Chapter XXV #2
Vic stretched her left arm in front of her and twisted it side to side. Did Max know what Xan had done for her? Did anyone?
“Nothing to complain about,” she said.
Max swept ice from the seat beside her and sat.
“I can’t imagine my mother here,” Vic said, watching the leafless branches of the elm tree shudder in the wind.
“I can’t imagine her anywhere else,” Max said. “We sat under that tree for an afternoon one spring. Meredith kept catching people watching us, which made her all kinds of angry.”
“Why?”
“It was 1993, and we were the first class of recruits to include Mades. Myself and three others came that year, though I was the only one who made it to initiation.” He shook his head at the memory. “It was a period of adjustment for everyone.”
“They were unkind to you,” Vic guessed. She knew her own treatment in the Order likely paled in comparison to that of the first Mades, especially when she had the express support of an Elder. She doubted Max had had the benefit of someone like himself.
He frowned, like the memories were distant and unpleasant, but his answer was diplomatic. “Change can be difficult.”
“I can’t imagine my mom took kindly to feeling slighted,” Vic said, smiling. “She used to get so fired up whenever she thought someone was disrespecting her.”
“Exactly,” Max said. “She caught one too many glares and accidentally gave an Elder the finger.” He pointed to an arched window three stories up. “The three of us were called in to be disciplined.”
Aren Mann was with them, then. Vic tried to imagine him alongside her mother and Max in the courtyard surrounded by melting snow, and she couldn’t do it.
“How did the three of you meet?” Vic asked.
Max sighed. “We were in the same class, but Mann and I were always…unusual.”
“Powerful?”
“Outcasts,” he said. “Aren came from the South, from a poor family with no influence, and he had this awful accent.” Max laughed under his breath. “Like a hillbilly wandered into the castle by mistake.”
That sounded nothing like the refined man who ripped Vic from her dreams. Who killed innocent people to advance a bloody cause.
“But everyone loved Meredith,” Max said, his face lost to the memory. “She was old money, old manners, with a wild side. The magic, like everything else, came naturally to her. I never understood it.”
“She never talked about her life before me and Henry,” Vic said.
All she’d known before she showed up here was that Meredith was an only child, that her parents were dead, and that she didn’t like to talk about the past. “But I always wondered if she grew up rich, especially as I got older. It was something in the way she carried herself….”
“Like royalty?” Max asked.
Vic nodded. “Like she would do what she pleased, and everyone else would fall in line. And we did.”
“I loved that about her,” Max said. “We became friends because she decided that we would be. I don’t think it ever occurred to either me or Aren to question it. Meredith’s word was law.”
Max shook his head in wonder and seemed to pull himself back to the present.
“Back then the Order was stronger than it is now, but it was brittle. We didn’t see the cracks in the foundation until they broke open, and Aren fled, and everything went to shit.”
He smiled, almost embarrassed.
Vic wanted to ask how. How did everything come apart in the end? How could he have been friends with someone like Aren and not noticed the rot at his core? How could any of this happen to the three smiling people in that photograph? How how how, Max? she wanted to demand. She wanted to scream.
“Why are you still here?” Vic asked. “Your friends are gone and everyone treats you like some kind of freak.”
Max laughed. “It would be a tremendous waste to have experienced everything I have and not use it to improve the lives of those who come after me.”
“And you believe the Order is capable of improving,” Vic said. He would force it to, if it came to that. That was what he was doing with Vic, wasn’t it? Proving the Order wrong, showing them a better way.
“Walking away is easy. Washing your hands of the whole sordid business and finding peace somewhere else, that’s easy. Like it or not, the Order has power, and power is the only thing you need to make things better.”
He bumped his shoulder against Vic’s.
“Congratulations, by the way,” he said. “I heard about what happened this morning. Welcome to Level Two.”
“I didn’t do it right,” Vic said.
“But you did it. You’re doing fantastically, just as I knew you would.”
Half a day had passed since she’d told Xan who was behind the bind on her wrist—if he’d wanted to go complaining to Max about the security risk waltzing about the castle, he could have.
The fact that Xan kept quiet only underscored for Vic the significance of her promise last night.
Xan was scared for her, and he was willing to keep secrets from Max to keep her safe. She owed it to Xan to keep her word.
Here was Vic’s chance to tell Max for herself that he was wrong.
She could show him the mark on her wrist, the evidence of her failure to belong.
The imprint of magic she could neither see nor understand.
Vic had let the enemy behind the gates, and Max deserved to know.
He deserved to hear from her that she was not the success he imagined.
But Vic couldn’t bring herself to disappoint him. She couldn’t break the illusion that she somehow deserved to be here.
“Why did Meredith leave the castle?” she asked, hiding her eyes. “If this was everything to her, why did I grow up a thousand miles away?”
“Isn’t it obvious? She did it for you. Meredith worried you wouldn’t be safe nearby.”
Vic thought of Xan’s brother, who’d been unlucky enough to live in the Order’s orbit, and wondered if he would have survived if he hadn’t been sucked into this.
“You were born in the castle,” Max said, and her eyes snapped up. “You lived here for a few months before Meredith took you away.”
“I didn’t know that,” Vic whispered.
“Meredith cared about the Order more than anything. Until you came along.”
Vic shook her head. “But she came back. She set me aside and came back.”
Max’s palm landed on Vic’s shoulder, and she faced him with tears in her eyes.
“Now she’s dead, and Henry’s here, and I’m alone. And all of this because she couldn’t leave the castle behind. She couldn’t pick me over Avalon.”
“I don’t understand much about Meredith, but I know that she loved you,” Max said. “I know it like I know my own name. She loved you.”
“Not enough,” Vic said, and she was crying. “She didn’t love me enough to stay.”
Max pulled Vic forward and wrapped his arms around her.
Vic went eagerly, crushing her cheek against his wool-covered chest and letting him hold her as she sobbed.
Her throat burned and her chest heaved, and she felt two decades of confusion and grief fall out of her.
They stayed that way for a long moment, silent but for the wind and Vic’s sobs, which eased at the relief of releasing her most deeply held secret.
Vic sat back up, wiping the tears from her face. “I wish you were right, Max,” she said. “More than anything, I wish I could learn how to do this. If she left me for this place, this power, maybe if I could learn how to use magic, I could…become someone she would have come back for.”
“Of course you do,” Max said. “How could you not?”
“I thought I could find something here. Some connection to my mom, maybe. Or a sense of belonging I’ve been missing since she left.”
Max squeezed her shoulder.
“But it’s not working,” Vic said. She recalled Xan’s words the night before, the open fear on his face. His request had been so simple. Save herself. Leave. “And I’m scared.”
Vic squared her shoulders and sniffed, pushing the emotion aside.
“Whatever you think you need me for, Henry can do it,” she said. “He’s strong, and he’s dedicated. And he and Mom always had a special connection—he can help you.”
Max watched her with a somber expression.
“It was always supposed to be him, anyway,” Vic said. He was chosen, according to Meredith. He would do what needed doing.
Max nodded, and he must have understood that Vic had already decided.
“You will have a place at Avalon as long as I am here,” he said. He paused a moment and then stood, sweeping snow from his front. “You know where to find me.”
Vic didn’t trust herself to speak. She nodded thanks.
He touched her shoulder a final time before turning and leaving the courtyard.
Vic wouldn’t come back here. She knew that. When she left, it would be permanent.
Lightning never strikes the same spot twice.
The thought appeared unbidden in her mind, as though set there by someone else. Vic shook it off, along with the strange feeling that accompanied it. The sense of being stared at, though no one was around.