Malas was unsurprised to see me and didn’t ask for an explanation. Alania must have told him I was coming. I let him touch me and braced myself against the sickening wave of displaced magic.
“Are you alright?” he asked, while I gritted my teeth and waited for the magic to settle down.
“Fine,” I said. “I just can’t seem to get used to that, no matter how often you do it.”
“My apologies. There’s nothing immediately alarming about your biology. I’d advise drinking something with salt in it before you go to bed, though, or you’re going to have a headache in the morning.”
“Uh-huh. Hey… weird question. What would happen to you if you lost control of your spells?”
Malas blinked in surprise. “What?”
“Your spells. I know Alania’s would freeze or burn people or something, I’ve seen it. Yours are way more powerful than hers, right? But they’re also… well, a prophecy, and a really limited creation spell, so…”
“The power is largely a moot point,” Malas shrugged. “If I lost control, I would die before any other damage could occur.”
I looked him up and down, looked at the blue magic entirely encasing his eyes, threaded through his mage tattoos. “The magic is keeping you alive?”
“Technically speaking, the kuracar is too powerful a pair of spells for a human body to contain. The only reason I can contain it is because it repairs its own damage and helps to contain itself. Were I to lose control, I would die before it could do much else, and I would probably lose a few apprentices after that as it tried to find one that could handle it. But there is no cause for concern; I have a good few decades in me yet.” He smiled.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“My physiology isn’t of concern here. Yours is. And you seem perfectly fine, which is good.”
“Tell that to Max,” I said, rolling my eyes. “He thought I might hurt myself.” I don’t know why I was confessing this to Malas, of all people. I supposed I’d probably just feel better if I had someone agree with me about what an absurd proposition that obviously was, and it felt weird to bring it up with anyone whose opinion on me I actually cared about.
But Malas didn’t shrug the possibility off. He just said, “If you find that you do need mental health services, you are of course aware of how to – ”
“Yes, I know where the counsellors are,” I snapped. Malas knew I was seeing a gender specialist so of course he knew I already knew how to access mental health services. Mentioning this to a doctor had been a terrible idea; he probably dealt with self-harm injuries a lot and just assumed that any teenager was at risk. Kylie or Talbot or Hua would have understood, but I cared too much about their opinions to talk about this kind of thing. Even though I knew it was useless, I felt compelled to explain myself, so he didn’t misinterpret my comment as a cry for help or something. “Trust me, I’ve never self-harmed, and I’m not about to start now.”
But Malas didn’t immediately agree and back off. He seemed to be watching me from the corner of his eye, although it was always kind of hard to tell with his pale blue magical eyeballs. He said carefully, “Your past is your own business, and nobody else’s unless you want it to be. But it is also – this is important, Kayden – it is also nothing to be ashamed of.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“… Nothing. Your personal business isn’t my business unless it poses a physical danger to your health, or you need references for specialists. I just hope that you’re looking after yourself.”
“You think I’m going to hurt myself?”
“No. I have no reason to think that.” He hesitated. “I simply meant that if you choose to hide your history, that is a choice you are free to make, not an obligation.”
He was avoiding my gaze now. Great. “If that’s supposed to be some kind of cryptic hint, you’re going to have to be clearer, because I’ve completely lost track of whatever we’re talking about.”
“Did you know that physical wounds don’t heal?”
“Um. What?” I glanced at the mostly smooth skin of my frequently-injured arms. “Yes they do.”
“They certainly appear so. But there are underlying structures in the body severed by injuries that never quite match up when they heal. Newly grown flesh and healed flesh are different; there are interruptions in the collagen network in the skin, in how muscle fibres interact, in the structure of bone, the patterns formed by capillaries in the body. The majority of injuries won’t scar in a way that you can see or feel – but my prophecy is extremely thorough. If I scan somebody deeply enough, I can see every injury they’ve ever had.”
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“Uh… okay?”
“It’s fairly common for the skin of a person’s hands, arms and feet to be a tangled mess of healed skin. Legs, shoulders, faces and backs usually show a handful of interruptions.” Malas hesitated a few seconds before pushing on. “It’s not very often that I see such extensive healing in the flesh over somebody’s sternum and ribs.”
“Um. What?”
“The skin on your chest, Kayden, has undergone very extensive healing. It seems to be centred over your curse. The damage is extensive enough that it’s difficult to be certain of the pattern, but it looks like several dozen straight cuts of various lengths were made with a very sharp implement, possibly a scalpel or a razor. The lack of visible physical scarring means that they couldn’t have all been made at the same time; they must have been made a few at a time, possibly one at a time, and allowed to heal.”
I stared.
“You’re wrong,” I eventually said.
“My prophecy is extremely accurate when it comes to the physical structure of – ”
“Well, today it isn’t. You’re wrong. I can guarantee that I’ve never taken any kind of blade to my chest except my runecrafting pen because I’m not an idiot.”
“Alright,” Malas said, obviously not believing me.
“Maybe it was an injury. I injure myself a lot.” A chest injury I’d forgotten about, as if that would ever happen. As if the slightest scratch on my chest, back before Refujeyo, wouldn’t have me in a panic for a week about the possibility that the physical damage might somehow wake my spell. (This was also why I was absolutely certain I would never take a blade to my chest. I’d never self-harmed at all, but if I was going to, the absolute last piece of my body I would have risked damaging back before Refujeyo was the area around my curse.)
“An accidental injury that extensive would have scarred,” Malas said gently.
“Not if I got it here. I’ve cut myself up pretty badly here and your magic almost never leaves scars, no matter how bad the cut is.” I rubbed at the semicircular scars under my left wrist.
“The first time I scanned you was the day you arrived, when you walked in here all cut up and drenched in empowered water. I scanned your chest quite extensively; you may recall that you were trying to convince me to arrange heart surgery. The collagen interruptions were already present and the skin undamaged. These cuts must have occurred and healed long before you arrived here.”
“Well, they didn’t,” I snapped. “Your stupid spells got something wrong.”
Then I stormed out of the ward before he could reply.
Because here was the thing: I could think of one pretty clear way that my chest could have been injured like that.
Not by me. Not on purpose; as I said, I wouldn’t be that stupid even if I had ever hurt myself, which I hadn’t. Not by accident; seriously damaging the flesh around my spell would have been a major cause for panic, involves some emergency consults with my GP, and generally been an experience I wouldn’t forget. Such injuries might be less memorable after arriving at Refujeyo – I regularly stabbed my witch mark to extract ichor these days, and I’d lost count of how many injuries I’d gotten wandering the giant spell rune corridors under the school last semester – but if Malas had detected the old, healed injuries on the very first day… well. One possibility.
I went back to my room, which was thankfully empty, and jumped in the shower. I didn’t like looking at my chest, really – I’d promised long ago to never be ashamed of my body, but without the bulk of my clothing, the shape wasn’t exactly masculine, and there was no need to remind myself of that – but I took the time to carefully inspect the skin, running my fingers over it to feel for any old scars or, or collagen interruptions, or whatever Malas had said, but of course I couldn’t feel anything. The only unusual sight and texture was the mage mark tattooed over my heart. The rest felt the same as it always had.
The same as it always had.
The only way I could have had the injuries that Malas had described, and not remember them… was for them to have occurred when I was too young to remember very much.
I’d been six months old when I’d been cursed. When my parents, hopeful for a bright future for their precious baby, suddenly found themselves raising a time bomb that could unpredictably hurt or kill them at any moment. They’d tried almost every binding ritual they could get their hands on; salt and holly and silver and thread, poems and prayers and invocations and songs. Almost everything – they’d never hurt me. They’d taught me to make purifying tea, to recite blessing backwards, to mark my door with salt; they’d never pierced my skin with iron or put burning ashwood on my tongue or fed me poison. They hadn’t tried, hadn’t even mentioned, anything that would actually hurt me.
… That I could remember.
But my memories only went back so far. And Malas was too good at his job to be wrong about this. Had one of them dragged a silver razor across their baby’s chest, whispering blessings through tears? Laid a sharp knife over my heart at night to protect be from evil, and kept doing it even though I was getting cut? Twisted some kind of protective charm out of a thorny plant, or hired some cursebreaker dedicated enough in their job to hurt a child? Had they argued over it, one of them refusing but the other insisting that this needed to be done if it had any chance of working, of stopping my curse from possibly killing me as well as them? Had they both refused, and had to be convinced by my GP, or had they both jumped at the possible solution?
I had to ask them about this, right? I had to ask them what had happened. How the fuck was I supposed to start that conversation? Could I even trust them to tell the truth? And if it hadn’t been them, if they had no idea what I was talking about… who had it been? When? How?
I don’t know how long I spent standing in that shower, staring alternately at my own mage mark and at the wall. Trying, and failing, to come up with any other explanation than the obvious one, the understandable one, the thing that two desperate parents afraid for their family must have done. In a world where cursed children were often abandoned, or mutilated, or accidentally killed in binding rituals, I had made it this far without being hurt… and that was still true, right? Because I hadn’t even known about the damage to my chest until Malas had told me. It didn’t affect my life at all. So even if I was right, even if the only possible explanation was true… I was still fine, and they had… they hadn’t… they’d done their best. They’d probably been scared.
It was hard to breathe, suddenly. My hands were trembling, and I was sinking down to the shower floor.
I shouldn’t be upset by this. It made no sense to be upset by this. Once upon a time, I would have been able to nip those feelings in the bud, calm them down before they risked awakening my curse, redirect to something else to keep the entire world safe from me. But I wasn’t so good at that any more. I was out of practice at not letting myself feel things.
I missed it.