“Please,” Magnus said after a pause.
“Carry on showering me with compliments. This is an extremely pleasant experience for me, by the way, and precisely how I was hoping my day would go.”
“You are just . . .” Imasu took a deep, frustrated breath. “You seem always . . . ephemeral, like a glittering shallow stream that passes the whole world by.
Not something that will stay, not something that will last.” He made a small, helpless gesture, as if letting something go, as if Magnus had wanted to be let go. “Not someone permanent.”
That made Magnus laugh, suddenly and helplessly, and he threw his head back.
He’d learned this lesson a long time ago:
Even in the midst of heartbreak, you could still find yourself laughing.
Laughter had always come easily to
Magnus, and it helped, but not enough.
“Magnus,” said Imasu, and he sounded truly angry. Magnus wondered how many times when Magnus had thought they were simply arguing, Imasu had been leading up to this moment of parting. “This is exactly what I was talking about!”
“You’re quite wrong, you know. I am the most permanent person that you will ever meet,” said Magnus, his voice breathless with laughter and his eyes stung a little by tears. “It is only that it never makes any difference.”
It was the truest thing he had ever told
Imasu, and he never told him any more truth than that.
Warlocks lived forever, which meant they saw the intimate, terrible cycle of birth, life, and death over and over again. It also meant that they had all been witness to literally millions of failed relationships.
“It’s for the best,” Magnus informed
Ragnor and Catarina solemnly, raising his voice to be heard above the sounds of yet another festival.
“Of course,” murmured Catarina, who was a good and loyal friend.
“I’m surprised it even lasted this long; he was much better looking than you,” mumbled Ragnor, who deserved a cruel and terrible fate.
“I’m only two hundred years old,” said
Magnus, ignoring his friends’ mutual snort at the lie. “I can’t settle down yet. I need more time to devote myself to debauchery.
And I think—” He finished his drink and looked speculatively around. “I think I am going to ask that charming young lady over there to dance.”
The girl he was eyeing, he noted, was eyeing him back. She had lashes so long they were almost sweeping her shoulders.
It was possible Magnus was a little bit drunk.
Ragnor twitched violently and made a sound like a cat whose tail has been stepped on. “Magnus, please, no. The music was bad enough!”
“Magnus is not as bad at dancing as he is at the
“I do not feel even slightly reassured,”
Ragnor said. “Neither of you are reassuring people.”
After a brief heated interlude, Magnus returned to the table breathing slightly hard. He saw that Ragnor had decided to amuse himself by hitting his own forehead repeatedly against the tabletop.
“What did you think you were doing?”
Ragnor demanded between gloomy thumps.
Catarina contributed, “The dance is a beautiful, traditional dance called El
Alcatraz, and I thought Magnus performed it—”
“Brilliantly,”
Magnus suggested.
“Dashingly? Devastatingly attractively?
Nimbly?”
Catarina pursed her lips in thought before selecting the appropriate word.
“Spectacularly.”
Magnus pointed at her. “That’s why you’re my favorite.”
“And traditionally the man gyrates—”
“You did gyrate spectacularly,” Ragnor observed in a sour voice.
Magnus made a little bow. “Why, thank you.”
“—and attempts to set fire to his partner’s skirts with a candle,” Catarina continued. “It’s a wonderful, vibrant, and rather gorgeous dance.”
“Oh, ‘attempts,’ is it?” Ragnor asked.
“So it is not traditional for someone to utilize magic, actually to set the woman’s skirts and his own ostentatious coat on fire, and keep dancing even though both the dance partners involved are now actually spinning towers of flame?”
Catarina coughed.
“Not strictly traditional, no.”
“It was all under control,” Magnus declared loftily. “Have a little faith in my magic fingers.”
Even the girl he’d danced with had thought it was some marvelous trick. She had been enveloped in real, bright fire and she had tipped back her head and laughed, the tumble of her black hair becoming a crackling waterfall of light, the heels of her shoes striking sparks like glittering leaping dust all over the floor, her skirt trailing flame as if he were following a phoenix tail. Magnus had spun and swung with her, and she’d thought he was marvelous for a single moment of bright illusion.
But, like love, fire didn’t last.
“Do you think that eventually our kind becomes far enough removed from humanity that we transform into creatures that are untouchable and unlovable by humanity?” Magnus asked.
Ragnor and Catarina stared at him.
“Don’t answer that,” Magnus told them.
“That sounded like the question of a man who doesn’t need answers. That sounded like the question of a man who needs another drink. Here we go!”
He lifted a glass. Ragnor and Catarina did not join him, but Magnus was happy to make the toast on his own.
“To adventure,” he said, and drank.
Magnus opened his eyes and saw brilliant light, felt hot air drag across his skin like a knife scraping across burned bread. His whole brain throbbed and he was promptly, violently sick.
Catarina offered him a bowl. She was a muddle of white and blue in his blurred vision.
“Where am I?” Magnus croaked.
“Nazca.”
So Magnus was still in Peru. That indicated that he had been rather more sensible than he’d feared.
“Oh, so we went on a little trip.”
“You broke into a man’s house,”
Catarina said. “You stole a carpet and enchanted it to fly. Then you sped off into the night air. We pursued you on foot.”
“Ah,” said Magnus.
“You were shouting some things.”
“What things?”
“I prefer not to repeat them,” Catarina said. She was a weary shade of blue. “I also prefer not to remember the time we spent in the desert. It is a mammoth desert, Magnus. Ordinary deserts are quite large.
Mammoth deserts are so called because they are larger than ordinary deserts.”
“Thank you for that interesting and enlightening information,”
