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Chapter 5: Names and Kisses
The next day happened. Alex did not. Garrett, growing more and more tense as the hours went on, wanted to pace back and forth, which rocks generally didn’t. He said, to Quen and Karis and Maggie and Lilac and Jen and shy little Tamlyn, “Think about names. About knowing a thing.”
They were gathered this afternoon in one of the workrooms, one of the places he’d constructed his best shields: dense bricklike layers of almost physical essence of stone. He’d given them the morning to write home or kiss each other or whatever students did, because he’d thought Alex might appear; now they watched him, wide-eyed, as the day tiptoed toward evening.
He said, “When we talk about names. About knowing. I don’t mean this is a cabbage, and that’s a goat, and that’s a collection of syllables. It is, of course it is, but it’s more. You can know what a cabbage is, you can feel it growing and drinking water and tasting sun, without knowing the word for it in Penthii or Averenish or any of that. It’ll tell you who it is.”
“Er,” Lilac said. “Is it always a cabbage?”
“No. Sorry. Lorre would be better at this. For you it’ll be language. Writing, symbols. A shape that means something, that knows what it is. For Quen it’s water. I can manage a decent boulder.” Names, he thought. Shapes. Alex talking about work, about handwriting and spelling, revealing an unknown story beneath the obvious. “I’ll show you what I mean—”
He wasn’t Lorre, but he could turn himself into a few elemental pieces: speaking to, borrowing, wrapping the resonances he knew into his bones, his self. It felt the way he imagined acrobats must feel, soaring; from the sounds, he guessed the students had seen their Second Sorcerer blur into a tall standing-stone in the workroom, heavy, blue-veined, granite.
He heard, through vibrations and hums, through rock-seams and golden lacy deposits, through the noises of the capital city and its stone buildings, someone say his name.
He melted back into flesh, faster than he’d meant, disorienting. He put one hand on the wall. “Did someone…”
“I think Lorre’s here,” Jennet said. “He’s a bright spot, in my head.”
“Stay here,” Garrett said, “and think about what shapes you know best, and don’t try anything without me,” and hurried out. The gold-and-sapphire tug stayed in his head, pulling him on—to his own room, he realized with some annoyance, opening the door. “Lorre—”
“Oh, good,” Lorre said, getting up from the edge of Garrett’s bed, where he’d dropped—a person? An injured person, sitting up, bruised, pale—
Garrett clutched the wall for support. “Alex?”
Lorre said, “Why doesno onelisten to me, I could hear you losing focus five hundred miles away, do I have to doeverythingaround here? I found him for you, since you didn’t. Humans, honestly. I’m going to be a thunderstorm for a while.” He promptly turned into a unicorn, which was not a thunderstorm, but was gold and blue and ethereal and sulky, and fled Garrett’s bedroom and human emotion.
Garrett flung himself to Alex’s side. His scarf, his ruby sculpture, lit the room with color and fear. Alex’s right eye held color too: the wrong kind, angry, swollen. “What—”
“Well.” Alex, leaning back against the wall, in shirtsleeves and less clinging trousers than usual, tried to focus on him. “So that’s what that feels like.”
“What? Being beaten? Did Lorre—”
“No. I meant magical transportation. He came and got me. Right out of my writing-desk.” Alex’s hand found Garrett’s arm. “I was about to send you a note. I couldn’t come up today. I suppose now I have.”
“What happened?” Healing—he could find more pebbles, could pull power into his own hands if—
“It’s not bad. I meant to—”
“Didn’t you use—”
“I’ve only got one left.”
“How?” Alex had been injured enough to use all twelve? In a handful of days? “How badly are you hurt? If you tell me, I can—”
“Oh. No. Well. Mostly not.” Alex stopped to breathe. His hand remained on Garrett’s arm. “I might’ve shared. A palace maid. A page-boy. One of Father’s mistresses. He was in…a certain mood. They needed your help more than I did.”
Garrett stared at him, felt an impossible snarl of amazement and awe and love and horror gather and grow and fill up his own chest.
“I do have the one left,” Alex explained, as if concerned that Garrett thought he’d been careless with them. “But I was saving that one.”
“The King—”
“It’s not something I wanted you to have to know. He apologizes, after. He’s got a temper.”
“He…you…” The terrible shape of it burned as clear as everything Garrett had failed to see. Alex quietly not taking his father’s money, but hoping for his father’s approval. Flinching from a bruise on one arm, under a shopping-basket handle. Saying,he made us earn everything, he told us we deserved nothing, unless we were good enough…
“Things fly when he’s upset. Drinking horns. Plates. His fists.” Alex touched the spot below his eye, winced. “Normally I’m better at dodging.”
