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Dark magic means that Claudia never has to lose at bingo.
The best part is that winning so easy.
“Hey, Sor! What’s that?”
She points out the window, knowing he’s going to look.
“Clauds, I don’t see anything.”
Claudia looks up, and he’s actually at the window, peering up into the branches of the tree. Now she feels a little guilty, so she comes to join him at the window sill.
“I could’ve sworn a saw a peacock.” She frowns. “Too bad it’s gone now!”
By then, she’s already done transfiguring both their cards, and all her guilt vanishes with the thrill of victory.
***
Soren starts training with the royal guard when he’s eleven, and then he gets a little wiser to her subterfuge.
“Dad, Claudia’s cheating!” He takes off toward their father’s study, never mind that the door is closed and smoke is billowing out and they’re definitely not supposed to go in there.
Claudia chases after him. “Sor, wait! We’re both going to get in trouble!”
“Should’ve thought of that before!” And then he actually trips her with some fancy footwork he’d learned in the guard, but she closes her hand around his ankle, and he goes down with her, right in front of the study’s heavy wooden door.
There’s shouting coming from the inside.
Their eyes meet.
“Shit, they’re fighting again.”
“Sor, you’re not supposed to say that word.”
He’s been picking up bad habits from the guard, her mother says. It’s one of the fights their parents have most often, second only to “Claudia is way too young to be using dark magic.”
Wordlessly, they try to inch back from the door, but it’s too late. They’ve already made too much noise. The door swings open, and their father’s looming on the other side. Claudia steels herself for his fury. They’ve probably interrupted a delicate potion or a volatile experiment, and if she doesn’t respect the magic, he’s not going to teach her more. Using illusion to cheat at bingo is probably not respecting the magic, and Soren’s going to tell, and --
“It was my fault,” Soren says. “I tripped Claudia on the stairs.”
But their dad doesn’t look angry, just really, really tired.
“Why don’t you go back to the kitchen and play another game?” he says.
They trudge back toward the stairs, but Claudia’s mind isn’t really on the game anymore. Whatever is happening between their parents, it’s not good.
But then Soren says, “Race you!” and Claudia forgets everything except how bad she wants to win. She doesn’t, of course. Soren’s legs are longer and he has all that guard training now, and she doesn’t know any magic for winning races. Which is okay, because she knows all the magic for winning bingo.
She actually lets him think he’s going to win this time. He pulls the right number out of the bag, and she says, “Hey! What’s that?”
She wasn’t sure he’d fall for it, but he does look out the window, and then his jaw falls open. “I think Mom’s leaving with all her stuff.”
Bingo gets less fun after that.
***
The next summer, she and Sor almost die of malnutrition. Well, die is probably too strong a word. They just get really, really sick.
Claudia had no idea her father was an amazing cook, but after Mom leaves, he starts serving up elaborate feasts every night - whole pork roasts with crackling skin and creamy gravy, buttery mashed potatoes, jewel-bright plates stacked high with jam tarts.
The thing is, it’s all rice. Dad can make it look like other things and taste like other things -- but apparently he can’t actually make it nourish their bodies the way real meat and vegetables would. They figure that out when Soren starts passing out at sword practice and Claudia’s hair starts falling out in clumps. King Harrow sends his personal healer, who says that Claudia and Soren are as malnourished as the street urchins who hang out at the docks.
“Hey, so fake illusion food can’t really nourish people. Who knew?” Claudia forces a grin and gives her dad a little punch on the arm. He’d gone even paler than the rest of them.
“I knew! I knew! But I thought I fixed it!” Dad’s eyes are getting that wild look that means he’s about to start smashing things, which happened a lot when magic doesn’t work the way he wants it to.
Claudia manages not to roll her eyes. Violence is such dumb response to a failed experiment.
“It’s okay!” she says, really meaning it. He tried, right? Sure, the results were a little wacky, but the whole single dad thing is hard. At least he’s here, with them, unlike her mom. “We’ll rest up and get better,” she says. “I’ll get so much reading done! Sor’s going to be disappointed about training, but between you and me, he could use some extra time for book learning.”
Her father seizes her by the shoulders, his eyes still burning. “I will fix this, Claudia.”
And then he vanishes into his study and emerges a week later with bags under his eyes and two vials of glowing amber liquid.
Claudia swallows the potion and stares at her reflection in the mirror. She can see the light working its way down her esophagus, into her stomach, and branching out into hundreds of tiny lights across her veins. Her skin glows rosy pink and her hair falls down her back in lush waves, and when she turns around, Soren is sitting up on his bed, looking surprisingly muscular for a kid who’d just turned twelve.
And her father is positively gray.
“You’re even better than you were before,” he says, weaving a little on his feet. “I told you I would fix it.”
And then he collapses.
“Dad?” He opens his eyes a crack when Claudia shakes him. “Did you, um, just let us drink your life force?”
“Only a little,” he murmurs. “I’ll be alright. Just let me sleep.”
Soren looks at her with wide eyes, and she thinks about all the times he took the blame for something she did wrong, all the times he protected her from bullies, all the books he stole from the library for her and treats he filched from the kitchen. Now it’s her turn.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m going to fix this.”
For the first time in her life, she marches off to her father’s study.
***
Claudia’s thirteen when she burns off an eyebrow, turns Soren into a toad, and almost destroys their whole family.
It starts with some unauthorized experimenting while Dad is out of town. Who knew fire was so hard to control?
Well, apparently Soren, who’d told her not to do it, but he’s super into following rules since he joined the cadet force. And anyway, she only lost the one eyebrow. It’s not a big deal.
Except for how it’s the very first thing her father notices when he comes home.
He pushes back her bangs and raises one perfectly arched eyebrow. He’s doing that whole looming thing that terrifies pretty much everyone who ever meets him. The worst part is, there won’t even be a real punishment. Just his disappointment.
“Tell me what happened here.”
“I was, um....” His gaze makes her squirm. If he already knows, why does he make her say it?
“Experimenting,” he prompts.
She chuckles weakly. “It’s kind of embarrassing actually. I was experimenting, but not the way you think! I was experimenting with...waxing. Yup, the brows were getting kind of wild, and I thought, you know, I could make them more like all the girls in the palace.” Is her father actually buying any of this? “Um, it didn’t work,” she finishes lamely.
She glances up, and her father looks crestfallen.
“A girl needs a mother,” he says, falling heavily onto the couch.
“No, no, no. You are more than enough for me.” Claudia scrambles up beside him. “Do not go hunting some arranged marriage just so some lady can do my eyebrows, please.”
Her father manages a chuckle at that, thank goodness. Because she would feel really guilty if he rustled up a wife because she lied about her eyebrows.
“Anyway,” she says brightly, “you have a spell to fix this, right?”
“To replace an eyebrow? I don’t think so.”
“Really?” Claudia sighs. “I can fix it is practically the family motto.”
“Oddly, I have never removed my eyebrows, so I have no need to learn how to regrow them,” he says.
Claudia’s not buying it; his eyebrows are way too perfectly groomed to be natural, but then, she doesn’t want him asking any awkward followup questions about her own missing brow -- especially not when she’s winning.
“Okay, then, how about a spell to turn anyone who makes fun of me into a toad?” It’s a long shot, but then, he hates anything second class for his children, even if it’s ten times better than what every other kid has. He can barely stand that she and Soren only get to eat at the king’s table if Callum or Ezrin invites them. Petty vengeance on a bully isn’t beneath him.
His lips curl upward. “Temporarily, of course. And not your brother.”
“Of course not!” Claudia would never want to turn Soren into a toad. She had so many more ways to get vengeance on him.
***
Does it count as breaking a promise if you didn’t mean to do it? She’d been going for Callum, who’d called her unibrow. That didn’t mean what he thought it meant, but whatever.
“You’re going to pay!” she’d yelled, but the spell went wonky, and now Soren’s a toad.
She scoops him up so she can look him in the eye. “Sor-bear, I am so sorry. We’re gonna get you some nice flies, okay? Dad will fix it as soon as he gets home.”
Well, Dad would have fixed it, if Soren hadn’t hopped away the second her back was turned. He turns up naked in a field somewhere, all because he hadn’t wanted her to get in trouble.
“I don’t get where my clothes went,” he says, scratching his head. He’d crawled into her window wearing a red-checked table cloth.
Claudia frowns. “Magic’s weird like that sometimes.” She settles beside him on the bed and leans her head against his shoulder. “Hey, Sor, thanks for not telling dad.”
“Well, you didn’t tell him about the time the guard caught me sneaking into that girl’s window,” he says with a grin.
She smiles, thinking of the thick leather tomes stacked up in her father’s library. “I’ll find you an invisibility spell soon. I promise.”
***
The letter from their mother arrives two weeks later. She’s not supposed to know it’s there. Her father slams it shut inside a book the second she walks into his study. His eyes are all dark and shadowed again, and he’s started muttering things that he thinks they can’t hear, like “can’t let her take them away from me.” Obviously, she’s going to investigate.
Claudia takes the stairs to Sor’s room two at a time. “Hey, Sor-Bear,” she says, leaning against his doorway with one of his favorite jam tarts. “Wanna help me break into Dad’s study and figure out why he’s going crazy?”
“Are you insane?” he asks. “Your eyebrow hasn’t even grown back yet.”
But he does it anyway, partly for the jam tart but mostly for her.
The letter is wedged inside one of those books that Claudia’s not supposed to open, but she does anyway, every time her dad’s at the king’s council. Usually, she’d give herself half an hour to read the spells -- there’s one for curing paralysis that could be important someday -- but she can’t take her eyes off her mother’s words.
Everything that’s gone wrong in the last three years is there. The summer of accidental malnutrition, Soren getting turned into a toad, and loads of other magical experiments that Claudia hadn’t realized anyone had seen her doing. That’s why her mother is asking King Harrow send the children to her. Because her dad isn’t “fit,” whatever that means. Because he lets her learn dark magic and lets Soren fight with a sword instead of forcing them to be children when they don’t want to be.
Fury wells up in her until she can’t help but crush a fire slug in her fist just to feel the flames. It’s not fair. Their mother had left, and now she wants to come back and rake through every mistake Father made when she was gone? No, she couldn’t let that happen -- especially not when it’s her fault Soren got turned into a toad, and her fault for doing experiments where other people could see them.
“Claudia, I didn’t mean for you to see that letter.”
Her father’s voice startles her so badly she almost loses control of the fireball in her hand.
“I should’ve known you’d come in here looking.” He doesn’t look sad, just wistful.
Claudia’s cheeks flush hot. “You knew I turned Soren into a toad? And all the rest?” she asks, glancing down at the letter.
“Very little happens in the palace that I am not aware of.” He cocks an eyebrow. “Publicly turning your brother into a toad was particularly unsubtle.”
“So how am I not grounded for the rest of my life?’
Her father offers her a half smile. “The situation resolved itself, and your loyalty to one another is admirable.”
Claudia clenches the letter in her hand. Loyalty. That’s what the three of them have. “I’m not leaving you. Harrow wouldn’t side with her, would he? He’s your friend.”
Her father sighs heavily. “I doubt it. But...your mother can be persuasive. Parents make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes, learning how to raise you on my own. Your mother chose not to be a parent, so she has no mistakes.”
“Except leaving us!”
When Mom first left, Claudia just wanted her to come back, but she never did. And now that she and Dad and Sor have made a life together, she wants to drag the two of them away? Someplace where Claudia can’t learn magic and Soren won’t get to join the guard? Claudia can’t let that happen.
Potions in stoppered bottles gleam from her father’s shelves. Books whisper to her in languages she can’t understand yet. Beneath the table are rows upon rows of specimen jars, creatures painstakingly harvested from all over Katolis and even Xadia.
“Isn’t there something here to make sure she can’t take us?” she asks.
Her father’s eyes sweep the room slowly, and he plucks a slender green book from a shelf. “There is,” he says, tapping his fingers against the spine. “But you’ll have to trust me.”
“I do.” She has no hesitation there. She still remembers drinking that amber potion, watching it glow through her veins while her father turned gray beside her. Her father made mistakes, but he always fixed them, no matter what the cost to himself. That’s why she loves him. That’s why she’ll pay any price to stay. She draws herself up straight so he can see her determination. “Just tell me what to do.”
The answer is anticlimactic. “Invite her here while Soren is at practice. Keep her talking. I’ll handle the rest.”
***
It’s hard to remember what happened the day her mother came. She remembers talking at the kitchen table, thinking how much her mom looked like Soren. But the actual words she’d spoken -- why she’d left, why she wants them now -- won’t stay.
She does remember her father stepping into the room silently, a swirling purple ball hovering between his hands. He blew into it, and sweet wind drifted toward them.
“Eb yppah. Tegrof.” He’d said it three times. The first time her mother’s eyes widened and she grabbed Claudia’s wrist. The second time, her fingers slackened and her eyes fluttered shut. The third time, she rose and walked out the door.
Claudia rewrites the words in her diary as many times as she can, as many spellings as she can put together. Finally she sees it: Be happy. Forget.
Her father is sitting on the big sofa in the parlor, feeding her mother’s letter into the fire piece by piece.
“She doesn’t remember us, does she?” Claudia asks.
Her father shakes his head. “Should I have told you exactly what would happen?”
“If I’d known, I couldn’t have done it.” Shame twists in her belly, but she forces herself to lift her head. “Magic always has a price, doesn’t it?”
“You’re wise to realize that. Are you satisfied with the price you paid?”
Claudia knows that he’s already thinking of ways to undo the spell. If she says she made a mistake, he’ll find a way to fix it, no matter how difficult or dangerous or how much of himself he has to give up in the process.
She curls up on the couch beside him and rests her head on his shoulder, like she used to do when she was still young enough for bed time stories.
“You’re worth it,” she says. About that she has no doubt.