Chapter Text
Cale realised they’d been locked in the room the moment Claude had laid his hand upon the doorway.
The Emperor must be an idiot, to think neither of them would pick that up —Felix had noticed the moment he crossed the threshold, before even him. Cale had seen perfectly how his head jerked, ever so slightly, to the focal point of the wards: the portrait of some long-dead aristocrat hanging up on the wall facing the entrance, gazing out at them with an expression as proud and cold and bare as his gravestone no doubt was and remains to be.
It was only because of his brother’s guarded expression, as he sat on that velvet-covered sofa, that Cale made the decision to take the chess match seriously, regardless of the risk to his safety. Felix loves the Emperor deeply, a brother in all but blood —but despite that Cale knows that he’d drop everything for Raziel Robaine. If Claude ever tried to harm him, Felix wouldn’t hesitate.
Felix is easy to overlook; his demeanour is like that of Choi Han, persistently cheerful, energetic, positive, and possessing a deep hatred of confrontation or conflict toward people he sorely values. Most people see his gentle gray eyes and altogether miss the sharp hint of steel beneath —the truth is, however, that Felix Robaine is far cleverer than anyone gives him credit for.
And the fact that he likes it that way, never making an attempt for recognition, makes him all the more dangerous. Under the watchful eye of such an excellent brother, it was so very easy for Cale to say anything he goddamn liked and to add a maddeningly bright smile.
“Checkmate, Your Majesty.”
Claude’s face, features locked to a freezing stand-still, satisfied Cale to an obscene degree.
“It seems,” the Emperor says, voice nearly nothing but a breath of cold wind, “I’ve been misled about the full extent of the youngest Robaine’s intelligence.”
Translation : You lied to me about your aptitude for chess and utterly humiliated me, you lying piece of shit. I don’t know what you are, but a child is not it.
Cale hides any faint suggestion of his snicker deep, deep inside him as he childishly replies, “Of course not, Your Majesty. It was simply luck.” Keenly, he watches the vein at the Emperor’s temple throb, cherishing the irate stiffness in his shoulders.
And when he thinks of a certain baby princess, living as if in exile in her own empire, her tiny back hunched in resignation and bitterness, Cale wants to rile this bastard up even more.
Claude’s lips curl into the faintest impression of a snarl. “You mean to say that luck is enough to win against me?” Felix shuffles a bit from the couch, and Cale feels magic coalescing at the Emperor’s palm, hidden beneath the table.
He sends out the tiniest, thinnest thread of his own, feeling it out, trying to gauge the purpose in the Emperor’s growing spell, nearly flinching when it brushes past a brewing, violent storm.
“Your Majesty, I’m three years old,” Cale points out, fidgeting with his hands in his lap. “Papa says I should listen to my elders, and Duke Alpheus is old and he says kids are lucky, so—”
“—That’s because Wise Elder Alpheus is full of shit,” the Emperor interrupts dismissively.
That, it seems, is a point they both agree on.
“Luck has a minimal role in a game of logic and skill. Nor does it explain why a snot-nosed brat still hanging off his nanny’s apron strings has enough raw magic to blow up a room.”
Cale very carefully controls his breathing. He cocks his head to the side. “I’m a magician?” He asks tentatively, throwing a puzzled glance at Felix, seeking reassurance and noting, absently, that his brother shows no sign of surprise or disbelief at this news.
“I just told you that, brat,” Claude snaps back waspishly, rubbing at his temples. “Don’t be obtuse, Raziel Robaine. It doesn’t suit you.”
Cale stays awkwardly silent, because how would the Emperor even know what suits him or not? And, Felix’s ass might have gone numb on that sofa, because he keeps adjusting himself on its velveted pillows, the sound of his rustling and clink of his sword against its sheath alone in the stillness and quiet. He wishes his brother would stop, because it makes everything a million times more awkward.
Just tell me to go home, Cale begs the Emperor . Tell me I’m annoying and a brat and an idiot child and send me away.
“Raziel Robaine,” Emperor Claude finally calls to him, waving his hand and unravelling the oppressive wards around the room.
“Come back for another match tomorrow.”
Cale blinks.
“What?”
“Phew,” Felix breathes out over his hair as he carries him out of the oppressive castle. “You did well, Raziel. It seems His Majesty likes you.” His tone is distinctly shocked, as if he’s not sure how such a miracle happened despite being witness to it.
He doesn’t like me, Cale wants to say, irate, he doesn’t know what to do with me because I’m apparently a powerful magician, but I’m three years old and thus unusable.
“Ah, but of course he likes you,” Felix is saying, answering his own silent question and nodding now in quick acceptance and understanding. This idiot. “I’ve never met anyone who dislikes you. If they exist they must not be sane.”
I’ve met many of them, Cale thinks. Do you want the alphabetised list?
Felix cheerfully jumps over a pile of leaves on the cobblestones, completely unnecessarily, and Cale’s hair comes undone, the ribbon flying away on an errant gust of wind and the braid hugging the crown of his head loosening. There’s a floatiness to his brother’s movements now that they’ve escaped the danger zone, and he’s glad he’s feeling more relaxed, truly he is, but if he would at least adjust the way he holds him so that the wind doesn’t blow his hair into his eyes and mouth, Cale would be much obliged.
He lays his forehead on Felix’s shoulder again to avoid eating his own hair or succumbing to another bout of irritating sneezing. The dappled sunlight pulls him into a comfortable, warm doze, like he’s at the terrace at Super Rock’s mansion and all is right in the world.
“Oh, by the way Raziel, since when have you been a magician?”
He flinches and knocks his nose against a very hard, muscular shoulder. Pain hammers through his skull, eyes watering. He vaguely hears Felix’s yell of horrified surprise, the pitch nowhere to go but up, up, up into worried hysteria.
“Motherfucker,” slips out in Common Western as a long, angry hiss, and Cale wishes he could curse way more, but alas. “I’m fine,” he wrests out from between clenched teeth. His hands clutch at his head as if to reach inside and take the reverberating pain out of it.
“I’m fine,” he repeats, suddenly thinking and hating how small his hands are and how they’re supposed to be bigger, patting a scaly head or soft fur. His mouth opens without his input, rational mind running on autopilot and spirit lost in a terrible feeling of loss that makes his body into something foreign and uninhabitable. “I set my sock on fire last week” —technically true— “but I got scared and threw it in the kitchen scrap bin. I didn’t want to tell Papa in case I got in trouble.”
The ‘papa’ feels like it gets stuck in his throat and he has to cough it out, but somehow it works. And, in fact, Cale saw one of the younger maids-in-training attempt to patch up a hole in a sock and throw it with desperation in the bin when it was ruined beyond logicality only last week. The head cook was up in arms about it for days, and no doubt the butler already let the Duke know of the commotion, which in turn means that Felix knows as well, since those two like their gossip so much. The culprit had not been found, as far as Cale was aware. It’s your lucky day, unknown Miss, he thinks stoically, I will be your scapegoat and shoulder the burden of your underwhelming sewing skills.
“Raziel,” he hears his brother’s voice, unbearably soft. A hand makes its way through his hair, until Cale’s entire head is cupped in it like he’s something fragile and precious. “How silly. We wouldn’t be mad at you for something like that. You should have told us, having magic is something to be proud of. I’ll have to see whether we can arrange for another tutor.”
Cale’s first instinct is rejection. But…
“Alright,” he murmurs, “Will the tutor know a lot about” — teleportation — “zipping?”
“Know a lot about what?”
“Zipping. Whoosh,” Cale says, gesturing dramatically, feeling a part of his dignity perish. “Would they know about how to get to places that are far away?”
The spark of comprehension lights up Felix’s eyes, and he gives a short laugh. “Ah, teleportation. Yes, you can do that if you’re a magician, so your tutor would know about it. Why, Raziel? Where do you want to go? Your big brother will take you wherever you want.”
I want to go home. “No, you can’t.”
“Why not?” Felix says, smiling. He thinks it’s a joke. Thinks it’s a child’s stubborn idea that nobody can help them and that they have to do it themselves.
“Can you take me home?” Cale asks, despite knowing the answer.
“Of course I can,” Felix Robaine responds obligingly. “We’re heading there now, aren’t we?”
Cale gives a jerky nod, and falls silent.
“Raziel, I’m going to say goodbye to Miss Lillian,” Felix tells him when they’re back in front of the Ruby Palace, depositing him under a maple tree, on soft grass littered with snow-like daisies. “Stay there for just a second, I will be right back.”
You rascal. Don’t try to trick me, you just want alone time with Lillian Yorke.
Cale is tired . They’ve been at the palace for what seems like the entire day, and the sun is starting to slowly descend, aegean bleeding across baby blue sky. He babysat a baby, defused a bomb, won a chess match against said bomb, was outed as a magician, and now he’s left outside to wait like yesterday’s rubbish.
“Absolute bullshit,” he mutters in Common Western, standing up and off the ground and trying in vain to wipe the grass stains on his shorts. “You crazy God.” He throws the accusation up in the clouds along with a searing glare. “You think you can just do whatever you want? Keep fucking watching, then. I’m going to tear you down from there and watch Choi Han and the kids slug you like the world’s ugliest pinata.”
He hears the sound of lighting, and it takes a while to notice it’s coming from the twin magic circles spewing thunder at his hands. As another chain of expletives unravels from his mouth, he shakes them off, the glow of magic fading into nothingness.
A cold breeze blows, leaving a trail of gooseflesh in its wake, and there’s something else in the air, a vibrating, charged crackle of energy, that raises all the hairs in his body.
Well. That’s certainly not him.
Cale pauses, ears pricked for anything beyond the sound of rustling leaves, grass, and the occasional clanking of armour as patrolling guards move about, further off into the distance. A listening augmentation spell improves matters immensely, and he purposely puts more power into it.
There. The faintest, barest sound of breathing —the breathing of someone in deep sleep, and a slow, serene heart beat to match it. And beyond that, beyond the realm of sound, magic buzzes around inside the woods, like a swarming beehive with the queen at the centre, sending off tiny ripples like alarm bells.
Whatever’s sleeping in the woods was in a magic-induced coma, and it’s preparing to wake up.
Cale sighs, debating it.
“Fuck it, let’s go.”
Perhaps under normal circumstances he’d never have accepted the risk. But a tiny part of him, desperate to go back, kicking and screaming for it, asks itself… if he dies, won’t he wake up back home?
There’s a man sleeping in a translucent tomb in the middle of the woods.
Cale, as he stands over him, can do nothing except stare. To be very honest, the stranger has a face that deserves to be stared at a bit. Claude de Alger Obelia might have been on par with Eruhaben, but this guy’s hair has beat the Emperor and had managed to score way higher.
“Hey,” he calls loudly, kicking the tomb with his foot. Wet grass clings to the pristine shimmering surface, and by all that he believes in, Cale cannot find it in himself to feel bad about it. “Wake up.”
Nothing much happens, except for a few fireflies making their way over as if to see what’s up. Nothing’s much, you see, Cale thinks. Just a three-year-old desecrating someone’s resting place.
Cale kicks the tomb again. “Oi.”
The man’s fingers twitch.
Cale wordlessly begins to smear all the grass and soil stuck at the bottom of his shoe onto the tomb. There’s script and symbols chiselled into the imaginary stone —something about a Tower, something about centuries ago.
If that wasn’t a dead give-away, the massive wave of magic that rears up, like a tsunami that has yet to collapse, sure is. The tomb grows more transparent.
“What in the flying fuck are you doing to my tomb?” A hoarse voice cracks out.
“You’re up,” Cale blinks, pausing in his vandalism to turn his eyes to the guy that sits up with a groan. “Why the fuck are you camping in the forest of the concubines’ palace, Master Magician of the Tower?”