[story] drinking sand
author: thornsmoke (thornsmoke)
email: lasyungwen [at] gmail.com
Connor writes to her sometimes. Even in his letters, though, he doesn't tell her why he left.
Instead, he talks about all the things he could never say in real life: stuff about knives, spitting fire, magic tricks and tricks that aren't but hurt like hell just the same. About dancers pirouetting with curving hands and empty faces on wires thin and shining as hammered gold, lights roping through the tents at night.
He covers pages with these descriptions, writes ugly bits of verse in the margins, draws clumsy stick-figure diagrams of how he once filled in for one of the trapeze artists. (He skips over the part where it wasn't actually at a performance but a practice, and he fell and took an hour to be untangled from the netting and even the youngest of the dancers laughed at him.) With every line, the distance between them expands. These things in his letters, he knows, are the things she would never listen to: things he would have to let slide through his voice like water; things he could never voice for fear that she would, eventually, stop hearing anything he said.
The Lise Ash he left likes order, he reminds himself, and her ideas of beauty are very different from all the wild things he has seen.
Somehow, the news that Connor writes gets out to the troupe. The magician makes fun of him for wasting the paper; the dancers sidle up to him and ask him if he'll read them aloud; Tristan only nods and looks away. None of them care, so long as nobody takes him back, and Connor's made sure of that.
The trick is not to send them.
He likes performing in strange cities - the stranger, the better. His favorites are the cities with sculptures as tall as houses, showing a bearded young god with arms flung out to the sky or a triumphant general on a horse; the towns with the giant potato cast in bronze in the square; the outskirts with coffeehouses in the shape of coffeepots. He roots himself there with those oddities. He can say, This is nowhere near home, and be sure.
It warms him, as long as he remembers to leave before the memories start bleeding through: corners rounding into old paths walked in childhood, strangers' faces changing underneath his tired eyes.
It happens more often than he could have ever guessed. Too many times he hesitates on the high wire, seeing her glare leap out of the crowd. He doesn't know why; it isn't as if he and Lise ever had anything. Eventually, he gives up on answers and gets used to having the sensation of missing her knotted between his shoulder blades, as if her glare (a thousand miles away) is still painting a target on his back.
There are times in the night, sprawled across the creaky mattress, when he thinks, I can never go home again, and feels such burning satisfaction that he's almost afraid of what he has lost.
Once, wandering through the streets at night, he stops at an intersection to wait for the lights to change. A girl catches his eye - ash-electric hair and a certain lift of the chin - and he starts out of confusion.
She slinks up to him, slow and easy, and he should be running but he has no idea how. And they do look so very much alike: tall and deeply awkward to the cores of their bones. Up close, she has old eyes and could never be anybody he's known. But by the time he remembers how to move, how to fall, she has grabbed his arm and pressed her mouth to his.
The stranger tastes mostly wet, and very faintly of something bitter. Ash, he thinks, but it could never be anything so romantic.
He shoves her. "Go away," he says wildly. "I don't have any money." Without a word, she gives him a swift, disdainful look and walks away. He watches the twitching sway of her hips as she stalks down the sidewalk.
Their routes rarely cross those of other traveling companies, but it does happen. The magician is brooding over a mirror cracked by a careless trapeze artist that day and clearly has no use for him, so he goes to visit the other circus in town.
Their clowns are fat and frightening; their acrobats move in less-than-perfect synchronicity, and their games are too hard. He wastes half an hour at a stand, half-heartedly trying for a pink teddy bear, before he realises that he only wants one to annoy Lise. Hastily, he heads for the tents instead.
The fortuneteller there is young, with swinging curls and hoop earrings. Her tea doubles as paint thinner. She pores over his palm and eventually tells him that he's a clever young man whose girlfriend - "for I can tell that you have a girl, darling" - feels betrayed by him. "Careful, dear," she says. "She's not happy about it. She could leave you."
Connor only laughs.
On his way out, an old woman catches him by the arm. "You," she says, "You're on the right track. A chosen one, if you like that type of thing." She looks familiar, and Connor thinks that his nostalgia's sunken really low if even senior citizens remind him of Lise.
"That's great," he says. "I don't have any money and soon I won't have any circulation. Please let go of my arm or amputate it." He waits. She holds on. "Pick one before it drops off on its own."
She gives him the fish-eye and sniffs darkly, and he remembers where he's seen her. She's his circus's own fortuneteller, though she rarely comes out of her tent. The whole circus lives in deep superstitious fear of her. The jugglers bury the leftovers of the first meal in each new city behind her tent. For luck, they say, and it's true that only Jonas, who skipped breakfast that day, has ever dropped a ball. "Though I was always sure that chosen ones were more respectful of their elders."
"Respect is only used by people without enough wit for insults," Connor says. "Go find someone else to bug. It's a big city." He wrenches at his arm but she hangs on.
"Tell the magician that it's time," she says, both soft and sharp at once. "It's the ninth prediction and the right one, and if you don't consent he'll never have a chance."
At last, he manages to twist himself out of reach. "Tell him yourself," he says, and turns away.
He gets five paces down the sidewalk before he hears her again. "Stranger in a strange land!" she calls.
"I hate Heinlein novels!" he shouts back to her, and gets strange looks from the passers-by before he rounds the corner and disappears.
Eventually, three cities later, he tells the magician. After being brow-beaten by four acrobats and a fire-eater and hearing tales from every member of the troupe about the startling accuracy of the fortuneteller's prophecies, it's not as if any other option's open to him.
Aleron only looks at him. "You?" he says.
"Uh," Connor says. "Why are you wearing a dress?"
The magician draws himself up. "It's a traditional robe--"
"--with sequins on it because he lost a bet," Tristan says, looking considerably more cheerful than Connor has seen him for a while.
"I did not lose," Aleron says, his foxish features sharp and sullen. "T. S. Eliot was referring to John Donne's mermaids in the last part of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It's not my fault that you are an uneducated boor of a guardian."
"Talk all you like," Tristan says. "Just don't forget the corset." He glances at Connor. "Are you sure it was our fortuneteller?"
For some reason, though his words come easily, his expression is taut and careful.
"Yeah," Connor says, and hesitates. "N-- Yeah. Definitely."
The magician exchanges an inexplicable look with Tristan, and not for the first time Connor is a little unnerved by the two of them together. The circus performers, who have mythology and superstitions for every little thing in their acts, are utterly silent on the subject of how Tristan and Aleron might have met, and why they have stayed together.
"Then," Aleron says at last. "I suppose it's you after all." He smiles, and Connor feels a little wary - a belated survival instinct kicking in at last. "I've been waiting a long time for this."
The magician spends the next two weeks stalking through the circus muttering darkly about angles and axes. Everyone in the circus nods sagely and tolerates him. It's widely understood that Aleron kicks puppies and gives everyone beady shark looks when he's in the midst of inventing a new trick, which is almost inevitably a decent crowd-pleaser.
In fact, it's a month and five days before he actually figures out what Aleron's trying to do, and another two weeks before Aleron finally gets it right. This epiphany is helped a great deal by Tristan, who steals Aleron's workpapers while he's at lunch and invites Connor to pore over them with him.
("He wants to turn me into a mouse? That's what being the chosen one entails? A tail and cheese-cravings?"
"No, not a mouse. It's clearly some sort of zebra-fish hybrid. Look at the stripes."
"I think that's his idea of shading. Hey, what does this say? Frugal lumps dim battle coops? That... makes no sense."
"Neither does Aleron."
"You know," says an ominous shadow in the doorway, "if I'd known that the two of you had death wishes, I would have happily obliged you a long time ago.")
The final ceremony is surprisingly boring, although Tristan assures him that this is because Aleron did all the animal sacrifices before Connor arrived. Considering this is Aleron, Connor isn't quite sure whether he's joking.
He stands at the middle of a circle drawn out of chalk mixed with what smells like parsley, and waits. When Aleron gives him the nod, he wills himself to change.
At first, the only change that starts is the slow feeling of silliness burning through his ears.
Abruptly, the transformation takes hold, seething through blood and flesh and bone. It starts easily: he falls forward into an expanding world, his nails curving into small yellow moons, the sudden press of teeth on an unexpectedly hairy lip. It's almost funny. Connor laughs, and hears the coarse chuckle rasp, singing down through the air.
Then, he feels it: something pulsing wrong beneath his heart. He flinches and it spreads, coursing through his veins in a thousand pinpricks that writhe and burn. They grow to splinters, to shards, to fragments, and the world is dim, rolling grey and screaming.
"Silver," the magician is snarling, "silver, now," and the words are curving into the endless roar of blood. He sees red, then nothing at all.
"Connor?"
He's standing in a tree, a fact that becomes abundantly clear when he looks around for her and a branch smacks him in the face.
Her laughter is sweet and delicate, and utterly strange. "Higher, you fool." At last, he finds her, grinning fondly over a windowsill.
Since she's leaning out, he sees her hair first, pale and tangled and badly-cut. Her eyes are the wrong color, though he can't pinpoint why. She is Lise as Lise has never been - not the girl with the sharp elbows who kicked him out of a tree when they were both ten, but someone else.
Lisianthus, he thinks, madly, then winces; Lise has always hated her full name.
"Exactly," she says, and smiles at him with a sort of bitter-wry twist to the edge of her mouth. He's reassured. This is the first Lise-like thing she has done.
"What?"
"Where do you think you are?"
He searches his memory, which is disturbingly blank. "Somewhere near... Com... something? Lise, this really isn't the time."
"No," she agrees, and reaches out to him. "It's not. You were wrong, you know."
"About what?"
"Not you," she says. Their hands overlap. Her fingertips are very pale over his, ghosting a familiar touch. "Me."
Silver flashes at her wrists, and he grabs hold, reeling, as the tree collapses beneath him. She is laughing still, half-dangling out of the window. "Bad idea, boy-kid-thing," she says, and between one blink and the next she becomes the fortuneteller, no longer smiling at all.
"You got the wrong message," she says, and then he is no longer dreaming.
"Did you hear me?" the magician says irascibly. Connor blinks up at Aleron with rusty eyes, then remembers and sits up. Pain sparks behind his eyes, and after a few seconds he finds himself sprawled again.
"I think I've forgotten how my spine works," he reports.
"No, you simply forgot how to use your brain, stupid boy." The magician is clearly sulking, which is not a surprise; he always sulks whenever one of his tricks, so meticulously planned on paper, fails on the first try. He seizes Connor's wrist and holds it up to his face. Connor presses his lips together and tries to curl up as a wave of nausea overrides his lingering sleepiness.
"From now on," the magician says, shaking a remarkably hairy arm at him, "you will not touch silver of any kind. Do you understand? You're a delicate magical construct and silver plays merry hell with delicate magic."
He stares at his exposed skin, or lack thereof. There's an awful lot of what looks like fur. "I-- why--"
"He screwed it up," Tristan says from somewhere considerably beyond the circle. Connor gets a flash of knives and unnaturally sharp instruments and decides not to look too closely. "You're going to be wolf-boy for a while. Luckily your face is okay--"
"--as all right as it's ever going to be, anyway."
"Stop fretting the boy, you're going to make him think that there's something you can't fix."
"There's nothing I can't - oh, very clever of you, catching me by my ego."
"It's how you caught me," Tristan remarks. He kneels beside Connor, looming unexpectedly; Tristan has never been the kind to present much of an imposing figure. "Really, beware of silver. His majesty neglects to mention that you are a delicate magical construct that's been broken in some places. If silver wears away too much of any of the pieces, we won't be able to fit them back together properly and you may get stuck for even longer."
The magician is still fiddling with his wrist, which is less creepy than it sounds. At last, he lets go, and Connor sees another bright gleam. Something cold and heavy slides down his arm as he lowers it.
"A bracelet of bright silver about the bone," Tristan says, sounding very pleased with himself.
"John Donne," Aleron says without looking up. "Paraphrased. Your references are awful. If you can't do better, you're to wear the dress for the next performance."
"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?"
"Not half as much as you would."
Connor stares at his shiny new silver bangle. This, he knows, will put him unfortunately ahead in the Girliest Boy contest. It fizzes dizzily against his skin. "Didn't you just tell me not to touch silver?"
"That's controlled silver," Aleron says. "If you carry a piece of glass around for long enough, banging it into anything that comes along, it'll wear down on its own. This will act as a sort of.. container. It's charged with my magic, so it only responds to me, and it'll stop you from getting worse."
"Look at you," Tristan says, folding his arms. "You even sound half-clever."
"Is the silver why I had this weird..."
"Dream?" asks the magician. His eyes brighten. "That happens occasionally. I didn't really think that it would... In the Middle Ages, guardians and alchemists used to study the effects of silver on prophetic--"
"Don't get started or he'll overdose on silver just to get away from you."
"Just because I've been talking about this to you for the past several centuries doesn't mean he's innured to it. And it's fascinating."
"It wasn't exactly prophetic. Just... kind of..." He has no words for it, but it has been several months since he's seen Lise or spoken to her, and however strange it was, the dream is the closest that he has come to normal for a long time. "Can you do it again?"
"Only with silver," Tristan says. "There's a great deal of chance that it'll damage you."
"But it'd be good to have some prophecies and know what's coming ahead," the magician says. He exchanges another look with Tristan, this one considerably less friendly. "It's up to the boy."
"Connor," Tristan says.
Connor looks up. "I'll do it."
They are sitting in a garden this time: a garden shaped with painted glass. Everything is red as far as the eye can see: the sky is a great burst of flame. Lise is a shadowy figure in a gown the dark color of a rose. She rises when she sees him.
"You're not supposed to be here," she says. "Are you still looking for me?"
"No," he answers, flatly, and she laughs. It's so odd to hear her laugh again.
"Of course," she says, and sits, leaving enough space on the bench for him. "You never were. You're looking at the wrong person and you can't even guess. Neither can they, though for different reasons." She cocks her head. "Is it the transformation?"
"This is the weirdest dream I have ever had," he says. "You make no sense at all."
"I already told you," she says. "It wasn't you that was meant." Suddenly, she smiles. "I meant to read your letters, you know. You'll let me before the war, won't you?"
On another night, he nearly falls off the tightrope and hears the laughter running through the crowd like poison. His head snaps down in a savage look 'round, and for an instant he sees it laid out before him: how to kill every spectator at the show.
His eyes gleam at him in the polished mirrors, a monster's yellow eyes.
After the show ends, he goes to Aleron's tent.
By now, the magician knows. He only laughs. "Again?" he asks. Then, "What do you think you're seeing?"
"Nothing that you'd want," Connor snaps, low and rough, and keeps still while the magician lays a fingertip against the silver. Power arcs through, and he falls to darkness and dreams and the strange not-Lise's smile again, in a world that is mysterious and safely empty.
It becomes a habit. He comes back because he cannot stop, and she tells him a thousand things - secrets, dreams, prophecies. But she always begins with the same words, which is how he knows he's dreaming: you're (with) the wrong person.
And perhaps what she means is that they are nothing alike, dream-Lise and real-Lise, but he cannot speak to the real one. It reminds him of a story they used to tell each other, over and over again until it spun outrageously into several different things, none of them quite coherent. The only reason it stayed the same story was because it always began the same way:
A wanderer journeys through a desert. Although he is a clever man, a remarkable man, he dies of drinking sand.
When the fortunetellers consult his bones, they ask him: why? Why sand, a day away from a city full of water?
He answers: Because I was thirsty.
A few weeks later, when Aleron finally figures out how to stop his hands from turning into claws at the slightest annoyance, he burns the letters. There seems to be one missing, but he can't imagine why.
He drops them into the bonfire and walks away singing a hoarse song.
"No," Tristan snaps, when he returns for another dose of silver. He's tense all over, his small eyes slitted. "We have all the prophecies we could possibly need. At this point, the only people who'd want more prophecies from you are probably in investment banking. Stop it."
"I didn't ask you," Connor growls. He turns to the magician. "There's more she hasn't said. There has to be--"
"She?" Tristan says deliberately. Then, as Connor rounds on him again, he snaps, "We already know. Do you know anything anymore? Do you have any idea where we're going? You--"
The magician laughs softly, and the two of them split apart. "You're burning yourself out," he says. He doesn't sound as if he cares. That pleases Connor, too.
He smiles, grim and wicked and edgeless, partly magic and partly reflection.
"I know," he says, and walks out to help the troupe pack up the tents.
the end
email: lasyungwen [at] gmail.com
Connor writes to her sometimes. Even in his letters, though, he doesn't tell her why he left.
Instead, he talks about all the things he could never say in real life: stuff about knives, spitting fire, magic tricks and tricks that aren't but hurt like hell just the same. About dancers pirouetting with curving hands and empty faces on wires thin and shining as hammered gold, lights roping through the tents at night.
He covers pages with these descriptions, writes ugly bits of verse in the margins, draws clumsy stick-figure diagrams of how he once filled in for one of the trapeze artists. (He skips over the part where it wasn't actually at a performance but a practice, and he fell and took an hour to be untangled from the netting and even the youngest of the dancers laughed at him.) With every line, the distance between them expands. These things in his letters, he knows, are the things she would never listen to: things he would have to let slide through his voice like water; things he could never voice for fear that she would, eventually, stop hearing anything he said.
The Lise Ash he left likes order, he reminds himself, and her ideas of beauty are very different from all the wild things he has seen.
Somehow, the news that Connor writes gets out to the troupe. The magician makes fun of him for wasting the paper; the dancers sidle up to him and ask him if he'll read them aloud; Tristan only nods and looks away. None of them care, so long as nobody takes him back, and Connor's made sure of that.
The trick is not to send them.
He likes performing in strange cities - the stranger, the better. His favorites are the cities with sculptures as tall as houses, showing a bearded young god with arms flung out to the sky or a triumphant general on a horse; the towns with the giant potato cast in bronze in the square; the outskirts with coffeehouses in the shape of coffeepots. He roots himself there with those oddities. He can say, This is nowhere near home, and be sure.
It warms him, as long as he remembers to leave before the memories start bleeding through: corners rounding into old paths walked in childhood, strangers' faces changing underneath his tired eyes.
It happens more often than he could have ever guessed. Too many times he hesitates on the high wire, seeing her glare leap out of the crowd. He doesn't know why; it isn't as if he and Lise ever had anything. Eventually, he gives up on answers and gets used to having the sensation of missing her knotted between his shoulder blades, as if her glare (a thousand miles away) is still painting a target on his back.
There are times in the night, sprawled across the creaky mattress, when he thinks, I can never go home again, and feels such burning satisfaction that he's almost afraid of what he has lost.
Once, wandering through the streets at night, he stops at an intersection to wait for the lights to change. A girl catches his eye - ash-electric hair and a certain lift of the chin - and he starts out of confusion.
She slinks up to him, slow and easy, and he should be running but he has no idea how. And they do look so very much alike: tall and deeply awkward to the cores of their bones. Up close, she has old eyes and could never be anybody he's known. But by the time he remembers how to move, how to fall, she has grabbed his arm and pressed her mouth to his.
The stranger tastes mostly wet, and very faintly of something bitter. Ash, he thinks, but it could never be anything so romantic.
He shoves her. "Go away," he says wildly. "I don't have any money." Without a word, she gives him a swift, disdainful look and walks away. He watches the twitching sway of her hips as she stalks down the sidewalk.
Their routes rarely cross those of other traveling companies, but it does happen. The magician is brooding over a mirror cracked by a careless trapeze artist that day and clearly has no use for him, so he goes to visit the other circus in town.
Their clowns are fat and frightening; their acrobats move in less-than-perfect synchronicity, and their games are too hard. He wastes half an hour at a stand, half-heartedly trying for a pink teddy bear, before he realises that he only wants one to annoy Lise. Hastily, he heads for the tents instead.
The fortuneteller there is young, with swinging curls and hoop earrings. Her tea doubles as paint thinner. She pores over his palm and eventually tells him that he's a clever young man whose girlfriend - "for I can tell that you have a girl, darling" - feels betrayed by him. "Careful, dear," she says. "She's not happy about it. She could leave you."
Connor only laughs.
On his way out, an old woman catches him by the arm. "You," she says, "You're on the right track. A chosen one, if you like that type of thing." She looks familiar, and Connor thinks that his nostalgia's sunken really low if even senior citizens remind him of Lise.
"That's great," he says. "I don't have any money and soon I won't have any circulation. Please let go of my arm or amputate it." He waits. She holds on. "Pick one before it drops off on its own."
She gives him the fish-eye and sniffs darkly, and he remembers where he's seen her. She's his circus's own fortuneteller, though she rarely comes out of her tent. The whole circus lives in deep superstitious fear of her. The jugglers bury the leftovers of the first meal in each new city behind her tent. For luck, they say, and it's true that only Jonas, who skipped breakfast that day, has ever dropped a ball. "Though I was always sure that chosen ones were more respectful of their elders."
"Respect is only used by people without enough wit for insults," Connor says. "Go find someone else to bug. It's a big city." He wrenches at his arm but she hangs on.
"Tell the magician that it's time," she says, both soft and sharp at once. "It's the ninth prediction and the right one, and if you don't consent he'll never have a chance."
At last, he manages to twist himself out of reach. "Tell him yourself," he says, and turns away.
He gets five paces down the sidewalk before he hears her again. "Stranger in a strange land!" she calls.
"I hate Heinlein novels!" he shouts back to her, and gets strange looks from the passers-by before he rounds the corner and disappears.
Eventually, three cities later, he tells the magician. After being brow-beaten by four acrobats and a fire-eater and hearing tales from every member of the troupe about the startling accuracy of the fortuneteller's prophecies, it's not as if any other option's open to him.
Aleron only looks at him. "You?" he says.
"Uh," Connor says. "Why are you wearing a dress?"
The magician draws himself up. "It's a traditional robe--"
"--with sequins on it because he lost a bet," Tristan says, looking considerably more cheerful than Connor has seen him for a while.
"I did not lose," Aleron says, his foxish features sharp and sullen. "T. S. Eliot was referring to John Donne's mermaids in the last part of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It's not my fault that you are an uneducated boor of a guardian."
"Talk all you like," Tristan says. "Just don't forget the corset." He glances at Connor. "Are you sure it was our fortuneteller?"
For some reason, though his words come easily, his expression is taut and careful.
"Yeah," Connor says, and hesitates. "N-- Yeah. Definitely."
The magician exchanges an inexplicable look with Tristan, and not for the first time Connor is a little unnerved by the two of them together. The circus performers, who have mythology and superstitions for every little thing in their acts, are utterly silent on the subject of how Tristan and Aleron might have met, and why they have stayed together.
"Then," Aleron says at last. "I suppose it's you after all." He smiles, and Connor feels a little wary - a belated survival instinct kicking in at last. "I've been waiting a long time for this."
The magician spends the next two weeks stalking through the circus muttering darkly about angles and axes. Everyone in the circus nods sagely and tolerates him. It's widely understood that Aleron kicks puppies and gives everyone beady shark looks when he's in the midst of inventing a new trick, which is almost inevitably a decent crowd-pleaser.
In fact, it's a month and five days before he actually figures out what Aleron's trying to do, and another two weeks before Aleron finally gets it right. This epiphany is helped a great deal by Tristan, who steals Aleron's workpapers while he's at lunch and invites Connor to pore over them with him.
("He wants to turn me into a mouse? That's what being the chosen one entails? A tail and cheese-cravings?"
"No, not a mouse. It's clearly some sort of zebra-fish hybrid. Look at the stripes."
"I think that's his idea of shading. Hey, what does this say? Frugal lumps dim battle coops? That... makes no sense."
"Neither does Aleron."
"You know," says an ominous shadow in the doorway, "if I'd known that the two of you had death wishes, I would have happily obliged you a long time ago.")
The final ceremony is surprisingly boring, although Tristan assures him that this is because Aleron did all the animal sacrifices before Connor arrived. Considering this is Aleron, Connor isn't quite sure whether he's joking.
He stands at the middle of a circle drawn out of chalk mixed with what smells like parsley, and waits. When Aleron gives him the nod, he wills himself to change.
At first, the only change that starts is the slow feeling of silliness burning through his ears.
Abruptly, the transformation takes hold, seething through blood and flesh and bone. It starts easily: he falls forward into an expanding world, his nails curving into small yellow moons, the sudden press of teeth on an unexpectedly hairy lip. It's almost funny. Connor laughs, and hears the coarse chuckle rasp, singing down through the air.
Then, he feels it: something pulsing wrong beneath his heart. He flinches and it spreads, coursing through his veins in a thousand pinpricks that writhe and burn. They grow to splinters, to shards, to fragments, and the world is dim, rolling grey and screaming.
"Silver," the magician is snarling, "silver, now," and the words are curving into the endless roar of blood. He sees red, then nothing at all.
"Connor?"
He's standing in a tree, a fact that becomes abundantly clear when he looks around for her and a branch smacks him in the face.
Her laughter is sweet and delicate, and utterly strange. "Higher, you fool." At last, he finds her, grinning fondly over a windowsill.
Since she's leaning out, he sees her hair first, pale and tangled and badly-cut. Her eyes are the wrong color, though he can't pinpoint why. She is Lise as Lise has never been - not the girl with the sharp elbows who kicked him out of a tree when they were both ten, but someone else.
Lisianthus, he thinks, madly, then winces; Lise has always hated her full name.
"Exactly," she says, and smiles at him with a sort of bitter-wry twist to the edge of her mouth. He's reassured. This is the first Lise-like thing she has done.
"What?"
"Where do you think you are?"
He searches his memory, which is disturbingly blank. "Somewhere near... Com... something? Lise, this really isn't the time."
"No," she agrees, and reaches out to him. "It's not. You were wrong, you know."
"About what?"
"Not you," she says. Their hands overlap. Her fingertips are very pale over his, ghosting a familiar touch. "Me."
Silver flashes at her wrists, and he grabs hold, reeling, as the tree collapses beneath him. She is laughing still, half-dangling out of the window. "Bad idea, boy-kid-thing," she says, and between one blink and the next she becomes the fortuneteller, no longer smiling at all.
"You got the wrong message," she says, and then he is no longer dreaming.
"Did you hear me?" the magician says irascibly. Connor blinks up at Aleron with rusty eyes, then remembers and sits up. Pain sparks behind his eyes, and after a few seconds he finds himself sprawled again.
"I think I've forgotten how my spine works," he reports.
"No, you simply forgot how to use your brain, stupid boy." The magician is clearly sulking, which is not a surprise; he always sulks whenever one of his tricks, so meticulously planned on paper, fails on the first try. He seizes Connor's wrist and holds it up to his face. Connor presses his lips together and tries to curl up as a wave of nausea overrides his lingering sleepiness.
"From now on," the magician says, shaking a remarkably hairy arm at him, "you will not touch silver of any kind. Do you understand? You're a delicate magical construct and silver plays merry hell with delicate magic."
He stares at his exposed skin, or lack thereof. There's an awful lot of what looks like fur. "I-- why--"
"He screwed it up," Tristan says from somewhere considerably beyond the circle. Connor gets a flash of knives and unnaturally sharp instruments and decides not to look too closely. "You're going to be wolf-boy for a while. Luckily your face is okay--"
"--as all right as it's ever going to be, anyway."
"Stop fretting the boy, you're going to make him think that there's something you can't fix."
"There's nothing I can't - oh, very clever of you, catching me by my ego."
"It's how you caught me," Tristan remarks. He kneels beside Connor, looming unexpectedly; Tristan has never been the kind to present much of an imposing figure. "Really, beware of silver. His majesty neglects to mention that you are a delicate magical construct that's been broken in some places. If silver wears away too much of any of the pieces, we won't be able to fit them back together properly and you may get stuck for even longer."
The magician is still fiddling with his wrist, which is less creepy than it sounds. At last, he lets go, and Connor sees another bright gleam. Something cold and heavy slides down his arm as he lowers it.
"A bracelet of bright silver about the bone," Tristan says, sounding very pleased with himself.
"John Donne," Aleron says without looking up. "Paraphrased. Your references are awful. If you can't do better, you're to wear the dress for the next performance."
"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?"
"Not half as much as you would."
Connor stares at his shiny new silver bangle. This, he knows, will put him unfortunately ahead in the Girliest Boy contest. It fizzes dizzily against his skin. "Didn't you just tell me not to touch silver?"
"That's controlled silver," Aleron says. "If you carry a piece of glass around for long enough, banging it into anything that comes along, it'll wear down on its own. This will act as a sort of.. container. It's charged with my magic, so it only responds to me, and it'll stop you from getting worse."
"Look at you," Tristan says, folding his arms. "You even sound half-clever."
"Is the silver why I had this weird..."
"Dream?" asks the magician. His eyes brighten. "That happens occasionally. I didn't really think that it would... In the Middle Ages, guardians and alchemists used to study the effects of silver on prophetic--"
"Don't get started or he'll overdose on silver just to get away from you."
"Just because I've been talking about this to you for the past several centuries doesn't mean he's innured to it. And it's fascinating."
"It wasn't exactly prophetic. Just... kind of..." He has no words for it, but it has been several months since he's seen Lise or spoken to her, and however strange it was, the dream is the closest that he has come to normal for a long time. "Can you do it again?"
"Only with silver," Tristan says. "There's a great deal of chance that it'll damage you."
"But it'd be good to have some prophecies and know what's coming ahead," the magician says. He exchanges another look with Tristan, this one considerably less friendly. "It's up to the boy."
"Connor," Tristan says.
Connor looks up. "I'll do it."
They are sitting in a garden this time: a garden shaped with painted glass. Everything is red as far as the eye can see: the sky is a great burst of flame. Lise is a shadowy figure in a gown the dark color of a rose. She rises when she sees him.
"You're not supposed to be here," she says. "Are you still looking for me?"
"No," he answers, flatly, and she laughs. It's so odd to hear her laugh again.
"Of course," she says, and sits, leaving enough space on the bench for him. "You never were. You're looking at the wrong person and you can't even guess. Neither can they, though for different reasons." She cocks her head. "Is it the transformation?"
"This is the weirdest dream I have ever had," he says. "You make no sense at all."
"I already told you," she says. "It wasn't you that was meant." Suddenly, she smiles. "I meant to read your letters, you know. You'll let me before the war, won't you?"
On another night, he nearly falls off the tightrope and hears the laughter running through the crowd like poison. His head snaps down in a savage look 'round, and for an instant he sees it laid out before him: how to kill every spectator at the show.
His eyes gleam at him in the polished mirrors, a monster's yellow eyes.
After the show ends, he goes to Aleron's tent.
By now, the magician knows. He only laughs. "Again?" he asks. Then, "What do you think you're seeing?"
"Nothing that you'd want," Connor snaps, low and rough, and keeps still while the magician lays a fingertip against the silver. Power arcs through, and he falls to darkness and dreams and the strange not-Lise's smile again, in a world that is mysterious and safely empty.
It becomes a habit. He comes back because he cannot stop, and she tells him a thousand things - secrets, dreams, prophecies. But she always begins with the same words, which is how he knows he's dreaming: you're (with) the wrong person.
And perhaps what she means is that they are nothing alike, dream-Lise and real-Lise, but he cannot speak to the real one. It reminds him of a story they used to tell each other, over and over again until it spun outrageously into several different things, none of them quite coherent. The only reason it stayed the same story was because it always began the same way:
A wanderer journeys through a desert. Although he is a clever man, a remarkable man, he dies of drinking sand.
When the fortunetellers consult his bones, they ask him: why? Why sand, a day away from a city full of water?
He answers: Because I was thirsty.
A few weeks later, when Aleron finally figures out how to stop his hands from turning into claws at the slightest annoyance, he burns the letters. There seems to be one missing, but he can't imagine why.
He drops them into the bonfire and walks away singing a hoarse song.
"No," Tristan snaps, when he returns for another dose of silver. He's tense all over, his small eyes slitted. "We have all the prophecies we could possibly need. At this point, the only people who'd want more prophecies from you are probably in investment banking. Stop it."
"I didn't ask you," Connor growls. He turns to the magician. "There's more she hasn't said. There has to be--"
"She?" Tristan says deliberately. Then, as Connor rounds on him again, he snaps, "We already know. Do you know anything anymore? Do you have any idea where we're going? You--"
The magician laughs softly, and the two of them split apart. "You're burning yourself out," he says. He doesn't sound as if he cares. That pleases Connor, too.
He smiles, grim and wicked and edgeless, partly magic and partly reflection.
"I know," he says, and walks out to help the troupe pack up the tents.
the end