Cedric was sick.

He suspected that he had come down with something when he laid down in bed and found he was having trouble breathing through his nose. So he opened his mouth, though he hated to do so, and he did it, but only because it was what he had to do.

Later that night he woke when the sky was still dark and his cheek was wet because he’d been sleeping in a puddle of his own saliva that had fallen from his mouth. Frustrated, he flipped the pillow to the other side and tried to get back to sleep.

But he still could not breathe easily and after a while his throat was dry and sore and sometimes he spasmed and spat out a cough or two but that just made him all the more miserable.

So when the Sun rose in the sky, Cedric did not leap out of bed. And though he did not get up, he did not sleep either, and he just laid there with his eyes closed until he heard Eloise’s voice. And when he heard her voice, he knew there was a silver bell ringing alongside it, because there always was, but between the door and the air and the fluid in his head, he could not hear that.

But he did hear her voice, and though he did not want food, and though his reactions were slow and sluggish, he rose when he heard her call,

“Breakfast!”

“You didn’t eat very much,” Myrtle said with concern.

They were in the library, and Cedric had only gone there because he was weary of the walls of his bedroom and he didn’t know where else he wanted to hide. Despite the largess of the old manor, sometimes it seemed there were very few corners where one might successfully remain in shadow.

Myrtle had found him after breakfast; a breakfast at which he’d left his plate practically unsoiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not feeling well.”

He knew he could ask her to alleviate the symptoms. And she knew he knew that, so she didn’t insult him by stating the obvious. He had seen her do this for the others, and the offer sat in plain sight like a biscuit in a bowl, but he did not want it. He did not know exactly why he did not want the remedy, a remedy she could grant with the wave of her hand, but the thought made him ill.

“I think I’m gonna stick around the house today,” Cedric said, and afterward he sniffled, and reached toward the tissues on the table to his left and took one for himself.

“How are your studies going?” she asked after a while.

Cedric blew his nose and then said, “Well enough, I guess.” The circle around his nostrils was raw and painful when he brought the paper against it.

“Though I’ll be missing lecture today,” he added. “I don’t feel like it.”

She didn’t respond immediately. “I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. Not with what you’re studying.”

“It’s—” he responded gently, seeing the old woman and her careworn face. “It’s okay.”

“I do okay,” he said, trying to dispel her worry.

They just sat there for a minute, and Cedric had a lot on his mind, but he didn’t have any idea how to best frame it.

But he tried.

“Can I—” he started to say, though his voice was muffled through the congestion. “Can I ask you a question?”

She looked at him, and her face softened. “Of course.”

Cedric had been mulling over many things, but he was also tired, so trying to parse through his thoughts was like wading through mud, and because he was exhausted, that was a difficult labor. But, he noticed, gratefully, that for once the house was not shaking underneath the footsteps of teenagers and children, and the whole thing had become quiet, and what few words he could summon to his mind, he could parse clearly.

“I heard that—” he took a breath, and jabbed awkwardly on the initial consonant, “—Davian used to come here and give lectures to the other kids, before… Before I got here.”

Her face was still, and yet, he thought she was frowning, even if only just.

“Is that true?” he asked.

“…Yes,” she said carefully. “When the children were younger, he used to visit. I asked him, years ago, and he came from time to time.”

Cedric did not say anything because he was imagining it, and thinking what the house was like then, and how things were now.

“I thought it was a good thing for him to do that,” Myrtle said. “I was worried about him for a while. Quite… Worried about him.”

Her voice took on a different quality, and it was clear, remorseful, and her own. “A man becomes different,” she said, “when he lives on his own: when he forgets what it is to live with a wife, with children, with — family.”

“I met him,” Cedric said suddenly, and Myrtle turned her head in surprise.

“Who?” she asked. “Who did you meet?”

“Adam,” Cedric said.

“I…” she said, slowly, as if trying to read his temperature. “I see.”

Cedric wasn’t sure if he should have said that thing, but it was a relief to say anything at all. “It wasn’t exactly a happy meeting.”

“No,” she responded. “I can’t imagine that it was.”

The air was still and heavy for a moment between them, because in carefully chosen chains lay kernels of truth.

“I wish he would reconnect with his daughter,” Myrtle said.

Cedric did not understand what she had said, thinking of the last time he’d seen Davian watching the images from the Dreamcatcher, so he sat there quiet until—

“Kira has all his Talent and little of his pride. But perhaps that’s the very reason why she’s now on the other side of the world, estranged from him.”

“It—” she said, looking as if her eyes might hold water, “is a tragedy to see families once united fall into tatters.”

And if he’d been holding his breath, he wasn’t anymore, because his confusion melted into curiosity.

“Kira?” he asked.

And Myrtle saw something then, and when she looked at Cedric, she looked wistful so she refocused her eyes, clarified her statement, and said, “Kira is his daughter by his first wife, born some time ago in India.”

“I met her many years ago, when I went overseas… to—”

She stopped short, with words unsaid. And Cedric knew what she meant, or thought he knew, and on this, intended to ask no questions. Whatever she was willing to say would have to be enough.

“I didn’t want to leave,” she said. “I waited, in this house. I waited, stupidly.”

“I waited until doing nothing was as dangerous as drawing a gun.”

She was looking somewhere Cedric could not see.

“The year was 1939, and I was convinced that winter had arrived before a single flake had fallen onto the grass. I do not know if the numbers in the mercury read anything different than they had in any other year, but it felt different to me. And I remember that no matter how many layers of wool I covered myself in or countless logs I laid upon the fire, I was cold; and I knew I was cold because the cold was coming from within.”

“My father had been gone many years at that point, and when the basket came to me every Sunday, I gave. And when the women bearing crosses came to knock on my door, I emptied my pockets and sometimes I went into my quiet house and gave them still more. The coins were cold and the metal was heavy, so I surrendered them and hoped my heart would be lighter and make me warm.”

“But I was still cold.”

Her lips trembled while Cedric watched her wander through places she knew and kept within her, places where the color would never turn to sepia.

“So I did not wait until the first snow, though the glistening white always reminded me of happier times. I left because I knew I could give and should give, and I knew that I had not yet given enough.”

“I was near forty then, and I suppose I more or less appeared as such. I knew little of longevity and had even less desire to seek it out; I knew if I were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I could die just as easily as anyone else, and maybe that was an end that did not frighten me as much as it should have.”

“Davian was my senior by several decades, but wore a face that betrayed none of those years. And I had grown up mostly in isolation, so I did not know to question why or how that was, even from a Mage, but then, one day, before I even thought to ask, he told me.”

“He called it,” Myrtle said, “Amrita. He called it Amrita because that’s what his wife had called it when she’d given it to him many years before, years before I had even been born. Her name was Maya, he said, and she must have loved him to give this to him. And she had told him that it could not be given to the self, and could only be given to others, and she had been gone many long years so he offered it to me.”

“Although I had lost the evidence long ago and my fingers were bare, my heart belonged somewhere else. I could not take what he offered, not from him, not while the world around us was crumbling, and not while so many others would never see such a boon.”

“I…” she said, almost whispering. “I could not.”

Cedric was listening while she shifted.

“Kira came to join us shortly afterward,” Myrtle recounted. “And I was glad for what I had refused because I believe he gave what he had and knew to her instead, perhaps thinking it his last chance, his last will, his last testament.”

“When I came home, I knew I had to build something with what I had left. All the time in the world would mean nothing if I could not free my heart from the poison I was willfully ingesting.”

“I had to nurture the hearth before I could receive the warmth.”

She was quiet for a moment, because she didn’t want to speak about that anymore.

“Davian is strange when he is alone,” she said. “He is at his best when he is serving, when he is teaching. That is when his generosity and strength shine through.”

“And I thought if I left him alone…”

She trailed off and did not finish her statement. And she was still looking away, and Cedric did not know exactly where his thoughts were. But he knew he was sick and he felt lightheaded, and if he laid down in his bed, he would find it even more difficult to bring oxygen into his lungs.

And without any images at all, and with just raw feeling, his memories floated piecemeal at the edge of his consciousness. And those memories joined hands with ghosts he had never known, and the foreign became familiar.

“When—” Cedric began. “When did he have the dog?”

He asked again. “…Sam?”

Myrtle did not say anything for a moment, as if she had to strain to remember.

“It was not too many years ago,” she said. “Four, five, six, perhaps. That Sam passed away.”

It hurt to hear her say that, and he thought of things he didn’t want to think of. And all of a sudden, a passion rose from his innards, because the dog hadn’t passed anything, or become past, or ever really gone away.

He had died, and he was dead.

Cedric did not do much for the next couple of days. It quickly became apparent to him how many things he was leaving undone, as opposed to the very few things he was actually doing.

He didn’t bother taking a shower because he could not stand even the thought of entertaining that heat. And because he wasn’t bothering to bathe, he wasn’t shaving either, and when he saw himself askance in the mirror, he looked very tired and unkempt and disheveled. So when he had to leave the room, he didn’t inspect himself because he knew what he wouldn’t find.

He showed up for meals but didn’t eat much and said even less. He tried to drink, but most of the time it was only enough coffee to wash down a few bites of bread. The emptiness inside growled at him from time to time, but the lumps of undigested food lingering resistant in the acid within were even less tolerable. When his eyes stuttered and caught on the gaze of Eloise’s anxiety over the table, he pushed his face into a weak smile and said something to the effect of, “it’s just a cold,” because he did not want her to spend her energy on him.

And because Cedric did not want her to spend her energy on him, he went further inward, and took a book or two from the library and then went back to his room for the night. Fiction, because fiction was the only thing that made sense. And even that left him with guilt because his textbooks messily stuffed with paper had remained closed for longer than they should have. He knew if he left those things for too long, the dust would collect and he would forget everything he was supposed to have learned. But all he wanted was for something to feel closer than the distant stars.

After a while, the words that had been swirling and unreadable started to settle and he was able to move and take in something of sustenance. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to start the ignition. He stood and cleaned up his face, and when his nausea was behind him, he took a book in his hand and left the house for Manhattan.

When the double-doors painted deep green were closed, Cedric deposited the key into his right pocket. And when he did that, he thought maybe he should move it to the left, but didn’t, because he wasn’t sure he had any reason to. He thought he usually put his keys on that side, but he was unsure.

And so he thought again, and did it anyway, moving the keys, and then put his book down on the little table in the hallway, and he put it face-down in an instinct to hide whatever it was he was reading from the person who lived there, because he was sure whatever it was was never going to be good enough.

Davian was not in the front room, but that was not surprising because he rarely was. So Cedric walked through the hallway and found him in the study on the first floor in the back of the house. And maybe he’d already had dinner, or maybe he hadn’t had anything at all, but at any rate he was sitting on the taupe stuffed chair and he had a short glass about half-full with a golden liquid, a liquid that was filling the small and poorly ventilated room with the smell of alcohol. And Cedric did not really like to sit in this room as they usually did here, because the chair opposite to Davian was a rocking chair, and because it was such a chair, he could not recline without it forcing him backward at an angle that left him feeling prone.

So he sat down and leaned forward and put his feet flat on the floor.

“Cedric,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

Davian looked at him, and said what he always said next. “Care for something to drink?”

“I’ve been sick,” Cedric said hesitantly.

The Mage laughed a little and smiled, satisfied. “A good spirit in you is just what the doctor ordered.”

Davian lifted his glass and gave a quick whistle, and when he did that, an exact copy of his own appeared and hovered in the space between them. The man in his plush burgundy robe and dark brown eyes pushed the crystal in his hand up and toward Cedric and his green, so Cedric took the glass and accepted the toast.

And when he did that, the three ice cubes that had been alone clinked against the glass because the three had become six, and Cedric knew Davian always favored an even pair.

“You do look to be on the mend,” Davian said, taking a sip. “This will help.”

“It was worse a few days ago,” Cedric said, the smell of booze making him a little heady as he drew it closer to his mouth.

He wasn’t sure if he really wanted it, but then, repulsive too was the idea of absolute sobriety, so he took a drink, a drink that fell like fire upon his thickened tongue.

“It’s been quiet here without you,” Davian said.

Cedric wanted to put his drink down, but he couldn’t, so he just held the cold in his hands. “Heh,” he said. “Thanks.”

And he thought back to his conversation with Myrtle, how he’d heard about the daughter and asked about the dog, and how he’d attempted to pry knowledge from her instead of asking the man himself. It had been a small thing, he supposed, but still—

Davian lowered his drink, and the liquid inside had yet become lesser than when he’d summoned the facsimile. “Cedric,” he said with a gleam. “I want to show you something. I’ve been trying to keep busy.”

He put his glass down on the little table to his right where also lay a small chest of trinkets. And Cedric did not have anywhere to set his own, so he did the only thing he could do; he lightened his load.

Davian raised his hand, pinched two fingers together, and let loose with a snap as his thumb struck the palm of his hand. And there, in the flourish, appeared the Dreamcatcher held between the Mage’s taut fingers.

“I found something caught on the strands between,” he said. “Something on a vertex, on the intersection of two strings I hadn’t thought to check.”

“You must have brought this forward,” Davian said with gratitude, eyes shining at Cedric. “I hadn’t known this was here. Whether I left it there, or it was drawn in and became intensified by your use—”

Cedric saw Davian tear his eyes away and down toward the Dreamcatcher, but it was a glad expression; a smile was spread across his face and he looked as if he might cry.

“I haven’t seen this in years,” he said. “I thought it had been lost.”

Davian paused, and then continued. “So precious, and few, these moments.”

His face, serene, was lit up as he pulled an image from the artifact. And Cedric was not watching the Dreamcatcher so much, because he had seen this bit of magic many times before, but instead he was watching the Mage, who wore a rare look of peaceful bliss.

“We should have traveled more,” Davian said, watching the mirage coalesce between the two of them. “These are the kinds of mistakes you make when you think you have all the time in the world.”

Cedric felt his lips draw together in mourning while his mouth remained closed.

“Yes, I should have taken her to see more things, but we did—” Davian paused, taking a breath when the cloud before him turned to blues and bright greens, “we did go one spring to the Falls.”

And they just looked for a while before Davian elaborated on the bright spot that broke up the darkness in that small room.

“We were cooped up that winter,” he said. “Cabin fever. By the time the weather broke, I think we were all on the verge of going stir-crazy.”

Cedric was looking down. None of what he pulled from the Dreamcatcher ever threw out sound. But as he looked into the Mage’s memory like film, his imagination brought a sensation to him that he couldn’t distinguish from fantasy. It was the sound of gallons upon gallons of water rushing through a massive river and falling in a torrent to mix and froth into white against the rocks below.

And though Cedric knew he’d never seen or heard such a sound in the flesh, and thought maybe he’d only ever seen such a thing on television, when he looked into the moving picture, it was just as real as anything he could ever claim to have experienced.

“I had promised to take her to High Force because she so loved the water, even when she was very tiny,” he said, a twinge of wistfulness underlying the admission. “But I don’t know if she ever remembered that.”

“She was just two when we left England.”

The Mage pushed air from his nostrils in an effort to keep his composure.

Cedric looked into the moving lights, and it was something like Davian’s memory viewed as if conjured from his own mind, because although he did not appear, when Lila, clutching a clumsy teddy bear, looked back, he knew she was looking at him because of the way her face overflowed with joy. She still had one hand wrapped around the bear, who looked a little scraggly and unwashed with limbs that were hanging loose from the body. But the other hand she raised and pointed at the falls in a gesture of awe, and Cedric could see that what the Mage had said was true.

It was daytime in the memory, though outside the cloud was darkness split by lamplight in an enchanted house in the West Village. And Davian kept watching and seeing and reliving that place, a place contained in that cloud of memory summoned from the recesses of his accumulated experience and made shared.

And because he was still smiling a quiet and tender smile while Cedric continued to watch, the young man knew the older was not seeing exactly what he was seeing, because Cedric’s eyes drifted, and there at the edge of the scene was a man who couldn’t have then been too much younger than himself. He was standing with his yellow hair strewn messily about his face, obscuring his expression but not his stance and certainly not the fact that his arms were crossed and he seemed rather dour and unhappy. And though the eyes were hidden, and he’d only met him once, Cedric knew the identity of the third.

Whatever Adam saw, it was not worn on his mentor’s face, not then, and not now, and it was still not the splendor witnessed by the child, and truly he stood somewhere else and might not have been seeing the waterfall at all.

“Have you ever been to Niagara?” Davian asked, watching the little girl in the white dress and ribbons in her hair. “We should go.”

Cedric was still watching Adam, and he did not blink for a while, so his eyes went dry and out of focus and several seconds later he wasn’t seeing or hearing anything at all. He remembered his drink because the cold water was collecting on the side of the glass and taking the warmth from his skin, and when the booze passed his lips, it did not burn and he did not flinch and he said, “No, never.”