Chapter Text
This is the story of how I got divorced.
Hey, whoa, hang on a second! I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry. This is actually a very fun story.
The truth is, it’s not even my story. This is the story of my wife. And also my wife’s girlfriend, and partially also my wife’s girlfriend’s incredibly annoying owl. Yeah, you read that right. Who has an owl? Anyway, my reformed teen delinquent foster-brother’s reformed teen delinquent foster-kids also had a share in it. Oh, and I guess you have to mention the heroic rag-tag band of linguists on the run from a deranged fire-breathing pelican, too.
Mostly, though, this story is ours.
Now, once upon a time, a queen, her archnemesis, and her devastatingly attractive scamp of a husband saved the world. Pretty sure you’ve heard about it, actually. Where were you when the two ancient celestial power-sources vanquished the ghost of the evil sorceror and then the palace exploded, know what I mean?
Thing is, grand cosmic events like that don’t just happen and then, you know, stop happening. The way ol’ Xavier explained it, that much magic leaves – well, traces. All that power, it has to go somewhere. Just ’cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean that it’s not there anymore. And just ’cause it’s been weakened doesn’t mean that it’s not still pretty dang appealing to a certain kind of megalomaniacal academic.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. If I’m going to tell this properly, I’m going to have to start all the way back at the beginning.
I’m going to have to start with the International Convention for Logopoetic Initiative (Not Cursed!).
The International Convention for Logopoetic Initiative (Not Cursed!) was much like any other book fair. Rhapsodes elaborated with gusto upon why their version of The Slaying of Zhan Tiri was better than everyone else’s version of The Slaying of Zhan Tiri. The preliminary rounds of the proofreading tournament had already drawn cheering crowds armed with many a basket of overripe produce. Small independent authors twitched nervously behind eye-wateringly hopeful banners. Any rare manuscripts for sale were strictly vetted by a crack team of paleographers, cryptosyntacticians, and legal executives specialising in eldritch torts to ensure that any and all alleged spells that may or may not have been housed therein were thoroughly dormant. And, of course, children skipped merrily from bookstall to bookstall, laden with lavishly-illustrated fairytales and swashbuckling yarns and heroic tales of shapeshifting child soliders committing atrocities against parasitic aliens.
‘You don’t understand,’ Catalina was saying. ‘I love it when she’s transformed into a giant bear and the aliens chop off her bear arm and she picks it up and beats them to death with it! It makes me feel so seen!’
‘I’m happy that you’re finding characters you relate to,’ Lance said, trying to untangle three satchels’ worth of watercolour paper from a ludicrously overpriced box of glittery cupcakes with little marzipan inkwells on top. ‘I’m just wondering if the characters you relate to could maybe be a tiny bit less bloodthirsty?’
‘Eugene said when you were my age you guys were obsessed with the Flynn Rider books,’ Catalina pointed out. ‘The main character’s a thief!’
‘He’s a gentleman of contrived opportunity,’ Lance corrected her, hurt.
‘You guys were thieves!’
‘Well, maybe we want your literary role models to be less morally questionable than ours.’ The cupcakes teetered dangerously. ‘Where’s your sister, anyway?’
‘If anything, it’s an important coping mechanism for me,’ Catalina continued. ‘It’s, it’s a healthy depiction of dismemberment that allows me to process violence safely within a controlled narrative.’
‘You know you can just say you want to find out if she marries the cursed hawk guy at the end, right?’ he reminded her, righting the cupcakes with the pointy end of one of the less expensive paintbrushes. ‘Where is your sister?’
‘Oh, she went with Varian to go see the unveiling of the Forgotten Dooms manuscript.’
‘See, at least with that I know she’s being exposed to age-appropriate conte –’ Lance broke off. ‘She what?’
‘The Forgotten Dooms manuscript,’ the clerk said, ‘is, of course, a virtuoso example of the very best Middle Bayangori illumination techniques, and one of only four extant manuscripts known to have been illustrated by the hand of Ibtisaam the Illusionist herself. Her characteristic hemicynthian scrollwork is apparent in the frontispiece, as well as on pages thirteen, seventeen, and twenty-eight, although the majority of the illustrations are probably the work of – sir, please hold all questions until the end of the –’
‘Hi, yes, sorry, I know,’ said Varian. ‘I’m just, I’ve been to these things before and you guys never talk about the – no, I know, just – the actual magic –’
‘Sir, Forgotten Dooms contains no, ah, actual magic, as you put it,’ the clerk said. Behind him, the panel of theoretical magimaticians permitted themselves a titter. One went so far as to raise an eyebrow. ‘Certainly the contents of the manuscript do include a number of interesting incantations from the Second Interregnum. One of our research fellows at the Scriptorium has recently published a monograph on the eldritch syntax of the Song of the Red Star, if you are interested in reading further. However, I assure you that this establishment would never exhibit anything so gauche as a book imbued with actual magic. Goodness, no!’
‘Well, I’m out,’ said Kira.
‘Alright, but I’m just saying that, you know, maybe you need to consider the fact that Ibtisaam herself was a practising magician,’ Varian said, jostling several of the snootier patrons as he strained over the velvet guardrail in an effort to make his point. ‘I mean, her title alone –’
‘Ah, yes, the literalist analysis of ‘illusionist’,’ a magimatician sighed over the growing mutter of discontent from the crowd of collectors. ‘My dear boy, as has been the consensus for many decades now, the epithet honours Ibtisaam’s artistic mastery of lifelike illustration, not any silly preoccupation with what layfolk call magic.’
‘You don’t know that!’ Varian insisted, and, reaching into his rucksack, produced a small glass vial. ‘Now, my research suggests that she was actually an alchemist as well as an illusionist, and that she annotated her spellwork in a special invisible ink of her own devising. If you’ll just allow me to adminster this lemon juice to – no, listen, just a tiny corner, just one page – listen to me –!’
Lance arrived outside the discreet little upmarket salon just in time to see the doors slam shut on Varian and Kira. Still engrossed in her book, Catalina trailed behind, mouth full of marzipan and head full of war crimes.
‘You know, I’m a research assistant!’ Varian yelled, pounding on the tasteful stained glass panels, through which a bailiff’s face could vaguely be seen grimacing. ‘I came all the way from Corona to be here! Ever heard of The Heart of the Sun: A Revised Anthology of – yes, by Xavier Silversmith! Yes, the Xavier Silversmith! I’m in the acknowledgements, you elitist, gatekeeping, overly-literal son of a – oh, hi, Lance.’
‘They kicked you out again, huh?’ Lance said, fumbling around in his many, many shopping bags for some sugar. ‘Kid, they’re just a bunch of stuck-up old weirdoes who smell funny. You can’t let ’em get you down.’
‘I know they’re a bunch of stuck-up old weirdoes,’ Varian said, taking the proferred cupcake. ‘They also have access to some of the last surviving spellwork written by a major scholar of the Moonstone! If they’d just let me look at it –’
‘Maybe if you weren’t so skinny and weird you could, like, fight them for it,’ Kira suggested kindly. ‘You sure you don’t want me to teach you how to punch people?’
Varian sighed. ‘I’m legally required to remind you that I’m committed to non-violent conflict resolution.’
‘Oh, right, because of the whole jail thing,’ Kira remembered. ‘Hey, why doesn’t Cat just, you know, get fluffy? She could barge right in there and grab it for you!’
‘Cat is reading,’ Catalina said archly.
‘It would only take a minute,’ Kira said, then caught sight of the cover. ‘Oh, man, is that Book 7? Let me see, let me see!’
‘No! Lance said I get to read it first!’
‘You always read so slow – let me just see it before you hog it all week –’
‘You can’t keep skipping to the end! What is wrong with you? Laaaance!’
‘I just want to see! Laaaaaaance!’
Distracted by the realisation that he was about to experience a pounding headache, Lance did not, at first, notice the hooded figure climbing stealthily out of the second-storey window of the salon. It was only as he moved to extricate Catalina from Kira’s loving sisterly headlock that he became aware of a fleeting shadow in the ornamental tea-roses spilling over the balcony. He looked up. A particular scent came to him, something like cold wind and deep water, something he had not smelt in nearly three years. A light flashed in the dark folds of the cloak around the figure’s throat.
It was at this point that the salon exploded.
‘For me, the most important part of storytelling has always been to make something for myself,’ Rapunzel explained to a gaggle of seven-year-olds. The toddler in her lap punctuated every other gurgle with an inspired lunge for the paintbrush behind her ear. ‘You see, when I was little, I didn’t have any friends. Not one friend at all!’ Cross-legged on the grass, the little crowd gasped in sympathy. ‘And so, every day, I painted friends for myself. I made up stories about all the people I wanted to meet. When I was sad, I painted stories about being sad. When I was bored or angry or lonely, I painted stories about being bored or angry or lonely. And the only person I was painting stories for was me.’
‘Bluh,’ the toddler said, entranced. ‘Brushy.’
‘Oh, you want a brush? Great idea! Does everyone have a paintbrush? Now, what I want you guys to do is close your eyes. Close them tight! Think of a time you were angry. Really, really angry. Like, super mad. What colour is angry?’
‘Red!’ yelled a child.
‘Black!’ yelled another.
‘Black!’
‘Red!’
‘Purple!’
‘Brushy!’
‘Black, red – ooh, purple! Good choice! Now, I want you to open your eyes. Everyone got your paintbrush? I want you choose the colour that makes you think of being angry. I want you to paint what being angry feels like for you. Don’t worry about what anyone else is painting. Don’t worry about making it nice, or pretty, or cool. Just paint what being angry feels like for you.’
Fifteen paintbrushes were dipped into fifteen paint palettes. Fifteen frowns of concentration formed on fifteen earnest brows. Undeterred by its lack of fine motor control, the toddler commenced chewing on the most expensive sabletip it could find. ‘No, honey,’ Rapunzel said, rescuing her brush and delegating babysitting duties with an air of great regality. ‘Here, why don’t you chew on Eugene instead?’
‘It’s going pretty well,’ Eugene remarked, accepting the sticky bundle. ‘Ow!’
‘The sign came out so nicely,’ Rapunzel agreed, beaming at the teetering arrangment of old crates and ink-spattered journals that justed managed to pass as a booth. ‘I mean, probably we should tell Kira that that’s not how you spell Lessons. Or Painting. Or Free. Hmm. But other than that, it looks great! Really captures the, the spirit of Coronan culture!’
‘Next time, leave the sign to me,’ Eugene said, slinging an arm around her shoulders in a thinly-disguised attempt to reassign toddler-carrying responsibilities. ‘I’m known for my mastery of calligraphy. They say it teaches you nerves of steel, you know. Focuses the mind, hones the senses. Nimble Fingers Flynn, they used to call me.’
Rapunzel rebuffed the toddler, which resumed its cheerful gnawing of Eugene’s earlobe. ‘Are you sure that was because of the calligraphy?’
‘Well,’ Eugene began, with a smirk best left undescribed, ‘they said it was the calligraphy, but I’m pretty sure that was, you know, a euphemism.’
‘Euphemisms Eugene, they used to call you,’ Rapunzel agreed. ‘I’m well aware of your, you know, euphemisms.’
A rather large boom! interrupted both the flirting and the painting. The ground shook, briefly but unmistakeably. Eugene, to his credit, did not actually drop the baby, although it was a close call. The banner sagged on its posts as several crates collapsed, and more than one juvenile masterpiece found itself splattered in spilled watercolour.
‘Why’d it go boom?’ a small voice asked with interest.
‘My picture!’ wailed another. ‘My picture’s all ruined.’
‘Oh, I see that, sweetie – don’t worry, Eugene will find you some more paper –’
A second, louder boom! sent the booth toppling. An older brother swooped in to gather up two of the would-be artists. Shouts of concern began to rise up from all over the fair. A few people ran, either from or towards the explosions; most looked around in confusion.
‘Everyone just, uh, stay where you are?’ Eugene began, feeling fairly useless, as the toddler hiccoughed in surprise. ‘Uh, don’t move? Probably?’
‘My picture!’
‘Boom!’ one girl yelled with delight. ‘Boom!’
‘My picture is ruined!’ the boy insisted. ‘Make it not ruined!’
‘Eugene, make his picture not ruined,’ Rapunzel said, and strode off toward the plume of strangely sparkly smoke rising from the Antiquarians’ Quarter.
Eugene shepherded children towards parents, deposited the toddler into the arms of its anxious aunt, and, finally, heaped watercolour paper and spare oil pastels upon the disappointed painter. ‘Just tell him, ah, tell him it’s fine, he can make another picture,’ he advised the older brother, who, clutching an enormous tome titled Special Topics in Arcane Semantics, kept shifting nervously from one foot to another as he glanced towards the towering column of bright blue smoke. ‘Hey, buddy, I promise you can make another picture. Just, you know, maybe go home and lock the doors first?’
‘Do you think we should be panicking?’ the brother asked in what Eugene assumed was a Bayangori accent, although it sounded different to anything he’d heard so far. ‘That looks almost, well, magical.’
Eugene glanced over his shoulder. The smoke had already begun to thin, and no ravening beasts or portals to otherworlds or unnatural geological features had appeared just yet. There was a faint scent on the breeze, almost familiar, that he couldn’t quite place. ‘I thought magic was strictly theoretical here,’ he said, slowly.
‘Oh, of course!’ the young man said, sounding shocked. ‘There’s no such thing as magic! It’s just, well, at the Scriptorium, whenever things get all glittery and explodey and there’s definitely no magic involved, well, that’s when we panic.’
‘Definitely no magic,’ Eugene agreed, frowning.
He was still frowning some minutes later when, half-heartedly righting crates and gathering up spilled paint palettes, he caught sight of Lance, hurrying towards him and smouldering only slightly.
‘You alright?’ Lance called. ‘Where’s Rapunzel?’
‘She was headed your way – are you alright? Where are the kids?’
‘Sent ’em back to the lodge,’ Lance panted, looking around dazedly as he came to a halt. ‘They’re fine, but Varian was – well, you know Varian and explosions.’
‘Too excited?’
‘Way too excited.’ Glancing down at himself, Lance seemed to realise for the first time that he was a little bit on fire. He patted distractedly at his shirt. ‘You know how all those fancy Scriptorium guys keep going on about how they only do theoretical spellwork? Well, all I’m saying is, we were pretty close, and I know applied magic when I see it. Took out half the bookshop.’
‘I thought this thing wasn’t going to be cursed this year,’ Eugene mused, pinching out a still-smoking thread on Lance’s shoulder. His fingers came away blue, and sparkly, and smelling faintly of something he almost remembered.
‘I know, right? Said so in the brochure and everything.’ Lance rubbed his temples. ‘Anyway. I had a headache before we had to fight our way out of a crowd of panicking academics. Just please give me some good news and tell me you found it.’
‘Oh, yeah, buddy,’ Eugene said, ferretting a glossy hardcover out from underneath the rumpled banner and carefully wiping away an errant smudge of paint before handing it to Lance with the kind of reverence typically reserved for old gold and new babies. ‘You know I got the goods.’
‘Son of Flynn Rider: Riderson Rides Again,’ Lance read. ‘Ooh, special deluxe edition with author’s foreword! This is why you’re my favourite brother.’
‘I’m your only brother,’ Eugene reminded him. ‘And don’t hog it all week.’
‘You just want to skip to the end, as usual,’ Lance sniffed. ‘By the way, the kids took it back with them, but we got all the art stuff you wanted for –’
‘Raps!’ Eugene yelled. ‘Raps, over here! Over here! What are you doing?’ He peered at her through the haze, then faltered at the expression on her face. In an instant, he was striding towards her. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked, more quietly, taking her by the arm.
She took several seconds to answer. It might have been his imagination, but for a moment, the afternoon sun glowed darkly golden in her hair. A warmth lifted up from her skin under his palms, like new hot bread, or cobblestones under summer. Then she shook herself, almost imperceptibly, and looked up at him, and the goosebumps that had begun at the top of his spine subsided.
‘I’m alright,’ she said, then smiled over his shoulder as Lance followed close behind. ‘I’m alright.’
Lance met Eugene’s eyes briefly, as though making a decision, then turned to Rapunzel. ‘I don’t want to worry you,’ he said, in the special, gentle voice he always used with her, part roguish fondness, part endless respect. ‘But, Majesty, I think you know why Varian was interested in the auction.’
‘Some crackpot theory about invisible ink?’ Eugene suggested. Rapunzel let out a puff of laughter and rolled her eyes at him. He let out a deep breath. ‘What?’ he said, grinning. ‘Last I checked he was ranting about mystical pigments and fondling lemons.’
‘Yeah, the lemons thing got him kicked out before the book destabilised,’ Lance said. ‘Probably for the best. I heard them saying something about a, a reaction between some inscription’s hypothauma-something field and an unexpected source of magical interference in the area.’ He bit his lip. ‘I heard them saying something about it being deliberate.’
‘The book’s still in one piece,’ Rapunzel said. ‘I saw it. It just – it didn’t want to be touched.’
Almost as though he didn’t want to, Lance added, ‘I also think I saw someone.’
‘I think I did, too,’ Rapunzel said.
Eugene looked between them, understanding slowly. He said, ‘We should probably leave.’
One of the lesser-known facts about linguists is that they are actually quite calm, most of the time.
This was not most of the time.
‘I knew it,’ said Taph. ‘I knew it! Didn’t I tell them? Didn’t I tell them? I told you guys I told them! And look!’ He gestured frantically out of the window of the cryptosyntax library, out across the grounds of the Scriptorium towards the Antiquarian Quarter. ‘That spellwork was not appropriately stabilised, no one checked to make sure that the venue was free of contaminants, no one bothered to take an inventory of other potentially reactive manuscripts that could have been present, and oh, also, we shouldn’t be displaying hemicynthine material at all! But nooooooo, the Dean just had to go ahead, because he just had to make another million off unsafe auctions so he can keep funding his camel-racing problem –’
‘I still think you should have shown him the bit about the split ergativity,’ Rwa called down from a trapeze high up in the gallery. ‘Like, if anything could have convinced them that thing was evil, that would have done it.’
So saying, she recommenced her thoughtful twirling amid the elaborate system of pulleys and swings that granted access to the loftier bookshelves. The cryptosyntax library, it must be remarked, was both very small and very tall, and pulled triple duty as a tea room and as an ad hoc containment centre for the occasional grammatical horrorterror. The linguistics department was not not underfunded.
‘It’s not evil,’ Wlwn put in patiently from underneath the tea table. ‘Just grumpy.’
‘I’d be grumpy, too, if someone kept telling me I wasn’t real!’ Taph snapped. ‘It’s like the Dean doesn’t even care about irrealis effects on spellwork this old. I published on calculating sentience from hypotheticals last year! Does he even read his own faculty’s research?’ He strode from the window, threw himself over his wellworn fainting couch, then leapt up in agitation and resumed pacing. ‘And where the hell is Vasil? You know how jumpy he gets. Last thing we need is for him to start another petition.’
‘He went to pick up Tis,’ Rwa said, fidgeting on her trapeze. ‘Anyway! Does anyone have the big Middle Bayangori grammar? I need to check how renarrative verbs were conjugated during the Second Interregnum.’
‘Where during the Second Interregnum?’ Wlwn asked, and actually bothered to stick his head out from under the table, turtle-like. ‘Devoicing on word-final fricatives had already started in the western valleys, but it wouldn’t reach the capital until –’
‘What are you people talking about?’ said a voice from the doorway.
Taph paused, mid-rumination, to shoot a glare over his shoulder. ‘You are not supposed to be here!’ he hissed. ‘Office hours are over! Come back never!’
‘Oh, hey!’ Rwa called down, then cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. ‘Wow,’ she said after a moment. ‘You’re super glowy. Like, more than normal.’
‘Careful, we’ll need to neutralise the fallout,’ Wlwn said, striding over and shooing the newcomer back beyond the containment threshold. ‘Behind the line, please. There’s a great deal of very sensitive material in here, and you’re an anomaly to begin with.’
‘Yeah, about that,’ the newcomer said. ‘Just for a second, while I was listening to Varia – while I was at the salon, just for a second, I swear I –’ She shook her head, briefly, then swatted at Wlwn. She said, ‘The book spoke to me.’
Taph made a sound more normally associated with small hippos or large goats. ‘It’s happened,’ he said, in dreadful tones, and flung himself facedown onto the fainting couch.
‘Hmm,’ Wlwn said. ‘And did you speak back to the book?’
‘It knew my name,’ the stranger said. ‘It knew a lot of names.’
‘Oh! Oh, that I should live to see this day!’ wailed the lump of robes on the couch. ‘I knew it! I told them! But would they listen?’
‘I’m taking this to mean that talking books aren’t normal,’ said the stranger.
Rwa spun gently on her trapeze as she descended from the bookshelves. ‘Well,’ she said, swinging her legs, ‘it is accepted that, in incantations above a certain threshold of thaumatological magnitude, syntax itself can begin to acquire sentience.’
‘Explain it to me like I’m your funding advisory board,’ the stranger said, patiently.
‘If spells are powerful enough, they can start to be, uh, kind of, sort of, uh, conscious,’ Rwa offered. ‘That is actually pretty normal. ’Cause, well, spells are made of language, right? So, like, basically – OK, you’ve seen electric demonstrations, right? So, like, if you run enough magic through enough grammar, it’s kind of like putting electricity through a dead fish. So sometimes the spells twitch a bit. You see?’ Recalling the instruction, she added, ‘This has multiple potentially lucrative applications in various sectors of industry!’
‘What does any of this have to do with the fact that my mission objective just blew up in my face?’
‘The spellbook might be alive,’ Wlwn said. He shrugged. ‘And if it’s alive, it’s definitely bored.’
The picturesque little town of Samar, situated in the foothills of the Bayang Mountains just east of the Ingvarrsch border, was famed for its book fair, its scriptorium, its considerable distance from any royal buildings that would have been expensive to rebuild if blown up in a completely theoretical magical explosion, and not much else. The presence of aristocracy was not unheard of during festival month, but the more distinguished visitors tended to lodge in hotels along the swankier tourist streets, where hot springs and candied bimberries were always on hand, and where views of the sundrenched mountainsides could be enjoyed unimpeded by anything so tacky as a local resident.
As such, the proprietors of the Other Dumpling, a little inn tucked away behind an olive orchard near the common, had been quite flustered by the arrival of a quasi-incognito royal party. Only the queen’s indefatigible sweetness had secured the hire of three rooms underneath the eaves, which was thick with the scent of wild roses. The small contingent of royal guards, once installed in the pub downstairs, lost no time sampling the very finest tea and honeyed figs the establishment could provide. Far too hardened and ascetic a man for such luxuries, their illustrious leader remained upstairs, fretting, until his wayward charges deigned to clamber back in through the window just before sunset.
‘I ordered you not to go out with an escort,’ said Pete. Having been promoted to captain of the guard after Eugene’s abrupt realisation that what he really wanted to do with his life was enjoy the perks due a princeps jure uxoris and not much else, he took his job very seriously. ‘What am I supposed to put in the report? Magical explosion? I can’t spell explosion!’
‘Just draw a little cloud of smoke and, like, the bookshop on fire and stuff,’ Kira suggested. ‘They’ll get the drift.’
‘Put in the old magic guy’s hat on fire!’ Catalina said.
‘Oh, yeah, that was great,’ said Kira. ‘Heh, his beard was on fire, too! Here, give me the pen.’
‘Hey, that’s official stationery!’ Pete wailed. ‘Doodling is against regulations!’
‘Don’t worry about it, you old stickler, you,’ Eugene said, clapping him on the back and spilling the large cup of camomile Lance had made him for shock. ‘No one reads the reports anyway.’
‘I ordered you, if you’re going to go out, you need to take one of us with you,’ Pete insisted. ‘Just in case! Greg’s not doing anything! He was right there, downstairs! I ordered you!’
‘I know, Pete,’ Rapunzel said. ‘And I really admire that! I can tell you’ve been working hard at giving orders.’
‘Thank you! I have!’
‘Yeah! High-five!’ They high-fived. ‘And I’m sure that, if you just keep at it, pretty soon, you’ll figure out how to get people to listen to you, too.’
‘Yeah! I will!’ Pete beamed, then deflated again. ‘But, Majesty, couldn’t you just have listened to me this morning?’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t want to,’ she told him, blithely. ‘Now, why don’t you go downstairs and have a nice honeyed fig?’
Kira and Catalina, overtired and ebullient, were charged with accompanying Pete to dinner, more for his protection than theirs. Over on the windowseat, Lance sat carefully checking the girls’ socks for any remaining embers, while Eugene took note of whose trousers would need darning when. The only real casualties of the explosion had been Kira’s second-favourite jacket and Catalina’s fringe. The cupcakes, tragically, had been beyond salvaging.
‘And you’re completely sure that your lemon juice obsession had nothing to do with this?’ Lance checked.
‘Well, for one thing, it’s not lemon juice,’ Varian admitted. ‘It’s a universal alchemical indicator. I wanted to determine the composition of some of the inks used. But no, it’s not magical. Just alchemical.’
‘Inks, the man says,’ huffed Eugene. ‘Can we ever just have a normal holiday? You know there’s a charming little place near the Hotel Amadis that offers a tasting course of fifteen different kinds of olive oil? Fifteen! But no, it’s the composition of inks in the explodey death book.’
Varian ignored this, instead settling in for a lecture. ‘Ibtisaam the Illusionist was famous for using a special pigment in her work,’ he began.
‘Hemicynth,’ said Rapunzel.
Varian blinked at her. ‘Yes, hemicynth. Uh –’
‘No one’s ever been able to replicate it,’ Rapunzel said. Her voice was low and dreamy. ‘I’ve only read about it. Most of her actual illustrations are lost now. But it was supposed to be the clearest blue, the palest silver, that anybody had ever seen.’ She smiled, a little bashful, and rolled her eyes at herself. ‘I always thought, maybe if I had some of that, maybe I could finally paint min flowers properly.’
Eugene coughed.
‘Well,’ Varian went on, ‘part of the archives from her scriptorium, which are written in a code that was very difficult to crack, by the way, no, no, hold your applause, suggest that she had in fact travelled at least as far as the Dark Kingdom in search of new pigments. It’s only in paintings dated after this trip that hemicynth starts to appear in her work. My theory is that she took mineral samples of the –’
‘Of the Moonstone?’ Eugene yelped. ‘Wait, wait, wait. So there’s a magical book, except everyone said it’s definitely not actually magical, and it’s got magic spells in it, except they’re definitely not actually magic spells, and it was illustrated by some ancient scribe lady who was definitely not secretly a witch, and her secret magic witch-ink has bits of Moonstone in it?’
‘Probably not the Moonstone itself, but possibly material from the surrounding landscape. Certainly she writes about having seen the black rocks.’
‘Am I the only one who didn’t know about this?’ Eugene demanded. ‘Lance? Sunshine? Come on!’
‘You were pretty busy reading tasting notes on olive oil,’ Rapunzel reminded him, with a tired smile.
He glanced down at her, then bumped her shoulder with his own. She laughed. Varian glared at them until Rapunzel sat up straight and saluted. Eugene snickered.
‘Regardless,’ Varian sniffed, ‘I think that, whatever pigment Ibtisaam found, whatever clay or chalk she used, it was partially imbued with some of the Moonstone’s influence. Not enough to do any serious damage, hundreds of years later, but maybe enough to – well, to react, if. Exposed.’
‘Exposed to what?’
Rapunzel did not answer. In the silence, Lance and Varian glanced at each other. They had conspired earlier on the most delicate way to broach this particular topic. ‘Well,’ Lance said, in his best Eugene-calming voice, ‘I guess the simplest way to put it is that it reacted to itself.’
‘Which means?’ Eugene said, irritably, and then, just as irritably, answered his own question. ‘Ah. Cassandra.’