Chaos and Conjurations

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2The rain hadn’t ceased by the time proper morning arrived. Theo eyed it through the bedroom window. The roads would be mud; no help for that. At least their carriage was one of the College’s enchanted light-flyer type, no horses needed.

As magicians, they should have other ways to travel. He sighed, sound echoed by the rain.

“Don’t have emotions,” Dominic ordered, and poked him in the temple. “I’m trying to sort out your head.”

“Sorry.”

“We wouldn’t do a gate-spell back anyway. I hate those, and you know I hate those, so be quiet about it, telepathically speaking.”

Theo sighed again. “Fine.”

In a moderately small irony, Dominic, as the College’s most competent senior physician, remained among the small percentage of people who had adverse—and nauseated—reactions to the quick sharp physical transfer of gate-spells. At least they did have a carriage, because Henry and Theo had taken one on the outward journey, because Henry had been so terribly weakened then and they hadn’t wanted to induce any more stress.

Theo knew perfectly well that Dom and Linnet had come through a gate as soon as Henry’d magically shouted for help. After he, Theo, had collapsed in Henry’s arms.

He did not know how to say thank you for that. Any more than he knew how to speak to Henry, whom he loved, who smiled at him with such painful distance, as if afraid closeness might cause harm.

A whisper of mint-music, cool and crisp and pale green, brushed his aching thoughts. Dom’s mental fingertips were those of a doctor: precise, focused, clean, touching the tangle of chaotic hues and shapes and memories in Theo’s head. The clarity was soothing, and more compassionate than Dom would ever admit.

Does this hurt? Here? One metaphorical fingertip found a muddy tangle of Theo’s own book-affinity, tawny-gold letters and stories and symbols, knotted up with tall English oaks and fallen burning-color leaves. It was his own gifts, and Henry’s, a bibliomancer’s sense and an elemental land-sense; except they’d snarled together like a wyvern’s nest. Filaments stretched like harp strings outward, finding Henry, binding them.

Not as such. It didn’t, yet. Only an awareness.

Dom pressed harder on it. Now?

No…it isn’t a hurt. Not unless Henry did magic, when the tangled threads pulled and scraped each other raw. Henry was downstairs right now, seeing to the carriage; his face had been taut with concern, leaving Theo for a final check-up. And you and I both know you can’t simply break it.

Oh, can’t I, Dom muttered. He couldn’t simply slice through the seething knot with a scalpel, that much was true; none of them knew what that would do to Theo’s and Henry’s magic. I can see most of those threads, you know. I could unweave it. Give me a few months in a properly focused trance, with you and some silver needles and a rowan infusion…

We don’t have months to spend inside my head and you know it. I’m all right, I can live with it. Anyway Linnet would miss you, back at the College, if you were in a trance for months.

Dom, who had for at least two decades stubbornly remained oblivious to undergraduate magicians, various nurses, and junior physicians who regarded his silver-dark good looks with longing gazes and persistent crushes and love sonnets, said, I’ll also thank you to shut up about Linnet, or I’ll put something vile in your tea.

Do no harm, was it?

I’m writing an article about your head. Sending it off to the Journal of the Society of Thaumaturgical Aesculapians. When i***t librarians decide to be heroes, and go off on their own to sever an ancient black-magic draining-spell that shouldn’t’ve been allowed in the first place, and get hit by a trap-curse, and then manage to c**k even that up…

“…by all rights you should be dead,” Dom finished aloud, pulling back from Theo’s head in an ebbing wash of snow and mint and herbal coolness. “You’re lucky your captain’s as idiotically heroic as you are. Made for each other, the pair of you. I’ve left some shields up, in there. They won’t last, but they’ll give some of those raw channels an extra layer of protection, at least the next time.”

Theo shut his eyes, let himself feel the presence: comforting, like a sheath of gentle ice, like a remedy held to a swelling pain. “Thank you.”

Dominic sat back. Looked at him, across the quiet and the country house bedroom. Voices drifted up from outside, indistinguishable. Henry’d already taken down their luggage, not that they’d had much. “We should talk.”

“Er. About what?”

“Don’t act like an undergraduate pretending not to have set off a firework after hours. You know what.”

“Yes.” Theo resisted the urge to rub his own temple, where Dom’s fingers had rested. “In the carriage, though. With Henry.” No secrets. Not about this, at any rate.

“Fine. I’ll tell him you’re cleared for travel, all of that nonsense, it’s not as if the travel matters for what you’ve done to yourself. You’re over the physical backlash, other than just being exhausted, which frankly you deserve.” Dom got up, a wry line of practical trousers and long coat, the grey flecks in his hair turning it lighter than his eyes. “Tell me when those shields break, and I’ll do it again, as long as I’m close enough to set them.”

“You can’t keep doing that for me forever.”

“No, and I don’t intend to. Which is why we should talk. I’ll let the Headmistress know we’re on the way.” He vanished through the door, and down the stairs.

Theo watched the empty space for a moment, sighed again, and did rub his temple, briefly.

He wasn’t precisely sure he considered Dom a friend, or he hadn’t, before this; they hadn’t known each other well. In passing, yes. Residents of the College, but not teaching faculty, either of them, though both of them might occasionally take on a student with an aptitude for bibliomancy or physic. And of course Dom was over a decade Theo’s senior; Theo’d been the second-youngest person ever appointed to the College staff. Barely out of school, in fact. If one chose to recall that.

He knew the College, especially Headmistress Campbell, hadn’t wanted to listen. Hadn’t wanted to know what he and Henry had seen, had witnessed. Case closed, neatly. One body, easily dismissed as a single lunatic, not even a College graduate. One Magicians’ Corps veteran, healed. A tidy outcome, even if the College’s head librarian had broken a few rules and ended up wounded.

No room for questions in the story. Everything explained, wrapped up, dusted from the College’s hands.

He didn’t know what Dominic thought. Dom had been in Theo’s head, and had been kind, beneath the grumbling; but Dom was older and had been a part of the College for so long, loyalty given and no doubt expected. If Theo said, Henry and I think someone’s reviving proscribed magic, or I think the College doesn’t want to see it or admit to it, and they’re choosing not to believe us about Sir Geoffrey’s partner, at least one, maybe more…

Would he sound insane as well? Would Dom say so, not in so many words, but a diagnosis of exhaustion, magical injury, confusion?

Sitting on the bed, hugging one knee, Theo felt very young and very small, just now, left alone in a room with only the raindrops and the quilt for company.

He also felt very old, and very tired. He wanted to curl up in bed and let Henry bring him tea and buttered crumpets and a storybook; he wanted to be back in his library, among his own magic and the scent of antique paper and his established routines, back in the world he knew. A world away from war and dark cultists and black ledgers and a murder and a mystery, from the dead men who now lived in his memories—his own, and Henry’s—and the incipient dread of pain.

The next time Henry used magic—and he would; no magician could help it for long—Theo’s head would feel the scrape and sear of it, and that would be inescapable, despite Dom’s shields and his own words about living with it.

He could live with it, and it wouldn’t kill him. Dom was certain about that.

Theo, however, had killed someone. That was also present, and he’d mostly managed to live with it, as well.

He hadn’t exactly meant to—it’d been the spell snapping back on its caster—and he knew, having been in the man’s head, that Sir Geoffrey Lloyd had been an evil person. Had been the sort of person who harmed others, and who enjoyed it. Had killed before, and had been finding pleasure in the drain of Henry’s magic and lifeblood.

Theo knew all of that. And he’d seen, felt, tasted Henry’s memories of war, of battlefields, in France and Spain.

He thought he was coping with it well enough. He’d examined his own decisions, his own choices. He’d talked to Henry about that much, over the last three weeks of examination, self and physicians’. He’d asked himself those questions all over again, in the silence of night with Henry asleep beside him.

He’d do it all again, in the same position. Because Henry was asleep, alive, beside him. And together they’d tugged on a string that might lead to a frightening tapestry, a plot against England or the College or magic itself, a secret that desperately needed uncovering.

But nevertheless: he had killed someone. And he couldn’t go back to being the comfortable young librarian who’d never known that moment, who’d never felt a life end, who’d never cast a counter-spell in full awareness that a man’s death would be a possible, though not guaranteed, consequence.

He’d never be that version of Theo Burnett again. And he wished, for a hopeless futile second, that none of this had happened: that he’d never met Henry in his library, that he’d never fallen in love, that he’d never flung himself into a cultists’ seductive puzzle with reckless abandon and run off to Hertfordshire and thrown himself between Henry and harm, and ended up internally bleeding for it…

He didn’t wish any of that, not deep down. And he would do it all again. He knew he would. Those choices were his, and he wouldn’t deny them.

He had Henry. They had each other. That was something. That was at least one anchor, amid the chaos.

And Dom wanted to talk, and couldn’t keep shields in Theo’s head forever; and the College did not believe them with regard to cultists and conspiracies; and someone somewhere had a copy of ritual magic that shouldn’t exist anyplace outside the College archives, and that someone certainly knew that Henry and Theo existed, at least in general terms, if not their names, because Geoffrey Lloyd had absolutely not been alone at the moment of his death…

Theo got up, wearily, hand on the bed for support. The floorboards creaked under his step, commiseration a counterpoint to the rain.

* * * *

Henry was hurting because Theo was hurting and Henry himself was powerless, or more accurately had had his power restored, but that caused harm to Theo, which—

He stared at the carriage, not seeing delicate dark blue and bronze filigree, the crest of the College, the ancient four quarters of sword and wand and cup and pentacle. He kept picturing Theo’s face, thinner than before, green eyes stubborn.

Theo had asked him to go and see about preparations to depart. Henry had practically begged that Theo decide to stay, if travel would be at all painful. His family wouldn’t mind. He wouldn’t mind.

Theo had agreed to let Doctor Lyon examine him one more time. That was the only concession.

Henry set a hand on the side of the carriage, beneath the overhang of the mews. His family still kept horses—most people did, at least most people not magicians, who had other means of conveyance—and he could smell their large warmth, the hay, the barn, the refuge from the rain. It was real and earthy and alive, the home he recalled and the place he’d grown up.