Cyan and the baby have another visitor, and Cyan explains how the walls began to close in as his exams swiftly approached…

An Episode of The Twelvelms Conspiracy

Content Warnings

• An infant in mild distress
• Allusions to self-harm or self-harm-adjacent behaviours
• Descriptions of violence towards animals and humans
• Implications of child abuse
• Descriptions of an animal suffering from neglect and abuse
• Discussions of denied autonomy
• Description of a character abusing alcohol to self-medicate
• Description of an animal which has been harmed, apparently non-violently

Transcript

[SOUND OF DISHES BEING DONE]

[SCRAPING AT THE DOOR]

Taceo?

[MOVEMENT]

[DOOR OPENS]

[TACEO’S NAILS CLICK ON THE GROUND AS SHE WALKS IN]

Where’s Abagnale?

[DOOR SLAMS SHUT]

He’s not visited us for almost a week.

[TACEO HUFFS]

There’s a letter tucked into your collar. He’s not coming, is he.

[AS CYAN OPENS THE LETTER, TACEO HUFFS]

She’s in the bed, on my coat. She’s fine. She’s safe.

[TACEO’S NAILS CLICK ON THE GROUND AS SHE MOVES AWAY FROM CYAN]

Hey, where are—

[CYAN SIGHS. HE REFOCUSES ON THE LETTER]

It’s important I know as little as possible, apparently. That’s the safest thing for us right now. Isn’t it fucking always? Oh he got the impression when you last visited that I was dissatisfied with the lack of information he provided me with. Funny that.

[THE BABY CRIES]

HEY!

[CYAN RUSHES TO THE OTHER ROOM]

Get away from her!

[TACEO LEAVES THE BEDROOM, CLOSER TO THE AMANEUSIS STONE THAN CYAN NOW. SHE SCRATCHES THE DOOR.]

CYAN
(Distantly)
What did she do? Are you alright, little one? Hmm?

{THE BABY CRIES, BUT WITH LESS DISTRESS. CYAN MARCHES INTO THE ROOM WITH HER IN HIS ARMS. TACEO IS PANTING AND SCRATCHING AT THE DOOR]

Hey! You can’t just come in here and—

[TACEO PANTS MORE URGENTLY]

Oh, what, you’re leaving?! You only just got here. You march in, you disturb the baby, and you leave?! That’s it?!

[TACEO YIPS, SCRATCHES, PANTS]

Well go then!

[DOOR OPENS, WIND HISSES THROUGH THE TREES OUTSIDE]

Go!

[DOOR SLAMS SHUT. THE BABY IS STILL CRYING. CYAN PACES AS HE ROCKS HER, TRYING TO SOOTHE HER]

It’s okay. She didn’t hurt you, baby. She just gave you a fright. That’s all. Just a little fright. You’ll be okay. You’re okay. I’ve got you. Cyan’s got you. We’re alright, aren’t we?

[INTRO MUSIC: EIRA: This is the Twelvelms Conspiracy, Episode Ten, Hollow Sleepers]

[THE BABY IS QUIETER, BUT STILL UNSETTLED]

Yes, you see? You’re alright. You’re alright. Safe and warm and loved. Yes.

[CYAN PACES AND ROCKS HER AS SHE CONTINUES TO SETTLE]

There we are. We’re getting the hang of this, aren’t we? You know, you might be the best roommate I’ve ever had. You certainly sleep better than Felix. He likes it when I talk to him, too. Says it helps him sleep. I pretend that upsets me. You must never tell him, little one, but it doesn’t.

Ah. He knows.

He knows.

I’ll make you something to eat, shall I? It’s close enough to time, I think. Maybe you’ll sleep long enough if your belly’s full that I’ll be able to get some things done. Right. I’ll set you here, and—

[THE BABY SQUEALS AS CYAN SETS HER DOWN]

Yes, that’s right, that is where you go when I feed you. It’s coming, don’t worry.

[GLASS CLINKS AS CYAN PREPARES A BOTTLE FOR THE BABY. A LOW, TREMBLING SOUND; MAGIC]

Perfect temperature for you to drink. Come on then.

There you go.

[THE BABY MAKES SOFT LITTLE SOUNDS AS SHE SUCKLES]

Clever girl, look at you go. Gods. Your little nose. Like a button. Precious little thing. I see Reilly in you already. I wonder if you’ll have her freckles when you grow up? Or if you’ll be like your father. Like a Scarlett. Like Felix. Hmm.
I look a lot like my mother. My height, I get from her. But then, I’m all angles. I can never seem to keep enough weight on. Even when I shift forms, you can tell, even now. Felix says I look more sea lion than seal. I know, ridiculous isn’t it? Sea lions have ears and much more slender muzzles. And I have pretty patterns. Yes, I do. Pretty patterns. You like touching my spots when you’re falling asleep, don’t you? You like the little ones on my sleeves most of all. Felix mapped them all out, once, my markings. How they correlate to my coat from my seal form. Some of the spots on my sleeves are on my sides when I shift.
He likes tracing them, too, as he’s drifting off to sleep.
Yes. You also like the scar. I know. It feels funny, doesn’t it, under your fingers? It’s the only part of my coat I can’t feel when you touch it. It’s almost surreal when I touch it myself. The sensation is there and then it’s gone. But that’s what scars do, I suppose. That’s the only one I have when I’m in both forms. You see it here, on my arm? Yes. That’s the same scar. Matching. It’s because a part of the coat was lost. You see how the spots don’t quite line up? Yes. When I shift, the scar’s right at the top of my front flipper. I feel it when I swim. I don’t think it slows me down but I feel it, a little pull that’s always there.

[THE BABY’S CONTENTED GRIZZLING BEGINS TO SETTLE]

Felix has a scar that matches. It’s on his shoulder. Same shape. Though it’s been years now since it happened, Felix’ scar is still dark, not pale and pearly like the ones on his arms and his thighs. dark, and soft to the touch, with pale hair, soft as down.

[CYAN SIGHS]

We’ll get to that.

[THE BABY HAS STOPPED GRIZZLING HAPPILY, AND NOW SOFTLY SNORES]

Where was I up to, before I put you to bed? Ah, yes. Quinn. She handled it well that I was a selkie, though she impressed upon me that I had to find a way to tell Reilly, too. I wasn’t sure how to approach that. Over the last few months, Reilly and I had become fairly close. Felix had pushed through my boundaries and found out I was a selkie before I was ever his friend. Quinn and I had a tentative trust of one another, but I could not say we were close until months after I’d told her what I was.
It was different with Reilly. We studied alone together many evenings whilst Quinn and Felix engaged in their various extracurricular activities. Everything I knew about magedom, I owed to Reilly. Obviously, I’d been hiding from everyone. But Reilly was the only one to whom it felt like I had been lying.
I bolstered my reluctance to open up to Reilly with a botched kind of logic. Abagnale had instructed me to tell nobody. I hadn’t told Felix voluntarily, but I had told Quinn, and she’d made it clear she didn’t think I’d be able to keep it secret for much longer. If she was right, then it didn’t make sense for me to tell Reilly about it. The more people who knew, the more at risk I was, I reasoned.
Really though I was just a coward.
Only a few days after I’d told Quinn what I was that Abagnale called me to his office. I panicked before I went. I was worried he was going to throw me out. When I walked in, shoved between the stacks of paper on his huge, crowded desk, was the chest in which he’d instructed me to keep my coat.
‘Where is it?’ Abagnale demanded.
I pulled my satchel around to my front, hands closed over the sealing flap.
‘You’ve been carrying it around with you?’
‘I couldn’t cast magic, I thought. Maybe it’s because of my coat.’
Abagnale frowned. He sat down slowly. ‘Explain.’
‘Well I— I was doing some reading.’
‘Almost everything mages have on selkies is speculative. Old wives tales and fairy stories for magelings who cannot sleep.’
‘I know, Lord Abagnale. But there were some common factors, and then when I considered them against what I’ve learned about familiars—‘
‘Pray tell what you think you understand about the familiarisation process that would have you apply it to your coat?’
‘The— pain. Mostly the pain. It seemed similar enough for me to try.’
‘And? What were the results?’
‘I— I can cast now. Almost anything I want. I’ve gone from the worst ranked in practical casting to the second best in the class.’
‘After Master Scarlett, I presume.’
‘Yes. After Felix.’
Abagnale hummed. ‘And you’re confident you can keep it from others?’
‘I mean, it’s just a coat, isn’t it? You can’t tell by looking at it what it is.’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘And I feel better when I have it. More grounded.’
Abagnale sighed. ‘As long as you understand the risk. But I suppose it is of benefit to our case if you are able to cast practical magic effectively. If the only way you can do that is when you have your coat close by, I suppose that will have to be what we do.’
‘Lord Abagnale. Why is it that you brought me here?’
‘You’d rather I left you in that cottage with your father’s rotting corpse? Or perhaps you’d prefer one of the Watchers from the Alliance had found you, locked you in one of their cells under the Raeg?’
I thought of the bird, wasting away in the cells beneath Twelvelms as we spoke. About what Felix said about it, that there was no way Abagnale could not have known the bird was there. In that moment I was certain that Abagnale knew that I also knew about the bird, though I would never have admitted it.
‘Of course I’m glad,’ I said, carefully. ‘I just want to understand why you’d assume this amount risk. Sir.’
‘You’ve been exposed to speculation about me, I presume?’
‘Yes.’
’You’ve heard the theories about who it was that broke in at Samhain, too, then. As much as I’ve worked to quash those rumours there is no way to prevent them circulating entirely, and although Quinn ap Howell’s care is the safest I could think to place you under, it does put you in close proximity with Felix Scarlett. If anyone was going to fantasise about Thomas Vane, it would be him.’
‘He’s very afraid of Spicers.’
Abagnale laughed. ‘Yeah, he grew up on Isla Sambuce. He has good grounds to be. It’s because of the revival. A bunch of mages pretending to be survivors of the fall set up a new chapter of Respice Finem on Isla Sambuce many years ago. And they were a radical group. Violent, and set upon toppling the Alliance. For a while, it looked like Coven Sambucus might be struck out of the Alliance, until the Watchers managed to stamp out the revivalists for good. What breeds the fear of their continued existence on Sambucus is mostly shame, from what I can tell. It’s difficult to get them to speak of it plainly. This too I assume is the produce of shame.’
I thought about Felix’ haunted eyes, but he had ghosts of his own which had nothing to do with Respice Finem. Maybe that’s all I was seeing.
It wasn’t like I could ask Felix about it directly. Things had not recovered from Quinn telling me about his past. He’d started coming to the baths with me again, but it was different to before. He never dangled his feet into the water as I swam. He never reached out to touch me once.
‘Thomas Vane was not a Spicer,’ said Abagnale, unprompted and without room for argument. ‘He was a very troubled young man. If I’d known the extent of his disturbances, I’d never have recruited him as my assistant. Whatever talents he possessed were not worth the cost of what happened.’
‘To Greaves, you mean.’
Abagnale smiled, his head dipping forward so his eyes were cast in shadow. Where she had been lying in her bed beneath the window, Taceo raised her noble head.
‘We will never know for certain what happened to Greaves.’
‘Reilly said that Vane killed him.’
‘That is the common mythology, yes. But it is not fact. The fact is that Greaves is gone, and Vane had committed unspeakable crimes. He should have been punished for them, but he escaped the Raeg.’
‘How?’
Abagnale’s smile widened. ‘He had bonded himself to a familiar without anyone’s knowledge. Even mine.’
‘He made a familiar by himself? I thought you were the only one who’d done that.’
‘No. I’m not the only one, just the only living mage on record. And it was never proven that Vane had a familiar. The scars on his body would suggest otherwise.’
‘Scars?’
‘Oh come on, Cyan! Surely you have been informed on how it is familiars are made? You can surely infer from that that marks would be left on the mage and familiar both that would confirm the bond was forged?’
I thought of what Reilly had explained, my horror at the visceral nature of it. The reality that Abagnale had performed the procedure on himself, so would have to have been conscious as he stitched his heart to Taceo’s. I had failed to consider that for those stitches to be made the body would need to be cut, but of course it would.
’So Vane’s familiar helped him escape the Raeg?’
‘That is the only way I believe it could have happened. You cannot escape the Raeg without help, and I know of no living mage who would have helped a man like Vane, not after what he’d done.’
I desperately wanted for Abagnale to explain further, for him to speak what he claimed was unspeakable, but I also desperately did not want to know. Wished that much of what I’d already learned about familiars and mages and Felix in particular could be erased entirely from my mind. Even if I had pressed Abagnale for an explanation, I doubt he would have given it. He keeps his cards close to his chest. He always has done.
Abagnale let me go from his office. He hadn’t asked about the baths, and at the time that made me feel like like I was getting away with something. But I’m certain now, looking back, that he knew. His knowledge of what happened in and around his university was comprehensive and there was simply no way it could’ve escaped his notice that I was not using the bath he’d carved out for me. Even if he’d not known it explicitly and outright where I was going and who I was with, the state of my skin would allow him to infer I had to have been soaking somewhere. Despite the pantomime of anger at me having my coat on my person as I moved through the university, I am certain he had hoped this is what I would do. That he must have known long before he summoned me before him that I had the coat in my possession, and he probably knew for what purpose.
That is the trouble with Abagnale’s plans. He is not a step ahead, but a whole game. You can think you are operating outside of what he wants, but almost always he has predicted your behaviour exactly and accounted for it in his machinations. Of all his many gifts and talents, his ability to understand the people around him is by far the strongest, and the most underestimated. It is the nature of the gift that most people will never know its power has been exerted over them. They will believe they are acting entirely of their own will, but they’re not. They’re doing what Abagnale wants them to do
His weakness in this, of course, is that it breeds a kind of arrogance that leads him to underestimate people. He underestimated Vane. He underestimated Reilly, too. His mistake with both of them, I am certain, is to assume their bookishness and dedication to study defined them. That it would dictate their actions beyond anything else.
Maybe it’s naive of me to think he’d underestimated them, though. Maybe Abagnale knew all along that there was something wrong with Vane and despite what he says about him, that was precisely the reason that he acquired him as an assistant. Maybe he did let him do what he did willingly, because he would never risk doing it himself.
I will not outline the gory details of Vane’s crimes to you. You do not need to know the horrible specifics; they add little context to anything and do not explain much about his behaviour.
There is also a good chance that the Raeg’s reports on Vane’s crimes are meticulously edited. They cite propriety for not documenting evidence, and certainly from the nature of them I can see why they would not want to photograph or even sketch what the investigators found. But it does mean there is no evidence beyond the words on the pages of their reports and in the hundreds of amanuensis stones that record their interviews with Vane. I have read and listened to all of them, now, and I have noticed some gaps.
Not that intend to imply anything, of course.
In brief then, what you should understand about the crimes Vane was accused of is that they involved the extensive and brutal torture of both animals and people. Repeated, violent attempts at something Vane could never wholly articulate. A break down of the barriers that separate one being from another. Dismantlement of the boundaries of consciousness. An attempt at ascension.
What Vane is clear about is that he intended to be his own final experiment. That his work was building to a conclusion in which he himself would transcend the limitations of his form. A hope that he might become a thing of pure magic, a wandering spirit, like those Tegid wrote about. Thomas Vane hoped, in some ways, that he might be able to mutilate himself into a god.
Back then, though, all I knew of Vane was that he had committed some heinous crimes, and that he had perhaps committed more, and worse ones. And Felix thought his familiar was held under the university where we were spending our days writing essays and practicing casting and brewing potions, eating our lunch, laughing on the lawns, sleeping in our beds. And Abagnale knew the bird was there.
So did Felix and I, of course. And we were feeding it.
The bird’s condition was deteriorating. Great patches of its pale grey skin were naked of feathers. What feathers remained stuck out at strange angles, shafts bent. Most days, the bird had not moved at all between one feeding and the next. Sometimes, it would have flopped from its back to its side. Always its wings stuck out, lame and awkward.
By the end of April, to feed it, Felix would have to jab slices of meat to the back of its beak and massage its throat until it swallowed.
‘It seems much worse today,’ I said to him, as he stroked the delicate bare skin on the bird’s neck.
Felix glanced up at me. We rarely spoke when we visited the bird.
‘It does seem worse.’
‘Shouldn’t we. I don’t know. Do something.’
‘Like what?’
‘I— maybe we should… I don’t want to kill it, but maybe it would be kinder than letting this go on the way it has.’
‘I’m not sure killing is ever kind,’ said Felix.
I thought of my father. I shuddered.
‘The Spicer isn’t dead, Cyan, the bird would be gone if he was.’ Felix was trying to reassure me, but it was doing the opposite. ‘You saved me that night. I. I know that maybe it doesn’t seem like it but. It means a lot that you did.’
‘Right,’ I said. I wondered if that was why he was still coming with me to see the bird and to the baths, some twisted sense of obligation. As if he owed me something. It made me want to scream.
Felix shifted in place. He leaned against the bars of the bird’s cell, one hand still hanging through them. His fingers spooled and unspooled against his palm. ‘Maybe you’re right and it would be kinder to put it out of its misery,’ he said. ‘But I. I don’t want to.’
‘Then we won’t.’
‘I… I just. I look at this bird and I think. Would it not have been happier if it could have stayed a bird? If it could have flown free, with others of its kind? After the bond is made, familiars are more intelligent than other animals of their species. They think more like us. They understand more. But before that happened, this was just a raven. It didn’t know what was happening. It couldn’t know, didn’t have the capacity to understand.
Felix had not budged from the bars. He reached further into the cell, turning his fingers through the raven’s mangled feathers. It did not respond, except to close its eyes.
‘Everyone seems so fine with it,’ I said. ‘So many mages have familiars and they don’t seem to consider any of that at all.’
‘Why would they? Mages have always made familiars, for as long as we’ve had records of mages. It is of benefit to the mage and the animal, they say. The animals, they live longer, better lives. They’re smarter, more skilled, than other animals like them. But maybe they didn’t want that. Even if they can understand it after, and I’m not sure they ever can. Even if the bond could be severed, if it could survive the loss of its mage. The bond itself is so— it’s so fundamental to what they are. What’s happened to it has changed it so much it couldn’t even just be a regular raven again. It will always be this. We can’t ever ask. We can’t ever know.’
‘Would you want it to stop? For mages to stop making familiars altogether?’
‘I… I don’t know. It’s hard not to see the love between them and their mages, you know? And most of them, most of the time, they seem happy. I just. I wish people would acknowledge that they didn’t have a choice. That we’ve forced this on every familiar we’ve ever made.’
Felix sighed. He withdrew his hand from the cell.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, softly.
Felix shook his head. ‘What for? You didn’t do it.’
‘I know, but—’
‘We’re just talking about the bird,’ said Felix, firmly.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘W— we don’t have to kill it.’
Felix got to his feet. ‘Aside from the morality of it all, we can’t kill it. If we did, people would know we’d been in here.’
‘You think they’ve not guessed already? If this is making any difference at all, then—‘
‘You think they care enough about this thing to notice the rate at which its weight is dropping?! They’ve changed the straw in here twice since we started visiting. I’d be shocked if they’d been down here to look at it much more often than that. It’s bait, nothing else.’
‘But. Aren’t mages and familiars connected?’
‘Yes. That’s why the bird isn’t dead. We’ve talked about this already.’
‘No, I mean, they’re connected more than that, aren’t they? Couldn’t they use the bird somehow to find Vane? Like trace him through it, somehow?’
‘No, a mage and a familiar can always find each other, but it’s not like they’ve got a trace on each other that mages could co-opt. It’s the bond that allows them to find one another. Modern spells, we tend to document all their elements, record all their consequences. We can counter different parts of them as we go if we understand how they were cast, and who cast them. Magic like this, though. It’s a mess. The parts can’t be extricated. My grandmother, she told me it was like… like pull on your soul. You follow the pull, you’ll find your other half. It’s the bond itself, pulling them back together. That’s why it hurts to be apart. The bond wants them to be close to each other. Maybe if they released the bird with a tracking spell on it, it would fly back to him. But more likely, it would just find a way to die. It knows they want its master. It won’t give him up easily.’
‘Why hasn’t it already found a way to die here? The walls are made of stone, for one.’
‘There’s a shield spell on the walls. Can’t you see it?’
‘No.’
He picked up a pebble, threw it between the bars. When it struck the wall, it didn’t sound like bare stone. It sounded soft, muffled, like it was striking a blanket. Where the stone had struck, just for a moment, I saw a glimmer of movement. It rippled outwards like rings across the surface of a pond. I looked harder at the rest of the walls. The more I stared, the more I saw the surfaces of them were all shifting just slightly, almost imperceptible. Like tiny, translucent blades of grass cropping right out of the rocks.
‘I never noticed.’
‘I suppose you wouldn’t, if you didn’t know what to look for. The walls of my old bedroom were like that. I can’t miss it.’
‘Oh.’
Felix ran a hand through his hair. It had been jaw length when I’d first met him, but now hung down past his shoulders, shaggy and dark. When sunlight caught it, you could see that it was a very dark auburn. In the dark of the cells beneath Twelvelms, it looked like spun obsidian.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You still need to soak.’
We walked back through the tunnels to the baths. I shifted into my seal form and twisted through the water. As had become routine, Felix sat in the corner of the room, reading, and ignoring me. When I was done, we walked back to House Derwen, exchanging a few words about upcoming classes, and nothing else.
It felt like my chest had been entirely hollowed out.
When Felix went into his room, I stared at the solid wood door. I listened to the sounds of him moving on the other side of it, the quiet rustling of fabric as he undressed, the slosh of liquid in a bottle. Probably wine, he had been drinking a lot, was drunk a lot. Often hungover. When Reilly confronted him about it, he said it was the only thing that would help him sleep.
‘What about a sleeping draught? I’m sure I could whip one up for you.’
‘I’ve been brewing sleeping draughts since I was nine, Reilly. But thanks.’
‘I could use the practice anyway. Surely it would be better than being hungover.’
Felix sighed. ‘Drop it, alright.’ He got up and left the library.
Reilly shrank behind her book.
‘It’s the nightmares,’ said Quinn. ‘Sleeping draught doesn’t ward them off, it just stops him from being able to wake up and get out of them.’
‘Oh,’ said Reilly. She sat up straighter and cleared her throat. ‘Maybe I could find some combination of a dream easy potion that would work better? Perhaps if he drank both of those—’
‘Reilly. He’s managing it. If there was a solution he’d have thought of it. This is the best he can do right now; let him do it.’
Reilly sighed. ‘Right.’
Quinn glanced at me. ‘Cyan, how are you getting on with your Hermetics paper?’
‘I’m making progress. Agonising progress, but progress.’
Quinn chuckled. ‘That’s Hermetics for you.’
‘I don’t understand why you all hate it so much, it’s the principle behind all magic, so—‘
‘I thought that’s what bionomy was?’
‘No, no, it’s not the theory, is it? Hermetics is all about making spells as efficient as possible, ideas behind different methodologies for magic. Bionomy is the study of what magic is.’
‘All I know is Hermetics makes my head hurt more than bionomy does.’
‘Is it the equations?’
‘It’s not just the equations, but yes, the equations are part of it.’
‘Maybe if I show you again how—’
‘I think I just need to push through it, but thanks. I’ll get it. I just. It’s not my wheelhouse.’
‘No. You’re a practical caster. You and Felix both. It’s almost silly to have you take the placement exams at all. We all know which track you’re going to be placed on already.’
‘Oh, try not to look so hurt about it, Reilly,’ said Quinn. ‘You’re the smartest mage in our year, for certain. You haven’t got any competition in a single other class, it’ll do you good to finish behind a few of us.’
‘I just wish my weak spot wasn’t the most fun subject,’ Reilly muttered, miserably. She turned through the pages of her book.
We were in the library until late that night, the threat of our essay deadlines and looming examinations outweighing our heavy eyelids. Lady Ottilie had to kick the three of us out so she could lock up.
It was still relatively warm out despite the dark. April had turned to May and summer was definitely threatening to oust spring early. The new leaves on the trees rustled in the pleasant breeze, and we chatted about what work we each still had to complete by the end of the week. And then Reilly and I noticed Quinn was no longer walking with us. We stopped, glancing back, expecting to find her tying her shoe or checking her bag. But she was doing neither. She was stood in the middle of the path, looking between the trunks of the trees that lined it, looking out across the lawn.
‘Do you see that?’ said Quinn.
We both looked out into the dark. For a moment, all I saw was the lush, swaying grass. But then I saw it. Something lying there, moving just slightly. Up and down, like a log on the surface of water,‘What is it?’ said Reilly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Quinn. And then she stepped between the trees.
‘Oh Quinn, don’t,’ Reilly squeaked.
Quinn held up a hand to silence her. She walked slow, careful through the grass. When she got close to the breathing thing that lay there, she crouched down.
‘It’s a deer,’ said Quinn. ‘It’s alive.’
Reilly frowned. We followed Quinn out onto the lawn. There was indeed a deer. She was lying on her side. She did not flinch as we approached, did not even flinch as Quinn laid a hand on its side. She was breathing steady and even. Her ears were perfectly still.
‘Is it hurt?’ asked Reilly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Quinn. She muttered some words in latin. Magic glowed purple from the signet stone around her neck. The light traveled down Quinn’s arm and rippled across the deer. ‘She’s not hurt, not a scratch on her, except—‘ she reached up, parted the doe’s fur at her throat. A closed wound, scabbed over.
‘It’s like the bird Charlie and I found at House Derwen over the Winter Solstice break. Just lying there, almost like it was sleeping. But it wasn’t.’
‘And the fox we found over the summer.’
‘Yes, the fox too.
Reilly gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh. I wonder if— But it can’t be.’
‘Can’t be what?’ asked Quinn.
‘I read something, years and years ago. Hollow sleepers.’
Quinn frowned. ‘Like the mageling story?’
‘No. Or, yes, kind of. Ah, Cyan, you wouldn’t know this. Apparently if magelings didn’t do as they were told and respect the words of their elders, sometimes Tylwyth Teg would come in the night and curse them into a hollow, waking sleep from which they could never be roused. Pretty horrible actually.’
‘Sometimes it wasn’t the Tylwyth Teg,’ said Quinn. ‘Sometimes it was Spicers.’
‘Oh.’
‘It doesn’t matter, they’re just children’s stories, and there’s no evidence of it ever happening to people. But I read in a history book. Tegid’s Depths, which one was it?!’
‘The book doesn’t matter, Reilly, what did it say?!’ said Quinn.
‘Apparently there was a problem a few decades ago where there were animals kept by unmages who this kept happening to. The carers would go out to look at their animals and they’d find one or two of them in this state. It was going on for months before the Raeg twigged something magic was going on. They thought someone was trying to make familiars by themselves, or maybe to try to bond animals to each other like they were each other’s familiars or something, it wasn’t clear. Nobody was ever caught and convicted of it, so nothing was ever proven and they weren’t sure why it was happening. And then it just. Stopped.’
‘When did it stop?’ asked Quinn, quietly.
‘Oh, I think it. It must have been in the 1970s or 80s that it started, and it didn’t go on that long, just a few years.’
‘Forty years ago, then,’ said Quinn, relieved. ‘Abagnale wouldn’t have even been at Twelvelms by then.’
‘For goodness sake. He’s controversial but he’s not a bad person, Quinn. You know that.’
Quinn glanced at me. ‘I don’t think he’s bad, Reilly. I just. I wonder what his intentions are, that’s all.’
‘He wants to understand how magic works.’
‘Yes. Exactly.’
‘Why do you keep looking at Cyan?’
I sighed. ‘There’s something you should know. And it’s probably best for you to see it, rather than have me try to explain.’
In my room, as I had with Quinn, I put on my coat and shifted forms. Reilly’s response could not have been more different. She burst into tear
I’d worried so much about how it might upset Reilly that I’d not told her. About what would happen to me if word got out more widely about what I was. About what damage it might do to Abagnale. Until Reilly had started to weep I’d not for a moment considered what I was doing to my friends by letting them in on this.

[CYAN SIGHS]

How naive of me.

[CYAN BLOWS OUT A CANDLE]

[END]