A Magic of Nightfall

Varina ci’Pallo

“ You look awful tired, Varina,” Nico said.

She was. She was exhausted, so tired that her bones ached. The afternoon had been spent preparing spells, shaping the Scath Cumhacht until the spell was complete, then placing the trigger word and gesture to release it in her mind. The spell-weariness dragged at her-it was worse now than it had been when she was younger, worse since she’d begun experimenting with the Tehuantin method. She’d gone to the small room where they kept Nico to bring him his supper and check on him.

“I’ll be fine in a few turns,” she told Nico. “I just have to go to sleep for a bit so I can recover.”

“Talis was always tired, too, when he did magic things, especially with that bowl. I thought it made him look old, too. Like you.”

The brutal honesty of a child. Varina touched her graying hair, the deep wrinkles that had carved themselves into her face in the last few years. “We pay for magic this way,” she told Nico. “Nothing ever comes to you in this world without cost. You’ll learn that.” She smiled wryly. “Sorry. That sounds like something a parent would say.”

Nico smiled: hesitantly, almost shyly. “Matarh talks like that to me sometimes,” he told her. “Like she’s talking more to herself than me. I’ll try to remember it, though.”

Varina laughed. She sat on the chair alongside his bed, leaning forward to tousle his hair. Nico frowned, sliding back a little on the bed. “Nico,” Varina said, drawing her hand back, “I have to talk to you. Things are happening, outside. Bad things. After I rest a little, I have to go do something, and when I get back, we’re going to have to leave the city, very quickly.”

“Like I had to with Matarh?” He drew his doubled legs up to his chest as he sat on the bed, wrapping his hands around them. He looked at her over his knees.

“Yes, like that.”

“Are you in trouble?”

She had to smile at that. “I’m about to be.”

He sniffed. “Is it because of that man?”

“Karl, you mean? You might say that.”

He released his legs and glanced at the food on the tray but didn’t touch it. “Are you and Karl…?”

She understood what he was asking without the word. “No. What would make you think that?”

“You act like you are. When the two of you talk to each other, you remind me of Matarh and Talis.”

“Well, we’re not… together. Not that way.”

“He likes you, I can tell.”

That made her smile, but the taste of it was bitter. “Oh, you can, can you? When did you become so wise in the way of adults?”

Nico shrugged. “I can tell,” he said again.

“Let’s not talk about this,” she said, though she wanted to. She wondered what Karl would say to Nico if Nico told him the same thing. “I need you to eat, and I need you to get some sleep because very likely we’ll be leaving the city tonight. You need to be ready for that.”

“Will you take me to my matarh?”

“I wish I could, Nico. I really do. But I don’t know where we’ll be going, yet. I’ll take you somewhere safe. That much I promise you. I won’t let anything bad happen to you, and we’ll try to get you back to your matarh. Do you understand me?”

He nodded.

“Good. Then eat your supper, and try to sleep. I’m going to rest myself, in the next room. If you need me, you can call me. Go on now, you should try that soup before it gets cold.”

She watched him for a few minutes as he ate, until she felt her eyelids growing heavy. When she woke up, she discovered she’d fallen asleep in the chair next to his bed, and Nico was asleep himself, curled up near to her with one hand stretched out to touch her leg. Outside, she could hear rain pattering against the roof and the shutters of the house.

She brought the covers up over Nico and pressed her lips to his cheek. She left him then, closing and locking the door behind her.

She hoped she would see him again.