I woke in a cold sweat and I couldn’t see Robin and my arms reached for him on instinct, arms which both still somehow worked, and they found him in the bed beside me and I gasped in air through a ragged throat and I panted and puffed and groaned out, yelled out, tried to calm my frantic chest. It pulsed and throbbed like someone wouldn’t stop punching it. Dragged a hand across my eyes to smear the tears away. Didn’t help much.

  “You’re hyperventilating,” he said softly. “What happened?”

  “Can’t…” I gasped in, ended up biting on the sleeve of my shirt to ground myself. “Can’t… No…” Sucked in deep breaths. Robin still looked bleary.

  “Oh, spirits, it must have been awful, whatever it was. You’re safe here. Look at me. Focus on me. You’re safe.” I blinked hard and most of Robin coalesced into roughly his normal shape. “Focus. Breathe. Slow. Give me your hand. I’ll put it on my chest. Look at me. Copy my breathing. Slow.” Robin was breathing far far far too slow for any normal person but I did my best, I did my best. Slow. “In. Hold it. Out. Hold it.” Slow. I breathed in time with him and the world began coming back to me. “Look at my face. Focus just on me.” We were in his room. Safe in his room. Safe with him.

  “You were right,” I sputtered. “You were right. I can’t do it. I don’t wanna do it.”

  He did his best concerned expression. “I’m gonna say I have no idea what you’re talking about and I think for now, it might be best to leave it that way.” After another minute of the breathing, I started to feel my body again. I felt cold and hot at the same time, and like I wanted to run forever and never move again in my life. “Hold still. Keep breathing slow. I’m gonna go make us some nettle tea. It’s almost morning. I’ll leave the door open and I’ll only be in the next room. Just us. Safe in this apartment. Front door’s locked. Only us. Okay?”

  *

  “It’s so unfair. Why do good people have terrible stuff happen to them, and why do all the bad people seem to be having such a great time all the time?” I took another sip of the tea and it felt like life itself was flowing back into me. Robin looked perfectly dishevelled, his hair pointing everywhere except where he usually had it. I couldn’t imagine I looked any better. But sitting on his only chair, my body was coming back to me. Even my tail was clearing of pins and needles. “And my exam’s in, what, three days now? And they won’t even fucking tell us what it’s on, so I have to study everything. Do you have any idea how long my notebooks are? At the moment I feel like the instant I step through the threshold of that castle, I’m gonna explode.”

  “Oh. How do you feel here?” Robin asked.

  “Good,” I said. “Why?”

  “You could study here.”

  I blinked. “Wouldn’t you have to give me your door key for that though?”

  He shrugged lightly. “That’s okay,” he said cheerily. “I trust you.”

  I finished the tea too quick and it scalded my tongue, but it still felt good. Good to be here. Good to be safe. “I’m so mad at everything,” I said, mouth stinging. I had to set his cup down carefully on his little table: I could see myself smashing it way too easy. The way the chunks would crumble in my fist… “I didn’t know I could be mad at everything. It’s all useless, and the most awful people always win everything. It’s pointless to try. They’re always the ones standing tall when the dust settles.”

  “Oh. So what can you do about it?”

  “Fucking nothing!” I exclaimed louder than I meant. Robin jolted, and I let my head hang. “Sorry. I know you’re trying to help.”

  “I… Maybe you don’t want to hear this right now but I don’t agree with you. There’s always small things you can do, and over time looking back, they look like big things. One stone alone is worthless, but enough of them together can build a house.” A ginger hand stretched out and took the cup out of my reach. Likely for the best. “I think you’ll pass, no problem. I think the fear you’re directing at the exam is actually a fear or something much deeper. Probably something like –”

  “I don’t wanna know right now,” I said. “Please, Robin. I can’t even focus as it is.”

  As I slumped on the chair, I heard him washing cups, then heading into his room and changing. Whistling something to himself. Returning, slicing some bread and eating it plain. “I wasn’t joking about giving you my key. You’re about the most trustable person I know right now.”

  “Then you’re misled. I can’t even trust myself.” I groaned and pulled myself up enough to look at him. “It won’t do any good anyway. If the exam’s on the arcane, I’ll freeze up and it won’t work – if I couldn’t even perform it in a dream, what chance do I have in the waking world where it’s actually, really difficult?”

  He unlocked the front door and set the key down where I’d left the cup. Least this was harder to break. “Oh, dreams aren’t the truth,” he said. “And I find only half of our thoughts are. So don’t worry about it.” His hand strayed closer to mine and I flexed my fingers away. His scratched at the table as if he hadn’t intended anything at all. “There’s food and water. Look after yourself?”

  As if it was that easy. Maybe it was for him. He made it seem that way – he thought of something and said it or did it. He’d almost got out the door when I said, “Wait. Robin.” And he lingered. Came back. “Robin… I’m scared and I guess it sounds dumb but I think I’ve been having kinda prophetic dreams sometimes. I see stuff happening and then it happens in the waking world. I’m scared of doing what I did in the nightmare.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Oh. Then don’t do it,” he said simply.

  “When it happened before, it never felt like I had the choice.”

  This time his fingers did find mine, and they felt like everything I’d ever needed. “I understand your fear. I feel it too. And I think [you/we] have a lot more choice in this world than they wanted us to believe when we were small.”

  *

  On a stomach of slightly stale bread and a second strong cup of nettle tea, I marched fiercely up to the Institute. Slipped twice. Swallowed my tattered dignity and walked properly the rest of the way. Then lost all my points again when Kaspar spotted me wandering the dorm halls. “I’ve been worried about you,” he said like he’d rehearsed it. “Where on all the seas have you been?”

  “Busy,” I replied, trying to slink past him and not succeeding but not yet rude enough to make it obvious. “Just busy.”

  “I could have helped with that!” he insisted. “Gan, I told you could come to me with anything and I keep finding out that you don’t.”

  My eyes flicked up to his. “A friend died.”

  “I’m… That’s terrible. Skies above, I’m so sorry for you.” Still in my way. “How was I meant to know if you don’t tell me?”

  “We don’t have a good record of telling each other things and this was too personal. And all too quick. I haven’t been avoiding you, but… doing other stuff.” I swayed to the left.

  Kaspar slid to his right. “Which rather sounds as if you have been avoiding me.”

  My patience wore thin. “I’d love to hang around and argue with you again but I really do have more important things to do. Can I get to my room, please?” And while he huffed indignantly, he did stand aside. I sought the books I needed and dropped them all in my old hessian kit bag – about the only thing Kaspar hadn’t bought a replacement for yet – and he was still there when I emerged.

  He raised his hands in surrender and sighed like a dusty pair of bellows. “Please listen,” he said, and I was about to walk right past him. I would have done, but… Robin had stopped and listened for me, right? I grunted and stared up at Kaspar. “I’m sorry for how I become sometimes. Understand I dreamed of a life far away where I could live as I wished, free from all which erstwhile suffocated me. I fear it seems too often as though I’ve brought most of it with me, in here…” he said with a gesture to his head, “and in here,” he added with a hand on his chest. “I’d designed to have room for you too, and perhaps tried to push you in there without adequate space. I shan’t keep trying to do that: I want to be friends with you still.”

  A fair performance. “Of all the logs I have to chop right now, you aren’t even in the top five,” I told him. Considered telling him how I’d met someone much better, how I’d slept over a couple of times, how I was now going to that same place to study instead of being in the castle. But I saw his sorry expression, his perfect little kicked-puppy face, and... did I really want to hurt Kaspar more, after all the hurt of late? “I promise I’ll tell you everything when the week is over. I promise… Kaspar… We’ll catch up properly,” I said, and I meant it. I guess I was still sick of people getting hurt in this world, no matter who they were.

  *

  The first notebook I narrated and explained aloud like I was teaching it to someone else. I’d read that was a good strategy to learn. I stopped when my throat tightened, realising my imagined student was Omen, and how we’d never share another conversation again – not even over the dumbest little things we used to talk about. I’d burn any of the books into ashes right now if it meant I’d get just one more conversation with him. All of them, even. For one more chance to talk with him. Or even just a few minutes if that’s all I could have. Less than that – I’d burn it all, everything I’d made, just to see his face, see his smile, hear him –

  Took a break. Took a drink. Replaced what I’d lost from the tears and waited for the various bits of my head to stop bleeding from picking at them and pulled myself together and read on. Forced myself to focus. One, two, three more books by the time Robin came back. He excitedly told me about his day and the long discussion he’d had with a newcomer over a curiously complex complaint, and how they’d resolved a few salves worth trying, and I relayed the more interesting parts of what I’d refreshed today while we filled a stew bowl with hearty beans and something green and leafy that he showed me how to dissect. We chatted more, and I showed him all the exhilarating shades I could turn his lampshade, the whole gamut from cornflower to periwinkle to lavender. If you squinted, you could just about tell. We vehemently agreed transmutation had better be on the exam – how would the world survive without it?

  I even opened up and told him about the nightmare. No one else would ever hear a word of it apart from Robin, who got the whole story. Every finest detail, all etched immutably into my mind. He told me exactly what I didn’t want to hear but knew I really ought to. And then we shared out the stew.

  We even tried the thing where you feed each other across the table, and with sauce all over my shirt and Robin giggling so hard he hit his forehead on his bowl, we both swore off ever doing that again in our lives. Though he was very impressed when I cleaned it up using a little more of the arcane. Few things were worth more than the genuine smile of someone you had such immense love for.

  The next day I woke in his arms, hurting for having missed a chance to dream of Omen but at the same time knowing no dream was far better than what could have caught me in the night. He went off to work and I studied some more, convincing myself what Robin said was true and the effort would be worth it when I could look back at the progress as a whole. Page by page, stone by stone, building that house. And what happened if the war came down to the valley and everything you’d built was ripped asunder by the bellicose machinations of a man who looked objectively too good to be that much of an asshole? Well, we’d rebuild. Me and Robin. And we’d do it even better each and every time we had to put the stones back together.

  But he was late back today, so late I considered starting cooking on my own. What if something awful had happened? What if this couldn’t last and we had to go our own ways, and I had to take that fateful barge upstream when I failed the exam – when I failed it, despite Robin’s naive hopes – and my path went the same way as Omen’s except one hell of a lot quicker? People far better than me had lost far easier. Kaspar, with all his money and standing, must have been so lonely these past few months. Holly, with all her heart and dedication, must feel so powerless against her body. Even my parents with their war-won glory and esteem now returned to a cold and empty house each night. Was that the truth of it all? We were only snatching at jutting crags to cling to on the inevitable, inexorable cliffside tumble to our rocky ends in the icy, endless seas below.

  A knock on the door. I wiped my face dry with my sleeve before letting him in. Robin looked so contented, I didn’t wanna tell him what I’d felt. Nor how my mouth tasted of blood. I just wanted to cook with him. Make something good we could share.