Page 22 of The Mage on the Hill
Darius gave him that little sideways head tilt that was more agreement than a simple nod. “Food back there. Sandwich.”
“Not sure I’m really hungry.”
“Something besides… cookies.”
Toby let out a dramatic sigh. “All riiight, Dad. Geeze.” He twisted around and dug a ham sandwich out of the cooler behind Darius’s seat. “You want one?”
After a silence long enough to make Toby feel silly about hanging nearly upside-down over the plastic tubs and packaged food, Darius muttered, “Could eat.”
“Good. You’re doing all the work, so you should be eating too. Fainting while driving isn’t really recommended.”
Toby unwrapped a roast beef sandwich for Darius and set it on the console between them before he realized that was a dick move. Darius probably couldn’t see it. Instead, he retrieved a couple of napkins from the glove compartment, the logos indicating ones left over from fast food visits, draped those on Darius’s nearer thigh—because brushing against that hard thigh was awkward enough to make reaching across his lap out of the question—and set the sandwich on top. He most definitely did not look at Darius’s crotch. Nope. ’Cause that would’ve been wrong, even if it was impossible to miss that Darius tucked left.
Dammit.This is stupid. He’s my mentor, and I’ve imprinted on him like an orphaned baby ducky.Toby crammed his mouth full of sandwich to ensure no ridiculous words made it out.Except it’s not that, is it? He’s grumpy and stubborn and awkward—and Ilikehim.And he’s hot, which really isn’t fair because I still can’t since he’s all kinds of screwed up, probably, even though he’s super smart and probably knows just how he’s screwed up and how badly and it would look bad if I screamed right now, wouldn’t it?
He took another bite of sandwich instead and concentrated on how good the stupid sandwich was. Darius didn’t buy the cheap ham, and the mustard was the good brown kind with the little seedy bits in there. Sandwich, good. Mooning over teacher, bad. He’d just keep repeating that to himself until he managed a restart for his glitching brain.
“Penfield,” Darius said after half a sandwich.
That took a few bites to puzzle out, telling Toby just how overloaded his brain was. “That’s where we’re going? Not that I asked, but good to know. Another magical confluence point?”
Darius nodded. “Bigger one.”
“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you know someone there too?”
“Yes.”
Toby chewed for a while before he had another thought. “Is this a thing? Knowing people who live near concentrations of magic?”
“A thing?” Darius rolled his hands around the steering wheel. Either he was trying hard to word or he just hadn’t considered the question before. “Outcasts…. Isolation draws them. To those places.”
“So is your place near a magical confluence point?”
“Small one.”
“Darius?” Toby leaned his head against the dash so he could see Darius’s eye. “How many outcasts do you know?”
A deep rumble preceded the next answer, which could’ve been a ruminating sound or a growl. “A handful.”
“All mages the Montchanin Guild tossed out?”
“They…. Outcasts are those the guildsfailed.” Each word clawed its way out separately and carefully, full of an anger so bitter Toby could taste it.
“I guess, yeah, if you keep tossing the people out who think differently, nothing changes. And I guess if it’s just a handful of people, just sometimes, nobody questions it.” He finished his sandwich and contorted his spine again to get out waters for both of them. “Most people, the guild teaches their kids and they do fine. When they have disputes, the guild’s there. When they need help, there’s someone to go to.”
A huge sigh lifted Darius’s shoulders. “Serve a purpose. Yes. Necessary. But outdated.”
“There’s a slogan for you. A modern guild for modern times. Why didn’t you start your own? I mean, it sounds like you probably got pushback way before anything, um, bad happened.”
“Regional approval.”
“Well that sucks. I guess there’s politics in everything. And I guess if you tried to have, like, an outsider guild, they’d come and shut it down, right? Which makes sense since you can’t just have guilds popping up just wherever ’cause of exposure issues and keeping guildmasters from running their own little kingdoms. Still.”
Darius gave him another little head tilt and lapsed into silence as they turned off the interstate and the road grew darker. Considerably darker as they turned off the two-lane state road and onto something that might’ve been called a road by someone who didn’t want to hurt its feelings. In some places, the pavement appeared to simply drop off into darkness on either side, and in others, two cars would’ve met at their own peril as it wound ever upward through larger and larger trees. Toby snuggled down in his seat and tried not to see things lurking beyond the headlights as the drive started to resemble a David Lynch scene.
About half an hour into the drive, they left even the dubious road for a gravel track where Darius had to slow the truck to a crawl. To Toby’s relief, this only went on for a few hundred yards before the headlights framed a cabin tucked into the woods.Which, not ominous at all, right? Cabin in the woods.
“So does your friend—”
