“I can’t shapeshift, either, and I’m an earth-talent, not a walking kaleidoscope.”
“You’re powerful enough to be the Second Sorcerer of the Middle Lands.”
“I think,” Garrett said tiredly, “I’m probably the most powerful human magician we know about. But it’s just a talent. It just happened. I once caused a rockslide while trying to get my family’s caravan through a mountain pass. Lorre showed up and rescued everything. And then spent six months trying to convince me to leave my family and learn from him. I’d wanted to follow in my parents’ footsteps.”
“The famous Pell merchant traders,” Alex agreed. “I’ve seen your storehouses. Enchanted caves. Wonders. Another kind of magic. You wanted that?”
“I was good at organization. Negotiation. Record-keeping. Overseeing the main store if we were staying in the city for a while.” He paused. “Knowing whether gemstones were counterfeit. Asking rocks and roads where the wagons were, if they were late.”
“So you were using it all along.”
“Since I was eight.” He finished a second pear, drank more wine, let the sparkle of it fill up his head. “My sister Kyra will take over, eventually. Now that I’ve left. She’ll be just as good; we were both meant to inherit.”
“You couldn’t’ve stayed?”
“No.” Garrett set the wine down; it was dangerous. Like beautiful amber-eyed king’s sons, making confessions happen with a look. “No. Not the way it feels, the way the world opens up, and it’s all too easy…you can touch a stone and ask it to move or to tell you what wind and water feel like across centuries, wearing lines into your skin…you can mean to move a single boulder and cause six more to shift. Onto a rival’s caravan. Or your own. And Lorre told everyone what I was. He meant well, or maybe he wanted to make sure he’d burned all my metaphorical bridges, or he wanted me to openly claim all the pieces of myself.”
“He told everyone,” Alex said, with the caution of a man holding out a hand to another across slippery ice, “something you’d kept secret.”
“Not from my family. They knew. But once everyone else did…it’s hard for people to trust magicians.” He should probably eat more. Or drink water. “We can do anything. Frightening. Unpredictable. Not at all good for business.”
Alex didn’t say anything for a moment. The sun fell in long golden streamers across the bench between them, over bread and fruit and basket-weave.
“Anyway,” Garrett said, and put the end of the bread and cheese away. “Sorry. You didn’t ask.”
“I did,” Alex said. “And I wish…I don’t know. I didn’t know that was how it was, for you.”
“I’m here now,” Garrett said. “And building the biggest organizational adventure of the Middle Lands. Out of marble. It’s sort of hideously blinding. No, sorry, I’m not insulting you, you’re beautiful.” He touched the bench, an apology: accepted.
Alex cleared his throat. “Speaking of. I’ve brought you something else. Here.” He produced oiled linen from the bottom layers of the basket, like a street conjuror; handed it over.
Garrett unfolded the wrapping. Felt his breath catch, involuntarily.
The fabric fell like water over his hands, weightless as sunbeams, fine and delicate as starlight. The scarf held every shade of sunrise imaginable: dusky rose, joyous fuchsia, blazing gold, blooming violet, rich copper, night-blue lightening to periwinkle. It wove fantasies into the morning, a lifted banner vivid against cool white stone and clear sun and Garrett’s astonished fingers. It unfolded, and kept unfolding, until it gathered like liquid dawn at his feet.
“I know Lorre wants the School to be a statement.” Alex’s voice emerged not exactly hesitant, but more so than Garrett had ever heard from him before. “Clean and bright and unmistakable. But you like color. Your belt, yesterday. Your shirt. Your family’s work. I thought you might be missing it. I thought…when I saw this, I thought about you.”
Garrett hadn’t managed to find words. He kept wanting to touch each color, each glowing thread. Not magical, not at all, except that it was, oh, it was.
“I can take it,” Alex said hastily, “if it’s not something you want.” He’d scooped the linen wrapping into a ball, in one hand.
“No! I mean. Yes. No. I do want it! Thank you. Again. I don’t know if I can—if I should…” Words. Speaking. Important. A spell. “I know how much this must have cost. In the market. If you paid more than thirty—”
“I’m not admitting anything. It’s a gift.”
“I can’t, if it means I’ll owe you. If we’ll owe you.”
Alex tossed crumpled linen back into the basket. “You don’t. Owe me. I bought it for you. Do you need to get back to your students?”
“Yes—wait,” Garrett amended. “Do you want to stay? To listen?” He couldn’t offer much. But perhaps it’d be a fair trade: perhaps that return, letting the prince see what the School did or hoped to do, would matter. Perhaps letting Alex see something he loved, something of himself, would be enough of a balance.
If it meant something. If it meant anything at all. If Alex weren’t simply out buying scarves for a legion of lovers, in the marketplace, and flirting idly with magicians and merchants alike, and then coming up the hill with a bribe on behalf of his father.
But this swirl of dawn hues was something Alex had chosen. Remembering about Garrett and color.
Possibilities hovered in sunbeams, perilous, unsteady.
“I would.” Alex’s face had lit up. “Can I? I always wanted to be a magician. From the stories. The legends.”