Shoestring Theory

FOUR

Once the news about the king and queen broke more widely, a pall descended upon Margrave House and its court. Cyril was not there to witness the initial spread.

After he was done retching, he crawled to the stream Eufrates had sat by what felt like hours ago and rinsed his mouth with the cool, fresh water. Not finding this enough, he fully dunked his head in and held his breath to the point of light-headedness.

Shoestring, who had kept his distance for the entirety of Cyril’s embarrassing little spat with his ex , sauntered over a few moments later to drink his fill, observing his master’s pathetic state with empty disinterest. Cyril pulled the cat into his lap as though he were still a newly weaned kitten. He gently stroked Shoestring’s back, burying his face in his side. His shoulders shook.

He had failed.

He was fool enough to come back to the past, to his youth, to hope, with only one shoddy plan and it had utterly and completely failed . He was not here to right some kind of terrible wrong. He was being punished. He was about to witness tragedy strike twice, only this time, he’d be lucky if he lived past Eufrates’s coronation.

Cyril reached for the ring pressed against his chest, thumbing it curiously. He wondered if Eufrates could kill him. If they were bonded in more than just the plane of the living.

They were ghosts to each other now. Apparitions of the past, steadfast in getting in each other’s way. Given their track record, Cyril was bound to lose.

It was late in the evening when he picked himself up off the ground and snuck back into the palace, a thief in the night. He was not in the right state of mind to play-act a reaction to a tragedy he’d mourned all too well, and he was not interested in hearing condolences.

Cyril’s own parents, after dropping him off with his aunt on his fifth birthday, had died unceremoniously one after the next over the most trifling of misfortunes. While they kept a cool distance from their strange ward, Rohan and Micaela treated him kindly, with a certain fondness, and he was very grateful. He did not understand the cruelty of living through the same death twice until this moment and it made his heart ache terribly.

He would not be comforted over the death of the king and queen. He did not deserve it.

He crept up the steps to his quarters with Shoestring wrapped tightly in his arms, more out of habit than anything at this point, and contemplated what he was meant to do with the rest of his short life.

Perhaps Eufrates would spare him. He needed a mage to keep up appearances, after all. But he could just as well find a non-Laverre. Pluck an eager graduate from the Academy, perhaps even break tradition entirely and hire a team of specialists instead of one lone grand mage and replace Cyril completely.

Running away was starting to sound quite enticing.

Cyril paused in front of his door. He remembered this night, vaguely. Exhausted, he had gone to bed early. Grief-stricken and young, he had thought of no one but himself.

He opened the door to usher Shoestring in, but then shut it behind him, trapping the cat inside. He got little resistance save for a confused mewl.

Then, he began to climb farther up than his third floor of the tower.

Floors four to seven belonged to the grand mage, with the very tallest among them being Heléne’s opulent apartments. Five and six were grandiose studies he had been eager to inherit, and four was a modest kitchen, more for potions than for cookery.

Cyril bypassed the kitchen and the studies until he stood in front of the great wooden door leading to the grand mage’s private rooms.

He knocked. He received no answer, so he pushed the door open and walked inside.

“Tantie,” he tried.

He did not expect a response, so he pressed onwards into the bedroom.

When Cyril was a child, his aunt’s quarters were sacrosanct. He was not to enter without being invited in, and even the thought of it felt wrong in his gut. Heléne Laverre had not been famously good with children, having never had any of her own. So she’d kept her new ward at arm’s length those early days.

Not that it wasn’t obvious upon a glance, but Aunt Heléne was not actually Cyril’s aunt. They were related by blood, of course, but his father had only had brothers. She was an older cousin of Cyril’s grandmother, herself already a woman of some years. The well of magic in the Laverres seemed to have run quite dry until Cyril manifested his gifts out of the blue one day.

Cyril would never dare ask how old his mentor was, but he could make an educated guess that she was in the higher eighties. Perhaps even older, considering the revitalising properties of magical blood. It meant when he blundered into her life, snot-nosed and ruddy-faced, barely out of toddlerhood, she did her best with the very little she knew. But for the most part, she had palmed him off to nurses and tutors the Margraves were already employing.

They had formed a bond regardless, especially once Cyril really dedicated himself to the patterns. He had always guessed she held a fondness for teaching, if only to be able to show off.

“Tantie…” he called for her again and rapped on her door. It was only when he gently pushed it open that he heard a sob.

He had never seen her like this, and if he could guess, he would blame it on a mixture of her never letting him see her like this and him not wanting it.

Heléne Laverre was hunched over in her oversized plush bed, an embroidered blanket wrapped around her like a frightened child’s comforter. She rocked herself back and forth. Her crow, whose name was Ganache, cooed and cawed at her in concern.

“I saw that boy be born…” She shook as she spoke. “I was at his delivery. I was never meant to outlive him.”

It took Cyril a moment to realise she was talking about the late king. Rohan Margrave had perhaps been in his mid-fifties at the time of his death. He knew somewhere in his mind that his aunt must have watched him grow up, but to suddenly see him through her eyes, a young man in his prime taken before his time, wrecked him.

In that moment, Cyril realised that perhaps his entire life he had never regarded his aunt as a person. A witch, a crone, a menace, perhaps. A guiding hand, a strong presence, but he could not imagine her young or aging. He could not imagine her cradling the king when he was born, seeing him grow up, loving him and his future wife in deep friendship. To Cyril, she had always been Aunt Heléne Laverre, Grand Mage of Farsala, the Witch Upon the Tower.

“Tantie, it’s me…” he whispered, doing his level best to soothe. “It’s Cyril.”

She looked up at him and her rheumy eyes were swollen with tears. He was sure that if she did not want him there, he would be woven to his rooms in the blink of an eye and tied to his bed till late next morrow. She did no such thing.

“Duckling.” She reached out to him. They had the same bony limbs. “What are you doing up here?”

Gods. He had not heard that name in years.

He was not fool enough to insult her, to point out her weakness, so he sat next to her on the bed instead.

“I could not sleep.”

“No…” She shook her head. “Neither can I.”

“…I’m sorry,” he murmured after a grave pause.

Heléne tilted her head up to finally look in his eyes. “What are you sorry for, child? You’ve done nothing wrong.”

She had no idea. Cyril shifted, uncomfortable in his seat. “It’s what you’re supposed to say… after a death, I mean.”

Sorrow welled up in her eyes again and she looked down at her fists clenched around a hunk of embroidered fabric. Her long, silver hair cascaded over her face just enough she was spared the humiliation of tearing up in front of a “child”.

“It was not their time. They were too, too young, and now that girl .” Tigris. “The weight on her shoulders. She’s barely out of the tutoring room.”

In a different time, Cyril would have balked. Protested, even. Tigris Margrave was to be wed soon. She was reaching her latter twenties. But being this elder in the shell of a youth, he nodded. People should only have responsibilities thrust upon them well into their forties.

This was going horrendously. He had crept up here to try and offer some solace and yet he was letting Heléne twist herself up in knots, carving away at the fresh wounds the more she spoke.

When he was a boy and the pressures of his station got to be too much, he would have crying breakdowns, sweaty night terrors and breathless anxiety attacks. He thought he hid them well, ensconced in his rooms with Shoestring’s head against his chest, but sometimes his aunt would notice the change. Perhaps out of a dormant instinct for parenthood, she would then call him up to her own chambers and let him lay his head on her shoulder as he sobbed, babying him until he finally tired himself out and fell asleep.

With this vision in mind, Cyril clumsily scooted up on the bed until he could make the old woman comfortable. Gentle as a feather he tugged her towards him, resting her head upon his chest.

She felt very frail, then. So frail that Cyril was scared to touch her, but eventually he began to stroke her hair.

“You can cry if you’d like, Tantie.”

Heléne seemed to be recovering from the initial shock of the tenderness at first to do anything at all, but eventually she did.

She wept. She wept for the man she’d regarded at once a surrogate son and a treasured friend, she wept for his wife who she’d come to love just as dearly, she wept for their orphan children and finally, she wept for Cyril. A lonely boy she now wasn’t even strong enough to comfort herself. And just like Cyril all those years ago, she wept so long and hard she fell asleep in his arms.

Cyril kept vigil until the sand in his eyes weighed much too heavy, and then he had to retire himself. He did not leave the room, however. The bed was large enough he could sleep at one end of it without disturbing her, and he did not wish to leave her alone.

It was, mercifully, one of the first untroubled sleeps he’d had in years.

She was still fast asleep a few hours later when he awoke. He lay in bed waiting for the sun to rise before restlessness overtook him and he decided to make himself useful.

Cyril descended the tower to the kitchen floor, which was empty of any servants at this early hour. Unlike the palace kitchens, they did not use it to prepare meals, but occasionally they flitted in and out of the room to replace and restore produce.

He was no chef, and he was not about to begin trying. So instead, he found a large platter and piled it high with fresh, ripe fruit, biscuits, bread, small tins of butter and jam. Then, he brewed a kettle of rich, fragrant tea and balanced all this on a tray all the way up to the top of the tower, where Aunt Heléne was already rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Good morning, Tantie.”

He cleared room on a table by clumsily shoving papers and trinkets out of the way and deposited their scavenged breakfast. Heléne, who had clearly regained her composure since the evening, regarded the offering with suspicion.

She sauntered over to the table and took a seat. Cyril poured her a cup of tea, spooned sugar and poured cream into the liquid.

Heléne looked at him with an arched brow. “Who taught you to serve tea?”

He felt almost embarrassed that this was unusual knowledge for him as he poured his own cup, more sugar than liquid in the end.

“It’s hot water and leaves, Tantie. No need to underestimate me.”

“Bah.” She crunched into a biscuit and her familiar began pecking at the crumbs (Cyril would have to remember to fetch something for Shoestring later). “You’ve always been a milksop, boy. I can’t imagine where you would have learned this.” She took a sip. “It is quite adequate.”

Cyril sighed. It seemed Grand Mage Laverre was back in fighting form. “Thank you, madam.”

She paused in front of her cup. “Thank you, Cyril.”

They sat in a companionable silence that was not meant to last, because eventually his aunt broke it with:

“You should have brought raisins from the pantry. They are Ganache’s favourite.”

Cyril stifled a laugh. It was very like her to make demands of a kindness.

He looked at the old crow. “Forgive me, Ganache. I will cut up some fruit for you instead.”

Ganache preened, seemingly unperturbed by the lack of raisins on the table when she could peck at sweet biscuits and cream to her heart’s content.

“Where is that cat of yours, Duckling? Still asleep?”

Cyril tensed. If there was anyone in the palace who could suss out the true nature of his familiar, it was his aunt. So he nodded. “Shoestring does love his naps. And you know how independent he is.”

“Yes… a perfect complement for such a needy child.” She smiled through a bite of an orange wedge.

His ears reddened and he slumped back in his chair with a defiant little pout. He could argue with her on this, of course, but he had a feeling she would win.

He stared at Ganache as she pecked her way through a halved papaya, crunching the black seeds in her beak without a care in the world, before he cleared his throat.

“Tantie…” he said.

She did not look up from her meal. “Yes, child?”

“Have you ever…?” He gripped the end of his tunic, as if wringing water from it. “Has there ever been a mage who’s lost a familiar?”

She raised a brow at him. “Familiars die with their mages.”

“Yes… yes, I know that, but…”

“Is something wrong with Shoestring?”

Yes. Desperately.

“Oh, no.” He waved his dismissal. “I just get worried about him sometimes. He wanders about so often, I fear I might find him crushed under the wheel of a carriage.”

Heléne snorted. “Well, worry no longer, child. Familiars cannot die before their time. They’re beings borne of magic, the essence of a mage’s soul. I do not believe your essence could be run over by a vehicle .”

“No, perhaps not, but… you are so very…” He paused. “Experienced. Has there really never been a familiar death in your time?”

To Ganache, she grumbled, “The nerve of this child, coming up here to call me old.” But before Cyril could raise his voice in protest, she pondered his question seriously. “I suppose… I have met mages who’ve lost their familiar. It would be hard to forget something like that. But Duckling, I could count their numbers on one hand.”

Cyril leaned in in breathless rapture. He had to know. “What happened to them?”

“Oh, well, it is not a difficult deduction. If the very essence of a mage has passed on without them–”

“They no longer have an essence at all,” Cyril finished in a very small, dry-throated voice.

“Precisely.” Heléne did not seem to notice her ward’s internal crisis. She rattled on as though giving a lecture, “Horrible creatures, those mages I met. They were living half a life, almost in defiance of the Undertaker. It was like the soul had given up, but the body was clinging.”

“…Do you have any idea why?”

She shrugged. “Cowardice, most likely. A primal fear of death.”

“Not unfinished business?”

She laughed at this. “They were not poltergeists , child. But perhaps. I’ve not met nearly enough to paint a clear picture. And I should loathe to encounter another mage so careless with their own essence that they would let a familiar die.”

Cyril’s blood ran cold. Regardless of being a ghost or not, he certainly felt like one now he was roaming aimless in an afterlife he had trapped himself within.

It was mid-morning when he descended to his own floor of the tower. As soon as he opened the door, Shoestring tumbled out, mewling for food and attention. The tell-tale scratches on the wood an indication he’d neglected his phantom a bit too long.

“I don’t even know who you are ,” he murmured as he rustled up some leftovers from the morning’s feast for the cat to eat, along with a bowl of clean water. Familiars had no particular dietary restrictions, but he did not know if whoever this was did.

This Shoestring seemed to behave like a normal cat, but if he looked closely, Cyril could see in his pattern that he was not of flesh and earth. He also held a vacant, empty look in his eyes, and no shine reflected off them.

Like Cyril, this was some kind of facsimile of life. A creature that had no right to exist.

If anything, they were twin flames.

Out of nowhere, he felt a bubble of laughter escape his lips, contained at first, but then hysterical.

Between bites of salted meat, Shoestring tilted his head at him and yowled.

“Oh, you would find it funny if you could grasp it, stupid cat.” He sighed and steadied himself against a table to cool his outburst.

He truly had nothing to lose now. And if he had come to this place – this time – with a purpose then, well, he ought to fulfil it.

He examined the empty vessel of a creature prowling in his room and a new plan began to blossom in his mind. One perhaps even more foolish than before. As the gears turned in his head, a grin split his lips and he knelt down to pet Shoestring on the soft spot between his eyes.

“What have we to fear?” he said. “I’m living on borrowed time, and you aren’t real!”