A Practical Guide to Sorcery
Chapter 251: Sudden Showers

Sebastien

Month 9, Day 17, Friday 2:00 p.m.

The next day, Sebastien left the Order’s headquarters. Damien and Deidre had argued with increasing passion about who she should stay with until she put her foot down and picked Damien. In part, this was just to keep him from becoming even more suspicious of their strange behavior and deducing a possible connection between Sebastien and the Order. She had no reasonable excuse to want to stay with these people, and she was still far from ready to be on her own.

The first day at Damien’s was entirely uneventful in a way that left Sebastien feeling strange, but on the second day, Titus came home for dinner. He stared at Sebastien a little too long, then looked at Damien. “I didn’t know we had company.”

Damien nodded with forced obliviousness. “I invited Sebastien to stay with us for a few days. He’s set up in the green guest room.”

“Hmm.” Titus spent a lot of his time at dinner asking probing questions about and directly to Sebastien. Things like, “So how did you do on your end of term exams?” and, “What kind of job are you hoping to get after graduation?” Damien let her answer a few, but then started monopolizing the conversation with such rambling monologues about himself that he couldn’t even eat properly.

After dinner, Titus called Sebastien into the drawing room and spent a long time very determinedly beating her at the dueling board and other games.

The next day, he came home with a letter from Professor Lacer. “He was alarmed that you were not at your stated residence, and might have gone looking for you, had I not informed him that you were here with Damien and entirely safe.” He yanked at his tie, loosening its grip around his neck. “Please. You are both adults now. Do not make people treat you like children by being so inconsiderate.”

Sebastien hoped it was not obvious that all the blood had left her face in a single rush. Somehow, when she spoke, her voice did not crack. “My apologies. I will write him a letter in return. It had not occurred to me that he might be concerned about my whereabouts.”

Titus didn’t seem to notice anything, though Damien stared at her a moment too long.

Still, they were both quickly distracted by dinner, and then games. Titus’s dominance recurred, aided by Sebastien’s distraction, until Damien got fed up. He enlisted the help of several of the servants, and they all teamed up to crush Titus in a variety of games—even those that didn’t inherently involve teamwork—until he pleaded mercy.

Damien cast her dreamless sleep spell for her, but he was not as skilled nor as powerful as her, and the nightmares continued to command undue strength. Several times, they snuck up on her so subtly that she almost didn’t realize she was dreaming, and they fought to keep her under the surface when she tried to wake. Sebastien was still recovering, and in no shape to do anything about it. Not that she knew what to do about it. She did have one idea how to find out, but the crown of madness, which should allow her insight into whatever magic had been worked on her via its traces in the spirit realm, was dangerous.

Sebastien spent four days at Westbay Manor, and though she cast no magic during that time, she did probe through her own mind, checking on the healing process and exploring recent changes. ‘What does it mean that there are now three pieces to my Will? What even is the Will, that it can split like that? Has my brain expanded, or is it just running, in effect, three times as hard as an average person’s when I have all three pieces of my Will active at once? Why don’t I get any stupider when I’m focused on two different things at once? And…how was the third Will born?’ She recalled her memories from the period she had blacked out. It was almost like a new, infant version of her had been birthed, and took some time to find its feet. Now, it felt indistinguishable from the other two facets.

She had missed the Saturday-night-Sunday-morning meeting with Thaddeus and Kiernan. She had no good solutions for how to handle that whole situation, so she set it aside for the future. Perhaps she would really just leave Gilbratha this time. But something small and weak inside held her back from committing to that decision. In a small attempt to mitigate potential repercussions, she left a letter for Thaddeus in the dead drop box she had set up before, apologizing for her absence and explaining that she had Will-strain and was recuperating. This was in addition to the lighthearted note she sent him in her normal handwriting, as Sebastien.

Thankfully, he was not so worried that he came to visit. She didn’t know that she could have withstood that.

There had been no scrying or other attempts at sympathetic magic. Either Thaddeus hadn’t kept any strands of her hair, he was not trying to find or harm her, or he had simply judged sympathetic magic to be infeasible. She had gone to a lot of effort to convince the University and the Thirteen Crowns of that. Thaddeus knew that he could overpower her automatic defenses, but he had no way to guess at her distance or her wards, and if the memory modifications had worked as intended, he would have no good excuse to be scrying for her.

Damien assured her that all the traces of their research project had been destroyed, loathe as he was to do so, and that Ana had helped spread some rumors about Sebastien that had nothing to do with having her brains scooped out like someone digging into the center of a watermelon with a spoon.

Apparently, it was best for the rumors to be both faintly outrageous as well as contradictory. So, some people might hear that Sebastien was spending time at Pendragon Palace, where the High Crown was considering him as a replacement heir in lieu of the failure, Frederick. Others might hear that he had been seen leaving on a ship whose captain had once been arrested for piracy, before he bribed his way to freedom. And yet others would hear about a trio of young men who were disguising themselves as Sebastien Siverling to run various cons on people just wealthy enough to be worth it but not so rich as to be dangerous.

When she could cast the light-refinement spell, she did so. It was a strain to both her body and mind, but a pleasant one, and left her feeling as refreshed as she was shaky and exhausted. It also helped with the sudden flashbacks—memories of being overpowered in the dark confines of the white cliff tunnels—and the prickly feeling of being hunted even when she knew she was as safe as it was possible to be.

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Which was not perfectly safe, and perhaps that was really the problem.

At first, Damien argued hotly that she was being reckless to start casting so early, but she knew her own mind. It was only a little bruised, a little sore. Perhaps it should have taken longer to heal. Perhaps having three sides to her Will made her heal three times as quickly? Eventually, she had to just ignore Damien and prove that she could handle it. If anything, she felt a little stronger than she had been before this whole fiasco.

Damien settled down after the first fifteen minutes, watching the whole thing with fascination. However, when Sebastien offered him the light-refinement instruction manual, he immediately gave up with the somewhat petulant declaration that he would continue to focus on modern sorcery. “I can’t do everything. I have to focus if I’m going to be good enough.”

Sebastien understood the desire for excellence, even if she did not want to limit her interests to achieve it. So, even though it was a little disappointing, she didn’t offer him the gesturan primer, either.

She spent a lot of her time on a balcony near the Charybdis Gulf, looking out over the water and the city beyond. The weather was changing rapidly, and with that came several sudden showers. At times, she could watch the rain pour down in blinding sheets over one part of the city while the sun still shone brightly in others.

As she sat and watched one such shower crawl over the city at a rate only slightly faster than the average pedestrian could run, an unbidden flashback to the moment Thaddeus had caught her took over her mind for half a second.

Sebastien gasped, leaning forward and hugging herself to ward off a sudden chill. She had been powerless. Everything she could bring to bear, and more that she shouldn’t have, had been useless against him. ‘I’m still so weak.’

She remembered the look in his eyes as he had crushed her beneath his Will. She remembered the desperate, intangible battle for her mind. She remembered being flayed of her protections and unraveled from her core.

And then she remembered his smile afterward. How he had said, “I promise not to tell anyone,” as if they shared a secret joke.

She understood that he’d had no choice. He could have killed her and he hadn’t, and though he also hadn’t planned it this way, she was here, still sane, still herself. This was one of the best possible outcomes for her misplaced trust.

But some part of her still couldn’t help but hate him.

She hunched forward further and hugged herself tighter, letting out a low, stifled moan. With the noise came the tears she had been trying to hold back. Her body convulsed, almost breathless, and she opened her mouth in a soundless scream.

She had trusted him.

Sebastien cried for long minutes with only the occasional audible sob slipping out, and then, quite suddenly, she became too exhausted to continue. She lay sprawled over the chair just breathing for a bit, then forced herself upright and cleaned away the evidence of her breakdown.

By the time Damien joined her half an hour later, the rain had reached Westbay Manor and she was wrapped in a thin blanket, scribbling in her grimoire.

‘What if he betrays me, too?’ The thought came without warning. She took the steaming mug of hot chocolate Damien offered her and turned her gaze back out over the gulf. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she told herself. ‘In this case, I am the one betraying him.’ She stifled an ironic laugh. ‘I guess I absorbed more from Ennis than I thought.’

On the evening of the fifth day, she left for Liza’s, again despite Damien’s protests. She wanted to re-cast the sleep proxy spell. It might take her more than a single day to get through all the steps, with her Will still slightly tender, but she longed for the freedom and safety of eschewing sleep once more.

True storm clouds, more ominous than the sudden showers and cheerful drizzles they had been getting all week, had rolled in since that afternoon, and as the wind picked up, the rain came with it. Instead of trying to cast a shield barrier, Sebastien stopped by the front of an enterprising shop and bought an umbrella for the usurious price of five silvers. It was a good umbrella, high-quality, bright red, and wide enough to block out the rain driving in from a slight angle.

She traveled most of the way as Sebastien, slipping into and out of carriages and a couple of different pubs. Normally, she wouldn’t have gone to Liza’s in her male form, but with the woman being gone anyway, and the fact that Thaddeus must have reported what happened to the Red Guard, she was wary about using her original body. What if they wanted to do some kind of follow-up to ensure the memory modifications had worked? What if they decided her continued existence wasn’t an acceptable risk, no matter how Thaddeus had tried to mitigate the situation? She disguised herself, of course, wearing a black-haired wig and darkening her eyebrows and eyelashes to match with a color-changing spell. A little highlighter to soften the angles of her nose and round her cheeks, and she was unlikely to be recognized.

When she got closer to Liza’s, she drew her cloak’s hood farther down her face and popped up the collar of her jacket underneath. If someone were watching Liza’s house, hopefully she would remain entirely nondescript, except for her height.

She planned to stop and watch for any signs of a lookout before entering, but as soon as Liza’s apartment block came into view, Sebastien saw that the light was on inside.

Liza was home.

She suppressed a groan, hesitated for a while, and then turned to walk off in a different direction than she had come. She would change into Siobhan close by, hurry to Liza’s, and then change back again as soon as she was finished.

She changed the color of her umbrella first, giving it a midnight-blue hue, then changed into her battle dress. She remembered how she had wished she were wearing it the last time she was in this body. ‘This might actually be advantageous,’ she realized. ‘I can buy a few thousand gold of warded artifacts from Liza while I’m there. Everything she rented me last time, and more.’

With excitement quickening her movements, she changed forms and began to make her way back. While she walked, she allowed herself an extended daydream about a life where she made and sold beautiful, treated-silk umbrellas for a living. Each one would be a unique work of art, and she wouldn’t take commissions. Ana would handle sales and marketing, of course. Their worries would be mundane and small; the worst they would have to deal with was thieves and jealous rivals.

Siobhan got lost enough in this daydream, distanced from the world beyond the edge of her umbrella, that she almost didn’t notice when things started to go strange around her. Silhouettes with no faces watched from the windows, and the street was already empty of other pedestrians.

Siobhan’s heart sank all the way down to the bottom of her shoes and then ripped free of her body entirely. ‘The Red Guard. It’s their shitty, “destined to meet under the rain,” spell again. If I had stayed Sebastien, would they have caught me? Whatever they’re doing, there’s no sympathetic magic involved, which means it might have more to do with the idea of me than my actual self. And their idea of me is the Raven Queen.’ Despite that shaky inference, the only comfort she could find in this moment was that if they had found her as Sebastien, they might have grown suspicious about what that meant.

But then, that comfort was ripped away by another thought. ‘What if they watched me transform?’

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