Work Text:
The bandages wound over Master Qifrey’s skin did a lot to hide his wounds and very little to hide his pallor.
He looked like snow. White hair, white sheets, white bandages, white skin. Coco had seen bodies at funerals. They were never her grandparents being laid to rest — or infants that arrived quiet and unmoving — but they were neighbors. She walked up with her hand in her mother’s to say goodbye, laying flowers on their chests without touching their greyed and fragile skin.
Master Qifrey looked like that. The sheets could be a burial shroud. Her mother had been the one to weave them.
Coco reached again to set her fingers under his wrist. She was unafraid of waking him as she felt for the shallow throb of his pulse. If this got him to stir, Coco would only cry with relief.
She might cry regardless. Now she wished that she’d woken Tetia instead of sneaking here alone. It felt better to cry with someone else.
Sometimes Mom would match her shaking breaths when they talked about the father she didn’t remember. She didn’t feel so selfish for clinging to comfort if they clung to each other.
Master Qifrey blurred in front of her. Coco scrubbed the tears away, trying to blink the fresh ones back. She needed clear vision and steady hands to draw.
Though even the sharpest eyes couldn’t save her current project. The spell in her lap was a dud. She’d torn through a quarter of her palm quire, each attempt worse than the last. The lines were shaky, the rings uneven, the signs unbalanced. Staring at the latest failure, Coco suddenly ripped it out to throw it into her growing sea of crumpled pages.
If he woke up now, Master Qifrey would be devastated to see the carnage. He told them to test every spell, no matter how messy they seemed. Then she had caught some curtains on fire with an unbalanced seal and he had amended it to test every spell unless you believe it may be dangerous. Particularly fire.
He didn’t call them failures. They were experiments instead, each one a marker of progress being made. By learning what you’d done wrong, you saw a little keener how to do it right.
Coco stared at her own mess. Then she took a breath, hopped out of her seat, and set about collecting each crumpled seal. Soon she was staring at the creased visage of each spell, trying to recall what each one conjured.
She changed pens to one filled with mundane ink as she copied the seals and noted their results. The closest she had gotten to the intended design had been an accident when she’d unintentionally tilted her signs. So maybe if she did it on purpose, or if she interspersed wind, or…
Coco jerked her head up. She was bleeding ink into the paper, seeping onto the desk beneath it. She grimaced as she tried to blot it up with an edge of the page. It had eaten into the letters, turning ‘wind?’ into ‘wi ?’
Her own magic was pleading with her. Coco laughed, startling herself. Then it turned into a yawn that forced her to put her pen down in order to cover her mouth. She shook her head, smacked her cheeks, and dragged up to find her bag.
“Goodnight, Master,” she said. It felt wrong to break the silence. It felt too cruel to leave him inside it.
She cleaned the sweat from his brow before leaving, waving goodbye to the overnight healer as she passed.
Coco longed for a windowway. Even in the cold beneath the sea, she was nearly falling asleep as she walked. This morning, Coco was crawling through the uneven heights of the Serpentback Cave. This afternoon, she was trapped in a room with the Knights Moralis and the Watchful Eye, fixed under two distrustful glares. This evening, she met the master of her master and threw herself into his challenge. Visiting her master in his hospital room was the first time she had gotten a break.
Coco didn’t think it was possible to be this exhausted. She didn’t trust herself to fly, certain her feet would slip and she’d go tumbling to the ground.
She was tired enough that she trudged a full street from the healing spire before she remembered her notes on the table. Panic woke her. Heart racing, she darted back to the spiral stairs to launch herself up their height.
The healer wasn’t at the desk anymore, making her rounds on the mark of the clock. Coco scrambled for Master Qifrey’s door, throwing it open and tumbling in with a shout readied in her throat.
No one else was there. It was just Master Qifrey and Coco, and the fluttering of her notes as they skimmed across the floor. Her rush had made a draft that blew them from the desk.
Coco let her breath go, slumping in the doorway. She hadn’t managed to blow the secret of magic tonight. She retrieved her pen and the fallen page, then stopped as she saw the new writing nestled beside her own. A chill pressed under her skin.
Coco lifted the witchlight on the wall. It hadn’t been a trick of the darkness — there was a ragged scrawl marking up the page. It reminded her of her mom’s handwriting — sharp and confident and crammed together in a rush. Some words took her parsing one letter at a time to read.
‘Power is easy, gentle is intricate,’ the scrawling said. ‘Intricate takes a steady hand. Food and sleep. No all-nighters.’
An arrow pointing to a rough draft seal declared, ‘Solid idea.’
Her own note of ‘less signs??? :(‘ was answered with ‘Keep them small.’
The final note, near the bottom of the page, had circled her practice of a water sigil. An arrow led from it to the words, ‘Water and fire are more similar than' before they cut off with a broken line.
When she first saw the writing, a cold fist had closed around her heart. It loosened as she read on, checking three times over that was the full extent of the additions. There were no hidden seals or meanings that she could detect.
The Brimhats talked a lot. Their speech was long and meandering to make her own head wind around like a river. The notes here were opposite; there wasn’t a lot you could hide in such short, punctuated phrases. At least, she thought so.
Coco looked at Master Qifrey. At a glance, he seemed untouched. Then she saw that the blankets had been pulled up to cover his arms, and that made her realize that the room had been warmed in the minutes she was gone. It was drier, too, the air no longer clogged with the salt and humidity that filled the Great Hall.
Just in case, she shuffled towards Master Qifrey’s bed. She wiggled the blankets, listening for the crinkle of paper and hearing none. She checked his skin, inspecting the bandages to ensure they hadn’t been unraveled. There was no forbidden magic hidden around her teacher. It was just warm and dry and the crease in his brow had relaxed.
Coco swallowed. She wet her tongue, struggling again to find her voice. When she called, “Hello?” it was with a hoarse crack to the word.
She stood in the quiet, breath stuck in her lungs, terrified that someone would respond. When no one did, it plucked a new twinge in her chest.
The seconds unraveled. She didn’t move until a door shut down the hall, the healer finishing her rounds.
Checking once more that she’d really collected all of her belongings, Coco took her leave. The scare had woken her enough to fly and the whip of cold air on her cheeks helped keep her alert. She’d be poorly rested in the morning, once again a burden to her fellow apprentices as they tried to beat Beldaruit’s challenge.
Her mind wandered from her. Tomorrow felt ages away. Today she had met three different brim-capped witches, and not a single one of them made sense.
Of the three, the one that confused her the most somehow scared her the least. That was bad. That was stupid. She knew she couldn’t trust brimhats. One gave her the magic that petrified her mother, one had hurt Euini in a way they couldn’t fix. One had hurt Master Qifrey.
His skin — she didn’t want to think about the state of his skin when they found him again. She’d seen a shred of it intermingled with the fabric of his cloak and the memory nearly made her land to heave in the gutter. That had been after Master Qifrey chased after the witch with the smoke veil. He was unconscious when they found him, and bleeding. Almost to death.
The same person who did that to her teacher spoke with such a gentle voice.
Coco drifted to the ground. She made her way through a door and up a narrow stair. She’d followed a dark cloak through narrow, winding paths until he led them out to the day.
The first bandages on Master Qifrey were the ones she’d cut from his cloak and the smoke-veiled witch had placed. Good witches weren’t supposed to practice medicine. Her teacher would be dead if he hadn’t, and Coco wouldn’t even remember it.
She’d hugged him. Coco gripped the front of her shirt, heart suddenly racing. She’d hugged a brimhat witch. Because he had been nice. He had helped them. He had told them everything was going to be okay.
Master Qifrey had chased him down like a guard dog chased a thief. Was he wrong, or was Coco?
There was no light beneath the door to the room she shared. Coco stood with her fingers wrapped around the handle. In her other hand was the page of notes, two different scripts joined to build her spell. By every rule she knew, that magic wasn’t forbidden.
Gentle magic is intricate, he’d written. If it was him. But it had to be, didn’t it? Or was that another feeling she couldn’t trust?
Coco shut her eyes. She leaned her forehead to the door, then pressed it open. She’d look it over in the morning, and she’d try her spell again.