Grosday. Again. The clock rattled me awake and my head felt like someone’d used it for a game of bowling while I slept, best of ten rounds. Then chucked it in the bins out back after they lost. I cursed and levered myself passably upright, regretted it, crowbarred myself out of bed and took the full impact of standing up.

  “S’up, Leafy? Wow! You look rough!”

  My eyes squeezed shut. “I’m fine. Just went through a lot yesterday. I’m fine.”

  “Aw, sorry about that.” Holly tapped the Ooh as she passed it and it lit up orange and red and I didn’t wanna be here when it got warm. “What happened?” she asked, a little too close to me.

  “I said I’m fine.” I dug in the little closet space for my robe, the fancy one, contemplated dressing properly, but the thought alone hurt my head. Pulled it on over my nightclothes.

  “You don’t seem… fine?”

  “It’s life. I’m just getting used to it. Not everyone can be happy all the time like you.” She looked directly at me when I talked and I didn’t like it. “Some of us have these things called problems in our lives. Must be nice not knowing what that’s like, Clearlander.”

  Despite a clear effort, her smile started to waver. “Those feathers you hung up look real nice next to my flags,” she said genuinely. “Well, if you feel like talking later –”

  “I won’t.” I didn’t want to freshen up. Just needed food in my stomach. Something to heal me. “I said I’m fine.” And I closed the door firmly on my way out.

  *

  We didn’t talk for the first five minutes of transmutation. Shoreshell had us hooked on a spellbinding demonstration of making a single leaf wither. They promised down the line some of us would make grand advancements in the field if we stuck to it, and I hoped that was true because clearly none had been made in the past millennium.

  “Where were you on Hesserday?” I asked Kaspar, once we’d somehow navigated an entire fresh leaf back to our desks in the far corner of the room – one leaf each, no less. “You missed conjury,” I said. I missed you in conjury, I didn’t say.

  “I felt as though a break would serve me better than the lesson.”

  “Oh. Well I, uh…” I toyed with the leaf in front of me. Still green. I looked at Kaspar but he wasn’t looking at me. Focused on his task. I focused on mine.

  In the theory lessons, Shoreshell had posited the idea that transmutation, like life, was about change. And change came down to three things: understanding the change we wanted to see, visualising what it would be, then enacting it. Realisation, definition, and actualisation. A lot of big words to make a leaf go brown. But I followed the process in my head as I drew the energy up into my body, the now-familiar buzz starting to return. It didn’t seem to be getting any easier but all the professors said it was an acclimatisation: it took years, not months. Still left me drained after every attempt, as much as the speed drills from the training exercises way back in Dreadfall. Yet each time the class was introduced to something new, I seemed to manage it in the first lesson. I didn’t know why and I hated the attention it brought me. Especially from Stack.

  Half of me didn’t want to try. If it was this bad in class, it worried me how it would get if he ever saw me out of class. Even some others had shot me dead-eyed glares, scorning me for interrupting their vitriolic whispers, from which I couldn’t work out many words except my name and a few that I really didn’t want to repeat. Any hopes I’d had of meeting halfway and getting to know them had burned up as quickly as my sheets in Field’s conjury. I glanced at Kaspar, still focused on his leaf. I glanced at my own and tried to block all the angst, the weight, the ache, the dread from my mind, scrunching my face with the force of it. When I opened my eyes, my leaf was withered to a crisp, and I cursed under my breath. Cursed at myself. “Hey, here, you can have this,” I said quietly and shifted it over to Kaspar.

  He jammed a hand in the way. “I don’t need your shickziri hand-me-downs.”

  He said it so sharply I gasped. “I’m sorry, I –”

  “No...” He immediately softened. “No. Hold your apology. You keep offering it to me and you have nothing to apologise for.” He plucked his leaf up, still as bright as the moment it was picked. Rotated it slowly between deft fingers. “I haven’t been fair to you. At times I shut you out and I can’t explain why. It’s better if it’s not said. As I’m sure you are aware, for reasons, I don’t have many other people I can talk to here. Not like you, Gan. I can’t keep pushing you away. Let me be sorry for that.”

  I inched my leaf away from him. “But you were nice to me too. You got some very nice stuff for me. Those gloves you gave me last week – I know I’ll use those a lot through deepfrost. They’re thicker than Windsong’s eyeglasses.”

  He shook his head softly. “I feel I should make it up to you with something more than a gift. Something you want that can’t be bought. You seemed interested when I spoke in my natural language, so perhaps I could teach you some?”

  “Yeah, sure, we could do that.” My pulse quickened as I dug in my – Kaspar’s – robe for my timetable. “I think I can be in the study hall this afternoon?”

  “Not there. It’s too…” He spun the leaf again. “Too public. Wouldn’t it be nicer if it was just us?”

  “Just us?” I felt like I was about to not just wither the leaf but set it on fire too.

  He nodded, and his hand wandered across the desk. I wanted to take it. So badly. I couldn’t here. But maybe when it was just us… “Come to my dorm this evening, room fifty-five. Not far from your own.”

  “...Hey, when you left the inks and the gloves and the other stuff, how did you know where mine is?”

  He smiled in that captivating, charming way, the one that sent sparks through you and made you want to get some air under your shirt collar. “Let’s call it a little magic, shall we?” His fingers tapped softly and I wanted madly to hold them. With everyone else drawn into their work, perhaps I could get away with it… No. It had to be the two of us alone. “What do you say to this evening?”

  I swallowed unsteadily. “Absolutely.”

  *

  Room fifty-five. I’d had lunch, I’d been to lessons, I’d dropped things in my dorm and changed clothes and both Holly and Grove had painted on their best concerned faces the entire ninety seconds I’d been there, but all I could think of was room fifty-five. I’d dined as soon as the kitchens opened. And I’d looked for him there but I hadn’t once seen him around the castle, only in the lessons we shared, and even then not all of those. Where did he go? He was like a pigeon in the rain.

  I found the door and knocked. Hoped I wasn’t too early. Hoped he would be back from wherever he went. Hoped –

  “Door’s open. You may enter.”

  He was reclined easily on the lone bed, a large double, pillars on each corner and thick burgundy curtains hanging from them. Maybe it made up for the other alcoves being empty, only the polished mahogany timbers and the elaborate fern carvings which adorned them. The chandelier in the room glowed low and warm, and a model of our planet and both moons sat on the desk below the window plus a small… thing, that people used to look at the stars. I’d read about them, never seen one. Kaspar yawned and stretched like he’d just woken up. “What do you think?” he said in that liquid syrup voice of his.

  “It’s lovely,” I said. Both chairs were so elegant they were almost regal, and the crimson-white-ochre rug hypnotised in its complex weaving structures. He had tapestries on the spare wall, actual real tapestries – one of a blue forest framed in gold, one of a black wolf standing atop a white rock. Even the wine-red sheets under him shimmered with the candles’ dance. “It’s like a palace…”

  He made what I guessed was a snort of laughter. “Since it’s only me here, I thought I should make it comfortable.”

  “And how come it’s only you?”

  He shrugged effortlessly. “Might be a privilege afforded to those of us who wandered in from afar.”

  I neared him, traced fingers across sheets soft as water. “I guess coming from the Sunken Forest wasn’t exciting enough to give me that luxury,” I said lightly. “Not that I’d know what to do with all this space.”

  “Nor do I. It needs another presence. Someone to help fill it.” His hand meandered across the bed and momentarily over mine. His touch was electric. “I hope you brought a workbook, Forester,” he said, and for the first time in the month I’d been here, the word didn’t feel like encroachment or entrapment. It felt like endearment.

  I withdrew it from my – his – robe. “Teach me everything, Wanderer.”

  *

  When some people taught, they directed. Big words, tricky terms, like a labyrinth of lexicography. When others taught, they insinuated. Hints of things understood by those already in the know but wholesale lost on outsiders. But when Kaspar did it, he enhanced. He took me as I was and he made me more. Led me along, hand in hand, side by side. It wasn’t him and me in the room. It was us.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “So you see how darum este mino frindo is word-for-word ‘where is my friend’?” I hummed in agreement. “That’s the masculine. Make it feminine and neutral.”

  “Darum este mina frinda, and then mine frinde.”

  “Very good. What next?”

  I tapped my paper with the end of the pen from the set he’d bought me. “What about ‘I’m so lucky I have a pretty guy to teach me cool things all night’?”

  “Hmm… min en herexi, da schess-mano kool dinzi gans notte parlenmi.”

  “Oh, say it a little slower please.”

  “You want to write that down?”

  “...And I just like hearing you say things.”

  *

  We went until I tired. I glanced at the clock after I was done: I’d worked far longer than any of my lessons and still a nagging part of me wanted to continue. “So all of these words here, here, and here –” I tapped five or six places with my pen, “– all mean ‘love’?”

  “More or less.” I felt Kaspar standing over me, but he was looking out the window. Daylight drawing into night. “It’s missing context but that would be accurate enough.”

  “Why do you have so many words for love?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Why do you guys have so few?” I felt a hand on my shoulder, instantly warm on me. “One final severance to remove the only one you have, and you all can finally escape talking about it forever. It seems the popular intention here.”

  “We don’t all want to escape it…”

  “So if I told you of the love you have for me,” he said in a caramel tone, “the kind you’d probably describe as a passionate investment from the heart, would you deny it?”

  Would I? Could I? I swam through my mind and searched for words but none in either language would come. My chest gripped my heart and my hand gripped my chest and I tried to remember how to breathe. In his presence I was warmed, absorbed, and I wanted to tell him I never wanted to leave it. I wanted him. I really did.

  “If it’s easier for you, we can talk about it on the balcony?”

  My head shook clear. “You have a balcony?”

  *

  Two chairs sat out there, the kind most every Dreadfall home had in the front or back yard, but entirely devoid of the thick rust coating necessary for Dreadfallers to consider buying anything you couldn't stab someone with. Though now I thought about it, I was sure I’d heard someone stab someone with a rusty chair leg a few years ago. I was never in the taverns to catch the gossip first- or even second-hand. “If you’re careful, you can likely climb to the roof from here,” said Kaspar. “I shouldn’t fancy it tonight. We’ve done plenty.”

  “I’d like to try it sometime. You could probably sneak to anyone else who had a balcony and sit on the edge of the roof and see what they’re up to too. Wait – that’s eaves-dropping."

  “Not tonight, Gan,” he said. “Din arbeto az vielo. Let’s just admire the night, shall we?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He took a chair, and I took the other. Half considered taking the same one but I didn’t want to risk the best evening of my life so far. “It means I want to spend time with you and not for the sake of achieving some academic goal. Let the arcane rest. It is nothing but us tonight.”

  “I meant what you said in…?”

  “Cracean? My Avernorri dialect? It doesn’t really matter.” He settled a bit more, leaned back, and although you could sense from how tight the clouds hugged the mountaintops in the last drops of daylight that the snows were only a few days away at most, I didn’t feel the cold here with him. “At home, we had a tutor. Wonderful woman. One of the few people there I actually liked, and one of the few who actually talked to me like I wasn’t some… secondary character. She said that all the worthwhile lessons in life have to be learned by experience, and the smart people are those who can learn from the experience of others before they make the same errors themselves. It sounds better when it’s not in your mess of a language.”

  “That’s really cool,” I said. “You speak others too?”

  “A few, but not so fluently. My brother and I had to focus on your Wrevon dialect because of the new trade links for agriculture and forestry and armaments – I think you mentioned those before. Our hand was forced: the overthrow in the city-state of Havastat to the south created risk of copycat revolutions, and we desired stability. I didn’t understand why we had to reach out to your snarl of mountains, valleys, and incessant pot-shot warfare of all the fine places of the land, but the Wrevon people seemed eager to buy what my people could supply.”

  My thoughts flicked back to things I wished weren’t inside my head. “We needed arms to keep that war going and our own mines couldn’t supply us enough to sate the bloodlust. Or that’s how it seemed at the time.” I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Do you think if we learned the languages of the Marshmen instead, and we sat down and talked with them, worked to make both of us stronger instead of sacrificing ourselves to make the other one weaker… Do you think it’d all just go away?”

  At that moment, a moon drifted out from behind the clouds, Castor, the larger and paler one. It glowed so bright tonight that even the edge of the balcony railing caught a glimmer. “I’d hope so,” Kaspar said. “But someone would have to reach out first and I think they’d be seen as crazy.” And under the brightness of the moon’s spotlight upon the two of us, everything else around was merely a void. Me and him, we sat alone together at the edge of the universe, only an inky ocean of shadow below and beyond the balcony. If we fell from. here, we'd fall forever. The moon and her court of stars drifted overhead, the stark chill roving in the air, but Kaspar was warm and real and close beside me. A moth fluttered between us, striving for the light. “You know, I once read a tale where it might be possible to draw magic from a moon, the same way darkmagic is drawn from our planet and light magic is drawn from our star.”

  His words were a gentle massage on my ears. “Huh. Why would you? The moons are much smaller and so much further away. It doesn't seem like you'd get much out of it.”

  “To be the first arcanist to ever do it, that’s what you’d get. What arcanist doesn’t want to have their name in the books? With something entirely new: not darkmagic, not lightmagic, but rather… greymagic. Moon magic. That has a ring to it.”

  The moth flitted, came back between us. In its silence I was aware of how the brush of wind combed the trees, though I could not see them, and still the castle existed with its students, but I could not hear them. It really was just us out here in the night. I ventured a hand across to his elbow, and he took it with his other hand, took it tight and firm.

  “Maybe the moths do it,” I said. “That’s why they’re always attracted to the moons. They’re drawing magic.”

  “So do your wolves then howl at the moon for the same reason?”

  He squeezed my hand and I couldn’t help but smile. “Imagine… moths and wolves, eternal enemies locked in interminable conflict. One of the air, and one of the land, both drawing power from the moons, both fighting a war that cannot be won. Both sides always ending weaker once the night returns to day.”

  “And why do they fight a war if they know both will be weaker for it?”

  “Yeah… why indeed…” He tapped on my sensitive palm, his fingers everything I needed right now. “I’m tired of thinking about it. We can sit and pontificate another night on whether learning a language would bring people together.” The taps turned to strokes, deliberate strokes, and all notions of cold evaporated from my body. “I know another way of bringing people together and you don’t even need to share a language for it.”

  My heart thumped. “Kaspar, are we…?”

  “I want to try it,” he said, low and inviting. “But only if you do too. And if we wake up tomorrow and don’t want to ever again, then I still want to be around you as much as I have done till now.”

  I held onto him, my grip tight on his fingers. “You might have to, uh, teach me a little.”

  “I’d love to,” he replied. His eyes wrapped me in a way I’d never known before, and in a way I’d never forget. “Want to show me how you learn?”

  *

  I could drown myself in someone like him. I could dive so deep, I’d never come out.

  He took hold of me in a way no one had before and adored me, loved me, intense beyond words. Firm hands, caring hands sought across all of me, draping the robe over the heavy trunk at the end of the bed and seeking down the buttons of my clothes. “I can get you something nicer,” he said, “as soon as you say the word. You ought to be dressed as you deserve.” His lips went to my neck and I saw stars, sparks, shimmers. “But right now? You ought to be un-dressed as you deserve.” He took off everything I had and then took hold of everything I had, making me need, making me his, making me strong and weak and everything all at the same time. Every time I lost myself in his heat, he was there for me. His hands, his mouth, his fingertips, his tongue, his soft and searching touch, his deep patchouli smell, his eyes so dark and entrancing.

  Even naked, he looked impossibly, irrepressibly good in that really annoying way he always did that looked like he put no effort into it at all. All of him. All of him. My head on his pillows, my back on his sheets, I traced a hand down his chest and felt the rise and fall of his breath, then he pulled me against him and took me past the edge.

  *

  His hand in mine. His other still toying, teasing me tenderly. My head on his chest, my ear on his skin. His heart beating firm. “This is the only thing I wanna hear for the rest of my life,” I said. “Just this. Just here. Just now.”

  “Shame,” he said in that easy way that made me feel like everything we’d just done, it was all meant to happen, it was all so right for it to happen. “Then you’ll never hear me tell you all the ways of how pretty you are.”

  “...Hm. I guess I can make an exception.”

  His fingers stroked something sensitive and I shivered in his touch. “Your face is a map of everywhere I want to explore. It compels me the way an adventurer covets a fabled treasure. It’s the last thing on my mind before I sleep and the first thing when I wake, and on my lucky nights, I also get to see it for hours between. Until today I dared not hope I’d be so lucky as to have the real thing in the waking world, right here, right where I want it so. Yet here you are, a miracle of experience.”

  I hummed softly. “Tell me more. I want details.”

  “Look at you,” he returned. “I look at you and I see my future. Hair the colour of the blood I’d bleed for you, eyes the colour of the forest I’d grow for you, and these horns the colour of the castle I’d build for you.” He circled one of them with his spare hand. “Look at these. Fearsome things. Out in the world they’d make you distinguished, mighty, captivating. But maybe they need to find a way to take them off before sex,” he said with a rippling, warming chuckle that washed across my head on his chest. “Or at least give me a pair of them to give me a fighting chance. You’ve got teeth like a fox and claws like one too. And see this thing too!” He reached my tail from between my legs and stroked it in a way that sent an addictive shock through me. “I have no idea where to even start with this. But by the spirits am I curious to contemplate it.”

  I nestled in his arms. “You really think the horns make me… captivating?” I asked in the smallest voice.

  “Entirely so. They add a sculpture to your face that no high cheekbones or strong jaw could ever hope to emulate. I think they make you defined, distinct, and thoroughly desirable. Without them you’d look like a king without a crown.” He was quiet a moment, his fingertips tapping meditative patterns on my skin. “Wait, wait, are you… crying? Are you alright?”

  I sniffled and rubbed a hand to my face. “It’s dumb,” I said with a sniff. Another tear rolled down onto his chest. “Sorry. It’s nothing. It’s just… the first time in my life I’ve ever felt good about them. The first time I ever felt like I wanted to keep them.”

  “Oh, by the high gods, I never knew.” Strong arms wrapped around me, cradled me close to him. “If anyone ever makes you feel that way again, come straight to me, and I’ll spend as long as it takes reminding you just how good my king looks with his crown, until you feel as good as you should. Promise me?”

  I nodded. Yawned a little. “I promise.”

  “Good. Now get some sleep. You’ve got armies to lead and a kingdom to rule, and you can’t do it on little rest. I won’t stand by and let your crown slip, my king.”

  “You’re being silly,” I mumbled.

  “I know. And don’t you love that side of me?”

  “I do. And I want to know every side you have to offer.”

  “Same back to you,” Kaspar said softly.