Chapter Text
“This is a waste of time. We’ve been here all day, I’m never gonna get better at magic if I don’t practice!”
Agott yanked her hand away from Olruggio’s and shuffled away from the meatball kebab he was holding out to her. Her face was flushed an angry pink, and her freshly cut curls were sticking out from under her cap in an unkempt halo around her head. She folded her small arms and stuck out her chin at Qifrey defiantly. “Let’s just go home already!”
Olruggio grunted and bit into the well-seasoned meatball himself. “Being a witch isn’t only about learning more spells and practicing them, you know. A fundamental part of being a witch is learning how to use your knowledge and abilities to help other people, especially those who don’t have access to magic like you do. A place like this—” He waved a hand at the festival around them, gesturing to the bustling crowds and rows of decorated booths filling the town square. “—is one such example of where witches can be asked to provide their services. No witch is too good to help out their fellow man, Agott. Not even a daughter of the House of Arklaum.”
The now-meatless skewer disappeared under Olruggio’s cloak, and a couple seconds later, it reappeared in his hand with a dazzling display of colorful sparks dancing at its tip. His beard twitched with a sly smile as he bent down and offered it to Agott.
“And sometimes these services include reminding children that festivals are supposed to be fun.”
That earned him an even deeper scowl from the young witch.
Qifrey laughed, his eye bright with amusement, and scooped Agott up in his arms, settling her on his forearm so she could peer over the crowd from the safety of his shoulder. “Why don’t you tell us which stall you want to check out next? We’ll need to eat dinner before we head back home anyway, and if you spot anyone who looks like they could use a little assistance from magic, you can guide us in drawing the spells you think will help them best.”
Agott’s large violet eyes widened at the unexpectedly warm gesture, and her cheeks colored. Her lips pressed into a thin line, but her stormy expression seemed to lighten a little as she glanced around the square curiously.
“Okay, fine.”
The three were making their way toward a stand of caramelized fruit tarts that had caught Olruggio’s attention when a small girl with a flower wreath atop her short golden hair suddenly emerged from what appeared to be an alcove in the outer walls of the castle. She nearly ran headlong into Olruggio in her excitement, and after a stumble and a hasty squeak of “Sorry, excuse me, mister!” she raced past them toward a textile stall not far away. She had a leather-bound book clutched in her arms, and her face was lit with joy as she made her way to a kindly-looking woman in a yellow dress, who was calling to her that it was time to go home.
Olruggio shook his head as they continued on their way. As rigid and severe as Agott could be, he was quietly grateful that she was at least a relatively easy student to manage. It had taken him longer than Qifrey to get used to having a young child to look after, and he suspected a more rambunctious apprentice would have been beyond him.
As they walked past the alcove, he absently glanced toward the opening in the stone wall. It wasn’t an alcove at all. The doorless entryway led into a basement-like stone chamber beneath the ground floor, and a shadowy figure sat in the far corner dressed in black. The person had a pointed cap on, but… he paused, squinting into the darkness. Was that a mask?
Unnerved, he turned to look back at Qifrey and caught sight of his friend’s face. Qifrey had gone rigid. His good eye was wide and unblinking, and his pupils were narrowed. His gaze turned cold as ice as it locked onto the unidentified witch with an almost predatory intensity, and for a chilling moment, Olruggio wasn’t sure he recognized the man beside him.
Before he could ask Qifrey what was wrong, Qifrey had already begun to move with lightning speed. In a blink, Agott was back on the ground, and Qifrey’s palm quire was in his hand. With a sharp stroke of his ink wand, a torrent of water erupted from his outstretched hand toward the masked figure.
The water struck the stone walls at the far end of the room with a thunderous crack, snapping Olruggio out of his shocked state. Qifrey stepped past him, already moving again before Olruggio could process what had just happened. His cloak flew back as he pulled out a pre-drawn casting seal and swept it in a wide arc along the stone of the entryway. The walls immediately began to extend inward; Qifrey was trying to seal them all inside. Olruggio’s eyes darted around the dark room, trying to get his bearings before the fading light of dusk was completely cut off by Qifrey’s spell, but the masked witch was nowhere to be seen. Impossible… they couldn’t possibly have both imagined it. Where—
A blast of wind suddenly hit him with the force of something solid, and he stumbled backward. Instinctively, he reached down to grab Agott’s upper arm, yanking her behind him just before he looked back up to see a cloaked figure darting past him and into the crowd.
What the hell was that?
“Qifrey, what—”
He started to turn, but Qifrey was already gone, bolting after the masked figure without so much as an explanation.
“Oi—! Qifrey! What are you doing?!”
Stunned, Olruggio looked down at Agott. The confusion in her eyes mirrored his own. He had never seen Qifrey react like that before. He still had no idea what was going on or what any of it meant, but he knew Qifrey. Whatever this was, it had to be deeply personal, and he couldn’t let him face it alone.
Olruggio let go of Agott’s arm and took her hand, enclosing it in the comforting warmth of his own.
“Agott, are you okay?”
For once, Agott was speechless. She gave a small, shaky nod.
“Do not let go of my hand until I tell you, and remember: you must not cast in public. Understood?”
Another nod.
“Then let’s go after Qifrey.”
A few seconds’ head start was all it had taken for Qifrey and his quarry to disappear from Olruggio’s line of sight. The sky was growing dark with the coming of twilight, and Olruggio couldn’t make out which direction to go in the crowded square until he heard panicked shouting up ahead.
He rushed forward, pulling Agott along with him, and as the agitated crowd parted before him, he saw it. Crackling flames were climbing up the canopy of a nearby vendor stall, spreading rapidly from several upturned lanterns that had been cut down from where they once hung overhead. Farther ahead, several more stalls were also ablaze, burning like beacons beneath the darkening sky. This must’ve been the work of the witch Qifrey was chasing.
Olruggio’s jaw tightened, and he let go of Agott’s hand to reach for his palm quire. He needed to hurry if he hoped to be of any help to Qifrey, but he couldn’t just leave these fires to burn. Almost all the civilians here were Outsiders, and the fires were growing fast. People’s lives could be at risk if he did nothing to help them, and Qifrey, despite his skill with water magic, had continued his chase without putting these fires out.
But before he could begin drawing a spell under his cloak, he saw a dark figure streaking up into the air above the crowd some distance away. Chunks of hardened earth billowed outward from behind the black cloak—had Qifrey tried to trap him with a sand cage spell?—as the witch flew upward, following the castle’s outer wall toward the roof of one of its towers. Olruggio couldn’t see his face from this distance, but Qifrey’s white cloak and hat were easily recognizable as he launched himself into the air in close pursuit, sending water bolts shooting after the masked figure to force his target off course while steadily closing the distance between them.
Qifrey wasn’t thinking straight if he was casting spells this recklessly and offensively with so many witnesses watching. There wasn’t time. He needed to reach Qifrey before things got out of hand.
With one last glance at the roaring fires spreading on the ground, Olruggio gritted his teeth and hoisted Agott up into one arm, holding her against his side. The ground might still have been safer than dragging her into a potential confrontation with an unknown witch, even with the fires. But the thought of abandoning Agott in this chaos, after the adult she trusted most to keep her safe had already left her behind without a second look, turned his stomach. With a barked command of, “Hold on tight!” he took off into the air with Agott’s arms wrapped around his neck and raced toward the rooftop Qifrey had just followed the masked witch onto.
Qifrey, what on earth is going on?! For you to be acting like this… What haven’t you told me?
He couldn’t bring Agott into the middle of whatever this was. Qifrey didn’t seem to be in control of himself right now, and he trusted the masked stranger even less. Just before reaching the rooftop, he slowed and landed on a balcony on one of the castle’s upper floors. He carefully set Agott down and knelt in front of her so she could see the seriousness in his expression.
“No matter what you see or hear, you are to stay put right here until we come back for you. I can’t look out for Qifrey and protect you at the same time.”
“But I can help!” Agott finally burst out. Her small hands were balled into fists, and there was no fear on her face as she glared up at Olruggio with a fire in her eyes. “The Outsiders can’t see us from up here, and I’ve been practicing my primer spells every day. Let me help you protect Master Qifrey!”
Olruggio shook his head firmly. “I mean it, Agott. I’m not your master, but I am responsible for your safety. Do not do anything reckless or dangerous, you hear me?”
He didn’t wait for Agott to protest. The confrontation above them had gone eerily quiet, and something about it made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. After giving Agott’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze, he rose into the air again and headed for the roof.
Just before he reached the height of the tower’s rooftop, he heard Qifrey’s voice. He abruptly stopped, hovering in place in the air just out of sight of anyone standing on the floor above. Qifrey’s voice was dark, darker than he’d ever heard it.
“All these years spent searching for clues, chasing every lead I could find, and you choose to show yourself at a festival for Outsiders. Who are you, and why are you here?”
“Now, Qifrey,” an unfamiliar voice replied, the eerie calm beneath it a stark contrast to the barely restrained fury in Qifrey’s. “That’s not what you really want to know, is it?”
“What do you know of what I want?”
“Don’t you want to know who you were before the pointed caps found you?”
A stunned silence followed.
“The pointed caps don’t know the first thing about your affliction, do they? But I do. Don’t you want to know how to stop the seed inside you from sprouting?”
A sharp inhale. “You—! Were you the one who took my eye and left me like this?!”
The masked witch chuckled. “Still asking the wrong questions, are we? Shouldn’t you be asking if we’ve learned how to control it? If we’ve succeeded in learning how to make the Silverwood serve our needs, and how to remove it from its host when it stops doing so?”
Qifrey’s voice grew thin, stretched tight like a string about to snap.
“So that’s why you’re here. To tempt me. I suppose you plan to tell me that the answers I’ve been denied all these years lie with forbidden magic?”
“Magic is magic, Qifrey. It is simply a tool. The pointed caps call it forbidden because they fear what it can do. How many years have they watched you live with that curse, insisting nothing could be done when they condemned the very magic that could have helped you?”
The silence was deafening now.
“You don’t even remember your own name, do you? I could tell you.”
“Enough.”
“Come with me, and I’ll show you what the pointed hats have kept hidden from you all these years.”
Olruggio’s veins ran cold.
Forbidden magic. Silverwood. A curse Qifrey had never once mentioned to him… What was all of this? Why did this stranger know that Qifrey had lost his memories before he came to the Great Hall? And Qifrey was responding like he knew something Olruggio didn’t.
None of it made sense, but he knew with absolute certainty now that this person was dangerous.
With a blast from his sylph shoes, he propelled himself upward, and the rooftop finally came into view. Qifrey stood before him, his back turned as he faced the masked witch, and Olruggio had just enough time to see Qifrey pull out a large roll of cloth with a prepared seal drawn on its surface before he heard Qifrey’s composure snap.
“I said, enough!”
The moonlight shone brighter on the rooftop as the clouds above them vanished in an instant, casting the masked witch’s visage in harsh relief. The eye on the mask seemed to bore into Olruggio’s as the figure turned to face him. There was no brim on this witch’s cap. Just who was this person…?
As Olruggio’s hand closed around his palm quire, a colossal mass of water gathered in the air between Qifrey and his adversary. Its rippling surface glittered under the clear night sky as the water began to shape itself into the form of a dragon. Before Olruggio could cast his own spell, it spread its massive wings and hurtled toward the masked figure.
The masked witch didn’t even flinch as a hand emerged from under the dark, heavy cloak. Olruggio caught sight of a magic circle drawn into the palm just before the water seemed to freeze in mid-air, the dragon’s jaws spread wide just inches from the masked witch’s extended hand.
The water shifted before the seal, twisting around on itself in a vortex, before it suddenly surged back in the direction it came.
Qifrey flung his arm up reflexively, and a wall of stone rose up from the castle rooftop in front of him. Olruggio, who was still hovering in the air behind him, was not so fortunate as to react in time.
The water slammed into him like a brick wall. His shouted warning of “Qifrey—!” was cut short as the force of the ice-cold liquid engulfed him and knocked the air from his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. His vision went black, and then his stomach lurched as gravity took hold and dragged him down.
“Olruggio!”
Distantly, he heard Qifrey’s voice, horrified and shouting his name from somewhere above him. He couldn’t hear anything else after that over the roar of wind rushing past him as he fell. He blinked hard, trying to clear the water from his eyes, and the spots in his vision cleared just enough for him to see Qifrey throwing a seal into the air. For a brief moment, everything seemed to go still—and then the air around him suddenly went dry, as though all moisture had been pulled out of it at once.
Above him, droplets of water began to form and converge. They twisted around each other, combining in mid-air into a spiraling formation in a downward direction, pulled down by something faster than gravity as the water raced toward and past him.
Olruggio didn’t have a chance to turn his head to follow the water’s path before a sudden force seized the edge of his cloak and yanked him sideways. He let out a yelp, expelling the little air left in his chest before water closed over him again as he was pulled into the swirling vortex below.
Then, as abruptly as it had formed, the water dispersed, sending him crashing into a stall on the ground. A fierce, searing pain flared at his side—he had fallen into the jagged edges of a collapsed beam. He looked down with a groan at the torn skin where the wood had cut deeply into the side of his abdomen. Had he fallen a few more inches to the left, it would have gone straight through him.
Gasping, he rolled over onto his other side and pushed himself onto his knees. His vision swam, and the water dripping down from his hair into his eyes wasn’t helping. His arms shook—his sodden cloak felt like a weighted net, trapping him under it. He forced down the bile rising in his throat and gave his head a hard shake. He didn’t have time to sit here. Qifrey had turned his back on his opponent to cast his water vortex spell to break Olruggio’s fall, and that would’ve opened him up to an attack if the masked witch intended to hurt him.
Olruggio squinted up at the sky, searching desperately for signs of movement at the top of the tower. His heart leapt into his throat when he saw Qifrey’s form lying motionless on the rooftop as the masked witch ran toward a stone archway at the other end of the tower.
Qifrey, get up! Show me that you’re okay.
Clutching his hand to his bleeding side, Olruggio staggered onto his feet and lifted his shoe to peer at the glyphs at the sole. Some of the lines were smudged by the force of the water, but his handiwork wasn’t entirely ruined. He might be able to risk flying back up to Qifrey, but he’d need to redraw first. His breaths came shallow and labored as he leaned against a broken crate next to him. He had to make sure—
His breath caught as he saw Qifrey stir, and he froze. Qifrey slowly struggled to his feet and turned toward the archway. Together, they watched the masked witch reach the stone arch at the other end of the roof. The moment the witch passed under the structure, they vanished from sight as if they had never been there in the first place, and Olruggio knew. It was a windowway.
And Qifrey had taken off running toward it.
“Come with me, and I’ll show you what the pointed hats have kept hidden from you all these years.”
Was Qifrey serious…?! Was he really chasing after this person who spoke of forbidden magic like… like it could offer Qifrey something he was desperately seeking?
No one but the masked witch knew where the windowway led. If Olruggio let Qifrey disappear through it, he couldn’t know if and when he’d ever see him again. And if this witch was truly a Brimmed Hat, and if the Knights Moralis were to learn of this and find Qifrey before Olruggio did, he feared there was a chance he could lose Qifrey for good.
As he watched his best friend’s silhouette race across the backdrop of the starry night sky, he made up his mind. He wouldn’t make it to Qifrey in time by flying. He had to stop him at any cost.
Olruggio reached up and unclasped his cloak, pulling it off his shoulders in one sweeping motion. His hidden scrolls and palm quire were all soaked through now and would be impossible to draw on, but he had one option left. With a sharp flick of his arm, he unfurled his cloak on the cobblestoned ground with the lining facing the sky. He dropped to his knees and seized a loosened seam near the hood and tore it open, revealing a large, intricate—but incomplete—magic circle hidden within the cloak’s double lining.
He took out his wand and, with a shout of “Stand back!” at the bystanders rushing up to him to check on his wounds, began to draw. He drew openly before the Outsiders surrounding him, racing against time to complete his spell before Qifrey crossed the threshold of the windowway above.
When the last signs had been added, he closed the circle and rose quickly to his feet, backing away as the air in front of him began to crackle. Within seconds, the space above the cloak burst into flame, and the curious spectators who had drawn too close stumbled back in alarm as the blaze swelled outward in a rush of heat. Then the unmistakable shape of spread wings emerged from the white-hot ball of fire, climbing higher and faster than the flames consuming the stalls around them. A burning phoenix soared straight up into the sky in full view of the festival attendees, lighting up the night sky like the heavens themselves had caught fire as it aimed itself at the archway above.
The fire spell crashed into the pillars of the archway just before Qifrey could reach it, sending stone crumbling down and destroying the ring of glyphs that connected the tower to wherever the masked witch had tried to lead him. Qifrey dropped to his knees, and a frustrated cry followed, faint but still audible from where Olruggio stood.
Olruggio’s throat tightened in confusion as he watched Agott fly up from her balcony ledge toward her master.
What had just happened?
“Did you see that? The witch drew on his cloak—and the minute he was done, fire came out of it!”
“I can’t believe it. Do you think magic is… drawn?”
A hand grabbed Olruggio’s shoulder from behind, and the astonished chatter of the onlookers around him suddenly became louder as his focus was pulled away from Qifrey and Agott. The implications of what he had just done in front of all these people suddenly set in, and a knot tightened in his gut as he turned to face the person standing behind him.
He came face to face with Easthies. Behind him, the rest of the Knights Moralis were already striding into the crowd, and his next words brought Olruggio’s fragmented thoughts fully back to the present.
“Stand down.”
Olruggio grimaced and took a step back from Easthies, fighting to stay upright as the pain at his side began to burn.
“I had no choice. An apprentice I’m charged with watching over was in immediate danger, and her master was incapacitated by a dangerous witch. It was a matter of life and death—”
“You are about to cost all these people their memories of this night because of what you’ve done,” Easthies interrupted sharply. “You acted with full knowledge that you were violating the Pact. There is no justification for your actions.”
Easthies’ dark gaze flicked up toward the huddled forms of Agott clinging to Qifrey at the top of the tower. His eyes were colder than the night air seeping through Olruggio’s soaked clothes.
“Especially from a witch in your position as Watchful Eye, Olruggio of the Torch.”