Chapter Text
Time passed. Agott tried not to worry about Coco and Iguin the Brimmed cap but failed. She’d been unable to shake her thoughts —or her dreams— of the girl she’d sat with in the forest next to that petrified tree.
After she’d spoken to Master Qifrey —who said that he wouldn’t tell anybody, for some reason—, she’d waited for over a week for him to say or do anything else, but he simply hadn’t. She’d been worried that he’d still be angry with her, but his anger had never shown on his face again after that first night. She’d been worried that by only reporting anything after the fact, she’d breached Master Qifrey’s trust in her, but he continued to teach her with his same optimistic pep day after day as though nothing had happened. She kept worrying.
After two whole weeks of nothing but silence from Qifrey, Agott had nearly been prepared to confide in Olruggio, when an overheard conversation at bedtime stayed her.
“I’ll say nothing of it,” Olruggio’s harshly accented baritone rasped from around a corner.
Agott, not accustomed to eavesdropping, had flattened herself against the wall in the darkened hallway to listen at the door of the great-room from which the light and sound spilled.
“If it’s as you say, and all we have is Agott’s word that Coco can do magic or that there ever was a brimmed cap in that village, then there’s not a whole lot we can do anyways.”
That decided it, and Agott went to bed alone in the bedroom off of her study.
She dreamed of Coco again.
***
Another month passed without issue.
Agott worried every time that Qifrey or Olruggio was out of the atelier that this would be the end, that the Knights Moralis would barge in, force her testimony, and then fly off to erase Coco’s memories. She was her own worst enemy.
“Agott?” Qifrey’s voice pierced her spiraling mental fug, but her self-possession was such that she did not look up, feigning continued focus on the sigils and signs she was puzzling over from the pages of her primer.
“Yes, master?”
“Are you alright?”
“Yes, master.”
“Only, you’ve been staring at that paper without moving for a while. If you sit still much longer, you’re bound to get a cramp.”
“I’m sure it’s fine, master. We have to be able to hold still and steady, after all.”
“Just so, but I only ask because your conjuring ink has dripped off of your pen into one enormous blot with how long you’ve been holding still.”
Agott blinked and came to her senses. The ink-blot on the piece of scratch-paper she’d been hovering over was nearly dried despite having had a full dip of ink fall on the one spot.
Agott tisked at herself in disgust, set her pen down on the small glazed porcelain block set aside for its rest and nonchalantly stretched both arms up and over her head.
Through her own squinted eyes, she realized that not just Qifrey, but Tetia and even Richeh were looking at her with mild concern.
Qifrey diverted his eyes first, casting a glance over his other apprentices and said, “I think we could all use a bit more movement just now.”
Richeh and Tetia both affected stretches of their drawing arms. Richeh nodded quietly, but Tetia perked right up.
“Yeah! The weather’s much too nice to stay cooped up today!” Tetia enthused.
“I could do with walking around a bit,” Richeh reasoned.
“Why don’t we all have a bit of a fly. It’s still early and if we don’t dawdle, we can fetch in the groceries from Kalhn for the next few weeks?”
“Yeah!” Tetia cheered.
Richeh made an affirmative noise.
“Oh…” Agott trailed off, the change in mental gears from silently fretting to concern with a flight to Kalhn catching up with her.
“Come on!” Tetia urged, helping Agott to her feet. “You must be thinking ‘Agotta go find some new books!’”
“Yes, thank you, Tetia,” Agott said, thoughtless of the consequences of saying so.
“And thank you!” Tetia delighted.
Agott, long acquainted with Tetia’s personal philosophy, simply nodded to avert a spiral of a different kind.
***
They touched down in Kalhn after a flight that was no faster or slower than normal. Agott and Richeh had held formation on Qifrey and each other without discussing any plans to do so; they kept a few strides ahead of him in level flight, and spaced off to each side. Tetia, as was her wont, flew high above them, alternately swooping down in front to hug the rolling hills of the landscape or soaring high above the trees to keep the oncoming view of Kalhn in sight.
As usual, Kalhn was crowded. Witches from all over East-Central Zozah came and went on errands and the streets were the typical blur of colorful hats and robes. Mostly adult witches and mostly they walked or —disdaining to climb stairs— flew on sylph shoes. Other flying or floating contraptions were in evidence, but no more than was usual. There were also the usual small numbers of apprentices from the small number of ateliers who followed their masters around like ducklings, very much as Agott, Tetia, and Richeh were now doing. Almost invariably, those apprentices dressed in colors more like to those of their masters than Agott and her fellow apprentices. There was a grey-haired woman with two boys following her who looked old enough to be on the verge of taking their fourth test; all of them were clad in brown hats and robes that barely reached their knees. There was a girl running to catch up with a man some distance ahead of her; both of them were wearing green, though his was a darker forest green and hers was much lighter so that it almost hid how it matched her hair the color of freshly mowed hay. There was a very short woman being escorted by her two apprentices, both barely shorter than she was, and all wearing the same shade of purple so that it was hard to tell the master from the apprentices until you got a good look at their faces and noticed that one of them had prominent laugh-lines and crows’ feet.
The sound of running boots caught Agott’s attention and she turned to look at the running girl who’d passed them in time to see the apprentice turn down an alley, completely failing to follow the witch in darker green Agott had thought was the girl’s master.
Odd, Agott thought, wasn’t she running to catch up with him? Evidently not.
Then again, there wasn’t any reason why they all needed to follow Qifrey, which fact reminded Agott that she did want to go and have a look into a bookstore as Tetia had suggested.
“Master,” Agott piped up, but Qifrey already had her number.
“Go on, Agott,” he said, turning his head to favor her with a soft sidelong smile, “just meet us down by the market in an hour. I’m going to see about some sewing notions —Olruggio’s missing a button— but I’ll want your help carrying things back once I’ve gotten the groceries.”
Tetia began noisily exclaiming her own plans before grabbing Richeh and charging off in another direction. Agott, for her own part, fell out of line and walked on sedately down a side street.
Sewing notions, Agott’s spiral caught up to her. Couldn’t have picked up buttons from Coco’s shop. But then there had been little reason to go to her shop again in the first place, and little to recommend the village.
Agott had very nearly begun to suspect that Qifrey might already have suspected Coco of something worth going back to her mother’s shop for when she was caught short by a sight at the far end of the street she’d just turned onto.
Agott, emerging from an alley, caught sight of the apprentice in light green she’d seen on the previous street, only this time, the other girl was not running and didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry at all. In fact, the other girl was practically strolling nonchalantly down the street, heading right towards Agott, and thus directly in the opposite direction of where she’d been going the last time Agott had seen her. The other girl had seemingly run up one street, ducked down an alley, and then doubled back in the other direction.
The other girl who was wearing a light green hat and robed.
The other girl whose hair —the color of freshly mowed hay in a meadow— matched her hat and robes.
The other girl who had stopped in the middle of the road with a mortified expression on her face and who was even now locking eyes with Agott.
The girl who was very obviously Coco.
Agott’s preteen vocabulary lacked the sorts of expletives that her cortisol-addled body yearned for with which to express itself right at that instant.
Both girls moved practically as one, but Agott moved faster. She rushed across the narrow street, seizing Coco by the hand as she went. Coco, who had begun trying to flee directly away from Agott, was caught off-balance by Agott moving in the same direction as her, and the two of them half jogged and half staggered into an alley between two houses.
Coco nearly ran headlong into a wall, almost loosing her pointed hat in the process, when Agott pulled her up short by the arm, spun her about, and pressed the two of them up against the wall. Coco, preoccupied with not loosing her hat, did not have enough hands to both hold onto it and prevent Agott from seizing her by the front of her robes.
“What do you think you are doing here?!” Agott hissed, her teeth clenched and eyes wild and frantic with the panic of seeing Coco in the middle of Kalhn. Relief, rage, and weeks upon weeks of wanting just to see Coco again caught up with Agott and activated every fiber of her being.
Coco, her lips pressed tight together, her eyes wide, tried to see an exit with Agott’s face in the way, did not say anything for a second, but swallowed to try and clear her throat.
“I’m… er… looking for the… conjuring ink… wholesaler’s?” Coco guessed lamely, her voice pitching up at the end.
Agott felt one of her eyes twitch and her vision actually blurred. She blinked to regain her senses, and then scowled at Coco; it was hard to go too seriously wrong with a scowl.
“Do you perhaps mean that you’re looking for the magic stationer’s?” Agott asked.
“Do I?” Coco asked, her voice failing to come back down from the pathetic heights of inflection to which it had climbed.
Agott released Coco’s robes and backed up until she was slumped against the opposite wall.
They both stood there and quietly breathed for a minute or so.
Agott, failing to come up with any idea for what to do with an outsider disguised as a witch wandering around in Kalhn, fell back on what she did know to do.
“The Magic Stationer’s in Kalhn is called the Starry Sword. They’re this way, but they’re easy to miss since the door to the building moves.” She took Coco by the arm and escorted her there.
If she’s going to be here, Agott reasoned bleakly, I can at least keep an eye on her.
***
For as long as she would live, Agott would never be certain of how they’d managed to get in and out of the Starry Sword with the bottle of ink that Coco had come to buy without arousing mister Nolnoa’s suspicions that anything was amiss. In the end, Agott guessed it had something to do with how Coco didn’t ask any questions apart from “how much is it?”
The two of them were now sitting on a bench in a small garden at one side of a square in a low-traffic part of Kalhn and not saying anything to each other.
“Thank you, Agott,” Coco broke the silence.
Agott tried to decide what to say and settled on.
“Don’t mention it,” then added, “ever —to anybody.”
The silence returned, but Agott broke it this time when she drove the heels of both her hands into her eyes in an effort to squish the sights of the last hour out of her mind.
“I can’t BELIEVE you’d be so reckless as to just waltz in here! This is Kalhn! Only witches are supposed to be here!” Agott protested.
“The ferry only stops you if you don’t have a hat, and most witches can fly over the walls in any case. I let my sylph-shoes dry long enough this time, so they made the flight no problem. I’ll probably be able to make it back home before sunset too, they’re faster than the first time I tried drawing the seal.” Coco lifted up the soles of her bright yellow shoes to show off the halves of two seals on the soles of each, then rolled back down into her proper seat next to Agott.
“We’d be in so much trouble if anybody ever found out,” Agott moaned, not loosing focus on what really mattered. “Master Qifrey would probably get in trouble with the Knights Moralis, you’d have your memories wiped, who knows what they’d do to me if they knew that I knew.”
Coco gingerly reached out to pat Agott on the back reassuringly, but Agott bolted upright and scooted back from her.
“Why did you have to come to Kalhn? I left you a whole bottle of conjuring ink and you still had some left from what that… other witch gave you,” Agott tried to pick up the threads of what must have driven Coco to be here.
“Well sure,” Coco admitted, sheepishly rubbing the back of her head, “but I knew that I’d go through the ink you left me sooner or later, so when my own ink ran out, I figured it was important to figure out where to get more before I needed it. So I figured out where lots of witches were from what everyone in my village knows, learned it was called Kalhn, and then tried getting here by myself. Then, when they said I couldn’t use the ferry, I realized that they probably wouldn’t sell me any ink either unless they thought I was a witch, so I watched the ferry for as long as I could that day to figure out if all witches dress like Master Qifrey and you, and when I saw that hats and robes come in all colors, well… I live in a tailoring shop,” she gestured at her robes. “It wasn’t hard to come up with something that would fit in.”
Agott sighed again and put her head in her hands, grabbing hold of the edge of her hat to avoid losing it.
“Honestly the most dangerous part was just that I didn’t think about how I was going to avoid being seen flying until I was halfway to Kalhn that first time,” Coco admitted. “After I realized, I tied up my hair, covered it in a scarf, and pulled my hood up over it until I was nearly all the way home.”
Agott groaned. The situation just got worse and worse the longer Coco talked. She was an outsider who didn’t merely know the secret of magic, but she was also an outsider who’d realized that practically anybody could make a pointed hat who wanted one and so long as they could do a bit of magic if a witch asked, there was practically nothing to say that she wasn’t a witch unless the Knights Moralis caught her alone and started asking her questions she wouldn’t have answers to. Questions like: Who are your parents? Where’s their atelier? Are they at the Great Hall?
And of all the outsiders who could have done this, it just had to be her, Agott’s mind wailed at her. She didn’t even know she was looking for a Magic Stationers.
“There are enough apprentices wandering around Kalhn that nobody’s looked twice at me until you,” Coco interrupted Agott’s spiral.
Agott opened her eyes, hat in hand, and stared at the grass under her feet. Was it that simple? Was witch society so porous that an outsider could really just walk into Kalhn blithely and without a care? Was a pointed hat all it took for…
Master Qifrey hadn’t looked twice at Coco and she’d run right past him. Had he seen a hat and thought that she was just another apprentice he didn’t know? Was it that simple.
Agott tipped back and stared in horror at the sky as the myriad implications came home to roost in her mind.
Coco could cast spells. She’d apparently improved enough at drawing the sylph shoes seal in a few weeks that she was able to fly from her home to Kalhn and back alone. When you got right down to it, most witches who shopped in Kalhn lived there. Qifrey and Olruggio weren’t unique in having an Atelier off in the middle of nowhere, but as a rule, most witches didn’t overfly large ranges of country every time they needed to pick up a bottle of milk. Coco would only need to come to Kalhn for conjuring ink maybe half as often as Agott and her fellow apprentices did. In principle, Coco would only be exposed perhaps once per month, and the only witch who might come to recognize her was mister Nolnoa. Coco could pass for a witch, would spend very little time anywhere where witches might see her coming and going, and she might very well only get to really know one other witch besides Agott; Coco could probably keep coming to Kalhn for ink every month for the rest of her life and, so long as she kept her head down, it was very possible that she might never be noticed for an outsider.
Agott stood up, determination filling her. If Coco was going to keep risking exposing herself like this and thereby put Agott, and Master Qifrey, and their whole atelier in peril of the Knights Moralis every time she tried this trick, then the least Agott could do would be to supervise her so that if she ever did anything that might risk exposing her to the Knights, then Agott would have a chance to know before the knights found out.
“Alright,” Agott said, affecting the very best imitation of her mother’s tone and confidence she could manage. “If you’re going to keep coming here, I’m going to require that you keep me appraised of everything you’re getting up to,” she declared.
“You want me to come to your Atelier and let you know how I’m doing?” Coco asked, sounding surprised. Agott froze for a moment with her back to the other girl, her eyes going wide at the idea, but she gathered herself again.
“Of course not!” She rebuked. “You can’t visit the Atelier. We have Master Qifrey and Olruggio, our watchful eye. Either one of them could report you if you just walked into our atelier as though you lived there!”
“Okay, okay!” Coco soothed like she was trying to calm a frightened animal. Agott didn’t pause to reflect on whether that was an apt reaction, but she stalled on what to suggest instead.
“Should you come and visit me then? You’ve done it before,” Coco suggested.
“That’s no good either,” Agott frowned, losing all momentum for declaring things. “I’m not supposed to travel without my teacher, so it would have to be all of us apprentices together with Master Qifrey if we came to visit you again.”
They both considered the problem for a moment, then Coco shrugged.
“I could write to you.”
“People would wonder about such close contact between an apprentice and an outsider if we just handed letters to somebody heading between your village and Kalhn.”
“Well, why not just deliver the letters as far as Kalhn ourselves,” Coco suggested. “We both have to come here. We could just leave the letters here and pick them up or leave new ones any time we come through here.”
Agott slumped. She had no better ideas, but they couldn’t simply leave the letters with somebody like mister Nolnoa, and Coco couldn’t use an official channel to leave her letters any more than Agott could sent dozens of letters to an outsider through them. They needed a decidedly unofficial channel. Eventually, the answer suggested itself when Agott tripped over a loose cobble-stone half-buried in the grass while pacing.
“If we use this stone-shaping spell,” Agott explained, drawing it on a page of her palm quire, “we can reshape this rock into an envelope for our mail.” She suited action to words and closed the circle of her seal while the page balanced against the face of the rock. Almost at once, the rock sagged in Agott’s hands and she pressed it flat between her palms, then began running her hands about it to shape it first into a plate, then into a bowl, and finally into a stone balloon several times the size of the original rock.
“Wow!” Coco enthused, her face lighting up. “Alright, let me try,” she said, removing a circular notebook that at least looked like a palm quire from an inside pocket of her robe. With painstaking care and almost comically exaggerated care and focus, Coco drew a miniature version of Agott’s stone-shaping spell, then pressed the paper onto the hollow stone. A dimple as wide across as her hand sagged inward on the rock and Coco dug her fingers into it to peel back the sagging stone substance. Inside, the stone was large enough to perhaps conceal a whole book. Coco resealed the stone again and the two of them fussed around with partially reburying it in the garden bed before they both rose to stand, nodded, and parted ways.
Agott tried desperately to think that she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her entire life, but was too exhausted from the events to care. She schlepped down to the market in time to meet with Qifrey, Tetia, and Richeh.
“Did you not find any books you were looking for?” Qifrey asked.
“I got sidetracked helping somebody who’d never been to Kalhn find the Starry Sword,” Agott admitted, the lie of omission dropping out of her mouth like a whole other stone.
“How wonderful!” Qifrey clapped his hands in delight, “such a kind and helpful young witch you are, Agott!”
Before Agott could answer, there was a pair of arms around her.
“Hurray! Did they thank you, Agott?” Tetia asked, squishing Agott only slightly.
“Yes, she did,” Agott responded flatly. This set Tetia off again in paroxysms of sympathetic thankfulness.
They were some time in getting home.
***
That night, Agott found her nerves still being eaten. It was still early, so Tetia and Richeh probably weren’t abed yet either. She cleaned up her desk, and left her study to go to theirs. Inside, the two of them, seeming to have packed up earlier than her, were braiding one anothers’ hair before sleep.
Tetia had her eyes closed as Richeh —her hair already fully braided— worked on her hair.
“Agott?” Richeh gently turned up both eyebrows in cool surprise at Agott’s presence. “What brings you here?”
Tetia opened here eyes to see Agott crossing to sit down with them among the cushions.
“I’ll bet she was thinking ‘Agotta—’” Tetia began, but was interrupted by Agott keeling over to rest her head in Tetia’s lap.
“Agotta get my head rubbed after the day I’ve had,” she admitted quietly.
For her own part, Tetia said nothing but began rubbing Agott’s head while Richeh continued braiding her hair.
“Thank you, Tetia,” Agott said after they’d kept at it silently for a few minutes.
“You’re welcome, Agott,” Tetia replied. She kept quiet for only a minute more before bursting: “and thank you, too.”