There was one complication I hadn’t considered when trying to get a room at the motel, and it wasn’t until Susan, the motel manager, was staring me down over stubbornly folded arms that I realised that I was an idiot.
“Kayden, I’m not renting a room to an unaccompanied minor,” she said sternly.
“C’mon, you know I won’t break anything.”
“That’s not the point! Where are you parents?”
I bit my lip.
“Really? Your school just dumped you here alone?”
I shrugged.
“Did you run away?”
“No, I didn’t run away! I’m fifteen, not nine!”
“Then you’re old enough to call your parents!”
“I’ll be sixteen soon,” I mumbled.
“But you’re not sixteen now, and it’s illegal for me to rent you a room. Just… promise me you’re meant to be here, alright? Promise me you’re supposed to be here, and I don’t need to call the police.”
I rolled my eyes. “No, you don’t need to call the police. The people responsible for me know where I am.”
“And they sent you off alone?”
“I’m an adult in mage culture,” I grumbled, in a very adult and not at all childish way.
Susan rubbed her temples and took a deep breath. “Okay. Look. Room nine isn’t being used. I can’t legally rent it to you. I really don’t want to call your parents on you. But I’m not going to let you sleep on the street, understand?” She pointedly turned her back on the key rack, where the key for room nine hung among the others. “I’m not very observant. Maybe I won’t get around to checking the room for a few days. But being unobservant has limits, understand?”
“You’re the best.”
“If you attract someone else’s attention, I can’t help you, because I’m not very observant and didn’t see anything,” Susan said pointedly, and left the room. I filched the key to room nine and got out of there. ‘A few days’ was perfect – in three days, Max would arrive, and he was using his family money to book us a room at the nicer hotel in town. He’d stayed alone before, and presumably knew how to do it without people making a completely unnecessary fuss over his age.
I stashed my stuff in the room, then headed out again. It was early evening, and I had somewhere to be.
The people who had bought the house I’d grown up in had changed the garden quite a bit, but the old peach tree leaning over the fence from Melissa’s yard was still there. It had been a long time since I’d climbed it, and doing so now was… odd. I’d discovered the easiest way to get up the tree very young, and every handhold was etched into my mind; I found them without any trouble, pulling myself into its branches. But I’d been shorter and lighter the last time I was up here; my centre of gravity had been different. I’d grown up with this tree, my body changing too gradually for me to notice how it affected my climb, and now there was this… gap. Almost two years’ worth of growth. It made me a little clumsy.
Of course, the very last time I’d been in this tree, the night before I’d met Instruktanto Cooper, I’d had a broken leg. I could hardly be clumsier than that.
I shuffled along a long, thick branch to Melissa’s window, pleased that it could still take my weight without any problems. She was in, curly hair silhouetted against the light of her desk lamp. I broke a twig off the tree and lobbed it at her window to get her attention.
She turned. Froze. I couldn’t see her expression, but I could imagine it perfectly. I hadn’t told the girls I was coming.
She dashed across the room and yanked her window open so quickly I thought it was going to break. She stared, mouth open. “Kayden?”
“Hi.”
“What the absolute fuck are you doing here?”
“It’s Saturday evening,” I said, putting every bit of effort I could into sounding casual and sincere and not at all like I was being a little git on purpose. “We meet up on Saturday evenings.”
“What the fuck?”
“Are you going to step back so I can get in?”
Melissa stepped back. I climbed in.
“Not to repeat myself,” Melissa said, “but what?”
“Something’s going on at school,” I shrugged. “We have some unexpected time off.” Panic flashed in her eyes, and I remembered that most of what I’d told her about school was quite dangerous. “Nothing dangerous! Not to me, anyway. There’s an infrastructure issue.”
“Riiight. And you can’t call ahead because…?”
Downstairs, I heard Chelsea talking to Melissa’s parents. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Because the look on Chelsea’s face is going to be amazing. Quick, get a camera.”
Melissa did not get a camera, but she did grin in delight as Chelsea’s feet thudded up the stairs. She swung the door open, saying, “Liss, I – ” and froze.
“Hi,” I said again.
“Um,” Chelsea said.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“Wow, not even pleased to see me.” I inspected my fingernails. “I’m hurt.”
Chelsea pulled herself back together with impressive speed. “Hey, Kayden. Did you run away from school or something?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that? No; there was a collapse. I have some time off while they fix it.”
“A collapse?” Melissa cut in. “You said it was an infrastructure issue!”
“A collapse is an infrastructure issue.”
“I haven’t seen your parents in town,” Chelsea said. “They haven’t called mine for coffee or anything.”
“They’re not here. I’d prefer if you didn’t tell them I was, at least, not until I’m gone again.”
Chelsea and Melissa exchanged a glance.
“Why – ?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Oookay.” Melissa sat on the end of her bed. “So how long – ?”
“My surv – ah, the teachers think six days. I’m having a school friend come by on Tuesday. Max.”
“Oh, the guy who did your arm rune thing.”
“Yeah. That guy.”
“What is going on with everything right now?” Chelsea asked. “You don’t write to us all that much.”
“Yeah, it’s… hard to secretly put stuff in letters that might be read. Our little code language just isn’t equipped to explain any of the bullshit going on right now.”
“Problems with your familiar thing?” Melissa asked.
“Oh, no. This is brand new bullshit.” I took a deep breath. “Let me tell you about this little town called Fionnrath.”
I quickly summarised the Fionnrath’s Destiny issue for them. I debated telling them about Saina and the Heiress prophecy, but decided against it. One complicated political problem at a time.
“Huh,” Melissa said. “But this isn’t a problem while you’re still at school?”
I shook my head. “Refujeyo has a legal claim on Kylie, and Fionnrath… doesn’t, by majority standards, but it does by their standards. It’s complicated. Most mage cultures abide by the international agreement that a spell belongs to its mage, but Fionnrath considers their prophecy to belong to Fionnrath, and therefore Kylie should go with them – except Kylie’s not a citizen of Fionnrath so not really subject to their laws. For as long as she’s under contract with Refujeyo – that is, until she graduates – she has that obligation to protect her; Fionnrath aren’t about to start a war with Refujeyo. But after that, we’re worried about the kinds of pressure that Fionnrath might use to convince her to go and live there.”
“And if you can’t undo this familiar thing, you have to go with her,” Melissa said.
I nodded. “The two weeks apart for the holidays were bad enough. I don’t think living apart forever would be pleasant for either of us.”
“Are you okay now?”
“Yeah. It starts to get wearing after about a week.”
Chelsea shrugged. “You didn’t die or anything in the two-week holiday, so… life on the road. Pop into Fionnrath once every two weeks and spend the rest of your days chasing the horizon.”
I laughed. “You’re suggesting I spend my whole life on an adventure holiday? How rich do you think I am?”
“Aren’t you friends with a bunch of rich kids? Rekindle things with that buff mage and become his trophy husband.”
“Oh, yes. I’ll pitch that to Magistus right away. Convince him to dump his boyfriend for me so I can leech off his money forever.”
“Well, you are pretty amazing.”
“That I am. How about you two? For people who like to grill me on my dating life, I don’t hear much about yours.”
Chelsea shrugged. “I’m seeing Rachel now.”
“Rachel…” I searched my memory. “Rachel Sanders? Green eyes, horrible haircut?”
“Oh, she grew that out. It looks great now.”
“Nice. How about you, Liss?”
Melissa shrugged. “No one right now. Martin and I tried to give it a go, but we’re better as friends, so…” she shrugged again.
“You are still friends, then?”
“Oh, yeah. We’ve started writing this really long fanfiction together, so we’re committed.”
“Wow,” Chelsea said drily. “That’s like one step behind joint ownership of a house.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Melissa’s mother’s footsteps started coming up the stairs, and we immediately fell silent. I ducked behind Melissa’s bed, just in case she wanted to come in. We waited, tense, while the footsteps passed us by to Melissa’s parents’ room, and then, about thirty seconds later, back out and down the stairs.
Only when she was back downstairs again, safely close to the blaring television, did we simultaneously dissolve into giggles.
“Shh, shh!” Melissa chided Chelsea and I around her own giggles. “If they find Kayden here we are all in so much trouble.”
“You guys aren’t going to get in trouble after I leave, right?” I asked. “I mean, people are going to know I’m in town. I’m not invisible.”
“No, we’ll just pretend we thought your parents were here,” Chelsea shrugged.
“Why didn’t you call them?” Melissa asked. “Even if they couldn’t come, they could have arranged – ”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.” I tried not to think about old, invisible scars lacing my chest. They must have been desperate, afraid, and they clearly hadn’t hurt me because I hadn’t even known it had ever happened, but… I didn’t want to talk about it.
Melissa was staring at me. “What?” I asked.
“I just noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
She brushed her fingertips across my lip. “You have a moustache.”
“I what?” I raced to her dresser to inspect my face. I’d hesitate to call the smattering of little hairs over my lip a ‘moustache’, exactly, but hair was present. I couldn’t help but grin.
“That’s hardly a moustache,” Chelsea pointed out.
“You’re just jealous,” I scoffed. “Jealous of my amazing facial hair.”
“Ah, yes. Jealous. I truly wish that I, too, could have hairy lips.”
“Damn straight you do.”
Melissa, ever the smart one, completely ignored this. “This whole spell problem you’ve got, with this town. We couldn’t help at all because you couldn’t tell us what was going on. We need a better, more specific code, that can transmit new information.”
“Impossible,” Chelsea said. “The system we have is uncrackable because it’s based on our shared memories. Creating an actual code, that can be specific, means it’s going to be crackable. You still don’t know if your mail is being read?”
I shook my head, trying not to be too obvious about how I was still admiring my reflection. “I don’t necessarily have any reason to think it is, no tampered letters or anything. But it’s the kind of thing they’d do and I don’t want to risk it.”
“Hmm.” Chelsea rubbed her chin thoughtfully. I mirrored the action, feeling for bristly hairs. None yet. “This is tricky,” Chelsea murmured.
“But solveable,” Melissa said firmly. “This sort of problem comes up all the time in fantasy books, and I’ve read a lot of fantasy books. One of them will have a solution we can use.”
“I know you’ve probably thought of this, Kayden, but magic…?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have any magic that can help us communicate long distance. There are ways to use runes to make one-time-use emergency signallers and stuff, but if you want me to pull out long-range telepathy or, or a pair of magic notebooks where whatever you write appears in the other book, or anything like that, we’re out of luck.”
“Pity,” Melissa said. “It would be really cool to have a notebook like that.”
“I guarantee that if I knew of such a notebook and how to get it, we would already have notebooks like that. Not because of this communication thing, but because you’re right; it would just be inherently awesome.”
“Melissa?” Melissa’s dad called from downstairs. “Chelsea?”
We froze.
“I’d better go,” I whispered. Like whispering mattered, when we’d just been talking perfectly fine and hadn’t been heard.
“Catch up tomorrow?” Melissa whispered back.
I nodded, paused long enough to give them each a brief hug, and climbed back out the window. Let them get back to their normal lives, for the moment.
Coming here on my own probably hadn’t been the most well-thought-out plan, socially speaking. I was too used to living somewhere where people didn’t care that I was young and just let me do whatever the hell I wanted; I’d forgotten what commonfolk adults were like, and now I was going to have to deal with that. But given all the stuff happening at Refujeyo, I couldn’t bring myself to feel bothered by stuff like that. This week was going to be great. And normal. And absolutely nothing weird was going to happen.
I could feel it.