Gray stood stiffly in the office.

‘This,’ Cyril muttered, ‘is precisely why I don’t want apprentices involved.’

He yanked a drawer open at his desk and pulled out a boiled yellow sweet wrapped in cellophane. Pushing it into Gray’s tender palms, he snapped, ‘the sugar will help stabilise your nerves. Sit still. I’ll find you a potion.’

Cyril pointed Gray to the plush chair behind the desk, and began fishing through a bunch of the cupboards underneath his bookshelves. He threw his long, silvery hair over his shoulder in frustration. His layered robes dragged on the ground as he crouched.

For a very old man, he was extremely spry.

Gray perched on the chair, eyeing Cyril. His fingers trembled as he ripped the cellophane. His clothes clung to his skin, damp with rain and sweat, and he was focused on controlling his breath. The storm continued to rage outside the windows. Gray watched the sleeping kids on the couch, wishing desperately he was one of them.

Fatigue was beckoning him harder and harder.

The sweet was a burst of lemon and fizzing sugar on Gray’s tongue.

‘But, no,’ Cyril continued to mutter, his ancient voice growing more acidic, ‘let’s toss untrained mages into the mix. Brilliant strategy. That’s bound to turn out spectacularly for all of us.’

Cyril pulled out a large leather bag and hauled it onto the desk with a thump.

‘We don’t have enough mages left for this kind of waste. And yet, Baldwin treats them like disposable weapons,’ Cyril said. ‘Do you have any idea how many mages used to walk these halls?’

Gray gave a small, noncommittal sound, unsure whether Cyril was actually addressing him, or if Cyril was doing the mental preparation for an argument with Baldwin, just out loud.

‘Hundreds of thousands,’ said Cyril, answering himself and pulling out chaotic handfuls of potions, bandages, and instruments from the bag and dumping them onto the desk. ’Sixty, seventy years ago, it was close to a million. Now, we’re down to thousands. Thousands! And half of them speak in riddles, you can’t get any sense out of them, they’re difficult to train …’

He trailed off, as another small crowd of master mages appeared at his door.

‘Stay here while I deal with them,’ he said sharply to Gray. He gestured at him like Gray was a puff of smoke about to evaporate. ‘Stay - still.’

Whatever the exchange was with the master mages, they left very quickly, and Cyril returned to Gray even more nettled.

Cyril pulled his wand out of his holster and pointed it at Gray.

Gray flinched.

‘I’m going to dry you,’ Cyril explained. ‘You’ll catch your death, sitting in wet clothes like that.’

Gray shifted, embarrassed. ‘All right.’

He waved his wand, and warm, drying air gushed over Gray. Plucking a potion out of the mess on his desk, Cyril examined it in the lamplight and then handed it over to Gray.

Gray drank the potion, and calm warmth spread through his body. His shaking stilled.

Taking up Gray’s hands, Cyril irritably clucked his tongue.

Gray had expected Cyril to pull out his wand again, but instead, he picked out a set of tweezers from the chaos on the desk and started deftly pulling splinters and grit from Gray’s hands and forearms.

Like he did this all the time. An experienced surgeon.

He was all steady hands and irritated frown lines.

‘Baldwin needs to change his strategy,’ Cyril said, ‘or we will be a dying kingdom.’

Cyril tugged Gray’s hands closer to the lamp on his desk.

‘He can’t rely on mages for his military power any more,’ said Cyril darkly, ‘but does he want to hear this? Of course not. He refuses to adapt, refuses to consider any other way to secure the safety of his kingdom. He takes my strongest talent, throws them into his wars and gets them killed, burns them out, destroys them. And he can’t wrap his mind around this, he refuses to see his own patterns, and he doesn’t listen to me.’

Cyril finished pulling splinters and stepped back with a sharp sigh. He looked Gray in the eye for the first time that night.

‘I’m genuinely impressed you didn’t die or get kidnapped,’ said Cyril. ‘Well done.’

Gray nodded, under the impression if he said or did the wrong thing, he’d be stuck in this office with Cyril ranting for a good long while.

‘You fought Longwark off?’ said Cyril. ‘What happened?’

‘I …’ said Gray, eyeing Cyril and lowering his voice as more master mages appeared at the door, waiting for their Grand High Master Mage. ‘I, uh kicked him,’ said Gray, dropping his voice even more, because he wasn’t super proud of this. He wished he could say he overpowered Longwark and used some cunning way to escape. But he couldn’t. ‘In the face and … ran.’

Cyril stared at him, his expression completely unreadable.

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Slowly, he backed off. He rubbed his face, hiding his expression.

Muffled laughter escaped through his hand.

Then, the room was filled with it, with his resonant, genuine laughter. It bounced off the walls, it seemed to weaken the intensity of the crashing thunder outside.

One of the waiting master mages edged forward into the office. Her robes were plastered down with rain.

‘Yes, yes,’ boomed Cyril, striding over to her. He spoke to the group of mages, fast and clipped, and dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

‘You were very lucky,’ said Cyril, coming back over to Gray and picking up a bottle of disinfectant. ‘If only more people had kicked that man in the face, we’d all be better off.’

Gray gave an uncertain smile.

‘Longwark doesn’t have a cyngryd with him?’ said Cyril.

‘He did,’ said Gray. ‘I, uh, took his cyngryd.’

‘You took his wand?’

‘I dropped it,’ Gray said hastily. ‘When I was running.’

Cyril glanced down at the desk, an echo of his laughter still in his expression, but it was mixed with something else that Gray couldn’t put his finger on.

‘We,’ said Gray, ‘came to blows. I slipped it out of his pocket.’

Cyril seemed to be struggling with himself, he looked on the verge of speaking.

He pressed his withered mouth into a hard line and then continued to heal Gray’s hands in silence.

‘It wasn’t personal,’ said Cyril, shrewdly, ‘in the meeting just before. I was making a point, I was demonstrating the folly of Baldwin’s plan. He doesn’t respond to heartfelt pleas. At least, not from me. You have to hammer the message sometimes. You were in the crossfire.’

Gray locked gazes with him for a second. He nodded.

Cyril’s face was grim.

‘It’s my responsibility to protect the mages in my care,’ said Cyril. ’Sometimes, the only way for me to do that is to be quite cruel.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Gray. The disappointment at being passed over for the Krydon job had been stinging, but after what had just happened, his focus was mostly on surviving the night. ‘I’d want to protect them too, given the chance.’

Gray had liked nearly every mage he’d met. Bookish peace-loving hippies, as Killian had described them, were his kind of people. He liked the riddlespeakers he’d come across in the tavern, he liked the Ralphs, hell, he liked Ellery Drake.

Cyril grunted. There was the smallest shift in him as he started packing up the healing kit. His brow relaxed. His breath gentled.

‘You’ll tell me what happened with Longwark tonight?’ said Cyril.

Stillness pressed the room as the windows were lashed by the storm.

‘Everything?’ Cyril paused. ‘Escaping from a sorcerer like Longwark is no small feat, but, I think, perhaps, you’re a master at masking your own competence.’

Gray suppressed a frown, confused.

Cyril bent so he was eye-to-eye with Gray. ‘And,’ he said, ‘I think you should do less of it. You don’t need to be invisible any more. We’ve seen you already, and here you stand, alive and whole.’

Gray dropped his gaze to his freshly healed hands. This man’d had three exchanges with Gray and now he was dolling out advice?

‘What competence?’ said Gray flatly. ‘I kicked him and ran.’

‘We’ve never had an apprentice return from an attempted collection,’ said Cyril. ‘What does that tell you?’

Gray opened his mouth to say he didn’t believe it had been a collection attempt, and then promptly shut it. Irritation echoed with him, at Cyril talking this way. With Longwark, Gray had been lucky, he hadn’t known what he was doing, and there had been no competence in the whole situation.

But, Gray pushed it down. The irritation was not going to help him right now, and he couldn’t say there had been no collection attempt, not if he wanted to be the one to go to Krydon.

Gray groped for something to say, because Cyril was watching him closely, clearing requiring a response.

‘You can be killed for having too much power,’ Gray muttered.

’True,’ said Cyril lightly. ‘But I’m not talking about magic. You didn’t use magic to escape tonight. There’s more to you than magic, yes? You have a head, a mind, a heart, a history. I’m asking you to tell me what happened tonight, with no holding back.’

Cyril smiled at him, his ancient face wrinkled, and Gray softened. After an awkward moment, Gray started speaking.

He launched into the sorcerer's attack on the carriage, and continued, speaking for a long while and pausing only when Cyril needed to attend to master mages at his door. He honestly answered every question Cyril asked.

Gray’s voice grew more and more hoarse.

His eyes grew heavy. His vision blurred.

‘ … and then,’ said Gray, ‘your guards escorted me here.’

Cyril had abandoned the mess on the desk from the healing kit. He leant against the far wall, his fingers steepled in front of him.

‘Longwark was not entirely lying to you,’ he said. ‘Some of it matches our intelligence. Some of it doesn’t. Wolfric Branbright … he has hunted down and assassinated every person marked with Wilde’s enemy symbol. If that’s not working for Wilde, I don’t know what is.’

Gray rubbed the X on his wrist with numb fingers as Cyril slowly made his way over to Gray, who was slumped in the desk chair. The old mage began tidying the healing pack once again.

He opened his mouth, turning to Gray. Then closed it, silently returning to packing up.

Needing something to do, Gray helped him pack up.

‘You speak northern?’ said Cyril abruptly.

Gray hesitated. ‘Yes.’

‘Don’t speak it myself, I’m afraid,’ said Cyril. ‘Not many around here do.’

Gray was uncertain of how to reply. He busied himself rolling an unraveled bandage and handing it to Cyril.

‘Your firebreath in Krydon,’ said Cyril, ‘it was all alchemy? No magic?’

For a moment, Gray considered saying he’d used magic to amplify it.

‘All alchemy,’ said Gray. Then, to fill the silence, ‘And a lot of luck.’

‘You did it to antagonise the army?’ said Cyril.

‘No,’ said Gray. ‘Yes. I,’ Gray handed Cyril a bunch of potions. ‘Krydon was about to retaliate to their treatment from the army. I figured I could antagonise the army and get them chasing me out of Krydon, leaving everyone in Krydon alone … avoid a bigger catastrophe, you know?’

Cyril had a very closed expression on his face. ‘You speak to me through subtext on purpose?’

‘Uh,’ said Gray, ‘excuse me?’

Shoving the remaining mess of potions and bandages into the bag, Cyril let out a very controlled sigh.

‘I barely speak through - text-text,’ said Gray. ‘I don’t mean to imply anything.’

Cyril’s lips twitched.

‘By all reports,’ said Cyril, picking his way through his words carefully, ’the firebreath was quite good. Weaponising it was creative.’

Gray glanced at him, surprised.

‘I do not approve,’ said Cyril, ‘of using apprentices, or any mage, as bait. The situation in Krydon is extremely dangerous, and if I could help it, I would not be sending even my master mages in there. But, if you …’

Cyril drew in a deep breath.

‘If you truly understand the dangers, if you understand this is life or death,’ Cyril said, as though every word was being wrenched out of him against his better judgement, and Gray waited, his heart leaping, but trying desperately to temper it, because Cyril couldn’t be saying what he thought he was saying.

Could he?

‘If you really want to do this,’ said Cyril, ‘to go and be bait for a sorcerer fight, and on the condition you go through a boot camp first - you must learn control - I won’t be the one to stop you. I will talk to Baldwin. You have proven yourself several times over. I’ll give him my blessing, not that he needs it, but he seems to want-’

The rest of Cyril’s words were cut off as a thousand tiny sunbursts exploded in Gray’s chest.

Gray spent a split second to check it wasn’t a literal explosion - no crashing of magic, no brightness - and then gripped Cyril’s ancient hands, stilling Cyril’s packing up of the healer’s kit.

‘Yes,’ said Gray. Then, louder, grinning. ‘Yes.’