THE NEXT morning was crisp with the rising sun promising a jacketless afternoon. Whatever demons Elias had been wrestling with appeared to have abandoned him in the night, and he’d risen just after sunrise to make a huge batch of pancakes. Toby had assumed he’d put on one of his pairs of prosthetics to work in the kitchen, but that’s what he got for assuming. For working in the kitchen, Elias had a counter-high rolling stool on which he sat and zipped from counter to stove, from cabinet to cabinet. Locking wheels and a ladder back helped him reach the seat without his prosthetics.
Offers to help got Toby shooed out of the kitchen, though he was permitted to set the table, carefully, with instructions as running commentary. Darius managed to time stumbling out of the bathroom, showered and mostly dressed, perfectly to breakfast being set on the table, and Toby was proud of himself for suppressing every smartass remark begging to leap out.
Elias waited until Darius had managed to force down a second pancake before he pounced. “So, teach. What’s the real reason you’re here? Magical confluence, great. Makes sense. But why here?”
It took so long for Darius to answer, Toby was sure he wouldn’t. He sat there wondering if the tension stacking up would grow higher than the pancakes, and whether one could pour syrup on tension, until Darius murmured, “Good to see you too.”
“Don’t be like that, Valstad.” Elias sighed. “It is good to see you. Alive. Mostly all right. Doing shit the guild told you not to do again. I’m glad you let me know you’re still around. But I know you. Don’t forget that. You have ulterior motives for picking out a pair of socks.”
Darius stared pointedly at his bare feet.
“Don’t get smart. You know what I mean.”
The same feeling of dread crawled over Toby as when his parents fought, and he caught himself trying to be as small and quiet as he could.
“For Toby,” Darius finally admitted. “Not losing another.”
Elias softened his tone considerably. “I hear you. It must’ve been awful. Honest to gods, I didn’t think you’d take another student. But still, why here? Can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”
“You’re unique.” Darius gulped at his coffee, finally looking up from the tabletop when he set the mug down. “There’s a chance. Maybe.” The gesture and shrug included Toby.
“You think Toby might be like me and that’s why he hasn’t channeled.”
“Possibly.” A growl crept into Darius’s voice. “How many lost? Like you?”
Elias turned half away to stare out the window. “No way to know. Slaughter of the innocents. I’m happy to help, but I don’t see how I can.”
“Walk with Toby. Show him.”
“Is he bleeding?”
“He’s right here.” Toby waved at both of them. “And we don’t use the B word.”
Darius snort-snickered. “Leaking. Yes. It’s escalating.”
“And you think watching what I do might help.” Elias finished his coffee and arm-walked over to the wall where his prosthetics stood in a neat line. He chose a pair with sneakers already laced on the feet.
“If he’s like you.” Darius pulled clean socks from his bag. “Yes.”
Elias used a strap on the wall to pull himself up, considered his collection of things by the wall, and selected a walking stick. “Fair. Toby, you don’t look like an outdoor person to me.”
“What gave it away?”
“Besides the fact that if your lips were just a little redder, we could call you Snow White? Though the badger stripe you have going on is cool.”
“Um, thanks. I think.” I guess we’re going out into nature. Toby pulled on his shoes, wondering if he should worry about mosquitoes. Were they out this early? Or ticks. Eeew. “No, I’m not much on the whole hiking, camping, fishing triad.”
“No big deal. Pick a stick. Grab a hat. I’ll make sure you don’t get sunstroke or fall in a ravine. Teach, you coming?”
Darius just stomped into his sneakers and pulled on his jacket.
“Yeah, of course you are.” Elias flashed a little smile. “Safety first.”
When Toby picked a hat with a unicorn off the rack by the door, Elias switched it out for a dragon hat with a muttered “I’m the unicorn.” Finally satisfied that his guests were properly equipped, Elias led them off at a meandering pace into the woods. The path started out wide and well used, though Toby had to watch his step around erosion gullies here and there, but Elias soon had them heading uphill onto paths that Toby thought maybe small animals used.
Maybe that was just him getting tangled in branches and root systems, but he was soon grateful for his walking stick. Darius fell behind quickly, since the rocks along their route were obviously more interesting than conversation with humans.
Elias stopped on a rock ledge and cast a fond look behind them. “That hasn’t changed, at least. Him and his rocks.”
“He can move them. Shape them. I’ve known other Earth mages, but not like him.” Toby wrenched his gaze back around so he was watching the path.
“Earth-Metal goes together really well, and Valstad? He’s powerful. Sometimes I think the guildmasters were jealous of just how powerful.”
“You have Metal, right? Can you do things like he does?”
The answering bark of laughter made Toby flush in embarrassment. Gods, how sheltered had he been with his family?
“No. Without a Major Arcanum, I can’t pull a lot of power. But that’s all right. I leave the big things to folks like our professor. I do little things.” Elias stopped to run his fingers along the edge of a crack in a ledge beside them. The crack smoothed under his touch, the rock shelf healing. “Most of the mountain here is sandstone and quartzite, which is one of the reasons I was drawn here. Silica in the rock and carbon in the shale and the plants satisfies my Crystallogen need. There’s enough iron intrusions in the rock for my Metal and enough limestone for the Alkaline. I fix little things. A plant stem here. A broken bird leg there. I don’t need to feel the earth move under my feet.”
“Show me,” Toby whispered, an answering whisper echoing inside him. Is that my magic? Please gods….
Elias searched his face before he answered softly, “All right. C’mere.”
They leaned together over a patch of delicate white flowers with yellow centers. One of the flowers listed to the side, its stem broken. Elias touched the damaged plant with the tip of his forefinger and the break began to close as if someone were pulling up a zipper tooth by tooth. It didn’t glow exactly, not like magic in movies did, but the light changed around the progress of Elias’s finger, breaking into prismatic bits.
Breath held, Toby reached out carefully until his fingertips brushed that light anomaly. A hum just under the skin, an itch, that’s what it was. He wanted to get closer to it, to bury his hands in it. There was something so close… so close….
Toby froze and stared at his hands in horror—his tingling hands. “Darius! Darius!”
The thud of heavy boots drummed up the hill, Darius moving faster than Toby had ever seen before. “How bad?”
“It’s… it’s like I’m covered in bees,” Toby whispered.
Darius seized his wrist and pulled him halfway down the hill to a small clearing in the trees. He dropped to his knees and pulled Toby down with him, clutching both his hands tightly. “Trust me.”
The tone was desperate and pleading, though Toby couldn’t think clearly enough to parse out if it was a question. He answered with a jackhammer nod, then cried out as Darius plunged their joined hands into the dirt, not just into the loose top layer, but into the hard-packed earth and stone that gave way before his magic as if it were suddenly liquid.
“What the fuck are you doing, Dar? Gods’ sakes!” Elias yelled from farther up the hill.
“Stay there!” Darius bellowed. “Get down!”
He stopped liquefying the ground when their arms were buried above the elbows and raised his head, eye full of wild anguish.
“Hold on, Toby,” he rasped out. “Hold tight. Don’t let go.”
A nervous laugh leaped out. “Where the hell do you think I’m gonna go?”
Still, he wrapped his fingers through Darius’s and clung for all he was worth. The buzzing under his skin vibrated through his bones and he knew what was coming next—he’d felt it enough times by now—except now Darius was hanging on to him and the explosion was imminent. Dammit, this is crazy.
“It’ll kill you,” Toby forced out.
“No.” Darius’s hair, half out of its ponytail, flew around his head as he shook it violently. “No. I’ve got you. Earth has you. Concentrate.”
“What am I concentrating on besides being scared to death?”
“Push. Down and out.”
Toby stared at him, hard tremors running from his thighs to his stomach. “I…. You know I can’t control this.”
“Breathe, Toby.” How Darius could look so wild and sound so calm was baffling. “Think. Push the bees. Down. And out.”
Vision and hearing tunneling, each breath thicker and heavier than the last, Toby still caught a hysterical giggle coming from somewhere. Oh. That’s me. Bees. Down bees, down. Out damned bees. Out I say. Life is but a walking beehive….
Everything faded in the wake of increasingly disjointed lines from Macbeth, but this time he retained a tentative hold on the world. He couldn’t see what happened around him, though a distant thud reached him and scraps of Elias yelling.
The high-pitched whine that often accompanied climbing back to consciousness peaked, then eased down as Toby found himself staring at a ladybug crawling over a fallen oak leaf, the red of her shell startling against the crackled brown. Scents of dirt and leaf mold tickled his nose, damp and loamy. A dull ache made the act of moving his stiffened fingers more difficult.
“Certifiable,” Elias was saying to someone nearby. “And your big-boned ass is crushing my patch of arbutus.”
“Toby?” The hoarse, anxious call could only have been Darius.
“I checked on him. He’s all right. Having a little leaf nap. You had no way to know that’d work, Valstad.”
“Done it….” The grunt might have been Darius getting out of the aforementioned arbutus patch. “Before.”
“Still. You take chances. You all right, old man?”
“Mmm.”
Not an answer. Toby did his best to get his brain talking to his limbs again and had managed to prop himself on an elbow when Darius staggered over to sit beside him. “I’m… I think I’m okay. My hands hurt.”
Darius frowned. He tried to push the hair away from his eye, realized he had dirt all over his hands, and stopped with a disgusted snort. “Fingers move?”
“Yeah. It’s not a broken kind of hurt. More like I slapped something way too hard a bunch of times with both hands. Like I was playing tetherball with a bag full of wet sand.”
“All right, campers. Hike’s over for today.” Elias nudged his hip with the toe of his sneaker. “Think you can walk, Toby? Me trying to carry you won’t end well, and the old man is barely walking himself. I can go for the travois if we need it.”
With all the speed of a geriatric sloth, Toby got to his knees and figured he could probably risk standing. Darius was crawling around in the leaves, smoothing his hands over the ground, and Toby realized he was repairing holes and humps in the forest floor that hadn’t been there before. Up. I can get up.
A little shaky, a little precarious until Elias handed Toby his walking stick, he managed to get upright-ish and hobbled a few steps. “I think I’m good.”
“Slow and steady, then. Let’s start back down, and you pull up a log or a rock whenever you need to.”
“Darius?”
“Our prof will come when he’s ready.” Elias put a steadying hand under Toby’s elbow as they stepped down rock shelves to the wider path below. Voice lowered, he added, “Let him put himself back together a little. Leave the man his dignity.”
“Seriously? I’ve seen him in cardigans with elbow patches.”
Elias shuddered dramatically. “What’s left of it, then.”
While the walk back to the cabin took three times as long as the hike out, they arrived without anything more dramatic than a stumble or two. Darius limped up the cabin steps just as Toby had finished washing up at the kitchen sink. His hands had been filthy, his jacket needed washing, but other than a few leaves in his hair, he wasn’t too badly off. By contrast, Darius looked like he’d had a pitched battle with a nature goddess. He headed straight for the shower, reappeared a few minutes later in a clean T-shirt and boxers, and promptly went to sleep on the futon.
“Hasn’t had a lot of exercise lately, has he?” Elias whispered and gestured to the front porch.
They settled side by side on the porch bench with bottles of water and a package of Triscuits, listening to the rustle and flutter of woodland life.
“I don’t think he has. No. He was living all alone in that big house with the garden kind of getting overgrown. It wasn’t like he was living in filth or anything. Just, you know, neglect. The fridge and the cupboards were mostly empty when I got there. I think he forgot about food and sleep sometimes.”
“And after you got there?”
“I was in pretty bad shape. Guess he went into caregiver mode or something. Ordering groceries. Making meals. Bullying me into eating and telling me when to rest. He was doing better. He was. And then we went to see Arden.”
Elias tapped his water bottle against the side of the bench. “Arden’s prickly sometimes. No. Back that up. Arden’s just prickly. Did he do something that made things worse again?”
Is this gossiping? Sort of feels like it. Maybe Elias had a serious Arden bias and wanted to think the worst. Except they were staying at his place and eating his food, and it was obvious he cared for Darius. “Arden was, um, upset. Really upset that Darius had never gotten in touch after Pittsburgh.”
“He thought the professor was dead.”
Toby sent a sidelong glance at Elias. “Yeah. I guess a lot of people thought he was. Director Whittaker told me he almost died, and maybe that was a slip. Maybe he just said that to me because I was supposed to go to hospice and die and it didn’t make any difference. Anyway—I don’t know what happened up there with Kara. I just know she did die and Darius thinks he killed her.”
“More than I knew.” Elias huffed a breath and took a long drink. “I don’t mean to sound bitter. It’s a small bitter. He’s been sinking in this swamp of depression, probably barely getting by all this time, and I’m hurt he didn’t call. He needed help, no one came, and somehow he hung on.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was seeing.”
Elias leaned back, unfocused gaze somewhere else. “We were still talking way back then. He’d text. We’d talk sometimes. Maybe he was too confident. On a high after Zubayr.”
“Who’s Zubayr?”
“His last successful student. Zubayr Tahiri’s a Water/Alkaline mage who was unplaceable. Like us.” Elias pointed the water bottle between them.
“How many were there? Ones that, ah, survived.”
“You’d have to ask Darius. Since he traveled to teach, he’s probably the only one who knows. Still, more than two. Seven that I know of. Most of them still with guilds.” Elias stopped again, cracked his neck, and went on. “Zubayr was a tough student. Close to dying, like I understand you were, until Darius Valstad rode to the rescue. It took a huge point of magical confluence and who knows what else, but he broke through. Found his channels before any catastrophe.”
“And then Kara.”
Elias nodded. “And then Kara. Disowned by her family, sure she was an abomination, powerful as all shit Kara. That poor girl.”
“Was she young?”
“Hmm. Younger than you. Still a kid. Darius took her on. From what he told me, they were making progress. He was sure he’d ID’d her channels, and they were going to the big confluence point in Pittsburgh where the rivers meet. She was Water, he was sure of it. And Zubayr was Water, so he was going along to help. Control where she was shaky. Help ease her into it.”
“And?”
“Don’t know.” Elias shrugged. “That was the last I heard. Heard rumors, of course. Huge magical explosion. The rivers rising. The city in jeopardy. But facts? Don’t have those.”
“Did Zubayr survive?”
“He did, but he won’t talk about it. Says it’s not his to tell.”
A long silence hung between them as Elias kept his thoughts close, and Toby tried not to think too hard. He was tired. Aching. It would’ve been good to curl up and sleep like Darius had, but that was the strange part. He was conscious and didn’t feel like death with freezer burn, as he had after every other magical explosion.
“What happened on the hill today? Why am I up and he’s not? Where was the explosion?”
Elias stared at him hard enough to make Toby squirm. “Huh. He really hasn’t been explaining much, has he? Or at all. I don’t know what he did exactly with you, but there was one. Magical explosion. Not a huge one, partly ’cause you’re bleeding little bits of magic all the time now, which you probably weren’t doing at the guildhall. Partly ’cause he redirected. I think he’s guessed something about your magic. Maybe from watching you today.”
“He did what, then? Acted like a damper? Or a freaking lightning rod?”
“Little of both, I’d guess. And he did get his ass tossed a good ten feet when the ground flumped.”
“Flumped?”
“Technical term, kid. The earth rose with the explosion, but only little divots popped out before it sank back. He used his magic to keep yours contained. But I think he was trying to get an answer too. About your channels.”
“And you think he got one?” Toby was embarrassed about the breathless quality of his voice, but too bad.
“Not sure. The old Darius would’ve crowed about it and told you right away. He’s changed, though. So much. So careful. So… restrained.”
Toby chewed on that for a moment, sorrow pooling around his heart. “Is there any of him left that you see?”
Elias let out a sharp laugh. “Yeah. Stubborn old fool still. He may be more careful, but he still thinks he’s always right, far as I can see.”
About someone else, it might’ve sounded like an insult. About Darius? Toby could only find relief hearing it. Parts of the original were still in there, and that hope hit him between the eyes with stunning force.
“Guess I should go rest too.” Toby heaved himself up from the bench and held out a hand for Elias’s empty water bottle.
“Hmm. Yeah.” Elias held his gaze before handing the bottle over. “Look, it’s not my business, but I hope you’re being careful with him.”
Toby rubbed at his suddenly queasy stomach. “What do you mean?”
“You see he’s attached to you, right? That this isn’t just a student/teacher thing anymore. He barely talks, but he doesn’t have to say much for anyone to see that.”
“I didn’t, I mean I guess….” Toby had to look away from the intensity of Elias’s gaze. “I’ve been trying so hard to keep things, you know, separate. Because he’s… and I’m…. But it’s hard when he glomps onto me in his sleep. And when he looks at me sometimes. I really like him. Like like him, you know?” Toby finished off with a helpless wave at the universe. “But the age difference. The teacher thing. This isn’t a thing that can happen.”
Elias put a hand on Toby’s arm, his tone considerably warmer. “Then you be careful with you, too. And if those things end up not being that important? Don’t make life harder than it has to be.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thank you.” Toby wanted to tell him that he was wrong. That both he and Darius were too messed up to know what they wanted and it was just a comfort thing. That the mentor aspect made it really wrong. But the more he fought against it, the more he felt himself sinking into more complicated feelings for Darius.
He shook his head at himself as he went inside. Maybe it didn’t have to be so complicated? Maybe he was too tired to think. Curled up beside Darius, he arranged the blankets around them both and decided to put off the whole thinking thing until later.