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“Well, this sucks.”
Understatement of the millennium. An hour after the festivities had wound down, the beast pacified and bundled back into its hole for another twelve turns of the moon, when the music was done and the lights came up and all the dancing was over, Emira and Edric were still sitting in the bleachers spectating other people’s lives, alone with each other.
Edric lay slumped against the slatted wooden seats, swilling the last backwash of the special punch the Potions track had cooked up around in the bottom of his cup. He’d stripped off his jacket coat like a proper gentleman after everyone had raced out in the wake of Luz and the event’s titular monster, thrown it around her shoulders; Emira tugged it closer across her chest. They were still basically the same size and shape, but she was beginning to realize the ways they were filling out differently as emphasized by the tailoring-- herself in the chest and hips, her brother’s forearms and shoulders. “Tell me about it,” she grumbled, unable to meet his eye. The jacket smelled like him, that terrible mint and camphor aftershave he liked and was beginning to need.
He knocked back the last gulp of punch and looked at her, and they both looked out over the empty gymnasium dance floor, where the janitors were beginning to sweep up the detritus of a successful Grom. “You wanna keep waiting?”
She set her chin against her knees, hugged her folded up thighs against her chest, and said nothing, expecting that he could read it out of her like a book. Emira had thought that even though they didn’t know each other the girl from the healing-and-animal-husbandry track, the one Luz liked (Luz liked everyone, it was one of her many enviable qualities) might have been more than disappointed to be asked by her. She’d seen Viney’s work around and surely she had to be aware of her; a girl who had ended up in permanent detention had to have some appreciation for the chaos she and Ed could create. But she hadn’t come, and now they were way past midnight, and instead she was just filled up with caustic embarrassment and bone-deep exhaustion and a hot, boiling shame.
Ed got up, and he just kept looking at her, and suddenly she hated it. She had never felt so alone, but he was still there. “Well, I’m gonna head out,” he said, snapping his suspenders against his chest. And then, so sickeningly softly, so fond, as if he was the one who was always having to take care of her and keep her out of extra trouble and from putting strange objects in her mouth-- “Come on, Em. Let’s go home.”
He held his hand out to help her up.
She could have taken it. Any other night of the year, she would have, thoughtlessly, the two of them melting into one body wherever they touched, his hands as familiar as her own. One heart, one flesh, since they were small. And now, instead, Emira didn’t look at him. “Go on without me,” she said, distant and detached. “I’m going to be by myself for awhile.” He was still for a moment, horribly frozen, and his dear familiar hand clenched to a fist as he drew it back to himself.
It all came out of that.
---
Emira had seen her worst fear reflected back at her for the first time when she was ten.
This had been when Amity was still fresh, comparatively, and hadn’t yet been assessed as a burning talent to be hung up among the stars, too busy being a baby to be heralded as a genius, and the eyes of the Elder Blights had been focused on their first children. There had been a lot of focus, once upon a time: a lot of promise.
Twin magic is special, their mother had told them as babes, standing stern across the room while their governess bounced them on her lap. Powerful, wild. Two sides of one coin, your strength is linked. You need each other to tame it. And you will tame it. Blights are anything but wild. They had, in fact, been frightful children, unruly and full of shenanigans, and their magic had been bound to one track and one coven at an early age in an attempt to keep them quiet and under control. It hadn’t worked, but at ten their parents still held out hope, and they’d still received hours of intensive personal instruction from private home tutors who often slunk from the Manor with conjured tails between their legs, literally cowed by their young students.
The most successful tutors had eventually discovered that the best way to keep them out of trouble was to take them on interesting field trips, anything to divert their attention. Today, the place of interest was the Bonesborough Museum of Ancient Artifacts.
“And this is the Mirror of Yamsid,” the elderly tour guide intoned in his dusty voice, gesturing towards a tall object draped in a heavy velvet brocade and compulsively closing three of his many eyes. “An artifact too dangerous to gaze upon.”
Even at ten Emira had thought, So why is it on display?
He went on, “A minor fear demon was sealed inside it by a witch long ago. Were you to see yourself in its surface, you would be assaulted by a vision of your worst nightmare.” The man crooked two of his many fingers. “Come along now, no sense in lingering.”
Emira had always been awful with rules. As the group filed past she ran her hand along the swooping curve of the heavy red rope cordoning the mirror off, and an infernal wind rippled the obscuring fabric just enough for her to catch a glimpse of its dull silver surface. For a split second she caught her own eye in the mirror; staring back at her was the face of an adult Emira, older and come into her fine-boned features, as sharply handsome as her mother and dressed in the same lavishly respectable outfit. At her side stood her brother, his hair done the way their father kept it, both of them every inch the perfect heirs to the manor and the Blight name. He had his arm around her waist, and it made her never want to touch Edric again.
But his pudgy little boy hand had found hers and tugged her away from the mirror and her own transfixing gaze. “Come on,” he hissed. “Nobody’s looking. Let’s go swap around that rack of magical hats in the gift store.” She giggled and grinned and fell into it easily, twining her fingers with his as they slunk down the dark cavernous museum halls, and the cold, distant eyes of her future watched them go.
She still thought about that sometimes, on the bad nights when one of them had left an illusion in their bed and crept across the hall to the other’s room, sleeping curled up like kittens with his back to hers. They’d gotten their own rooms at eleven but sleeping alone felt wrong, still, without the phantom pressure of someone else’s weight dipping down the mattress, a source of solid warmth beside them. In the dark of the new moon nights she had listened to the soft hiss of his breathing and thought about just him, and this, forever, no one else sharing her bed.
Emira couldn’t say if she’d been conscious of it as a fear before the mirror put it in her head, or even a worry; at ten they’d been far from growing sick of each other. You might as well be sick of your own arm. They were twins conjoined at the heart, their magic drawn from the same source, and she could never cut free of him.
Once she’d had the thought, though, it was hard not to want it.
After the clock struck two on Grom night she’d walked home alone, gone to her room alone, undressed alone and flopped down in bed alone, and in the dark there was utter, absolute silence except the push and pull of her own blood in her veins, and bitterly, she’d liked it. It wasn’t that she needed anyone else, Emira told herself vehemently. What was required wasn’t a replacement for Edric, another noisy, hot body with too many legs pressed up behind her, at her side with their arm around her waist. All she needed was a clean break, and plenty of space.
---
He gave it to her.
Emira didn’t see Edric at breakfast, though Amity was there, still looking a little overtired and poleaxed by some vast personal revelation, drifting as dreamily around the house as practical, neurotic Amity could be. Grom could have that effect on people, and she’d faced it directly. Emira pushed half of her scrambled ratbat eggs onto her sister’s plate and refilled her glass of orange blood and prepared to tease Ed for coming down to breakfast with bedhead and sleep gumming his eyes. And he’d say that he wouldn’t’ve overslept if she’d come to get him, and they’d think about starting an early morning food fight before their mother cleared her throat, and then they would settle at each other’s side.
She didn’t ask about it when he hadn’t appeared even after the house imps were clearing the greasy plates away, not wanting to embarrass him or herself by association in front of their parents, Titan forbid, but she did climb the two flights back up to their rooms before leaving for school, now intending to pull her deadweight brother out of bed and illusion his uniform onto him, no time to get dressed and presentable before class. When she walked in without knocking his bed was untidily empty, and Emira walked to Hexside with Amity instead.
“Where’s Edric?” Mittens asked, and Emira tried to decide if she thought her sister really cared, or was justifiably wary about some mischief he might be off committing that could blow back on them later.
It was faintly embarrassing to admit she didn’t know. “Around,” she said, and flipped her hair casually over her shoulder, and then expertly deflected that weak jab at conversation with the riposte of leaning in too close to ask how Amity’s date had gone.
(A squeak: “It wasn’t a date!”
“Did you even ask her?”
“She… saw the note.”
“So that’s a no, then.” Emira had run off ahead in order to avoid showing up to class covered in enraged Abomination sludge.)
Ed was in the Illusion homeroom, and seeing him eased a frisson of tension that Emira hadn’t realized she’d been holding tight down her spine; something in her heart unclenched. He was talking animatedly with Luz’s little friend Augustus, who neither of them had ever paid much attention to until he’d taught them the human trick of high fiving; the boy was sharp as a box of tacks on a teacher’s chair, like them, and he had a good if goofy sense of humor, which they respected, but anyone of a peer group with Mittens was inherently A Child, and not to be trifled with. Besides, they’d barely fraternized even with classmates their own age.
There were, in fact, two Augustuses holding court with Ed, who had put his face in an expression of vague amusement; Emira, who knew all his expressions intimately, could see the shadow of something else there, too, the spark of interest catching to tinder behind his eyes, the ghost of a dark and ravenous hunger. It all shuttered into a nothing she couldn’t read when he heard her approach, though; Gus immediately became uninteresting. Or it should have been that way. The way their lives usually went, he should have grinned at her lazy and easy, as relaxed as a cat in a sunbeam, and then draped himself over her shoulder like the same cat asking unsubtly for attention, but he just nodded shallowly at her and widened his half-smile a fraction. “Hey, Em,” he said, and then flicked his gaze back onto Gus. “Sorry little man, what were you saying?”
“Just that it’s a real drain on your magic,” the kid said. “There’s a lot of individual spells you have to layer on top of each other, but don’t worry. I bet a smart guy like you can catch up to me in no time.” He winked, and his copy winked the other eye, and both pushed thick books bound in blue leather into Edric’s arms before the illusion disappeared in a puff of twinkling smoke.
“Oh, I’m not worried,” Edric told him, reaching out to muss his hair until Gus squeaked and squirmed away. Emira slid into the seat next to the chair he was leaning against, trying not to seem too interested in the tomes while maintaining a good vantage point to spy on their titles. Unfortunately all the lettering was done in such flowery gilded calligraphy that you had to squint to decipher what was the loops of individual letters and what was mere adornment, and she hadn’t been able to covertly puzzle out much before Ed stuffed them in his book bag and kicked his chair out from the desk, collapsing into it. Finally, he looked at her. “You okay today, Em?” he asked. “I’ve got some leftover punch in my locker if you want.”
She waited for him to properly address her, pull the books back out and show her what he’d scored, talk with her in an excited whisper about the fun he’d decided the two of them could have with whatever they contained, but he didn’t, and she was too proud to ask. She shouldn’t have had to ask, she was his sister. “Just peachy,” she told him, her voice brittle and bright, and he smiled at her in a way that didn’t reach his eyes.
“There you go. Just gotta keep getting up on that griffin’s back.”
“Speaking of.” Emira leaned an elbow on the desk, and her lips twisted cruelly. “Want to sneak into the paddocks after class and dye Puddles’ feathers in Gladius colors? I think I found a charm that will really stick.”
Ed tilted over to copy her posture, a perfect male mirror image. “Petty revenge quest? Why, sister, how unbecoming of you.” His impression of their mother’s pinched, disappointed tone was really too good, some kind of sonic illusion vibrating his vocal cords.
She fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Shut up.”
“Maybe I don’t think she deserves your artistry,” he said. “Maybe she’s not good enough for you to even worry about.”
Hot annoyance simmered under her skin like a sunburn. “Are you in or not, Ed?”
“What kind of question is that? You know I am.” And the world shifted back into alignment. If they couldn’t be a united front in the face of slights against each other, then who even were they? At lunch Edric fed his bookbag to his locker and they ghosted down across the Grudgeby field and the impressively manicured lawns of Hexside to the Beastkeepers’ pens, past the stalls for unicorns and manticores and hippogriffs (griffins with the back halves of hippopotomi) to the barn where Viney kept her pigeon-feathered mount. The thing was terminally trusting and good natured, didn’t even squawk when they lifted the latch on its door and let themselves into the damp straw-smelling darkness. It pushed its hooked beak against her cheek and nibbled on a piece of her hair as they traced the shimmering circles that darkened its feathers to striped purple and white. Ed even stenciled Banshees suck! on its dappled flank, which was inspired. At an academy where School Spirit could be a very literal phrase, Viney was sure to get her fair share of heckling for how her pet was adorned before they got bored and ended the illusion or she figured out how to cancel it herself, and that was everything she deserved.
And when they were done they grinned and high fived (and Puddles licked her face, leaving a trail of griffin tongue slime that he cackled at), and they… didn’t walk home together.
The sun was already slipping down close to the horizon, casting half his face in shadow. “Got something else to take care of,” he told her, hands in his pockets. “You’re okay to get back alone, right?”
Emira rolled her eyes so hard they almost fell out of her skull and away across the green. “I think I can manage to make it home without getting lost.”
He laughed. “Well, yeah, of course. But I’d be lost without you, Em.”
They were at the age when feelings were anathema, when all you wanted to do was hide and deflect and present a perfect invulnerable mask to the world, and any hint of earnest emotion made something in her recoil with instinctive embarrassment-- but it was just the two of them, and between them he’d always been the one with more soft spots to press. She knew she’d driven a dagger into one of them the day they helped train up Luz for Grom, and she couldn’t come out and tell him now: it had been a joke. Not one that had stuck the three point landing, clearly; one that had cut too close to the bone, flaying away something living and vital. The best jokes were partly true and some sliver of her had really meant it, the part of her that still remembered being ten years old and looking bleak into the face of the Blighted future, but she’d meant it mostly as a tease.
Emira didn’t want to be stuck with anyone. If they were together, she wanted it to be something they both chose, not out of circumstance but desire, and some days it was harder to choose that than others. She’d wanted-- friends, real friends, not perfect plastic mannequins picked out by their parents, and not someone she had to share with Edric and Amity, like Luz. She wanted someone, selfishly, that was all hers, who didn’t belong to anyone else, but she wanted Edric too, of course she did. Their easy camaraderie, the warmth of knowing she could say anything, do anything, and be accepted and understood.
Maybe he’d understood her too well.
She’d waited too long to say anything at all. Edric rocked back on his heels and turned back towards the school, calling, “Don’t wait up for me,” over his shoulder. Emira waved back at him and watched him until he disappeared into the yawning mouth of Hexside’s wide double doors, and realized it was only the second time (outside of minutes spent waiting outside of various wrong-gender bathrooms for the other to reappear) that she’d been on campus without him, visibly in public as half of their combined entity. A chill autumn wind blew through her but she drew herself up tall and stalked with confidence and purpose back towards town, and with every step she took in the opposite direction of where he waited she felt lighter, unburdened, the way one might feel lighter having recently amputated an arm.
It was a little bit thrilling to walk through the markets as her own woman, smiling at the boys and wondering what they saw in her face and the elegant curve of her spine, even if it was in equal measure disappointing to have no one to turn to when she found some interesting cursed curio sitting out in a discount stall’s rejects bin. She bought herself three scoops of booberry ice scream and sat on a cracked marble veranda that looked out over the boiling tempestuous sea and watched the sun stain itself bloody as it slid down the sky, and she got to eat the whole thing without having to slap Ed’s hand away as he reached out to steal a bite-- and she didn’t have anyone there to feed off her spoon, either. Despite the distant crowd noise, there was a quiet around her that she’d only ever experienced in the dead of night otherwise, alone with only her own thoughts rattling around in her head.
This is what it will be like all the time when we’re adults, she thought, and had to sit uncomfortably with that emotion. After school, when they were full fledged witches with Palismen and staves, as was obligatory and expected, they would naturally separate off into their own lives and careers and she’d have to learn to live with this curious feeling of being unbalanced, swinging wildly without a counterweight. There was deep old magic in the celestial spheres, come from other Titans strung up between the stars, and in Astronomy they’d studied the particular power of binary stars: a set trapped together, bound by their gravity to push and pull against each other until they burned out to cold embers and ash.
She and Ed were like that. A closed system with the current of their power flowing through each other in a circle that couldn’t be broken, which was the truest form of magic. Emira couldn’t understand why Edric failed to see that; they’d never be alone. Never without each other, no matter how far apart they travelled. That bond was a shackle and chain around her ankle, and it was a collar pulled tight to her throat, and it was a warm blanket on a cold night, and it was nice, for once, to hear her own thoughts.
So she didn’t miss him on the rest of the walk home, or when she was spread out on her bed trying to balance tables of integers for year ten Arithmancy homework, or even when she realized that he hadn’t come down for dinner, either, his usual chair across from hers empty and leaving her to look into the sternly painted portrait face of some crotchety Blight ancestor while they all ate in a decidedly less peaceful silence, but then the grandfather clock down the hall screamed midnight and she was freshly showered and scrubbed, hair still clinging damply to the back of her neck, and they hadn’t said goodnight. They’d never once been so mad at each other, even when they were toddlers and incorrigible and prone to scuffles and dust ups, that they hadn’t said goodnight. When they were little Ed had always kissed her on the cheek, the one with the mole, and she’d responded in kind, and this was allowed when they were small; at a certain age their mother had started pushing them away, mouth pressed to a firm line of loveless disapproval, and the smooches had stopped but the hugs hadn’t, as much out of defiance as anything.
It seemed odd to need a reason to go in and see him but Emira still had his jacket, she’d fallen asleep in it last night with her face buried in stiff felt that smelled like his skin and whatever boozy potion he’d spilled on the lapels, and she made a brief stop in her room to grab it before crossing the hall to his. A static spark crackled and snapped at her fingertips as she reached for the knob and Emira was more surprised than hurt by it; she’d never expected him to put up a locking spell, especially not in the form of a blood ward worked into the ancient door. The heavy wood was as thick and hard as stone with age, and she could still see the dark splotches where he’d worked the binding into each knot and whorl. Emira wondered vaguely who he’d been hoping to keep out as she traced a lazy burning circle around the handle and effortlessly cancelled it. Not her, surely, because the blood they shared unsealed and melted like hot wax down the doorframe at her slightest gesture.
The lock clicked and the door popped open, swinging inward an inch that she helped along with her hand. Ed’s room was twilight dark, all the lights burned down, but she could see him slumped in an untidy pile across his desk; his cheek was pressed to his elbow where his arm flopped over a wad of loose leaf parchment and an open book, his reading glasses askew and slipped down the slope of his nose, fogging with each slow open-mouthed breath. Emira smiled and bit back a giggle, not wanting to wake him-- she could wait to tease him until the morning. Instead she carefully eased the glasses he refused to wear when they were together from his face and folded them beside the book, draped his jacket over his shoulders, and took the opportunity to lean over and look at what he’d been working on.
If this was one of the books he’d borrowed from Gus then it was, indeed, fiendishly complex magic. The most basic categories of illusion are monodimensional and bound to one of the five senses, she read off a section not obscured by his limbs. And at a distance, a conjured form spun out of one of these will be enough to fool the eye of the uninitiated. With every layer woven together, the form takes shape and, most importantly, depth, as there are a myriad of details that must be added and accounted for. A copy of the caster that can serve as their true and undetectable double must have the look of their mirror image, which is as easy as looking in the mirror to create, and it must hold their voice, which is only moderately more difficult to add. Any mage worth their salt can manage this parlor trick. It takes a true virtuoso to see what else makes a witch: the warmth wafting off their skin, the scent of their sweat, the vibration of their footsteps against the ground and the clack of them if the doppleganger’s boots meet stone. Five spells, a lifetime of details, distilled into one truly lifelike doll.
Emira thought about the flashy magic that Augustus favored, always calling up copies to practice high fives with himself and sit in for him through class when he wanted to make more interesting mischief somewhere else, and she had to admit upon reflection that there were… levels of sophistication. The version capable of taking notes and talking back to teachers was truly a masterwork, and it did seem like the sort of thing Ed would be interested in, if only to prove that he could-- that they could-- do it. No ordinary student could weave such a perfect illusion, only a natural talent like Gus.
Or someone who wanted to work very hard at it.
Neither Ed or Emira had worked particularly hard at anything since the middle grades, when their parents' watchful eyes had slipped off of them. It drove Mittens up the wall, that they could win high marks without really trying; no practice wands for the twins. They’d just been coasting, messing around and having fun, and she hadn’t ever suspected he had serious academic interests. The idea that there were things she didn’t know about him as much as he didn’t know about her sat oddly on her shoulders, and she decided in the end, easing the door closed so the haunted hinges wouldn’t shriek, not to ask about it.
Let Edric, too, have one thing that was only his own.
---
“Okay, what’s going on with you two?”
One lonely breakfast had turned into a week of lonely breakfasts. It had been a week of waking up alone, walking to school by herself, sitting at a table of seventh years not worth her time because Ed had taken to sitting with Gus in homeroom and chatting animatedly in a way that stopped whenever she got within spitting distance of the pair of them. They still took lunch together, and she found herself edging closer to him than usual on the bench, but they hadn’t really talked much about anything that mattered. He always seemed distracted, bouncing his knee impatiently like he was just waiting for everything to be over. At home he shut himself in his room or the catacombs under the manor and only emerged at odd, irregular hours to steal food from the kitchen.
Emira stared coolly across the table into her little sister’s earnest, scowling eyes and slurped at her orange blood until the straw made an obnoxious sucking noise against the bottom of the glass, and lied right to her cute rosy-cheeked face. “No idea what you’re talking about.”
Amity’s frown pulled a little more sour, and Emira fought the urge to laugh. Their baby sister always looked so cute when she was annoyed with them. “If you’re plotting something, I just want to know in advance so I can be prepared,” she said, already getting a little extra pink around the edges. Truly, watching her try to boss either of them around was a riot. Both in the metaphorical sense that it was funny, and that sooner or later something was going to go up in flames.
“Why would we be plotting anything? We’re perfectly well-behaved children.”
“Because I haven’t seen Ed outside of school in a week, and he’s never with you anymore.”
“Your concern for us is touching.”
“You’ll be just fine,” Amity snorted. “It’s everyone else in a ten mile radius I’m worried about.”
Emira dunked the ends of her toast in a pot of toe jam and crunched at it contemplatively. The last few days she’d woken up exhausted and totally drained, like she’d never even slept at all, and it was time to consider that Ed’s worst fear hadn’t been unfounded because she was truly miserable. She felt like a person without a shadow, a coin with only one side stamped, a single candlestick on a sideboard with no sense of symmetry and an open space at her side. The silence that had been so refreshing at first now just felt empty, and she’d found herself shamefully wishing more than once that she’d kept his jacket back so she could bury her face in it at night and breathe him in. They’d shared the water of their mother’s womb and everything after, but one week on her own and she was ready to admit: she liked him for reasons that had nothing to do with the circumstances of their birth.
She missed him. Missed just telling him things, or not telling him and having him understand all the same. Missed the casual brush of their fingers and thighs as they sat too close at a cafeteria bench, missed making him laugh and feeling the mirth reverberate through the strings of her own heart.
Sitting by herself at the breakfast table was like being left on the bleachers after Grom, over and over and over, and no one was coming to take her hand.
The thing left unsaid between them lurked like an invisible, ceiling-high demon in the hall between their rooms, waiting to catch her in its claws and crack her open to spill all the messy feelings out like her guts unspooled naked on the floor. You didn’t want to be stuck with me, she could hear him saying. You needed space. How are you liking it, Emira? They’d always hurt each other, in all the little inconsequential ways that brothers and sisters did, pulling hair and throwing mud when they were children and now with barbed words perfectly designed to catch and pull like a fish well hooked, and that had all been fine. It happened, in sixteen years of intimate acquaintance, but Emira was aware that there were some things you couldn’t say out loud without lighting your life on fire and watching it burn. She was too proud to tell him she’d been wrong.
But not too proud to say goodnight. That evening she paused outside his door again and examined the new ward seeped into the wood, as offensive as if he’d scrawled off expletives in his blood instead. When she’d gone without thinking to undo it the locking curse had struck electric at her hand, and she cradled it tucked against her side, fingers throbbing. How clever, to have wheedled at Luz (presumably) to allow him to prick her dog’s paw for a drop of ichor; how clever to blend the strength of a demon’s blood in with his own. The curse sat there emblazoned on the wood, malicious and mocking her, because now she knew for sure: the person he’d meant to keep out and away from him was his own twin.
As she lingered, heart in her throat and a horrible oppressive buzzing pushing in at her ear drums, she realized that there were voices behind the door, so muted and muffled that she could only pick up on the eagerly whispered tone. It was enough to know that Ed sounded happy, and unrestrained in the emotion the way she’d only known him in their private moments. Someone else’s laughter assaulted her and Emira wondered if Amity was in there, unsatisfied with her answers and set on buttering up their brother, but she had never known Mittens to laugh, especially not at anything Edric had said. Their best attempts at japes had only ever been met with a wall of withering scorn.
It made sense that Edric, who needed attention the way most people needed fresh air, would immediately seek to replace her with another sister, and that was fine. Emira’s smarting fingers curled to a fist against her ribs, knuckles bloodless and nails biting crescent moons into her palm, and something else curdled inside her heart. I’m afraid of being alone, not, I’m afraid of being without you. Ed had never needed her, he’d just needed someone, and Emira had always known that, somewhere deep down. Their jagged edges slotted into place together because they were twins, born within the same stretch of ten minutes, sharing hair and eyes and magic and time, but anyone else could fit with enough effort.
It was fine. It was what she had wanted. Her cold, empty bed had never felt so large, and even though they hadn’t slept together since puberty had hit her first and she’d shot up a foot taller than him that hadn’t stuck, she felt the ghost of him behind her all the same.
---
The moon waxed full and fat like a wheel of ripe cheese and then waned itself to a skinny sliver again, like the rind, and the days all ran muddily together. Amity had either stopped worrying about the trouble the two of them were potentially brewing or had simply gotten too distracted to care, pulled into Luz’s shining solar orbit and revolving irresistibly around her. Emira might have told her not to bother; it didn’t seem like there was a ‘two of them’ anymore. She might have been tempted to spend more time with Luz herself, who gave every indication of liking Emira on her own merits as well as Ed-and-Emira as a set, if the way Mittens looked at the human didn’t settle something heavy and cold in the pit of her stomach. It was less fun to tug the end of Amity’s ponytail now and coo about her crush, not when she could already see the ways her sister’s life and Luz’s were already bound together, the thread of their future entwined. Something about them felt as inevitable as the heat death of the universe, and for once Emira decided to leave it well enough alone.
Luz felt familiar now, though, like family, and the woods that hid her mentor’s home were no longer something to be skirted around. Emira had been to the Owl House and had biscuits and tea from a silver service stamped with a human maker’s mark, made conversation with demons, and while many Hexside students still avoided the area around the cottage like the plague (particularly after pictures of it ambling around the countryside had gone viral) Emira had taken to cutting through the densest part of the forest there on her way home. As long as she remembered to pack her pockets with gummy crickets to bribe the owl tube, it wasn’t a problem.
She never ran into Luz until one evening, passing by the house, she spotted her outside, kicking the dust off her shoes against the lintel before slipping in the door. The dog demon had climbed excitedly up her leg to perch like a parrot on her shoulder, and when he spotted Emira his bristlebrush tail began to involuntarily wag. He poked at Luz’s temple with a bony claw finger to get her attention and Luz turned to her with a bright smile and a wave that Emira returned at half intensity.
“Hey, Em!” she called, leaning faux-casual against the doorframe. “Didja forget something?”
Emira kept her surprise to herself. You didn’t get to be a cool kid by being anything other than outwardly unflappable. “Forget what?”
Luz shrugged the shoulder that King was on and he rolled with the motion, clenching his little claws into the fabric of her cowl. “I mean, we just saw you guys like five minutes ago. It’s cool if you want to visit, but Eda’s out, and--”
Emira wasn’t stupid. Edric wasn’t either, though he tended to be more cunning than book smart, which was different: cleverness and cunning and an ability to think on his feet, with no more sense than could fill a tea cup. She’d been privately certain since they were six that if they ever made it that far, his Palisman would be a fox. He’d outfoxed her the last few weeks, certainly, keeping enough to himself that she hadn’t been able to see his game until she was in the middle of it.
“Where were we?” she asked, voice as icy as the frigid winds that whipped around the Knee.
Luz blinked her wide, guileless eyes. “Uh. Back there where the tree fell across the path, right?”
She hadn’t been by that way in days, since after the storm that had cracked the old oak at the root and then boiled its bark off, leaving only the smooth greywashed bones of the wood. “Right.” Her heart burned as the obvious clicked into place; it had never been Amity in his room. He hadn’t gone to Gus for any academic or ambitious reason.
He’d replaced her. “Sorry, Luz,” she said, already crossing the clearing and accelerating. Past the house, past the crumbling ruins of the broken tower, take a left at the fork and around the bend… “I did forget something after all.”
Magic buzzed in her ears like the screams of dying cicadas, pumping flush through her veins with every tremble of viscera in her chest, and she didn’t know, herself, what she intended to do if she found him, slap him until her palm went numb or shout at him or cry. Blights don’t cry was another cardinal rule, but when had either of them ever respected the rules? Of the school, their family, basic bodily autonomy?
She was coming up on the place where the path snapbacked and was obscured by the rotting bulk of the tree, and the raw anger was beginning to resolve into coherent words out of the animal scream she’d initially wanted to make. How dare you? seemed wholly inadequate, which wound up being fine because the words died on her tongue the moment she saw them, anyway.
Emira saw herself, as if through someone else’s eyes or an out of body experience. The copy was perfect, lovingly so; there was her face as if on someone else’s skull, her hair threaded carefully through its bell-pull braid, her body in his arms. The woods were full of soft, intimate sounds, bedroom sounds, the rustle of clothing and skin against skin, the whisper of a breathless sigh she’d only heard herself make with her fingers between her thighs replicated with an accuracy that made her shiver, and his voice low and rich and deep with meaningless words she couldn’t hear. Edric had her doppelganger’s back against a tree still standing solid and his forehead pressed to hers, both of them flushed the color of good dark wine. It was hard not to watch her lips, mouth full and swollen with kisses, as she pressed them to his, and then Emira was distracted by the motion of his hand stroking down her side like he was indulgently petting a cat, settling it on the swell of her hip and digging his fingers in until her leg came up to rub against the side of his thigh to his flank.
They fit together perfectly, like two halves of a heart.
“What the fuck, Edric?” Emira demanded, and had the satisfaction of seeing them instantly jump apart, as though maintaining a respectable six feet of distance now could erase the memory of the last few minutes. The points of his ears twitched and burned bright hot with humiliation but his pupils were still blown to black new moon pits, and he was breathing heavily.
“I can explain,” he started, which is what they all said, and it never mattered or made a difference; if you ever had to explain your actions, the damage had already been done. The mirror Emira opened her false mouth to say the words for him, beg her to forgive herself, and Emira found that she simply didn’t have the patience for it; with a wave of her hand her brother’s illusion collapsed into mist and dust, a bad dream.
“Save it,” she snarled. She felt-- sick, she was sure, but everything was just a roiling mass of sludgy, acidic emotions and a hot pressure behind her eyes. Somehow, of all the ridiculous complaints, Why did you have to do this in public, in front of god and Hooty and everybody? was what was rising to the surface.
He took a tentative step towards her, looking pained, and she held up a hand palm out to ward off his advance. “Em, you don’t understand.”
“Oh, I think I do,” she said hollowly. “You were lonely. Your big mean sister decided she wanted a life of her own, so you decided to cut her out and replace her with some-- sapient sex toy. God, Edric, that’s so pathetic.” The venom in those words stung her own tongue, but there was some satisfaction in seeing them hit home, his red face blanching waxy pale.
This mean streak was a thing they shared, though, along with their hair and eyes and bile. “You weren’t supposed to find out,” he snapped back. “It would have been fine. You could go and have your own life, and… everybody could get what they wanted.”
She felt stupid for missing him. Stupid for being insensate with terror, even now, that they were going over a cliff together, that nothing would be the same. “It’s not real,” she told him. “You made me into some simpering girl tied to you. Is that what you think of me?”
That was, at the core of it, the heart of the hurt, the thought that he saw her as some one dimensional thing to play with and kiss, regardless of what she wanted. What Emira wanted clearly didn’t matter to him that much.
“I think you’re the only person I ever really wanted to be with,” he said. “I would have danced with you, Em. I would’ve done anything you wanted.”
She bowed to him stiffly at the waist, the way you bowed to your partner before a dance in all the formal, interminable lessons their mother had forced them to take, and then they danced a different way.
With the flick of a finger fire danced to life between them; pink and white witchfire where ghosts of the dead danced between tongues of flame that lived in the wild grass and licked up their ankles. Earth rolled beneath their feet like the Titan waking from its long dormant slumber, the branches of trees reached out to swipe at them. She saw Edrics’s face in the chaos of their duel, streaked with his own sweat and a line of bright red blood where something had cut a shallow mark down his cheek; she wondered if it would scar and if it did if he’d just cover it with a glamor, leave them both still unblemished and equal.
They hadn’t fought like this since they were very young, still getting used to each other, and they hadn’t possessed this level of skill then, anger refined by practice and imagination; she was half sure it would come to physical blows soon, her knuckles against the sharp arch of his cheekbone and then his weight bowling her over into the dirt, wound around each other more murderous, less lascivious. She wanted to taste his blood in her mouth, feel his heartbeat slithering against hers with their chests pressed together, dig her claws into his skin and scrape him raw. She felt sorry and stupid for missing him, worse for being bitterly jealous of herself.
Their eyes locked and she braced for his next feint, ready to dodge great grasping hands of clay coming out of the dirt or a hail of wet snowballs that would leave icy powder dusting her hair, but Ed set his stance, took a deep breath, and when he drew the circle the air shimmered and resolved itself back into her own image. Emira smirked, all fangs; she had to hold back her blows with Ed, not really wanting to hurt him in any lasting way, burn him more than skin deep but these smoke and mirror illusions that laughed in her face were fair game for the worst of her tricks.
The phantom Emira looked her over with an expression of pity. She didn’t lunge or kick or cast a recursive illusion of her own, just stood and stared, dolled up in the dress she’d worn to Grom, his jacket still over her shoulders. “What do you think the mirror would show you now, Emira?” she asked herself.
Her heart thudded once in her chest and then shattered like a dropped glass, cracked into too many infinitesimal pieces to be put back together whole again. Emira smothered the sob in her throat and tried, too late, to blast the imposter apart; the spell circle she traced wobbled and fizzed out. In a panic she tried again and again, but nothing came, the circuit wouldn’t connect. Her body felt as heavy and empty and dead as a corpse cleaned out for a funeral.
Edric looked stricken too. The illusion faded without either of them having to twitch a finger, and he stared into the space where it had been, and then into her face. “What?”
“What do you mean, what?” Emira asked. Her chest was full of broken glass, and every time she moved or breathed it perforated something new. “You told her to say that, don’t look shocked.”
“I don’t tell her to say or do anything specific,” Edric said. “What would be the fun in that?” He tried to draw the circle and it hung in the air a moment before fading out like the afterimage that burned across the retina following fireworks, but nothing else eventuated. Between them there was a deathly silence.
She could never be free of him. Before this moment she’d never really, truly wanted to, either. Their magic was bound up tightly into a braided cord, a circle without an end, twisted up like the branches of a tree that the wind had rubbed against each other until they galled together, growing incestuously into each other. Now several levels of betrayal and sheer stupidity had sawed away at that connection until they sprung apart, a gulf wider than the space of the clearing yawning open between them.
The conjured fire was still burning itself out, fed as much by air and fuel as magic, but a gust of wind from above flattened the grass and blew it cold. They were at opposite ends of a circle of ash blasted into the forest floor and Eda the Owl Lady touched down in the center of it, sliding off her staff with the grace of an elderly panther. She surveyed the external devastation while Emira examined the charred remains of sixteen years of her life. “Kids,” she said to herself, scornfully. And then, to them, “Hey, I get it, I’ve got a sister too, but you’re going to attract too much attention out here and if children die on my property it’s going to be a whole thing.” She tapped the staff with one elegant gnarled finger and it went parallel to the ground again, the owl carving spreading its wings invitingly. “At least let me take you home. Give you a fun new location to blow up.”
Emira didn’t want to go with her, but she also really didn’t want to talk about anything anymore, or think about anything, or have a single feeling that wasn’t the relief of sinking into sleep or having a good, private cry into her pillow. In some ways Eda felt like a kindred spirit, anyway, even if it was too late for the wildness of their magic to be unbound the way hers was; she exuded the same sort of gleeful, messy, self-interested chaos. “Sorry,” she muttered, and realized abruptly that Edric hadn’t even apologized to her, which rankled all over again. When she settled up with the staff beneath her and he tucked himself in behind her, she wanted to slap his hand to keep him from putting it on her waist.
He didn’t try, anyway, just gripped tight to the wood behind her, left them both unsteady and without really enough staff to sit on as Eda jolted them upward. They rose straight up, high into the clouds where the air was cool and crisp and didn’t smell vaguely of leaf mulch and rot the way the rest of the island did. Once she’d imagined herself flying like this with Viney, the velveteen flanks of a griffin shuddering under her legs instead, hands full of oily feathers with a soft body insinuated in behind her, soft breasts against her back. She’d pictured them soaring away over the glittering sea, somewhere without rules and constraints and covens and expectations.
Without her brother, whose humid breath she could feel against the nape of her neck. It was the closest they’d been in weeks, and for how shredded up she felt inside, nakedly humiliated, violated, cut off from the source of her magic, half a witch in a way that Amity’s little friend Willow had never really been, she was more comfortable with Ed at her back than she could remember being since Grom.
---
That night Emira lay awake thinking about Edric, and about Eda.
After Luz’s mentor had parked them the length of a Grudgeby field from the manor and hovered down to let them off, Edric had stalked straight to the house and slammed the door behind him, leaving Emira and the Owl Lady alone. She’d grown up hearing tales of the woman from her mother, all delivered in the tone of any dire cautionary tale for small children. Don’t play with knives or Mr. Scissorfingers will chop your hands off at the wrist, and don’t ignore authority if you don’t want to be gobbled up and end with your bones and hair and sinew pressed to a pellet in the gullet of a beast.
In another life, Eda was everything that Emira might have wanted to be: fearless, shameless, and entirely herself. And yet, before the human had shown up on the Boiling Isles she’d been almost completely alone. Emira got up off the staff on shaking knees but didn’t drift away towards the house, and Eda turned her big orange lamplight eyes on her.
“You got somethin’ to say, kid?” she asked, swinging her legs around on the staff to sit astride it sidesaddle.
Emira pulled on the hem of her tunic. “You said you had a sister.”
Eda’s severe expression softened a fraction, the face of a glacier melting in the sun. “Family is family,” she said. “You can’t change ‘em. Fights happen, just don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
Too late. “What if he did something unforgivable?”
“Was it?” Eda raised an eyebrow. Emira tried to draw a circle to demonstrate, just to pull out some dumb illusion, give the old woman rabbit ears. Instead the line of power broke apart into sparks. “That's twins for you,” Eda sighed. Then, “If you give it time, it’ll come back. You won’t be what once were, probably a good deal less powerful, but you’ll be whole again.”
“And on my own.” They both looked up at the sprawling castle of a house, the shaded window that Emira knew looked in on Edric’s room.
“Other things can come back too,” Eda said, looking into the near distance and somewhere very far away. “If you both want them to.”
Now, in the thick of the night, Emira lay on her back and stretched her splayed-fingered hand towards the ceiling, staring into the umbral and penumbral shadows that separated out of the greater darkness. What did it mean to know someone like the back of your hand? She couldn’t picture what her hands looked like, but Ed apparently could. The fingers she’d seen gripping at the back of his tunic had been perfect, the right length, the right width, and an illusion relied on the mind and memory of the witch to cast. Ed’s fingers were longer than hers now, she’d noticed that in the way that she’d noticed with annoyance when he’d gotten an inch and then two inches taller than her. Longer and thicker around the knuckles, she’d wanted to turn them over in her own hands, trace her fingertips down the leylines of his palm as if she could read a hopeful fortune there for them both.
She’d never thought of him as anything other than her brother, she’d swear it, but apparently Edric had. He’d thought on it enough that he’d poured that wanting into the version of her he’d decided he wanted to keep, the one who could never reject him. She would have thought he’d embellished her in other ways, and she wondered if the mirror Emira was quieter than her, if she always laughed at his stupid jokes, never contradicted him, let him do whatever ridiculous things he wanted and called it good.
She wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
The thought flickered across the surface of her mind unbidden, and she examined it alone in the privacy of her own head where no one could know or judge her for it, a natural consequence of seeing her double and her brother unabashedly sucking face. Emira touched her fingertips to her lips and thought about his mouth on hers, wet and eager, tongue teasing her open. Those rough hands a heavy warm pressure against her shoulders or at rest at the small of her back, urging her hips closer to his. They’d always known how to move together, effortlessly in sync, and it was hard to stop thinking that it would be the same here, instinct and a lifelong knowledge of each other’s bodies guiding his knee up to part her thighs, his warm weight a comfortable pressure above her. His body as her body, his skin as her skin, until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
By all rights it should disgust her, but it didn’t turn her stomach, only dripped a molten gold warmth down to pool there and lower, deep in her belly. Ed had looked at the work he had made of her, the form sculpted out of air and love and memories, and felt this way, tight and hot and dragged down with a somnolent heaviness. He’d looked at her shadow and wanted to kiss her.
Emira let her eyes flutter shut, thinking about it. Had Edric only kissed the copy he’d made, or had he used her for more? Did it count as losing your virginity when it was all some elaborate delusion? The thought made her shudder and pulled at the pit of her gut, disgusted and wanting it, hating it, wanting him, but Edric wasn’t here. Moonrise had pulled the ebbed tide of her power back a bit; when she drew the circle, jaw held tight with a vindictive frustration, it shivered uncertainly but held.
A simple spell, enough to fool only her eyes. It didn’t have to be much, and not much was about all she could make just then. The illusory Edric stood flat as paper on her bedroom rug, illuminated by a wave of milky moonlight that spilled in through the open window, pale like smoke suspended in the light.
“Why did you do this to us?” she asked him, knowing that the copy could tell her only what she wanted to hear.
He blinked at her owlishly. “Because I love you, Em. I always have.”
That was only what she’d expected. It made her breath catch in her chest all the same. “I know you love me. You’re my brother.”
“Too much,” he said. “And I’m not sorry for any of it.”
The Edric that lived in her head would have apologized. The brother she knew would have begged forgiveness the way they’d both apologized to Amity every day for a month over much less, but subconsciously, Emira knew what the truth was. She knew him as her brother, but not as a lover, or a man.
She lunged to her feet, reaching for him. “Kiss me,” she demanded, because that was fair, but when she grabbed for the front of his tunic and their lips met he vanished into thin air, nothing more after all than a trick of the light. The brief press of their mouths she’d managed had been less than insubstantial, extremely unsatisfying and all she could muster thus depleted. It was as cold as a mausoleum in her room, and she felt the shivering chill of the ghosts of everything they used to be as a hundred thoughts and needs and memories passed through her.
The hall was empty, thank gods. His door loomed heavy and foreboding, but the remnants of the blood ward boiled away when she looked at it now, his magic too weak to maintain it. After tonight, she was determined, he would never keep her out again, never keep anything back from her again. “Don’t lie to me,” she demanded, first thing through the threshold. He was sitting up in bed reading, and the glasses made his face look softer, younger, vulnerable and open. “I hate it when you lie to me, which, by the way, is something I have never done to you.”
He opened his mouth to protest, shut it again, and shut his book, too. “Okay,” he said quietly. “I won’t.”
She took a breath, and eased the door closed behind her. It shut like the lid of their coffin, with a finality that was utter and complete. “What you did was disgusting, do you understand that?”
Edric didn’t move, but he slid the book from his lap. “It was only once,” he said.
Emira, recalling the dozens of nights she’d heard laughter from his locked room, scowled at him. “What? I doubt that very much.”
“Today-- what you saw-- that was the first time.” He threw back the covers and leaned in towards her, frowning. “Honest, Em, it was never supposed to be about… that.”
“Then what was it about?”
“I missed you.” That thought dropped between them like a stone and sat there, an obstacle. He was quiet for a moment, and she let him be. “Emira, I know you’re going to have your own life. Next year is one year closer to graduation and Mom and Dad are going to start hounding us about what we’re going to do after we’ve passed our trials, and I know whatever it is, you’re not going to want to do it with me. You’ll have your own friends, and a partner, and me and Mittens will be your siblings you only see at weddings and funerals.” Emira edged in closer, afraid to approach too fast in case he startled or closed himself off from her, something between a scream and a sob caught in her throat.
“And that’s okay,” he continued, his voice a flat dead thing, intentionally killed. “But it didn’t start feeling real to me until Grom Night. I was thinking about how I didn’t know if I’d be able to face my fear, but it’s not like Luz with her fedora dudes and cat-faced men or whatever. I’m going to have to confront it sooner or later. This was all I could think of to do.”
“You could have talked to me,” Emira suggested.
He snorted out the last dregs of a laugh. “And said what? ‘Sorry, Em, I’m a possessive bastard and hate that you don’t love me as much as I love you’? Yeah, that would have gone over great.”
She was halfway across the room now. “That’s not true,” she said, soft and wounded. “And it’s not fair.”
“Em, you saw us earlier,” he told her, his mouth turned into the cruel slash of a smirk. “It was the first time I let myself act on them, but those are my real feelings. That’s how it is.”
“I am still mad at you about that,” she told him, and she closed the distance without fear. “How dare you get your first kiss without me? We do everything together.” First words, first steps, first spells, first kiss. He owed her one. Emira sank to her knees on the edge of his bed and then swung her leg across his lap to perch on his stomach, palms braced steady on his shoulders as much to keep him down as to hold herself up. Her wavy hair hung free of her braid and fell around his face as she stared down at him, seeing herself mirrored in his dark eyes, the same as hers.
“Emira,” he said, choked, and his hands twitched at his sides, clawing at the bedsheets.
“Do you know what my real worst fear is?” she asked him. “That we’ll grow up and get good jobs that Mom and Dad pick out for us, and we’ll get old and dusty in this stuffy house forever, just like them. I don’t want to be them, Ed. I want to be us. There’s no me, no you. Just us.”
She kissed him, for real, and the world was light and song and magic, endless waves of it rippling out from her pounding heart, a magic too wild to ever truly be tamed. His lips were chapped and unsteady and their noses and teeth knocked together on the first try, and it wasn’t really all that good. It was perfect.
And there was nothing left in the world that either of them were afraid of.