“You don’t think Callum would really hurt you, do you?” he asked, his voice more urgent than he would have preferred it to be. An hour before, even five minutes ago, he would never have attempted such a spectacular display of vulnerability, but now he needed to know. “In real life, I mean. In actuality. Whatever that means.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly in calculation.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, and turned away, but Nico tugged her back, imploring her.
“How can it not matter? You can see inside his head, Parisa. I can’t.” He released her, but kept the pull of conspiracy between them. “Please. Just tell me what he really is.”
For a moment when she looked at him, Nico thought he saw uncharacteristic evidence of tension in Parisa’s face. Vestiges of a secret soon to be known; a truth wanting out. She made the decision in the second her eyes met his, but even with the improbability of the conversation they’d just had, he couldn’t have prepared himself for how her answer would shake him.
“It doesn’t matter whether Callum plans to hurt me,” she said, “because I’ll kill him before he does.”
Then Parisa had leaned closer and said something that Nico had taken like a blow, still reeling even after hours had passed.
“What is it?” Reina asked again, startling him back to their conversation. She was normally comfortable without speaking, but presumably he had been silent for too long.
Nico tugged at a blade of grass, plucking it free. He wondered if Reina could hear it scream when he did so, and flinched at the reminder that the universe had some voice he couldn’t hear. Another detail among many he couldn’t un-know. A blissful piece of foregone ignorance, belonging to a person he would never be again.
“Would you kill someone to have all of this?” he muttered to Reina, though he regretted having asked the question as soon as it fell out of his mouth. Would she ask him why, and would he be able to answer if she did?
But he needn’t have worried. She didn’t even spare a breath.
“Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes, warming silently in the grass.
VII: INTENT
REINA
THE REALM OF THOUGHT wasn’t totally uninteresting as a topic of study, but even so, Reina was pleased to move on. The breaks in subject matter were particularly intriguing because there was always a sense of some invisible, underlying fabric; that they were being directed by currents they couldn’t necessarily see until they’d already absorbed it, swallowed it whole.
Reina had the benefit of being raised amid Eastern philosophies as opposed to Western, which meant she trusted general policies of oneness. Suchness, as it were. She understood, in a way the others did not, the existence of polarities, a mysticism of opposition: that acknowledging the presence of life meant accepting the presence of death. That knowledge necessitated ignorance. That gain meant loss. Ambition suggested contentment, in a sense, because starvation implied the existence of glut.
“Luck is a matter of probability,” said Dalton. He wasn’t always assigned the role of lecturer, which was probably for good reason. He didn’t seem to care for it, as if they had dragged him away from something more important; he had an air of wanting to be elsewhere, or generally belonging to thoughts a great distance from theirs. Still, they had grown familiar enough with him by then that his presence was less that of an administrator and more like a cook they rarely saw, or a housekeeper. Someone providing them with sustenance but not interfering much with their daily lives.
“Luck,” Dalton continued, “is both a magic and a science that has been studied in detail, by medeians and mortals alike. It is chance, but with a loaded die: the lean of likelihood toward a favorable event. For obvious reasons, one’s proclivity for luck is a valuable commodity. Also a common magic, even for the lowest rungs of witches. Now, the issue of unluck—”
“Unluck?” echoed Libby, bewildered.
（Reina had no such confusion. The existence of luck necessarily implied its opposite.）
“Unluck,” Dalton confirmed, “for lack of a better term, is the purposeful disruption of probability. Jinxes, hexes, curses—”
“Battle magic?” asked Nico, who despite his best intentions had a tendency to be mercilessly literal.
“Unluck,” Dalton repeated. “Hexes are of course the most direct form; intentional bad luck caused to the victim. The other two—”
“Jinxes are inconveniences, entanglements,” said Libby. “And curses are deliberate harm?”