All the Birds in the Sky(85)

“It’s never too late,” Deedee said. “Come on. We’re going to the next place, and I bet we’ll find you another swan there.”

“I should go home,” Reginald said. But then he paused halfway out the door, as if contemplating a return to an empty flat.

Patricia had done something weird, a few days before she had moved out. Deedee was washing her hands over and over, cursing into the steam cloud, and she’d looked up and seen Patricia’s face behind her in the slicked mirror. Patricia had stared, the way Deedee imagined that a lover would watch you after sex, with a kind of ownership. Or the way you would survey a pet that you had just gotten done domesticating. Something about Patricia’s look made Deedee’s scalp itch. “What are you—” Deedee had spun around, hands bright red, but Patricia had vanished.

*

THERE WERE SHORTAGES of HIV meds along with everything else, and normally Reginald would have been in a silent panic. But Patricia had done something, and now Reginald was cured. At least, that’s the word Patricia had used. “Cured.”

“You can’t tell anyone.” He’d woken up in the middle of the night to see her leaning over his bed. Two hands and one knee on the mattress, one foot on the ground. She wore a big black hoodie that only exposed a pointy white chin and a few strands of dark hair. “I have to leave town, maybe forever,” she said. “And I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.”

Patricia wouldn’t explain why she had to leave town, much less how she had “cured” him. She just did something elaborate and noninvasive, kneeling at the foot of his bed, and Reginald smelled burnt radish for a moment. “It’s complicated,” was all she would say, in a much older woman’s voice. Raspy. Bitter. “I’ve been called up to the front.” Reginald kept asking, the front of what? And then she was gone. Reginald had suspected the whole thing was a weird dream, but she’d left a long black hair on his floor and, yes, his viral load had tested at absolute zero afterward.

And now Reginald wasn’t sure what to say to anyone he might have sex with.

Deedee dragged Reginald to the Dovre Club and introduced him to Percival, who was some kind of architect or something, with tousled gray hair and a doughy face like a British movie star from the 1970s. He even had the houndstooth vest.

Percival was a “madrigal groupie,” who followed the groups around using a Caddy app and hung on every quaver. “My biggest fear about the apocalypse isn’t being eaten by cannibals—it’s the fact that in every other postapocalyptic movie you see someone with an acoustic guitar by the campfire,” said Percival, who had pale meaty hands with calluses on the sides of the fingers. “I can’t stand acoustic guitar music. I’d rather listen to dubthrash.”

“There’s no apocalypse,” Reginald snorted. “There’s just … a period of adjustment. People are being drama queens.” But even as he spoke, he had a vivid image of Patricia, looming over his bed at four in the morning, with an urgency in her hoarse voice that was indistinguishable from fear. Again, he wondered: The front of what?

*

EVERY STONE, EVERY leaf of ivy, every iridescent windowpane at Eltisley Hall rejected Diantha’s presence. The grass at the center of the Hex bristled at her. The chunky marble columns of the Greater Building drew themselves up, like magistrates taking umbrage. The narrow gates of the Lesser Building seemed to squint, to deny her entrance. The Chapel clenched granite and stained-glass fists, their knuckles spiked with gargoyles. Across the Hex, the big white slab of the Residential Wing turned opaque with mist. All six sides of the Hex puffed with hostility. Healers had built this place, centuries ago, and nobody does scorn like a pure Healer. Diantha hadn’t come back to Eltisley since she’d been allowed to graduate without distinction, and this was worse than she’d dreaded.

She almost turned and ran, but she would only have gotten lost in the Brambles and possibly eaten by something before she could have reached any kind of road. So instead, she made herself walk up the sharp steps to the Greater Building, where they were waiting for her in Formal Hall. She drew her thin black gown, with its yellow trim and ermine collar, tighter around herself against the sudden chill. Why had they demanded her presence when she was finally starting to build a life without magic?

Diantha found an empty seat in Formal Hall, in the back corner, as far as possible from High Table. Portraits of dead witches scowled from the dark walls, and chandeliers shuddered overhead. They were serving some kind of fish course, but the fish and the potatoes were the same mushy consistency. Someone tried to make small talk, but Diantha just kept her head down and pretended she was eating.

Just when Diantha thought the whole ordeal couldn’t get more miserable, she heard an inhuman chatter from the corridor outside, and the group burst in. A dozen of them, in their little suits and starchy dresses, singing madrigals. Fucking madrigals. Was there a more repulsive trend, in the entire universe? Trust hipsters to make even the collapse of civilization unbearably twee. These were the advertising jingles of the Renaissance, written by wife killers and creepy stalkers. Diantha wanted to scream, to drown them out with obscenities, to fling her fishtatoes at them.

Someone slipped an envelope onto the table, instructing Diantha to come to the Upper Common Room for after-dinner sherry.

The UCR was not the nest of luxury Diantha and the other students had always imagined. Just a mahogany box with seven leather armchairs and a crimson-and-jasmine carpet. The ceiling was a wooden grid, as were the walls. Everything tidy and regular, because this was Eltisley Hall.