Kit Fawkes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 04:56 pm
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 04:56 pm
Part One: And Bids You All Adieu
Title: And Bids You All Adieu
Universe: The Kitverse
Warnings: Spoilers for Godchild, but that's about it.
Summary: The merry adventures of Kit Hargreaves, and the trouble he gets up to in the two worlds he calls home.
Notes: Part 2-A of the KitVerse; make sure to read And Miles To Go first!
▶ Innocence
It's a wonderful place for a growing boy, the land of Daventry.
His life is about as close to perfect as such things can get, really. His grandmother dandles him on her knee and reads him the most wonderful stories; his grandfather smiles and winks and always seems to have a sweet hidden away in his clasped hand when he dashes over and pries open the lightly-calloused fingers in search of his prize. The castle is enormous and the surroundings are beautiful, and someday he'll learn to climb the solemn old oak at the edge of the forest, the one that's been standing proudly since before even his grandfather was born. His toys are elven-made and kept safely in a chest that sits at the foot of his bed, awaiting a sulking gray day when the rain keeps his play indoors for the afternoon.
He has everything a boy could want, and next week he will be six years old—a fact which he has made sure to announce proudly to everyone he meets, which has earned him smiles and pats and an extra cookie from the kitchen, one he’s not supposed to have before supper.
He doesn’t know why his mother’s smile sometimes wobbles when she looks at him, when she brushes his bangs off his forehead and peers down into his eyes with a strange look on her face. Sometimes he goes and looks in the mirror afterward, trying to find what it is she always looks at, but all he ever sees are plain old eyes, ones as blue as her own.
He wonders why that could be as he gazes at the six candles flickering merrily on his cake, and wishes he knew as he closes his eyes and blows them all out with one breath.
▶ Determined
The trouble with names, Christopher thinks sulkily as he slouches on his grandfather’s throne and swings his legs in irritation, is that they’re always things that other people give you.
It’s not that he minds his name, precisely. It’s a rather good one, in his opinion, and there are certainly much worse ones to have—like Ifnkovhgroghprm’s, for example. He had a terrible enough time mastering all the letters that went into his own, back when he was learning to read and write; he can’t imagine how difficult it must’ve been for the wizened old gnome back when he was first learning to spell his name. And he likes the name Christopher, really, because it has a nice ring to it, all crisp consonants and sleek vowels. Prince Christopher of Daventry. It sounds regal. It sounds right.
What he doesn’t like is that everyone seems to forget it is his name, because no matter how often he reminds them of it, they’ve all grown so used to calling him Kit that his insistence on being called Christopher never lasts for long. He doesn’t remember how that nickname first came about, precisely, but he does remember a little red hood with tufted ears, and a pair of black furred mittens to match, and he imagines that must’ve been the moment when the nickname set in stone because they never fail to bring it up when they reminisce about his younger days.
Kit is an awful name, he thinks sullenly, sinking a bit lower into the shadows as he listens to the merry chatter coming from the torch-lit ballroom down the hall. Kits are helpless, they’re babies. They’re not kings or conquerors, not like a Christopher could be.
He stays there a long time, sulking and moping and pretending he's not listening to the merriment he's currently abstaining from, and it’s his Uncle Alexander who eventually finds him. He appears quietly, in that unobtrusive way that seems to characterize all his uncle's movements, standing silhouetted in the archway with the light of the ballroom behind him. He’s missing the party, Christopher knows, but he vaguely recalls that Uncle Alexander doesn’t like parties anyway, not like Mother does.
“I thought I might find you out here,” he says in that same quiet way, walking over to where Christopher is still slouching on the throne. “Was the party too much for you?”
“They’re doing it again,” Christopher says, trying to sound indignant but somehow the words only come out petulant, instead.
It takes Uncle Alexander a minute, but then he gets it. “They can’t help it,” he says, taking a seat on the steps leading up to the throne and leaning his back against it. “They’ve come to think of you that way, and it’s hard to shake a habit like that.”
“My name is Christopher,” he insists anyway, folding his arms over his chest. “Not Kit.”
Uncle Alexander goes quiet again. “Mine is Gwydion,” he says after a long moment, which makes Christopher sit up a little straighter, because this is something he’s never heard before. “That’s what Manannan always called me. It’s been years since then and...honestly, I still haven’t gotten used to being Alexander yet.”
There's silence for a minute, still and stagnant amidst the shadows, and then he goes on, “What is it you don’t like about being called Kit?”
“I’m not a baby,” Christopher answers at once, because he’s given this a great deal of thought in the time he's spent sulking out here in the throne room. “And I’m not a weakling. And whenever they call me that, it’s like they’re treating me as one. I’m not a little kid anymore. I’m ten years old.”
“No, you’re not,” Uncle Alexander agrees, and runs his fingers over the smooth, worn stone of the steps. Silence lingers again, marred only by the chatter from the ballroom down the hall; for the most part, though, it’s quiet in the room, which is nice. He’s fond of the dark, really. It’s comfortable and quiet, and for a moment he wonders if perhaps his uncle feels the same, turning the question over in his head until he speaks again. “But kits grow into foxes, if you give them enough time. Rosella always said you were as clever as one.”
And then his uncle pushes himself to his feet, turning halfway to flash a smile before walking back toward the archway from whence he came. He stands there a moment, seeming to consider something, and then remarks over his shoulder, “Sometimes you end up with a name because you’ve earned it, Christopher.”
Once his uncle is gone, Christopher sits up a little straighter still, tracing his fingers over the arms of the throne as he looks out over the darkened room, imagining it filled with light and noise and people as he sits in judgment, as bright and merry as the party he's missing. That’s the life of a king, he knows, handing out the law and ruling over his subjects. And he could be a good king if he tried, he thinks, with a fine name to match.
But it’s soothing in the shadows, without all the bustle and fervor of bodies in motion, and he sinks down in the seat again as he thinks of running and playing, the thrill of a chase, the exhilaration of being smarter and faster and better than everyone behind him—and of snowy days in the woods where the winter’s chill never seemed to touch him, safe and snug as he was beneath his beloved fur hood.
“Kits grow into foxes,” he repeats under his breath, the thought stirring eagerly in the pit of his stomach as a smile creeps across his lips.
All right, he thinks. Then maybe I will, too.
▶ Magic
There’s a mirror that hangs on the wall of the throne room in Castle Daventry, a beautiful silver mirror set in a carved-wood frame, and it hangs there so prominently because it’s one of the three fabled treasures of the kingdom, the mirror that once belonged to Merlin himself. It’s a magic mirror, of course, because it’d hardly be a treasure if it wasn’t, and it’s said that the mirror never lies; it always tells the future, and it always tells it true.
Which makes it perhaps the kingdom’s most important treasure, really. In the stories of ancient past, the mirror has foretold things like droughts and invading armies; that sort of warning has always given the kings of Daventry time to prepare for turmoil on the horizon, and it’s been instrumental in keeping the kingdom safe, almost moreso than the magic shield with the power to guard its bearer from all harm. The king before his grandfather traded it away on a false promise, he knows, or so the stories go: King Edward lost it, and Sir Graham recovered it, and that’s how he ended up as King Graham, instead.
The odder part is, there’s a strange sort of link between that mirror and his family. He can’t explain why he feels it, but he knows it’s there just the same; it’s an innate sort of sense, an understanding of how it works without knowing a bit of the workings of it. It doesn’t just show the future, after all; his grandfather saw his grandmother’s face in it, once upon a time, and his uncle saw his aunt in it, too. And his mother never got the chance to gaze into it when she was his age, as it turns out, because the mirror clouded over on the day his uncle was kidnapped, and the shadows didn’t break until the day he returned—which is part of what made him realize that the magic was tied to the family, after all.
He’s not supposed to look into it, he knows. Magic mirrors aren’t toys, and knowing one’s future is a dangerous thing. More importantly, it’s a privilege; the mirror will reach out to him when it’s his turn to have a look, his family has assured him. It did for all of them, in the moment they needed it most. It will be the same for him someday, once upon a time.
He is twelve years old, the first time he steals a look. But to his dismay, all he sees is himself—a young, dark-haired boy looking back through startling green-gold eyes.
He creeps back to bed and lies awake long afterward, wondering what it could mean and lamenting that there’s no way he can ask without admitting he stole a look in the first place. But it bothers him for hours, because none of it makes sense; no one in his family has eyes of that color, and the mirror is supposed to show the future, not his own reflection. Is that the consequence of sneaking a forbidden peek instead of waiting for a legitimate one? Does looking without bidding mean the mirror will show nothing at all?
He is thirteen before he dares to look again, and this time he sees a girl, which is both better and worse at once. It’s better because at least he’s certain he’s seeing something—and a lovely picture it makes, too, a girl with long blond hair playing at some sort of cards—but it’s worse because everyone always seems to see the person they’re supposed to marry in this mirror, and go off on a grand adventure to rescue them, and he hasn’t the slightest idea who this girl is or how he even ought to begin with something like that. So instead he just stands on his tiptoes and watches, drinking in the movement of the deck as she shuffles and sorts it, and thinks it must be some sort of game she’s playing as she draws out the same card again and again and again.
The Magician, he reads as he strains for a glimpse of it, and wonders what sort of cards those could be, that they haven’t any suits or kings or queens. What could it possibly mean? But try as he might, he can't seem to puzzle out the answer.
He is fourteen years old when he looks for the third time in his life, and that’s when he first sees the city in the glass. He doesn’t know what it means, this haunting smoky place with buildings like spindles reaching up for the sky, but the part that scares him most is that he finds he can’t look away from it. There’s something in him that shudders at the sight of it, repelled by the claustrophobic press of stone and street, but there’s something in him that leaps, as well—something that claws at his chest from the inside out as though it’s fighting for a glimpse of it, too. It scares him because he’s reaching out for it before he realizes he’s doing it, because the smooth glass surface of the mirror feels more like jelly to his touch, and he thinks if he just pushed a little, if he only slipped his hand through—
He stumbles back and the vision disappears, and it takes him a good minute before he quite realizes how hard he’s shaking.
It’s the day after that sighting that he finally admits to his mother what he’s been doing; to his surprise, she doesn’t scold him or punish him, but only lightly chastises him for being too eager to seek out his own destiny. She doesn’t seem astonished when he tells her about the city he saw, though he thinks he catches her shiver when he first mentions it. And he does, he tells her everything—the girl, the game, the glass giving way under his fingertips, and the sight of himself with those strange green-gold eyes.
Cat’s eyes, he thinks abruptly. But that’s not the sort of Kit I am.
His mother takes the news surprisingly well; on further thought, he ends up realizing that she’s taken it too well, as though she’d expected to hear something like this out of him all along. The mirror is never wrong, she says as she strokes his hair with an almost wistful smile, and neither is Merry—and he wonders if she means the girl in the mirror, and how his mother knows her, and just how much is she keeping from him—and so if the mirror saw fit to emphasize things that way, well, then it really must be certain, after all.
He finally learns what she means a week later, or at least he thinks he does, when he’s called into the throne room to be presented to a wizened old man named Crispinophur, and he knows before they’ve even spoken a word to each other that this man is a wizard, and a powerful one, and the magic he can wield is unmatched in all the world—for now.
Because that’s also the moment when he realizes he’s going to learn it, too.
▶ Lessons
It turns out that Crispin is a magnificent tutor, which has less to do with the fact that he’s quite possibly the most powerful wizard currently alive and more to do with the fact that the gnarled old man has an absolutely wicked sense of humor.
He’s a very old man, Crispin, and yet somehow Kit knows that he’s not nearly so feeble as he pretends to be; there’s too much cunning lurking beneath the surface, too much wit glittering behind his seemingly tired eyes. It makes him a remarkable sort of teacher, mostly because Kit never quite knows if he’s being serious or not, and half the time he thinks Crispin is doing it because the lesson he’s teaching isn’t about magic at all, but about intent and trickery and reading between lines. Which means it also leads to a certain amount of trouble as he guesses wrong about which jar holds the whitesnake and which holds the nightshade—it’s not his fault that they sound similar when called halfway across a laboratory—and ends up singing his eyebrows off because of it. Crispin has a way of teaching things that he’s not entirely sure his mother would approve of, a style that seems to be focused mostly around the principle of pushing a bird out of a nest and leaving it to fly or fall on its own, but it’s almost comforting in a way because it guarantees that he always learns. There’s too much at stake not to, after all.
The other nice thing about learning from Crispin is that, being one of the most powerful wizards in the whole of the world, he’s often got more important things to do than teaching one boy the use of magic—which generally means that when they’re not having a formal lesson, he leaves Kit to his own devices and doesn’t dissuade him from exploring all the interesting passages and workings of the place. He’s never truly alone, of course; he learned how to spot the telltale presence of one of Crispin’s watch-spies after his first week, which he suspects was a test in itself. But it’s the semblance of independence, and he enjoys it. It’s interesting to poke around in things, to explore the aged, dusty cabinets, to read yellowed labels on ancient jars and wonder at what might be inside. It’s not quite as interesting when he accidentally spills a jar of fairy dust and sets off his allergies trying to get it all cleaned up again, but he manages, and the silence is nice when it’s not broken with uncontrollable sneezing.
It’s three months into his stay when their game officially begins. Crispin takes him outside the hut one evening and stands him by the pond, smiles conspiratorially, and then proceeds to blast him off his feet with a ball of magic that feels like a punch to the chest. It’s enough to send him sprawling backwards into the pond, which in turn leaves him sitting up to his ribs in water, fuming and sulking, and the chirp of evening crickets is suddenly accompanied by the sound of Crispin snickering away from behind his beard.
“What did you do that for?” he snaps, which is something of a stupid question, and he realizes that a moment too late—but he supposes he can be forgiven for the slip because he’s wet and his chest is smarting.
“Do you think you’ll get warning from a foe when he’s about to attack you?” Crispin chuckles merrily. “Some might be sporting enough to shout a ‘prepare yourself’ or something equally ringing of challenge before they try to kill you, but the most dangerous ones won’t.”
Kit sighs, shaking his head. “And the dangerous ones are the ones to be afraid of,” he finishes sulkily. “I get it.”
“Apparently not,” Crispin answers with an enigmatic shrug. “If you’re afraid of them, they’ve already won.”
And then he sends a new wave of water splashing down over Kit’s head with a twitch of his finger—which, predictably, leaves him sputtering—and, still chuckling, returns inside.
It takes another month of duckings before Kit finally catches on. The game is different every night: sometimes it’s a ball of force that knocks him into the pond, sometimes it’s an invisible hand sweeping his feet out from under him. Sometimes the water rises up and soaks him through, and other times an unseen vine whips down and ensnares him around the shoulders. But one way or another, he always ends up in the water, and Crispin always laughs, and every night the pressure of his temper gains a bit more tension in his shoulders.
The trick of the game is to keep from getting wet, he realizes. And night by night, Crispin is showing him how—because the more he thinks back over it, the more he comes to realize that each of the spells he's used would make a perfect counter to another one. When the hand tries to sweep his feet out, the vine could steady him in place. When the water begins to rise, the ball of force could knock his opponent off his feet and disrupt the spell.
And until he figures out how to do it properly, Crispin is going to keep knocking him into the pond.
He spends another two weeks watching for just one move, tracking the motions that go into the ball of force. He spends another two weeks after that practicing those motions in secret as he watches for the telltale signs that the rising water is coming. He needs to learn to recognize both, he realizes; it’s not just about recognizing when one spell is coming, but about instantly knowing the right way to respond to it. It has to be instinct, an entirely subconscious response, because if he has to think about it, then it’s going to take too long.
It’s two months after the start of the game when the moment finally comes; the twitch of Crispin’s fingers that signals the start of the water, the sweeping motion of his own arms as he hurls his ball of force in response—
And his reward is seeing a satisfied smile flicker across Crispin’s face, a heartbeat before he angles his hands and diverts the blast straight back at Kit. Which knocks him into the water anyway.
His sole consolation is that Crispin doesn’t laugh this time.
More weeks go by, and he slowly begins to learn the silent lessons that Crispin is teaching. Study your opponent. Any spell slower than a reflex is worthless. A battle doesn’t end with one successful counter. Frustration and anger make the magic sharper, more potent. And as the days pass, his repertoire grows, and each evening’s game drags on a little longer as they bat spells back and forth, one after another, dodge and parry and counter in what must be a beautiful dance of casting, if only there were an outsider looking in to see it.
But Crispin has had centuries of practice, and Kit is still only a novice, and so every single evening ends the same—soaked to the bone in the little pond, fuming and frustrated because he’s never quite good enough.
One afternoon, as he’s holed up in the study with his nose buried in an ancient, leather-bound spellbook and a whole stack of others piled around his overstuffed armchair, Crispin walks in whistling a merry tune. It makes him glad he’s got the book to cover his face, because he’s certain the expression he’s currently wearing isn’t one he particularly wants his teacher to see. But Crispin doesn’t bother with that, and merely selects a book from the shelf and thumbs through it as he remarks, “You’ll be a fine wizard, Kit.”
And that’s all well and good, but Kit doesn’t want to be a fine wizard. There are plenty of fine wizards out there, and sorcerors and magicians and spellcasters alike. It’s easy for Crispin to say that he is a fine wizard, because Crispin is the best there is—and he’s never going to be content until he’s bested Crispin, no matter how far he comes with it all.
He starts spending his free time in the woods surrounding the hut, letting his rage build from a smolder to a blaze, and marvels at how much better his spells come out when he uses them. And it feels so good to just let go, to cast in perfect silence but to scream and rage and cry through his spells, to watch wood splinter beneath the force and think I did this, I wrought this, my power is this.
It feels so good to let go. But it never seems to help.
He’s been with Crispin for nine months, a good half-year since the start of the game, when the frustration finally gets the better of him. He’s never going to manage it, he thinks in sullen despair as he sneaks down through the passages to the back cellar storeroom that Crispin rarely uses. It’s where he keeps his stores of spell ingredients, all lined up in neat glass jars in rows of handmade cabinets, and Kit can’t quite put his finger on what it is that he finds so comforting about the place, but it’s small and it's hidden and it feels like home in a way he can’t explain. So he curls up in the corner and hugs his knees to his chest and hides, staring at the powders and roots and poisons as he silently berates himself—and he’s not sure if it’s because he’s too weak to beat Crispin or because tonight he’s too weak to face him at all, because he’s so sick of getting wet and so angry at his chain of perpetual defeat and so frustrated that nothing, nothing seems to change it.
No watch-spies come looking for him, which is as telling in their absence as it would be in their presence. Crispin knows where he is. Crispin knows he’s not coming tonight.
He wonders if that means he’s failed some secret, overarching lesson in all this. Perseverance, perhaps. Mother always taught him how important it was to get back up again after he’d fallen. But there are only so many times one can get back up, he thinks sulkily, and there are only so many defeats one can take before he simply accepts it as a matter of course.
He rests his forehead on his knees and sulks in silence, punctuated only by the occasional sneeze—apparently he hadn’t cleaned up the fairy dust as well as he’d thought.
He thinks and sulks and dwells on his failure until he falls asleep down there, hunched over in a tiny ball, and when he does he dreams of running like a fox through the woods. He’s never thought it very fair, that hunters should bring a horse and a weapon and a half-dozen dogs to chase down a single fox; how could one little creature hope to endure against a force like that? How can the one little fox even stand a chance against such overwhelming odds?
He wakes up feeling worn and hollow, as though he’d run all night—and that’s when the answer comes to him.
The evening comes, and this time he’s waiting for Crispin in the usual place, as though they’d never missed the previous night at all. To his relief, the wizened old man doesn’t say a word about his previous absence; indeed, they carry on as though nothing had changed, taking their usual places and facing each other down as the little pond burbles merrily nearby. Kit draws a slow breath, feeling the tension in his shoulders increase in anticipation, and lets his frustration and rage begin to burn, coursing up and down his nerves like flames licking at dry brush. He breathes, and watches, and Crispin makes his move—
And Kit lets a pouch of black pepper slip down into his hand from where he’d secreted it in his sleeve, and in one fluid motion he throws it directly into Crispin’s face.
The powder explodes into the evening air, catching on the wind and sending the old wizard into a fit of uncontrollable sneezing, and he coughs and hunches over and waves his arms to try to clear the air, and Kit’s so busy laughing himself hysterical that he ends up pitching backwards into the pond all by himself.
He’s soaked to the bone and for the first time since they embarked on their game, he doesn’t care a bit about it because he’s laughing so hard he’s crying, laughing until his stomach aches from it, laughing until it dawns on him that every bit of the tension has seeped out his shoulders—and it feels as though he’s relaxing for the first time in ages as he stops bothering trying to hold himself upright and splashes backward into the pool. He’s damp all over anyway; he might as well let the water support him, instead.
He drowses there awhile, drifting placidly with his eyes closed, and when he finally opens them again, Crispin is gazing down at him with that quiet, smiling look on his bearded face.
“Six months,” he remarks with a good-natured wink. “It took your uncle less than a week to come up with the same answer.”
Kit frowns a little, but there’s no real anger in it. It’s as if all the tension in him is seeping out into the water, carried away like leaves in a gentle stream. “I didn’t know you taught my uncle.”
“I didn’t,” Crispin answers. “But he defeated his own wizard in the only way he knew how: by outsmarting him. It was a simple trick, a single serving of adulterated porridge.” He smiles. “But it worked.”
He flicks his fingers again, and Kit finds himself floating out of the water and into the air; another quick motion, and his clothes are suddenly dry, as though he’d never touched the surface of the pool at all. And perhaps it should make him angry, that Crispin’s known how to do this all along when he’s spent so many evenings toweling himself dry and wringing out his soggy clothes, but instead he simply watches the motions and commits them to memory so that he can someday repeat them.
And from that point on, the game is never played the same way twice. He learns new tricks—not spells, not attacks, but pranks and sleights of hand, misdirections—and dreams up innovations in how to use them to his advantage. The pepper will never work again, he knows, but it’s a lesson in itself that a good magician never performs the same trick twice. He finds variants, he bends rules; he sews false linings into his sleeves to better facilitate his ploys, and never goes anywhere without a trick or two hidden in them.
The game evolves and changes from there on out, and Kit grows and changes with it. He’s still learning things from Crispin, but he’s already taught himself to stretch his wings and fly; now, Crispin takes a more involved approach to things and guides him, refines him, smoothes over his rough edges and instructs him in efficiency and grace.
“There’s more to magic than power,” Kit remarks one afternoon as they hurl fire back and forth between them, lazily batting the blue-white ball of flame through the air. “It’s really about how you use it, isn’t it?”
Crispin smiles. “Which do you like better? The fury that could have leveled the forest in your wake, or the understanding you have now?”
“It felt awful to be angry all the time,” Kit answers after a minute, whirling the fire around in his fingers before pulling them into a pinch and letting the flame snuff out. “It felt good, too—exciting, I mean, and thrilling—but it hurt after a while.”
“Magic is magic,” Crispin says, giving his beard a thoughtful stroke. “There’s no difference in the power, only in the intent.” He shrugs. “You might’ve made a fearsome wizard, Kit. The sort that even Mordack and Manannan would have trembled before.”
It’s Kit’s turn to smile then. “Then I would’ve already won, wouldn’t I?” he replies, laughing at the old memory. “No sense in being afraid when it’s all just games and tricks.”
“Remember that when you go to see your father,” Crispin says, and suddenly time seems to jar to a halt because there’s breath caught in his throat and he doesn’t remember his eyes going so wide, and there’s a nagging feeling in the back of his mind that reminds him he needs to breathe but he can’t seem to recall how, and he’s hot and cold all over in a way that magic has never made him feel before.
“When I…what?” he forces out at last, through the lump in his throat.
“There’s three weeks left of your training before you go back to your mother,” Crispin answers instead, turning and heading for the door of the house. “Best come along, Kit. You’ve quite a bit still to learn.”
And that’s when Kit suddenly understands the purpose behind it all—the mirror, the training, the lessons in magic and trickery and cunning, in reading his foes and combating them, in falling out of a nest and learning to spread his wings and soar—
His time has finally come. It’s going to be an adventure of his own. He’s going to that city in the glass with its buildings like spindly fingers reaching up to the sky, that labyrinth of smoke and stone that tempted and repelled him all at once.
He remembers how he shook as he stared into the mirror’s silvered glass, wondering what it all could mean. And this time he hides a smile because now, somehow, the prospect of seeing it firsthand doesn’t frighten him at all.
▶ Midnight
Growing up with a mother like his, it’s probably no surprise that Kit knows just about every fairy tale there is to know inside and outside and backwards again.
He was raised on them, of course—and not just the storybook ones but the real ones too, like the one about how his grandfather climbed a beanstalk and rescued the kingdom from peril and became king himself, or how he saved Grandmother from her tower by riding a golden fish across a lavender sea, or how Uncle Alexander rescued Mother from a dragon and then Mother rescued Grandfather the very same day, without hardly even pausing to rest in between. And he’s learned silly rhymes that seem to go with them, nonsense poems he’s never been able to puzzle out—London bridges, and Mary contrary, and riding a cock horse to Banbury Cross. He doesn’t know what they mean, but Mother made certain he heard them, and now he knows all of those like the back of his hand, too.
He’s fifteen years old when he first steps through the surface of the mirror. It feels like floating through thick, dark water, up and up toward a glimmer of light at the surface, and it makes him think of mermaid princesses with oysters clasped on their tail, suffering pain for the sake of beauty but eager to see the world waiting above.
The disorienting lack of magic hits him at once as he steps out and down into a shadowed, claustrophobic alley that brings to mind thoughts of dungeons; it’s as though he’d been standing in sunlight all his life and suddenly had the warmth taken away, shivering and chilled from the lack of golden rays. He leans against the wall and makes himself breathe, in and out, tasting the unfamiliar flavor of smoke in the air and reaching for something indescribable that suddenly isn’t there, the heat of a candle that’s abruptly been snuffed.
It worries him for a minute, but then he remembers his lessons and the fear recedes. There’s no magic in the surroundings, not the way he’s used to in Daventry, but he can still feel the familiar pulse running through his fingers and he thinks with a rueful smile that it must be in his blood. It’s different, but it’s safe. He has his tricks. There’s nothing to fear.
There’s commotion coming from a little way down the street, and he slinks through the shadows to investigate; it sounds like some sort of party, and as he rounds the corner and peers down the lane he sees carriages and streetlamps and sprawling houses behind wrought-iron fences, and there is a small parade of people making their way through the gate and inside. The ladies are the first to catch his eye, not so much for their beauty as for their costume—he’s never seen such dress before, and it strikes him at once that such things must be entirely impractical, the weight and the bustle and the falls of so much fabric all around. He tries to imagine his mother in such a dress and finds himself failing miserably, unable to picture her pretty, slender frame forced into such a monstrosity.
The gentlemen are better, if a bit boring; they all seem to wear nothing but black and white, which doesn’t much appeal to Kit’s personal sense of fashion, but he does approve of the neat and trim look of the whole business. Some of the men look rumpled and ill-fitting, but there are some who wear their clothes well, who cut a fine figure in their ties and tails and cufflinks, and he thinks that perhaps he wouldn’t mind looking so fine, himself—even though he does still like his usual clothes best.
He straightens himself up the best he can and makes his way down the street, keeping to the shadows until he can duck behind one of the carriages still waiting to let its passengers out onto the street. It takes perfect timing, but that’s something he’s always had a knack for, and as the occupants come chattering out into the open air, he slips into file behind them and acts as though he knows what he’s doing—which he doesn’t—as he follows them all up to the door.
He’s five steps in before a lady comes to his side, simpering and smiling behind a strangely painted face as she catches hold of his arm. “Are you the magician?” she asks hopefully, pronouncing the vowels oddly in a tone he’s never heard before, and there’s a part of him that wants to say yes, yes he is, because technically speaking, it's the truth. But then she frowns and looks at him a little more closely, and shakes her head in what he assumes is exasperation as she quickly disappears back into the crowd.
He decides to keep to the shadows after that, and he’s good at keeping a low profile when he doesn’t want to be seen. So he finds himself a nice quiet corner and lurks within it, watching the hustle and bustle and trying to make sense of everything that goes on.
It isn’t until the real magician arrives that Kit understands why he was mistaken for one—the man is tall and confident, and wears his clothes well enough, but his coat and cuffs are trimmed in leopard fur, and there’s something almost lazy in the curl of his collar and the tilt of his hat. The colors are subdued, black and beige and navy blue, but Kit can’t help but think that such mores mean nothing to this man, and if he cared to, he’d wear all the colors of the rainbow and damn anyone who spoke out against it.
He wonders if it’s an attitude that comes naturally to magicians. Crispin was much the same way, too.
The magician puts on a good show, lots of fanfare and flash, but Kit finds it hard to keep from snickering as he watches from the shadows and reads between the gestures, sifting through the performance to separate the tricks from the misdirections. He’s good, very good, and these people want to believe in him—which is arguably the most important part of the magic at all. So he watches the show and makes note of the good bits for his own use: cards that turn to flame, items that disappear and reappear from sight, doves pulled from seemingly empty sleeves and cast fluttering into the air.
It’s only during the finale, when a table begins to levitate from the helpful use of piano wire, that Kit makes his mistake.
He laughs.
It’s only for a moment, a short bark of laughter that slips out before he realizes it, but it rings out through the room and it’s enough to draw the attention of the people close enough to hear it, the magician included. And then there are eyes on his hiding place, people looking closely enough to see him despite the shadows, and indignant chatter begins to fill the room as the people whisper to each other about his nerve and his behavior and his manners.
The only one silent is the magician, who stares at him through disbelieving eyes before finally forcing out an astonished, “Earl?”
And Kit doesn’t know what it is about that word that strikes him like a bolt of lightning, because he’s not an earl and has never been one—he’s a prince and an heir, but never an earl—but something in him catches and he bolts for the door, running like a fox with the hounds on his tail. And he thinks they must be pursuing him, or imagines that he hears someone crashing through a crowd and bearing down on him, hot on his heels, but he’s got a fair head start and it’s only a short distance to the alley from whence he came. He doesn’t know how he senses the opening through to the mirror, but he does and he feels it and he slips through, floating back down again through the dark, murky water to the kingdom he knows is waiting below.
He sinks back into darkness and he thinks of the mermaid princess as he goes, and how she must have felt after her first taste of the surface she’d longed after for so long.
It was midnight when he left, and it is midnight when he returns, stepping back out into the golden kingdom so rich and bright with magic; it’s strange to think that not a moment has passed since he’s been gone, but it’s an interesting tidbit to know and he makes a careful note of it, because such a thing might be useful someday, and one never knows when that may be.
He kicks off his shoes and returns to his bed, exhausted from the run but exhilarated by it, too, and he knows he’ll be asleep by the time his head hits the pillow. But as he falls toward it, his covers rumpled around his body, he’s already dreaming of the next time he’ll go back, and the new set of wonders he might see when he does.
When he wakes up the next morning, there’s a suit of clothes waiting for him—fine clothes, exquisitely tailored, in sleek black and crisp white with hat and tails and cane—and he catches himself wondering yet again if perhaps his mother knows more than she’s ever let on before.
▶ Nightmare
The twelve young princesses stole off every night through a magical passage, where they met their princes and danced all night and always came back by morning, and the king never knew where his daughters went every night, or how they’d danced their shoes all to pieces.
He doesn’t learn the dangers of London until he is sixteen.
There’s so much to see in the city beyond the mirror, and there’s something in him that’s desperate to experience it all. And there’s no time lost between when he goes and when he returns, so there’s a certain sort of indulgence in it, too—that he can come and go as he pleases, and no one will ever know the difference. He’s long since learned how to dress up in his suit and hat, and he’s made a few adjustments to the cane in particular; a weekend with Crispin helped him find a way to hide a magic wand in it, which helps to combat the dearth of magic in the air in London.
There’s always magic in himself, of course, which is a comforting layer of defense against that emptiness in the air, but he’s a bit afraid to draw on it because it’s a part of him and he doesn’t know what it might do if he should chance to use it all up. So the wand helps with that, like carrying a flask of water at his hip through a desert. It’s there if he needs it, but he hopes he never will.
He’s sixteen when he’s confident enough to walk the streets alone at night, having mostly memorized the landmarks of the city and learned his way around in relation to them. He’s also spent time watching pickpockets—and indeed, let them pickpocket him a few times, himself—to learn how they work, because that style of thievery is another type of magic, a sleight of hand designed to relieve gentlemen of their pocket change and leave no one the wiser until long after the young offender has gone. It was a lesson well worth the coins he traded them for it, especially since it all came from the chest that never empties; the urchins that chanced to steal from him made out like bandits that night, probably thinking they were gaining a few pence when really they’d ended up with gold.
Kit’s used to the idea that one has to pay to learn lessons. Good things seldom come for free.
He’s walking alone down the chilly city street, snug beneath his top hat and looking for an evening’s entertainment, when he first hears the sound of the violin. It’s not a song he recognizes—his grandfather plays the fiddle, but those are jumping jigging tunes, and this one is hollow and haunting—but the sound of the strings seems to resonate within him, pulling at him in a way he can’t explain. That happens more often than he’d like to admit, the times when he visits London; it’d scare him if he ever indulged in being afraid anymore, but mostly it only nags at him, like an itch he can’t reach to scratch or a word on the tip of his tongue that he can never quite place. It’s the feeling that he should know something, and doesn’t, and it bothers him immensely.
So he stops and listens to the song instead, resting his cane against his shoulder and feeling the comforting pulse of magic hidden within it. Street musicians shouldn’t be out this late, he thinks, and not in this part of the city. They ought to keep to the crowds in the daylight, or they’ll never have anything to show for it.
It’s the movement that he sees first, a flicker of white out of his peripheral vision; a moment later, the violin is louder, closer.
Someone is interested in him, he thinks.
He starts walking again, and as he suspected, the sound follows him. Other men, upon that realization, might have broken into a run; he knows better, and keeps his footsteps steady, patiently waiting for the moment when his foe will show his hand. It does no good to be careless, he thinks. He’ll see what’s coming when the violinist reveals himself at last.
And it doesn’t take long; there’s a rustle on the wind, a shiver on the rooftops, and the music draws to a high, whispering close as a man drops down in front of him—a young man, perhaps not much older than he is himself, with round dark glasses and a shock of spiky hair that makes him think of snow falling.
They regard each other in silence a moment, the violinist and the gentleman, and it's Kit who finally breaks the silence.
“Is your white hair real?” he asks with a touch of humor, the sort that most of London society reads as impudence.
For some reason, the young man looks amused by the question—too amused for Kit’s liking. “It is,” he answers, as though he’s trying not to laugh. “That’s why everyone calls me the Owl.”
And now it’s Kit’s turn to laugh, because the sheer coincidence of meeting another lad with an animal's name is worthy of a chuckle of his own. “You elegant fowl, how charmingly sweet you sing,” he replies, quoting the rhyme he remembers his mother teaching him so long ago. “Are you after a tip for your trouble?”
“That’s not my job,” the Owl says, tilting his head in an appropriately birdlike way. “I’m here to see you.”
“To see me?” Kit repeats, mildly surprised. “And what could you want with me?”
The Owl smiles. “You’re looking for something, aren’t you?”
Green-gold eyes in a mirror.
“You’re here to be my guide,” Kit answers, doing his best to maintain his confidence when suddenly, inexplicably, he feels young—as though the Owl is looking at him without seeing him at all, or seeing straight through him to someone else, and it’s that feeling of not knowing again that shakes him right to the core. “Is that it?”
“I don’t take anyone’s side,” the Owl teases again. “What is it you want to find?”
And there are so many ways that Kit could answer that question, all in varying shades of truth and lie, that for a minute he doesn’t quite know what to say. He’s looking for adventure, for knowledge, for understanding; he’s looking for answers, the explanation of how his mother knows so much about this strange and foreign place, the meaning behind the hints and comments that he’s never been able to decipher. He’s looking for the reason he spent a year being ducked in a fishpool until he learned to control magic with the skill of a wizard; he’s looking for the realization of what the blonde girl and her cards meant when she drew The Magician again and again before his eyes. He’s looking for the thing that draws him in ways he can’t explain, the feeling that urges him on like a hunger for something he’ll never taste.
The real truth is, he’s looking for his father and he knows it. But he knows it so deeply, so innately, that he’s buried it under layers and layers of reason and rationale, of thrill-seeking and experience, and it’s buried so deep that he won’t even admit it to himself. But it’s the one thing he wants more than anything, the thing he wants so bad he can taste it, and he just hasn’t discovered yet how to find it.
“An evening’s diversion, at the moment,” he says at last, more for the sake of something to say than because it’s actually what he means. “Shall we go out to sea in a pea-green boat?”
“Come see the end of the world,” the Owl says, as though he hadn’t spoken at all, and nods once at him before leaping back and darting off down the street—and Kit knows it’s a bad idea, but it’s such a strange encounter and an unusual promise that he follows anyway, his cane clutched tight in fingers with knuckles as white as his unlikely guide’s hair.
The end of the world turns out to be a mausoleum, a stately thing with marble and columns and a domed roof overhead, tucked away in the midst of grass and trees that seem strangely out of place in a land like this. He doesn’t know how long it takes them to get there, and despite his best efforts at landmarking, he’s unnerved to discover he’s lost his way in the course of following the Owl. And he doesn’t like that at all, because the most important part of traversing a labyrinth is leaving a string by which to find one’s way out, and all he has now to go on is a strange, flippant young man he only just met a scarce few hours before.
He knows from the minute his foot first touches the stone of the foundation that there’s something wrong about this place. It nags at him, like a tugging at a loose thread in a tapestry, slowly but steadily unraveling the once-sturdy pattern of his thoughts. There’s something wrong, even moreso than London itself is wrong, and it’s black and it’s cold and it’s creeping—but he knows it, he feels it, and he still can’t tear himself away.
He’s halfway to the door before he realizes the Owl has disappeared, and he wonders if this is a trap as he continues to make his way past the columns and under the archway, heading for the ornate scrollwork carvings that mark the entrance to the tomb. Is this what he’s been searching for all this time, he wonders? It’s white, such clean white, such a contrast to the soot and smog of London. Is this the end of his journey, the place where he will finally find his father?
The doors swing open at what seems like the slightest of touches, and there are angels inside, assembled with stone-feather wings extended around a casket that bears the face of a man. A funeral procession of angels, he thinks, and takes a step closer, feeling his wariness begin to evolve into something that might almost be fear, and he clutches his cane like a security blanket as he makes himself step closer again. What is this place? What trick is that Owl playing upon him?
Something cold washes over him, something that raises the hairs on his arms and makes him shiver like he’s just been drenched in ice water, and he’s another step closer when an old man’s voice whispers through the air—
You can’t resist the temptation, you who have that woman’s blood in your veins—
And all at once something hits him, crashes into him in a way that makes the memory of Crispin’s ball of force feel like nothing more than the prick of a pin; it hits him so hard he spins, reels, his mind whirling in disorientation as his sense of balance goes completely awry. His nerves are on fire but he can’t feel anything, and it’s only the sudden resistance of something firm beneath his shoulder that makes him realize he’s hit the ground at all. There’s blood in his mouth and he thinks he ought to be screaming but he’s not, he can’t, he can’t do anything because something is pushing down on his lungs and his limbs and his mind, raging at him, prying at his defenses, howling against the magic he wears like armor and digging, scratching, scrabbling for a chink—
Any spell slower than a reflex is worthless.
The world goes white as something gives, as light cascades through the shadows of the room, but he never has the chance to see what it is as his head cracks down hard against the stone—and his consciousness spins like a whirlpool before at last, everything finally fades to black.
~
ON TO PART TWO
Universe: The Kitverse
Warnings: Spoilers for Godchild, but that's about it.
Summary: The merry adventures of Kit Hargreaves, and the trouble he gets up to in the two worlds he calls home.
Notes: Part 2-A of the KitVerse; make sure to read And Miles To Go first!
▶ Innocence
His life is about as close to perfect as such things can get, really. His grandmother dandles him on her knee and reads him the most wonderful stories; his grandfather smiles and winks and always seems to have a sweet hidden away in his clasped hand when he dashes over and pries open the lightly-calloused fingers in search of his prize. The castle is enormous and the surroundings are beautiful, and someday he'll learn to climb the solemn old oak at the edge of the forest, the one that's been standing proudly since before even his grandfather was born. His toys are elven-made and kept safely in a chest that sits at the foot of his bed, awaiting a sulking gray day when the rain keeps his play indoors for the afternoon.
He has everything a boy could want, and next week he will be six years old—a fact which he has made sure to announce proudly to everyone he meets, which has earned him smiles and pats and an extra cookie from the kitchen, one he’s not supposed to have before supper.
He doesn’t know why his mother’s smile sometimes wobbles when she looks at him, when she brushes his bangs off his forehead and peers down into his eyes with a strange look on her face. Sometimes he goes and looks in the mirror afterward, trying to find what it is she always looks at, but all he ever sees are plain old eyes, ones as blue as her own.
He wonders why that could be as he gazes at the six candles flickering merrily on his cake, and wishes he knew as he closes his eyes and blows them all out with one breath.
▶ Determined
It’s not that he minds his name, precisely. It’s a rather good one, in his opinion, and there are certainly much worse ones to have—like Ifnkovhgroghprm’s, for example. He had a terrible enough time mastering all the letters that went into his own, back when he was learning to read and write; he can’t imagine how difficult it must’ve been for the wizened old gnome back when he was first learning to spell his name. And he likes the name Christopher, really, because it has a nice ring to it, all crisp consonants and sleek vowels. Prince Christopher of Daventry. It sounds regal. It sounds right.
What he doesn’t like is that everyone seems to forget it is his name, because no matter how often he reminds them of it, they’ve all grown so used to calling him Kit that his insistence on being called Christopher never lasts for long. He doesn’t remember how that nickname first came about, precisely, but he does remember a little red hood with tufted ears, and a pair of black furred mittens to match, and he imagines that must’ve been the moment when the nickname set in stone because they never fail to bring it up when they reminisce about his younger days.
Kit is an awful name, he thinks sullenly, sinking a bit lower into the shadows as he listens to the merry chatter coming from the torch-lit ballroom down the hall. Kits are helpless, they’re babies. They’re not kings or conquerors, not like a Christopher could be.
He stays there a long time, sulking and moping and pretending he's not listening to the merriment he's currently abstaining from, and it’s his Uncle Alexander who eventually finds him. He appears quietly, in that unobtrusive way that seems to characterize all his uncle's movements, standing silhouetted in the archway with the light of the ballroom behind him. He’s missing the party, Christopher knows, but he vaguely recalls that Uncle Alexander doesn’t like parties anyway, not like Mother does.
“I thought I might find you out here,” he says in that same quiet way, walking over to where Christopher is still slouching on the throne. “Was the party too much for you?”
“They’re doing it again,” Christopher says, trying to sound indignant but somehow the words only come out petulant, instead.
It takes Uncle Alexander a minute, but then he gets it. “They can’t help it,” he says, taking a seat on the steps leading up to the throne and leaning his back against it. “They’ve come to think of you that way, and it’s hard to shake a habit like that.”
“My name is Christopher,” he insists anyway, folding his arms over his chest. “Not Kit.”
Uncle Alexander goes quiet again. “Mine is Gwydion,” he says after a long moment, which makes Christopher sit up a little straighter, because this is something he’s never heard before. “That’s what Manannan always called me. It’s been years since then and...honestly, I still haven’t gotten used to being Alexander yet.”
There's silence for a minute, still and stagnant amidst the shadows, and then he goes on, “What is it you don’t like about being called Kit?”
“I’m not a baby,” Christopher answers at once, because he’s given this a great deal of thought in the time he's spent sulking out here in the throne room. “And I’m not a weakling. And whenever they call me that, it’s like they’re treating me as one. I’m not a little kid anymore. I’m ten years old.”
“No, you’re not,” Uncle Alexander agrees, and runs his fingers over the smooth, worn stone of the steps. Silence lingers again, marred only by the chatter from the ballroom down the hall; for the most part, though, it’s quiet in the room, which is nice. He’s fond of the dark, really. It’s comfortable and quiet, and for a moment he wonders if perhaps his uncle feels the same, turning the question over in his head until he speaks again. “But kits grow into foxes, if you give them enough time. Rosella always said you were as clever as one.”
And then his uncle pushes himself to his feet, turning halfway to flash a smile before walking back toward the archway from whence he came. He stands there a moment, seeming to consider something, and then remarks over his shoulder, “Sometimes you end up with a name because you’ve earned it, Christopher.”
Once his uncle is gone, Christopher sits up a little straighter still, tracing his fingers over the arms of the throne as he looks out over the darkened room, imagining it filled with light and noise and people as he sits in judgment, as bright and merry as the party he's missing. That’s the life of a king, he knows, handing out the law and ruling over his subjects. And he could be a good king if he tried, he thinks, with a fine name to match.
But it’s soothing in the shadows, without all the bustle and fervor of bodies in motion, and he sinks down in the seat again as he thinks of running and playing, the thrill of a chase, the exhilaration of being smarter and faster and better than everyone behind him—and of snowy days in the woods where the winter’s chill never seemed to touch him, safe and snug as he was beneath his beloved fur hood.
“Kits grow into foxes,” he repeats under his breath, the thought stirring eagerly in the pit of his stomach as a smile creeps across his lips.
All right, he thinks. Then maybe I will, too.
▶ Magic
Which makes it perhaps the kingdom’s most important treasure, really. In the stories of ancient past, the mirror has foretold things like droughts and invading armies; that sort of warning has always given the kings of Daventry time to prepare for turmoil on the horizon, and it’s been instrumental in keeping the kingdom safe, almost moreso than the magic shield with the power to guard its bearer from all harm. The king before his grandfather traded it away on a false promise, he knows, or so the stories go: King Edward lost it, and Sir Graham recovered it, and that’s how he ended up as King Graham, instead.
The odder part is, there’s a strange sort of link between that mirror and his family. He can’t explain why he feels it, but he knows it’s there just the same; it’s an innate sort of sense, an understanding of how it works without knowing a bit of the workings of it. It doesn’t just show the future, after all; his grandfather saw his grandmother’s face in it, once upon a time, and his uncle saw his aunt in it, too. And his mother never got the chance to gaze into it when she was his age, as it turns out, because the mirror clouded over on the day his uncle was kidnapped, and the shadows didn’t break until the day he returned—which is part of what made him realize that the magic was tied to the family, after all.
He’s not supposed to look into it, he knows. Magic mirrors aren’t toys, and knowing one’s future is a dangerous thing. More importantly, it’s a privilege; the mirror will reach out to him when it’s his turn to have a look, his family has assured him. It did for all of them, in the moment they needed it most. It will be the same for him someday, once upon a time.
He is twelve years old, the first time he steals a look. But to his dismay, all he sees is himself—a young, dark-haired boy looking back through startling green-gold eyes.
He creeps back to bed and lies awake long afterward, wondering what it could mean and lamenting that there’s no way he can ask without admitting he stole a look in the first place. But it bothers him for hours, because none of it makes sense; no one in his family has eyes of that color, and the mirror is supposed to show the future, not his own reflection. Is that the consequence of sneaking a forbidden peek instead of waiting for a legitimate one? Does looking without bidding mean the mirror will show nothing at all?
He is thirteen before he dares to look again, and this time he sees a girl, which is both better and worse at once. It’s better because at least he’s certain he’s seeing something—and a lovely picture it makes, too, a girl with long blond hair playing at some sort of cards—but it’s worse because everyone always seems to see the person they’re supposed to marry in this mirror, and go off on a grand adventure to rescue them, and he hasn’t the slightest idea who this girl is or how he even ought to begin with something like that. So instead he just stands on his tiptoes and watches, drinking in the movement of the deck as she shuffles and sorts it, and thinks it must be some sort of game she’s playing as she draws out the same card again and again and again.
The Magician, he reads as he strains for a glimpse of it, and wonders what sort of cards those could be, that they haven’t any suits or kings or queens. What could it possibly mean? But try as he might, he can't seem to puzzle out the answer.
He is fourteen years old when he looks for the third time in his life, and that’s when he first sees the city in the glass. He doesn’t know what it means, this haunting smoky place with buildings like spindles reaching up for the sky, but the part that scares him most is that he finds he can’t look away from it. There’s something in him that shudders at the sight of it, repelled by the claustrophobic press of stone and street, but there’s something in him that leaps, as well—something that claws at his chest from the inside out as though it’s fighting for a glimpse of it, too. It scares him because he’s reaching out for it before he realizes he’s doing it, because the smooth glass surface of the mirror feels more like jelly to his touch, and he thinks if he just pushed a little, if he only slipped his hand through—
He stumbles back and the vision disappears, and it takes him a good minute before he quite realizes how hard he’s shaking.
It’s the day after that sighting that he finally admits to his mother what he’s been doing; to his surprise, she doesn’t scold him or punish him, but only lightly chastises him for being too eager to seek out his own destiny. She doesn’t seem astonished when he tells her about the city he saw, though he thinks he catches her shiver when he first mentions it. And he does, he tells her everything—the girl, the game, the glass giving way under his fingertips, and the sight of himself with those strange green-gold eyes.
Cat’s eyes, he thinks abruptly. But that’s not the sort of Kit I am.
His mother takes the news surprisingly well; on further thought, he ends up realizing that she’s taken it too well, as though she’d expected to hear something like this out of him all along. The mirror is never wrong, she says as she strokes his hair with an almost wistful smile, and neither is Merry—and he wonders if she means the girl in the mirror, and how his mother knows her, and just how much is she keeping from him—and so if the mirror saw fit to emphasize things that way, well, then it really must be certain, after all.
He finally learns what she means a week later, or at least he thinks he does, when he’s called into the throne room to be presented to a wizened old man named Crispinophur, and he knows before they’ve even spoken a word to each other that this man is a wizard, and a powerful one, and the magic he can wield is unmatched in all the world—for now.
Because that’s also the moment when he realizes he’s going to learn it, too.
▶ Lessons
He’s a very old man, Crispin, and yet somehow Kit knows that he’s not nearly so feeble as he pretends to be; there’s too much cunning lurking beneath the surface, too much wit glittering behind his seemingly tired eyes. It makes him a remarkable sort of teacher, mostly because Kit never quite knows if he’s being serious or not, and half the time he thinks Crispin is doing it because the lesson he’s teaching isn’t about magic at all, but about intent and trickery and reading between lines. Which means it also leads to a certain amount of trouble as he guesses wrong about which jar holds the whitesnake and which holds the nightshade—it’s not his fault that they sound similar when called halfway across a laboratory—and ends up singing his eyebrows off because of it. Crispin has a way of teaching things that he’s not entirely sure his mother would approve of, a style that seems to be focused mostly around the principle of pushing a bird out of a nest and leaving it to fly or fall on its own, but it’s almost comforting in a way because it guarantees that he always learns. There’s too much at stake not to, after all.
The other nice thing about learning from Crispin is that, being one of the most powerful wizards in the whole of the world, he’s often got more important things to do than teaching one boy the use of magic—which generally means that when they’re not having a formal lesson, he leaves Kit to his own devices and doesn’t dissuade him from exploring all the interesting passages and workings of the place. He’s never truly alone, of course; he learned how to spot the telltale presence of one of Crispin’s watch-spies after his first week, which he suspects was a test in itself. But it’s the semblance of independence, and he enjoys it. It’s interesting to poke around in things, to explore the aged, dusty cabinets, to read yellowed labels on ancient jars and wonder at what might be inside. It’s not quite as interesting when he accidentally spills a jar of fairy dust and sets off his allergies trying to get it all cleaned up again, but he manages, and the silence is nice when it’s not broken with uncontrollable sneezing.
It’s three months into his stay when their game officially begins. Crispin takes him outside the hut one evening and stands him by the pond, smiles conspiratorially, and then proceeds to blast him off his feet with a ball of magic that feels like a punch to the chest. It’s enough to send him sprawling backwards into the pond, which in turn leaves him sitting up to his ribs in water, fuming and sulking, and the chirp of evening crickets is suddenly accompanied by the sound of Crispin snickering away from behind his beard.
“What did you do that for?” he snaps, which is something of a stupid question, and he realizes that a moment too late—but he supposes he can be forgiven for the slip because he’s wet and his chest is smarting.
“Do you think you’ll get warning from a foe when he’s about to attack you?” Crispin chuckles merrily. “Some might be sporting enough to shout a ‘prepare yourself’ or something equally ringing of challenge before they try to kill you, but the most dangerous ones won’t.”
Kit sighs, shaking his head. “And the dangerous ones are the ones to be afraid of,” he finishes sulkily. “I get it.”
“Apparently not,” Crispin answers with an enigmatic shrug. “If you’re afraid of them, they’ve already won.”
And then he sends a new wave of water splashing down over Kit’s head with a twitch of his finger—which, predictably, leaves him sputtering—and, still chuckling, returns inside.
It takes another month of duckings before Kit finally catches on. The game is different every night: sometimes it’s a ball of force that knocks him into the pond, sometimes it’s an invisible hand sweeping his feet out from under him. Sometimes the water rises up and soaks him through, and other times an unseen vine whips down and ensnares him around the shoulders. But one way or another, he always ends up in the water, and Crispin always laughs, and every night the pressure of his temper gains a bit more tension in his shoulders.
The trick of the game is to keep from getting wet, he realizes. And night by night, Crispin is showing him how—because the more he thinks back over it, the more he comes to realize that each of the spells he's used would make a perfect counter to another one. When the hand tries to sweep his feet out, the vine could steady him in place. When the water begins to rise, the ball of force could knock his opponent off his feet and disrupt the spell.
And until he figures out how to do it properly, Crispin is going to keep knocking him into the pond.
He spends another two weeks watching for just one move, tracking the motions that go into the ball of force. He spends another two weeks after that practicing those motions in secret as he watches for the telltale signs that the rising water is coming. He needs to learn to recognize both, he realizes; it’s not just about recognizing when one spell is coming, but about instantly knowing the right way to respond to it. It has to be instinct, an entirely subconscious response, because if he has to think about it, then it’s going to take too long.
It’s two months after the start of the game when the moment finally comes; the twitch of Crispin’s fingers that signals the start of the water, the sweeping motion of his own arms as he hurls his ball of force in response—
And his reward is seeing a satisfied smile flicker across Crispin’s face, a heartbeat before he angles his hands and diverts the blast straight back at Kit. Which knocks him into the water anyway.
His sole consolation is that Crispin doesn’t laugh this time.
More weeks go by, and he slowly begins to learn the silent lessons that Crispin is teaching. Study your opponent. Any spell slower than a reflex is worthless. A battle doesn’t end with one successful counter. Frustration and anger make the magic sharper, more potent. And as the days pass, his repertoire grows, and each evening’s game drags on a little longer as they bat spells back and forth, one after another, dodge and parry and counter in what must be a beautiful dance of casting, if only there were an outsider looking in to see it.
But Crispin has had centuries of practice, and Kit is still only a novice, and so every single evening ends the same—soaked to the bone in the little pond, fuming and frustrated because he’s never quite good enough.
One afternoon, as he’s holed up in the study with his nose buried in an ancient, leather-bound spellbook and a whole stack of others piled around his overstuffed armchair, Crispin walks in whistling a merry tune. It makes him glad he’s got the book to cover his face, because he’s certain the expression he’s currently wearing isn’t one he particularly wants his teacher to see. But Crispin doesn’t bother with that, and merely selects a book from the shelf and thumbs through it as he remarks, “You’ll be a fine wizard, Kit.”
And that’s all well and good, but Kit doesn’t want to be a fine wizard. There are plenty of fine wizards out there, and sorcerors and magicians and spellcasters alike. It’s easy for Crispin to say that he is a fine wizard, because Crispin is the best there is—and he’s never going to be content until he’s bested Crispin, no matter how far he comes with it all.
He starts spending his free time in the woods surrounding the hut, letting his rage build from a smolder to a blaze, and marvels at how much better his spells come out when he uses them. And it feels so good to just let go, to cast in perfect silence but to scream and rage and cry through his spells, to watch wood splinter beneath the force and think I did this, I wrought this, my power is this.
It feels so good to let go. But it never seems to help.
He’s been with Crispin for nine months, a good half-year since the start of the game, when the frustration finally gets the better of him. He’s never going to manage it, he thinks in sullen despair as he sneaks down through the passages to the back cellar storeroom that Crispin rarely uses. It’s where he keeps his stores of spell ingredients, all lined up in neat glass jars in rows of handmade cabinets, and Kit can’t quite put his finger on what it is that he finds so comforting about the place, but it’s small and it's hidden and it feels like home in a way he can’t explain. So he curls up in the corner and hugs his knees to his chest and hides, staring at the powders and roots and poisons as he silently berates himself—and he’s not sure if it’s because he’s too weak to beat Crispin or because tonight he’s too weak to face him at all, because he’s so sick of getting wet and so angry at his chain of perpetual defeat and so frustrated that nothing, nothing seems to change it.
No watch-spies come looking for him, which is as telling in their absence as it would be in their presence. Crispin knows where he is. Crispin knows he’s not coming tonight.
He wonders if that means he’s failed some secret, overarching lesson in all this. Perseverance, perhaps. Mother always taught him how important it was to get back up again after he’d fallen. But there are only so many times one can get back up, he thinks sulkily, and there are only so many defeats one can take before he simply accepts it as a matter of course.
He rests his forehead on his knees and sulks in silence, punctuated only by the occasional sneeze—apparently he hadn’t cleaned up the fairy dust as well as he’d thought.
He thinks and sulks and dwells on his failure until he falls asleep down there, hunched over in a tiny ball, and when he does he dreams of running like a fox through the woods. He’s never thought it very fair, that hunters should bring a horse and a weapon and a half-dozen dogs to chase down a single fox; how could one little creature hope to endure against a force like that? How can the one little fox even stand a chance against such overwhelming odds?
He wakes up feeling worn and hollow, as though he’d run all night—and that’s when the answer comes to him.
The evening comes, and this time he’s waiting for Crispin in the usual place, as though they’d never missed the previous night at all. To his relief, the wizened old man doesn’t say a word about his previous absence; indeed, they carry on as though nothing had changed, taking their usual places and facing each other down as the little pond burbles merrily nearby. Kit draws a slow breath, feeling the tension in his shoulders increase in anticipation, and lets his frustration and rage begin to burn, coursing up and down his nerves like flames licking at dry brush. He breathes, and watches, and Crispin makes his move—
And Kit lets a pouch of black pepper slip down into his hand from where he’d secreted it in his sleeve, and in one fluid motion he throws it directly into Crispin’s face.
The powder explodes into the evening air, catching on the wind and sending the old wizard into a fit of uncontrollable sneezing, and he coughs and hunches over and waves his arms to try to clear the air, and Kit’s so busy laughing himself hysterical that he ends up pitching backwards into the pond all by himself.
He’s soaked to the bone and for the first time since they embarked on their game, he doesn’t care a bit about it because he’s laughing so hard he’s crying, laughing until his stomach aches from it, laughing until it dawns on him that every bit of the tension has seeped out his shoulders—and it feels as though he’s relaxing for the first time in ages as he stops bothering trying to hold himself upright and splashes backward into the pool. He’s damp all over anyway; he might as well let the water support him, instead.
He drowses there awhile, drifting placidly with his eyes closed, and when he finally opens them again, Crispin is gazing down at him with that quiet, smiling look on his bearded face.
“Six months,” he remarks with a good-natured wink. “It took your uncle less than a week to come up with the same answer.”
Kit frowns a little, but there’s no real anger in it. It’s as if all the tension in him is seeping out into the water, carried away like leaves in a gentle stream. “I didn’t know you taught my uncle.”
“I didn’t,” Crispin answers. “But he defeated his own wizard in the only way he knew how: by outsmarting him. It was a simple trick, a single serving of adulterated porridge.” He smiles. “But it worked.”
He flicks his fingers again, and Kit finds himself floating out of the water and into the air; another quick motion, and his clothes are suddenly dry, as though he’d never touched the surface of the pool at all. And perhaps it should make him angry, that Crispin’s known how to do this all along when he’s spent so many evenings toweling himself dry and wringing out his soggy clothes, but instead he simply watches the motions and commits them to memory so that he can someday repeat them.
And from that point on, the game is never played the same way twice. He learns new tricks—not spells, not attacks, but pranks and sleights of hand, misdirections—and dreams up innovations in how to use them to his advantage. The pepper will never work again, he knows, but it’s a lesson in itself that a good magician never performs the same trick twice. He finds variants, he bends rules; he sews false linings into his sleeves to better facilitate his ploys, and never goes anywhere without a trick or two hidden in them.
The game evolves and changes from there on out, and Kit grows and changes with it. He’s still learning things from Crispin, but he’s already taught himself to stretch his wings and fly; now, Crispin takes a more involved approach to things and guides him, refines him, smoothes over his rough edges and instructs him in efficiency and grace.
“There’s more to magic than power,” Kit remarks one afternoon as they hurl fire back and forth between them, lazily batting the blue-white ball of flame through the air. “It’s really about how you use it, isn’t it?”
Crispin smiles. “Which do you like better? The fury that could have leveled the forest in your wake, or the understanding you have now?”
“It felt awful to be angry all the time,” Kit answers after a minute, whirling the fire around in his fingers before pulling them into a pinch and letting the flame snuff out. “It felt good, too—exciting, I mean, and thrilling—but it hurt after a while.”
“Magic is magic,” Crispin says, giving his beard a thoughtful stroke. “There’s no difference in the power, only in the intent.” He shrugs. “You might’ve made a fearsome wizard, Kit. The sort that even Mordack and Manannan would have trembled before.”
It’s Kit’s turn to smile then. “Then I would’ve already won, wouldn’t I?” he replies, laughing at the old memory. “No sense in being afraid when it’s all just games and tricks.”
“Remember that when you go to see your father,” Crispin says, and suddenly time seems to jar to a halt because there’s breath caught in his throat and he doesn’t remember his eyes going so wide, and there’s a nagging feeling in the back of his mind that reminds him he needs to breathe but he can’t seem to recall how, and he’s hot and cold all over in a way that magic has never made him feel before.
“When I…what?” he forces out at last, through the lump in his throat.
“There’s three weeks left of your training before you go back to your mother,” Crispin answers instead, turning and heading for the door of the house. “Best come along, Kit. You’ve quite a bit still to learn.”
And that’s when Kit suddenly understands the purpose behind it all—the mirror, the training, the lessons in magic and trickery and cunning, in reading his foes and combating them, in falling out of a nest and learning to spread his wings and soar—
His time has finally come. It’s going to be an adventure of his own. He’s going to that city in the glass with its buildings like spindly fingers reaching up to the sky, that labyrinth of smoke and stone that tempted and repelled him all at once.
He remembers how he shook as he stared into the mirror’s silvered glass, wondering what it all could mean. And this time he hides a smile because now, somehow, the prospect of seeing it firsthand doesn’t frighten him at all.
▶ Midnight
He was raised on them, of course—and not just the storybook ones but the real ones too, like the one about how his grandfather climbed a beanstalk and rescued the kingdom from peril and became king himself, or how he saved Grandmother from her tower by riding a golden fish across a lavender sea, or how Uncle Alexander rescued Mother from a dragon and then Mother rescued Grandfather the very same day, without hardly even pausing to rest in between. And he’s learned silly rhymes that seem to go with them, nonsense poems he’s never been able to puzzle out—London bridges, and Mary contrary, and riding a cock horse to Banbury Cross. He doesn’t know what they mean, but Mother made certain he heard them, and now he knows all of those like the back of his hand, too.
He’s fifteen years old when he first steps through the surface of the mirror. It feels like floating through thick, dark water, up and up toward a glimmer of light at the surface, and it makes him think of mermaid princesses with oysters clasped on their tail, suffering pain for the sake of beauty but eager to see the world waiting above.
The disorienting lack of magic hits him at once as he steps out and down into a shadowed, claustrophobic alley that brings to mind thoughts of dungeons; it’s as though he’d been standing in sunlight all his life and suddenly had the warmth taken away, shivering and chilled from the lack of golden rays. He leans against the wall and makes himself breathe, in and out, tasting the unfamiliar flavor of smoke in the air and reaching for something indescribable that suddenly isn’t there, the heat of a candle that’s abruptly been snuffed.
It worries him for a minute, but then he remembers his lessons and the fear recedes. There’s no magic in the surroundings, not the way he’s used to in Daventry, but he can still feel the familiar pulse running through his fingers and he thinks with a rueful smile that it must be in his blood. It’s different, but it’s safe. He has his tricks. There’s nothing to fear.
There’s commotion coming from a little way down the street, and he slinks through the shadows to investigate; it sounds like some sort of party, and as he rounds the corner and peers down the lane he sees carriages and streetlamps and sprawling houses behind wrought-iron fences, and there is a small parade of people making their way through the gate and inside. The ladies are the first to catch his eye, not so much for their beauty as for their costume—he’s never seen such dress before, and it strikes him at once that such things must be entirely impractical, the weight and the bustle and the falls of so much fabric all around. He tries to imagine his mother in such a dress and finds himself failing miserably, unable to picture her pretty, slender frame forced into such a monstrosity.
The gentlemen are better, if a bit boring; they all seem to wear nothing but black and white, which doesn’t much appeal to Kit’s personal sense of fashion, but he does approve of the neat and trim look of the whole business. Some of the men look rumpled and ill-fitting, but there are some who wear their clothes well, who cut a fine figure in their ties and tails and cufflinks, and he thinks that perhaps he wouldn’t mind looking so fine, himself—even though he does still like his usual clothes best.
He straightens himself up the best he can and makes his way down the street, keeping to the shadows until he can duck behind one of the carriages still waiting to let its passengers out onto the street. It takes perfect timing, but that’s something he’s always had a knack for, and as the occupants come chattering out into the open air, he slips into file behind them and acts as though he knows what he’s doing—which he doesn’t—as he follows them all up to the door.
He’s five steps in before a lady comes to his side, simpering and smiling behind a strangely painted face as she catches hold of his arm. “Are you the magician?” she asks hopefully, pronouncing the vowels oddly in a tone he’s never heard before, and there’s a part of him that wants to say yes, yes he is, because technically speaking, it's the truth. But then she frowns and looks at him a little more closely, and shakes her head in what he assumes is exasperation as she quickly disappears back into the crowd.
He decides to keep to the shadows after that, and he’s good at keeping a low profile when he doesn’t want to be seen. So he finds himself a nice quiet corner and lurks within it, watching the hustle and bustle and trying to make sense of everything that goes on.
It isn’t until the real magician arrives that Kit understands why he was mistaken for one—the man is tall and confident, and wears his clothes well enough, but his coat and cuffs are trimmed in leopard fur, and there’s something almost lazy in the curl of his collar and the tilt of his hat. The colors are subdued, black and beige and navy blue, but Kit can’t help but think that such mores mean nothing to this man, and if he cared to, he’d wear all the colors of the rainbow and damn anyone who spoke out against it.
He wonders if it’s an attitude that comes naturally to magicians. Crispin was much the same way, too.
The magician puts on a good show, lots of fanfare and flash, but Kit finds it hard to keep from snickering as he watches from the shadows and reads between the gestures, sifting through the performance to separate the tricks from the misdirections. He’s good, very good, and these people want to believe in him—which is arguably the most important part of the magic at all. So he watches the show and makes note of the good bits for his own use: cards that turn to flame, items that disappear and reappear from sight, doves pulled from seemingly empty sleeves and cast fluttering into the air.
It’s only during the finale, when a table begins to levitate from the helpful use of piano wire, that Kit makes his mistake.
He laughs.
It’s only for a moment, a short bark of laughter that slips out before he realizes it, but it rings out through the room and it’s enough to draw the attention of the people close enough to hear it, the magician included. And then there are eyes on his hiding place, people looking closely enough to see him despite the shadows, and indignant chatter begins to fill the room as the people whisper to each other about his nerve and his behavior and his manners.
The only one silent is the magician, who stares at him through disbelieving eyes before finally forcing out an astonished, “Earl?”
And Kit doesn’t know what it is about that word that strikes him like a bolt of lightning, because he’s not an earl and has never been one—he’s a prince and an heir, but never an earl—but something in him catches and he bolts for the door, running like a fox with the hounds on his tail. And he thinks they must be pursuing him, or imagines that he hears someone crashing through a crowd and bearing down on him, hot on his heels, but he’s got a fair head start and it’s only a short distance to the alley from whence he came. He doesn’t know how he senses the opening through to the mirror, but he does and he feels it and he slips through, floating back down again through the dark, murky water to the kingdom he knows is waiting below.
He sinks back into darkness and he thinks of the mermaid princess as he goes, and how she must have felt after her first taste of the surface she’d longed after for so long.
It was midnight when he left, and it is midnight when he returns, stepping back out into the golden kingdom so rich and bright with magic; it’s strange to think that not a moment has passed since he’s been gone, but it’s an interesting tidbit to know and he makes a careful note of it, because such a thing might be useful someday, and one never knows when that may be.
He kicks off his shoes and returns to his bed, exhausted from the run but exhilarated by it, too, and he knows he’ll be asleep by the time his head hits the pillow. But as he falls toward it, his covers rumpled around his body, he’s already dreaming of the next time he’ll go back, and the new set of wonders he might see when he does.
When he wakes up the next morning, there’s a suit of clothes waiting for him—fine clothes, exquisitely tailored, in sleek black and crisp white with hat and tails and cane—and he catches himself wondering yet again if perhaps his mother knows more than she’s ever let on before.
▶ Nightmare
He doesn’t learn the dangers of London until he is sixteen.
There’s so much to see in the city beyond the mirror, and there’s something in him that’s desperate to experience it all. And there’s no time lost between when he goes and when he returns, so there’s a certain sort of indulgence in it, too—that he can come and go as he pleases, and no one will ever know the difference. He’s long since learned how to dress up in his suit and hat, and he’s made a few adjustments to the cane in particular; a weekend with Crispin helped him find a way to hide a magic wand in it, which helps to combat the dearth of magic in the air in London.
There’s always magic in himself, of course, which is a comforting layer of defense against that emptiness in the air, but he’s a bit afraid to draw on it because it’s a part of him and he doesn’t know what it might do if he should chance to use it all up. So the wand helps with that, like carrying a flask of water at his hip through a desert. It’s there if he needs it, but he hopes he never will.
He’s sixteen when he’s confident enough to walk the streets alone at night, having mostly memorized the landmarks of the city and learned his way around in relation to them. He’s also spent time watching pickpockets—and indeed, let them pickpocket him a few times, himself—to learn how they work, because that style of thievery is another type of magic, a sleight of hand designed to relieve gentlemen of their pocket change and leave no one the wiser until long after the young offender has gone. It was a lesson well worth the coins he traded them for it, especially since it all came from the chest that never empties; the urchins that chanced to steal from him made out like bandits that night, probably thinking they were gaining a few pence when really they’d ended up with gold.
Kit’s used to the idea that one has to pay to learn lessons. Good things seldom come for free.
He’s walking alone down the chilly city street, snug beneath his top hat and looking for an evening’s entertainment, when he first hears the sound of the violin. It’s not a song he recognizes—his grandfather plays the fiddle, but those are jumping jigging tunes, and this one is hollow and haunting—but the sound of the strings seems to resonate within him, pulling at him in a way he can’t explain. That happens more often than he’d like to admit, the times when he visits London; it’d scare him if he ever indulged in being afraid anymore, but mostly it only nags at him, like an itch he can’t reach to scratch or a word on the tip of his tongue that he can never quite place. It’s the feeling that he should know something, and doesn’t, and it bothers him immensely.
So he stops and listens to the song instead, resting his cane against his shoulder and feeling the comforting pulse of magic hidden within it. Street musicians shouldn’t be out this late, he thinks, and not in this part of the city. They ought to keep to the crowds in the daylight, or they’ll never have anything to show for it.
It’s the movement that he sees first, a flicker of white out of his peripheral vision; a moment later, the violin is louder, closer.
Someone is interested in him, he thinks.
He starts walking again, and as he suspected, the sound follows him. Other men, upon that realization, might have broken into a run; he knows better, and keeps his footsteps steady, patiently waiting for the moment when his foe will show his hand. It does no good to be careless, he thinks. He’ll see what’s coming when the violinist reveals himself at last.
And it doesn’t take long; there’s a rustle on the wind, a shiver on the rooftops, and the music draws to a high, whispering close as a man drops down in front of him—a young man, perhaps not much older than he is himself, with round dark glasses and a shock of spiky hair that makes him think of snow falling.
They regard each other in silence a moment, the violinist and the gentleman, and it's Kit who finally breaks the silence.
“Is your white hair real?” he asks with a touch of humor, the sort that most of London society reads as impudence.
For some reason, the young man looks amused by the question—too amused for Kit’s liking. “It is,” he answers, as though he’s trying not to laugh. “That’s why everyone calls me the Owl.”
And now it’s Kit’s turn to laugh, because the sheer coincidence of meeting another lad with an animal's name is worthy of a chuckle of his own. “You elegant fowl, how charmingly sweet you sing,” he replies, quoting the rhyme he remembers his mother teaching him so long ago. “Are you after a tip for your trouble?”
“That’s not my job,” the Owl says, tilting his head in an appropriately birdlike way. “I’m here to see you.”
“To see me?” Kit repeats, mildly surprised. “And what could you want with me?”
The Owl smiles. “You’re looking for something, aren’t you?”
Green-gold eyes in a mirror.
“You’re here to be my guide,” Kit answers, doing his best to maintain his confidence when suddenly, inexplicably, he feels young—as though the Owl is looking at him without seeing him at all, or seeing straight through him to someone else, and it’s that feeling of not knowing again that shakes him right to the core. “Is that it?”
“I don’t take anyone’s side,” the Owl teases again. “What is it you want to find?”
And there are so many ways that Kit could answer that question, all in varying shades of truth and lie, that for a minute he doesn’t quite know what to say. He’s looking for adventure, for knowledge, for understanding; he’s looking for answers, the explanation of how his mother knows so much about this strange and foreign place, the meaning behind the hints and comments that he’s never been able to decipher. He’s looking for the reason he spent a year being ducked in a fishpool until he learned to control magic with the skill of a wizard; he’s looking for the realization of what the blonde girl and her cards meant when she drew The Magician again and again before his eyes. He’s looking for the thing that draws him in ways he can’t explain, the feeling that urges him on like a hunger for something he’ll never taste.
The real truth is, he’s looking for his father and he knows it. But he knows it so deeply, so innately, that he’s buried it under layers and layers of reason and rationale, of thrill-seeking and experience, and it’s buried so deep that he won’t even admit it to himself. But it’s the one thing he wants more than anything, the thing he wants so bad he can taste it, and he just hasn’t discovered yet how to find it.
“An evening’s diversion, at the moment,” he says at last, more for the sake of something to say than because it’s actually what he means. “Shall we go out to sea in a pea-green boat?”
“Come see the end of the world,” the Owl says, as though he hadn’t spoken at all, and nods once at him before leaping back and darting off down the street—and Kit knows it’s a bad idea, but it’s such a strange encounter and an unusual promise that he follows anyway, his cane clutched tight in fingers with knuckles as white as his unlikely guide’s hair.
The end of the world turns out to be a mausoleum, a stately thing with marble and columns and a domed roof overhead, tucked away in the midst of grass and trees that seem strangely out of place in a land like this. He doesn’t know how long it takes them to get there, and despite his best efforts at landmarking, he’s unnerved to discover he’s lost his way in the course of following the Owl. And he doesn’t like that at all, because the most important part of traversing a labyrinth is leaving a string by which to find one’s way out, and all he has now to go on is a strange, flippant young man he only just met a scarce few hours before.
He knows from the minute his foot first touches the stone of the foundation that there’s something wrong about this place. It nags at him, like a tugging at a loose thread in a tapestry, slowly but steadily unraveling the once-sturdy pattern of his thoughts. There’s something wrong, even moreso than London itself is wrong, and it’s black and it’s cold and it’s creeping—but he knows it, he feels it, and he still can’t tear himself away.
He’s halfway to the door before he realizes the Owl has disappeared, and he wonders if this is a trap as he continues to make his way past the columns and under the archway, heading for the ornate scrollwork carvings that mark the entrance to the tomb. Is this what he’s been searching for all this time, he wonders? It’s white, such clean white, such a contrast to the soot and smog of London. Is this the end of his journey, the place where he will finally find his father?
The doors swing open at what seems like the slightest of touches, and there are angels inside, assembled with stone-feather wings extended around a casket that bears the face of a man. A funeral procession of angels, he thinks, and takes a step closer, feeling his wariness begin to evolve into something that might almost be fear, and he clutches his cane like a security blanket as he makes himself step closer again. What is this place? What trick is that Owl playing upon him?
Something cold washes over him, something that raises the hairs on his arms and makes him shiver like he’s just been drenched in ice water, and he’s another step closer when an old man’s voice whispers through the air—
You can’t resist the temptation, you who have that woman’s blood in your veins—
And all at once something hits him, crashes into him in a way that makes the memory of Crispin’s ball of force feel like nothing more than the prick of a pin; it hits him so hard he spins, reels, his mind whirling in disorientation as his sense of balance goes completely awry. His nerves are on fire but he can’t feel anything, and it’s only the sudden resistance of something firm beneath his shoulder that makes him realize he’s hit the ground at all. There’s blood in his mouth and he thinks he ought to be screaming but he’s not, he can’t, he can’t do anything because something is pushing down on his lungs and his limbs and his mind, raging at him, prying at his defenses, howling against the magic he wears like armor and digging, scratching, scrabbling for a chink—
Any spell slower than a reflex is worthless.
The world goes white as something gives, as light cascades through the shadows of the room, but he never has the chance to see what it is as his head cracks down hard against the stone—and his consciousness spins like a whirlpool before at last, everything finally fades to black.
ON TO PART TWO