Chapter Eighteen #2
How much passion did the boundary require?
I set the silver candleholder on the ground and let myself imagine things that had not yet happened, things that never would.
I ran my fingers slowly across my mouth, closing my eyes.
Because Roland was beside me, I knew I had to say something as abstract as possible, otherwise he’d be able to sense it all.
Against my lids, I saw flashing eyes and thick bow lips.
A hand threaded through wavy, pink hair.
I heard a voice, whispering sweet things in my ear.
It all turned a lock in me, and I knew it would do the same for the door. “Endearments,” I admitted softly.
Roland was leaning against the stone wall. Watching raptly as I spoke my desire aloud. Our chests heaved in opposite rhythm.
“Satisfied?”
He nodded, his lips parting. Quietly, even quieter than I had, he murmured, “Giving praise.”
We pushed on the heavy doors, and they opened for us without any protest. Once we were inside, I nearly laughed—we both must have looked crazed. Red in the face and unable to look each other in the eye.
I set off for the library stacks with my candle outstretched, then realized he wasn’t following me. I turned back.
With a slight groan, Roland ran a hand across his face.
His eyes were wild, so dilated there was barely any rose-colored iris left.
When I took a step toward him, they slid shut, long lashes resting softly against his cheeks.
“Go on ahead. I need a moment, all right? Just a moment. That was—visceral for my magic, is all.” One eye opened.
He peered at me with it. “You like to be called darling and sweetheart, truly? I never imagined you would be so soft.”
I gasped. “What else did you see?”
“Nothing but that,” he replied quickly. “I swear it.”
He blazed with a frustration I didn’t dare touch.
I couldn’t. So I left him there, his jaw tight, twisting his rings, and ventured deep into the stacks of the library.
When I’d turned enough corners, I sank to the floor with my head in my hands.
I knew what he’d surely noticed by now, what Bess had surely reported to Cecily: the heat in my face. My body’s betrayal when he was near.
Enough, I told myself. That’s enough. Control was required to transform, to guide my body into intricate shapes.
Control was required to limit change, too.
If I only wanted to shift my hand, I’d cut off my magic before it advanced further up my arm.
Just as I wouldn’t allow this feeling to advance further. To change.
I brushed off my gown and stood upright.
My fingers skimmed across ancient spines, thousands upon thousands of them.
The tomes were dusty and frayed, clearly neglected, yet they had a far greater collection here than we did in Alvion.
I longed to stay here for days, and thought, despite the circumstances, how much Prospero would have loved it.
One name, stamped in gold foil, caught my eye.
Faustus.
The magician Prospero had been corresponding with.
Seeing it printed on a spine made Prospero’s words return to me.
He’d told me most of Faustus’s writings were forbidden texts in Alvion—dangerous, cataclysmic predictions.
Whispers of magicians overthrowing kings.
Yet the book I drew from the shelf was one I knew very well.
Prospero used to read it to me when I was small.
It was The Legend of Oberon, the story of the first magician.
Hal and Roland had both adored it. In the legend, they hoped to find themselves. Roland, as a chivalrous and dashing knight. Hal, as someone who would one day go on heroic quests. I smiled and tucked it under my arm, tempted by the past once again.
Deeper into the library, the bookcases were so stuffed and unbalanced they leaned toward each other, kissing above my head.
Most were histories and epic verse. But there were also shelves and shelves of astronomical and magical texts.
There was Prospero’s The Celestial Bodies; the very copy I had translated into Lionessian myself.
Then, others I didn’t recognize. The Ruling Planets. The Birth Charts of Kings. An entire book dedicated to Venus entitled The Morning and the Evening Star. I added them to my pile, grunting with the weight.
Roland found me splayed on the floor deeper in, stacks of ledgers and scrolls by my feet.
“Hello,” he said, knocking my knee with the tip of his boot.
“Hello.” I nodded toward one of my piles. “You can begin there.” He eyed the tome resting on top and tugged it closer.
“Faustus,” he read off the spine.
“That was who Prospero corresponded with. I didn’t remember he was the author of The Legend of Oberon.” I peered up at him. “Did you?”
He shook his head, a strand of hair falling over his eyes.
I tried to concentrate on the accounts before me, but he was already flipping through the old, crinkling pages of The Legend of Oberon.
“Oh, yes. Here. This was always my favorite part.” He cleared his throat.
“Oberon despaired,” he read aloud in Lionessian, his voice soft with remembrance.
“In the realm of the dead, the shadows were vast, and every ghost sought to return to the light.
While the veil between the ghosts and the living had been punctured long ago, no magician could give specters true form or flesh.
That would require alchemy of a kind Oberon had never witnessed.
“It was many days before Oberon rounded a bend in the river and found the sleeping king, resting his head on the bones of a leviathan. Yet to Oberon’s dismay, the king was not alone.
“‘Why have you come?’ asked the long-dead queen.
“Oberon confessed his terrible deed. He had bartered a soul for his king’s, and in exchange, he could carry one ghost from the realm of the dead, not two. All Saturn boundaries had their rules, and the limitations must be heeded. If he took both the king and queen with him, he would die himself.
“The wise king Armel was old—he had lived a long life. Together, he and Oberon had ruled as king and magician for many years. Alvion had prospered. He begged Oberon to bring his queen back instead. She had died young and longed to feel sunlight again.
“Oberon shook his head. ‘I have come for you. I have come for a time long past. The kingdom needs you. You have given everything, but it is not enough.’
“And so, King Armel and his young queen were parted once again, and Armel and Oberon passed through the boundary together as the queen wept.
“Back in his castle, the ghost king laid down his laws and commanded his armies, but he despaired for his queen. After fifty years, they had been reunited, only for their happiness to be stolen. Armel tried to drive a sword through his heart. He walked into the sea. He walked into fire. Nothing would touch him, for he was an unfeeling ghost. He prayed to the planets for relief. Oberon’s planet Saturn was silent.
Only the Moon answered Armel, taking pity on him.
She transformed his gossamer, spectral skin into true flesh, and out of shimmering moonlight she fashioned him a new sword. King Armel accepted her gifts gladly.
“He gathered his armies and met Oberon in battle. And when the sorcerer was on his knees, the old king plunged his sword into his chest, for Oberon had grown too accustomed to power, and it was time for the scepter to trade hands. Then, with the sword carved of moonlight itself, shining with fresh blood, King Armel slit his own throat and died for a second time. He was never woken again. At last, the world-weary king could rest.”
Roland sighed contently, closing the book.
“Did you understand Oberon was the villain of the story when you were a child?”
A shake of his head. “I wanted to be him.”
“He should have left Armel in peace.”
Roland leaned his elbow against the bookshelf opposite me. When it wobbled under his weight, he made a face and lowered himself to the floor. “Oberon required the legitimacy of Armel to unify the warring kingdom. Armel died too soon. He had to return.”
Oberon, the first magician, was far from the first man to study the stars—civilizations long past had always looked to the sky—but he was the first in Alvion to find magic in his veins.
Some said he was Sunborn, a truthteller.
He acquired his wisdom by seeing through and into people.
Others, like Faustus, said he was of Saturn.
In those stories, he acquired his wisdom from the ghosts he visited in the realm of the dead.
In different iterations of his myths, he was described as young or old, weathered or handsome.
Some said he was a fairy who rose from the barrows and became mortal, or that he floated down from the stars themselves.
Some said he carried a staff and others the Moon-carved sword, but some writers, like Faustus, said the sword was Armel’s, not Oberon’s.
Yet in all the stories, there was a single truth: He found a lowborn Armel in a backwater town when he was just a boy and made him a king by the crucible of fate.
“Armel was his tool,” I argued.
“Armel was his legend,” Roland countered.
“Because he was no one special. No one’s son.
No one’s heir. No royal blood. He was born in the rocky crags of Alvion, right from the soil.
He could have been you, or me. That is why the legend persists.
It reminds us we are not born—we are made.
And we can become anything if we are found by the right person. ”
I blinked at him, at a loss, and handed him ledgers to search through.
“Anything?” I asked after a quarter of an hour. I hadn’t heard him turn many pages, and I could have sworn I felt the weight of his eyes.
He shifted onto his side. “Not unless you care about room measurements.”