Shoestring Theory

TWO

The first thing Cyril wondered when he woke up again was if the ritual would still work.

He was certainly somewhere new. The synapses in his brain were firing erratically. He could feel things. The grass – grass? – under his hand and pricking the nape of his neck, the mystery weight on his chest, the texture of fabric on his limbs far breezier than what he’d become used to in the past several years

Cyril didn’t dare open his eyes out of lingering anxiety. That and, from the way the inside of his eyelids glowed a bright, searing red, if he looked up too fast he would be blinded by a light he’d become unaccustomed to.

There was a chance – not an insignificant one – that he had died, and this was hell . It was certainly hot out, and maybe the bright warmth he could feel from far above was a twisted vision of a forge. A place he’d be forced to labour in until the end of his natural afterlife. Cyril was never the type for manual labour. Even working in his sad little garden made him break into a sweat despite the biting cold outside. He thought if he lay very, very still, he might be able to sink into the earth instead. Buried, scattered, a part of the soil. No one would ever find him and put him to work – or torture him into a second wave of madness – no matter how much he deserved it.

Maybe whatever god ruled the underworld wouldn’t even mind losing one soul that much. Being buried alive for eternity is its own kind of torture after all, and how significant could Cyril’s life possibly be after what he’d become in his rundown cottage by the cold, deserted beach?

Try as he might to will it away though, the light behind his eyelids never got any dimmer, and the grass underneath never seemed to part and burrow the way he wanted. When he felt a sandpapery texture brush against his cheek, he knew he was done for. The servants of the Undertaker had come to get him. He should try and explain to them that he really did try to make things right at the end there, see if that would get him a lighter sentence.

And then he heard a mewl.

Cyril’s eyes flew open so quickly that he had to blink back tears as his vision got used to a sunlight he could barely remember.

Mercifully, Shoestring, who even now was much too grown and big to be perching on top of Cyril’s chest, was blocking out the brunt of the light. He stared down with his large, clever eyes and cast a stark shadow over Cyril’s brow, impatiently waiting for his master to wake up.

Cyril sat up with a sudden, desperate headache. He rubbed it away from his temples as best he could, until a feline interloper wedged his head firmly underneath his palm, looking for his dose of affection.

He stroked Shoestring gently, afraid if he pushed too hard or believed in his own success too promptly, the cat would unravel in his fingers just like his name. And slowly, fat, globby droplets pricked the edges of his eyes, rolling shamelessly down his cheeks and onto the powder-blue fabric of his shirt. Shaking with relief, he hugged Shoestring to his chest and received a paw to the chin as a warning not to push his luck.

Shoestring stepped away from him, having accomplished his sworn duty of never letting his master indulge in a full, proper nap for as long as he lived. And that left Cyril alone to inspect his surroundings.

It had worked.

Blinking rapidly, still unaccustomed to how much daylight was freely available, he realised he knew very well where he was. The real, more pressing question was when.

Behind the royal palace, still within its grounds, there was a forest the servants and nearby farmers used for foraging. It was huge and ancient, a true marvel, and since it was so easy to get lost among its elderly trees and rich foliage, it was ill advised to wander inside it unaccompanied.

But Cyril had grown up here. He’d lived by these woods his whole life, so he knew that if you went deep enough into the forest, unerring in your path, eventually you’d come across a river (a brook, really) shallow enough to cross on foot. And if instead you walked along its shore, you’d find a bridge, naturally formed by three smoothed boulders, one after the other, that you could cross with four short hops. And then, a few metres more still, you would find a sunlit clearing and an unkempt field of weeds and fresh wildflowers, with grass soft enough to sleep in, especially if you were trying to avoid going to lectures, or meetings, or formal events.

Cyril revelled in the feel of grass under his fingers, gripping and tugging at the weeds just to smell that waft of fresh grass. He lay on his back and rolled his whole body on the ground like a madman or a child, eliciting a startled yeowl from Shoestring, who was watching him carefully from a shady spot under one of the few trees the clearing had to offer. Cyril didn’t care. He rolled until his powder-blue shirt and his fine silks were stained with green. And then he picked himself up and hurled himself bodily into the soft grass once more.

“Shoestring!” he cried. His voice felt foreign, even to himself. The last time he’d spoken, hours ago in that cottage by the beach, it had been raspy. It felt like a lifetime ago. Then, he had needed to coax the words out of his throat, gritting them out like the croak of an old toad. Now, he nearly spooked himself. His voice was loud and clear, healthy. A young man’s register. He had never been much of a chatterbox, but now he wanted to talk forever.

“Shoestring, I think it worked!”

It hurt to smile for too long, when it was a reflex he seemed to have lost the use for years ago. Fortunately, he didn’t need to keep the grin on his face for too long. Cyril’s expression was wiped clean when he realised Shoestring was staring at him with a curious, cocked expression. As if he were watching some strange street performance.

Shoestring had never been the most expressive familiar around, but he was still Cyril’s familiar. Their emotions were one. Hell, their souls were one. That was the point . He didn’t expect the cat to jump for joy at his master’s success, but he expected… something . An approving purr, or a languid condemnation of his recklessness. Maybe even a thank you for saving his life, if he was feeling generous.

But had he? Cyril sat up on his knees and, carefully, crawled his way to Shoestring. He held his hand out with his palm down and outstretched, like he had done so many times before for the instant comfort of a soulmate connection. But when Shoestring touched his head to his fingertips, Cyril felt nothing but the fuzzy, gaunt ears of an overgrown house cat.

“Shoestring?” he murmured.

The cat purred.

There had been a part of him, a very strong part of him, that, upon realising his hare-brained scheme had actually worked, wanted to quit while he was ahead. Knowing what he knew now, about the future, about the horrors awaiting him, and feeling the grass under his feet and the warm breeze in his hair, he wondered why he had to be the one to bother fixing a fractured kingdom. Maybe he could run away before anything happened at all. He never actually wandered very far from the palace. The cottage, the ocean, the knoll, they were all still firmly within the kingdom’s borders. There was some kind of unspoken oath that if his land died, he was meant to perish with it.

Cyril thought about the brassy ring around his neck. Maybe not as unspoken as he would’ve liked.

By the time he had finished rolling around in the dirt and grass, Cyril had damn near made up his mind that his new plan was going to be to scoop Shoestring under his arms. Then, he’d march the pair of them out the palace gates and into town and with whatever funds jingled in his pocket he was going to take the first ship out of the city and sail far, far away.

But staring deep into those slitted eyes, he realised with a growing sense of nausea that no matter what stood in front of him, nuzzling his hand with his wet nose, his familiar had died a month ago. He wasn’t quite sure who this Shoestring was, other than a big, needy, stupid cat.

Cyril’s heart sank in his chest. He tried searching for any sign that Shoestring knew what was happening. The plan, the blood, the circle. The desperate attempt to put his own life – their lives – back together. but there was nothing but the wide, innocent eyes of a domesticated animal trying to read his master’s turmoil of emotions.

It was instantly sobering. He could still run. Him and his newfound youth and agility and his ill-gotten freedom and his phantom cat, but it felt wrong, sickening, to go through all that just to be alone again. To allow his beloved home to be destroyed anew when he’d gone through all that trouble in an attempt to salvage it.

Slowly, he sat up to a kneeling position, pulling his hand away from Shoestring’s curious snout.

He’d done this to himself, he decided. He’d gone through all this trouble. He might as well go through with it, for better or worse.

Cyril looked down at his clothes again, searching for more clues hidden in the styling of the fabric. With some relief, he quickly ruled out the possibility of being uniformed. This was good. He was young, he could feel it in his bones and his joints and the ease with which he moved in his own body, but he wasn’t a youth . He wasn’t a fledgling initiate to magic, unaccustomed to his own sage-grey student’s robes.

The fact that he wasn’t wearing any kind of formal attire was a clue in and of itself. There was a chance it was an off day, but the cut of the fabric and the style of the clothes themselves lent to a casually put-together ensemble. A ruffled shirt, with the sleeves cut into festive triangular strips at the end, paired with an open vest and matching, violet-and-green striped trousers.

Then he noticed when he rubbed at his eyes again, still in a losing battle against daylight, thick black ink flaking on his knuckles. The same ink seemed to have seeped into the blue of his shirt, where he’d first cried.

Kohl . It’d been so long he’d almost forgotten how he had woken up every morning to painstakingly paint his face in front of a cracked mirror that Shoestring had knocked a vase into. If he could find somewhere to look at his own face, he might be able to pinpoint his age by the black lines contouring his eyes.

Long ago, he painted his face in the style of court mages, just as he was taught. A mix of a courtier and a circus act. Exaggerated lashes, tightlined eyes, thick contour waterlines, reds, blues and oranges under the brow, beauty marks of all different shapes.

Cyril himself liked to trace the outline of his eye with a hand so heavy he looked like a harlequin, or an etching of an ancient owl, extending his bottom lashes comically far down his under eye. From what he managed to wipe away with his hand, he pinpointed his age anywhere from nineteen to five and twenty. Which wasn’t much, but it was a start. He shivered slightly, almost cautiously, at the smooth curve of his skin, boyish, fresh and unwrinkled. It would take getting used to, but all the same it brought him a fizzy, hopeful feeling.

Another clue, this time sprinkled all around the parts of the lawn he hadn’t crushed under his own weight in a fit of mania, were the wildflowers. Dandelions that were just beginning to sprout. Combined with the pleasant breeze blowing through his hair, it heralded a lazy, flowering spring.

If he had to make an educated guess, he’d put himself in April. Early May, perhaps. When he looked back at the early days of adulthood, all those springs blended together. Always nice, warm, languid. He couldn’t recall a bad spring.

Especially not after it became his first anniversary.

Cyril had been married on a day just like this, and the memory felt like a thick sludge down his throat, foreign and difficult to swallow. A perfect April wedding with all the fixings of one of the happiest days of his life. He’d worn his finest whites and flowers in his pinned-back hair, and at the time he really did believe there was nothing in the world that could go wrong anymore.

He had been in love. Truly and desperately, frenzied with a madness that reckless warriors go on death-quests to experience. He was far from perfect, but in retrospect it was the most devastating mistake he’d ever made.

Cyril stood up from the comfortable blanket of grass to make his way back to the palace grounds. Shoestring trailed a few feet after him, stopping every so often to paw at an anthill, or chase after a creature just out of human sight.

He only managed to take a few solid steps before paranoia overtook him, burning an acrid hole in his gut every time the cat left his field of vision.

While the Shoestring he knew had been fiercely independent, disappearing into cubbies or alcoves for hours on end to preen or feast on a hapless rodent, he always came back. A familiar always had to come back, no matter what. But for whatever reason, the bond between them had been severed. When Cyril looked into those mirthless eyes, he could no longer see a reflection of himself, the twin shine in their eyes that had bound them together since he was barely out of play-clothes.

Instead, he had a cat. Volatile and flighty, prone to his own whims and wants whenever he so wished. Cyril knew somewhere in the back of his mind that, familiar or not, if anything happened to this stupid cat, he would be so overcome by grief he might lose himself in the thick of the woods.

So, with the care of handling a newborn, Cyril took Shoestring into his arms and carried the Abyssinian all the way back with him, ignoring the pinpricks of claw at his hands, and the outraged, protesting mewls. He was so determined not to lose his one ally in this dreamy landscape of the distant past, that he paid no mind when the skin on his knuckles bloomed a bright red with his own blood after gruelling minutes of being scratched and nipped.

Cyril didn’t let go. In fact, he held on faster, shoulders shaking with the weight of the overgrown creature. When he was halfway out the woods, Shoestring finally slacked within his grasp and Cyril let out a grateful sigh.

“I’m going to get you a harness,” he said.

He wasn’t sure if, deep down, his familiar was still in there or if the cat simply had always had a naturally obedient nature Cyril was just learning about. But at least for the moment, Shoestring didn’t dare try to stray anywhere his master couldn’t see him.

It was frustrating how many times he got lost navigating the forest. Nothing serious, no fatal wrong turns that would careen him headfirst into a ditch, he was too smart for that , but Cyril took enough wrong turns the pink on his knuckles from carrying such a heavy load began to match the flush on his cheeks. This wasn’t supposed to pose a significant challenge for him. Not the forest he loved, in the kingdom he grew up in. But he had to admit to himself that for the better part of a decade, his excursions had consisted of shuffling to and from the cottage and the sea, the sea and the cottage. Most days, as soon as he woke up, he screwed his eyes shut and went straight back to sleep, willing time to move faster.

This was a lot of adventure all at once for someone so unaccustomed to it.

Finally, he spotted the ruddy peak of the spires poking out through the mess of trees, red contrasting green and the blue of the sky so strongly it felt like a beacon just for him.

He quickened his step, then, stumbling over his own feet, which seemed to have become too sluggish from traipsing through the woods to move as quickly as his brain willed them to. By the time he reached the wrought-iron gates separating the palace grounds from the thick of forest, his calves ached – but not his lower back, he noted with almost tearful gratitude, as it had been plaguing him since his mid-thirties – and he had to put Shoestring down.

Cyril gave the cat a warning glance not to stray and, squaring his own shoulders, marched purposefully inside a place he only just realised he never thought he’d see again.

It was normal, expected even, for none of the staff to pay him any mind as he sauntered into the palace halls through the servant’s entrance, cutting a path from the kitchen up to the main halls. The most attention he got were the curious looks from younger serving maids and the occasional valet, who weren’t yet masters of the art of minding their own business, and he realised quite quickly it was because he looked a fright.

A polished brass shield mounted on a wall reflected a dishevelled, dirty young man, with kohl running down his eyes from his uncontrollable sobbing earlier, smudges of green staining every inch of his clothes and raw knuckles like he’d gotten himself into a tavern brawl.

Cyril flushed and quickly looked away from the shield. He clicked his tongue to will Shoestring to match his pace as he began a casual jog to his own chambers before anyone important saw him and started asking questions.

The family he had grown up with kept a particular tradition. Since recorded history began centuries ago, the royalty governing the kingdom had insisted upon relying on the power of mages to aid their rule. The current ruling family, the Margraves, valued their mages so fondly that they made sure to give them a permanent home in the palace. Thus, the palace had a peculiarity.

Still within its walls, towards the back centre of the palace, a king long ago had left ample room for a wide, open courtyard adorned with carefully manicured hanging-gardens. In its very middle, there was a tower that climbed seven storeys high, the tallest one in the entire kingdom. It had a red tiled roof the same colour as the rest of the spires flanking the palace walls.

It was a home within the palace, both separate from and attached to the main building, marking the mages of Farsala as both family and distinguished servants. Cyril had lived on the third floor of the tower with his aunt Heléne, the high-court witch for the current royal family, since he had first shown magical aptitude at the age of five.

In a sense, the Laverres had their own lineage that ran parallel to that of the de facto monarchs. He had lived the charmed life of a dukeling under his aunt’s tutelage, and the Margraves treated him like one of their own.

Aside from his years at the Academy for Arcane Arts from ages twelve to eighteen, the tower had been his home well into adulthood. Despite how foreign it felt to enter it now, no one batted an eye when he began the short ascent to his chambers, Shoestring following close behind.

He did still live on the third floor of the tower, which meant arthritic aunt Heléne was still clinging tooth and nail to her seat in court. He could hardly begrudge her: the kind of sway that came with having the ear of the most powerful people in all the land was at times intoxicating.

Nostalgia hit him like a brick to the head as soon as he opened the door to his living quarters. It painted such a clear portrait of a spoiled young man revelling in a luxury he never had need to earn that it made Cyril’s teeth hurt. Aunt Heléne had installed a series of complicated patterns and magic triggers when Cyril had initially moved in and she couldn’t be fussed to call a maidservant over every little childhood mess. Despite that, it still had the confused quality of being lived in by a youth who still hadn’t learned to be judicious with his keepsakes. He hadn’t properly gotten into his room yet – just the study where he liked to read and take his meals – but already paraphernalia clearly too important to be let go of was in every corner. Rolled up scrolls and maps of places he’d like to visit propped against the wall, clothes he’d shucked off and left on the sofa or on the chair or even on his writing desk, a frankly ridiculous assortments of pens and quills, two different stacks of notebooks, one filled to bursting with annotations and another with lofty plans to be penned in at a later date (half of which would be thrown out brand new the first time Cyril would try his hand at decluttering), souvenirs from distant lands, glorified paperweights or doorstops, vials of potions, scattered plates containing cherry pits or pistachio shells, stacked mugs of cold tea, three musical instruments he’d tried to learn and given up on just as quickly, scrying runes, a kaleidoscope (broken), a telescope (repaired), letters from his parents, from his school friends and from professors, a vanity permanently stained in pressed pigments and kohl, a cat tower fit for royalty and, for some reason, a tricycle.

You could put a knife to his throat and Cyril wouldn’t be able to make sense of what he was thinking when he hung a paper lantern off the leaf of a fern . After living so long in the ascetic seaside cottage, two steps into the third floor of the mage tower sent him into fits of mild claustrophobia.

And yet, part of him was indescribably comforted by it.

Had he been recounting the tale himself, of his intrepid escapade into the past in order to prevent a doomed future, Cyril would’ve remarked on his single-minded sense of purpose. After all, he did have a plan in mind. It wasn’t particularly complex, but he was sure it would destroy the root cause of all his suffering in one fell swoop. And once he did a bit of research into exactly where in time he was and acquired a few things he might need that he couldn’t immediately find in his own room, there would be nothing stopping him from setting his plan into motion.

Cyril had always been the meandering type, and he was tired in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with the weary sense of dread that prey gets from being hunted. For eight-to-ten years (he’d lost count), he had lived in squalor, weaving salt out of seawater and picking meat out of gritty, bony fish. Even if in his current state he found himself in the body of a well-fed, pampered young mage, there was still an entrenched memory of the grime of that cottage permeating the roots of his hair and the undersides of his fingernails.

Not to mention the actual grime and fresh stains on his clothes.

So he drew himself a bath, and while he waited for the tub to fill and for the salts and oils to fully perfume the water, he rang up a maid to bring him what he now realised was an early afternoon meal. He still felt full from the lunch he’d presumably partaken in before his body had unceremoniously been taken over by a suicidal old man, but he was determined to eat himself into nausea.

As he began taking off his earth-soiled clothes, any thoughts of lofty idealism in his mind had been replaced by the memory of jam-filled pastries and salted cuts of meat. Then, a sudden clink against a button on his shirt drew Cyril’s attention to his chest.

He stood in the middle of his washroom, half naked in front of a floor-length mirror, staring at the familiar brassy golden ring hanging from a dirty string around his neck.

Cyril blinked, hoping against all odds that by resetting his vision the strange apparition would clear away. But the ring remained steadfast where it lay, burrowing a hole into his chest.

He wasn’t supposed to have this. Not yet and, in this reality, not ever . Carefully, Cyril willed his pulse to slow and wrapped his hand around the band to tug it off himself. It was looped through such a threadbare string; it should have been pulled off easy.

But the ring wouldn’t budge. It stubbornly clung to the string around his neck regardless of how hard he yanked and attempted to prise it free from his neck. And upon realising he had brought the keepsake with him, a bubble of panic swelled in his gut as he considered the implications.

Aside from his last little foray with sacrificial magic in that gelid seaside cottage, Cyril had only ever performed one other spell potent enough to carry itself through entire realities . He didn’t expect it to bite him in the ass so completely as it seemed to be doing now.

Cyril thumbed the ring on his chest as he finally gave up trying to take it off and dunked himself into the bath. He hoped that against all odds, the hot water would corrode through the loop strung around it.

On his wedding day, he made an oath upon the band, binding himself and his betrothed for eternity in something greater and more powerful than any church-sanctioned vow of matrimony. He thought he was being romantic. And, to his credit, he was . It was plenty romantic, regardless of the repercussions. He had truly believed he would be in love for all eternity.

Honestly, it served him right being married at fucking twenty-three, after a mere two months of courtship.

He decided that, until proven otherwise, he was dealing with a best-case scenario, because he couldn’t afford the migraine that a worse situation would beset him. The ring marked him as a spoken-for man, regardless of time or space or logic, and in some insidious way, it would prevent him from straying. Not that Cyril had flirtation on the mind much these days, not at his advanced age.

He soaked in the magically heated tub, alone with his thoughts long enough that the olive undertone of his skin took on a scalded-red hue. He only rose up from his parboil when he heard the tell-tale bell of food being placed upon his desk.

He dressed, applied some healing bandages around his knuckles to assuage the better part of Shoestring’s damage (the cat had settled nicely inside a cubby much too small for him), and finally got to work.

In retrospect, this all might’ve been easier if he’d still been a student. Sure, he’d need to make an excuse to leave the Academy and sneak back into the palace, but as a student, he was forced to keep a daily log of every class and lecture he attended, with detail so precise he could triangulate an exact date just by looking at a few timetables. The habit, unfortunately, didn’t stick with Cyril into adulthood. By the time he had finished flipping his pile of logs and notebooks inside-out-upside-down, he found that the last time he bothered scribbling anything of substance down at all was on February 12th.

One look outside the window confirmed he was long past that.

At least he had a year to pinpoint. The Cyril he’d usurped was in the beginning of his twenty-second cycle (he was a January baby, if it mattered) and, if his meagre journal entries were anything to go by, there was yet to be a single exciting event to have happened that year. He flipped through the book over bites of cream petit-fours and found the last event he’d bothered writing down was a shopping list of things he needed from town that his aunt had made him commit to ink.

He was going to need a more hands-on approach to situating himself. It struck him as odd, that he couldn’t remember anything important happening a year before his own wedding , but he chalked it up to old age. Honestly, if pressed, he wouldn’t have been able to name the precise date of his anniversary save for a sheepish “mid-April?”

Either way, he couldn’t put it off any longer. Cyril clicked his tongue in the direction Shoestring was hiding in to get him to follow.

“I’ll lock you in the bathroom until I get back if you don’t come with me,” he said for good measure.

The threat was met with a hiss, but it was enough for the cat to poke his head out of the discarded box of tomes he’d been hiding in and follow Cyril out the door. They made their way down the steps of the tower, back into the main building of the palace.

Cyril felt as though he was forgetting something tremendously important as he wandered the halls, looking for a recent newspaper or an idle serving maid or butler to casually ask the date. “Cyril!”

Cyril turned and his heart instantly dropped.

“I was just headed to the tower!” She bounded towards him without a care in the world and clapped both hands on his shoulders like greeting an old friend. “Thanks for saving me the trip.”

Tigris Margrave was the best, most charming and most beautiful girl he’d ever known. They had met when he was at the tender age of five, and Cyril had been instantly drawn by her full head of black hair, so dark it shone blue under the light, that perfectly dewy brown skin, stippled with delicate birthmarks only adding to her natural appeal, and that intoxicating grin so contagious Cyril was making a concentrated effort not to mirror her expression like a starstruck buffoon.

“I…” He nodded mechanically, suddenly unsure of what to do with himself. “Tigris,” he added, stupidly.

Tigris cocked her head to the side and gave him a fond smirk. “Cyril, I’ve been gone for a month . Is it the hair? I’ve been wearing it loose, do you not like it?”

He shook his head, seeming to go into some kind of self-preservatory autopilot. “No! Of course not, I…” He racked his brain for any context clues that would allow him to smoothly continue the conversation and settled on a non-committal choke of, “Only… only a month, huh?”

It was ridiculous the way she looked at him, like a concerned older sister fussing over a particularly fragile baby sibling. Especially when Cyril felt old enough to be this woman’s father.

“Well, Atticus finally let go of the leash long enough to let me come back and visit.”

Cyril nodded along, putting together the most high-stakes mental jigsaw puzzle he’d ever had to assemble.

Her Royal Highness, Crown Princess Tigris Margrave of Farsala, had been engaged to Atticus Wulfsbane, King of Cretea, just after her twenty-sixth birthday. Since the betrothal, the newly engaged couple had spent more and more time together, meaning Tigris’s trips to Cretea would increase in time and frequency. It had been a marriage of convenience, uniting two small kingdoms into a mutually beneficial political front, but from what Cyril could recall, Tigris was making the most of it. She seemed to think her fiancé genuinely handsome if nothing else.

“How’s Cretea?” he asked after much too long a pause. Tigris didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, wonderful this time of year. You should visit, it’s not like Auntie gives you anything important to do.”

The “ey!” that left his lips was almost a reflex.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m right, aren’t I? Well, when I’m queen, I’ll give her the retirement she desperately needs, and you and I can run this place.”

“Ostensibly, the grand mage isn’t meant to have political power.”

“Yes, but I’m stupid about all this magic stuff and I need your help ,” she whined.

Cyril wouldn’t go as far as “stupid”, not for Tigris who, at age fourteen, had managed to wrap all the high nobility around her little finger with her natural graces. Still, academic knowledge and magical comprehension weren’t exactly the Princess’ forte.

“Don’t let your fiancé hear you say that, he’ll start firing up for a coup.”

Tigris giggled and wrapped an arm around his shoulder, serving as a reminder of how, in general, the Margraves had always towered over the Laverres. “He wouldn’t do that before the wedding.”

“You’re very confident in His Majesty.”

She recoiled like he’d vomited on her new shoes. “Don’t call him that, ugh. We’re practically family !”

“We’re not family, princess.” He mock bowed. “I am your humble servant.”

“Gross!” She pushed him away, still laughing to herself. “Don’t let Eufie catch you talking like that, you’ll break his heart.”

And just like that, Cyril was violently jerked back into the reality of his situation. The jovial grin he’d been sporting a second ago went slack on his face as Tigris, bless her heart, carried on.

“Oh, wait! That’s why I was going to the tower. He’s been asking for you.”

There wasn’t a spell on earth that could carry him normally through the rest of this conversation, so he decided he’d nod and nod and nod until Tigris decided she’d had enough of hearing her own voice and left to chatter somewhere else.

“Eufie, I mean. Not Atticus. Do you even know Atticus? Well, anyway–”

Cyril was nodding.

“I met him on his way back from a hunt this morning, and he was looking for you.”

“Uh huh.”

“But when isn’t he looking for you?” Here, she waggled her thick eyebrows in a meaningful serpentine.

“Right?”

“So I said, ‘Have you checked the tower?’ but he said you weren’t at the tower all morning! So I think you must’ve just missed each other.”

He realised he had to put a stop to this before she realised there was something wrong with him aside from typical youthful ennui, so he blurted out, “I’ll find him.”

And then, after clearing his throat, “I’m sure he’ll be at the dinner table, at least. It’s… good. I needed to speak to him as well.”

He extricated himself from the conversation with the social graces of a new-born foal, but in truth he felt as though if he spent one more second looking at Tigris, hearing Tigris speak to him about her brother , he was going to burst a major artery.

And truth be told, he was more than a little ashamed of himself for being so surprised to see her, to do something so normal as have a casual conversation with her. It just wasn’t something he’d prepared himself to do, had expected to do.

Because Tigris Margrave had been dead for over twenty years.

Of course he hadn’t forgotten about her. What kind of horrible, callous man would he be if he’d erased one of his best friends growing up entirely from his mind? But she had passed so long ago and reminiscing about it provided him with nothing but more grief than he already had.

How stupid of him. He had been so caught up in the simple joy of seeing her alive that he forgot to be concerned about her death.

As soon as she retreated from his line of sight, it was like a bolt of electricity shot through Cyril’s whole body. He scooped up Shoestring, who had been languidly cleaning himself throughout their conversation and provided absolutely zero support for what was likely one of many traumatic situations his master was going to have to live through for the foreseeable future. Then, paying no mind to the frustrated mewls and howls, he darted down the stairs of the palace underground, to the armoury.

Cyril had had a full month to think about this when he was preparing his last spell as a wizened old hermit, and he’d concluded he was going to rule out magic. It was entirely too incriminating, considering the only mages in court were himself and Auntie Heléne, who would sooner throw herself off her spire than conspire against the Margraves. To be completely honest it was a fragile, hackneyed plan, as thin as spider silk and just as easy to spoil. Doubtless, sooner or later he would get caught.

It was also the only plan he had, now he realised how precious little time there was left.

Tigris Margrave, strong as an ox and hale as a well-kept housecat, died of a wasting sickness the summer of Cyril’s twenty-second year. It was theorised that she had been stung by an insect or been contaminated by a rot that festered in the heat (long before the uninhabitable days to come, as though she were some grim portent), but whatever the case made no difference when he had to sit for days on end in vigil, watching the heir apparent to the throne of Farsala wither into a brittle, sallow husk before his very eyes.

He was not a fool, or a child, or simple . Obviously, they investigated into foul play. Cyril could only do one thing, but he did it very well. He spent tireless nights checking the strings around Tigris’s body for any kind of manipulation. Once, he even opened up the pattern around her itself, despite his misgivings against doing something so invasive to the magic. The Guard conducted thorough searches of the kitchens, the greenhouse, the woods. Anywhere poison could be found or disposed of. He saw Atticus Wulfsbane, a king , laid low. Red-eyed and haggard as he submitted to every line of questioning directed at him, allowed Farsalan knights to turn his palace inside-out for signs of treason. He remembered the taste of retch on his tongue when he tried (and failed) to stay for the autopsy.

And Eufrates–

Eufrates .

Cyril clutched Shoestring tight to his chest and bounded down the spiral staircase leading to the armoury two steps at a time. He only let the poor cat down to throw the door open and begin his search.

If he had more time, he would have gone into town for this. If he was smart, he should have gone into town for this. But it was already such a remarkably ill-advised idea and he doubted this would be the drop that made the cup run over.

Shoestring stayed by the door, rubbing himself up against a box of spare armour parts as though he was on the verge of climbing inside, and Cyril didn’t even entertain thinking about what would happen if some keen-eyed guard found the tell-tale tufts of Abyssinian peppered through their equipment.

He realised he’d never actually had to come down here before in this life or the previous. A mage who fought with weapons -– not even enchanted ones at that, Heléne had always told him – was barely a mage at all. He would sooner pluck at the pattern around a sword until its grip melted in the wielder’s hand than attempt to use one himself.

He considered the kitchen first, naturally. It would’ve been easy to abscond with a chef’s knife or a meat cleaver.

It would’ve been just as easy to be seen. He could picture it now, a kitchen that never had fewer than five people in it at once, stopping their chopping and dicing and boiling in unison to watch as a comically misplaced little courtier plucked a knife off a countertop with a sheepish smile.

It was why he was in the armoury in the first place. For all the chaos and clutter in his quarters, there wasn’t a single thing in any of the rooms that could be considered dangerous, save for a decorative letter opener that sat gathering dust on his writing desk. And a paring knife originally meant for mangoes and persimmons that was so dull he often used it to scoop hummus directly into his mouth.

Cyril needed something with a bit more substance .

No. He was already being reckless enough without self-sabotage.

It took him upwards of half an hour to scour the armoury for something even Cyril Laverre, notorious featherweight, felt confident he could use. A dagger, more decorative than functional, tucked away with the rest of what Cyril decided was a section of the room named “small sharp objects” (not to be confused with “long sharp objects” or “big sharp objects”).

He found it inside a trunk containing everything baby’s first assassin might need to perform a hit, so covered in dust and spiderwebs it was a wonder it hadn’t blended in with the wall and sent him into a hacking fit upon opening.

Cyril grimaced. He supposed political subterfuge became more in vogue after Tigris’s successor took up the mantle.

Before he left, he made sure to manipulate the pattern so everything looked exactly as it had when he found it, undisturbed. If another mage looked into it, they would see through the deception, but to the untrained eye, the trunk was as untouched as it had ever been.

Cyril wove a pocket on the inside of his vest with magic and tucked the dagger inside. As soon as he felt the metal press against his chest, his heart thrummed a war-drum tune. The reality of the situation finally sunk into his gut. It felt like he’d just swallowed a handful of wet sand, and yet the worst was still to come.