Sunday, September 16, 2012 Part of Joshua was now relieved; the Motion lessons were done, and now he could start teaching his new pupils control, and that would make all of their lives much easier. But for the most part he was worried. On Tuesday MacAddie and Mrs. Weller would depart for Sheffield with their young charges, and Mr. Dorsey still would not be able to do them any good, unless he somehow managed to pull off a miracle tonight.
He’d already worked all three of them hard enough that Mrs. Mosley had gone directly to bed after the group lesson, and Mrs. Weller was currently napping on the couch. Mr. Dorsey wasn’t in the best of shape either, so Joshua tried to start him out a little more slowly, reviewing what they’d already learned. Dorsey could now easily hone his senses into anyone in Edinburgh, though he still couldn’t read much off non-magic users. But he couldn’t reach very far beyond it, and that was going to be harder to teach because tonight, his senses would likely go out of Joshua’s own range.
Within a few minutes he had Joshua counting up the number of people in various places on the city’s outskirts, and even outside of it, since of course they weren’t standing in the city’s center. Meanwhile Joshua reviewed a map of Scotland. He estimated his own senses went no further south than St. Boswell’s, if that. Sheffield was several times that distance; very few people would have been of any aid to MacAddie. That anyone after him would assume themselves undetected was, at least, one advantage they had.
“Now,” said Joshua, “you are going to stretch further, but now you’ll be looking for something different. Up until now you’ve been counting up people, paying attention to where they are and how many of them there are, but now, you are to look through all non-magic users. You should look over this until the only people you can sense in this city are us and Perpetua.”
“Okay,” said Dorsey, and Joshua felt him focusing. It was getting slightly easier to read his mental activity, as he grew a little more relaxed around Joshua.
He now also had a very, very crude sense of distance-he could automatically tell when he had reached what was roughly around Edinburgh’s city limits. Joshua didn’t know how much good it would ultimately do, if the amount of distance they were trying to cover would be too much for him to comprehend easily.
“Go South,” Joshua said, which Dorsey could do; he’d developed an efficient enough sense of direction. He stretched his own senses down, almost as far as they would go, sensing the population of the land without really paying attention to it. He wished he could connect with Dorsey’s mind again, the way he had when he’d first raised his magic and then closed him up, but Dorsey’s mind would no longer allow that.
“Oh dear,” said Dorsey suddenly, sounding nervous. “I think I’m sensing some other magic users down south.”
Joshua did some mental calculations. “Where exactly?” he asked. He took his own range to the limit, but couldn’t sense a thing. That was a good sign; they weren’t supposed to be in range.
“Truly, I cannot tell.” Dorsey wasn’t very good yet at using his other senses while doing this, another problem to fix, but he managed to look down at the map and point around the English-Scottish border. “Somewhere on the border, I think. They may be in Scotland, they may not yet.”
“They are,” said Joshua. “We keep some communes on both sides of the border; I don’t think we need to be alarmed about this. If they come within my own range we might have to be alarmed.”
“So I’m beyond your range now?” Dorsey sounded vaguely awed.
“You can sense far beyond the that,” replied Joshua. “Are you getting much past the border right now?”
“Not at the moment,” said Dorsey. “I didn’t...I sensed your people and than didn’t look any further!”
“Well, do so now,” said Joshua. “I think we extend pretty far down south. I know we have people in London, though I’m not sure you can get that far anyway.”
“We,” said Dorsey, “so you still think of yourself as one of them?”
“That is not relevant,” said Joshua quickly. “Try to get your senses further. Do you know how far you might be now?”
“Give me a minute,” snapped Dorsey. His hand hovered over the map. Then he put a finger down a little further south, near Newcastle. “More magic users,” he added, “but their ranks are starting to thin a little, I think.”
“Your sense of distance is improving, at least. Further.”
Dorsey was starting to turn pale; his shoulders were visibly tensed. Joshua counted off fifteen more seconds before saying, “Stop,” and he slumped in relief.
Deciding to let him rest for about a minute, Joshua asked, “How far now? Can you still tell?” Dorsey shook his head immediately. This was a setback, but not a surprising one; Joshua himself had suffered it years ago, when he’d first started learning. “When did you lose track?”
“Somewhere around...” Dorsey gazed very dully at the map. Finally he circled his finger all too closely to Newcastle. “There.”
Not enough, Joshua thought. Still, they had to try again. Joshua spent the next minute contemplating the distance between Newcastle and Sheffield before saying, “Try again.”
“Try what again?” asked Dorsey crabbily. “Reach further or measuring how far I reach in the first place?”
“Just reach further right now.” He might, Joshua thought, be able to determine the location of Sheffield once Mrs. Weller was down there; he could now identify her signature from close by. But he might need much more mental discipline in order to do it from so far away, and that wouldn’t be any use if he couldn’t reach that far, and now Joshua couldn’t think of a way to determine if he could. Perhaps if she ended up being the only active magic user in large enough an area that would work.
Several minutes later Dorsey shook his head. “I can’t go any further.”
“Yes you can,” said Joshua; there was a chance that he couldn’t, but he probably could. “Rest another minute and then try again.”
Three more times he ran Dorsey through the exercise, until finally the other man moaned and crumpled to the floor, clutching at his head, whimpering, “I can’t...”
“It’s all right,” said Joshua, resigning himself to it ending there. “You probably have reached the limit of your range now.”
“Will they not come swooping down on us now, since you can’t do that?” Dorsey continued. “I mean, I think they could sense me doing that, couldn’t they?”
“Only a select few, and they’d have to be paying attention,” Joshua reassured him. “In all likelihood you went undetected, at least this time.”
“At least this time,” Dorsey repeated tiredly. Joshua helped him up and to sit down. He’d have to give him a longer resting period before they moved on to the night’s second activity.
But meanwhile there was another groan in the room, and Mrs. Weller stirred. “Something’s going on,” she murmured. “I can tell.”
“Yes,” said Joshua, “and in fact, we’ll be needing your help once Mr. Dorsey has recovered from our last exercise.”
When about twenty minutes had passed and Dorsey had had something to drink, Joshua instructed the two of them to sit down together and look into each other’s eyes. “There’s only so much you can do at this early stage, Mr. Dorsey,” he explained, “but I want you to be as aware of as much of her mind as possible, to increase your ability to follow it, even from far away.”
“Quite a task, there,” said Mrs. Weller, “Mrs. Darcy.”
Hearing himself addressed in that manner provoked a visibly change in Dorsey; his expression turned cheerful, gentle.
“I’ve grown used to it,” he said. “Here in London we often do have guests, and sometimes a large amount of them. Fortunately most of Mr. Darcy’s friends are good company, intelligent and well-mannered; he would not be friends with them were they not. But someone they always cause more people to be invited with them whenever we have any serious parties, and too often those people are less desirable company.”
“Ah, but Lizzie, do they not divert you, sometimes?”
“They used to, but now I have seen too many of them, and they are all alike. If any of them somehow find their way to our table tonight, perhaps you will find them diverting, but not me, I fear. But, of course, this will be a relatively small affair, so the risk in minimal anyway.”
Then he looked up quickly, as if hearing someone call his name. “The cook,” he said. “You must excuse me, father.” He got up and hurried across the room.
“Of course...” she drifted off, then blinked hard. “I do not at all like that,” she then said.
“I can not deny I think it did me good, though,” replied Dorsey.
“Maybe me too,” said Mrs. Weller very softly, “even if I didn’t like it.”
Dorsey turned around, and Joshua watched as the two of them looked at each other, as if they only had remembered now that they had been father and daughter in a previous life.
“Well,” said Mrs. Weller. “I suppose we shall get to know each other even more after this, Mr. Dorsey.”
Dorsey flashed a cheeky grin, and said, “Don’t you think at this point, madam, that you ought to call me Doug?”
He pulled himself up, and his eyes fell on the far side of the bed, where George had fallen asleep. The dream flashed back to his mind, of the dance she had shared with the man she had married not much more than a year later. A very different man; he hadn’t been much of a dancer, for a start.
At least he was asleep, and he still was having trouble sleeping. Monday nights might be easier for him, though; the schedule on Monday exhausted them all. Which, in Diamond’s mind, only increased the question why, since that one aborted attempt exactly two weeks ago, he hadn’t tried to initiate sex at all. He’d been eager enough for it before the Awakening, albeit never in the bed then. Now he’d left Diamond high and dry, and this morning, with them to be parted, Diamond was feeling the want. He was not, by a nature, a man who made the first move, but that might be just about to change.
Perhaps he felt Diamond’s eyes on him, for George awoke and turned around. One look at the scattered curls clinging to his forehead and cautious desire in his blue eyes and Diamond had to have him. It overcame all restraint, and he pulled George to him and ground their bodies together, kissing him hard.
“Diamond...” George protested feebly when they came up for air. “I still don’t know...”
“Please, I can’t stand it,” Diamond pleaded. “Let me have this, for the next few days, let me have this to keep.”
He would have said more had he had the patience. But George was hard now, and Diamond could barely think any longer, not now that George was kissing him back, tongue deep in his mouth and hands down on his backside. Diamond wanted more, wanted George in him, which George still hadn’t done at all, and now their urgency overcame everything and they could do nothing but blindly thrust.
It was only moments before Diamond spent, seventeen days of tension and anxiety breaking out of his body and draining away. George took only two seconds more before he groaned his own release under Diamond and they both went limp.
“Thanks,” George whispered after another minute. “I needed that.”
Then he shifted to glance at the clock. “I think we better be getting up and into the shower.”
Though the two of them had taken to showering together, it was typically a brisk affair; water was costly these days; Diamond was aware of just how much that was straining the arena’s budget. It was only afterward, when they stood in the bathroom wrapped in towels, after carefully blowing his hair dry as Diamond finished shaving, that George pulled his lover to him and kissed the side of his face. “Just remember,” he whispered. “If they do well, claim all the credit, and if they do badly, absolve yourself of all the blame.”
“Either way, my primary concern will hardly be credit or blame,” replied Diamond. He leaned forward to wash his face off, then stared at himself in the mirror. His hair was out of order at the moment, but that wasn’t what he was looking at. “Will they take me seriously? I still look like a boy.”
“No, you don’t,” said George. “Trust me, once you ended up with a lifetime’s worth of memories, you aged up. I think we all did.”
Back in George’s bedroom, which would very soon become their bedroom, Diamond set upon his hair, and combed and combed and combed until finally George took the comb away from him. “If you want breakfast this morning, it has to be fairly soon,” he reminded Diamond. “Your train’s at 9:20, remember?”
Nessa joined them over the breakfast table, only just up, with her hair an absolute mess and her eyes half-closed. “I’m still not used to you seeing me like this,” she commented to Diamond.
“You’ll get used to it,” shrugged George. “And if Aunt Alice really does come live with us, you’ll hardly be the most frightening sight he sees in the morning.”
“Really, George,” said Nessa, “just because mum was a little too fond of her hair dye...though you know, I think the best day to move Diamond in might be next Tuesday. Sheila’s lease expires shortly after that, so we’ll want to move her.”
Diamond wasn’t even sure how much there would be to do; almost everything he used on a daily basis he had already brought over here so as to get at it more conveniently, and a bit more had been stuffed into the packed suitcase currently sitting in the bedroom, waiting to be taken down to Sheffield. He agreed readily; he was now eager for the thing to be done.
At the train station he would meet with Betsy and their young charges, and Sheila and Pamchenko had both promised to come to see them off, which made Diamond very glad, especially because George and Nessa could not. He could not even mention in any public environment that he was living with them, and if anyone was indiscreet enough to mention it, which they were unlikely to be, he was to point out the financial benefits, and mention, too, the decision to move Sheila into his own old childhood bedroom, without mentioning that this decision had been made after the one about his own relocation.
The two of them were lucky, they knew, to live a life where most of the people they saw day to day were not bothered by who they were, but there were the rules, which they saw no choice but to obey; their careers might very well depend on their obedience.
And so they parted before Diamond opened the apartment door. Nessa hugged him tightly and wished him luck, and discreetly left while George pinned him to the door for a long, sizzling kiss, as Diamond tried to commit every detail of it to memory. They whispered soft farewells to each other, and as Diamond stepped out, carrying his suitcase with him, he held George’s eyes until he had clicked the door closed behind him. He allowed himself a moment then, just a moment, to let himself be melancholy, something he had the feeling he would do many times in the weeks and months and possibly even years to come. Then he turned and headed down the stairs, stairs he was at last familiar enough with he could navigate them without thinking, leaving his mind to brood much longer and further still.
In the train Faye and Ken were chatting excitedly. “Don’t spend all your energy,” Betsy told them gently.
Outside the window, she watched Diamond hug Sheila, then Pamchenko, and the latter whispered something to him. She’d talked his own parents against coming to see him off, though if Lauren MacAddie had had her way she too would have been coming with them. Then he leaned in and called to them, “Ken, Faye, why don’t you help get all your bags on the train.”
Skaters tended to carry a lot of baggage with them; both Faye and Ken had had to pay extra for the amount they were taking. They both got up to carried their bags in, until they piled up over and around their seats and caused the other passengers to stare incredulously at them. “Don’t pay attention to them,” Diamond advised them. “They’ll grow bored of staring in time.” He ought to know, too; he’d taken this train ride in their position at least once every autumn since he’d been eleven. It was only this year that he and Sheila weren’t doing any very early season competitions. This year, however, he was unmistakably glad to have only one suitcase of his own.
They’d just gotten everything settled in when the whistle blew, and the train started moving. Mrs. Atwood and the three young people all craned their heads to watch their seeing-off party waving from the platform. Betsy pulled out her copy of Sense and Sensibility and started reading.
About an hour had passed and Colonel Brandon was offering Edward Ferrars a living and asking Elinor to pass the offer on to him, completely unaware of the agony her doing so would be for both of them, when Betsy suddenly felt uneasy. She glanced out the train window, but the swiftly-moving landscape offered no hint of where in the country they were. She looked next at her companions. Ken and Mrs. Atwood had both fallen asleep. Faye was doing homework, with her earbuds in. Diamond was writing in his journal, and she saw his hand pause, stiffen, then leap down and begin writing again; he was switching between writing as himself and writing as Marianne, and his absorption made him as cut off from noticing her chagrin as the other three were.
Another moment and she recognized it; her new senses were tingling. There were magic users about.
She had recalled what Joshua had told her about there being many of the cultists around the Scottish-English border, and that this wasn’t something to panic about. Still, it perturbed them that she could sense them; she’d never done that long-distance. When she wasn’t within a relatively small distance of Kate or Doug or Joshua or Perpetua...well, it actually wasn’t that she couldn’t sense them exactly...it was that consciously, she usually didn’t.
It was the large number of them that had triggered the reaction, she thought. She wondered if they might be able to read anything off any of them, as a group.
She closed her eyes and tried to tune out to the train around her, to see only the blur of magic that she was currently being transported through. After another minute she realized she couldn’t tell them apart; they were like a mass cloud. Doug would have been able to tell them apart, she thought. Even Kate, probably. Of the three of them, she was the least powerful, according to Joshua, which depressed her.
Her mind came back to the train and she picked up her book again, but now she couldn’t concentrate. The magic users, the cultists, the people who would kill her if they knew who she was-and then she realized that they could probably sense her and the terror nearly overcame her. If any one of them attacked, she knew, she would be no match for them. How could she have thought it was at all a good idea to continue on as if nothing had happen, to walk straight into death like this? She positively felt ill as she contemplated all of their folly.
“Mrs. Weller? Are you all right?” Diamond’s concerned voice snapped her out of it, and then another one kicked in, Don’t panic. No point in making things easier for a group of mad cultists. Even if they’re aware there’s a magic user on this train, they probably think you’re one of their own. They’re probably kept in isolation even from many of their fellow cultists, probably don’t have the slightest idea of what any of them are doing. Getting within their range may be an unwise idea in the future, once Gabriel Isaac sends the alarm out, but for now, if they’re not swooping down on you at this exact moment, I imagine you’re safe enough. At any rate, no point dying over something you can’t do anything about; you’ve spent you’re life in ice dance, so you know that very well.
“Mrs. Weller?” Diamond asked again.
“Just a little nervous,” she said. “When I ought not to be.”
“Do you mean about the competition,” Diamond asked, “or about...?”
“About that,” said Betsy. If she was nervous about the competition, it would be far better not to mention that to Diamond. “Which right now, I can not do anything about.”
“That’s the worst thing, isn’t it?” said Diamond. “When you can’t do anything to make things better.”
Now he clearly was talking about the competition. “If you really do plan to spend most of your life coaching, Diamond,” she said, “you’d best get yourself used to it!”
They were a little past Leeds when Betsy’s mobile rang. Not recognizing the number offhand, she answered with a simple, “Hello.”
“Hello, Betsy, this is Doug,” came the response. “You’ve gone out of my range. Have you reached Doncaster yet, at least? Are you anywhere near it?”
“We’ve only just left Leeds,” she told him. “So, not quite the success we were hoping for. But it’s early in the season, is it not?”
“That’s a strange way of putting it,” said Doug, who apparently hadn’t remember that Betsy was sitting with three people who could not know what they were talking about. “I’m not going to be able to extend my range any further, remember; Joshua’s already pushed me to that limit. So even you’re safe this week, what happens later?”
“We could hardly depend on you going out of the country,” Betsy pointed out. “We would be beyond your reach then. I shall have to learn to manage things for myself at some point.”
“That’s a good point,” Doug conceded. “I truly am sorry, though.”
“Never mind that,” she said gently. “Though just one thing, you haven’t been lingering at this task all day, have you?”
“Only the past couple of hours. I was able to trust you’d be able to stay within range before then. Not that Joshua believed me.” He said this last sentence with an angry tone that made Betsy suspect Joshua was in the room with him.
“Well, I can’t say I don’t appreciate the effort, so thank you. Call me back if you feel anything else is going on?”
“Of course I will.”
“Good, thank you. Good day.”
“And to you.” They both hung up.
She’d inevitably gotten attention during the call. Mrs. Atwood was still asleep, but Ken was awake, and gazing at her tiredly; she suspected he wouldn’t remember much of what she had just said. She saw Faye lose interest too, and look out the window, and since she still had her earbuds in she literally hadn’t heard anything. But Diamond had been listening keenly, and his face was full of questions. But how to answer them in front of Faye and Ken?
“That was from Kate’s husband,” she finally said. “Things didn’t go the way they wanted this morning. But as I told them, it’s early.”
Diamond had already known that Doug had been trying to track them, and now he nodded in dismayed understanding. “Too bad,” he managed, and she saw him reach for his journal. She considered buying one herself.
But she didn’t really need to, because even without it, in came that little voice into her head again, How much good would he have done anyway? It still would have been up to you to actually do something had anyone attacked. You’re no better or worse off than you already were, so there’s no need to think any differently about the situation.
Joshua shrugged. “We wait. And hope nobody takes any interest yet.”
“In order words,” said Doug, “I spent the last week being tortured for nothing.”
“It may do good in the end,” Joshua pointed out. “Being as advanced as you are now may well make the difference between life and death later. Besides, this exercise will have improved your sense of distance drastically.”
“Thanks,” grumbled Doug, who didn’t feel any better.