????“It.”
???“Is.”
??“Chosen.”
?“For.”
“Him.”
“All.
?“Quests.”
??“End.”
???“In.”
????“Death.”
“So does life,” said Sweeney.
????“Then.”
???“Choose.”
??“Yours.”
?“Well.”
“Sweeney.”
The heads cracked their jaws so wide, Sweeney wondered if they would swallow themselves. Then they began to laugh, and while laughing, whirled themselves into a small cyclone. Faster and faster it spun, until the heads were nothing but a laughing blur, and then were gone.
Sweeney, contemplative, watched the empty sky until dawn.
Maeve sat up, her head and neck aching from sleeping on the tile, her mouth tasting as if she had licked the subway station she fled from earlier that day.
Legs still feeling more like overcooked noodles than functioning appendages, she staggered into the kitchen, and poured the milk down the sink. It was a largely symbolic sort of gesture, performed only to make her head feel better—it certainly wouldn’t undo the food poisoning or the resulting fucked up dream, but seeing the milk spiral down the drain was still a relief.
Talking heads flying around Central Park and conversing with a bird who was sometimes a man. It was like something out of a Henson movie, except without the good soundtrack.
Becoming involved enough in her work to dream about it was, on balance, a good thing. But there were limits. She was not putting disembodied heads into her paintings.
Maeve painted a tower, set into the Manhattan skyline. A wizard’s tower, dire and ancient, full of spirals and spires, held together with spells and impossibility.
She hung the surrounding sky with firebirds, contrails of flame streaking the clouds.
Dawn came, but it was neither rebirth nor respite. Sweeney was still befeathered. He turned to the glow of the rising sun, and the tower that appeared there, as if painted on the sky.
Every wizard had a tower, even in twenty-first century New York. It was the expected, required thing, and magic had rules and bindings more powerful than aught else. It had to, made as it was out of words and will and belief. Certain things had to be true or the magic crumbled to dust and nothingness.
Sweeney cracked open his beak, and tore at the promise-crammed air.
A wizard’s tower is protected by many things, but the most puissant are the wizard’s own words of power. Even after they have cast their spells and done their work, the words of a wizard retain tracings of magic. Their echoes continue to cast and recast the spells, for as long as sound travels.
The words do not hang idle in the air. Power recognizes power, and old spells linger together like former lovers. Though the connections are no longer as bright as the crackle and spark of that first magic, they can never be entirely erased. They gather, each to each, and in their greetings, new magics are made.
Ronan had been a wizard for centuries now, perhaps millennia. A few very important years longer than Sweeney had been a bird.
He had fled Ireland in the coffin ships, with the rest of the decimated, starving population. His magic, the curse’s binding, had pulled Sweeney along in his wake.
In the years since his arrival, magic had wrapped itself around Ronan’s tower like fairy tale thorns, a threat, a protection, and a guarantee of solitude. A locus of power that sang, siren-like, to Sweeney, though he knew it was never what he sought.
Sweeney flew around the tower three times, then three, then three again, in the direction of unraveling. The curse, as it always had, remained.
“How many paintings do you have finished?” “Five.”
“How long will it take you to do, say, five or maybe seven more?” “Why?”
“Drowned Meadow will give you gallery space, but I think these new pieces are strong enough you’d be better served if you had enough finished work to fill the gallery, rather than being part of a group showing.”
“When would I need them finished by?”
Brian’s answer made her wince, and mourn, once again, the loss of the sketchbook, and the studies it contained. Still. “It’s a good space. I’ll get the pieces done.” “Excellent. I’ll email you the contracts.”
“Wait, that ’s what the naked bird guy looks like?” Emilia stood in front of the first painting in the series, the man transform ing into a bird. “No wonder you keep seeing him around the city. He’s hot.”
“He’s usually a bird.”
“Still, yum. And is that drawn to scale?”
Maeve snorted. “Fine. The next time I see him, if he’s being a person, I’ll give him your number.”
Emilia laughed, but she looked sideways at Maeve while she did. “So, are you seeing all of the things from your paintings?”
Emilia had moved to the newest painting in the series, a cockatrice among the tents at Bryant Park’s Fashion Week, models turned to statues under its gaze.
“Do you think I would be here with you, discussing the attractiveness of a werebird, after having consumed far too much Ethiopian food, if I had really encountered a bird that can turn people to stone just by looking at them?”
Maeve looked at Emilia again. “Or no. It’s not actually that you think that. You’re just doing the sanity check.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. But you know you don’t always take care of yourself before a show. And this one did start with you thinking that you saw a bird turn into a naked guy.”
“Which, I admit, sounds odd. But you don’t need to worry that I’ve started the New York Chapter of the Phoenix Watching Club.”
“That sounds very Harry Potter. You haven’t seen any wizards wandering around the city, have you? I mean, other than the guys who like to get out their wands on the subway.” Emilia twisted her face into an expression of repulsed boredom.
“And you wonder why I don’t like to leave the house.”
“No wizards?”
“No wizards.”
There were wizards in New York City, nearly everywhere. War mages, who changed history over games of speed chess. Chronomancers who stole seconds from the subway trains. And the city built on dreams was rife with onieromancers channeling desires between sleep and waking.
Even the wizard who had set the curse on Sweeney looked out over the speed and traffic of the city as he spoke his spells, shiftings and transformations, covering one thing in some other’s borrowed skin, whether they will or no.
But though Ronan was here, and had been, he was not the direction to which Sweeney looked to break his curse. Wizards did not, under any but the most extreme circumstances, undo their own magic. Magic, magic that is practiced and cast, is at odds with entropy. Not only does it reshape order out of chaos, but it wrenches the rules for order sideways. It rewrites the laws, so that a man might be shifted to a bird, and back again, no matter how physics wails.