Spring in Rogue reminded Dwayne of the Chrysallis summer, where he and Riel would sleep in hammocks on the tailor shop’s roof, talking about what odd spells they ran across for hours before finally drifting off. The summer before Riel left Chrysallis, their chats turned towards how they would handle the impending Provenance.
“I’m pretty sure I can pass Provenance next year,” she’d said after a long stretch of silence that, while comfortable, was too still.
“We could have tried this year. You’d pass.”
“No…besides, if I didn’t pass, you know what Tavena would say.”
“Mm.” She did have a point. Ever since Riel had decisively one-upped Tavena during a demonstration on how to conceal one’s presence, she knew the other witch was waiting for the first sign of failure.
“Next year,” Riel said again. “I want to leave Chrysallis.”
“And go where?”
“I’ll know by next summer.”
Not wanting to risk being stuck at the seminary for another year, Dwayne spent long hours practicing and studying with Riel. Their spells went from simple mischief like making exam papers turn into piles of feathers to more sophisticated, like making rain that wasn’t wet. He found that he was no longer barred from the Smith forge, as he had been after accidentally making a crucible filled with molten iron explode when he tried to keep it hot enough to pour into a knife mold. He’d had to settle for only sharpening the knife he gave to his grandfather that year.
The other students in their year stopped regarding them with such extreme caution, though they were never welcoming. Not all of their teachers responded in kind. Those ones who’d been responsible for cleaning up their messes were skeptical, and Riel did a better job of brushing it off than Dwayne did. But always they stayed the course. Then the chance to take the Provence came in mid-summer.
Riel’s test went well, and so did Dwayne’s, much to the shock of their peers and chagrin of their skeptics though by the time his exam came, he couldn’t blame anyone for being wary. Like most every other year a solid half of the prospects didn’t pass, their ambitions far outweighing their skills. Dwayne used to think the extra year failed prospects had to spend at the seminary was excessive until he’d felt at least three earthquakes, the exam room had to be changed due to flooding, and there was a solid hour where no sound at all could be heard around the seminary.
At the end of the day, Dwayne was tired, wishing he’d decided against turning day to night for his final exhibition. It was a complicated illusion to pull off in the summer but he’d done so flawlessly even after multiple rounds of breaking curses that left him disoriented and fending off attacks of increasing complexity and intensity, sometimes even having to get himself down from a ceiling while avoiding falling rocks and water spouts. Riel’s exhibition was in the same realm of ostentatious, where she’d conjured up a rendition of the old Eprec coast, before the drought, complete with a merchant ship and the scent of the ocean that covered the entire exam room.
“What now?” Dwayne sat next to Riel on the front steps of the seminary, clutching the pendant that signified he was now a proper witch. It was made of wood taken from a branch of the red mulberry tree in the seminary’s courtyard. There were no intricate carvings or paintings on it; only Dwayne’s initials and the “192n” that was used to identify Chrysallis on naval maps were burned into the wood so lightly Dwayne couldn’t feel where any of the letters began. It would give him access to places only proper witches could be, spellbook caches most couldn’t just walk into. Chrysallis had few of those places but Dwayne figured there were enough to satiate his curiosities for a year or two.
“I’m going to Rogue,” Riel said without looking at him.
A knot began to form in Dwayne’s gut. She really did want to leave Chrysallis; it wasn’t some idle notion like he’d had over the years, where a few weeks of thinking gave him time to poke holes in the plan. Riel had spent a year poking and prodding and hadn’t wavered.
“That dust bowl?” is what he ended up asking.
“There’s an opening at the morgue. I’m gonna take it.” She kept looking straight ahead,
“When did you go there?”
“Last month.”
Looking back, he couldn’t see where she had the time to slip away long enough to secure a job. But she had. She never acted on a whim, this he knew, but suddenly leaving to work at a morgue across the country?
“You’re sure?” is all he ended up asking.
“I am,” Riel nodded her ascent. She spoke nothing of why and Dwayne did not push, not once admitting to himself he feared what she might say.
###
The next month passed much in the same way time had always passed between them, though now they could go over the spells they’d been denied access to for so long. Most were banal and underwhelming, the sort of magic only thieves and charlatans bothered with like manipulation and binding. One afternoon in the basement of the Chrysallis library, Riel let out a long sigh as she slouched into a chair.
“All that work for…this?” Riel didn’t bother trying to hide her disappointment. They’d even had to bother one of the librarians to take them down to the basement. They popped in and out of the room with an ease Dwayne had never seen up close; few had enough stamina to actually master teleportation.
Once they were alone again and Dwayne felt more at ease, he flipped through a book of binding spells where one was supposed to use a line of brick dust as a barrier.
“Look at this,” he showed the pages to Riel. “Like it just sound fake.”
“Sounds? Prolly is…”
He flipped through the book a while longer before giving up and going to put it back on the shelf. How was he supposed to send off his friend with such boring spells? They’d found more interesting things when they “borrowed” lesson plans at the seminary.
“May I?” He stiffened when he realized the voice was coming from right beside him. He couldn’t keep track of any of the librarians no matter how hard he’d focused. He put the book in the witch’s hand but did a double-take when he saw the witch’s face.
He was darker skinned, and kept his hair cut shorter than most, and came nearly eye-to-eye with Dwayne. He wore the robes of a librarian, so long they scraped the floor yet were never tattered around the hems and their deep purple hue signified he was the head librarian.
“…you used work in the library at the seminary,” Dwayne said.
“It’s been a few years, but yes. Have we met?”
Of course Dwayne remembered; that was the first time he’d ever been afraid of another witch, when he’d first run across someone he couldn’t read. His parents were easy enough to predict, and Riel was his other half. But this witch?
Dwayne’s growth spurts had been quick, and he spent most of his early adolescence readjusting to his own skin. He slept little, aches keeping him awake at night, with too much pride to ask either of his parents to do something. On one of his less coordinated days, where he tripped over his own feet several times on the short walk to the seminary, he’d bumped into the librarian. He’d apologized, and the librarian accepted, but the fear he’d felt from that brief brush with him had never fully left.
“What are we supposed to do with any of this?” Riel asked and Dwayne was just glad the librarian’s attention was off of him.
“If you feel there’s nothing here for you, then there’s nothing here,” he shrugged. “That’s how this place works.”
“I guess that’s why there’s nothing here about morgues…everyone here is cremated within a week…” Riel sighed.
“Maybe. And you?”
“I suppose I’ll come back,” Dwayne said carefully. It wasn’t as though he’d have any plans once Riel left.
“Before then,” the librarian ran his hands across the spines of a few books before sifting through the books on Dwayne and Riel’s table. He settled on a rather large one that only seemed to contain woefully out-of-date maps; they all still had water in the Eprec Ocean. “Try something out of here.”
Then he left, and Dwayne began flipping through the book once again. He started from the back this time, where all the actual spells apparently were. He wondered where the library had obtained it; he could scarcely make out the scrawl in the margins. But what he could read seemed to inane ramblings—something about a ship that would just appear suddenly that no one ever seemed to be able to board.
“Should we actually try one?” he asked Riel. “You know the librarians just be saying shit sometime.”
“I mean, it can’t hurt,” she shrugged. “Nothing else in here was useful.”
And so they went to one of the practice rooms right outside of the library. They were deceptively small, looking no bigger than a small shack but went hundreds of feet in every direction on the inside. They were lined will all sorts of fail-safe spells, all to protect the witches inside and keep the library from suffering any damage.
They flipped through the handful of spells in the atlas for a good while, before deciding on a harmless bit of divination. Fool’s magic, hence why it was locked up in the basement and not to be trifled with by the impressionable.
The spell called for a drop of blood each and for a long while, their two drops of blood did nothing but hover over the atlas, going in circles, occasionally bumping into each other before separating again. Then the two drops moved in separate directions, with the one nearest Dwayne stopping in a forest not far outside Chrysallis, where Riel’s went over to Rogue.
Dwayne let out an ugly laugh. “Isn’t this what we’d already decided to do?”
Riel had been silent then, setting the two drops of blood ablaze and picking up the atlas. “Let’s go home,” she said. To whose home they were going, she didn’t say.
###
The night before Riel left, they were in the tailor shop’s hammocks, staring up at the twin moons. They offered safe travels for the three days they were visible, and Riel had spent two of the three trying on and having clothes altered, and negotiating with her parents which spellbooks of theirs she could take, tasks that Dwayne had not needed to be involved in. At dusk the next day, she would open a portal to Rogue.
Dwayne’s outstretched arm only just reached Riel’s, their first two fingers interlocking on occasion. He’d brought the sweet cornbread she liked, the kind he’d only ever had at home. After they’d eaten, it was time to wait for the twin moons to rise. They did little magic or talking. What was there to say, Dwayne wondered.
Just before the moons reached their zenith, Riel got out of her hammock and dragged Dwayne with her. There were only a few clouds in the sky that evening, and Riel waited until they weren’t obscuring the moons before she spoke.
“I’ll come back before next time,” she said quietly.
“That sounds like you don’t want me to come visit.”
“Not until I…” she trailed off. When Dwayne was sure she wouldn’t add to that, he pulled her in for a hug. He rested his chin on her shoulder, not wanting her to see any of the tears. There weren’t many, but they were his. She didn’t need to carry them with her.
###
But now they were both in Rogue, and the walk back to Riel’s house had not been nearly as slow or plodding as Dwayne hoped and he didn’t want to go inside. Her house had the only fence that stood straight, the only roof that had no holes, and was the only place besides the lighthouse that Dwayne had felt any life since he got to Rogue. His friend’s presence had been easy to navigate during the Conception festival when they were both busy all the way until she’d left him at the lighthouse. But there were no further distractions in the pseudo-desert that was Rogue, not when the town proper was another hour from Riel’s house and there was no chance they could go there and be back inside before dark.
He sat on the back porch for a long while, wishing the air wasn’t so still. There was nothing to see besides a few succulents that lined the porch, the stones that formed a swirling path through the red dirt, and the laundry shed he’d first arrived in. By the time he was done counting all 247 stones in the swirl, the last few streaks of purple were about to fade from the sky.
Riel would know he was back, as she always did, so he didn’t announce himself when he went inside. No lights came on when he walked further into the kitchen which was odd but he didn’t question it as he sat at the table. He reached for the fruit bowl that sat in the center. She had his two favorites in there; oranges and ocean kiwis. The latter were hard to come by in Chrysallis given they were so far from the ocean where they could just be plucked from bunches of kelp, and it was probably even more difficult to find them in Rogue.
By the time Riel came down to the kitchen, he’d eaten two each of the oranges and kiwis, glad his stomach seemed to have settled down from his mid afternoon trip. The switch she hit on the wall as she came in caused a light that was far too bright to appear on the ceiling, and Dwayne covered his eyes for a few moments.
“The old undertaker used to live here,” she said as she sat across from Dwayne at the table. “Couldn’t see too well. Don’t know what he had done to the place to make a switch work a spell.”
“And you never dimmed it?”
“I usually never turn it on,” she smiled but it faded quickly.
She took an orange from the fruit bowl and took her time peeling it, neatly stacking the peels next to Dwayne’s. She went to wash her hands, even used a towel to dry them instead of quickly air-drying them.
“I couldn’t tell you why I was leaving.” Her back was still to Dwayne.
“You didn’t want to be stuck at your folk’s shop anymore than I wanted to be stuck at mines,” he said, the same refrain he used to convince himself to leave her be on those days when he was especially lonely. “I got that.”
“But that’s not why I left. I was called here,” she said.
“By who?”
She turned to face him now but came no closer, her hands gripping the edge of the counter.
“Not who. What.”
