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To save his life, Qifrey the Witch had to do two things: lose his eyesight, and make everyone forget all about—well, Qifrey the Witch.
The first had been the easier sacrifice, though easy was not a word he would place anywhere near the memory of that day. The silverwood was a parasite of connection, Qifrey had learned. It fed not on water or light but on the channels that bound one to the world. Block those channels and you starved the tree; let them remain and the tree would drink its fill until there was nothing left of the host but wood and silence.
Channels was too clean of a word for it. It made it seem as though they were pipes that could be capped and rerouted rather than the building blocks of a life. His sight was a channel. His name was a channel. Every memory that any living person held of him was a channel the silverwood could follow back to its host, a root that extended not through soil but through the minds of everyone who had ever known his face or spoken his name or sat across from him
That was the ultimate cruelty of it all. The silverwood could not be cut out. It could only be starved, and it fed on being known.
So Qifrey, desperate and hopeless, had drawn the largest, most intricate piece of magic he had ever attempted. The last seal his eye would ever see. He had drawn it on the floor because no piece of paper could hold it, building it one ring at a time. Each ring was a layer of erasure: first the acquaintances, then the colleagues, then the friends, and at the center the people he loved most. When he completed it, he felt each thread snap and fall away from the tapestry that was his life. The outermost rings barely stung. The middle rings ached. The innermost ring—Coco, Agott, Tetia, Richeh, and at the very center of everything, always at the very center, Olruggio—felt like dying.
The spell was a hand reaching into his chest, pulling out roots one by one. But the roots were not the parasite's alone. They were also his, the ones he had put down over years of knowing and loving and being known and loved in return.
The silverwood, starved of its precious channels, had withered quickly, though it did had not left without a fight. It thrashed inside him, tearing at the tissue of his lungs, splitting two ribs in its death throes. When it finally released him, it took his remaining eye with it. Perhaps it had been a parting toll, or just plain cruelty. The last root to leave was the one that had wound itself around his optic nerve, and when it pulled free it took the nerve with it, and the world went dark and had never lit up again.
That had been, approximately, twenty years ago.
Twenty years of solitude and blindness had taught Qifrey many things, most of them useless and several of them beautiful. He knew, for instance, that rain had a different feel to it depending on the season—spring rain was thin and quick while autumn rain was fat and slow. He knew that the way a voice was returned to you told you everything about a room's size and its furnishings. He knew that people's footsteps were as distinct as their faces had once been.
He knew, too, that memory was not stored in the eyes. That was perhaps the most surprising lesson. He had expected blindness to dim the pictures in his head, but the opposite had proven true. The images had sharpened in the dark behind his lids, growing more vivid with each passing year. It was as though his mind, deprived of new material, had turned conservator, restoring and polishing what remained obsessively. He could still see the atelier. He could still see the rolling fields. He could still see the four girls at their desks.
He could still see Olruggio.
But that was a thought he did not allow to deepen. Not today, that is—today was for the festival.
Ezrest was the grandest city in Zozah, so it wasn't all too surprising that it hosted its fair share of celebrations and festivals throughout the year. The Spring Turning Festival had been underway since morning, drawing visitors from across Zozah, and even from the bench where Qifrey sat at the edge of the square the noise of it was enormous. Music from at least three competing bands, children shrieking, the hiss of fireworks being set off in the square. The smells were just as varied as the sounds: candied apples, roasted nuts mixed with cinnamon and clove, fresh bread, flower garlands, beer and wine and a thousand other smells he could not catalog with any accuracy.
He had come to enjoy the chaos of living in a city like this. It was the main reason he had settled here, renting a room above an apothecary's shop at the city's edge. The noise and smells asked nothing of him, filling the spaces in his chest without requiring him to open it up.
To his neighbors he was nothing more than the quiet fellow who mended minor enchantments. Pleasant enough, kept to himself, had a way with small magics though he never spoke of where he'd trained.
He was not lonely, that was the official position. He was a blind man of moderate means who kept to himself and troubled no one and was troubled by no one in return. If the shopkeeper downstairs occasionally left pastries outside his door without being asked, that was simply the kindness of neighbors and not an indication that he had become, in the two decades since the spell that took his sight and his name from the world, a figure of pity.
He was not lonely, and the festival was pleasant, and the candied apples smelled very fine.
He found a bench near what he judged to be the edge of the square. The stone was sun-warmed and he sat with his cane across his knees, turning his face toward the music. This was enough. This had to be enough. The proximity of joy, if not the full possession of it.
He had almost convinced himself of this when he heard a voice.
"—told you already, we're not spending the whole day at the ink merchant's stall, this is a festival, not an errand—"
A woman's voice, but young still, mid thirties perhaps. It was joined by a second one, also female.
"I wasn't going to spend the whole evening, I only wanted to—"
"You wanted to compare three different batches of midnight-blue and I know where that leads, Coco, it leads to an hour of you holding bottles up to the light. I love you but I am not doing that tonight."
"You always say you love me right before you refuse to do something."
"Because it softens the blow. Olly, tell her."
A third voice, and the world seemed to stop.
"Leave me out of this," said Olruggio.
They were close, perhaps ten paces from his bench. He could hear their footsteps clearly; three sets, one heavy, two lighter, two brisk and one easy.
"The wisteria is nice, at least," said Agott. Her voice was warm and full where it had once been small and uncertain. "Remember the wisteria at the atelier? Along the east wall?"
He should leave. He should stand and take his cane and walk back to the room above the apothecary and close the door and sit in the quiet, feeling grateful that they were still together and, apparently, happy.
No one had ever cured a silverwood infestation before, there was no grimoire to consult, no precedent to follow, no way to know whether the parasite was truly dead or merely dormant, waiting for a channel to reopen. If they came to know him again, even as the blind mender on the bench, would the tree stir at the scent of a connection rekindled, however faint?
He stood to make his retreat when a child hit his cane running past, sending it across the cobblestones. The child ran on without stopping, and the cane rolled, and a hand picked it up, and the hand belonged to Coco.
"Here—oh, I'm sorry, are you all right? You there on the bench, is this yours?"
He had schooled himself for this exact situation. In the early years, when the temptation to seek them out had been strongest, he had practiced what he would do if chance put them in his path. He would be polite. He would be brief. He would give nothing away. He was a stranger, and strangers did not tremble when a woman they had taught to draw her first seal handed them a cane.
"Thank you," he said, and took the cane. "Yes. Mine. Clumsy of me."
"It wasn't you, it was the child—honestly, they're everywhere, like mice." She laughed. "I'm Coco. Are you—"
"Coco," came Agott's voice, "leave the poor man alone, he's trying to enjoy the festival, not be interrogated."
"I'm not interrogating anyone, I'm being friendly!" Coco turned, Qifrey heard the rustle of her cloak as she did. "Am I harassing you? Tell her I'm not harassing you."
"She is not harassing me," Qifrey confirmed, and he heard Agott arrive beside Coco. Behind her came Olruggio.
"See?" said Coco. "I'm sorry, Mister, I didn't get your name?"
"Frey," he said. He did not use the name Qifrey anymore. He had considered keeping it in those early days, since no one would recognize it. But the sound of it had become unbearable, a key to a house that no longer existed, and so he had let it go along with everything else. Frey was close enough to ache and far enough to bear. A half-name for a half-life. "Just Frey."
"Frey," Coco repeated. "Nice to meet you. This is my partner Agott, and this is Olruggio. He's family."
"A pleasure to meet you," Agott said.
"Likewise," said Olruggio, and nothing more, which was very much what Qifrey had expected.
"Nice to meet you all."
"Well," Coco again, "Frey, would you mind terribly if we sat with you?"
He should say no. He should say he was just leaving. He should take his cane and stand and walk into the crowd and disappear, which was, after all, what he had spent twenty years practicing. The risk of sitting here was entirely theoretical but the theory was all he had.
"It would be my pleasure," was what he said instead, because he was, and always had been, a fool where these people were concerned, and twenty years had not cured him of it.
The bench accommodated the four of them poorly. Coco sat to his right, close enough that her elbow brushed his when she moved, and Olruggio sat to his left, smelling faintly of wine. Agott had opted out to sit on the ground, Qifrey could feel her rest her back against Coco's knees.
"Are you from Ezrest?" Agott asked. Her manner was courteous but evaluating at once, just like he remembered.
"I've lived here some years. And you?"
"We're visiting from the south," Coco said. "We've actually been looking at a property just outside the city. It needs a great deal of work, the roof's half gone and the garden is all wild, but the bones are good, Agott says, and the main hall has these enormous windows—"
"Coco is telling you all of this," Agott said dryly, "because we mean to establish an atelier there, to teach young witches."
"Agott! I was getting to it."
"No, you were boring Frey to death. You have this way of straying from the point you were trying to make in the first place. I love you for it but most would say it's amongst your most tedious traits."
Qifrey suppressed a smile. Their bickering had the worn, comfortable feeling of something that had been practiced for years, a duet so familiar that both performers could have done it in their sleep.
"An atelier," he said carefully. "Are you witches yourselves, then?"
"We are! I just passed my final examination last autumn, which means I am officially allowed to take students." Coco's whole bearing changed. He could hear it; the excited breath, the shift of weight, the way her voice brightened and opened like a window thrown wide. "It took me, well, it took me rather a long time, to be honest." She laughed. "Longer than most, but I got there in the end."
Qifrey heard how Coco's hand went to rest on Agott's hair. "Agott right here will be my watchful eye. Every atelier needs one, to ensure a witch's students are well-cared for. She will also manage the practical side of the atelier, she's better with structure. I'm better with, well, with the students, probably. I know what it's like to struggle, so."
He knew what it had cost her, that admission. Even now, even grown, even with Agott's hair under her hand and five successful examinations under her name, he could hear the old uncertainty threaded through the new confidence. She had always been hardest on herself. He had spent a great deal of effort, once, trying to convince her otherwise.
Qifrey cleared his throat. "That seems like exactly the kind of teacher worth having."
One of the three bands started up a new song, faster than the last, a fiddle leading and a drum following. A song made for dancing, clearly. Coco was on her feet before the second bar finished.
"Agott. Up."
"Coco, I am perfectly comfortable—"
"Up, up, up, this is our song!"
"This is not our song, this is a generic turning-dance. They play it at every festival in every town between here and the sea, and you have simply decided it is our song, you sentimental—"
"Up, love."
He heard Agott being hauled to her feet against her better judgment, and then the two of them were off, Coco saying, "Frey, we'll be back, don't let Olruggio bore you to death with workshop talk."
Then there were only two.
Neither of them spoke for a while, which gave Qifrey plenty opportunity to spiral. Olruggio in Qifrey's mind was thirty-three years old, sitting in a chair by the fire with his sleeves rolled to the elbows and his hair messy. That exact image had been polished by repetition into something almost holy, kept in the dark behind his eyelids.
But the man on the bench beside him was not thirty-three. The man on the bench was fifty-three or thereabouts, the same age as Qifrey, and twenty years had moved over his face like weather moved over the land, and Qifrey could not see any of it.
Was his hair grey? Qifrey would have wagered yes. Olruggio's mother had gone grey at the temple forty, and her son had always been more like her than he cared to admit. So the temples would certainly taken a silver hue by now. The beard, if he still kept one—and Qifrey thought he probably did—would be salt-and-pepper now, perhaps mostly salt. Did he still not brush his hair properly? Did he have the same line at his brow that deepened when he was thinking? Were there new lines? Crow's feet and laugh lines?
"They'll dance all night," Olruggio said at last. "Every festival, they drag me out and then they abandon me for the music and I end up talking to whoever's closest. You drew the short straw, I'm afraid."
"I don't mind," he said. Anything to break the silence. "They're good together,"
"They are. Took them long enough to finally give it a try. I watched those two circle each other for years, both of them were convinced the other one wasn't interested. I nearly locked them in my workshop once just to get it over with."
That sounded exactly like them. "What stopped you?"
"Agott would have killed me, I'm pretty sure."
Qifrey laughed fondly, and in the next breath Olruggio went rigid beside him. Qifrey knew Olruggio's small peculiarities better than he knew his own soul. The stillness of Olruggio puzzling out a sigil-structure, the stillness of Olruggio catching him in a lie, the stillness of Olruggio looking at Qifrey the Witch.
"I'm sorry." Qifrey's laugh died as quickly as it had bubbled up in his chest. "I didn't mean to—" He didn't know how to finish the sentence. Laugh like someone he wasn't supposed to be anymore?
"There's nothing to apologize for." The easy, festival-warmed quality was gone from his oldest friend's voice. "I just—" He stopped and Qifrey heard the sound of a hand running through hair. "This is going to sound strange, but have we met before?"
Qifrey turned his face toward him. He hoped his expression was composed, he had not had much occasion to practice composing his face for company. "I don't believe so," he said evenly. "I'd have remembered the voice."
"Hm." A hand moved through hair again. "It's just… you laugh like someone I used to know. I think. I'm not sure. There's a—it's hard to explain."
The fiddler continued their merry dancing-song. Somewhere in the square Coco and Agott were turning together and Qifrey could not see them. The night air was warm and smelled of boughs and wine and the last of the candied apples.
"It's the way you laughed," Olruggio said at last, sounding apologetic. "Has anyone ever told you that you have a familiar laugh? I know that sounds strange."
"It doesn't sound strange." It sounded like the worst thing Qifrey had ever heard and also the best. It sounded like a door he had bricked shut twenty years ago, and behind it something was scratching to be let back in. "Some laughs are common enough."
"Not like that." Olruggio was quiet for a moment and Qifrey could hear him working through something. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm like this. You're a stranger, and I'm sitting here telling you that your laugh sounds like—I'm not usually—" He exhaled. "Forgive me. I'm going to get candied apples before they run out."
He stood. The warmth along Qifrey's left side vanished, and Qifrey's hand shot out before thought could catch up with it, fingers closing around Olruggio's forearm.
His arm was thicker than he remembered. The muscle beneath the sleeve was denser, the shape of it different. The warmth of him was still the same, though.
"Stay." What folly. What absolute, ruinous folly. "I'd like to hear what you have to say about the familiarity, if you don't mind."
The tension between them eased and the bench dipped again, Olruggio's weight settling beside him, now closer than before. Qifrey released his arm and folded his hands on the cane, trying to look as though his heart were not attempting to break his ribs.
"Right." Olruggio cleared his throat. "Right. Well." Another throat-clearing. "There's this desk."
"A desk?"
"At the atelier. The old one, where the girls learned magic—Coco and Agott and two more, Tetia and Richeh. It's mine now, the atelier. Has been for… well, since whoever ran it before stopped running it." He sighed, frustrated. "There's this desk there, right, sits in front of the west-facing window. Perfect spot for a desk, really. You can work there clear through the afternoon and into the evening if you want, the sun doesn't leave it until it's nearly set. It's the best desk in the atelier. I've never used it."
He could see the desk in his study. He could see it as clearly as if the blindness and the two decades had never happened; his desk, the grain of the wood, the groove where the quill sat, the dark ink stains.
"It's just a desk. Good wood, solid construction, right height for working. There's no reason on earth not to use it, but every time I think about sitting there I get this feeling. It's like reaching for someone else's cup, you just know it isn't yours and you have no right to drink from it. I feel like that about the whole room, really. I sleep in the bedroom down the hall. The room attached to the study has a perfectly good bed and I have never slept in it. I keep the door open and sometimes in the evenings I go in and I light a candle and—"
He stopped, probably searching for words.
"Go on," Qifrey prompted. His voice was very even. His knuckles around the cane were white.
"I sit there and I feel like I'm waiting for someone to come home. I don't know who and I don't know what they look like or what their name is. But the desk is theirs and the room is theirs and somewhere in my chest there's a space that is also theirs and I have spent years trying to fill it with work. Nothing fits because the space isn't shaped like anything I know, it's shaped like a specific person and I cannot for the life of me remember who."
Qifrey was unsure what to say. Something in him longed to tell him everything. He wanted to say, The desk is mine. The room is mine. The space in your chest is mine, and I have been keeping the matching space in my own chest warm for twenty years, and I am sorry, I am so sorry, I did not want to leave but the alternative was dying and I was a coward who wanted to live. He wanted to reach over and take Olruggio's hand and press it to his own face and let him feel the bones beneath the skin. Let him feel the shape of a man he had once known better than anyone. He wanted to be known again.
"I sound mad," Olruggio said flatly. "I'm aware."
"You don't sound mad." Qifrey's fingers unclenched from the cane, one by one. "It makes me think of something my teacher used to say." He thought of Beldaruit, wondering whether he was still alive. Twenty years was a long time and Beldaruit had not been young when Qifrey knew him. "He said that the heart has its own memory, and that it keeps what the mind cannot. That you can take a name from someone, take a face, take every fact and detail, and the heart will still remember."
Olruggio was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Qifrey began to wonder if he'd overstepped.
"Your teacher sounds a lot like my teacher," he said at last. "Wise old sort? The type who says something simple and you spend the next ten years figuring out what he meant?"
"Something like that."
"What was your teacher's name, Frey?"
The name that was on his tongue was Beldaruit. He waited for the silverwood to stir, expecting the telltale tightening in his lungs, the splintering pressure behind his lungs, the root reaching up from its deep sleep toward the channel he was about to reopen.
Nothing came.
"His name," Qifrey said, "was—"
"Candy apples!" Coco's voice shattered the moment, Qifrey was almost glad for it. "The woman at the stall said these are the last batch so consider yourselves blessed—Frey, here, take this one. Careful, it's still warm, the stick's a bit dodgy, so eat it quickly before it falls apart—"
She handed it to him. The apple was indeed still warm, smelling like cinnamon and cloves.
"There. Now you're properly inducted into the festival. You can't really say you've been to Spring Turning unless you've eaten one of these and gotten sugar on your sleeve."
"I'll take your word for it," Qifrey said, and bit into the apple. It was too sweet and stuck to his teeth. Some things didn't change.
They stayed together until the festival wound down. The bands thinned to one and the crowd drained from the square in twos and threes, their voices fading into the side streets. The four of them remained on the bench eating candied apples and talking about nothing.
Qifrey was not truly part of it. He was a stranger they had adopted for the evening, a stray taken in from the margins and fed candied apples. But he sat among them and he laughed when Coco said something funny and he offered a jest when the conversation lulled. The new atelier came up, and Qifrey listened quietly while they debated the merits of east-facing windows versus north-facing ones for a teaching room.
At some point, much past midnight, Coco fell asleep on Agott's shoulder.
The other witch sighed, "And there she goes. Every festival, without fail." He heard her shift and grunt softly. "Olly, help me with her?"
"Got her." Olruggio's voice was close, then farther, then close again. "There we go. Agott, you've got her legs?"
"I've got her. Coco, love, arms around my neck. There you are."
Coco mumbled something incomprehensible before he heard her settle against Agott's back.
"I think that's it for us. Frey," said Agott, "where are you staying? We can walk you home."
"That's kind of you, but I know the way." He tapped the cane against the cobblestones. "Advantage of the dark; every route is equally well-lit."
"You're sure? It's no trouble."
"I'm sure." He stood, finding his balance after sitting the entire evening. "Thank you for the company. It was good to be among people again."
"We'll be in the city a few more days," Olruggio said. He stood as well now; Qifrey could tell by the direction of his voice, further away than it had been on the bench. "Looking at the property, finalizing some things. I'd… I'd like to continue our conversation, if you're willing."
Qifrey reached inward, the way he had learned to do since that day at the tower, checking for the silverwood like one might probe a healed wound for signs of infection. He searched for the stirring, the pressure, the root uncurling toward the channel letting in the light of his star.
There was nothing. Only the ordinary beat of a heart that had, against all evidence and expectation, survived its own emptying.
"Yes," he said, smiling. "I'd like that."