What happened over the Solstice changes everything for Cyan, but not in the ways he expects…

An Episode of The Twelvelms Conspiracy

Content Warnings

• Descriptions of violence
• Discussions of death, loss and grief
• Mentions of discriminatory practices
• Discussions of institutional racism
• Depictions of emotional distress

Transcript

Ah, it is so nice to be well-rested. My skin looks a bit better too, don’t you think? You don’t think. You sleep. Very good. Very good. 

There was a time where I thought nobody would ever see me like that. As a seal, I mean. Where I truly believed that nobody would ever find out my secret. I think before Felix walked in on me that night, before the Winter Solstice, it was such a frightening possibility that I hardly allowed myself to consider it. I had to manage to keep things quiet; the alternative was unthinkable. And I mean that literally: I simply could not allow myself to think it. 

That night, after Felix left, I stayed in the water a long time. I kept waiting for someone to burst in. Maybe it would be everyone who’d been at the feast. Maybe just Abagnale. The magnitude of the horror was yet to be decided but I had thoroughly decided that there would be a horror. So I lay and I waited and I believed these may have been the last moments of my life. 

I remember, I tried to think of what I would say to Abagnale. How I’d apologise for ruining him, in this way. I didn’t know what would happen to him when the High Table of the Alliance found out he’d known all along what I was. Perhaps that would be the play; I would be ousted but I could cover for him. 

It didn’t help that I had no idea what mages actually thought of selkies. I knew that they thought we were all dead, things of myths and legends, but I didn’t know how that manifested for them. Almost the sum total of my knowledge of what I was then came from a book on the shelf in my attic bedroom in my father’s cottage. It was in Welsh, so I didn’t understand all the words, but I could follow the story from the pictures. A fisherman hears a voice when he returns from a day of fishing. He creeps along the dunes, peers through the grasses, and sees a beautiful woman sat on a rock, combing her sea-damp hair. Draped around her arms, a fur coat. Seals dance in the moonlit water around her. 

He calls out to her. She smiles. They dance, and in the morning, she puts on her coat, turns into a seal, and swims off into the morning. 

The fisherman looks for her again the next night, but she’s not there. Back again and again he goes. Weeks pass, and finally, there she is again. Once more, they meet, they dance, they kiss under the moon. 

But. He cannot stand for her to leave. So before she can slip into her coat, whilst she sleeps on the sand, he takes it, steals it away across the dunes. 

When the coat is hidden, he comes back, she’s crying, every tear drop calling to the sea that is denied her. He takes her home, wraps her in blankets, makes her soup. In time, despite the pain and the fear and the longing of the water, she falls in love with him, cooks and cleans. Becomes his beautiful wife. Bears him beautiful children. 

One day, one of those children comes to his mother. In his hands, a beautiful coat, stained with mud. The man returns home, just in time to see his wife streaking from the house across the beach, wearing her coat. She slips into the waves, and is gone. 

[INTRO MUSIC: This is The Twelvelms Conspiracy, Episode Six, Friends and Familiars]

Nobody came for me, the night of Solstice Eve. I sat in the water until the quiet around me grew so deep it was like being smothered, then I got out, and I dried myself off and went back to House Derwen. 

I stared at Felix’ closed bedroom door. I thought of knocking, but I didn’t. 

The next morning, we all went out to build the Solstice pyre. Felix did not say a word to me all day, all through the night. The next morning, the fire had burned down to smoking stubs of char, and the sun was bleeding a pale light over the trees, and we were sent back to our beds, finally. My skin was itching. I wanted desperately to sleep, but I knew I had to soak first, after so long so close to that fire. I was already breaking out in patches of dry skin, flaky and shiny and peeling off in flakes from the backs of my knuckles. 

When I got to the door, there was Felix. 

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. I was too tired to be angry. 

‘You need a lookout,’ he said. 

‘No I don’t. Nobody knows I’m here.’ 

‘Exactly,’ said Felix. 

‘I don’t follow your logic.’ 

‘Anyone could stumble in.’ 

‘The only person who would come up here at night is Abagnale.’ 

‘You don’t know that for sure,’ said Felix. 

‘I do not need a lookout!’ 

Felix shrugged. He crossed the hall, slumped against the wall. 

I was too tired to argue further, too tired to even be angry, certainly not to parse through the strangeness of the fact he hadn’t outed me to everyone. Instead, I just went into the bathroom, locked the door behind myself, and slipped into the water, this time leaving on my clothes. They’d be soaked, of course, but at least I wouldn’t have to be naked if Felix decided to burst in after me again.

He didn’t. Burst in, I mean. When I opened the door some hours later I found him sitting there on the floor still, slumped against the wall, mouth hanging slightly open. I nudged his shin with my foot and he stirred. 

‘Some look out,’ I said. 

Felix shrugged. We walked back to House Derwen in silence. 

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I was exhausted; it was like the mattress was trying to pull me inside of it, but I felt strange and uneasy. Felix knew, and had not told anyone. This was good, yes, in a sense, but it also meant he now held an immense amount of power. Who knew what he might do with it, given the chance? 

We didn’t speak at all the next day, Felix and I, but the next night when I went to my bath, he followed me there, sat outside the door as he had before. I soaked for as little time as I could stand, then stormed out. This time, Felix hadn’t dozed off. instead he was holding his signet stone aloft from his palm, a faint glow of purple red magic rolling off its edges like mist off the surface of a pool. 

‘What are you doing?’ I demanded. 

‘Looking out,’ said Felix. 

‘Why?’ 

‘So that nobody—’ 

‘You don’t like me,’ I hissed. 

‘Who said that?’ 

‘You did, or as good as. And when you walked in the other night, I scared the shit out of you.’ 

Felix frowned. ‘Obviously. A gigantic beast climbed out of a pool, and stripped off its skin to reveal the skinny weirdo who showed up with no explanation three months ago was inside it. And then you screamed in my face.’ 

’So what? What is this about?’ 

Felix opened his mouth, closed it again. ‘Does Quinn know?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Reilly?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘So. Just Abagnale, then.’ 

‘Yeah. Just Abagnale. So what?’ 

Felix shook his head minutely. ‘You don’t…?’ 

‘Don’t what?’ 

Felix took a deep breath, looked at the ground. ‘What do you want me to say, Stranger?’ 

I blinked at him. It was all I could do. I didn’t know what I wanted him to say, after all. So instead, neither of us said anything. 

The next morning, at breakfast, Felix sat at the same table as me even though there were a half dozen empty ones, and the whole time we’d been alone there, I’d not seen him come down for breakfast once. But there he was. Sat there. He had a book open on the table, turned the pages with magic and a dip of his hand as he ate his toast. Did not say a word. 

That night, he came to the bath again. Sat outside the door. Walked back to House Derwen with me in the quiet. Just as I started to close my door, he said, ‘Goodnight, Stranger.’ 

‘Night, Felix.’

Two days later, people were trickling back to Twelvelms from their Solstice holidays. Felix and I were yet to have a full conversation, and I’d not seen him for breakfast again since that first time, but that afternoon he knocked on my door. When I answered, he said, ‘Quinn will be back around four. Reilly at six. I’m going to wait for them by the fire.’ 

It wasn’t an invitation, but at the same time, it clearly was. I followed him down the stairs, into the reading room with the big fire, and we sat around the little table closest to it. Felix was still reading his book. I read mine. Other people were nearby, a hum of friendly chatter made everything feel almost cosy, despite the nerves in my stomach that I didn’t understand. 

I had completely forgotten why we were there when Quinn said ‘nice Solstice, then?’ 

Quinn was smiling at us. There was something different about her. I had noticed she was pretty before, and I’d certainly seen her smile. But this smile was different than any of those I’d seen before. Small, private, quiet. It made her someone different than I’d taken her as before. 

[CYAN SIGHS]

Sorry. 

Ah. This is hard. 

It’s not that it hasn’t been, ’til now. I just. You don’t know people, and then you do. I didn’t know them. 

Ah, what an absurd thing to say. 

Quinn had looked like something else in that moment. For the first time, she let down her guard, just a little, when I was there. It was a relief to me immediately, I think, but I didn’t understand what was really going on, that Felix sitting quietly beside me the way he was, it meant he’d signed off on me, and that meant Quinn could breathe a little easier. There was so much about her I didn’t understand, a lot I still can’t fully appreciate because of who I am, but that she spoke to me about enough that I can at least comprehend. There were things I didn’t appreciate because I didn’t know her well enough, didn’t understand the context in which we existed, but some of it was just because I was an idiot.

I remember there was this day, I can’t recall exactly when, and it was— god. Quinn laughed at me so much, they all laughed at me so much. I can’t even remember how it came up. We were talking about Quinn becoming leader of Coven Derwen for some reason. Reilly made some sort of comment about how much harder she was going to have to work at it. I asked why, and they all laughed.

‘But you must have noticed there are not many people at Twelvelms who look like me?’ Quinn pressed. ‘Almost two hundred and fifty scholars, and the teachers, and there are, what, three other black people in the whole school? You must have noticed.’ 

I had, but given I’d spent most of my life alone in the attic, it had not occurred to me that this was unusual. However, there as no way for me to explain this to them. So I just said, ‘not really.’ 

Quinn and Felix were in hysterics.

‘Oh god,’ said Reilly. ‘In all the records of the High Table, we’re pretty certain there’s been about twenty consuls who weren’t white.’ 

‘Consuls?’ 

‘That’s the proper name for Coven Leaders, in their capacity at the High Table.’

Everyone was still laughing, though Reilly was very kindly trying her best to stop. There were probably more mages at the beginning with different ethnic backgrounds, it turns out, but there’s no way to prove most of them. 

Derwen’s connection to the Romans, a thing that marked them out from the other covens, meant that back then it was one of the most diverse, and several of their leaders were almost certainly black. However, there’s only evidence to confirm one or two of them right at the beginning, and after that the records become harder to parse. Around the Middle Ages, there’s more effort taken to keep visual records of who these people were. As unmages further developed practices in the written word, mages followed suit, making books with illustrations as well as the amanuensis stones that they’d relied upon for centuries before, if not millennia. 

In time, I came to understand that many things in magedom were like this; pieces of the unmage world would trickle in as convenient, always without proper acknowledgement of what they were. To acknowledge the unmage influence on magedom would be to acknowledge that transfer of information, things, people… It would mean it was possible for that exchange to occur. To acknowledge that woul mean to recognise that the movement only went one way. That was not something the High Table took kindly to.

Mages… we like to think we’re immune to what goes on outside of our cloistered rooms, but we’re not. And the pressure on Quinn would not have been there if magedom were this blissful, disconnected world with no tethers to anything beyond. 

And the pressure did weigh on Quinn. Not just because of the ways in which she knew more would be expected of her because of the colour of her skin; her mother had been part of another coven. She’d renounced that coven when she married Quinn’s father, but there was a fear that Quinn was not Derwen enough for the position she would inherit. Her parents had been older when they’d had her; her grandmother was aging fast. Quinn would likely only be in her thirties by the time she took over Coven Derwen, a shockingly young age to become a consul. 

Quinn told me about her parents a long time after. Her father was working at the Raeg, when they met. Learning his mother’s work. 

‘She always said he hated it,’ she told me. Seredipity, Quinn’s mother, she was a mage from Coven Collen. Collen is a very different type of coven to Derwen, with a staunch kind of rivalry. Collen calls itself the only Welsh coven; Derwen is right on the border of Wales and England, they call themselves Welsh, too.

Serendipity was a little older than Quinn’s father. She was only visiting the Raeg, hoping to plead her case to see a book they had sealed in their vaults. Collen is known for its music and incredible furniture making; they sing items out of solid wood. I’ve visited their purlieu a few times, seen the orchards where they grow their chairs. Such a remarkable thing to see trees with branches growing into seats, legs and spindles. Truly remarkable magic. Truly.

Serendipity wanted to document it, to find out its histories, plunder the Raeg’s vaults for any records she could find. Quinn’s father was in love the moment she tried to convince him to let her see one of the tomes that the High Table had sealed away, as soon as she explained why it was important to her. 

They did not marry for a long time. Serendipity didn’t want to turn her back on Coven Collen; she loved where she was from, and to marry Quinn’s father would mean renouncing her connection to it. As much as Quinn’s father loved Serendipity, he was afraid of what marrying her would do to her reputation. And his. It wouldn’t be proper, for the leader of Coven Derwen to have a wife who was a historian. Especially a historian who learned outside of Twelvelms, who did not work for the Raeg. Quinn’s father attempted to have Serendipity receive an honorary degree from Twelvelms for her research work so it would be institutionally legitimised, even in retrospect, but was forbidden from doing so. She wasn’t part of his coven, after all. 

After many years, they did, eventually, marry. Rather than proposing on the Summer Solstice like he’s supposed to, Quinn’s father proposed on a spontaneous day in May. ‘Serendipitous, my grandmother said was how he would describe it,’ Quinn told me. 

The following autumn, Serendipity re-kinned to Derwen, and Quinn was born the next summer, her brother Charlie the year after that. 

Quinn was three when her parents died. An accident, people say. Experimental magic gone wrong. But I don’t know— I don’t know if I believe that. Especially not now. I’ve seen the records of what happened to them. What they did to the cottage where Quinn’s parents were staying. And it does not look like an accident. 

[CYAN SIGHS] 

Like I said, I didn’t know most of that for a long time after I met Quinn. Back then, in my second term at Twelvelms, I was just relieved she didn’t hate me. I was just getting to know her. 

Ah this stuff, how she felt about it, and her parents. She’d have liked to tell you about it, I’m sure. She’d have liked to tell you herself. She loved you. We all loved you. She’d have raised you like she promised. Like you were her own. In a lot of ways, that’s what you are. All of ours. 

I’m not sure I can ever forgive Reilly for what she did. But at least she left you with us. Hideous thing to do, in many ways, but I am sure you will have enough rage to fill the ocean with about that yourself. 

To me, her leaving you, it is the only thing that makes me think she’s still, in some small way, the girl I’d known at Twelvelms. Reilly Rowse, who was shy and bookish and so, so brave. Because it was brave, leaving you. Awful. And awfully, awfully brave. 

Sorry.

I am trying to tell as full a story as I can, but that grief. I am sure it has coloured some of what I’ve said. It’s certainly coloured what I remember of this day; and half the things I’m thinking of didn’t even happen on that day! It’s not important. 

Oh, look at you. Little thing, lovely little thing. Ach. Fuck. 

Oh I shouldn’t say that, in front of you. You’re going to start parroting things at me before long. Bad enough that Felix keeps. Kept. 

[CYAN GASPS, SOUNDING ALMOST PAINED. FOR A MOMENT HE CRIES, THEN HE RIGHTS HIMSELF.]

Right. Right. Right. Right.

Sleeping seems to have made my storytelling worse. You’d think it would be the opposite, wouldn’t you? I’m getting all out of order. And it is important that it’s in order, if I can manage it. 

The bird. The little bird. What did she say? 

Ah!  She found it behind Castle Derwen with her brother. ‘It was just lying there. At first, we thought it was dead,’ she said, or something like that. ‘But when we picked it up, it was warm. Only it didn’t stir or anything. It was hurt; there was a cut on the side of its neck.’ 

‘What kind of bird?’ asked Reilly. 

‘Um, I’m not sure? A blackbird, I think. A female blackbird. It had brown feathers. We took it back to the castle, showed my grandmother. She couldn’t find anything wrong with it. There was a gash on its neck, but it was shallow. There was no sickness and the blood the bird had lost was minimal. It should have been fine, but it wasn’t.’ 

‘Like the fox?’ Reilly asked. 

Quinn frowned. ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that, but yes, like the fox.’ 

‘What fox?’ I asked. 

‘Last summer, we were walking through the woods and there was a fox,’ said Reilly. ‘It was there, right in the open. She had cubs nearby and they scattered away when we got close, but the mama didn’t. She just kept lying there.’ 

‘It like she was dead. Only she wasn’t,’ said Felix.

‘There was nothing wrong with that fox that we could see,’ said Quinn. ‘But the cut the bird had was so small. Maybe we missed something.’ 

There was not much more to be said about the bird or the fox, and Quinn and Reilly had stories to tell us of their Solstice trips. They pressed Felix and I for details, and I kept waiting for him to tell them, about what he’d seen, what I was. But he didn’t. And the rest of the day, he kept not telling him. And the next day, and the next. When Quinn was supposed to walk me across the grounds to my fake appointment with Abagnale, Felix emerged from his room. 

‘I’ll take him,’ he said. 

Quinn faltered. ‘You… you’ve been going with him, whilst I was away?’ 

Felix shrugged. 

‘You said it was good,’ I said. ‘It’s good to trust people with things.’

Quinn smiled. ‘No. I said it was an honour,’ she said. 

We weren’t friends. Not yet, not really. But we were on our way.

I think it was about halfway through that second semester at Twelvelms that Felix suggested we go to the other baths. He was brazen, under the moonlight as we paced fast across the centre of Twevelms grounds.

‘Oh come on,’ Felix needled. ‘You’ll be able to swim around. I saw how big you are; that bath Abby’s sorted for you is barely large enough for you to turn.’ 

‘It’s fine,’ I said. I grit my teeth. 

‘What, you’re worried that I’m going to shove you into a wall again?’ Felix asked. 

‘A little,’ I admitted. 

‘What if I promise to be very, very nice?’ 

I raised an eyebrow. 

‘That’s overpromising, I suppose. I can be a bit nice, though. And it’s actual seawater. That’ll be better for you to soak in. Right?’ 

‘How do you know?’ 

‘I did some reading,’ he said. 

I blinked. ‘Oh.’

Felix set his mouth in a thin, hard line. ‘Look. If you want to try it, we’ll go up to the main building for your coat first, and we’ll go down to the baths through the door we used on Samhain.’

‘Are you mad? Someone might see us.’ 

‘So what? We’re scholars here together, that’s not exactly a secret. Unless you’re worried they’ll think we’re hooking up in the baths. They’d certainly be a good place for it.’ 

‘What?’ 

‘Don’t look so fucking scandalised, Stranger, I’m not going to jump your bones or slam you into any more walls. It’s fine. Besides, maybe a rumour about us shagging would give you a bit of breathing room in a lot of ways. Not that it wouldn’t come with its own complications. But people thinking you’re gay has got to be a lot less complex than that you’re a fucking selkie.’ 

It was the first time I’d heard him say it out loud like that, what I was.  It was the most he’d said to me at once, ever, besides what happened on Samhain. 

‘Half,’ I said. ‘I’m only half-Selkie. My mum.’ 

For a while, the only sound was our shoes crunching on the frosty grass, and the sound of us breathing out of pace with one another. 

’You looked like a whole selkie to me,’ said Felix. ‘You don’t have to do it. It’s just, I’ve seen how it gets by the end of the day, your skin. It looks like it fucking hurts. That’s stupid. What are you torturing yourself for?’

Even though I’d made the climb up to the bathroom dozens of times, it felt frightening that night. We went into the room together. Felix watched me unlock the trunk, slip my coat out over my hands. 

‘The books all said it hurt to be apart from it,’ said Felix. 

‘I’m never that far away.’

‘What’s it like, when you get it back?’ 

I looked at the fur in my hands, supple and warm as it passed over my palms. ‘Like waking up from a bad dream.’ 

Felix looked at the ground. ‘Come on.’ 

We hurried back down the stairs, crossed the moonlit atrium. The little door we’d burst in through the night of Samhain was almost invisible, painted over with part of a floral fresco that covered the whole of the wall. Felix pressed his palm against one side of it. His signet stone glowed at his throat. The door latch clicked, and we were through. We hurried down a corridor, and a huge, solid set of wooden stairs, and there we were. 

Without the sounds of peril ringing out above us, the smell of the sea in that room hit me like a punch in the face. You could smell that the sea was close by at Twelvelms all the time, or at least I could. This faint, salty freshness on the wind that called to me. I could maybe have followed the smell if I’d tried. But I never had. It hadn’t occurred to me, until that night, in the baths, that I even could. 

I touched my clothes, wished I’d brought an extra set to walk back home in. But we could get back to House Derwen through the tunnel; we wouldn’t need to be outside. It struck me as odd that the baths under the school weren’t the place Abagnale had brought me in the first place. It was much easier to be secret, this way. He could have at least told me about the tunnels. 

The water in the baths was warm. Warmer than the one upstairs. Steaming slightly. 

‘It’s old magic that heats them up,’ said Felix. 

‘Right,’ I said, turning my hand through the water. 

‘Yeah. Reilly told me. She’s big into that kind of thing. How old magic works, and stuff. Nobody really knows. But that’s just how it is, I guess.’ 

‘How what is?’ 

‘Don’t you get that feeling sometimes that what we do, we’re just playing at the edge of something we don’t really understand?’ 

‘I… I don’t know. I feel like that about everything.’ 

Felix hummed a laugh. I slipped into my coat. 

‘Do you want me to look away?’ asked Felix. 

I stared at him.

‘‘When you change? I’ll turn away if you want me to.’ 

I pulled the collar of my coat close. ‘Would you?’ 

‘Yeah.’ Felix turned away, faced the wall. 

I twisted into my coat, that falling, sighing feeling of changing forms.

‘Can I look?’ said Felix.

I bleated back. 

Felix turned. He stared at me, lying on the floor. There is a comfortable shape, when you are a seal, lifting your head and your tail. Felix stared at me as I shifted into it. An odd, glorious grin spread across his features. ‘Well, fuck,’ he said. 

I chuffed at him and sluiced into the bathwater. I was not confident in my ability to elegantly swim, so I checked I could get to the surface without embarrassing myself before sinking right to the bottom. I stayed there, against the rough rock of the bath’s basin. It was huge. Ten times larger than the bath up past Abagnale’s rooms, huge, and quiet, the walls muffled by rock and earth. 

I felt bold, moved. I twisted through the water. It was easy, intuitive, instinctive. I was swimming. I could just do it. The feeling was glorious but cut through with an awful, exquisite kind of sadness. 

I could have followed her. I could have followed my mother into the sea. I could have left. None of this had to happen. I could have left. 

None of this had to happen. 

I could have left!

Felix’ voice drifted down to me through the water. He was calling my name. I thrust myself up as hard as I could, breached the water’s surface. Felix was right there, at the edge of the pool, sitting with his knees balled up against his chest. I changed shape. 

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Is someone coming.’ 

‘You made a sound,’ said Felix. 

’So?’ 

‘You sounded sad.’ 

‘I was a fucking seal, how could you possibly know that,’ I said, even though I could hear the thickness in my voice. 

‘Sorry,’ said Felix, almost like it was an instinct. 

I shifted in the water, clinging to the edge of the bath. I could swim as a seal, but not a person, it was quickly becoming clear. 

‘You can change back,’ he said. ‘It’s fine.’ 

I nodded. Shuddered into my seal form again. I twisted through the water, spiralling through it, brushing against the rock walls, bursting through the surface and flopping through it again. I swam and swam until my body started to tremble, and then I sank, slow, back to the bottom. 

My father’s face stared at me from inside my eyelids. Blood gushing out of him, twisting like ribbons through the air. My mother’s cold hand on my arm. The scabs on her hands matched the ones on mine. I was taller than her but I felt minuscule as she walked away. She was a woman as she slipped into the waves, and then. She was gone. 

And I could have followed. 

I could have followed. 

Enough, I think. Enough for now. 

Yes. 

[A CANDLE IS BLOWN OUT] 

[END]