Max looked thoroughly miserable when I got back to the room. He leapt up from his desk and was over his bed and in the main part of the room before I had the door closed. “Where’s Ed?”
I shrugged. “Left, probably? Unless he has other business with you? I dealt with it, anyway.”
He blanched. “Did you – ?”
“No, I didn’t start a blood fued with your family or anything. I was perfectly polite and diplomatic. I told him I didn’t need his help without telling him to piss off even once. Seriously, it’s fine; I was very careful.”
“I’m sorry you had to deal with that.”
I shrugged again. “It was bound to happen sooner or later, right?”
“I held them off as long as I could. I should’ve tried to hold them off longer.”
“That’s not your job.”
“Yes. It is. That’s what we agreed, right? That you could pass these people along to me, and I’d keep them away from you.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, “I’m starting to think that maybe we shouldn’t have decided on that. I’m starting to think that even though I’m the one who pushed everyone into this familiarity thing, we’ve pushed most of the messy aftermath onto you.”
“It’s fine. I’m the Nonus Acanthos. This is the sort of thing I’m supposed to do.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re a student, and what you’re supposed to do is get an education, and you’re too busy for this bullshit.”
“So are you.”
“Nonsense. Nobody expects me to get good grades in anything. I don’t even read if I can help it. I’m not the scientific supergenius around here.” I tried to look past him, at what was on his desk. “Speaking of which, what are you working on?”
“More rune homework. I should never have tested out of the beginner class, this is a nightmare.”
“Another ‘use these runes for something basic’ puzzle?”
“Yeah. And I absolutely cannot figure out why the power isn’t moving through this one.”
I lifted my arm. “Want to write it on me again?”
Max flinched back like I was made of fire. “Uh, no. No; I’ll figure it out.”
“What’s the problem? The runes do something dangerous?”
“N-no, I just – ”
“Don’t tell me you’re worried about cheating.”
“Yeah, that’s it. It’d be cheating.”
“Sorry to insult your honour, ubernerd.” I rolled my eyes while he went back to his desk. But something bothered me.
Max was lying.
I wasn’t sure why, but Max was weird about this. He’d been a bit weird about the familiarity mark since he’d given it to me, which was to be expected I supposed, but I’d expect him to, I don’t know, adapt to it over time. Go back to normal. Instead, he seemed to be getting weirder about it over time. I’d held out my arm and he’d flinched. Which might mean…
“Hey, Max? Can I ask you something?”
“Hmm?”
“No judgement, alright? It’s just a casual question. And it’s totally fine, really, I’m not mad or anything, I just want to know.”
“Ominous. What is it?”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“What?!”
“It’s a simple question. It’s totally fine if you are. I just – ”
“Kayden, how under the seven points of power could anyone in the world possibly be afraid of you?”
“Okay, hurtful. But I just meant, since the familiarity thing you’ve been kind of… well, I know you’re afraid of magic – ”
“I’m not afraid of magic! You’re always saying that! I’m a mage, Kayden, how can I be afraid of magic?”
“Alright,” I said. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, no; it’s important that you understand this. I don’t want you going around thinking I’m scared of you. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“That’s a completely different topic, but fine.”
Clearly, Max didn’t think I believed him. He narrowed his eyes. “If I wasn’t afraid of you when we all thought you had an out-of-control violent curse, why would I be afraid now?”
I had clear memories of him flinching away, back then, when I’d pointed at him, clearly afraid that I was going to curse him. But this didn’t seem like the right time to mention that. “Alright, alright. It was just an idle question. But something’s going on, and the full moon’s in about ten hours, and we probably won’t see each other for a few days and I don’t want to spend those few days puzzling out what I might have done to – ”
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“You haven’t done anything,” Max said, perfectly composed and relaxed as he pulled his stupid diplomacy mask on, that mask that was perfectly convincing if you weren’t watching for the change in expression. There; the conversation was over. I’d pushed too hard and he’d shut me out. I’d offered him my arm and he’d actually flinched away and he –
But Max had flinched from me in fear before, and it hadn’t been like this. That wasn’t fear that had been on his face. It was guilt.
“Oh,” I said, the pieces falling into place. “You think I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“How they must talk about me, to you. Like a science experiment, right?”
Max looked away, the mask slipping. He really was getting sloppy with his false composure. Or maybe I was just getting better at reading him.
“It’s not like that,” he said, which is what he always said when something was like that.
“Because everyone looks at this,” I said, flashing the familiarity mark, “and sees a science experiment, and they talk to you like I’m a science experiment, and that offends you, right? And you’re, what, worried that it’ll offend me? Like I don’t know?”
“Why aren’t you angry?” he asked. “Don’t you just want to shake some sense into them?”
He still didn’t get it. No matter how many times it came up, it was like the fact that I’d grown up cursed among nemaganti kept slipping his mind. He didn’t understand that none of this was new to me; it was the same bullshit in a new environment. Doctors had been treating me like a science experiment liable to blow up in their faces since I was six months old.
Frankly, I was getting tired of explaining. I just shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“You don’t hear the sorts of things they say.”
“I can imagine.”
He flushed. “You don’t hear the kinds of conversations we have to have.”
Oh. “That’s what you’re embarrassed about? Having to play their game, talk their language? I don’t like politics, but I get the gist of the kinds of things that need to be done. I bullshit people like your uncle and the Fiore all the time. Look, I didn’t realise this whole thing made you this uncomfortable. We should stop making you deal with all these people. Try something else.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have to deal with them.”
“Neither should you!”
“This whole situation is my fault!”
I blinked. “Max, I literally forced you into cutting this mark into me.”
“It was your idea, but you didn’t literally force me. I could have refused.”
“And if you had, I would’ve cut the mark, and probably fucked it up. You know this. I told you so at the time.”
“You made that decision under the assumption that I could undo the mark afterwards. You trusted my competence, and I failed. You didn’t sign up for any of this; the only reason any of this is happening is that I couldn’t undo the link.”
“Alania Miratova and Malas Aksoy couldn’t undo the link. I have no doubt that they’ve contacted world class familiarity experts who wouldn’t be able to undo the link. Of course you couldn’t do it. That’s not your failure, it’s mine; I made a bad assumption. And you know damn well that I would’ve made the same choice even if I hadn’t known it was permanent, and so would you. Kylie’s life was on the line.”
“She would never have been in danger if it wasn’t for me,” Max said quietly.
“Max, what on this great cursed earth are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. The two of you only went down there to save me. If I hadn’t have gone down alone – ”
“Yeah, going down there alone was stupid as hell. But if you hadn’t gone down alone, you would’ve gone down with us. So that particular situation, with Kylie getting overwhelmed by her spell, would have happened anyway.”
“We could’ve not gone down and investigated at all.”
“Be realistic. This is us you’re talking about.”
“We could have planned a lot better.”
“Could have. Should have. Probably would’ve almost died a lot less if we had.” I rubbed at the scar on my left arm. “But this particular incident wasn’t something that we could’ve planned around. It happened because of where we were. And we were always going to end up there or die trying, because you were onto a big secret about the operation of the school, and would we ever have let that go without investigating? Of course not. You wanted to protect us, and you wanted to see exactly what the school wanted and what threat it posed. Nobody can fault you for that.”
“You make it sound a lot more noble than it actually was,” Max said quietly. “But it wasn’t like that, not really. It felt noble, charging off at the time. But what we found down there was nothing like what I’d expected. It showed that I didn’t do nearly enough research. I should have waited, looked into things more. I had years to work with. I didn’t have to go charging off the instant I found the way in; that was stupid. And it was selfish.”
I shrugged. “I make impulsive decisions all the time. I don’t see how it was selfish.”
“I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to prove…” He shook his head. “It’s complicated.”
“We have all the time in the world. Well, we have ninety minutes. I want to catch a full night’s sleep before the full moon.”
“You should do that, then.”
Heart-to-heart time was over, apparently. I shrugged. “I have time to help with your homework, if you like.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t have to do anything. You help me with mine all the time. What, you’re worried that making use of the side effects of my familiarity link is going to offend my dignity or something?”
He blushed. “I just… don’t want to take advantage.”
“Why not? This thing’s fucked up all three of our lives. Why not make what use out of it we can? I ‘take advantage’ of your memory and your weird quirk of actually liking to read stuff all the time. If I ever need anything off high shelves I’m gonna ‘take advantage’ of your freakish height. What’s the difference?”
“My height is average. You’re just short.”
“Hurtful, and my point stands. Come on, let’s cheat – I mean, use initiative and problem solving skills – in this dumb rune assignment.”
Max sighed the familiar sigh of somebody who’d given up arguing with me, and went to grab a brush. I sat as still as I could and let him paint the runes on my flesh.
“Do you think you could channel Kylie’s magic through runes like this?” he asked after several minutes of focused silence.
“I can’t channel the spell, you know that.”
“Not with your will, no. But when I put magic through these runes, her magic is going to move out of the way, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So. My magic is going to act as a sudden barrier, blocking the access of hers to certain parts of your skin. My question is this: what if we used my magic to create ‘walls’ to force her magic into runes? Directing her magic into the right shapes, kind of like how the shapes of these tunnels direct students to move in runic shapes.”
“Would there be any point to that, though? I mean, you’d still have to use your magic to make the ‘walls’. You’d end up using a lot more of your magic for that than just channeling it through a rune normally, right? So it’d be a really complicated, really energy-expensive, and slightly dangerous way to do something you can already do.”
“Oh, yes. It would be completely pointless. But you’re forgetting something. Kayden.”
“I am?”
“Yes. It would be awesome.”
“Well, you know me; I am definitely a fan of doing stupid things because they’re awesome.” Of course, when I saw Max again in three days, he would’ve nixed the idea for being too dangerous and gotten distracted by his other projects. But maybe he’d stop being so weird about the familiar thing.
That was something.