With every day that came and passed through the changing autumn, the Sun rose one minute later, and it set one minute sooner. Cedric couldn’t quantify this or prove it for with him he had brought neither chart nor watch. But he, wordless, could feel the night encroach upon them, getting stronger and darker with each hour, with each cycle that came and went as they journeyed through the wild and forgotten places.

The going was slow, and the going was arduous. By day, Davian sat upon a velvet chair which itself sat upon a marble platform that he, by virtue of his mind and his Talent, levitated effortlessly above the ground, ground that was growing drier and more brittle in the chilling air. And though this feat did not appear to tire the old Mage, such things did indeed tire his younger companion.

Simple feats of levitation were well within Cedric’s purview at this point, but only those he could classify as just that: simple. And though he could lift objects at a distance with only his concentrated thought, and he could especially slow the descent of things that were already falling, he did not seem able to push with the advantage at which Davian could propel his own Talent.

Yes, Cedric could lift a curtain, a book, hold a glass impossibly in mid-air; but when it came to lifting his own body off the ground, much less with a platform or chair or what-have-you in tow, it quickly left him exhausted as if he were holding such a thing in his own hands, without any help from magic at all.

So the boy took to walking, and because he was walking, Davian on his floating disc had to totter along at the pace set by his pupil, though he hated to do so, and often insisted on finding himself as far ahead as was physically possible without letting Cedric, dear Cedric, fall from his line of sight.

For hours each day, they proceeded just like this, steady, slow, and usually, by virtue of the distance between them, silent.

Cedric, for his part, sometimes stumbled upon the Mage when he had decided to stop. Here he would set up several arcane instruments and sensors, attuned, as he claimed, for tracking and finding those things that were close, but not close enough. And whatever the Mage did or saw or read from those machines was as strange as if he’d been licking his fingers and putting them into the twisting wind, but Cedric was quiet while the Mage worked, and after he’d seen the man turn the knobs or reconfigure the dials, the man came back with his energy renewed and a knowing smile on his face and he would say something like, “This way,” or “Just over the hill,” and sometimes, “They came through here not too long ago, let us make haste.”

Davian, and Cedric following him, made his way like this while the Sun was high overhead and left shadows to fall behind the tall trees. But when the sky turned to reds and oranges and purples, even if the colors were obscured by the forest all around, Davian stopped, and Cedric kept walking for a minute, walking until he reached where the Mage was hovering still. When Cedric was finally within earshot, Davian would say something like, “It’s time to make camp.”

And when it was time to make camp, Cedric stood and put his hands in his pockets because to do anything else was to interfere with everything getting settled just the way the Mage wanted his home away from home to be arranged. So Cedric waited, but he only had to wait for a minute or two, because all Davian needed to do was wave his hands to make things appear, though he always did it one-by-one to make a bit of a show out of the whole process. It was clear to Cedric that Davian had set everything up as a script long, long ago, long before they ever set foot in the forests far and away from the cities that lined the East Coast, and every time Cedric stood there and watched, he was watching a performance of a man who’d never been absent for the dress rehearsal.

On the first night, when Cedric laid his eyes on the tent, Davian knew he’d never seen it before, because it was his own creation, and because he was laying it between them anew. And if there was anything that gave to Davian an exquisite joy, it was giving lectures about things and places and circumstances that had long blown away as dust and been scattered on moving air. Davian had a never-ending stock of stories, but this one, when they were standing in front of the canvas on a cold night in October, was about the years he’d spent as a young man not yet thirty.

The impression of his lodgings, a sort of mobile compound drug about by camels and elephants and the Indian men and women who went with them, was something he drudged out of memories a century old. It was a strange thing when he narrated that experience, because even as he described what it was to “do without”, he was smiling a strange smile, and his eyes were without focus while he was remembering the sights and sounds of a place no man could anymore reach by passenger jet. He explained that there were three seasons there, and the one that stretched through the hemisphere’s winter was the cold season, and that was when tens or hundreds of Englishmen collected thousands into an entourage, and they went all around the subcontinent riding horses in fields and drawing up documents and meeting the locals and taking notes for the Crown about all the things that were so curious to see.

And the country was beautiful, he relayed, and the people still more beautiful yet, but the nights were dark and sometimes people came who were less beautiful and took and stole from him and the other English, and when the people did not steal, sometimes the jackals came and bared their teeth and tried to see if the foreigners had really truly picked the bones clean. And though the water there was the worst part, Davian said, and it always tasted brackish and stale and he hated to drink it, none of that was here, and here in their tent that wasn’t there, but was instead somewhere west and north of the city that fashioned itself The City, Cedric, as his honored and esteemed guest, would have nothing but the best.

And when Davian was done, he would smile and look quite satisfied with himself, and he would lift the flap, bow at the waist, and look back at his apprentice to say, “After you.”

When they were, as Davian said, “in camp”, if any mere Mortal had walked past (though there were none to be had), they might have looked upon the scene and seen a green tarp laid on a rope suspended above a shelter made from simple brown canvas. And if the hour were just right, there would have been faint orange or pale yellow coming from within the tent and through the seams, and maybe there would be a faint smell of burnt wood rising from a fire that couldn’t have been doused too long ago. Or, otherwise, maybe the lantern at the edge would have been dark, and the passerby might have assumed that the stranger inside was, perhaps, ‘out like a light’.

But Davian didn’t sleep much anymore, because he had too many tasks that needed to be done.

There was something else curious about the tent, though little that Cedric saw while in Davian’s company surprised him anymore. Though from the outside it might have altogether seemed something simple: large, yes, well-provided, certainly, and through the doorway might have been seen a cot, a chest, a woolen blanket messily folded — those who were invited to walk through the doorway beheld nothing promised by that illusion.

Maybe it didn’t all come as one cohesive story delivered on night one or night two, but after a while, Cedric pieced together what he could from the little bits that Davian threw out and suggested and teased of the things he’d seen and known a hundred years ago.

When Davian wasn’t “in camp,” he was in a fine home that served as his respite during the oppressive summer heat he endured while in the country of India. And this place was laid out very nearly symmetrically, and when you entered through the front door, there was a wing that broke off to either side, and if you instead went straight forward, you ended up in a fine dining room with a white table located in the center of the house, and if you looked up to the right (and it was impossible not to), hung on the wall was an enormous portrait of none other than the Mage himself.

And there were many portraits all around of all kinds of people but that one was the biggest one of them all.

Most nights, around seven and never later than nine, he summoned a fine meal for the two of them, complete with fine wine, little bites to whet the appetite, and a ham or a turkey or a roast duck, whatever memory of whichever evening so came at Davian’s beck and call. Sometimes the bottle had already been uncorked, and sometimes the meat required carving, but it was always precisely what the evening required.

And they never skipped dessert.

And sometimes, often, almost always, after dinner, Davian took his saucer and his cup and the black coffee he so desired and he sipped on it while standing in front of one of the other pictures in the house. And he would say something he thought was a funny thing to say, something like, “and this surly young gentleman before you is,” and the name always started with a title and ended with a roman numeral but Cedric could never afterward remember what came in the middle. But none of that was new.

One of the very worst changes that had happened, despite all the rest of the oddities, was that Cedric rarely, that is to say, almost never, saw Davian walk anywhere anymore.

That isn’t to suggest that it stopped the Mage from getting around. Rather, he took to simply appearing wherever it was that he wanted to be; teleporting instantly to any room, any corner, any position in the house that so suited his fancy. He could be sitting with his pipe one moment, even appearing half-asleep to Cedric, and then vanish to a desk where none would dare pursue. And then, having recovered whatever reference or footnote he had half-remembered, he would appear right back where he had started, albeit with fresh packing of tobacco to replace what had become blackened in the effort.

And when he did this, there was no warning where, or when, or how he would appear. And at first Cedric leapt in his skin when he was trying to lose himself in a book. Where he once imagined, if only for a moment, that he was inside the book in his hands, in an instant there was the Mage, seated in his chair on the other side of the room, and after a while Cedric realized that he had never once, ever, been actually alone.

It quickly became apparent to him that stitched together like a strange fever-dream was the bungalow that Davian summoned each and every night in the wilderness.

In the manner of all the great estates in England, Davian said, the sanctuary between the layers of canvas had a name, and there were many ways a place could be named and honors that were paid in that currency, but this one was called by Davian Toujours Aimée.

And Cedric concluded it must have been composed of places and rooms and scenes that existed in the Mage’s memory, not because it was ever narrated to his pupil as such, but because some rooms were entirely known to Cedric, while still some others had a faint familiarity that resonated like a never-fully-finished story, like a melody he’d heard twice but couldn’t anymore place, like déjà vu.

They always entered through the front door into a drawing room or a sitting room or whatever it was that you were supposed to call the grand entry to the sprawling house. And there were chairs and loveseats against the walls so that one could be civilized as they removed their shoes and, when that was done, in the middle of the room was an enormous globe.

And this globe had brown oceans and browner land and it labeled countries that didn’t exist and left out countries that Cedric was sure did. And it didn’t spin because that function had been removed and there was instead a hinge on one side, and when Davian stopped here after he had been unburdened of coat and boot, he dug his nails into where the globe split into two and lifted the top up because inside was the finest bourbon that couldn’t be bought in any store.

The glasses that were inside this world were always cold and they gave away their temperature by turning a little icy when the air hit them.

On the first night Cedric had stepped into this room, it had been dark, and he’d supposed it had been so dark because Davian said the place he remembered from India had no electricity so he figured there was no wiring to be found inside the walls, and, if there was no wiring, nothing so coarse as a light switch would ever mar the woodwork.

So Cedric took a right, and he took a right because there was an orange glow coming from that room and it was warm because he found a fireplace: burning logs surrounded by red brick.

And the first thing Davian said was that this wasn’t at all taken directly from his memory, because, as he then said, “If you’ll remember,” and that the bungalow was where they spent the summer months, and the summers were so hot, so devilishly hot, that they rarely bothered building fireplaces, if at all and if such a desire struck them as to burn something and watch a dancing flame, they always went out-of-doors.

But, as Davian so carefully reminded him, “It’s not summertime anymore, is it my dear boy?”

The left side of the house, as beheld by the entrance, was an entirely different affair. This was where they retired when the light began to wane and the hours became thin.

There was a study there, with two wooden desks that faced into walls on either side of the corner of the room. And on the walls here were still more portraits, though they were much smaller than the ones on the side of the house intended to entertain. And sitting on a long thin table against one of these walls was a pair of photographs of a young girl, and if you folded the metal frame like a book, the two would have faced each other. One of the girls was smiling, and the other wasn’t, but he imagined both were Lila.

If you went through the entry and still beyond that study, there was a small hallway, and though Cedric was sure Davian was awake and conscious most every hour of the day, sometimes the man went to the end of the hallway and into his own private room when he thought he should draw a bath and change into something more befitting the occasion or mood.

And if Davian was certainly on the left side of the house and he wasn’t in his study or his bedroom, he was probably in the smoking room.

When Davian was in the smoking room, he left the door cracked an inch or three, and when he left the door cracked the scent of his Turkish tobacco went into the hallway and crept around the passages and through the doorways and made it so that even if no one could see the Mage, everyone knew exactly where he was.

Cedric stood in the hallway and knocked on the door, cracked as it was, and it was a terribly bashful thing completely unbecoming to a man who had as many years as he did, but he felt stupid and small, and when he felt stupid and small, his actions spoke as loud as his words.

“Davian?” he said into the polished wood.

And it took a minute, but Davian appeared at the door, wearing a dark red robe and a white shirt underneath that came up tight around his neck and sort of puffed up a bit as if he were wearing some kind of kerchief. And he was hovering above the ground and his feet hung slack too, so that he had to look over his nose to see the one who stood at the threshold.

“Yes, Cedric?” he asked. “Can I help you?”

Davian had opened the door a little roughly, and he left his hand to linger on the knob on one side, his left, and because the door had been opened by such a wanton gesture, and because Davian was not one to admit anything but the most intentional intention, he kept it where it was.

Cedric looked into the Mage’s face, but he also looked through and behind him and into the smoking room, where the dark wood paneling was almost black and almost bare because there was only one portrait there, and she—

“Cedric?” Davian asked again.

Cedric remembered himself. “Oh, uh—” he said. “The door to the library is locked, and—”

Davian pursed his lips and feigned amusement by forcing air from his nose and lifting his head to nod, as if anything his pupil could utter could be predicted by a random finger placed within a rather thin book of phrases.

“There isn’t a lock in the house,” the Mage said plainly. “Not on the library, nor on anything else. You just don’t know where it is.”

“Come,” he said, lowering his hand from the handle. “I’ll take you there.”

“Come.”

“The Reverend Mr. Dodgson isn’t worth your evening or your eyesight,” Davian said, taking the book off the shelf and looking at it for only a moment before throwing it over his right shoulder.

And the book landed on the floor while Davian continued to talk. “A mathematician by trade, and his sparse prose and farcical tale are akin to nonsense; doesn’t do a damn to conceal him or his wasted education.”

Davian was hovering mid-air, glancing over titles on a shelf some eight feet over Cedric, who was standing on the floor holding a large stack of books with both hands, a tower that reached to his own nose, a tower upon which every book had been placed rather haphazardly and threatened to lose its tenuous balance with every addition.

“Very good, Cedric,” Davian said then, having concluded his time at the high shelf. “I do think that will keep you quite busy for a while.”

“Have you got Spenser?” he asked, his voice gaining volume as he carefully descended toward Cedric.

“Yes,” Cedric said, a little muffled as his mouth was obscured. “I think that was the first one you gave me.”

“Indeed,” Davian responded. “And right you should start with him. It is truly the foundation upon which was built the entire rest of the corpus. My collection is split by knight and virtue; do take care that you start with the first.”

“And do not neglect to read the foreword and preface and all the material that comes before. A thorough reading of the poem cannot be rendered without an understanding of the symbolism and motifs in which the contemporary were invariably steeped.”

Cedric was just standing there.

“Oh!” Davian said suddenly. “Do hand me the last one in the collection if you would, Cedric.”

Cedric frowned a bit, and was forced to carefully place the books upon a nearby endtable, which he did slowly and with care so that the stack remained in order. And when his hands were free from the canon he’d been given, he looked over the titles, starting from the bottom, and found the last volume described as The Faerie Queene, and he gave it to Davian as he’d been asked to do.

“Sir Calidore, yes,” Davian said, and began to flip through the brittle pages.

“The subsequent was left unfinished at the time of his death,” Davian said while looking into the book. “But I do hope that will not dissuade you from giving it the time it is due.”

“Yes, it is true that we shall never know the fate of the seventh or those that were meant to follow. And yet, a mind that is worth its salt will find—”

“Ah yes!” he said, interrupting himself. “Yes, here they are!”

Davian pulled several folded pieces of paper from the end of the tome. He put the book upon the stack so that it sat apart from its fellows, and then he opened the first note while holding the others behind.

Cedric saw that he was smiling as he looked into the letter, so he was silent and just watched the Mage.

“Letters,” Davian said, wandering in the pen. “Musings I shared with my beloved. She did so have a gift with words.”

He passed the letter to Cedric, who took it in his hands and looked at it, somewhat puzzled. There was the recognizable pattern of lines that made it certainly a piece of correspondence, but at ninety degrees had been laid still more words stretching from bottom to top.

Cedric tried to read the Mage’s hand left in the ink, but he stumbled. “Hon,” he said, finding the salutation. “Honey—”

Davian sort of bent into himself in a wistful reverence, but still he was smiling, because he had something to say, and he started talking. “Yes, you know,” he said. “Crossing letters was quite antiquated even by my time.”

Davian held out his hand to say with a gesture that he desired the letter be returned to his person, so Cedric obliged.

And he knew that he probably couldn’t read the Mage’s handwriting even if he tried.

“All those who fashioned themselves experts on proper etiquette advised against it, but I had seen it in pieces my mother and father had composed while courting,” Davian said. “And I suppose I thought the practice might serve me and I did it anyway.”

Cedric looked at Davian, but he was looking up and away, and his voice was similarly muted and nostalgic.

“Always having so much to say.”

They just kind of stood there for a while, Cedric waiting for the Mage while he lingered in his memories. And he thought there might have been water in his eye, but then he blinked and it was gone.

“Yes, well,” Davian said, renewing himself.

He looked around the library, where there were many bookshelves that stretched up into a dark ceiling, and against walls that faded into the distance.

“What I have given to you will surely occupy your attention for a good bit of time, but when you have made your way through that, you’ll find no lack of quality reading material here, all in English, including many of the classics you might desire from the French, Russian, and Scandinavian traditions, and still others,” Davian said, from the look on his face, hedging into a joke. “I even have some texts from the Orient on the recommendation of She-who-must-be-obeyed.”

Davian set down the last letter that he had been holding and was then unencumbered.

“But you know,” he said, “the Chinese have quite a different idea of what constitutes a fine novel.”

Davian took great pride in his kitchen, his impeccable manners, and, most of all, his boundless knowledge of how best to prepare a proper meal.

But the Mage had taken a sudden renewed interest in his private studies, and sometimes Cedric found it necessary to go through the hallways, past the books and pictures and bric-a-brac — and find himself something to eat.

If Cedric could, he very well might have gotten into the habit of summoning himself whatever it was he wanted to eat. Most of the orphans could do that easily, even if their results were rudimentary; simply enough to get them through until Myrtle or Eloise would present them with something more palatable at the appointed hour. And Cedric — well — Cedric did not much enjoy the act of cooking, and when he became hungry, he mostly just wanted to alleviate the need and get back to whatever it was that he had been doing before.

Davian knew the feat of conjuring even simple foodstuff was beyond Cedric, and he also knew he did not want to be disturbed if he were just getting into his intended engagement. So early on during their sojourn in the forgotten places, Davian entered the kitchen and waved his hand at the device that didn’t look different from the one he kept in Manhattan, but now it was different because the icebox was enchanted.

So whenever Cedric stood in front of it and went to open it, he took a handle in his right hand and opened the door and inside the chamber was whatever it was that he wanted to consume to solve the emptiness that was the pit at the bottom of his stomach.

And whatever he found there was always, as he found it to himself, good enough.

“What from the ninth circle of Hell have you brought into my kitchen?” Davian said, appearing as he always did, and barking at Cedric.

Cedric was at the stove, and he had been supervising a small pot of boiling water and softening noodles, though now he was turned around toward where the other had appeared. “‘s Maru—”

“It’s—” Davian said, nearly foaming, “—absolute rubbish!”

“Davian…” Cedric tried. “I—”

Cedric had his head turned so that the stovetop just appeared in the corner of his vision, and he saw that his meal was gone.

“Mother’s been dead a hundred years and I wake to find the odor of her accursed beef tea wafting through the doorways of my home! You can have anything your heart desires and you betray me with this?”

He disappeared and then re-appeared on the other side of the room and began waving his arms about violently, and when he did this, meats and roasts and fricassees of all types began to pile on the counters.

“Rump roast, pot roast, pheasant, leg of bloody lamb—”

He continued with false whimsy, “you can skip the mint sauce, I won’t take offense; I’ll make gravy — the main course doesn’t even have to be yet cooked, you decide; rare, on a spit, never well-done; I’ll mince the onions, you can cut the blasted potatoes!”

Cedric wasn’t sure exactly where Davian was, but he stayed where he stood.

“We’ll bake them if you like, coat them in oil and coarse salt so that the skin toasts up just the way I know you prefer!”

Cedric just listened, exposed, while the Mage demanded, “Do what you want, take what you please, be what you will but I won’t have you put me in the damn sickroom!”

He paused, and just stared into the kitchen, and the air between, and Cedric. And Davian was like a big angry… balloon, because all at once where he had been filled to the brim, the pressure leaked out from a hole in the side, and what remained was despondent, and maybe… tired.

“Dammit, Cedric — I lost them,” he said. “Cedric, I lost them.”

And Cedric did not know what to say, because he was torn, and he too was tired. He did not want to find them, and yet, this was not what he wanted either. Since October he’d been on a journey he hadn’t wanted or asked for, on a quest to get something the Mage wanted desperately and Cedric was desperate to leave in the woods. But Cedric knew a few things, mostly that the Mage would never give up. What he didn’t know was how to get out.

So he just stood there with stupid eyes, searching his thoughts until the Mage spoke first.

“Do you understand what the Dreamcatcher can do, really? What it could do for us?”

“You don’t; you couldn’t,” Davian said, deflating, talking more to himself than to Cedric. “That smell, that smell, that horrid smell — not of food, never was food—”

He paused, and he might have been holding something back, but Cedric wasn’t sure. “—I’m six years old again, Cedric, and I’m sick, sick; I was always sick,” Davian said mournfully. “And do you know what they did to me one time I got sick?”

Cedric kept looking.

“I had a little stuffed cat,” Davian said. “And it was the sort of simple common thing Mother or Father would never have given me, not at all; because maybe it wasn’t proper for their son to have such things, even if he were the second, and they wouldn’t have it, or let me have it, but I had her all the same because one of the women who did the cooking and cleaning made her and gave her to me.”

“You’re fortunate to be a child of a later era,” he continued. “But when I was young, the people suffered under the yoke of what they only partially knew. All in the name of health and good medicine. So they locked us in a room and kept everyone and everything else away and—”

He paused to make sure Cedric was following.

“Finally able to eat something besides boiled beef, I was told to leave the room. Lured by the promise of a meal and a sweet treat, led away like a right fool. And Mother…”

Davian’s eyebrows drew up in a knot then.

“Mother did exactly what the doctor had told her to do. Damn good science to incinerate the whole lot of it, I’m sure she thought, if she thought at all. Doctor’s orders! And when I came back to my room, it was all gone, damn it, all gone: my blankets, my curtains, my favorite goose-down pillow, and the little cat made of blue gingham with the button-eye missing.”

And then he spoke with renewed resolution. “I’m one hundred and thirty years old, Cedric,” and for a moment, he looked every minute as old as he said.

“There are some things that I’m ready to forget.”

Dear Eloise,

I want to apologize. First and foremost because I was selfish, and I made something about myself when I should have made

Dear Eloise,

I’m sorry. Sorry because I put more stress on you when that’s the last thing you need and I should have thought

Dear Eloise,

I want to apologize because

Eloise,

I shouldn’t have done what I did. If I could take it all back I would

Eloise, I’m sorry