I want to say something, but my words stuck in my throat. Will my apologies make any difference? She wouldn’t, probably, understand me and interpret my excuses as the end of our “contract”, and, as a result, her falling into disfavour. I could not just now give Cygnie a lecture on human rights, could I?
My stupid selfishness is winning: I don’t want to let her go.
Cygnie is wiping some soil clumps from her hands hastily drying them on the apron.
“Hey,” I smile, trying not to spend too much time inside my head overthinking.
She is making a deep bow.
Not again!
“Cygnie, don’t bow! It’s so embarrassing!” I hold her shoulders making her stand tall. She doesn’t look into my eyes.
And now she doesn’t want to look at me too! As if she is in cahoots with Zarya! Gee...
“I’m sorry to leave you so soon. I thought you’ll not remember me till your homecoming from the Black Night,” she mumbles.
I put my arms behind back, understanding how close we are standing, “I came here to ask you...” I clear my throat, “...to ask you on a date,” I don’t believe I said this. It’s was a pure improvisation. “Where do we usually go out? Are there any...taverns or other places to hang out?”
Cygnie is wrinkling her black apron, “We haven't been out together since we met,” she says dumbfounded. “I used to come to you when you wanted me, Mage Avis.”
“Call me...”
Call me how? Tell her my real name and then explain why I prefer her calling me such-and-such! She would think I have a strange sex fantasy or a fetish.
“...Avis. Call me just Avis,” I sigh. It seems that omniscient Avis has stuck to me forever.
“Yes, M... Avis,” Cygnie is looking at me again; she doesn’t seem distressed.
“Come on now,” I relax a little bit myself, though I feel like a teenager on my first date.
“But my duties!” she exclaims, “Mage Sperber will kill me if I leave the place!”
“This place belongs to me. Congrats, you have a day-off!” I say it like a cocky gangster to his girl.
“You are not angry with me for leaving your chamber without permission, are you?” she puts off her apron and delicately hangs it on a tiny silvery hook on the wall.
“Oh, please! Leave your pots and sprouts and just let’s gooo!” I take her hand and walk to the door.
“Maybe we could use the back door?”
“Why? I’m going to say “goodbye” to the chief herbalist mage. What’s his name again? Sperb-something? And I smelt something sweet when I was in the common area: no one refuses free pastries, Cygnie! It’s an ironclad rule,” I smile, entering a huge living room full of young mages drilling some spells or chatting with their counterparts in blue tunics.
About ten maids and manservants not older than Robin or Selina are dashing and running between massive wooden tables, little glass coffee-tables, soft armchairs, comfortable divans, and impudent mages and mage herbalists. They give them refreshments: hot and ice cold beverages, sandwiches and some other bright canapés; or scurrying back to below stairs with dirty dishes and glasses. More nimble maids are going after scattered papers under tables and between chairs. Some servants bring in and out rolls-scrolls and various books to their mage masters.
Everyone is so busy: no one even notices us, but I notice a lad carrying a tray of sugary buns that smells like heaven. Tania’s grandma always cooks them when I visit her. When I visited her. She has never existed like any other people I love: neither she, nor her grandma. I remember these sweet coffee rolls, because more likely I used to eat them here.
I stop the boy, “This is a robbery, son! Give me all you have!”
While he’s taken by surprise, I snatch all buns from the tray; one is resting under my chin now, “Hot stuff, Bonnie!”
Cygnie, who has been hiding behind my back since we entered the living room, sneers and grabs two smoking mugs from the nearest table. I chuckle, looking at her: I didn’t expect the girl to play along, “Let’s get out of here!” I whisper dramatically, for some mages start poking their heads up every once in a while and looking around to see what's going on.
***
“Take the bun, please. My neck is aching!”
“You look better. I’m so glad!” says the girl, helping me with our looted goods.
“Better?” I take one piping hot mug out of her white hands.
“You were so sad and pale when you came: I thought that something terrible might have happened. But now you look so fresh!”
“Good robbery is just what the doctor ordered,” I try to laugh it off, but dull walls of the Mirror world are still right before my eyes: just a couple of seconds there made me a wreck.
People are watching us attentively when we are walking by. I offered to have a picnic somewhere away in the fields; Cygnie happily agreed, and now I know why:
“Why are they looking at us?” I ask her quietly. “I thought they all know about my return.”
Cygnie, obviously, is ill at ease again, “They don’t look at you, Mage Avis,” she keeps on calling me mage. “They are looking at me walking with you. Let me go a little bit away from you,” she makes two steps aside.
“Are you embarrassed about going with me?”
“I’m from the Moorland; I don’t want to disgrace you. Someone could tell His Highness or...”
“Or I don’t care!” I put a bun in her mouth and hook my arm through hers. “Do you know that you can drink water from this well?”
“Yesh, I do. You’ve alweady told me about it,” she answers with her mouth full.
At least something she did right that Avis.
***
Buns are eaten; mugs are lying forgotten between the pointy grass blades. We are sitting between the white roots of a tree hiding from the sun. A blue leaf is falling and now rests on Cygnie’s white head. She is passionate about her story and doesn’t notice a weightless guest on her head. The air, the field, our conversation: everything seems tranquil.
“Ardea would climb the tree and reach for the top, while I could barely get to the lowest limb, and I would seat there holding the Nila trunk and watching him balancing on the thinnest branch high above my head. I was not scared; I knew he could do anything. I was thrilled and exited as if he was a real mage who could become as light as a feather and jump from one bough to another like a transformed shifter. ‘Don’t you dare climb higher?’ I would tease him. The fruits from the top are the sweetest and the juiciest, and he would always give me more than I could eat,” she smiles, remembering her brother. “We would come home, and I would make some jam in accordance with the mother’s recipe. I don’t remember her, but Dad and Ardea assured me that it tasted the same as if mother herself did it.”
Cygnie is my peace and serenity. I want to think that Avis might have found calmness and comfort being with her too. The young servant has a gift to create a comfort zone for me; probably, she did the same for my previous version. That seems like a whole other thing when I’m with Zarya. I am always existed just like Cygnie who was watching her brother on a tree: my heart is thumping, and I’m either nervous and timid or irritated and full of desire to tease or wound her somehow: an endless crazy carousel of emotions.
“Is anything bothering you?”
I don’t even realize that I am thinking about marigold time and again.
“I’m sorry. I’m just daydreaming,” I say, taking a blue leaf from her head.
Cygnie entwines her fingers with mine and looks into my eyes with concern, “It’s not your daydreaming expression, Mage... I mean Avis.”
“You do know me, Cygnie. There are so many things that are bothering me that I don't know where to start,” I squeeze her hand that is too delicate for a servant.
“Let it out. You know that your secrets will die with me,” she leans closer: everything is feathery and soft in her and her manners.
All of a sudden, I burst into talking and talking, and I can’t stop, “I have no idea how everything is working here: how to run the castle, and the land, and the herbal business. I can’t just leave it all to marigold and blondie! But it’s hard for me to talk to them, for they are driving me mad! And I can’t forgive them for having left me alone with Max in the forest! Above all, I don’t know how to deal with magic! It’s like a random Russian roulette: sometimes I can produce a spell; sometimes my so called powers are dead!”
“But yesterday night you were able to make a nice fire!” she exclaims, cuddling up to me.
“It was a coincidence!” I hold my hands palm up. We both look at them in silence as if expecting something magical to happen right away. “And,” my voice quivers, “I was in a Mirror today.”
She gasps, “No! I don’t want you to disappear again! Not your in between and Mirror experiments! I beg you to stay here!”
“I wish I could control it, but I’ve told you before: I can’t! I don’t understand the principle of this bloody magic and Mirror jumping. And what kind of experiments do you mean?” I look at her in surprise. “I thought somebody cursed me or put an oblivion spell...”
“You’ve always been interested in Mirrors and parallel worlds. It was so hard to watch you wading eagerly into Mirrors over and over again and search for artifacts. I was so scared that you might hurt yourself or never return back. Once you were able to return a minute before the Mirror collapse! You were lucky that time, but my great fear was meant to be: you disappeared one day, and nobody knew whether you were lost in the Mirror or elsewhere! So please, don’t go there again... don’t!” she buries her nose in my lacy shirt.
“Tell me more!” I plead her.
“But that’s all I know, Mage Avis! ‘Keep your pretty nose away from magic’ you would say. And you were right!”
Balls! Bloody secretive Avis!
“I won’t go there. I promise,” I lie to her.
Now I want to know more about in between. I might even find a parallel universe where my parents and Tania exist if they don't exist in the world I used to live. They can't be just pure magical apparitions! Blondie said there are no copies of us in other worlds, so I will not, apparently, meet another Avis or someone like me. I just have to survive the Ball; talk to all the aristocratic snobs, and then worm all the information out of Kal.
“I don’t want to go to the Black Night: it fills me with dread. I want to stay here with you,” I tilt her chin up, giving the girl a deep kiss without permission. Cygnie turns her head to the side and slightly parts her lips.
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