Sciona answered honestly because she knew the baker’s son would not understand, and she needed to test her own courage—to see if she had the strength to say the truth aloud.
“Because the space beyond the barrier is a Reserve siphoning zone. And the Reserve siphons continuously.” A guard who saw people thrown back through the barrier would have to watch Blight eat them alive. It was no wonder a simple, sweet person like Ansel’s brother had lost his mind.
“What do you—”
Before Ansel could ask any of his own questions, Sciona reached out and touched his hand. It was awkward. But it turned out to be the right move as the baker’s son was struck dumb, their entire conversation seemingly forgotten as he looked down at the hand on his.
“Thank you.” She squeezed gently. “For the scones and for sharing with me.”
The barrier cast enough light to see by in the long twilight of winter days, but the absence of working streetlamps still made the Kwen Quarter alarmingly dark. Sciona had to squint at the slip of paper on which she had scrawled the address from the recesses of the university’s staff directory. She had never gotten off the train in this part of town, believing Aunt Winny’s claims that she would be robbed or kidnapped. Standing on a platform crawling with rats and beggars, she saw where people got that idea, as well as where they got the idea that Kwen didn’t bathe. An acrid soup of smells washed the quarter—some combination of urine, chemical smoke, and rotting garbage.
Sciona hadn’t worn her best skirts, but she still picked them up high as she made her way among the towering apartment complexes where families lived crushed together in squalor. She had to gather the fabric right up to her knees to keep it from catching when she climbed the rusting metal stairs up the outside of Thomil’s building.
By the time she reached the door, she was sweating through her blouse, but she smoothed her skirts in an attempt to look presentable before lifting a fist to the faux wood and giving a crisp knock.
The moment after the knock lasted an eternity, during which Sciona thought, God, why did I come here? How is this a good idea? What was I planning to say? In fact, she had done a lot of planning for this encounter. But the words all spilled from her brain like sand from a sieve as the doorknob turned.
The door opened, and she experienced a surge of simultaneous relief and panic. Relief because Thomil looked alright. Panic because, if he wasn’t, it was all her fault.
His expression went cold. Without a word, he closed the door.
“No, wait!” Sciona pushed forward, and the door closed painfully on her shoulder, the edge banging into her head. “Ow!”
“Highmage Freynan, for gods’ sake!” He put a hand on her shoulder to shove her out, and she grabbed onto him in desperation.
“Thomil, wait! You were right! You were right, okay? You were right!”
Her fingers weren’t particularly strong, but she had managed to get them tangled in his shirt so that he had to stop. Suspicion creased his brow. “What do you mean?”
“I thought about everything you said when we argued. I tested, and you were right. About magic, and Blight, and all of it. I just—I need to talk to you. Please.”
“Last time we talked, you told me my family deserved to die in agony. You are not welcome in my home.”
“I know,” she said miserably. “I know. I shouldn’t have said any of that. Thomil, I was confused, and angry, and—”
“I don’t care,” he said, and it was like he had driven a shard of ice into her heart. But she pressed forward anyway, uncaring how deeply the ice drove into her. She had to do this.
“What I mean is, if you’re still angry, that’s fine. If you never want to see me again after this is over, that’s fine. I understand. But if we’ve found what we think we have, we need to get to the bottom of it. I don’t know another Kwen immigrant, and you don’t have access to another highmage, so if we’re going to figure this out, we need to do it together. Please. You can hate me the whole time. We just need to talk.”
“You really want to talk about this?” There was that skeptical, scathing eyebrow.
“I really do.”
His expression was still hard and cold all the way through. “Well,”— he sighed—“you are bleeding.”
“I am?” Sciona touched her forehead, and her fingers came away wet. “Oh.”
Thomil muttered something in Kwen that Sciona could only take to be a curse, then stood back. “You’d better come in and let me look at that so I don’t get jailed for attacking a Tiranishwoman.”
“It’s not like I’m going to report—”
“Just come in, Highmage.”
Breathing a sigh of relief, Sciona stepped into the apartment. The first thing that hit her was the smell of herbs, and she found a ring of dried woody-stemmed plants nailed to the inside of the door. Highmage Jurowyn had written of witches and hunters carefully braiding herbs into wreaths for their religious rituals. Having never been inside a Kwen home, Sciona hadn’t realized that modern city-dwelling Kwen would still do this. It certainly had the effect of cutting the vile smell of the Kwen Quarter with spring-like freshness.
“Sit where you like,” Thomil said.
There seemed to be just the one place to sit in the form of an impossibly ragged couch that looked like it had been green once upon a time. Sinking down on the faded cushions, Sciona set her basket of scones on a tea table that, upon closer inspection, was not really a tea table but a pair of wooden crates with a board nailed over top.
The apartment was tiny, even for just one man. A sink, a cupboard, and a sliver of countertop clung to the far wall by way of a kitchen, and a single door led off the main room. Sciona supposed it was a bedroom, which meant that Thomil must share a washroom with other apartments in the complex—a grim prospect that made her wonder how he kept himself so clean.
“I am sorry I closed the door on your arm, ma’am,” Thomil said as he went to the minuscule kitchen area and wrestled with a sticking drawer.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sciona said, though she did feel a burgeoning bruise on her brow. “I know you didn’t mean to.”
“Still happened, though, didn’t it?” Thomil returned to the couch with a cloth and a bottle of clear alcohol.
“Should I have you thrown in jail, then?”
“I’d rather you didn’t, ma’am,” he said and leaned in to work on the cut, “but you’ll do what you want.”
Sciona fought a flinch, but those rough hands were shockingly gentle as they brushed her hair out of the way and put the cloth to her brow to protect her eye as he applied alcohol to the cut. She pressed her lips together against the sting, but it wasn’t as bad as she’d anticipated. And Thomil’s gray eyes were suddenly so close that she couldn’t see or think about anything else. The silver threads of each iris moved subtly with the contractions of Thomil’s pupil as he focused on his work.
“You’re good at this,” she said to break the intensity of the silence.
“Practice, ma’am.”
“You get hurt a lot while mopping floors?”