paused, and something in his expression must have shifted, because her gaze sharpened slightly.
It was a healer’s reflex, studying him for signs of distress.
But he wasn’t in distress. He was only revisiting a memory that, for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain, felt to him like a wound that had healed well but still troubled him when the weather changed.
“The ward was terrible. Functional, but inelegant. I rebuilt it four times before I was satisfied, and even then, I knew there were flaws I couldn’t see because I lacked the training to identify them.
But it held. The figurine’s energy stayed contained.
No one was the worse for it, and I had learned something that the Van Horn library, for all its accumulated wisdom, had never been able to teach me.
” He met Roslyn’s gaze. “These objects aren’t inherently evil, and they aren’t inherently good.
They’re powerful, and they’re neglected, and that neglect is far more dangerous than the power they contain. ”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she murmured, “You found your purpose.”
The word startled him. Not because it was inaccurate — it was actually all too accurate — but because no one had ever named it for him before.
He’d referred to it as a calling, a responsibility, a vocation, even an obsession.
But he had never called it a purpose. Purpose implied meaning, and meaning implied that his life had something to it beyond mere survival.
He hadn’t allowed himself to believe that for a very long time.
“I found a problem no one else was solving,” he said simply.
He realized then that he was talking too much. The story had gained a momentum that was carrying him past the boundaries he’d set for himself, past the careful version of his history he’d curated over the years and into territory that was far more honest than he was comfortable with.
But for some reason, he kept talking.
“After the figurine, I kept finding them,” he said.
“Or they kept finding me. I suppose it depends on how you look at it. A set of probability dice in an antique shop here in Astoria, and a weather-working in a sealed jar that had been gathering dust in the attic of an estate outside Cannon Beach. I found an astrolabe that whispered in languages that haven’t been spoken for two thousand years, left in a storage unit in Portland by a warlock who’d died without heirs and whose belongings were about to be auctioned off to the public.
” He spread his hands — hands she’d been watching the whole time, although she probably thought he hadn’t noticed — in a gesture that encompassed the study, the house, the life he’d built within its walls.
“It wasn’t as if I set out to become a collector.
I set out to ensure that these things were safe, and those two intentions converged at some point.
By the time I realized what I’d become, it was too late to become anything else. ”
“So you found this house,” Roslyn said.