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A small fire crackled, the size of a heart, spiraling gently floating embers into the evening air.
The boy, Euini, was a bit desperate to be helpful, and to be fair his fire glyphs were precise and adequate. He offered her his notebook, with its little flame cupped between his palms, his mouth a thin line, like he hoped this spell might, in some small way, make up for his imposition on her life. Everything he did sounded a little like I’m Sorry to Alaira, even when he didn’t say anything.
She offered him a smile, but she also motioned his notebook away with a bat of her hand.
“It might be useful for you to learn how to make a campfire the old-fashioned way,” she said.
He was an exile from witch society, after all. If they ever ran out of ink, or if anything happened to her… Well, she’d never had apprentices of her own, but this seemed like the important thing to teach right now.
“R-right! Useful…” He ended his fire spell with some flapping of his notebook, and picked at the paper edges with nervous fingers. This seemed to be a habit of his. The edges of his new notebook were already torn and twisted, just a tiny bit. “Thank you, Professor.”
She tried to keep her expression upbeat, but honestly he kind of saddened her.
He was a sweet kid… She couldn’t help but feel like this world would eat him alive. If she couldn’t do anything else, she’d have to try and toughen this little guy up a bit.
For this reason, she didn’t say I meant you’re supposed to be useful for yourself, not for me. Coddling him scared her.
She was new at this.
“I’ve been roughing it out in the woods a few times,” she said instead, summoning up some humor and good cheer.
Through the fall of his hair, she could see just a hint of his eyes, big and brown and downright glittering with respect.
They’d already gathered firewood earlier in the afternoon, and had made a nice camp for themselves in the lee of a pair of large boulders, slate gray and slathered in dry yellow lichen. They had weaved their way into the mountains during their travels, keeping low for safer terrain and always mindful of potential hiding places, keeping to the shelter of stones and the shaggy pines that lived at this level. Euini sat among the roots of one of those pines now, as if held by the knots of dirt and wood.
They had already stacked up their firewood as well, with stones in a circle around it, and now Alaira rocked from her sitting position up to her knees with a sigh like an old man.
“Your notebook is useful for more than just spells sometimes,” she said, and tore some pages from her own book. She set the papers strategically amidst the thin sticks. “There are all sorts of things that will catch on fire more easily than the wood, and you’ll need that. Grass. Dried leaves. Some of your shirt if you’re desperate enough. Just use your head and what you have around you.”
Euini nodded along emphatically.
Finally, Alaira pulled a small leather pouch from her belt. Untying the strings, she poured the contents into her hands: a collection of jagged stones. She handed two of them to Euini.
“This stuff is good for starting a fire,” she said. “I collect it when I spot it around… It’s called hardchalk. There are big hunks in the rock around here, if you pay attention… But don’t worry about that part right now. We have plenty and it’s not like you run out. You just have to take good care of it.”
She took his small hands in hers, and guided him in a sort of mime of striking the sharper hardchalk piece over the other.
“If you do it fast enough and at just the right angle, it’ll make a spark,” she said. “It’s kind of like snapping your fingers.”
“I can’t snap my fingers,” he admitted.
“What do you mean? Everybody can snap their fingers.”
He demonstrated a sad sort of… fast rubbing of his fingers that indeed made no sound.
“That’s amazing,” she said, dumbfounded.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. Try the rocks instead.”
It took a lot of trial and error. Mostly error. But Alaira kept cheering him on, making the failures into jokes more than problems. An amusing story for the future, perhaps.
“Everybody is like this learning how to use hardchalk,” she said. “I sucked at it too when I was first trying it, and I was older than you. The great equalizer!”
It was starting to get dark by the time he was finally getting some sparks and she urged him to scoot closer and aim for the paper edges. They could smell the hint of smoke, and the page curled slightly, but still not much of a fire was happening.
Eventually, though, she stopped cheering altogether and just watched him, because he was nowhere near giving up. His brows were furrowed, his bottom lip sucked in a little, and he was studiously and intently doing his work. Over and over again.
This boy was good at failure. He was good at learning from it, honing it, until he got what he needed.
Finally he got the tiniest flame, and she maybe got too excited, waving her arms at him and telling him to get down and blow at it. He accidentally blew it out. But at that point he had a small grin on his face in his own earnestness, and he already got to striking the hardchalk again for his next try. He was happy, invigorated.
He finally got his fire, and Alaira fed it gingerly with more paper. Maybe this was what being a professor would be like, she thought in that moment. Strategically sliding more kindling into his flames, in between the sticks, at just the right places. She had been pretty good at that all the times she proctored the second test at Romonon.
Of the two of them, she didn’t know who was more relieved and pleased with themself, once they had that fire burning bright between them.
“You hold onto them,” she said, when Euini tried to hand the hardchalk back to her. She got all the extra pieces back in the bag, tied it off, and passed it over to him.
In case anything happens…
This made her feel better.
“Should we sleep without our magic tents too?” he asked excitedly, getting into this roughing it business.
She handn’t thought of that, and wasn’t particularly enthused by the prospect. “... Well, why not,” she said. “It’s a mild night.”
After a dinner of jerky and some bready lentil patties they’d picked up in the last village they passed through, they laid out under the stars and under their cloaks, the fire dwindling to just smoke smell and a dull glow amidst the remaining lumps of charred wood.
“Every night it’s amazing,” Euini said in the dark, curled up among the roots.
“What is?”
“There’s so many stars. There aren’t stars in the Assembly.”
Alaira had spent so much time out in the world in her own travels, it was easy to forget such things.
“It makes me feel small,” Euini said.
“In a bad way?”
“No… I guess it’s like…” She heard him shift, fidgeting again as he tried to find the right words. He still wasn’t used to expressing his actual thoughts, and perhaps had to fight through the instinctual expectation that he would be annoying. She wondered if he thought about his new little friend Riche at times like this. “I guess I’m kind of used to feeling small in a bad way. But this isn’t like that at all. This is like oh, maybe it’s not so bad to be small. Maybe we’re all pretty small, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Hm,” she said. “I think you’re onto something.”
She wasn’t sure she liked the smallness, though. It reminded her there was a huge world around them, too many things for her to possibly teach a child, or protect him from. Small things were so easily squashed.
How did Qifrey do this? With four of them, to boot?
“Thank you, Professor,” said Euini.
What was he thanking her for? Well, that was just his way.
They drifted to sleep in no time, tired from another long day.
~
In the morning, Alaira woke up with black fur in her face.
Most nights this happened – the protective talisman at Euini’s neck shifted as he turned in his sleep, the glyphs disconnected, and he went on snoozing as an enormous scalewolf.
She blearily readjusted, accidentally kicking his flank, and his tail beat the ground a few times before flopping again. He was curled around her, which also happened sometimes. She gave a slightly exasperated sigh and swung an arm around him, giving the fur on his side some brusque pets. His tail beat the ground again and he made a low snort of a noise in his sleep.
As a human, Euini was still awkward in his own body, and had trouble knowing what to do when faced with the conundrum of physical affection.
But as a scalewolf… He seemed to reveal a secret craving for an arm slung over his shoulders, or a hug around his neck, or a pat on the head. Alaira even scritched his ears once without thinking about it and he leaned into the touch immediately, not mad at all that she was treating him like a dog. If anything, she got the impression he’d never been held much before.
It made her angry on his behalf. He was growing out of the age of being held already, but every child needed arms around them at some point, didn’t they? He needed to slow down and get a damn hug, if it was going to be like that.
She sat up and maneuvered over his hind paws to get to the fire, which had petered out over the night and was now a pile of blackened wood. She made sure there weren’t any remaining embers that could catch a careless scalewolf tail on fire, and then rummaged in her bag for her spellbook.
She had a number of pre-written spells on tiny, translucent pieces of paper. She peeled one and placed it high on her cheek, like a beauty mark. It created the illusion that she was wearing a full face of makeup exactly as she liked it. Without the effort, of course.
Arguably, there wasn’t much reason to look her best anymore, when they were out roughing it and she was more or less an exile from society too now. But it was something grounding. It was a way to be at her best, to at least look the part of a professor who had everything together and knew exactly what to do next.
Euini gave a big dog yawn, long tongue curling, and then raised his head to look at her.
“Time to wake up,” she said, although she was mostly making that up. “Get dressed, sleepy head. No wet dogs at breakfast.”
She had transplanted her need for looking her best, for that sense of stability, onto him, and encouraged him to prepare for the day like he would normally if he was at the Assembly still. She hoped this made their journeys less frightening for him, as well as keeping up at least some semblance of personal discipline in all this.
“Um, Professor?” Euini asked. It was still always a little funny for his tiny voice to come from the direction of that wolf.
“What’s on your mind?”
“... Nothing.”
Well that wouldn’t do. But she didn’t press him yet. She let him pick up his knapsack in his mouth and drag his day clothes and toiletries behind the trees. A spell like a curtain made of leaves hung itself up between the tree trunks for his privacy.
Maybe he’d had another bad dream. He tended to have those–anxiety dreams more than anything.
She made a new fire with a spell and started cooking some cornmeal pancakes in a skillet made from an earth glyph, as a treat.
When he emerged, he was human again, in his robes and his scalewolf cloak. He came to sit beside her and she casually put an arm around his shoulders and squeezed.
He stiffened, it was awkward affection, but she would get him used to this eventually. To being cared for.
“Did you have another bad dream?” she asked him finally.
He gave her a look of such wonder, like she was a mind reader rather than he was just completely obvious.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” she added, peeling off pancakes onto a makeshift plate for him.
“I’m not sure it was a bad dream exactly…” he mumbled. She had to fight the urge to tell him to speak up. Being too harsh on him wouldn’t work either, it was a constant balancing act. Instead she just listened harder. “I keep dreaming that I’m a scalewolf, running. Just running. In some endless place. It’s hard to explain but… maybe the bad part of the dream is when I wake up and I’m just me.”
Qifrey, what am I supposed to say to that?
In silence, Alaira served herself her own portion of breakfast.
“Should I spend less time as a wolf?” Euini asked nervously.
“I don’t know,” she said, opting for honesty. “It’s a process, isn’t it? Learning to be ok with just yourself. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that process is ever entirely over.”
“Even for someone like you, Professor?” She could tell her directness rattled him.
She gave him a warm smile. “We’re more alike than you probably think,” she said, injecting her usual humor, her usual gumption. “It’ll help, the more you believe there’s nothing particularly wrong with you. Like what you said about the stars last night. You’ll be saying things like that more confidently someday. The feeling will stay for longer than just a night, and eventually… Maybe it’s not most of the time, but at least a consistently usable amount of the time. Someday.”
“Someday,” he repeated.
“Yeah. It doesn’t have to be today. Right now, it’s just breakfast.”
Just breakfast. Shared together, and then they would continue their traveling. One foot in front of the other, step by step. When you looked at it like that, you barely even noticed how far you’d gone, until you finally looked over your shoulder and the whole mountainside was sprawled behind you.
It was advice for herself as much as him.
~
Euini seemed perfectly fine with long bouts of silence, but Alaira was not. She got too easily bored. She wasn’t used to being around somebody and not talking their ear off, so during their days of walking, she usually talked his ear off.
They spent their time on the move, because they hadn’t fully decided on their course of true action yet. It would probably be wise to leave Zozah, if the Knights were looking for Euini. It would probably be equally wise not to spend too much time in any one town along the way. But neither of them knew their actual destination yet, not at this point of the journey. So they just kept moving. It would find its way somehow.
Today, Alaira talked about birds. She pointed out a four-legged warbler perched on a tree branch, scratching its fluffy head with scaly black talons.
“You always know what the birds are called,” Euini said, mystified. They stood still for a long time just watching the bird before it left.
“Sure. I used to study them.”
“Used to?” He caught himself. It was maybe the first time it had fully occurred to him there were many things she used to do before becoming his guardian. She’d had an entire life of her own.
She winked at him. “That was my contribution to society. I traipsed around through the woods researching birds and taking notes on them. Not a bad gig, right?”
She had loved it more than anything. It was the one thing she was allowed to have all for herself, just for herself. There were reasons she never chose to become a professor.
Maybe it was more selfish than a witch was supposed to be, but with her sort of family life it had been the only option. The only escape she could think of. Even witches need their own ways of surviving in the world.
“My grandfather was the first one to teach me about birds,” she said, as they continued their walking, boots shuffling through the underbrush. She had bought Euini boots at a recent town, better shoes for their rough terrain. “I spent a lot of time with him to get away from my more immediate family… I even wanted him to become my professor, but he wouldn’t take me on. Nothing personal, he was just too old.”
Euini listened so attentively she could practically hear his ears working.
“He kept birdfeeders outside his house, a little cottage up here on the surface. I think I annoyed him to be honest. He was an old man just trying to rest, and here I was this little tyke always wanting his attention. He came up with this funny way of distracting me… He told me about a beautiful, magical bird called a golden snipe. It was small and brilliant yellow and even glowed, like a miniature sun. But no one had ever seen one in person. He said if I could find one of them in his yard, that would make us both famous.” Alaira laughed. “The old coot! It worked, it kept me occupied and out of his hair for hours, on my hands and knees digging around his garden, looking for this glowing bird… It’s a nice memory though, at the very least. And in the weirdest way, I think that’s what inspired me to study birds when I grew up. I just never stopped loving them.”
As her story winded down, they found themselves on an outcropping of rock, gazing down at the hills dipping below them, the brownish grasses waiting expectantly for the first frost of the season.
“You never know what’ll stick with you, I guess,” she concluded.
This would be the time someone might add their commentary in a conversation, but again, Euini wasn’t much of a talker. He picked at his sleeves, shifting his boots.
She never wanted a student.
You really can’t predict anything in life.
She turned on her heel and started her next ramble, her next story.
“Have I ever told you how bad my first sylph shoes were?” she asked him. “I just about broke my neck…”
~
That evening, she left the fire to Euini. It still took him awhile to make one without magic, but he eventually got it going again, right as Alaira’s fingers and toes were starting to go numb from a sudden falling of cold. They had a grainy stew for dinner, and then sat awake for longer than usual. Eventually, the fire had burned down more than they expected.
“I’ll get some more firewood,” Euini said, bolting up to his feet and scurrying off into the trees before she could even comment.
He’d been extra jumpy this evening. Had she accidentally upset him with one of her stories? Tripped over some secret trap she wasn’t supposed to as a professor?
Again she found herself thinking about Qifrey. He’d been such a curmudgeonly, hapless kid. How did he navigate these delicate balances with children so well, as an arguably equally hapless adult? She could remember the brightness in his eye when he first finished off his paperwork and was ready to take on apprentice applications. He was exhausted of course from all the effort, and yet this might have been the happiest she’d ever seen him, even in their long friendship. Something appealed to the job so much to him, in a way Alaira had never fully understood.
She liked kids, sure. That was why she proctored the second test from time to time. But with Qifrey it was something more, something she still hadn’t figured out yet.
It was like he was bigger than himself all the sudden. Running himself ragged, packing lunches and writing lesson plans, and yet more fully a person than she’d ever seen him, like he’d spent his whole life before then being slightly transparent and just now he’d solidified. It just worked that way for some people, maybe.
She still didn’t think she was quite that sort of person. She envied him a little.
Was it still possible to do this job when she wasn’t like that?
She realized suddenly that the fire had burned all the way down, the last wood crumbling into just silvery ash chunks. Her fingers and toes were starting to get cold again.
A different coldness traveled down her insides.
Euini was taking too long. He’d gotten firewood perfectly fine on his own before… And he could transform into a scalewolf whenever he wanted… But then where was he?
The most horrible thought arose in her mind, illogical and unwanted but impossible to ignore.
What would she do if he just decided to run away one day? If one day she made such an ignorant mistake that he ran off alone, where she couldn’t protect him at all anymore? Into this world that would so easily destroy him…
It would all be her fault.
He was such a sweet boy, a boy she honestly believed had so much potential in him, but that would all be snuffed out so easily and it would all be her fault, her fault for not being the right person in the right place.
She was starting to get to her feet, her head spinning despite how irrational she knew this sudden fear was, when Euini finally re-emerged from the trees. She breathed out too big a sigh of relief. She almost wanted to yell at him but stopped herself. That would be stupid. And anyway, she mostly just wanted to yell at herself.
He was holding his cloak in his arms, bundled up and bulging with something. Now that she was paying closer attention, she doubted there was any firewood in there.
“What took you so long?” she asked, careful to keep her tone measured despite her heart still jumping around in her chest.
He was a little breathless. Red-cheeked and red-nosed from the cold, with this little pinch of a smile on his face.
“I found you some golden snipes, Professor!” he finally got out, the smile showing a glint of teeth. Had his canines gotten sharper lately?
She blinked at him. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at what he’d said.
“Golden snipes don’t exist, Euini,” she said slowly.
“I know.” His smile grew again, so brilliant but so crooked, like it knew it should be sheepish but for once couldn’t bring itself to be. He was… well, shit. He looked damn pleased with himself, didn’t he? “I thought you’d like it anyway.”
He finally let his cloak fall open and… light poured out. Coin-sized balls of glowing yellow drifted up from his arms like floating stars, rising slowly into the air, flickering daintily.
Alaira was mesmerized. She couldn’t stop her own grin from splitting her face. Soon they were both looking up, craning their necks to keep watching those glittering lights as they rose higher and higher and higher.
Glowbugs. Not birds at all. Alaira recognized them, had seen plenty in her travels, but this was the first time they had ever meant something so… so…
Something.
“You’re pretty incredible, kiddo,” she said to him, no longer caring if she was coddling him or not.
Her voice strained at the edges with how proud she was, and how grateful, and how inconsolably content.
“You too, Professor,” he said, grinning right back.
He really meant it, too.
They both did.
They decided they didn’t need a fire that night. With just a simple warming glyph, they lay under the stars and told one another stories.
These were two people who still did not know where they were going. But they were happy to enjoy one another’s company in the meantime.