When you get on the train to head to work, you don't expect to end up standing next to someone who will become the most important person in your life.
Tom was just going to his job at the bookstore. Carl was headed for the library. Two male students, about the same height, darkhaired, both of them students at the University of New York. Both of them wizards.
At the moment, it was all that connected them. As yet, neither knew the other's name.
Consider Tom Swale: he has a family tradition of wizardry. His father was a wizard, and before him his grandmother; when he came of age at fourteen and undertook the Ordeal he came into his heritage gifted with power, will, and a bird already strange from living with three generations of wizards.
They converse often: a slightly haggard college student still living with his parents and the resplendent rainbow macaw who has chosen him (because Peach is old and instensely magical, and is not to be made to do things she doesn't care to do). They talk about family and being magic workers and the likelihood of Tom's dying tomorrow on a mission against the Lone Power, like his grandmother did many years before. They share an apple: tart and crisp. Wizards do not need to eat spotty, bruised grocery produce unless they want to.
"Family doesn't mean blood," Peach tells him, on one of her obscure conversational tangents. She holds the half-apple up with one claw and slices shards of white flesh away, swallowing them whole. "You don't need to even know someone to be part of their family, especially now, as a wizard. You're part of a brotherhood of thousands. Most of them don't even know you, and will never meet you, and would never know if you died, but they will care for you when it counts because you're a wizard and that means something."
His father had come home from an assignment last night, with weary lines in his face and a washed-out look in his eyes. He moved slowly this morning, taking his time over coffee and bacon and eggs. Tom thinks he might have brainburn. "Blood is still important," he says to Peach. "It's more than just being part of a group- it's being there, ready to support you, someone who would give themselves to help you..."
Peach would probably snort, if she could. "And you think that other wizards wouldn't do that? You would have a legion of family, if you knew where to look for it. You never need to be alone. In fact," the soft white skin around her small eye wrinkles wickedly. "I challenge that you'll find a brother in the faith, one to make you know what brotherhood really means, and you'll give your life for his and he'll give his life for you and in the end you can both have faith..."
It has the feel of a prophecy. On Tom's arms goosebumps rise. He is thinking about this on the train, wondering when the story will unfold.
Tom and Carl both get off on the same stop. They look past each other and away.
Carl came late to his wizardry, and is the only one in his family that he knows of to have the knack. On assignment he rides a certain mad knife-edge of terror, because he knows there is so much that he does not know. He expects impending doom, and scrapes out of it each time. There is so much he wants to learn about the world, about wizardry, about being himself that he is desperate not to die before he learns a little more. Timeheart or no; it just wouldn't be the same.
The day he meets Tom he is riding on the jagged edge of death, running low on power and blasting away wyvrens with the few drabs of power he has left. Time is going wonky in the world around him, and the fight jump and skips from moment to moment; the fighters hang for five minutes still in the air and jump ahead like skipping along a video, jump jump jump. It's impossible to keep everything straight. Beads of blood are dripping from his fingers, making splatterart on the rocky ground. He spins madly to keep the screaming ugly monsters that are closing in around him away. It is a bluff and he thinks that he is going to fail, and he wants to weep because this is his fifth big assignment, because he still thinks of them as big and small yet, and he is going to die on it, and all the other differences he could have made are going to be gone.
And then something happens, and three of the fat, stinking bodies around him flicker and are then gone, SNAP. It takes a few minutes for the rest of the ugly creatures to realize that three fellows are dead, and that reinforcements for the wizard have come in, and that they'd better get themselves gone right now unless they want to follow their friends, and then they are gone. Except for the two that got killed while they were mulling it over.
Carl pushes his bloody hand into his side and looks at the person who saved him.
Someone about as tall as he is, dusty, blood-smeared. Someone with, incongruously, a bird on his shoulder; a large and cranky and brightly-colored bird that is ruffling it's feathers and muttering to itself. Carl wipes sweat off his forehead (this results in a long smear of blood over his face, and an even more disheveled appearance. He does not bother fussing over it). Instead he goes to shake hands.
"Dai, cousin," he greets, noticing the slight flinch of surprise the other has at the greeting. "The name's Carl Romeo. You?"
"Dai," the other responds, perfectly polite (but there was that moment of surprise, how strange). "I'm Tom Swale, the bird's Macchu Picchu, call her Peach if that's too long."
The are of the same height, and Carl forgets his wound and shakes hands with the bloody one. He had tripped and caught himself, and torn a line across his palm, and not bothered to stop and heal it because at that point he was running for his life. When they release hands it is actually five minutes later because time has done a little jump again. Tom's palm is red and sticky too. Carl notices. "Oh damn, I'm sorry, I think that's my fault.."
"No, it's fine," Tom stops him, smiling wryly, and turns his hand to expose another jagged wound following the thick pad of muscle at the base of his thumb. "I tripped."
They've shaken hands and traded blood- so they're blood brothers now. "Really?" Carl laughs, slightly hysterical. He hasn't eaten in six hours (longer counting time stops) and he's been on the run the whole time. "I did too. This place is hell, huh? Wanna stick together?"
Tom doesn't look certain. He might be starting to refuse when the bird on his shoulder ruffles her feathers and says in a high and somewhat crotchety voice, "Two heads will be better than one on this. Don't be pigheaded, Swale!"
As it turns out, they complete the assignment together, and are even kind of friends by the end of it. At the end of the year they've saved each others lives three times.
END
8-16-05