“What? Why?”
“Something you said before intrigued me.” Jacques placed a piece of paper and a pencil before her. A complicated maze filled the page. “Solve this.”
“What?”
“You have never solved a maze before? It is a children’s game.”
The whole thing seemed stupid to Faye. “No. Why would I have?”
“I forget myself, your upbringing was rather harsh on the frontier. I would imagine that any papers you had were saved for the outhouse.”
Faye’s eyes narrowed dangerously as she picked up the pencil. She contemplated stabbing Jacques with it.
“I joke. Please forgive my impertinence… It is simple. There is an entrance and there is an exit. Draw a line from one to the other. I wish to see how long it takes you.”
“This is dumb.” Faye folded the paper in half so that the two ends were touching, and then jabbed the pencil through. Problem solved. “There.”
“Heh… Just like a Traveler.” Jacques shook his head. “No. Not like that. Through the maze. Those are walls. You must not cross any of the existing lines.”
“Why?”
He thought about it for a moment, and then laughed. “The rest of us have to put up with walls. Please, just humor an old man and do it again.”
Faye studied the map. It was too easy. She put the lead down. “Why are you wasting my time on this stuff?” Back and forth, up and down, twenty-seven separate turns, and done. She passed it back. Jacques’ mouth was agape. “You’ve got that surprised look again, Jacques.”
“Fascinating… Here, do another.”
This one had twice as many lines inked on it. Faye sighed as she took it in. It took longer to actually draw her way through it than it did to analyze it. Sixty-eight changes of direction, and she was done.
“You did not backtrack once, not a single mistake.”
“Why would I? Jeez, is this what normal folks do for fun?”
Jacques’ eyes were opened a bit too wide. He was flabbergasted but trying not to show it. He skipped several other papers and went to the bottom part of his stack. “Try this one.”
This page was absolutely full of twists and turns, not just square edges. Faye simply put the pencil down and drew the path through it, seventy-four turns and eighteen points where she had to choose from divergent paths, but she could instantly see which ones were dead ends, so she just skipped those. Dead ends were for suckers. “Really, Jacques. When do we get to the part where I master magic?” And by the time she said that, she was done.
He took it from her and traced his finger over the pencil line. “Unbelievable.”
“You French folks must be entertained super easy. In America we’ve got this thing called radio…”
“One more.” Jacques handed her the very bottom sheet from his stack. She’d thought the last one had been as full as possible, but this one was absolutely filled with tiny corridors. It must have taken hours to draw. The paper was actually heavy with ink.
Her eyes flicked over it once. “I can’t. Not your boring, normal walk-around-stuff way, at least. It’s all blocked.”
Jacques took the paper back slowly and sat it on the table in front of him. He stared at it for a long time.
“You trying to figure it out, because trust me, I already—”
“No. I know it is, but you figured that out in a second… There are hundreds of possible paths there.”
“Yeah, but when you know what you are looking for, some stuff fits, and some stuff don’t. It’s not hard to figure out.”
He was still looking at the maze with a funny look on his face. “How does the world appear through your strange grey eyes?”
Faye didn’t know how to answer that, other than seeing a little bit better in the dark than most folks she knew, Faye didn’t think her eyes were any big deal. They made it so she had to wear dark-lensed sunglasses out in public to keep people from recognizing her as a Traveler, but other than that, no big deal. “I just see stuff normal, same as anybody. I just think about how it all goes together better, I guess. I’ve got this map in my head—”
“Yes. You’ve mentioned that, but in other Travelers, it is more of an instinct. For you, it is something more.” Jacques seemed distant, distracted. “Very few Travelers live long enough to get very good at their peculiar form of magic. This thing in your mind, it is really like a map?”
She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live without a head map, or even worse, how terribly limiting it would be, not having the freedom to Travel. “Well, that’s the best way to explain it I guess.”
Jacques was quiet for a really long time. She thought about asking him another question, but he seemed to be thinking really hard about something. Whatever it was, something must have clicked, because he started talking, all while still staring at that maze.
“Whisper confirmed for me that you were not born with grey eyes. All Travelers are born with grey eyes, but you were born with blue eyes. Your eyes turned grey on September 18th, 1918, the day we killed the last Spellbound.”
“I don’t remember…” As far as Faye knew, she’d always been a Traveler.
“Yes, you were far too little. He was named Anand Sivaram. What do you know of him, Faye?”
“Just what Whisper told me. He was a real bad man. He was a Traveler, but real smart.”
“Smart is an understatement. He was an astonishingly brilliant man, perhaps one of the greatest minds of our time.”
“It sounds like you respected him.”
Jacques chuckled. “How could you not? One must give respect to those who deserve it because of what they are capable of, even as you despise them for how they use their capabilities. Sivaram was born in one of the poorest slums in a very poor nation, with a rare form of magic that everyone around him saw as a malicious curse.”
“I know the feeling.”
“The parallel had not escaped me. Sivaram mastered teleportation, Traveling, as you are fond of calling it. As you are well aware, most Travelers do not live to adulthood. It is a form of Power most unforgiving of mistakes. Perhaps it was the complicated and dangerous nature of his Power that honed his curiosity so, but Sivaram embarked on a lifelong quest to understand magic. He was one of the first to discover that you could fashion spells and bind bits of the Power to them in order to create various effects. He went on to invent many of the spells we take for granted today, such as using the Power as a method of long-distance communication. He fashioned many others, great and marvelous spells that have since been lost to us. It was his greatest spell that pushed him over the edge into madness and murder. His notes have since been scattered around the world, but I sought out every last piece I could in order to better understand him.”
“So you could kill him better?”
“Of course. I may not look it now, Faye, but I was once quite the dashing leader of Grimnoir. The task of stopping his reign of terror fell to me. As you know, a Traveler can be a wily foe. Now imagine, if you will, a Traveler who came to hunger for death, and did everything within his considerable ability to cause death on a massive scale.”
The thought made Faye uncomfortable, mostly because she knew she’d be super good at it. She tried to hide her discomfort by nonchalantly eating one of the pastries. It was delicious.
“Sivaram’s earlier works were rational, coherent. He was a compulsive letter writer, and there was so much correspondence to choose from. I read so many of his words that I began to feel like we were old companions. I truly believe he started out as a kind, generous, gentle man, but the more he delved into the mysteries of the Power’s true nature, the more it changed him. By the time he’d fashioned the spell that you would come to inherit, his character had fundamentally changed. He believed the Power was talking to him, actually communicating its will and wishes. He became delusional, erratic, and eventually driven mad with homicidal urges.”