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The Silverwood branch protruding from Qifrey’s eye socket ignited easily, the spell to burn it, and only it, working exactly as intended. The flame crawled down the branch, toward Qifrey’s pale, terrified face, where it would burn away the tendrils of Silverwood growing inside of his body, freeing him from the curse he had been placed under during the time before he had memories.
But when the first tongue of flame licked at Qifrey’s flesh, Qifrey screamed, the terrible sound echoing through the hills, startling nearby birds into flight.
Olruggio froze, rooted to the ground in horror, as the flames engulfed the rest of Qifrey’s body, the flames drinking up the air in Qifrey’s lungs until he could no longer scream, the acrid stench of burning flesh replacing the still air of the forest—
Forest? Hadn’t they just been outside of the atelier? Olruggio whirled around, expecting to see the glow of lights from the atelier in the distance, but it had been replaced by clusters of dark trees. In the grisly light of the inferno that had been Qifrey, Olruggio could see the black trunks and clawing branches of the dead Silverwood trees surrounding them. Thristas.
They shouldn’t be here. This wasn’t right. Olruggio had tested the spell, again and again. It should have worked. It had to have worked.
The world tilted under Olruggio’s feet and reshaped around him. Qifrey stood in front of him again, hunched over, his hands covering his face, the smoke in the air still heavy, but no longer full of the smell of burning flesh.
“You took away my life,” Qifrey hissed from between his fingers. “Everything I worked for is gone now because of you, Olruggio.”
The dread prickling at the back of Olruggio’s neck increased at the use of his full name, just before Qifrey’s fingers clawed down his own face, leaving trails of red behind as he tilted his head up to stare at Olruggio with an eye as dead and white as the eyes of the fish they had grilled for dinner last night. As Olruggio watched, the overcooked eye burst, oozing down Qifrey’s cheek in a mess of blood and gelatinous fluids.
“I could have fixed that,” a gentle voice said. She stepped out from behind Qifrey, who had frozen in place—still doubled over in agony—like a child’s doll that had wound down and needed the key in his back turned again to continue playing out his horror story. The smoke snaking through the trees obscured the woman’s face, but Olruggio recognized the long braids swinging around her.
“Sinocia?” Olruggio choked out.
She didn’t answer, her attention on Qifrey, wiping the gore from his face, then tilting his head this way and that to asses the damage. When she turned, Olruggio could just make out the flash of her smile through the smoke. She stepped away from Qifrey’s unnaturally still body, now rearranged to be standing up straight, arms loose at his sides, eye whole and undamaged, the familiar ice blue of the iris somehow still visible through the hazy air.
This wasn’t right. Olruggio should do something. But he couldn’t move. It was like his body had been filled with lead, leaving him no choice but to stand witness to the horrors unfolding around him.
“Oh, did you want the other one too?” Sinocia said, cocking her head to the side, when Olruggio didn’t—couldn’t—react. “I can do that.” She twirled to face Qifrey again, and when she stood on her toes to brush the silvery hair out of his face, there wasn’t even a scar underneath to show where the eye had been missing. Two eyes, perfectly healed, when the best Olruggio had been able to do had left Qifrey blind.
“I could have helped,” Sinocia tutted, too eerily like the way she did when she was treating Olruggio’s burns. “This is what you could have had if you had trusted me. Why couldn’t you have, Olruggio. I kept all of your other secrets. Couldn’t you have trusted me with this one too?”
Sinocia took a step forward, and Olruggio realized what he had taken for her green linen work dress was far more intricate than he remembered, the fabric around her legs moving with her steps like it was made of scales. The smoke in the air from Olruggio’s spell swirled around her head, solidifying into a pointed tip. A final wreath of smoke created the brim to keep her eyes in shadow.
“I could have helped so many people,” Sinocia said, spreading her arms as she walked closer. “How many lives have been lost—will be lost—because you didn’t have faith in me?” She shook her head, disappointed. “Olruggio of the Torch. The Star of Ghodrey. A fallen star now, I suppose, wasting your life hiding in the middle of nowhere, making trinkets. What good you could do if you were not so limited.”
Olruggio’s deepest insecurities, wearing his friend’s face, stepped close enough to reach out and touch his cheek with a cold hand—
Olruggio woke with a start in a bed that wasn’t his, wrapped around something that was definitely not a pillow with one of his snugstone prototypes shoved inside the case.
It took another moment of disorientation for Olruggio to claw his way out of the dream and make sense of the warm body curved to fit into his under the covers, bare skin flush against Olruggio’s. He remembered how he got here now. There was no gap in his memory—and Qifrey had sworn there would never be again, but Olruggio couldn’t stop himself from checking, hating that he even still felt the need to—between getting ready for bed and waking up in Qifrey’s room.
Olruggio pressed his forehead between Qifrey’s shoulder blades, and let out a breath, careful to not wake the man sleeping peacefully in his arms. In all the years Olruggio had known him, he had never seen Qifrey sleep well until now. When they had been children, camping out on their frequent escapes from the Great Hall, Qifrey had tossed and turned by their dying campfire most nights, often finally falling asleep with his arms wrapped around his knees, curled into a tight, uncomfortable looking ball. On the occasional nights Olruggio had caught Qifrey dozing in the living room of the atelier, he had always carried a similar air of tension, like his body didn’t know how to fully relax into a restful sleep.
Now Qifrey slept with his back pressed comfortably against Olruggio’s chest, one hand loosely curled near the arm Olruggio had draped over his waist, where they had been holding hands before sleep relaxed his grip, the rise and fall of his chest deep and even. It still felt like such a rare sight, Olruggio didn’t want to risk breaking the spell.
Olruggio let out another careful breath. Maybe if he matched his breathing to Qifrey’s, he would be able to go back to sleep. Maybe the nightmares wouldn’t come back.
His Silverwood spell had worked, he reminded himself, exactly as he had known it would. He wouldn’t have risked hurting Qifrey. He had made sure it would work. There was nothing he could have done to save Qifrey’s eyesight, no matter how hard Olruggio had looked for a solution. Everything that came close was locked away into forbidden spellbooks. But the whole atelier had been adjusting to the change over the last few weeks. They were still figuring out where Qifrey’s limits were, and how to accommodate the things that were past them, but all that would take was time.
Maybe the nightmares had come back because Olruggio felt a little uneasy about the new game the girls had invented after their lessons that afternoon. The girls had been doing their best to tag Qifrey while he tried to splash them with gentle water spells, so well memorized, Qifrey could easily draw without being able to see them. Olruggio hadn’t joined in at first, but he had sat nearby to dry off anyone who got too wet, until Tetia had insisted on trading places with him. Then they had all taken turns either using Olruggio’s drying rings, acting as an advisor to Qifrey on everyone else’s positions, or being one of the attackers trying to sneak close enough to Qifrey to stick a paper brushbuddy on his cloak.
It had been fun for all of them, an afternoon full of shrieks and laughter whenever Qifrey got a hit, and clever combinations of spells from their students. But Olruggio couldn’t shake the knowledge that this was a first step toward all of them preparing for the next Brimhat encounter. That was what had been lurking in the back of Olruggio’s mind when he and Qifrey had both fallen, exhausted from the game, into bed that night. There would be a next encounter, and Qifrey didn’t have sight to rely on anymore.
“You could have trusted me,” the echo of Sinocia’s dream voice floated through his mind. He shook it away. He did trust Sinocia, but there were some lines even Coco couldn’t find loopholes across, and teaching a doctor how to work magic was one of them.
Even if she could have kept the secret of magic and only used it for good. Even if she could have saved the things Olruggio had only been able to take away from Qifrey before they ended up killing him. Even if she still might be able to restore those things now, with the right spell.
“You’re worrying,” Qifrey’s sleepy voice murmured. He shifted under Olruggio’s arm, turning over to face him, blinking the sleep out of an eye that was unfocused and unseeing, but far from the dead white thing of Olruggio’s dream. Cool fingers slid across Olruggio’s chest to lay over his heart. “Another nightmare? Your heart is still racing.”
Olruggio sighed, which was all the answer Qifrey needed. Qifrey’s arms wrapped around him, pulling him into an embrace. Olruggio tucked his face into the crook of Qifrey’s neck and breathed in the misty scent that was somehow uniquely Qifrey’s, even though the whole atelier used the same soap. Qifrey’s fingers soothed up and down the bare skin of Olruggio’s spine, growing warmer the longer they spent pressed against Olruggio’s skin, and Olruggio felt some of the tension start to drain out of him. This was everything he had wanted since he had fallen in love with Qifrey so many years ago. They had stolen it through technicalities and loopholes in the laws, but they had it now, and Olruggio was going to hold on to it with everything he had in him.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up again,” he mumbled, muffled into Qifrey’s skin. “Thought they were going away.”
“Was it the one where you burned me alive?” Qifrey asked, his tone light, but Olruggio knew how to read the thread of tension underlining it. Qifrey was worried about him. “Or was it the one where all those animal corpses crawled out of the ground and chased you?”
“It’s been at least a week since that one,” Olruggio mumbled. He felt Qifrey’s chuckle, still underlined with that worried tension, vibrate through his chest. It helped, to try to make light of the nightmares when they were things that hadn’t been real. With all the real things in his life to have nightmares over, it felt unfair to be haunted by the things that could have gone wrong, but— very importantly—didn’t.
The first time Olruggio had tested his spell on more than bundles of cut Silverwood branches had been on a hallowhare he had found near the estate of one of his clients. The pale fur had caught Olruggio’s eye, and then he noticed the slender branches twisting around and through one of the hallowhare’s hind feet.
The decision to test the spell had been the most terrifying line for Olruggio to cross. He had been reasonably confident that the spell would either work as intended, or not affect the little creature at all, which is how he had finally justified trying it in the first place. Either it wouldn’t work, or the hallowhare’s life would be saved, and it would someday be allowed to experience peace without its body being torn apart to grow into a tree that would eventually be pruned for magic by people like Olruggio.
The spell itself had worked, but removing the tree had left behind a hole in the hallowhare’s foot without the Silverwood to repair it. Olruggio had bundled it up in his cloak and taken it to Sinocia—the real Sinocia—and she had done her best to patch it up while Olruggio had hidden in the toilet to be sick with a mixture of relief and horror over what he had done. When the hallowhare’s foot had healed a few weeks later, Olruggio had released it near the atelier, where he still saw it on occasion. It had healed with a limp, but it still continued to live its life as a hallowhare and not as a Silverwood tree.
It got easier after he was sure the hallowhare would be all right. Next had been the stray owlcat he had found prowling near the Silverwood grove in the Great Hall with twists of pale wood repairing tendons connecting one of its wings to its body, that Olruggio had saved from joining the grove, and Sinocia had found a home for with the sister of one of the other doctors, away from the witches of the Great Hall, who might have noticed something odd about it. Then there had been the quadryphon with a tree branch replacing one of its talons, who could still fly without it and barely even seemed to notice the loss after the wooden digit burned away.
Sinocia had raised her eyebrows at him and made a comment about starting a menagerie for injured wildlife every time he brought her a new animal to heal, but she hadn’t asked the kind of questions that would poke holes in his flimsy stories, or suggest he take the creatures to someone with more expertise in healing animals. They both pretended it was a series of strange coincidences and not that Olruggio was actively searching for creatures with oddly pale fur or feathers and bits of wood holding parts of their bodies together. And Sinocia had kept this strange new hobby of his a secret.
“Imagine what we could do if you just trusted me.”
It wasn’t the outcome that the creatures he had burned the Silverwood out of could have had if things had gone wrong—and would he have kept trying if they had? If the hallowhare had died in his hands, would he have stopped, or would he have rewritten the spell and tried again in order to save Qifrey, all in secret behind Qifrey’s back? He knew that was the reason that nightmare would come back to him again another night—that haunted him tonight.
“I turned Sinocia into a Brimhat,” he said into Qifrey’s collarbone. “After I burned you alive, of course.”
“I’m right here, Olly” Qifrey said gently, the way he did every time Olruggio woke up from that nightmare, his lips brushing against Olruggio’s hair. “You didn’t hurt me. Sinocia is a new addition though. I suppose she used healing magic if you said she had become a Brimhat.”
“She healed your eyes,” Olruggio said. He paused for a moment, wondering if he should add the rest. But they had promised no secrets, at least between each other. Not any more. “She reminded me how many other lives could be saved with just a little bit more magic.”
Qifrey’s hand drew a final line up his back, tracing a path to find the edge of Olruggio’s jaw, the tips of his fingers carding through the short hairs of Olruggio’s beard as Qifrey tilted his face up. “My kind Olly,” Qifrey murmured, his thumb brushing over Olruggio’s cheek to find the corner of his mouth. “You carry too much guilt over things that you’ve never done.”
Qifrey’s lips met his, and Olruggio let the warmth wash through him, the pressure of anxiety in his chest easing from a spell as simple as kiss it better. But even as he threaded his fingers into Qifrey’s hair and tilted his head to deepen the kiss, pressing their bodies closer together, catching the soft sound Qifrey made in the kiss, he couldn’t entirely shake the thought that it wasn’t guilt that haunted him, but fear. Fear of how far he would go to protect this. Something would come to rattle the fragile peace of their atelier again. Some danger would threaten Qifrey or the girls, and Olruggio feared what laws he would burn down to keep them safe.