Over the next few days, Drystan and I spent so much time palming cards at the top or bottom of a deck as we shuffled, or hiding them behind our fingers, that new blisters formed on our fingertips. Eventually, we moved onto coins, billiard balls, eggs and flowers from paper cones. Soon, I felt as though my fingers had a mind of their own. My thumbs no longer caused me pain.
Drystan grew impatient, as many of the tricks were those he had learned from Maske before, or were a regular part of his clown’s repertoire.
“When will we move onto illusion?” he would ask.
“When you are ready,” was all Maske would reply.
At the end of the three months, Maske did not ask us to leave.
Neither did we ask to go.
The next day, he said that we were ready, and we’d meet the magician’s assistant he planned to hire.
“I don’t like that Maske is bringing in someone new,” I told Drystan as we hung our paltry washing on the line attached to the roof.
“Maske has known her since she was a child, and says we can trust her.”
“That’s all very well and good that he knows her, but we don’t. And he’s being very cagey about this girl’s background.”
“He doesn’t like to divulge secrets. His or anyone else’s.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said, dourly, as we made our way back to the loft. “So maybe I should be the pretty female assistant. You’re better at magic than me anyway.”
“I’ve only had more practice.” He cocked his head, studying me. “That could work.”
I stifled a girlish blush, wondering if he had just called me pretty. Did I want him to consider me pretty, or handsome?
He continued without hesitation. “I think most of the illusions Maske is planning require two people, though.”
“What about stagehands?” I asked.
“Maske doesn’t like stagehands,” he said. “Many of them have stolen or sold his tricks to his rivals. Besides, you’re probably better off hiding as a man.”
“Why?” I asked. “People are hunting for me as both a man and a woman. I’m not safe as either.” Bitterness colored my voice. “They’re looking for two escaped boys from the circus.”
“Yes, but not two boys, a girl, and an old magician.”
“And not an old magician, a boy, and a girl,” I countered.
He paused at the heat in my voice. “So, are you saying you want to go back to dressing as a woman? Is that it?” he asked.
That brought me up short.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose not. I’ve worn skirts for quite a long time. I’ve only worn trousers for less than a year.”
Drystan looked as though he wanted to ask me something, but he wasn’t sure if he should.
“What is it?” I asked, my stomach twisting.
His hair fell over his forehead. I fought down the urge to push it back from his face. Freckles dotted his nose and cheeks as though they were dusted with cinnamon. “We haven’t really broached the subject, have we?”
We hadn’t. Not since I’d shown him what I was. Before that, he’d thought I was a girl disguised as a boy.
“We have successfully avoided many things for months, yes.” We never did move from the loft to separate bedrooms downstairs, but I always dressed in the bathroom. Drystan was less self-conscious, often lounging on his bed without his shirt after a bath, leaving me studiously avoiding staring at the flat planes of his stomach and chest.
He pressed his lips together. “It’s hard to phrase it like I want to. But – how do you feel? About what you are?”
I turned the question over in my mind, trying to find the words that would articulate how I did feel. In the end, it was simple.
“I’m fine with what I am.” It felt freeing to say that aloud. I would not change what I was. I ran away from the chance. “What I don’t like is that many are not, and that I never know how people will react if they find out.”
He nodded. “Was that why you hid it from Aenea?”
Aenea. Her easy laugh, the sound of her voice. Her dark eyes, the soft curl of the brown hair about her temples, the shape of her smile. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I had sixteen years of being told that if anyone found out, it’d be shameful. The first boy to discover what I was…” I would not tell Drystan that it had been his younger brother, Damien. That would just be too bizarre. “He… He didn’t react well. I was afraid that Aenea would be the same. But I took the choice away from her to decide for herself. I paid the price. But not as much as she did.” I balled the fabric of the quilt in my hands.
I didn’t want to talk about Aenea. I kept my grief tightly controlled so I could make it through the days, and I didn’t want it to break free. But it would, in little ways. Going to bed alone, when often she’d come to visit me in my cart on the beach and we’d fall asleep together. Remembering something she’d find funny and being unable to tell her. Those stabs of guilt and grief I could not protect myself from.
“How did you feel? When you… discovered what I was?” As soon as the question left my lips I wished I hadn’t asked it. I held the tip of my tongue between my teeth.
“Surprised.”
I said nothing.
“How many others are there like you?” He said the words carefully, as if worried they would cause offense.
I shrugged, striving for a nonchalance I did not feel. “A doctor gave me to my adopted parents, so I don’t know where I came from. I was trotted to plenty of others during my youth. There are other disorders, but they haven’t come across anyone quite like me.” How strange yet liberating to discuss this so frankly. I never had, except with Cyril, who had known almost his whole life what I was. Drystan seemed only curious and interested.
“What do you think that means?”
I frowned at him.
Drystan shrugged a shoulder. “What I mean is, do you think that’s significant? That you might be the only one?”
I swallowed. “I don’t think I am. I merely think it’s rarer than the other forms they’ve come across.”
Drystan had that look on his face when he wanted to say something else but was not sure if he should.
“You can say it.”
“Do you… think you might be a Chimaera?”
I did not like this turn of conversation.
He sensed he had offended me. “You called yourself a Kedi that night,” he said, defensive.
“It’s as good a name as any – I’m not sure what else to call it. The doctors never shared their official diagnoses with me.” I had taken to calling myself Kedi after Mister Illari gave me the figurine, but I did not know if I fully embraced it.
“They’ve been gone for millennia, if they ever really existed at all,” I said.
Drystan made a noncommittal sound.
“What?” I asked him.
“Nothing. It just reminded me of something I read at university.”
I looked at him expectantly. He shook the hair out of his eyes.
“It was a banned scientific paper looking at birth anomalies in the past century. They seem to be on the rise. Babies born with scaled legs, a tail, webbed toes, that sort of thing. The report said the findings were skewed.”
“There you go.”
“Some say it’s a conspiracy to keep it quiet because they don’t want to upset the public.”
“And what happens to these babies?”
“They’re operated upon to fix them,” he said blithely and then winced at the look on my face.
“Sorry,” he said, “I forgot.”
“It’s nothing.” I hunched my shoulders.
“I didn’t mean it, Micah. And a tail is different from–”
“A dick,” I said, shortly.
He didn’t bat an eyelid. “Well, exactly. If I’d had a tail removed, I don’t think I’d miss it. The other, however…”
He shocked me into a laugh, dispelling some of the tension. We were so close to each other on the bed. I leaned back, but decided to take advantage of his talkative mood. “You haven’t told me your story yet, you know.”
He raised an eyebrow. “My story?”
“Well,” I began, hesitant. “I only know you were born Drystan Hornbeam. I don’t know why you left university, or how you know Maske.”
He did not answer for so long that I did not think he would. “Do you realize, Micah, that despite all you’ve seen, even recently, you’re still remarkably sheltered?”
“You don’t know all that I’ve seen,” I said, churlish, though I knew that in many ways he was right.
He laughed. “I would not assume to. But I have a feeling you have not truly seen the dregs of Imacharan society.” He sighed and turned to me, the candlelight playing on the angular planes of his face, the circles under his eyes. Though he hid it well, he still suffered. As did I, but I had not killed a man. Though I had blinded men.
As Gene, I would have hugged my friend Anna without a second thought when she was upset. I’d not touched Drystan often, except during the pantomime and that night everything fell apart. How often did boys hug each other? My arms stayed heavy at my sides.
I did not tell him to forget it, that I did not need to know. Because I did.
We stared at each other, his blue eyes boring in to mine.
“Do you want the long version or the short version?” he asked.
“The long one,” I whispered.
He sighed, composing his thoughts.
“I was raised with the best of everything,” he began. “And I was a rotten child.”
It was at odds with the Drystan I knew.
“It took an embarrassingly long time before I realized that the world did not, in fact, revolve around me. This happened when I was sixteen and about to start at Snakewood.”
My age. The six years between us seemed impossibly far. And sixteen was a young age to start at the Royal University, which was notoriously selective in its exams.
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I liked a girl, or thought I did. Linda Aspen. She was a pretty thing – long dark hair and blue eyes. I decided I’d court her, and my parents approved of the match. Thought it would be easy. Nothing challenged me, you see. My marks from the tutors were nothing but praise, and I did well at hunting and court dances. I had friends from the best families.”
“Sounds like you were a plonker.”
He laughed. “Oh, I was. You would have hated me.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. I gave Linda the best gifts – the finest chocolates from Byssia, bouquets of sugared flowers from Linde. I thought she’d be mine by month’s end.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Yech.” Not that I’d been courted much as Gene, but I knew enough that it would not have turned my head. Though if it had been Drystan… I quelled that thought. “Didn’t work, did it?”
“She was unmoved by my affections.” He winked. “This, of course, made me think that the answer was simple: more gifts.”
I groaned. “You cad.”
“You’re fond of insulting me tonight.”
I pushed his shoulder. “I’m not insulting you
now
, I’m insulting you
then
.”
“Of course. But yes, I gave her more gifts. Asked her to dance at all the balls. Came to her house unannounced and asked her to walk with me in the park.”
“Good grief – you stalked her?”
“I didn’t stalk her! Alright, maybe slightly. I thought it was romantic.”
“Stalking is never romantic.”
“True enough. Once, just the once, she accepted my invitation to walk in the park. And I thought I had her.”
“Uh oh,” I said.
“Indeed. She only walked with me to tell me to leave her alone. She turned and walked away, leaving me stupefied in the middle of the park.”
“Poor little Drystan.”
“You won’t feel too sorry for him. Poor little Drystan made a spectacle of himself.”
“You didn’t.” I leaned toward him.
“Oh, but I did. I yelled and stomped after her. Everyone turned to stare, and it was a fair summer’s day. A lot of my peers were there with their friends or intendeds.
“She laughed at me.” Drystan put on a falsetto. “‘I can do as I please. And maybe if you bothered to try and speak with me you would have realized this. Do you know my favorite wine, or chocolate? My best friend’s name? Do you even know what color my eyes are?’ she asked.
“Naturally, I couldn’t answer any of her questions. I remember her eyes were a bright green. ‘Just because you want something does not mean it is yours to take,’ she said. ‘Especially when it is something as complex as a woman’s heart.’”
I giggled.
“Yes, she was rather melodramatic, wasn’t she?” He smiled wryly.
“Those were the last words she said to me, and I have not seen her since. She’s Lady Linda Windbeam now. I wish I could thank her. Her words found something within me that I had dampened with fine horses and expensive cologne.”
I smiled at him. “So what did little Drystan do next?”
“My, my, so curious, Micah.”
I made a face at him, but I hung onto his next words.
“I continued with university. I wanted to understand people, so I started watching them. I sketched them, trying to see what they felt and who they were. I studied history, religion, and philosophy. I failed classes like law and business. My parents weren’t too pleased.”
“I’ll bet,” I said, thinking of the austere Lord Hornbeam.
“I considered studying antiquities, as I was interested in the Chimaera and the Alder, but in the end I settled on philosophy. I stumbled across the teaching of Alvis Tyndall – do you know him?”
I shook my head.
“He’s quite obscure, and the monarchy don’t quite… approve of his philosophy. He stressed that nobody could ever truly know humanity without first trying to be the best, and then trying to be the worst. You will find out where you belong on that scale of light and dark, but you will never, truly know until you do.”
I swallowed.
“At university, I had been kind and courteous to all around me. I was on my way to being a saint. And so I decided to become a demon.”