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sonreirEnvy
Tom and I grew up together. We were inseparable as children. He was the golden boy, destined to do great things, and I...wasn't.
Tom was charming and likeable even from the time we were in the cradle. He was the baby that would coo and grasp your finger. I was the one who screwed up my face at the light and screamed. Tom never suffered from colic, and slept through the night by the time he was three months old. I was plagued with colic, then croup, and a host of other childhood illnesses, and didn't sleep through the night until I was a year old.
Tom had gorgeous blue eyes and blond curly hair even as a child. I had brown eyes and mousy brown hair.
People often commented on his beauty, when we were children -- looking, as he did, like something out of a painting -- and told me, with unmistakable pity, that they hoped I would grow up to be smart.
Tom preened, whenever he was given a compliment.
"Thank you," he said, as soon as he was old enough to enunciate the words (and he did, beautifully). "You are too kind."
I flushed red, whenever anyone tried to say something kind about me -- that they liked my dress, or they 'd been told I was good at reading. I stammered, trying to thank them. Mostly, if given a compliment, I fled. I knew what my role was, where I fit in, and I didn't mind it. Tom could get the glory and the accolades; all I wanted was a book and somewhere quiet to sit, somewhere out of the way.
Despite all this, we were friends -- best friends, even. Our parents had been friends, and it was their desire that we be friends, too, and so we were.
We were well-matched, in a way. Tom dragged me into adventures, but I dragged him right back to the ordinary world. I kept him honest, and he kept me dreaming.
I knew, from a young age, that Tom was different.
I knew he could do magic. I'd seen him do it. We'd held hands, and I'd felt the buzz, the golden-hot burn of the spell, as he created the illusions -- as he made it rain flowers (they melted away to nothing when they touched the ground), or put leaves on the trees in the dead of winter, created tiny fires that gave warmth and light only to us.
I was the mousy little friend that followed him wherever he went -- not devoted, as the adults said (somewhat pityingly, it seemed -- they thought I had a hopeless, schoolgirl crush on him), but curious about what he would do next, what mischief he'd get into.
He carried everything out, but I was the one with the ideas, sometimes. I came up with the games.
Tom was the one selected to go to the wizard's school.
What surprised everyone was that they chose me, too.
I wasn't a handler -- I wasn't someone who could direct magic and shape it into whatever I wanted it to do. I was something different, a little rarer. Less flashy, but useful, sometimes: a conduit.
Whenever wizards got together and did whatever it was that they needed to do, saving the world from whatever peril it was in on any given day (usually something relatively dire that most people never found out about -- massive earthquakes, gigantic asteroids, and the like), they needed a conduit -- someone to channel the power through and put it in the right place, make sure it ended up where it needed to go. Magic handlers were good at drawing magic out of things and forcing it into whatever shape they liked, but they were mostly good at handling their own magic. When it came to working together, that didn't go so well. Most likened it to herding cats. They needed someone to channel it through, to guide it and make sure it arrived at the right place, in the right shape, without any important bits missing.
If magic was the river, then the conduit was the riverbed, and the wizard was the water. They were the force behind things, and they dictated what happened, but I made sure everything stayed together and guided it to the right place.
Tom was a good handler. His skills as an adult never quite lived up to his initial promise, but he was good enough. He was capable enough, and well-liked, and so while he wasn't the earthshattering talent everyone had thought he was, as a child, he was still good, and often sought after for minor things that the truly great wizards (the ones that taught at the university, and who were tasked with keeping the world safe) thought beneath them.
I was an excellent conduit.
That was a surprise too, I think. I'd spent my childhood being overlooked, in favor of Tom, but as soon as we went to the wizard's school, suddenly he was overlooked in favor of me.
We had different classes. I learned mostly about guiding, about controlling magic, while Tom learned about how to draw it out of things -- but I excelled. It was what I'd been doing for years, anyway -- that golden-hot burn of magic as he cast things, holding my hand, telling me what he wanted to do, was me guiding the spells where they were supposed to go.
Before long, I was taken out of the ordinary classes, with others that would learn the same skills, and put into advanced classes, taught by the high wizards themselves. I learned a little of handling (I was not good at it, but I could perform some of the most basic spells), and I learned how to act as the channel they needed for the higher magic that they cast.
I learned, long before Tom did, what the best of them did, and why it was essential.
I grew up soaked in their magic, learning how to channel and guide it, how to ensure that what they wanted to happen, happened.
I was very good at what I did, and there was talk, in the college, that I would replace the current Conduit to the Royal Wizards when it was time for her to retire.
I looked forward to that day -- to serving the country I loved, to doing what I loved.
I was good at what I did because I loved it. I never got tired of the burn of magic, the feeling of forcing it to go where I wanted to. It felt like playing, to me -- playing with clay, or playing at damming the stream, the way that Tom and I did when we were children. A push here, or a stone placed there, and your model went from looking like nothing to resembling the horse that you had always intended it to be, or else the stream was dammed and suddenly overflowing its banks, filling the lined area you'd created.
Magic was full of potential. I loved driving it, putting it where it was supposed to go. I lived for the feel of it, flowing through my body, for the connection I had to it and the control I had over it.
Tom was jealous -- I knew he was -- but that was only to be expected, and the wizard's school had many wise and wonderful people in place to sit with students and talk with them about their futures, and how power was not the end-all be-all.
We had a few fights, the first year that we were there, after I was pulled from regular classes and put into the advanced ones, while he struggled with some of the curriculum. His transition from golden boy to ordinary student was not an easy one -- but there were people there to help with it. Incoming students were assigned mentors in the form of older students in the program, and Tom's was a particularly good one.
James Dunn -- Jim, he preferred to be called -- was a lot like Tom, in a lot of ways. He, too, had been the best in his little pocket of the world at what he did, until he came to the college, whereupon he found out that he was mostly ordinary. Jim had a skill for healing, and was one of the best in his year at it -- but he struggled with the basics in other schools of magic. Transmutation, in particular, was something that he had a lot of difficulty with. The instructors at the wizard's school assigned him to Tom because Tom also struggled with the subject (though he excelled in illusion and divination). They felt, given their similar backgrounds, that he and Jim could relate to one another well.
Jim was kind and frank and funny. He was good at forcing Tom to slow down and reassess what he was doing before he did it, and he was the one who helped him work through the jealousy he had about my place in the school.
Tom might have hated him, the way that some students resented their mentors, but Jim was impossible to hate. He liked him, instead -- loved him as a brother -- and Jim loved him in return. They were fast friends.
Once Tom had overcome his disappointment (helped, deeply, by the fact that he'd improved enough at transmutation to be put into one of the advanced warding classes), he introduced me to Jim, too, and the three of us were fast friends.
I introduced Jim to my own mentor, Roberta -- Bertie -- Jones. The four of us got along well. We studied and ate together, and helped each other with homework when we could. It wasn't often -- we were in vastly different classes, all of us -- but it was often enough.
After graduation, we tried to stay in touch. Bertie and I continued on, enrolling in the Wizard's College, but Jim and Tom immediately went out and got jobs, and...changed. We all got dinner together once a week, and Tom and I talked through little messages magicked to travel back and forth, but the dynamic was different.
I tried to talk to Bertie about this, but she only laughed. "You're still in school, like me, and they're off in the adult world. They probably fancy that they're adults now, since they've got proper jobs, and we're still stuck here."
"We're not stuck, though," I protested. Bertie was training to be an adept (one of the great wizards, whom I would work with later on), and I was completing my training to take over for the current Conduit, when she retired in four years.
"They don't know that," said Bertie. "They didn't want to continue -- they saw it as being stuck. You remember what they said."
I did remember.
"Still..."
"Everyone goes through this," said Bertie. "My mentor did, when she graduated. You won't, but you're special."
I blushed, just as I did each time she said anything positive about me. We had all grown up, all graduated, but we had not grown up enough for me to tell her the truth: that I had feelings for her, beyond those of friendship. It was acceptable, by that time, if uncommon. I knew that she didn't feel similarly about me -- she wasn't interested in women. It was a kind of Hell, not telling her.
She must have known, on some level, the feelings that I had toward her. She asked me, often, to reaffirm that we were friends -- "you'd do anything for me, right?"
In retrospect, I can recognize this as something unkind -- but I was eighteen to her twenty, and I had a helpless crush I knew would never go anywhere.
"Of course," I told her. "Because we're friends."
"Best friends," she clarified, each time, and grinned at me.
Tom knew how I felt about Bertie. He'd guessed, before I had told anyone else.
"You need to tell her," he prompted me. "Get it off your chest and get it over with."
I sighed. "Tom, it's not that easy."
"Sure it is," he insisted. "Remember when I had that crush on Isadora? I told her, and we went on a couple of dates, and that was the end of it."
"Sure," I said, "but Isadora is straight. So's Bertie. Even if I did tell her, what would come of it? She'd pull back and start re-evaluating all of our interactions. She's one of my best friends, along with you and Jim -- I can't stand that."
"Suit yourself," said Tom.
He didn't raise the subject again.
Two years after my conversation with Tom, Jim and Bertie started going out. Their relationship, which didn't strike me as anything serious at first, quickly turned serious, and before I knew it, they were engaged to be wed.
"We'll be married in the spring," Bertie told Tom and I, breathless, over our weekly dinner. She held out her hand with the ring on it (a large pearl -- large enough that I wondered, unkindly, how Jim had come to afford it).
I steeled myself. I had known this was inevitable -- she wanted to marry young, she had talked of dropping out of the college and going to work as an adult, for the idea of becoming one of the Adepts no longer interested her -- I knew that she would be leaving, someday. I just hadn't expected it to be so soon.
"Congratulations," I managed. My voice sounded strange, to my ears, and I hoped that she could not pick up on it. "Jim's a good man; you'll be happy."
"Congratulations," Tom echoed. "Though I do wonder..."
I was not skilled in Divination, but I did not have to be, to know what would come next.
Tom announced my secret to the table: "Did you ever notice how Adelaide looks at you when she thinks you're not paying attention, Bertie?"
I knew that standing up and protesting would make it worse. I knew that Tom's announcement wasn't out of malice, or I hoped it wasn't, but out of a desire to spare me further pain. Rip off the plaster, hurt in the short term but not in the long.
"I'm happy for you and Jim," I said, weakly, as Tom finished announcing my transgression and Bertie stared at me in horror. "I...excuse me, please."
Tom apologized later -- he was drunk, he said, and that was why he'd done it.
I didn't go back to my room that night. I stayed over with other friends, and tried to forget what had happened.
Bertie sent me a message later, asking if I was up to seeing her. I wrote back that I wasn't. She didn't press.
I avoided her as long as I could, and after a week, when I felt I could meet her for coffee without dying of embarrassment, I agreed to a brief get-together after classes.
When I saw her sitting at the table, stirring sugar into her coffee -- when she looked up at me, dejected, and began with a sigh: "Ada, I love you, but not like that" -- I merely nodded, agreed when she told me it was wisest if I didn't come to the wedding, and walked away without ever sitting down.
I graduated, and prepared to take the place of the retiring Conduit.
As part of the procedure for swearing the oath to the King and court, I was asked to meet with the Adepts, one by one, to be interviewed by them for how well we'd all work together.
I had lost track of Bertie, after her engagement to Jim. She had sent me a wedding announcement, along with a note that Tom was not invited, either, and I was not to take it personally, it was only that there was limited space in the venue, but I had not heard from her since.
Imagine my surprise, then, when she was one of the Adepts to interview me.
"Ada," she said, smiling, as she saw me. "I hoped you would be the one they're interviewing to become the new Conduit."
I froze, seeing her. I didn't love her -- I hadn't loved her in a long time. Pain and mortification had taken care of that.
"Ada?" she pressed. "Won't you take a seat?"
There was hesitation in her voice, as she said it; fear, perhaps, that I would react badly.
I looked at her, and the old feelings came running back.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I can't."
I withdrew my nomination, and began searching for a job -- any job. The College offered to keep me, to let me teach, but I, my pride wounded, wanted nothing to do with magic.
I found a job waiting tables in a diner in the city. I quit it when the manager made a pass at me. I found another job, then another. I found an apartment, and kept it. When the lease was up on it, I moved.
It was easy, too easy, to let myself slide downward. I could have said enough at any point, gone back to the College. They would have tested me, but they would have let me back, let me teach.
I saw the headlines in the newspaper -- small ones, but still there -- about the search for a proper Conduit. There was no one else; the others they'd tested had never worked well with the Circle. I could have gone back, put my name forward: I will do this thing, if... -- but I couldn't stand the thought of facing her again, couldn't bear to think that we'd work together. So I didn't.
I stayed away from magic. I felt its absence like a hole, an empty pit that gnawed at me as I laid awake in bed at night, staring at the cracked plaster of the apartment's ceiling, the glow-in-the-dark stars that had been left by some previous tenant. I ached for the burn and glow of channeling, the one thing I was good at, for a return to the life that I'd left.
I let myself keep falling, instead.
I took up smoking because the burn reminded me, in some poor way, of magic-handling.
I kept hopping from serving job to serving job, never making more than enough to cover rent and buy cigarettes. My jobs fed me. I lived for family meal.
Tom kept in touch. I told him, each time, that it didn't matter, that I was never going back. He persisted anyway, asking for my address each time I moved, doggedly following me from job to job. He knew, I think, that my fall from grace was at least partially his fault.
I kept him around without really knowing why. I knew, or could recognize, that lingering jealousy, that last little bit of why wasn't it me was what had caused his outburst that night at dinner. I'd forgiven him, but I had no real reason for keeping him in my life.
Two days before my rent was due, when I'd walked out on yet another job and was considering what my next move was (borrowing money from my parents' or temporarily crashing on someone else's couch until I found another job serving at yet another shitty cafe), there was a knock at the door.
"Coming," I said, figuring it was the landlady coming around to remind me yet again that rent was due in full on the first, and if I wasn't going to be on time this month could I at least do her the courtesy of telling her...?
I yanked back the chain and pulled the door open.
There, standing on the front stoop of my shitty apartment, was Bertie.
"Jim left," she said, before I could formulate the kindest way of telling her to leave and never come back. "I'm locked out of the apartment. Tom gave me your address. I..."
I could tell she'd been crying, and I silently cursed Tom (Tom, who lived alone and had a whole house to himself in the suburbs!) for not taking her in himself.
I wanted to turn her away, but the old promise, I would do anything for you, came back to me.
"Come in," I told her.
Bertie told me everything. The fights they'd had, how life as an Adept had not proven what she wanted it to be; how she'd often thought about leaving so that Jim (Jim! Jim, who had guided Tom through his jealousy over my achievements) would no longer be envious.
"It's not like school," she said, her hands curled around a mug of tea (the only thing to drink in my apartment). "Where you're the cleverest in the room, or you can fake it...it's hard. Jim did all right, but after one of his patients died on his watch, he quit work at the hospital. I rose through the ranks of the Adepts, and I'm second in command now -- will be the Head Wizard, as soon as Merton retires in two years -- and Jim just...can't take it. I don't even know where he is, and I can't focus myself long enough to cast a finding spell."
"I'll channel for you," I said, automatically. We'd worked together, back in the day, and I knew we could do so now.
Bertie stared at me, her eyes wide. "Are you certain?"
I shrugged. "I haven't done it in a few years, but it's not like it's something you forget. And besides..."
Pain and embarrassment had done a lot, to help me forget. We'd both behaved badly, but we'd barely been adults, then. It was seven years since the wedding, five since I'd been out of school. I was 28, going to be 29 in a few weeks. If I had any lingering ill feelings now, they were toward myself, for letting my pride ruin my future -- or if not ruin, at least delay it. I'd hit the bottom and started digging, and now I didn't know how I was going to get out, but this was at least a chance to set things right.
"Thank you," she said softly.
She began murmuring the words she would use to locate Jim. A simple finding spell, one that I could have cast myself. I watched the glow of magic build around her hands, and waited for her signal.
She nodded at me, when it was time. I placed my hands under hers, and she dropped the threads of the spell into them.
I felt it, the golden heat of magic, running through my veins. My eyes filled with tears and my mouth burned as I held her spell, forced it to stay in its shape. It was easy, too easy, and it reminded me of what I had missed, what had been missing from my life in the years since I had turned down the job of the conduit.
"There," said Bertie, her voice sounding as though she was across the house, not merely across the room. "Hold it there."
I tied off one of the threads, let it drop.
"There he is," she said, her voice full of pain. "Hold it."
I held onto the magic, tears streaking my face, unsure of why I was crying, aware only of a deep joy, the sense of what I had been missing, what I had been without for so long.
"Hold it," she repeated. "There. Let it drop. Ada -- let it go."
I dropped the threads, tying them off one by one.
"He's at his mother's house," she said, quietly. "I'm going to call him, and...I don't know what comes next."
"You can stay here," I blurted. I wasn't sure why I said it, only that it was the right thing to say. "I'm a bit short on funds at the moment, thanks to being between jobs, but...the couch folds out into a bed. You're welcome to stay here."
She hesitated a moment.
"Thank you."
"Of course."
"Ada?" she started. "I'm sorry."
I felt a weight lift off my chest. I was freer than I'd been in years -- almost a decade.
"I know," I told her.
"I don't know how to fix things," she continued. "But I'm sorry for what I said -- how I acted, back then. I'm sorry for not getting in touch sooner. I've thought a lot about what I wanted to say, these last few years, but I've never been brave enough to say it."
"I wanted to reach out," I said, "but I was never sure how welcome it would be. I understand."
"Where do we go from here?"
I shrugged, rubbed my palms together, thought about how good it had felt to work with magic again. "Up?"
Bertie stayed for two weeks. Tom apologized, for dropping her on me, and we managed to make up, too, in a way.
I found another serving job and managed to pay my bills with a bit of help from both of them.
Bertie left a card, at the end of her stay, with her phone number and the number of her office, encouraging me to apply for the still-open Conduit position.
"You've passed your portion of the interview with me," she said, when I began to protest. "And that's the hardest part. Everyone knows who you are; no one gives a damn how long you've been out of school or what you've been doing. Come interview."
So I did.
It's been two years since everything was righted.
Tom and I are back to being good friends, finally healed from our years-long rift. We talked, the night after Bertie arrived, about everything that had happened and what we wanted from one another. We'd missed one another, it seemed.
Bertie and I work well together. I'm back to doing what I love, and making up for lost time.
She and Jim are still together. I keep silent on that front, but they seem happy enough.
Tom teases me, occasionally, when I see him, about the time I spent slumming it -- but they're friendly jokes, tinged with a bit of envy (that he was never brave enough to run off and do something like it himself; fear that he's not doing what would make him happiest, because he never tried anything else), and I don't mind them.
I tease him back, these days.
I'm the Conduit, after all -- I can take a joke.
Tom and I grew up together. We were inseparable as children. He was the golden boy, destined to do great things, and I...wasn't.
Tom was charming and likeable even from the time we were in the cradle. He was the baby that would coo and grasp your finger. I was the one who screwed up my face at the light and screamed. Tom never suffered from colic, and slept through the night by the time he was three months old. I was plagued with colic, then croup, and a host of other childhood illnesses, and didn't sleep through the night until I was a year old.
Tom had gorgeous blue eyes and blond curly hair even as a child. I had brown eyes and mousy brown hair.
People often commented on his beauty, when we were children -- looking, as he did, like something out of a painting -- and told me, with unmistakable pity, that they hoped I would grow up to be smart.
Tom preened, whenever he was given a compliment.
"Thank you," he said, as soon as he was old enough to enunciate the words (and he did, beautifully). "You are too kind."
I flushed red, whenever anyone tried to say something kind about me -- that they liked my dress, or they 'd been told I was good at reading. I stammered, trying to thank them. Mostly, if given a compliment, I fled. I knew what my role was, where I fit in, and I didn't mind it. Tom could get the glory and the accolades; all I wanted was a book and somewhere quiet to sit, somewhere out of the way.
Despite all this, we were friends -- best friends, even. Our parents had been friends, and it was their desire that we be friends, too, and so we were.
We were well-matched, in a way. Tom dragged me into adventures, but I dragged him right back to the ordinary world. I kept him honest, and he kept me dreaming.
I knew, from a young age, that Tom was different.
I knew he could do magic. I'd seen him do it. We'd held hands, and I'd felt the buzz, the golden-hot burn of the spell, as he created the illusions -- as he made it rain flowers (they melted away to nothing when they touched the ground), or put leaves on the trees in the dead of winter, created tiny fires that gave warmth and light only to us.
I was the mousy little friend that followed him wherever he went -- not devoted, as the adults said (somewhat pityingly, it seemed -- they thought I had a hopeless, schoolgirl crush on him), but curious about what he would do next, what mischief he'd get into.
He carried everything out, but I was the one with the ideas, sometimes. I came up with the games.
Tom was the one selected to go to the wizard's school.
What surprised everyone was that they chose me, too.
I wasn't a handler -- I wasn't someone who could direct magic and shape it into whatever I wanted it to do. I was something different, a little rarer. Less flashy, but useful, sometimes: a conduit.
Whenever wizards got together and did whatever it was that they needed to do, saving the world from whatever peril it was in on any given day (usually something relatively dire that most people never found out about -- massive earthquakes, gigantic asteroids, and the like), they needed a conduit -- someone to channel the power through and put it in the right place, make sure it ended up where it needed to go. Magic handlers were good at drawing magic out of things and forcing it into whatever shape they liked, but they were mostly good at handling their own magic. When it came to working together, that didn't go so well. Most likened it to herding cats. They needed someone to channel it through, to guide it and make sure it arrived at the right place, in the right shape, without any important bits missing.
If magic was the river, then the conduit was the riverbed, and the wizard was the water. They were the force behind things, and they dictated what happened, but I made sure everything stayed together and guided it to the right place.
Tom was a good handler. His skills as an adult never quite lived up to his initial promise, but he was good enough. He was capable enough, and well-liked, and so while he wasn't the earthshattering talent everyone had thought he was, as a child, he was still good, and often sought after for minor things that the truly great wizards (the ones that taught at the university, and who were tasked with keeping the world safe) thought beneath them.
I was an excellent conduit.
That was a surprise too, I think. I'd spent my childhood being overlooked, in favor of Tom, but as soon as we went to the wizard's school, suddenly he was overlooked in favor of me.
We had different classes. I learned mostly about guiding, about controlling magic, while Tom learned about how to draw it out of things -- but I excelled. It was what I'd been doing for years, anyway -- that golden-hot burn of magic as he cast things, holding my hand, telling me what he wanted to do, was me guiding the spells where they were supposed to go.
Before long, I was taken out of the ordinary classes, with others that would learn the same skills, and put into advanced classes, taught by the high wizards themselves. I learned a little of handling (I was not good at it, but I could perform some of the most basic spells), and I learned how to act as the channel they needed for the higher magic that they cast.
I learned, long before Tom did, what the best of them did, and why it was essential.
I grew up soaked in their magic, learning how to channel and guide it, how to ensure that what they wanted to happen, happened.
I was very good at what I did, and there was talk, in the college, that I would replace the current Conduit to the Royal Wizards when it was time for her to retire.
I looked forward to that day -- to serving the country I loved, to doing what I loved.
I was good at what I did because I loved it. I never got tired of the burn of magic, the feeling of forcing it to go where I wanted to. It felt like playing, to me -- playing with clay, or playing at damming the stream, the way that Tom and I did when we were children. A push here, or a stone placed there, and your model went from looking like nothing to resembling the horse that you had always intended it to be, or else the stream was dammed and suddenly overflowing its banks, filling the lined area you'd created.
Magic was full of potential. I loved driving it, putting it where it was supposed to go. I lived for the feel of it, flowing through my body, for the connection I had to it and the control I had over it.
Tom was jealous -- I knew he was -- but that was only to be expected, and the wizard's school had many wise and wonderful people in place to sit with students and talk with them about their futures, and how power was not the end-all be-all.
We had a few fights, the first year that we were there, after I was pulled from regular classes and put into the advanced ones, while he struggled with some of the curriculum. His transition from golden boy to ordinary student was not an easy one -- but there were people there to help with it. Incoming students were assigned mentors in the form of older students in the program, and Tom's was a particularly good one.
James Dunn -- Jim, he preferred to be called -- was a lot like Tom, in a lot of ways. He, too, had been the best in his little pocket of the world at what he did, until he came to the college, whereupon he found out that he was mostly ordinary. Jim had a skill for healing, and was one of the best in his year at it -- but he struggled with the basics in other schools of magic. Transmutation, in particular, was something that he had a lot of difficulty with. The instructors at the wizard's school assigned him to Tom because Tom also struggled with the subject (though he excelled in illusion and divination). They felt, given their similar backgrounds, that he and Jim could relate to one another well.
Jim was kind and frank and funny. He was good at forcing Tom to slow down and reassess what he was doing before he did it, and he was the one who helped him work through the jealousy he had about my place in the school.
Tom might have hated him, the way that some students resented their mentors, but Jim was impossible to hate. He liked him, instead -- loved him as a brother -- and Jim loved him in return. They were fast friends.
Once Tom had overcome his disappointment (helped, deeply, by the fact that he'd improved enough at transmutation to be put into one of the advanced warding classes), he introduced me to Jim, too, and the three of us were fast friends.
I introduced Jim to my own mentor, Roberta -- Bertie -- Jones. The four of us got along well. We studied and ate together, and helped each other with homework when we could. It wasn't often -- we were in vastly different classes, all of us -- but it was often enough.
After graduation, we tried to stay in touch. Bertie and I continued on, enrolling in the Wizard's College, but Jim and Tom immediately went out and got jobs, and...changed. We all got dinner together once a week, and Tom and I talked through little messages magicked to travel back and forth, but the dynamic was different.
I tried to talk to Bertie about this, but she only laughed. "You're still in school, like me, and they're off in the adult world. They probably fancy that they're adults now, since they've got proper jobs, and we're still stuck here."
"We're not stuck, though," I protested. Bertie was training to be an adept (one of the great wizards, whom I would work with later on), and I was completing my training to take over for the current Conduit, when she retired in four years.
"They don't know that," said Bertie. "They didn't want to continue -- they saw it as being stuck. You remember what they said."
I did remember.
"Still..."
"Everyone goes through this," said Bertie. "My mentor did, when she graduated. You won't, but you're special."
I blushed, just as I did each time she said anything positive about me. We had all grown up, all graduated, but we had not grown up enough for me to tell her the truth: that I had feelings for her, beyond those of friendship. It was acceptable, by that time, if uncommon. I knew that she didn't feel similarly about me -- she wasn't interested in women. It was a kind of Hell, not telling her.
She must have known, on some level, the feelings that I had toward her. She asked me, often, to reaffirm that we were friends -- "you'd do anything for me, right?"
In retrospect, I can recognize this as something unkind -- but I was eighteen to her twenty, and I had a helpless crush I knew would never go anywhere.
"Of course," I told her. "Because we're friends."
"Best friends," she clarified, each time, and grinned at me.
Tom knew how I felt about Bertie. He'd guessed, before I had told anyone else.
"You need to tell her," he prompted me. "Get it off your chest and get it over with."
I sighed. "Tom, it's not that easy."
"Sure it is," he insisted. "Remember when I had that crush on Isadora? I told her, and we went on a couple of dates, and that was the end of it."
"Sure," I said, "but Isadora is straight. So's Bertie. Even if I did tell her, what would come of it? She'd pull back and start re-evaluating all of our interactions. She's one of my best friends, along with you and Jim -- I can't stand that."
"Suit yourself," said Tom.
He didn't raise the subject again.
Two years after my conversation with Tom, Jim and Bertie started going out. Their relationship, which didn't strike me as anything serious at first, quickly turned serious, and before I knew it, they were engaged to be wed.
"We'll be married in the spring," Bertie told Tom and I, breathless, over our weekly dinner. She held out her hand with the ring on it (a large pearl -- large enough that I wondered, unkindly, how Jim had come to afford it).
I steeled myself. I had known this was inevitable -- she wanted to marry young, she had talked of dropping out of the college and going to work as an adult, for the idea of becoming one of the Adepts no longer interested her -- I knew that she would be leaving, someday. I just hadn't expected it to be so soon.
"Congratulations," I managed. My voice sounded strange, to my ears, and I hoped that she could not pick up on it. "Jim's a good man; you'll be happy."
"Congratulations," Tom echoed. "Though I do wonder..."
I was not skilled in Divination, but I did not have to be, to know what would come next.
Tom announced my secret to the table: "Did you ever notice how Adelaide looks at you when she thinks you're not paying attention, Bertie?"
I knew that standing up and protesting would make it worse. I knew that Tom's announcement wasn't out of malice, or I hoped it wasn't, but out of a desire to spare me further pain. Rip off the plaster, hurt in the short term but not in the long.
"I'm happy for you and Jim," I said, weakly, as Tom finished announcing my transgression and Bertie stared at me in horror. "I...excuse me, please."
Tom apologized later -- he was drunk, he said, and that was why he'd done it.
I didn't go back to my room that night. I stayed over with other friends, and tried to forget what had happened.
Bertie sent me a message later, asking if I was up to seeing her. I wrote back that I wasn't. She didn't press.
I avoided her as long as I could, and after a week, when I felt I could meet her for coffee without dying of embarrassment, I agreed to a brief get-together after classes.
When I saw her sitting at the table, stirring sugar into her coffee -- when she looked up at me, dejected, and began with a sigh: "Ada, I love you, but not like that" -- I merely nodded, agreed when she told me it was wisest if I didn't come to the wedding, and walked away without ever sitting down.
I graduated, and prepared to take the place of the retiring Conduit.
As part of the procedure for swearing the oath to the King and court, I was asked to meet with the Adepts, one by one, to be interviewed by them for how well we'd all work together.
I had lost track of Bertie, after her engagement to Jim. She had sent me a wedding announcement, along with a note that Tom was not invited, either, and I was not to take it personally, it was only that there was limited space in the venue, but I had not heard from her since.
Imagine my surprise, then, when she was one of the Adepts to interview me.
"Ada," she said, smiling, as she saw me. "I hoped you would be the one they're interviewing to become the new Conduit."
I froze, seeing her. I didn't love her -- I hadn't loved her in a long time. Pain and mortification had taken care of that.
"Ada?" she pressed. "Won't you take a seat?"
There was hesitation in her voice, as she said it; fear, perhaps, that I would react badly.
I looked at her, and the old feelings came running back.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I can't."
I withdrew my nomination, and began searching for a job -- any job. The College offered to keep me, to let me teach, but I, my pride wounded, wanted nothing to do with magic.
I found a job waiting tables in a diner in the city. I quit it when the manager made a pass at me. I found another job, then another. I found an apartment, and kept it. When the lease was up on it, I moved.
It was easy, too easy, to let myself slide downward. I could have said enough at any point, gone back to the College. They would have tested me, but they would have let me back, let me teach.
I saw the headlines in the newspaper -- small ones, but still there -- about the search for a proper Conduit. There was no one else; the others they'd tested had never worked well with the Circle. I could have gone back, put my name forward: I will do this thing, if... -- but I couldn't stand the thought of facing her again, couldn't bear to think that we'd work together. So I didn't.
I stayed away from magic. I felt its absence like a hole, an empty pit that gnawed at me as I laid awake in bed at night, staring at the cracked plaster of the apartment's ceiling, the glow-in-the-dark stars that had been left by some previous tenant. I ached for the burn and glow of channeling, the one thing I was good at, for a return to the life that I'd left.
I let myself keep falling, instead.
I took up smoking because the burn reminded me, in some poor way, of magic-handling.
I kept hopping from serving job to serving job, never making more than enough to cover rent and buy cigarettes. My jobs fed me. I lived for family meal.
Tom kept in touch. I told him, each time, that it didn't matter, that I was never going back. He persisted anyway, asking for my address each time I moved, doggedly following me from job to job. He knew, I think, that my fall from grace was at least partially his fault.
I kept him around without really knowing why. I knew, or could recognize, that lingering jealousy, that last little bit of why wasn't it me was what had caused his outburst that night at dinner. I'd forgiven him, but I had no real reason for keeping him in my life.
Two days before my rent was due, when I'd walked out on yet another job and was considering what my next move was (borrowing money from my parents' or temporarily crashing on someone else's couch until I found another job serving at yet another shitty cafe), there was a knock at the door.
"Coming," I said, figuring it was the landlady coming around to remind me yet again that rent was due in full on the first, and if I wasn't going to be on time this month could I at least do her the courtesy of telling her...?
I yanked back the chain and pulled the door open.
There, standing on the front stoop of my shitty apartment, was Bertie.
"Jim left," she said, before I could formulate the kindest way of telling her to leave and never come back. "I'm locked out of the apartment. Tom gave me your address. I..."
I could tell she'd been crying, and I silently cursed Tom (Tom, who lived alone and had a whole house to himself in the suburbs!) for not taking her in himself.
I wanted to turn her away, but the old promise, I would do anything for you, came back to me.
"Come in," I told her.
Bertie told me everything. The fights they'd had, how life as an Adept had not proven what she wanted it to be; how she'd often thought about leaving so that Jim (Jim! Jim, who had guided Tom through his jealousy over my achievements) would no longer be envious.
"It's not like school," she said, her hands curled around a mug of tea (the only thing to drink in my apartment). "Where you're the cleverest in the room, or you can fake it...it's hard. Jim did all right, but after one of his patients died on his watch, he quit work at the hospital. I rose through the ranks of the Adepts, and I'm second in command now -- will be the Head Wizard, as soon as Merton retires in two years -- and Jim just...can't take it. I don't even know where he is, and I can't focus myself long enough to cast a finding spell."
"I'll channel for you," I said, automatically. We'd worked together, back in the day, and I knew we could do so now.
Bertie stared at me, her eyes wide. "Are you certain?"
I shrugged. "I haven't done it in a few years, but it's not like it's something you forget. And besides..."
Pain and embarrassment had done a lot, to help me forget. We'd both behaved badly, but we'd barely been adults, then. It was seven years since the wedding, five since I'd been out of school. I was 28, going to be 29 in a few weeks. If I had any lingering ill feelings now, they were toward myself, for letting my pride ruin my future -- or if not ruin, at least delay it. I'd hit the bottom and started digging, and now I didn't know how I was going to get out, but this was at least a chance to set things right.
"Thank you," she said softly.
She began murmuring the words she would use to locate Jim. A simple finding spell, one that I could have cast myself. I watched the glow of magic build around her hands, and waited for her signal.
She nodded at me, when it was time. I placed my hands under hers, and she dropped the threads of the spell into them.
I felt it, the golden heat of magic, running through my veins. My eyes filled with tears and my mouth burned as I held her spell, forced it to stay in its shape. It was easy, too easy, and it reminded me of what I had missed, what had been missing from my life in the years since I had turned down the job of the conduit.
"There," said Bertie, her voice sounding as though she was across the house, not merely across the room. "Hold it there."
I tied off one of the threads, let it drop.
"There he is," she said, her voice full of pain. "Hold it."
I held onto the magic, tears streaking my face, unsure of why I was crying, aware only of a deep joy, the sense of what I had been missing, what I had been without for so long.
"Hold it," she repeated. "There. Let it drop. Ada -- let it go."
I dropped the threads, tying them off one by one.
"He's at his mother's house," she said, quietly. "I'm going to call him, and...I don't know what comes next."
"You can stay here," I blurted. I wasn't sure why I said it, only that it was the right thing to say. "I'm a bit short on funds at the moment, thanks to being between jobs, but...the couch folds out into a bed. You're welcome to stay here."
She hesitated a moment.
"Thank you."
"Of course."
"Ada?" she started. "I'm sorry."
I felt a weight lift off my chest. I was freer than I'd been in years -- almost a decade.
"I know," I told her.
"I don't know how to fix things," she continued. "But I'm sorry for what I said -- how I acted, back then. I'm sorry for not getting in touch sooner. I've thought a lot about what I wanted to say, these last few years, but I've never been brave enough to say it."
"I wanted to reach out," I said, "but I was never sure how welcome it would be. I understand."
"Where do we go from here?"
I shrugged, rubbed my palms together, thought about how good it had felt to work with magic again. "Up?"
Bertie stayed for two weeks. Tom apologized, for dropping her on me, and we managed to make up, too, in a way.
I found another serving job and managed to pay my bills with a bit of help from both of them.
Bertie left a card, at the end of her stay, with her phone number and the number of her office, encouraging me to apply for the still-open Conduit position.
"You've passed your portion of the interview with me," she said, when I began to protest. "And that's the hardest part. Everyone knows who you are; no one gives a damn how long you've been out of school or what you've been doing. Come interview."
So I did.
It's been two years since everything was righted.
Tom and I are back to being good friends, finally healed from our years-long rift. We talked, the night after Bertie arrived, about everything that had happened and what we wanted from one another. We'd missed one another, it seemed.
Bertie and I work well together. I'm back to doing what I love, and making up for lost time.
She and Jim are still together. I keep silent on that front, but they seem happy enough.
Tom teases me, occasionally, when I see him, about the time I spent slumming it -- but they're friendly jokes, tinged with a bit of envy (that he was never brave enough to run off and do something like it himself; fear that he's not doing what would make him happiest, because he never tried anything else), and I don't mind them.
I tease him back, these days.
I'm the Conduit, after all -- I can take a joke.
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Date: 2019-01-05 11:01 pm (UTC)I do think jealousy was what prompted him to reveal Adelaide's feelings for Bertie. What a horrible, disastrous thing to do-- such a betrayal of Adelaide's secret and of her right to make her own decisions.
I'm glad things turned out all right for her in the end, though what an awfully long time she spent in a lonely limbo thanks to how awkward Tom made things for everyone. :(