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“Genuinely, how hard can it be to grasp the fundamentals,” Gale muttered to himself, crossing out yet another poorly crafted answer on a student’s exam paper while his enchanted secondary quill rapidly dictated the correct response with a careful annotation to explain where the student had gone wrong. Blackstaff was not just any other school—it was an elite academy, offering places to only the most promising students and rising academics in the field of wizardry. For a student to be failing was troubling, but for multiple students to be struggling with the foundations of illusory magic?
Was he a bad teacher?
“Daddy?”
He sat up with a lurch from where he was hunched over his desk, and weary smile already coming over his face. “Sera?” he said, looking over to see his daughter standing just inside the door to his study. Well—standing was probably the wrong word to describe the irrepressible ball of energy that was Serendipity Dekarios. She was… wiggling? Dancing? Bouncing on the spot? “What brings you in here, my little sparkle? You know Daddy is doing his work right now.”
Serendipity took after her mother in so many ways—her vividly golden scales, which were still expanding across her toddler skin seemingly with each new day, her stubby little horns, the vibrant colouring of pinks and purples—but the thing that made her Levity’s miniature mirror was the vivacious joy and curiosity in which she approached the world. Every day was a new adventure for little Serendipity, and every adventure seemed more outrageous than the last.
The beaming, giggling smile on her face right now seemed to indicate he was about to be privy to her newest scheme. “Daddy,” she said, all but fit to bursting from glee, “I know magic.”
He perked up immediately. “You cast your first spell?” he asked delightedly, spinning in his chair.
She covered her mouth with her hands, giggling. “I have to show you,” she said, toddling forward and taking him by the hand. “Come on.”
Gale looked back over his shoulder at the stack of exam papers, and then dismissed them; reading of his student’s failures could wait another half hour. To know his daughter was capable of casting magic, and so early? She hadn’t even turned four! “What spell did you cast, my sparkle?” he asked, trailing after her, back slightly hunched so as to keep his hand in hers. She rushed them out of his study and towards the stairs, navigating the steps with a ferocious concentration that he imagined he would also require were he faced with an obstacle where each step was all but half his height. Her little tail waggled back and forth excitedly as they went, almost tripping him a half dozen times at least.
In the sitting room, he found Levity and his mother enjoying an afternoon tea, where presumably Serendipity had been until coming to fetch him. Levity had her face in a hand, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter, while Morena had her tea cup held rather pointedly in front of her mouth, as if to hide her own smile; she could not hide the sparkle of mirth in her eyes, however.
“I hear celebrations are in order,” he said, as Serendipity led him proudly into the room. “We have a new little arcanist in the family?”
This only seemed to provoke Levity more, and Morena very obviously closed her eyes for a moment, as if to try and rein in her own laughter; their responses were perplexing.
Serendipity pushed him over to one of the couches. “Daddy, um, you sit here,” she said, patting his knees as he did her bidding. She then toddled around to the opposite side of the coffee table, which he now realised held three cups of varying sizes which were all placed upside down. He looked up and sought his wife’s gaze, and when he made eye contact with her, she almost doubled over with scarcely repressed laughter.
“Daddy.” Serendipity drew his attention back to her, where she was kneeling in front of the three cups. “You gotta guess.”
Oh. He could see what was happening now. He bit the inside of his lip and huffed a small laugh that he couldn’t suppress. “What do I need to guess, my love?”
“You need to explain the rules to him, baby,” Levity managed, her voice broken with that particular hoarseness that came from too much laughter. “Go on, tell Daddy the rules of your magic trick.”
Serendipity looked at the three cups placed upside down before her, and then grabbed at one two-handed, like a tressym pouncing upon a particularly fat pigeon. “I’m gonna hide, um, the gold,” she announced loudly, setting the cup down with a clang that made Morena wince ever so slightly as she murmured “The good porcelain,” prompting Levity to whisper back hastily “We can just cast Mending, it’s fine.” Beneath the cup, there was indeed a gold coin, and the look of gleeful hunger in his daughter’s eyes at the sight of the treasure was a mirror of her mother’s.
The draconic urge to hoard had started early.
“I hide the gold,” Serendipity announced again, and then looked back at her mother for reassurance. At the whisper of encouragement she received, she turned back around and beamed up at him so joyfully that he felt his heart melt anew. “And then you gotta find it!”
“Goodness,” he said, choking over the sudden ball of emotion in his throat, all but overcome by the sheer, ferocious love he felt for these three women. What fool he, to think he might ever have come to cherish any future without them in it. “That is a very powerful magic spell. Are you sure you can handle such enormous power?”
“Yep,” Serendipity said immediately, with that particular confidence unique to very small children. She set the cup back down over the gold coin, and then went about laboriously moving the three cups around with almost agonising slowness, the scales on her forehead rippling with her frown of ferocious concentration.
Levity was once again shaking with silent laughter, whilst Morena was smiling fondly over her teacup, eyes crinkled with delight. Gale, for his part, sat dutifully and patiently to be called upon again.
Eventually, Serendipity was satisfied with the vague circles she had pushed the cups in—as best as he could tell, none of them had actually moved from their original place in the lineup—and she sat back on her haunches with a smugly delighted look on her face. “Okay, Daddy,” she said in a sing-song little voice, “bet you can’t find them, um, the gold?”
Raising an eyebrow in challenge—which made his daughter burst into a fit of giggles—he leaned forward and tapped on one of the cups. Serendipity, grinning fit to burst, bounced up and down on her knees and started to say “Daddy, I tricked you, I—”
She tilted the cup up, and he saw her nose crinkle with consternation as she spotted the gold coin underneath it.
“Did I win?” he asked innocently.
“Spoilsport,” Morena muttered out of the corner of her mouth.
But his daughter was nothing if not a quick thinker—he could see the little cogs turning behind her eyes as she sat there, nose crinkled, trying to consider what to do. “Um, Daddy, you gotta close your eyes,” she declared loudly.
“Goodness, there are a lot of rules to this magic spell,” he said, but dutifully shut his eyes. Expecting to hear the quick scrape of the
coin being shuffled over to a new mug, he instead heard the sounds of Serendipity scrambling to her feet and pattering across the floor to her mother.
“Mummy, can you hold this?” she whispered, in that loud stage-whisper that seemed to be the quietest setting their daughter was capable of.
He heard the snorting sound he knew to be his wife fighting desperately to hold a hoot of laughter inside of her nose, and failing desperately. “Hold what, baby?”
“I gotta hide it from Daddy,” Serendipity said, and Gale definitely couldn’t hold back his laughter now. He did his best to smother it with a hand, trying to laugh as quietly as possible and hope that she didn’t think he was laughing at her. After a moment, he heard her scramble back into her seat, and she announced at practically the same volume as her whisper “Okay, you can open your eyes now.”
Gale opened his eyes again, as requested, and Serendipity grabbed at the cup he had tapped and wrenched it upwards dramatically. “Uh oh,” she said, and Levity absolutely howled laughing in the background, “sorry Daddy but you lose. The coin isn’t, um, there.”
He leaned back as if in shock. “My goodness!” he said, “what a phenomenal magic trick! You simply must tell me how you did it!”
Serendipity beamed up at him. “Magic, Daddy,” she said, as if he were a simpleton.
“Magic, you say?” He beckoned for her to come closer. “But, if you used magic to hide the coin, then... what is this?”
He reached up to her ear—slender and tapered to a point just like her mother’s—and with a little help from the illusory magic his students should have a solid grasp on by now, he produced a shiny golden coin. He brought it around in front of Serendipity’s face, waggling it towards her. “This looks like a coin hiding in your ear to me,” he said.
She squealed delightedly and grabbed for it, while he pretended to frown dramatically. “And, if that wasn’t your coin… then what is this?” He withdrew a second coin, which she snatched at just as greedily. “Or… goodness, do you keep your whole piggy bank in here?”
As he kept withdrawing illusory coins for her delight, Morena chuckled. “Someone is going to be very upset later tonight when their piggy bank is suddenly only half full,” she said pointedly, reaching for a scone.
“Well, perhaps we can make arrangements to ensure that won’t happen,” he said. “I know better than to come between a Dekarios lass and her treasure hoard.”
“Do it again!” Serendipity bellowed, hanging off of his arm as if trying to pull him to his feet, and not simply trying to direct his hand back to her ear. “More, more!”
“What do we say, Dippy?”
“More!”
“No, we say please.”
“More!!”
“What’s that? You’re speaking in draconic, I don’t understand—you’re asking to be dangled upside down?” Before she could protest, he rose to his feet and scooped her up by her ankles, her squeals of laughter filling the air. “I think I translated correctly, yes?”
“Daddy, nooooo!” she shrieked, even as she hooted and howled with laughter. “Noooo, Daddy!”
“If she thrashes too much, she’s going to get you in the thigh with her horns again,” Levity said in a sing-song voice.
To the surprise of no-one, Serendipity crashed into her nap-time approximately twenty-five minutes later, already half asleep on Gale’s shoulder as he carried her up the stairs.
“Daddy can I sleep with my gold?” she mumbled sleepily, crawling around in the bed to find the optimal placement amongst her literal hoard of pillows and stuffed toys and additional blankets and discarded items of clothing and sparkly costume jewellery.
“How about we put it in your money bank for safe-keeping,” he compromised, “that way, no-one can take it while you have your nap.”
“Okay,” she said, already mostly asleep. She was half buried amongst her dearly beloved fluffy and glittery things. “Love you Daddy.”
He bent and placed a kiss on her forehead. “Love you too, my sparkly little Dip.”
Levity was waiting for him in the hallway, and she grinned and snaked an arm around his waist as he emerged. “Her first magic trick,” she said, with an astonishingly straight face.
He played along. “Her very first magic trick,” he said in agreement, placing a kiss on his wife’s forehead now. He put one arm around her shoulder to match, and the other hand came down to rest on her hip. “I’m sure you had nothing to do with it.”
“I am naught but the picture of innocence, husband.”
“Mm, so my mother, then?”
“I blame Tara.”
He chuckled. “Don’t let her hear you say that,” he said warningly.
There was a stillness in Levity in that moment, a hesitation; he had learned to read it well over these many years, because his beloved was nothing if not a cyclone of magic and energy and passion, always moving, always thinking, never still. When she was still, she was trapped in the spiral of her own thoughts, and nothing good ever came of that. “Something on your mind?”
The hesitation lingered, as she nuzzled beneath his chin, the fingers on her free hand toying with the buttons on his shirt; he felt the telltale twining of her tail, as the coil of muscle wrapped around his calf. He half suspected she did not even realise she did it, most times. “Are you worried about her?” she asked quietly. “About her magic, I mean. You always—I mean, you were a prodigy, it came to you so easily, even during the years of the Spellplague, and she’s just—”
He knew better than to laugh at the nagging nibble of her fears. “She is three,” he said gently, “and yes, she bears your scales, suggesting she has some measure of Ansur’s lineage from you, but if magic is to be her destiny, it will come to her when she is ready for it.”
“Like your mother’s rosebushes were ready for you?” she muttered.
He smiled against her hair. “I’ll not deny it, there’s always going to be a part of me that hopes she follows in my footsteps, and I can share the majesty of the Weave with her, but darling—she’s three. She has time.”
He paused for a beat.
“And besides,” he said, less gentle and more teasing, “with a mother like you to teach her the fundamentals in such a clear, grounded manner, how can she possibly go astray?”
He squirmed to the side and missed the elbow aiming for his ribs; laughing, the two of them made their way back downstairs together.