Loosely Lawful | 10

Kali was not on her side. Granted, she wasn’t on Avon’s either, but that was neither here nor there.

“Cerene and Savidge,” Avon muttered, taking their flatmate by the shoulders to keep her from walking into a tree stump. The stump was big enough to be an apartment block. The fallen trunk next to it was as big and as long as Gaville Central Train Depot. “Are you actually interested in the contracts, Kali, or are you just interested in applying for research grants?”

Kali sniffed, fins fluttering in disdain. “They’re not mutually exclusive. A grant to further investigate a discovery of this merit could guarantee our incomes for years.”

“It would guarantee your income for years,” Avon pointed out. They helped Kali up an outcropping of rocks, torso thickening as they supported her, and then hauled themselves up after her. “I’ll be left high and dry again while you go become a famous arcanist.” That part they said in Sera’s direction, which was stupid because Sera had nothing to do with Kali leaving Avon for better things.

“Don’t pretend I wouldn’t retain you as hired protection,” Kali said. She adjusted her magic-sight glasses and waited for everyone to scale the outcropping before continuing the march. “Were a violent episode to occur while out here, I would need support. Our current excursion may only defeat one monster of many.”

Sera managed, eventually, and with a great deal of help from Kyle, to scramble up the rocks. She was pretty sure she had a new dent in her left pauldron, and as she checked it over, she noticed Benvolius looking more and more ashen the longer Kali talked about researching the language of the contract spell on him.

She sighed. “I’m not sure you’d be able to get a grant at all. This all goes back to the Wildes, and I don’t think they’d just let you come in and study their secrets.”

“What pessimism.” When Kali pouted, her whole face turned to sorrow. Her downcast eyes, without eyelashes to hide the effect, shone with water, and her perfect mouth pursed into a tiny, upsettingly fetching frown. Her fins drooped, and her scales lost their shimmer–though that might have just been due to her passing into shadow for the moment.

Sera gulped. “Er, well, maybe if we figure all this out, you’ll have an opportunity afterward to study the language.”

Kali just shot her a sly smile, all traces of her incredibly fake, pity-me face wiped clean. She adjusted her glasses and gestured out at the forest behind her. “Or, I can study it right now, while it’s in right front of us.”

Oh shit. They’d made it. Sera had known, vaguely, that after camping out last night, they wouldn’t have far to go, but it still surprised her that they’d found the magic in the woods with so little fanfare. Flustered, she pulled Librata’s power to her eyes and blinked a few times, adjusting to her own magic-sight while Kali flitted off the remaining few feet to kneel down and peer at the ground.

Sera hadn’t really known what to expect. Maybe some heavy fog, like in her vision. Maybe she’d expected a great wall of eerie, green magic blazing out from the script on the ground.

She didn’t expect it to be normal.

It probably wasn’t actually that normal. When Seraphina shifted around so that she could see both the spell on the ground and the one on Benvolius, they shone with the same brightness. However, while Benvolius was coated in magic, the text so densely layered that it seemed overwhelming, the spell on the ground snaked in one line over what could be miles and miles of distance, thinning the effect until it looked downright ordinary. Were it foggy today, Sera imagined she’d have to do exactly as she had in her vision and get on all fours to see the words.

She put a hand to her brow and peered into the distance. “Kali, do you have any way for us to read the whole thing from here? Or are we going to have to hike the entire length of this spell?”

Avon made a choking sound, and Sera watched out of the corner of her eye as Kyle offered to smack their back.

“Invariably,” Kali said, setting her bag on the ground so she could start pulling implements out of it. “Did you think I had Benvolius in the buff when I transcribed his contract?”

Well, Sera wouldn’t put it past Kali. The other girl had certainly gotten Kyle “in the buff” more than a few times. Though it might have been a little weird with Avon in the room.

“This will take approximately half an hour,” Kali explained, still laying out tools on the ground. “To be circumspect, let’s avoid crossing the line for now?” She tugged out a ream of paper so thick there was no way it actually fit in her bag and held it up, waiting for someone to hold it for her. Kyle, because he was whipped and an ass-kisser, did the job, grinning like an idiot as Kali dumped the stack into his arms.

Benvolio turned mournful with jealousy. “Um,” he said, raising a hand, “where is the line, exactly?”

“Sera,” Kali said, not even bothering to look up as she upended her bag, and a half-dozen ink pots tumbled onto the ground.

It wasn’t fair, Sera thought, that Kali could get people to do things for her both by being smart and reasonable and by being so disgustingly attractive. It should have been one or the other. People didn’t get to have both. Grumbling under her breath, she shooed the boys away from the line and gestured for Kyle to turn around so she could open his backpack. She pulled out a length of rope and laid out the boundary, setting it an armslength south of where the magical line actually ran, just to make sure no one accidentally stepped over.

Then she settled in on the half-rotted remains of a fallen redwood with the rest of the party to watch Kali work.

Fishmen didn’t flush the way lung-breathing topsiders did. When Kali exerted herself, the gills under her jawline fluttered open and closed, and the prim styling of her hair spiralled out into fetching waves and curls. She bit her lips and rolled up her sleeves, showcasing the splashes of orange and black that ran up her forearms. The tiny fish whiskers that she usually forced to lay flat against her skin popped out to wriggle and wave, on the alert for anything in the area that might interrupt her work.

This, more than her beauty, was probably what had Kyle so besotted with her. Kali, caught in the thrall of her interests, turned wild and disheveled, and Sera keenly understood that there was a kind of satisfaction that came from taking apart someone so put-together. It had been her favorite thing in law school, finding flaws in her peers’ arguments and breaking down their statements until she could rearrange all the pieces exactly as she wanted.

Ten minutes later, when Kali finally finished darting about and drawing magic circles and laying things on the ground, she settled in cross-legged on the ground, right in front of the magical line, and closed her eyes. If Sera were willing to spend more of her daily magical allotment on another magic-sight spell, she would probably see all kinds of magical machinations flitting about in the iridescent sea-green shade she associated with Kali’s power. As it was though, Kali just looked like she was meditating.

“Well,” Avon said, clapping their hands and standing up from the log, “that’s the interesting part over with. She’ll be dead to the world for the next bit.”

“I’ve never seen a wizard work a ritual spell before,” Benvolius said, still gazing at Kali in awe. “Did she study at a school, or is she self-taught?”

Sera was glad Kali couldn’t answer the question. When Kali answered, she always did this horrible thing where she played shy for a few minutes and then proceeded to list out every degree, published paper, and research fellowship she’d ever been a part of. Avon did not partake in such bullshit.

“Oh, you know,” they said, waving a hand. “All the best wizards are a mix of both. She finished her graduate studies at the Gaville branch of the National University about a year and a half ago. I swear on Damantine I still find her notes under the couch.”

“I went there too!” Benvolius said. A pleased blush rose to his cheeks, and he swung his legs back and forth like a schoolboy. “Well, just for my master’s degree. I was at the main branch for my undergraduate studies, but the forestry management program is better up here.”

Sera felt Kyle bubble over in excitement next to her, and she tensed. She shot a desperate glance his way, willing him not to say anything, but he either ignored her or didn’t notice, because he shot up, twirling to face Benvolius, his face lit up.

“Bro! When were you there? It’d be so cool if you and Kali and Sera all overlapped!”

Sera’s face twitched. She noticed Avon raise an eyebrow, but she couldn’t tell how they meant that look.

“Oh, wow, Sera,” Benvolius said. “What did you study?”

Sera didn’t want to answer that, actually. She avoided thinking about her life before the temple as much as she could. Even Calcitran, where her parents were still alive and well and constantly asking after her, rarely came up in her mind. She glanced around at the massive trees all around them, and then down at the ferns blanketing the ground, wondering if there were any she could use to redirect the conversation, but nothing caught her eye. She didn’t know enough about plants to even have an idea of which ones were interesting.

Eventually, she looked back at Benvolius, who’d traded in his bright-eyed excitement for concern. And, well, she couldn’t say no to that puppy-dog face.

“I studied law,” she said, trying her best to sound even and composed. She probably didn’t. Sera was pretty sure she hiccupped somewhere in there. She gulped and let out a sigh that could almost be considered a laugh, with some generous interpretation. “Dropped out though. I uh… had some financial problems.”

The financial problems, in the end, had been the least of it. Sera’d had a moral crisis. But it was far easier to say something like ‘my scholarships fell through’ or ‘I had to help support my family’ than it was to explain what actually had happened.

She glanced at Avon, expecting a sarcastic remark, but they instead had smoothed their face into a searching, unreadable expression. Sera could hardly look at Avon when they made that face; she felt too seen and too self-conscious. Face burning, she looked at the ground and toed a fern, which immediately curled up into itself when it touched the cold metal of her armor.

Benvolius, totally ignorant of the conflict in Sera’s head, blundered on. “Will you go back when you’ve saved more money, then?”

Sera would never save enough money to go back, not on an adventurer’s budget. The temple, theoretically, could sponsor her–they’d as good as done so when she first came to them, saddled with the debts that rolled in after she broke her agreement with the firm. But, well, Sera wasn’t sure she was cut out for actual law practice anymore.

She offered a half-hearted shrug in lieu of any real answer and tried to get the conversation to go away by checking in on Kali. The stack of blank papers she’d had out before was half gone, and next to it stood a growing stack of filled papers, so dense with text that they looked grey from afar. A quill zipped back and forth over top of the stack, moving of its own volition as Kali continued to sit, eyes closed, tapped into the magic of the spell.

They all sat in awkward silence for a few minutes, Sera trying very hard to push her memories out of her head, Avon staring at her, Benvolius taking stuttering breaths every time a question came to mind that he realized would be uncomfortable to ask. Eventually, Kyle gave up and rooted around in his backpack.

“You know what, team?” he said, standing up with a ball in one of his great, big hands. “We should play catch or something. This is depressing.”