Page 19 of The Mage on the Hill
“Don’t just touch. Feel. Reach.” Darius cleared his throat. More words. “See what reaches back.”
“This is one of thoseyou’ll know it when it happenskinds of things, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Toby rolled his eyes but seemed happy enough to skitter out the back door into the sunshine. Warmth spread through Darius to see Toby move like someone his age should rather than someone who was afraid any sudden movement would break bones. He turned toward the kitchen, arrested by the shelves of owls in the hallway. Owls, of all things—ceramic, pewter, plastic, yarn, and glass. Arden had always been a magpie, collecting bits of this and that, but this current collection of over-regimented obsessions? It struck him as worrisome.
Creaking from the second floor placed Arden upstairs somewhere, so Darius went through the kitchen as quietly as he could until he found pen and scratch paper. Since his ability to put spoken words together worked about as well as a clogged water pump, he would write. He took a seat at the kitchen table and began, slowly at first, to write a factual account of that trip to Pittsburgh. The magical confluence there, both intense and far-reaching, came largely from the meeting of three rivers—Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela. Darius hadn’t considered it a last resort, but he had thought it the best chance for Kara within easy reach.
He kept his own reactions out of the tale—the confidence he now recognized as arrogance, the rising uncertainty, the abject terror of those final moments. Only what happened, though twice he had to retrace his steps since the order of events wouldn’t stay in a neat line in his brain.
“Dar? What in the world?” Arden had come downstairs when Darius reached his third sheet of scribbling.
He handed off the first and kept on while Arden lowered himself into a chair and began to read. The end of the story came hard, and Darius’s hands shook already from unaccustomed writing, but he shoved his heart and his more visceral memories in a lead-lined box and went on, fact following fact.
“You don’t—”
Darius thrust the second page at Arden without even stopping for a glare.Three pages. Three and a half.He shoved them all across the table and walked to the counter to stare out the window over the sink, unwilling to watch Arden’s reactions. Maybe he was afraid to. Arden had always read swiftly, taking in information at a blinding rate that often left onlookers incredulous, disbelieving. Darius knew better. He turned back to the table when he heard the last page set down.
“You self-centered bastard.”
Notthe response Darius had anticipated. “What?”
“Always so sure of yourself. Never asked for advice. Never asked for help. No, the great Darius Valstad knows better.” Arden slapped the pages onto the table and rose, stalking toward him. “Someone should’ve been there with you.”
“But there—”
“Someone besides a student of yours.”
“I—”
“Someone who could’ve helped you control the blast. Put things back afterward. Maybe saved Kara, but from what you’ve written, probably not. Or not for long. Someone at least could’ve been there afterward.” Arden had reached him and poked Darius’s chest hard with one bony finger. “For you, you idiot! You shouldn’t have been alone!”
Darius squeezed past him and returned to the table to write, Arden, still bristling, peering over his shoulder.
Zubayr was there. Water for water. And I barely saved him. What could you have done?
In his irritation he may have underlinedyoua few too many times, which wasn’t kind or fair.
Arden’s whisper was an ice-tipped serrated knife. “He was too young. I could’ve done something. And you could’ve told me you weren’tdead.” He paced in a ragged circle around the kitchen, arms flapping. “I mourned for you, you son of a bitch. The guild told me nothing, and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t even acknowledge your death. I’ve spent these years constructing strange conspiracies in my head, and all this time you’ve just beensulking?”
“I… wasn’t well.” Darius’s own anger deflated in the face of such anguish. He hadn’t thought anyone would even wonder. He’d been resigned to being dead to the community.
“No shit, Dar.”
The break in Arden’s voice took his feet across the room, and Darius enclosed him in a hard embrace before either of them could think too much about it. Part of him recoiled from the raw emotion as Arden struggled with tears and clung to him. Part of him resented having to comfort someone else when his life had been nothing but pain for so long. Both of those dishonorable thoughts died well-deserved deaths in the face of Arden’s immediate need.
“I’m sorry,” Darius murmured, rocking them both. “I am.” He pulled in a shuddering breath. “Hospital. Then rehab. Wasn’t….”
Arden’s voice was steadier when he asked. “How long were you in rehab?”
“Don’t know.”
“Do you remember anything? From then?”
“Bits. Spots. It’s jumbled.”
“And then?”
