19. Aetheria #2
I turned and found myself facing Alaric.
“Where did you go, sweetling?” he asked.
His voice was cautious, despite the endearment, almost like he was restraining himself from saying anything, maybe because Luc had said it for all of them.
I reached over unthinkingly, and wrapped my hand around Alaric’s larger one. I squeezed his fingers in apology, and looked at Nyx, then Jolie.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “I shouldn’t have done it like that.”
“You think?” Luc grumbled from the kitchen.
“Leda!” Jolie gasped then. “Your neck… you’ve got a cut…”
“It’s nothing,” I said, waving her off.
She blinked at me, then frowned, her lips pursed.
“I still need to see to it,” she said briskly next. “One moment. Let me at least make sure it doesn’t get infected and bandage it.”
She rose to her feet and walked over to Bones’s study. I considered calling her back, telling her not to worry about it, then realized there was no point. She would insist on doing it anyway, and I should let her.
I looked around at all of them instead, including Nyx who watched me from one of the chairs.
“I really am sorry,” I said. “I know you were right. All of you, with everything you said. I really wasn’t okay in my mind. I should have done all of that differently…” I trailed when I glanced at Alaric, and found him staring at me, an odd look in his hazel eyes.
Before I could decide what the expression meant, he blurted out words.
“You saw him,” Alaric said. “Cal. You were with him.”
I hesitated, briefly thrown that he could know that.
I didn’t see the point in denying it, though, so I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “I went to the Tower again.”
“You got into the dungeon?” Jolie looked up from where she hovered over Bones’s desk, her voice shocked. “Did you phase directly there? To where he was?”
“No.” I shook my head, looking at her. “He found me.”
There was a silence where they all looked at me.
All but Luc, who remained in the kitchen, bent over the small saucepan. His spoon lightly scraped the metal as he stirred, but he didn’t look over.
“Is he all right?” Alaric asked.
I thought about that, about how he’d looked, how he’d felt, in the short time we’d had together. I thought about the way his eyes darkened at the end, and how he’d sounded when he asked me to take his mother out of there.
“No,” I said frankly.
I looked up at Alaric, and squeezed his hand again.
“No, he’s definitely not all right,” I said flatly.
I told them everything.
I think it might’ve been the first time with anyone where I didn’t censor myself at all, at least as far as Caelum Bones was concerned. It was definitely the first time I made no attempt to hold anything back with my friends.
I didn’t stop with describing everything that happened that night. I started back at the beginning, with how things had always been different between me and Bones. I told them how our magic connected, right from that first night, even when neither of us wanted it.
I told them about my primal.
Not the monocerus, which still seemed to be hiding from me, but my real primal, the blue-white sun that no one but Bones could see. I’d never spoken to anyone about that other than Bones. It hadn’t even occurred to me to do so, not until I did.
I told them Bones had a primal like mine, and that I could see his.
Somewhere in that, I must have decided to go all the way.
I told them about Bones being a caelum ignis.
It struck me as odd now, that I hadn’t told them, given how relevant it was to everything we’d been doing.
I explained exactly why Malefic wanted Bones, why he’d spent so much of Bones’s life finding ways to control his magic.
I explained how Bones and I ended up married, why I knew I could phase, even beyond what Forsooth and Blackstone believed, and why Golden Sun was so singularly focused on Bones’s role in Dark Cathedral.
I described to them what happened to caleum ignises when they reached Bones’s age, and what would’ve happened to Bones if he hadn’t married, and what would happen to him still if anything happened to me.
I didn’t think through all the implications of telling them.
It felt like it was too late for that.
If Bones belonged to Malefic now, they had a right to know what that truly meant.
I talked for what felt like a very long time.
Luc brought over hot chocolate for me, and when the others asked, he went back to the kitchen, pulled out a larger saucepan, and made more for everyone else.
When he came back to our circle the second time, carrying a tray and handing out more mugs, he set his own on the table next to his half of the couch.
By then, I’d just started to explain about Petrov the Dragon and his wife, Antonia, and about the caelum ignis who lived a perfectly lovely life with his wife and kids until his wife unexpectedly died and he incinerated the better part of four or five villages.
When I was finally talked out, my mug of chocolate was sucked dry.
Jolie and Nyx had also finished theirs, but Luc had seemingly forgotten his, which had gone stone cold on the table next to his armrest. Alaric had drunk most of his, I think, but still had his mug balanced on his knee.
He continued to stare at me, eyes wide, for a few seconds after I finished talking.
“How long have you known?” Jolie asked, breaking the silence first. She’d bandaged the cut on my throat after using a spell to close it, and smearing it with herbs. “How long have you known what he is, Leda?”
Thinking about that, I flushed.
“Yule,” I told her. “Roughly.”
Hesitating at their silence, I added, “But we both knew. Not the specifics, maybe, but we knew something was different with him, and with us. He’d known he was different since he was a kid.
His father told him without ever giving it a name, and hid him, claiming he had some kind of ‘illness’ so he wouldn’t need to go to school until he could control it better. ”
I exhaled, staring into the fire as I shook my head.
“The thing with us was obvious from the start,” I admitted. “Not just our primals, but, well… everything. The way we could hear one another’s thoughts. The way his magic didn’t hurt me. The way we both got around one another.”
Luc’s jaw had firmed when I glanced at him. I could see him thinking, his expression taut as he stared sightlessly into the fire.
“Have any of you…” I hesitated, glancing between them. “…heard of caelum ignis? Before this, I mean? Is it something you grew up learning about?”
Nyx shook her head. She glanced at Jolie, who nodded to the questioning look in her eyes.
“No,” Jolie said, looking at me. “I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of my magi-physiology courses, either. Not even when we’ve been studying magical maladies, or magical genetic mutations, or magical birth defects. It’s never come up.”
I glanced at Alaric, but he also shook his head.
When I looked at Luc, he hesitated, his blue eyes studying mine.
Then he shrugged.
“I read a little about it,” he admitted sourly. “It came up when I was reading about solutions to magical degeneration.” When Alaric’s eyebrow quirked in his direction, Luc scowled at him. “I didn’t say anything because it didn’t seem to be a particularly helpful reference,” he grumbled.
His blue eyes returned to mine.
“There was a group of Magicals in the 1500s that wanted to try and deliberately induce physiological mutations that increased magical output. Caelum ignis was considered to be physiological, although I’m not too sure about the science behind that, given the time period.
Regardless, because of how they believed it formed, it was one of the mutations under discussion.
Given what you’ve told us about Bones, I can guess why. ”
Grimly, Luc added, “The suggestion was controversial, to say the least. Petrov was mentioned, and there was a pretty big faction decrying the ethics of deliberately creating a mass murderer ‘for science.’ Ultimately they were forced to drop the experiment.”
I clasped my hands together between my knees and nodded.
“I’m not surprised,” I murmured.
The room fell silent again.
I grew acutely aware of how late it was. It had to be close to four in the morning. I tried to remember what day of the week it was, and drew a blank.
Before I could answer that question in my mind, Alaric broke the silence.
“Have any of you ever heard of divinities?” he asked cautiously.
At our collective silence, he cleared her throat.
“By which I mean primal divinities,” he clarified. “They’re a different kind of primal. Sort of like familials in how they’re categorized, but not remotely the same in either origin, prevalence, or effect.”
All of our eyes shifted to where Alaric sat, one leg crossed over the other, on the armchair closest to my side of the couch. Nyx now sat on his other side, on one of Bones’s large, black, satin pillows. She gazed up at Alaric with calm, brown eyes.
“All right,” Alaric said at our silence.
“Well, divinities are supposed to be really rare,” he continued.
“I’ve always been a little obsessive about primals, and just the nature of Aetheric beings in general.
At one point in my obsessive reading on the subject, I came across mention of ‘divinities.’ I found it in a theosophy book I managed to steal out of the private part of my father’s library, knowing he’d be unlikely to notice… ”
At our silent stares, he waved off his own words.
“…Doesn’t matter. As none of my middle school teachers were particularly helpful on this point, at some point in first year, I asked Forsooth about it.
In addition to giving me a few books to read, he gave me a rather long, very detailed lecture about the theoretical underpinnings of divinities, and told me about a few cases of divinities as primals documented over the years.
Some of those personages he had me look up, I remembered Cannon referencing back in middle school…
you know, during that term in fifth year about the America Wars… ”