VIVIENNE - PRESENT

Magic wasn't real, and Viv hated it—not the part about magic not existing. She hated that people believed in it. Their superstitions were annoying at best and harmful at worst. This occasion was both.

The child was not cursed, nor was the child diseased. The child had simply consumed little red berries and shouldn't have.

No, the berries weren't cursed either. They contained a substance mildly toxic to humans.

Yes, the drupes were very similar to a perfectly safe plant's, but this one's leaves had slightly serrated edges, Viv pointed out.

The parents insisted that obviously this was a sign the plant was cursed, not that it was a different species.

She explained everything she did for the child, from the emetic that emptied his stomach to the tea that would help him sleep. As she walked out the door, they thanked her profusely for her magics. Done arguing, Viv smiled tightly, adjusted the strap of her herb bag, and put on her longest strides toward the large hackberry tree that marked the village's center.

From this distance, its gray, warty bark was a dark smudge against the ocher sky, visible for leagues to show the residents of Hackberry Village the way home. The village was a sprawling place, its streets arrayed from the tree and never empty.

Viv passed wagons, covered and not, full of people and wares. Drawing them were thick-horses or the occasional wood-wolves. Viv owned a thick-horse. Every time she gave it away, the fief lord Bellamy gave her a new one. Her husband had died single-handedly saving the village, after all. But Viv preferred to walk.

Walking was a kind of rant. If not for the thrum of her boots on the packed dirt, her thoughts would ring too loud. It was a form of medicine, walking, one that kept her sane.

How many times did she have to tell Surfacers that magic didn't exist before it stopped sticking in their earwax and made it to their brains? By the violent reactions of some, the phrase was the equivalent of a waving sword. It clearly wasn't sharp enough to get through their thick skulls, though. Idiots, all of them, and Viv was once the biggest idiot of them all.

The light was directly above when she exited the lord's chateau and sat on the shaded bench around the landmark tree's gnarled roots. She nibbled a baguette bought from a street vendor and checked the Tablet, a clear thing thin as fine paper. Words and pictures appeared beneath her fingertips. It held the answers to anything she dared ask and more. It told her that to treat Lady Bellamy's foot boil, she needed an ingredient she didn't carry around in her bag.

Viv wasn't a doctor, her rant continued as she headed home. She helped people however she could, and most of the doctors of Hackberry Village were quacks. If they were better at their job, she would gladly let them do it, but at least this way she had coin in her purse.

These days, her coin poured out faster than it trickled in. A sixteen-year-old son ate more food than sixteen horses.

She was in a mood, she realized, steps softening. With a deep, slowly released breath, she turned her face to the sky. Backlit by a sun she had seen exactly once, clouds streamed like a river high above, gray, yellow, and umber. They blurred, and Viv closed her eyes.

Scent and sound told her where she was: lavender and honeysuckle from the edible flower shop on her left. The musk of droppings and squeak of metal as a scraper crossed her path, full buckets swinging from his yoke. These were familiar things of her village. She wasn't in the clouds or above them. Alessandro wasn't here.

He had last held her, assured her, protected her twelve years ago today.

"I'll be right back," he had whispered into her hair. He never had been good with punctuality.

A dozen years. A dozen steps. Sweet wafted into Viv's nose, accompanying warm yeast and warmer cinnamon. Viv leveled her head. The Main Street baker had those sticky rolls her pig of a son loved so much. She traded a hefty coin for a dozen of these to apologize for thinking of him as a pig.

She may have eaten one or three on the way home.

The forest thickened along the village's fringe, screening a narrow, winding trail from the busy road. By the time her cottage came into view at the end of it, a jounce had returned to Viv's stride, the kind that Alessandro said reminded him of a tiger cub. Treats always went straight to her hips, first in how she walked, then in how her trousers fit.

If the lingering cinnamon honey hadn't stuck her tongue to the roof of her mouth, she would have smelled the smoke before she opened the front door. A black cloud billowed out around her, and she swatted at it to little effect. The raised wooden floor trembled before a boom, and Viv dropped the rolls.

"Leandro?"

No response came from her son, unless another boom counted. He might not have been home; the boy had trouble sitting in one spot for more than two minutes. Yet, Viv's heart raced, and her feet followed, tracing the source of the smoke through the common room to the back entrance, where her greenhouse stretched the length of the home.

She had known this day was coming. Magic didn't exist. The Charlatans didn't like her saying it, didn't like her name for them, and especially didn't like that she debunked their tricks.

She scooped shears from their hook by the door and flattened herself against the back wall as faux thunder rattled again. The blades were freshly cleaned and oiled. At least Leandro had finished the pruning like she had asked and cared for the tools with his usual precision. He could be out there. Fighting. Captured by Charlatans.

Or it could be—

In the dimness of indoors, memory wished forgotten rose: shadows thicker than night and glowing circles of the palest blue.

No, Viv refused to entertain that possibility. Her grip tightened on the shears. The Charlatans had warned her. They had come before and gotten their tails handed to them. Twelve years later, they were back, but this time Alessandro wasn't here to stop them. This time, it would be her fight.

She kicked the door open.

* * *

Viv leapt through the door and kept to a low crouch, shears held like a spear. The denizens of her garden didn't like the smoke, if their drooping was any indication. There was little life aside from the plants amid the maze of wooden terraces and suspended pots. The first head she saw shone copper in the muted light, hair parted on the left and neatly combed aside, excepting a few strands that fell across a tanned forehead.

Everything about Fernando Bellamy was like that: perfectly put together except for the final details. One eyebrow was naturally higher than the other and a bit longer. His white shirt fit him like a dusting of snow over rolling hills of lean muscle, the embroidery that covered it elaborate but snagged in several places.

He squinted at a paper filled with too-familiar scribbles. "Le, I think it could use a little—" Whatever the whatever could use, he veered off mid-sentence as Viv's slow rise caught his eye. "Mrs. Favilla, welcome home."

"A fine welcome, Mr. Bellamy." Her tone was neutral, soft even, despite the smoke stinging her throat and the bubble of her fury. Her face heated; her fair skin would show her temper, freckles disappearing into a tomato's pallor.

"Mom, you should see it!" Leandro popped up from behind a terrace alongside Fernando, holding a clutch of brambly orbs dotted with pale purple flowers.

"Is that my Dictamnus albus?"

Leandro smiled in that shark-like way he had. "Kind of a nasty plant, but it makes awesome explosions."

"I am in awe," Viv said in that same soft timbre, every line straight except for the fingers dangling the shears by her thigh. "You nearly burned down the house."

And gave me a conniption, she didn't say. The Charlatans weren't here. She should be relieved, but relief didn't feel like one's bones were paper slowly dissolving over a bed of embers.

Leandro held his thumb and forefinger close and swept the gesture across the scene. "'Nearly,' is an important word there, and it isn't even accurate. The only things on fire are the things I wanted to be on fire."

"And did you want my plants to droop?" The softness slipped into a hard, jagged edge.

His excuse reached her like a shout from a thousand leagues away. The plants would be fine. They would air everything out.

Fernando stepped forward, folding papers into his bag of a million pockets. "Next time, we'll conduct our experiments outside."

In the forest? Next time?

The whole village viewed Leandro as special. His parents were magical, so of course he was, too, and destined for greatness. Yet, Fernando knew better. He had been sixteen when she met him, the third son of the fief lord, and she had seen him grow to a very fine thirty. His father didn't know what to do with him, especially when he took to Viv's science lessons like a sponge.

Fernando knew that the last thing the rumor mill needed was to see Leandro throwing fire balls in the forest. It wasn't something the forest needed either. That was likely why they had stayed inside, ill-advised as that was, too.

"A bit of glycerin, a by-product from soap making," her son explained in a waterfall of words streaming over her ears, "dripped on potassium permanganate ignites a flame, but then I thought to add the Dictamnus albus oil, and Fernando figured out how to wrap them in these spheres—"

Potassium permanganate. That was what she had come for to treat Lady Bellamy's boils. Viv could save herself a trip and send it back with Fernando, but the number of empty vials arrayed on the work bench behind Leandro was not a good sign.

She marched to her drawer chest alongside the bench and found their cubby was as empty as the vials. Leandro had used all of it. Poof, up in smoke in an instant.

"And the fire spreads out like a wave," Leandro described with a corresponding gesture she caught.

"Leandro, do you know what today is?"

He stilled, and though he was eight inches taller than her, as the focus of her glare he was no larger than a grain of the cinnamon he liked so much.

"That's why I was making these." He didn't match her gaze, and when seen at an angle, the lightless murk of his eyes had a bluish sheen to them, an iridescence like a feather. His father's had been the same, but Alessandro's had seemed brighter when touched by shadow. Leandro's hid in shade, and his dark curls offered plenty of that.

His free hand fumbled with a chain hanging from his vest pocket, then tucked into a fist, thumb enclosed. "We don't have to fear the Wizard's Guild if our science is better than theirs. They'll fear us."

Her grip on his wrist tightened, despite the incredible heat of his skin. That, too, was so much like Alessandro. At times, Viv could almost mistake them for one another. In faded memories, she couldn't tell anymore exactly how tall Alessandro had been. Leandro's features were as sharp, his skin the same swarthy, burnt chestnut, his hair as autumn night dark. Alessandro's had been straight and stiff, spiking easily. The curl came from Viv, as did the long fingers, spattering of freckles, and hooked nose. Poor boy had to get her nose.

She lifted her chin. "I have reasons for the rules I set, Leandro."

"I wasn't unsupervised. Fernando was—"

"If I can't trust you to be safe, then I'll burn up with worry every moment you're beyond my sight. I don't want to live like that."

He flinched, swallowed, and tilted his head as a tight-lipped smile appeared. "You always tell me if something's frightening, it's because we don't know enough about it." He paused too long, looking directly at her. The sheen was non-existent from this angle, leaving a darkness that, like the sun, Viv had seen elsewhere only once.

She released his arm and reached up to cup his cheek. "I know, my little lion. That unquenchable thirst for knowledge is the one thing I hoped you wouldn't inherit from me." And the destiny, but she would never voice that. Instead, she added, "And the nose."