“No, ma’am, but, like most Kwen, I’ve moved between a lot of different jobs over the years—and you wouldn’t believe the scrapes my clumsy daughter gets on the job.”
“Wait!” Sciona blinked up at him in shock, making him pull the cloth back and click his tongue in annoyance. “You have a daughter?”
“I do.”
“You never brought that up!”
“You never asked.”
“Oh.” Was that true? Sciona thought as Thomil withdrew from the couch again to dispose of the bloodied cloth. All these months working beside Thomil, had she really never asked about his family once?
When Thomil came back to the couch, he was bearing a cup on a saucer. “It’s mostly bruising. The cut should heal on its own as long as you leave it alone. No stress-picking.” He offered her the saucer. “Tea?”
Sciona eyed the slow curls of steam from the cup, feeling sick, and Thomil’s expression softened just slightly. “Heated over a fire, which I lit with a match, if that’s important to you. The noon shift knocks the stove conduits out at least every other day, so most of the time, I don’t bother.
“Oh.” Reserve spellograph shifts sometimes affected Sciona’s block, but she forgot that it was worst in the poorest parts of the city, where magical systems were rarely maintained correctly. “Thank you.” She accepted the tea but set it down on the makeshift table before her. “I just… I didn’t come here so you could wait on me. I came to tell you what I looked into after you left and the conclusions I reached.”
Thomil drew a long breath into his chest as if to steel himself, then dragged a kitchen chair up to the tea table to sit opposite her. “I’m listening, Highmage.”
Sciona had rehearsed this in her head, but it all came out in a disjointed jumble, broken up by tears. She pushed the words out anyway—because she had said she wanted to talk, and she owed Thomil the truth.
“I, uh…” She paused to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “I double-checked what you said about the Forbidden Coordinates against my maps at home, and it holds up—perfectly. The Forbidden Coordinates do line up with Tiran, and the Reserve siphoning zone numbers line up with the area two Leonic miles beyond Tiran’s barrier.”
Thomil’s eyebrow twitched. “What does that mean?” It was the first he had interrupted to ask a question.
“You…” You know what it means, Thomil, but he was going to make her say it. She swallowed. “The Reserve is Tiran’s fallback energy pool, so Reserve coordinates represent a space of continuous automated siphoning.”
Thomil’s quiet, “Oh,” didn’t register any emotion, but he put his head down for a moment, hands clasped together and pressed to his forehead.
Sciona ached, knowing that her unfailingly clever assistant was putting the pieces together as she had. Those two miles around Tiran were what the Kwen called ‘the crossing.’ It was where Thomil had lost his sister.
“Are you alright?” Sciona whispered when she could bear the silence no longer.
“No.” Thomil lifted his head, his calm restored but for a watery shine in his eyes. “But continue.”
Thomil listened, expressionless, until Sciona had finished relaying everything she had seen and deduced. When she got to the part where she had tested a siphoning spell on a girl, his clasped hands went white with pressure, and the furrow between his brows deepened, but he didn’t interject. At last, she finished recounting her conversation with Archmage Bringham, which brought her to the end of what she had to say to Thomil. He didn’t need to hear about her subsequent journey into madness and only partway back.
There was a terrible silence as Thomil digested her story.
Then, finally, he spoke. “So, Archmage Bringham said it was all a trick created by dead mages?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t believe him?”
“I can’t. I mean, I see where his claims come from and why he might be sure of them, but the evidence doesn’t bear them out.”
“So, you think he lied to you?”
“No, no. Archmage Bringham doesn’t lie to me. He just doesn’t have access to all of the information we do.”
“Really?” Thomil said. “He’s an archmage. Shouldn’t he have access to all the information we do and much more?”
“Well, yes, he has higher clearance than we do, but he’s not a mapping specialist, and, as we’ve discussed many times now, no mage has ever produced a mapping spell that actually showed the Otherrealm. The Freynan Mirror we produced in that lab was a landmark revolution in magic. No one—not even an archmage—has all the information that we do.”
“Are you sure? They could all be using this Sabernyn curse story as a cover.”
“Keeping secrets isn’t Archmage Bringham’s forte,” Sciona said. “If I had a copper for all the things he’s told me that he wasn’t supposed to…”
“Alright.” Thomil still didn’t look convinced but didn’t seem interested in arguing the point. “So, after speaking to Bringham, you decided to come to see me?”
“Well, not directly—obviously. For a while, I was sick, and crying, and I didn’t know if I…” Sciona looked down at her hands, realizing how pointless it would be to describe her suffering to Thomil. He couldn’t understand what it was to plunge from towers of light into the dark terrors below. And as someone born among those terrors, why would he care to understand? She shook her head, deciding to skip to the end of her ordeal.
“I only came back to myself when I decided something: all emotions are just energy, just potential fuel for action. Everything I felt about what I saw—the guilt and the terror—wasn’t poison. It was power.” She pressed a hand to her chest and repeated the refrain that had kept her moving since leaving the apartment. “This feeling is energy. And I’m going to do something useful with it.”
Thomil had just started to ask, “What—” when the front door banged open.
Sciona’s heart nearly jumped from her chest as a girl stepped into the apartment. She was a grimy, wiry thing, auburn hair spilling in messy, magnificent waves past her waist and her boy’s trousers black with soot. She would have been quite beautiful—was quite beautiful—but for a crescent-shaped scar twisting the right side of her face.
“Hey, Uncle Thomil, I…” The girl paused in the doorway as her eyes fell on Sciona. “Oops.”
“Carra!” Thomil stood, looking flustered and vaguely panicked. “Um—this is Highmage Sciona Freynan—from the university. Highmage Freynan, this is my… This is Carra.”
“Carra…” Sciona stood to find that she and the Kwen girl were just about the same height. She extended a hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Right.” The girl had Thomil’s suspicious silver eyes—only wilder, more dangerous—and she took the offered hand without warmth. Her palm was heavily calloused and altogether rougher than any child’s hand should be.
“But, um—shouldn’t you be in school?” Sciona asked for something to say.