CHAPTER 4
In Which the Bells Ring at Last
ANGIE. TIME TO TALK TO A STRANGE BOY.
Like, Angie wouldn’t have said she found the boy more attractive than Ryan, because that would have been a lie, but she’d also been borderline unhealthily obsessed with Ryan since she’d first laid eyes on him in the third grade. It was still a near thing. If the boy hadn’t been missing basically every one of the physical features she most loved about Ryan—his dangerous blue eyes, his fine, nearly white hair, his sharp features, his delicate size—he might have been in trouble. (Only not really, because Angie was fully aware she looked like a mannequin made of white mushroom leather stretched over wicker, so this gorgeous guy was probably not going to look twice at any of Angie’s assets even if his “girl” augury was about her. Which Angie already doubted.)
Instead, the boy was not much shorter than Evan, and well muscled, and black-haired, and he had the wildest eyes of anyone that Angie’d ever seen, even Megan with her violet-blues. As he approached, she could see that his eyes were sea-glass green, but with a ring of bright gray right around his pupils. That gray spiked out into the surrounding sea-glass green in jagged, asymmetric intervals, maybe five or six narrow needles of gray per eye, making Angie think of ice crystals, of strange stars. And she could somehow see them clearly from a preposterous distance, surely at least three meters still as he approached. It was almost disorienting.
Said eyes were set in quite a face, with high-set, prominent cheekbones, a strong, broad, though fine-boned jaw, a cleft chin, an easy, friendly smile on his full lips, and a strong nose that perfected the symmetry of the rest of the face. He had a widow’s peak, and his rakishly shaggy haircut looked like it belonged on TV. And, interestingly, around his neck he wore what looked like a bell-shaped charm, much like the one Megan was wearing. It was a common shape for luck-charms, but even so.
Angie didn’t know how to handle this. She hadn’t been prepared for Megan to want to make up, she hadn’t been prepared for rude magpies auguring at her, and she certainly wasn’t prepared to talk to this strange, handsome boy.
As he approached, she opened her mouth, because she knew she needed to say something. What came out of her mouth, as soon as he was at a distance she wouldn’t have to raise her voice for him to hear, was, “I’ve had a weird morning. So, are you an elf prince in a bad disguise or what?”
He let loose a surprised bark of laughter. “Fair question!” he said, with a bit of a chuckle in the words as well. “Most people try to ask it a little more delicately, but, I mean, even if they dance around it more, it’s not the first time I’ve been asked that.
“So, according to the family legend,” he said, his strange eyes sparkling, “The progenitor of our line went missing on the night of his nineteenth birthday. He was gone for a year and a day, then appeared at the village gates as the full moon rose with a baby boy swaddled in his arms. He said he’d had a dream, that he’d been taken as a lover of a queen of the Tylwyth Teg, and when he’d woken up he was lying in a circle of mushrooms in the woods, with the child he’d dreamed they’d had together lying beside him.
“The legend says he could never remember more than bits and flashes of his dream, which presumably was a kindness so that he could live a normal life after. But the child went on to be a Light Bearer, and every first born son of our line has been one ever since.” Though he’d kept it brief, he’d still taken on the cadence of a hunting tale as he explained the legend. Angie wondered if he’d hunted yet. Despite all the morning had brought, a hot little coal of excitement started burning inside her, and she wanted badly to hear his tales, if he had any.
It’d been so long since she’d heard a hunting tale.
“Ah,” she said. “How fortunate.”
“I suppose!” the boy replied with a big, bright smile, and though it was in a cheerful enough tone, it seemed a touch strained. “Soooo, is this… well, I guess what I want to ask first is, do you find my presence unwelcome right now?”
Angie realized she’d kept her expression severe. She considered for several seconds, then said, “I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s not the opposite of that, either.”
“Sure,” the boy said, nodding slowly. “Okay, well, can I just ask you a couple of questions?”
“That’s the second you’ve asked so far, so I guess you can,” Angie replied. She shouldn’t be reacting to him like this. She was going to mess things up for Evan, maybe more. But she could barely parse what had just happened herself, and he was going to want answers she didn’t have or didn’t feel comfortable sharing, and it’d been a taxing morning already.
He was silent for a moment, his smile somewhat faded from what it had been, but still present. “I can ask later, if you need,” he said. “I need to know, though. I’ve never had a corbic augury.”
“Corvid. Just get on with it,” Angie said. “I need you to ask so I can stop being stared at by your entourage. I doubt I have the answers you want, anyway, but I certainly can’t guess at the questions without you asking.”
Now looking uncertain, perhaps even concerned, the boy replied, “If you’re certain. If you’ve had a bad morning—”
“Just ask your questions, Ser Light Bearer,” Angie said, her temper flaring. “The last thing I need is people saying that the weird crittertongue girl was too rude to even talk to the new Light Bearer about the corvid augury that she saw him get.”
His eyes lit up, he took an eager step closer, he leaned forward. “So you were having a conversation with the magpies! How cool!”
Suppressing a sigh, Angie said, “Sure, I guess.” She had this conversation more often than she enjoyed.
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This seemed to throw the boy again. Angie supposed that as a Light Bearer who even at fifteen was unspeakably attractive, he might largely be used to folks fawning over him. But even if she wanted to hear some hunting tales, she didn’t have it in her, and kissing his ass wouldn’t have been her style anyway.
She was one of the Exiles, after all. They had to protect themselves.
After a pause that was just a bit too long, the boy said, “Well… it rather looked like you were talking to all four of them as I approached. And I was kind of distracted but it seemed like you were getting augured at the same time I was when those two first flew over and landed near me.”
“Observant,” Angie said.
He blinked, then said, “Well, I mean, I’ve been training to carry a flame since I was five. The Bearer’s Flame is a nice warning, but many Beasts are fast or sneaky. Learning to spot the Beast before it’s too late is an essential part of training to patrol and hunt, and that’s just learning to be observant. It doesn’t only apply to Beasts.”
“Sure,” Angie said.
The boy pursed his lips and said, “You probably didn’t need that, and you’re not really enjoying this exchange, my apologies. Did you also receive an augury before the two flew over to me? Aren’t those both pretty unusual? For people to get more than one augury, or for more than one person in one place to get auguries at the same time?”
“You expect me to know because I’m a crittertongue?” Angie said, consciously deflecting. This was the boy the augury had been about, she was sure, but she wasn’t the girl from his augury. She felt more and more certain of both, without reason, with every sentence they exchanged. But she was worried he’d think she was.
“Oh,” he said, blinking his long, pretty black eyelashes more. “I… no, I guess not. I hoped I guess. Did you receive auguries too, at least?”
She shook her head. “That’s kinda private, man.”
She wasn’t letting him catch any sort of balance—this was obviously not how most of his conversations with girls went. “Oh,” he said again. “Okay…. Do you… well, do you happen to know which poem is magpies? I think I remember all the poems but I definitely don’t remember which is which. I mean I’m sure that the two of them were predicting joy or mirth, but I’m not sure whether the three mean I’ll be getting a funeral or a wedding or a girl or, well, shitting. That fourth poem’s weird.”
He paused, but when Angie didn’t immediately start talking, he seemed unable to resist adding, “If you don’t know the poems, did the magpies at least say anything about it? While they were chattering afterward, both times? Or either time?” He stopped, and Angie even started to open her mouth, but maybe not visibly because then he said, “Okay, and I mean, if we both got auguries at the same time, doesn’t it seem likely they’re related somehow? I understand you not wanting to talk—”
“‘One for sorrow, two for joy,’” Angie said, “Is, I think, how the magpie verse starts. Then it’s ‘Three for a girl and four for a boy.’ I think it’s jays, like blue jays or scrub jays, that predict shitting in threes.”
“So weird,” he said, with half a shake of his head. “So I’m looking for a girl, huh?” He eyed Angie. He did a great job of not being visibly dubious as he did so. “Really, you’re sure our auguries aren’t related?”
“I’m not up to this,” Angie said. Megan should be talking to him, not Angie. If this was about his birthday, like the bird said. Megan had always been the one responsible for their birthday thing.
He closed his eyes for several seconds, then tried again. “Right. My apologies again. It’s just that if four is for a boy and you got an augury of four and then of two then—”
“I’m not your girl, Light Bearer,” Angie said, putting the Exile back into her tone of voice. “I have a boyfriend.”
“Well, I mean, auguries are… Fortune is fickle, as they say,” Chris said, “And I was kinda thinking, um, it was predicting that you’d aid me magically somehow?”
Angie hadn’t considered that. “It’s possible I could do that, but I don’t think that’s it. I’m not up for discussing why right now. It’s more gut feeling than anything.”
The boy grimaced. “That’s fair. Not really that long until class starts anyway,” he said, and he started to turn away, before pausing. “I’m sorry, I’d also wanted to ask, did they say anyth—”
“No,” Angie said. “Nothing useful.”
“Oh,” he said, as a small crease appeared between his brows. “Are you sure? I have some stuff going on, it might not be apparan—”
“I promise you. The longest phrase I could clearly make out was one either calling you a pus-oozing pustule plastered prick, or saying that you have one,” Angie said, every word the truth. “I didn’t catch the context because they were all busy screaming similar imagery as fast as they could.”
The boy’s mouth hung open. “Huh,” he said after a moment. “No wonder you replied that way when I said it was cool you were a crittertongue. Is that normal?”
“They’re like that a lot anyway, particularly magpies,” Angie said, “But I’m not sure they enjoy being augurs, entirely. And I’m glad I don’t merely have beakspeak. If I only got to talk to birds I’d be suicidal. The nice critters are shyer. Now will you please go back to your crowd of adoring fans?”
“Heh,” the boy said, his pleasant expression definitely getting strained. “I don’t know if I’d put it that way. If anything they’re accommodating me—I’m trying to learn the names of and introduce myself to everyone in the school before All Spirit’s Feast[1], and so far people have been patiently accepting of my attempts to make that manageable.”
[1] A celebration of the spirit world: those of humanity’s dead—both those lost to the Beasts and those safe in an afterlife, urn, coffin, or in Sanctuary on the moon—and those of nature and of Faerie. Taking place on October 31st, costumes and masks are donned to allow the spirits and the fae to blend in, and masquerades or open house parties give them the opportunity to visit. An important celebration for a community’s prosperity; offending the spirits isn’t wise.
Now it was Angie’s turn to be thrown—she found her own mouth hanging open without having noticed it drop. “We’re a 4A school,” she managed to say after a moment. “You know that, right? We have like twelve hundred students at this school. I know for a fact there are eighty-three classrooms among all the buildings, and that doesn’t even count the gym, music halls, and dance studio.”
He waved this off. “Oh sure. I’ve got a bit of a brain quirk where I can always remember and place a name with a face and vice versa though, so it won’t be that big a thing. I mean, I won’t remember fuck all about anyone I don’t actually talk to regularly, besides their names and faces, but all I can do is my best.”
He shook his head. “Speaking of which, where are my manners? So thrown by the birds that I’ve totally failed to get your name or introduce myself before so rudely barraging you with questions.” He stepped forward, and extended his hand. “The name’s—”