VIVIENNE - PRESENT

Potassium permanganate wasn't something one could buy in a place like Hackberry Village. To make more, Viv needed fire wash stone, which also was not something one could buy. It could be found near enough in the Gorge of Flame, but said gorge belonged to the Wizard's Guild. Trespassers were guaranteed a horrible death.

It wasn't patrolled, but it was cursed, Hackberry villagers claimed. They did not go there, but Leandro could because he was a magical child, so the curse didn't affect him. It didn't affect Fernando either, but they said that was because he had first gone with Leandro and been approved somehow.

Since the pair had used up Viv's supply, they would be responsible for making more, and they would collect the ingredients.

"We'll be back by six light," Fernando promised as he ducked out the door at the back of the greenhouse, and Viv smiled in acknowledgment. Surfacers marked time by the slant of light: weak east, east, high east, high, high west, and so forth. Yet, Fernando had a chained timepiece that didn't fit this world.

The Bellamy family heirloom crusted with diamonds divided the day into twelve numbers it repeated twice. Twelve dark came in the middle of the night, twelve light at midday. It wasn't a perfect system. Sometimes both sixes were dark, and Viv didn't have a matching piece to tell her when that number arrived anyway.

Leandro followed him out, and a streak of ashen green slipped in before the door banged shut.

"Prop it open, would you, Luce?" Viv called. Despite their efforts using mats as fans, it was still a little smoky.

Lucienne Chaney did as bade, long, graceful limbs reminiscent of a sapling. Like Viv, she wore a tank and short jacket, a multi-layered obi with pockets, and trousers, though hers hugged her slender frame and her belt tied on the side, trailing down one hip like leather vines. "Leandro has grown so tall. We should raise the lintel."

Viv and Lucienne, her new friend at the time, had built the greenhouse not long after Alessandro's death. They had proportioned it to fit Viv. Leandro had been a tot, climbing everywhere as he pleased.

"I'll add it to Leandro's to-do list. He needs more to occupy him, it seems." Viv, seated at the workbench's high stool, too high since it was Leandro's, leaned over her paper, pinching her quill between pursed lips.

Lucienne peered over her shoulder. "Writing to Lady Bellamy?"

"About the delay in her treatment. I'll let Fernando deliver it."

Lucienne hummed and squeezed her from behind, cheek briefly aligned with Viv's. "Is that really so difficult a topic? With you agonizing over the 'Dear Lady Bellamy' part, I thought perhaps you had finally given in."

"To?"

"You know the boy has an eye for you." Lucienne batted her own doey brown eyes, and the thin, green gray line of her lashes made it part comical, part eerie. No one had hair like Luce, like small roots pulled out of the ground and never meant for the light. It was always either hopelessly tangled or in a fat braid wrapped around her head.

Viv set a glare on her friend. "The boy has an eye for me? Leandro is my son."

"You know which one I mean." Lucienne rounded a raised flower bed, running spindly fingers along the underside of drooping leaves as if caressing a baby's cheek. The plants' constitution seemed to improve.

Viv's did not. She glowered. "Don't you repeat the same I've heard a thousand times: The poor widow, not pretty but too special to be alone, should marry into the lord's family so the third son can account for something."

"Lord Bellamy would welcome you as a daughter-in-law."

"He would play it as a joke and say at least he doesn't have to pay for his lady's cures anymore, then turn around and whine when Leandro ate him out of house and home."

Lucienne laughed. "Fernando does not believe you are magic, you or your son, and he cares deeply for you both."

Viv scrunched her lips, eyes on the uneven brick floor as if this were a theater and her lines were written there. Lucienne's point felt like a warm, spreading wound in her chest, not painful, just there, and she wasn't sure what that meant. She did not want to seriously consider any suitor, let alone one thrust upon her by rumor but who had said nothing of it himself.

Still, if Viv had to consider one, Fernando would not be the worst option.

Lucienne scooped up the Tablet, then unrolled and flicked it to stiffen the page. "He is your best student, too."

"Second best," Viv corrected. "You are my best student." She expected a smile for that, but Lucienne continued to swipe through the Tablet's menus with practiced ease.

"It would be good for Leandro, a father in his life." The sentence sounded light, vapid even, a marriage of words Viv had also heard a thousand times before, but Lucienne's posture didn't match: the rigid set to her shoulders. The hard plane of her lips.

Lucienne had jumped into this conversation with both feet, and this was the foot she chose to land on. The other hovered, waiting to drop.

With a squeal from her stool, Viv swiveled back to her letter, a hand on either temple like blinders on a thick-horse. "Fernando is barely fourteen years older than my son. He already has a stepmother, and you say he should be a stepfather, too? When did the world become full of piecemeal families trying to hold onto the shards of their happily ever afters?"

"You know the chain that leads into Leandro's pocket as if it holds something?"

Viv shrugged. He had found the piece five years ago, broken and tarnished, trampled and buried in Main Street's packed dirt. It had cleaned up nicely. "I think it looks dapper, and—"

Hands snared her shoulders and spun her so Lucienne's silencing finger could meet Viv's lips. "What will you do when Leandro wants to leave the village?"

"He doesn't want—"

Lucienne's finger pressed tighter. "Answer the question as stated."

Viv leaned back. "First answer why he would want to leave. I've made it safe for him here. Alessandro—"

"Your son feels stifled."

Viv's mouth opened in a gasp, a dozen protestations queuing, but Lucienne cut her off.

"Ask him."

"I will." After a moment of cross-armed contemplation, Viv added, "Hypothetically, if Leandro did want to leave once he's grown, he won't fall for the world's lies. I trust him to question everything."

"Would you not go with him?"

"Would he want me to?" Viv's voice broke, and she leaned her head back, focus lost in the stream of clouds so high above the glass. She had been there, above there, when she first held a screaming, wiggling bundle of so many emotions in her arms.

It's like he's roaring, she had said.

Alessandro's already league-wide smile had somehow stretched even further, and he wrapped them both in his hot embrace. Let's call him lion boy, then. Leandro.

The arms around her now weren't as long, strong, or warm, but they helped. Alessandro wasn't here, but Lucienne was, always. Though no older than Viv, Lucienne so often filled in for the mother Viv could never see again.

After several deep breaths, Viv could speak in something other than a squeak. "It's not the village in particular he wants to leave, is it? It's me who's stifling him." Her lip trembled, but her voice held, barely. "You should have seen him, Luce, quoting me, then a long pause bursting with words he wouldn't say: that I worry about him because I don't know him."

"He loves you too much to say it, and I love you too much not to."

"That I really don't know him?" Viv pulled away, all but tumbling off her stool.

Lucienne shook her braided head. "That you question everything too much. You are so worried about being gullible, you let real opportunities slip away."

"Opportunities like marrying Fernando?" Viv didn't intend for that to be a growl.

"I bookmarked a few things for you." Lucienne set the Tablet, still unfurled, atop Viv's letter. "Maybe instead of more tasks to occupy his hands, Leandro needs to face the lies you allow him to believe. Ask him why he wears the chain."

It was similar to the chain on Fernando's timepiece. Much as Viv hoped for that simple answer, a chilling knot in the depths of her stomach told her it was something more than that.

"I'll ask him," Viv agreed.

Instead of growing a smile, Lucienne stiffened, a distance in her mahogany gaze.

"I said I'll ask him. What's wrong, Luce?"

Lucienne's tone rang as hollow and distant as her eyes. "We need to get to the village square."