Andrea Höst: The Sleeping Life

"I’m not arguing. But even without Uncle the chances of me convincing Lady Rennyn she wants another student are slim at best. We need to—"

"We need the best. And to have a better strategy than I’ll show her how much I love magic . Be clever about this, instead of falling into your usual trick of getting caught up in whatever you’re thinking and letting your mouth run on by itself. How I ever thought you’d keep a secret—"

"Well I have," Fallon pointed out.

"Exactly! Well, with the help of a little choking, but you obviously can think without your tongue slipping the leash sometimes ."

"Nothing other than discussing you has me blue-faced and fainting," Fallon said. "And you’re one to talk about minding your words given it was your note that caused the problem. Keep this a secret or I’ll kill you indeed."

"It was just a note. I still can’t see how I went wrong. I had the Sigillic perfect, and it all was going as described and—Fel, I wish Lady Rennyn would come back to the city!" Auri whirled and dashed back through Fallon’s door.

Thinking too deeply about the miscasting always unsettled her, and Fallon knew better than to try to talk his sister into joining him. Rubbing his arms in hopes of warming them, he made himself turn the opposite way. The door of Auri’s room was different to all others: was like treacle or spider web, clinging and catching. All of the walls were like that too, but the floor was the worst, and Fallon still couldn’t bear to think about the time he’d tried to go down through it and almost been trapped.

In the waking world the room felt heavy and cold. The door stuck in a warped frame, the beams of the ceiling bowed, the walls leaned. The floorboards spiralled to a point in the very centre of the room. On the night Auri had complained of a headache and refused to go to the theatre, they’d returned to find every piece of her bedroom furniture clumped in the centre of the room, bent and distorted into a single mass. But no blood, no body.

Hand investigators concluded that she’d been trying to summon a mage’s focus—six years before legally permitted—and paid for her over-eagerness with her life. The note Fallon had found in his room had confirmed that, though he couldn’t show his parents or the investigators, since the slip of paper had crumpled into nothing as he read it, and when he’d tried to talk about it hands seemed to close about his throat.

Standing in the centre of the warped and nearly empty room, Fallon wrestled with that memory, with the suffocating weight of Auri’s half-life. It was unsustainable. Wherever it was she was trapped, she drew on his strength to come into the Dream. If she did nothing but read the books he set out, he did not feel the impact too greatly, though there had not been a morning since Auri’s death that he had not woken feeling tired. But it was Auri’s boredom that was liable to kill them both.

The very first night of the Dream, she had found that the world was not entirely soap bubble permeable. If she tried hard enough, she could touch, move, even cast if a Sigillic had been set written and waiting for her. But the energy this cost Fallon was ruinous, not only forcing him to sleep more and more, but bringing him to the very verge of over-commitment, the most common cause of any caster’s death. If a mage commenced a casting that they did not have the strength to sustain, something had to fail: either the casting, or the mage’s heart.

They had found a balance. The page-turner, a Sigillic Fallon would activate before he slept, would allow Auri to read without touching. He would set out newssheets, leave notes. On nights he was better rested, she would draw him into the Dream, and they would talk. But most of Auri’s existence was cold silence while the world slept, and Fallon desperately needed to understand what had gone wrong with her casting so he could fetch her back to the physical world. Focus-summoning required a trip to the dangerous shadow world of the Eferum, but Fallon was certain she was no longer there. Instead, she seemed to have found some place between the two worlds, less dangerous, but also less tangible.

Since it was essential for him to excel as a mage to figure out this puzzle, he attended the Arkathan, the most prestigious of the schools, but the cost took up most of their Mother’s annuity, leaving too little for household expenses. Fallon had hit on the idea of becoming a private student even before Rennyn Claire had surfaced that summer and shown Tyrland the kind of casting that hadn’t been seen since the Elder Mages had walked—and nearly destroyed—the world. But how was he to win her interest when he couldn’t explain how important it was? He loved magic, but he had hardly set the Arkathan ablaze with his brilliance.

"Get to know her other students." Auri, tense but resolute, stood at his elbow. She crossed to examine the Sigillic he had chalked earlier that day, adding: "Not her brother, but those other two: that villager and the Kellian girl. Work out why she decided to teach them, and maybe you can catch her notice the same way. Or get them to recommend you."

Moving carefully, so she didn’t push through it, Auri settled into one of the few pieces of furniture that had not been distorted beyond recognition: a heavy and ornate chair that had been left with a permanent forward bow, embracing its occupant.

"I’ll think about it," Fallon said, though he suspected those reasons would involve being a Kellian or having his home destroyed, neither of which were practical options. "I’m trying this divination because I think the floor in here might be distorting the ones I’ve used before. This should just make any magical emanations visible."

"Did you try it waking?" Auri asked, propping her chin on her hand.

"Yes. Just the usual miscast. The distortion in the physical world is fading a little, I think, but it still makes it too difficult for me to cast there."

Fallon frowned at the sigils he’d chalked down the length of one curving board. Why was it worse in the physical world than Auri’s Dream? And where was the Dream, if it was neither the physical world, nor the Eferum, the dimension that was the source of all magic? There were so many experiments he could try, and it was maddening to never have the energy to attempt them, or the freedom to discuss them with someone more interested in theory than his sister. She’d always found the why of magic boring, and had been so naturally talented that she felt she could skip plodding lesson plans and all the theory that went with the practice. If Auri had cared about theory they wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

"I swear, if you meet Lady Rennyn and spend an hour standing there thinking about what you might say to her instead of just going ahead and doing , I will—"

"Haunt me?" Fallon swallowed a giggle he knew would sound wrong. It wasn’t funny, not at all, and if he was half the mage he wanted to be he’d be neither slow nor rash, but simply sure. The kind of mage Lady Rennyn was said to be.

Sigillic casting was easy—so long as it was written correctly, was a true and tested formulation, all that was necessary was to feed power and let it work. He’d researched a divination that seemed perfect for his purposes: simple, and robust, showing only lingering traces of worked Efera. Fallon could cast it in his sleep—and almost stopped feeding power, thinking about how true that was. But neither distraction nor the strange environment prevented the Sigillic from obediently completing.

Pastel blue shading. It made the cold worse somehow, but it had done exactly what Fallon had wanted, and he let his breath out, pleased. That the entire room still carried the imprint of Auri’s miscasting was obvious to anyone who entered it, but what Fallon had wanted was the impression of the sigils she had used, the Sigillic form that had dictated the magical result. Sigils written with ink or chalk were usually consumed during a casting, but a strong Sigillic could at times leave a physical or Efera imprint, and Fallon’s divination was one used by the Hand to uncover the terms of Sigillics which had burned away or been erased.