Chapter Text
Qifrey hunches over a scattered sheaf of half-formed spells, kneading at the familiar ache in his neck. It’s been plaguing him for days now, gradually creeping up to his head and knotting behind his eye. A dull pressure that refuses to recede, no matter how much rock ginger tea he forces himself to drink.
He straightens up and surveys his work: floating reduction, lasso winds, bubble shield spells. It’s enough to get him and his belongings to his destination—hopefully undamaged—but Beldaruit’s voice is in his head. ‘Why accomplish in many spells what you could achieve in one?’ He’s right, even if he’s often so aggravating about it.
Qifrey sighs and shuffles a fresh sheet of parchment from the pile. He hovers his pen over the page, but no matter how long he sits there, waiting for the correct configuration to reveal itself, the answer won’t come. Visualizing the necessary keystones is like trying to carry water in his hands. They slip from between his fingers, obscured by impending deadlines and the increasingly painful drumming behind his eye.
He sets his pen down with more force than necessary and presses his fingertips into his eyelid. He half expects to feel the telltale furrow of maturing vines, but his eye is as it’s always been—warm and soft. No branches, no twisting tendrils of sapling stems, just the unceasing thundering in his brain, cracking his skull with arteries of white light.
“Hey, water witch—” a hand drops on his shoulder—“you’re needed topside.”
Qifrey jerks his hand from his face and upends the inkwell at his elbow. “Olly,” he gasps, scooting back from his desk before the ink can drip onto his robes.
Oluriggio stumbles out of the way, nearly tripping over a stack of twine-wrapped books. “Wasn’t tryin’ to startle you,” he laughs, pushing his pointed cap back into place.
Any other day, Qifrey would be happy to see him, but today his presence twists his stomach like bedding after a restless sleep. He looks to the ceiling, waiting for his breathing to steady—for the sharp, piercing pain pulsing in time with his heartbeat to recede. “You know, most people find it customary to knock before entering someone else’s home,” he says when he’s gathered himself enough to speak.
“Those people probably weren’t given a key by the owner,” Olruggio teases, waving the offending object in the air as he passes by Qifrey’s desk into the kitchen.
Qifrey grinds his thumb into his temple. “A decision I regret more with each passing day,” he says, extracting his Palm Quire from his cloak and closing the circle on a reverse time spell. The spreading puddle of ink freezes, switches its trajectory, and curls back into the bottle like an oily black eel. “You said there was an emergency above ground?”
“Right—” Olruggio opens the lid on a pot of stew and inhales deeply—“a fire. In Balmoral. Seems some traveler had the bright idea of lighting a campfire near a field of Brittle Brome Grass.”
Qifrey corks his inkwell and slides it into his pocket. “In these winds?”
“Mm,” Olruggio hums. He ladles up a mouthful of stew, visibly relaxing when it reaches his lips. “Well, that’s city folk for ya,” he sniffs, settling the ladle on a trencher before changing his mind and spooning up another mouthful.
Qifrey laughs and shakes his head. “You can have a bowl, you know.”
“No, no, there’s no time,” Olruggio argues, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and re-lidding the pot. He pauses, looking from Qifrey’s bare shelves to the assortment of oddly-shaped parcels littering his table. “What’s this you’re workin’ on, anyway?”
Qifrey scrapes his drawings into a stack and tucks them into a leather portfolio. “The spells?”
“No,” Olruggio says, picking up a frying pan-shaped bundle from the pile and turning it over in his hand. “The parcels. You remodeling?”
Qifrey slips the portfolio into his waistband and lifts his cloak back over his shoulders. “Ah…no. Moving, actually.” He stands and takes his cap from the back of his chair. “Shall we go, or did you want to continue ransacking my kitchen?”
“I—” Olruggio sets down the wrapped frying pan and hurries after him. “Wait, are you serious?”
Qifrey steps into the street. The artificial sun slots into his eye like a knife into its sheath. He winces and raises his hand to shield his face. “This would be quite a lot of effort to put into a joke.”
Qifrey tries to leave the conversation there, but Olruggio takes him by the elbow and pulls him to a stop. “Since when?” He asks, his voice graveled with disbelief.
Qifrey fights down a wave of irritation. They’ve had this conversation twice before, and he hasn’t had time to retool his story in the intervening days—to turn it into something less honest, less real. “I found a place when I helped repair the water wheel on the Dalelray farm,” he says, choosing the easy lie first—fooling himself that this time it will be enough. “I guess it was around…three weeks ago?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Olruggio clarifies—soft, like he’s trying to coax a wild animal into eating from his hand. “Since when have you been planning to move?”
'Forever,’ Qifrey thinks, ‘and it was your idea to begin with.’ But that’s not fair, and he knows it. He turns his eye to the sky—the thin yellow haze stagnating over their heads like tepid pond water. “I—I don’t know,” he begins, already hating the lie and himself for telling it. “The opportunity presented itself, and I just thought—” he smiles and shrugs a shoulder, hoping it comes off more casual than it feels—“maybe it isn’t such a bad idea.”
Olruggio frowns. He squeezes Qifrey’s arm—a gentle pulse. “After all this time, I wish I knew why you still feel you have to lie to me.”
On a normal day, Qifrey would appreciate his friend’s uncanny ability to see through him. It had been a lifeline in the early days before he knew himself well enough to recognize his own needs, let alone to voice them. Now, that attentiveness eats at him, pulling him apart like strips of flesh from a scavenged corpse. He can’t be seen. He can’t be understood. Not fully—not without giving up his life and the sacrifices Olruggio has made for him to have it.
“It’s not a lie,” Qifrey insists, his smile tight.
Olruggio pulls Qifrey towards him. His breath is hot against Qifrey’s ear. “Is this about the Brimmed Caps?” He asks, his voice lowered into a forceful whisper
Qifrey’s vision throbs in time with his heartbeat. “It isn’t,” he says, the denial so brittle it cracks in the back of his throat.
“Whatever you’ve discovered, whatever you’re planning,” Olruggio barrels on, already convinced of his conclusion. “You can tell me. Have I not proven myself to be trustworthy?”
“You have,” Qifrey agrees easily. “Of course, you have.”
“Then stop trying to push me away,” Olruggio pleads. His grip tightens around Qifrey’s arm, like he’ll lose him if he lets go.
Qifrey’s fingers twitch at his side. The conversation is long past salvageable. Once Olruggio believes Qifrey’s move is a scheme to conceal his pursuit of the Brimmed Caps, there’s no dissuading him from it. He’ll continue to dig until there is no option left but to start them back at the beginning. Qifrey knows this, but he sifts his mind for an excuse, anyway, desperate to find another way, to reassure himself that it’s possible to protect Olruggio without losing him completely in the process.
“Qifrey,” Olruggio prompts—impatient.
Too much time has passed. Whatever safe path might exist through this tangle of misunderstanding, Qifrey won’t be finding it now. He begins to lift his hand to unbutton the flap on his hat, but the chimes from the Windowway Parlor rattle down the alleyway, startling him into stopping.
Olruggio turns his head toward the sound. He screws his mouth up—jaw shifting—then looks back to Qifrey. “Come on,” he says, dropping Qifrey’s arm and tilting his head towards the Silver Garden. “We can talk about it later.”
The surface world is dry and overwarm for the season. A parched wind gusts through the surrounding brush, fanning thick plumes of smoke into the sky. Qifrey squints at the horizon, shielding his eye with his hand. He can’t see the flames from their vantage point, but he can feel their suffocating heat, settling over his shoulders like his heavy winter robes.
“Olruggio! Qifrey!” A member of the Knights Moralis glides through the air towards them, his robes flapping against his back like a pair of scarlet wings.
Qifrey recognizes the man from his many childhood run-ins with the Knights Moralis. ‘Colkutt,’ his brain supplies. An elder lieutenant of the guard. As stringent as he is haughty, to the detriment of anyone with the great misfortune to encounter him.
“It would seem those from Ghodrey have a different definition of the word ‘haste,’” Colkutt says as he lands, his nasal voice lilting with condescension.
“Forgive me,” Olruggio says without looking at him. He steps to the cliff’s edge and peers down to where the villagers are congregated—scattered along the foothills like wildflowers. “I would’ve thought the Knights Moralis could handle a simple fire.”
“Our primary directive is not to interfere but to oversee the methods of those that do,” Colkutt snaps, brushing away his staff’s pennant when it flaps into his face.
“Of which you are certain to do a more than thorough job,” Olruggio retorts, his forced formal language poorly papering over his disdain. He steps back and tilts his head toward the dark cloud mounting in the distance. “Has the fire grown since I left?”
Colkutt screws his mouth up sour-tight. “It’s the blasted wind,” he says, wagging his staff as though admonishing a child. “Every time the fire is contained, the wind blows and carries the embers.”
Olruggio squints at the towering rafters of smoke. He crooks his finger against his bottom lip, rubbing his beard with his thumb. Qifrey follows his gaze— anything to avoid engaging Colkutt in conversation—but the sun is too bright, even buried behind a dense shroud of cotton haze. It pounds on his eye like a door, rattling the landscape into a frenzy of scattered shapes.
Qifrey sucks in a breath and lowers his chin to his chest, trying to blink back a wave of dizziness. He feels more than sees Olruggio glance at him—a question poised in the lean of his shoulder.
The wind picks up again, flattening the field like a rolling pin. Olruggio gives up on Qifrey and looks back to the horizon. “There!” He says, signaling with a lift of his chin. “D’ya see that?”
Qifrey looks, but all he finds is pulsating pain. It squeezes his brain, pulverizing his thoughts into an unintelligible mush.
Olruggio sighs at the answering silence. “The fire isn’t natural,” he explains, resting his hand on his belt.
“What?” Colkutt pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket and swabs at the sweat beading in his hairline. “Based on what evidence?”
“The wind is blowing against us to the South,” Olruggio says, pointing at Colkutt’s whipping pennant. “The fire is spreading in the opposite direction.”
Colkutt's mouth hangs open—half-shaped over a knee-jerk rebuttal. “But—” he lowers his staff, watching as the pennant twists and turns against its tether—“that’s not possible. The village lies to the North. We’ve already doused the land to protect it.”
Olruggio shrugs. “It’s the work of a contraption, most likely.”
“Who would approve of a contraption that creates a fire that cannot be extinguished by normal means?”
“No one,” Olruggio says simply. “It wouldn’t be legal.”
“As suspected,” Colkutt hisses, his voice taking on the hard-edged fanaticism Qifrey remembers from his youth. “It can’t be but the work of the Brimmed Caps!”
“Or perhaps that of a naive apprentice,” Qifrey counters lightly when Olruggio stiffens at the Brimmed Caps’ mention. “We shouldn’t be so quick to assume.”
Colkutt rounds on him, eyes as dark as the bruises he’d leave on Qifrey’s arm whenever he was tasked with returning him to Beldaruit’s side. “And what reason do you have to defend them?” He demands, the question punctuated with a spray of spittle. “I cautioned the Security Council so many years ago about your entry into Magical Society. Ever since your arrival, the Brimmed Caps’ malfeasance has increased tenfold! Twentyfold!” He pants, his face gone stark white except for the bright blotches of pink on the apples of his cheeks. “Don’t think the timing has escaped our notice."
“Enough,” Olruggio’s booming voice cuts through Colkutt’s tirade. “Qifrey’s right,” he says, stepping between them. “The explanation could be as simple as a poorly-drawn glyph. We won’t know for sure until we find it.”
Colkutt whips away from Qifrey, retraining his ire on Olruggio. “And how, pray tell, do you suggest we do that?” He demands, driving his staff’s end into the ground. “The fire has besieged the forest. It is not safe to enter!”
“I can take us,” Qifrey offers, fingers tracing the outline of the Palm Quire in his pocket.
“But the steam!” Colkutt squawks. “The smoke! We won’t be able to see a blasted thing!”
“I didn’t realize the Knights Moralis were so fainthearted,” Olruggio smirks and folds his arms over his chest. “If you fear a moment’s discomfort, then you needn’t join us.”
Colkutt gathers his staff in both hands, glaring at Olruggio as though to set fire to his robes with the heat of his contempt alone. “If the source of the fire is a contraption as you surmise, a member of the Knights Moralis should be present to retrieve and dispose of it.”
“Then it’s the only option we’ve got,” Olruggio says, gesturing at the crowd of village people huddled below them. “Unless you’d have us sit by and watch these people’s homes be destroyed.”
Colkutt’s mouth puckers with indignation. “Of course, not.”
“Then it’s decided,” Olruggio says with finality. He turns his attention, settling his heavy, probing gaze on Qifrey, instead. “Y’ready to go, then?”
Qifrey startles, the flow of the conversation momentarily lost to the thunderous drum of his heartbeat in his head. He meets Olruggio’s eyes, sculpting his face into a reassuring smile. “As ever.”