April 1989
Violet wasn't sure how she felt about Egypt.
Mum was continuing on her thing of going to duelling events in all kinds of interesting places, so Violet could see more of the magical world. And also just the world in general, Violet guessed — Mum knew Violet didn't really go anywhere, before, so. And it was fun! This was only really the second time, but it was neat to go new places and see new things, and, there was always good food, and Síomha came with them, Síomha was nice, and they were always finding interesting things to do and everything. Violet didn't like watching the duelling so much — it was fine, it wasn't so scary anymore as it was the first time, but it still wasn't her favourite thing — but the going neat places and doing stuff part was great.
Just, it was really hot? Like, Egypt was way south, and it was in the middle of a big desert, and there wasn't even a single cloud in the sky, super super bright and sunny all the time, and it was very very hot. Violet didn't get sunburns — Mum never did either, apparently it was a metamorph thing? Not sure how that worked, Violet could still get burned touching hot things, but whatever. But, even if the sun didn't hurt her skin, it did hurt her eyes, all the super brightness giving her a headache if she stayed outside for too long, and also it was really really hot — that was worth making clear, again and again, because it was super stupid hot. At this time of year, a high of thirty degrees was normal, sometimes it even got as high as thirty-five to forty — Violet had never been out in thirty-five degree weather before this week — and even overnight, it maybe got as low as twelve degrees, at the lowest, maybe. Twelve was right around the high back home right now? It was, just, mad.
Violet kind of didn't want to think about what it was like here in the summer — she was told it got five to ten degrees hotter, somehow. She was pretty sure she would just die.
Mum and Violet didn't have to worry about sunburns, but Síomha did. She actually burned pretty easy — there were potions to heal that, and Mum had gotten some ahead of time just in case, but Síomha was being super careful about the sun anyway. She was always wearing big floppy hats and scarves and stuff whenever she went outside, it was a little funny.
Easter was actually one of the more important holidays for Gaelic mages, so the Academy gave them a whole two weeks off for it, from the Wednesday before Easter until the Tuesday after the Tuesday after. Violet was invited to some holiday stuff, since she had Gaelic friends and could actually understand the language now, and it was a bit different from the Easter she was used to. She could tell Palm Sunday was kind of supposed to be the same thing, except it was outdoors, and it was noisy, with a lot of singing and stuff. Then there wasn't much going on for a couple days, until Wednesday night, when there was a really quiet, sad church thing. (Violet and Mum didn't go, so she didn't know what exactly.)
And by Thursday the whole town started to shut down, because holiday things were happening. There was big ceremony thing she'd missed — something to do with washing feet, apparently? — and then there were a whole bunch of spots where people were having dinner outdoors. Pretty simple dinner, you know, nothing fancy, doing the Last Supper thing, lots of prayers and songs and stuff. When night came everything got quiet and sad again, and there were services for Good Friday that lasted for hours. They all ended at sunset, and everyone was supposed to go inside and be quiet and not eat anything or do anything fun just, you know, think about Jesus dying and stuff. (Mum turned the lights down to be polite, but she wasn't Christian at all, so they still had dinner and everything like normal.) Priests and nuns and volunteers or whoever went around the town lighting candles and lamps and stuff, specially made to go out one by one over the next day — so, while all the sad prayers and songs and stuff were going on all day Saturday, the lights around the town slowly went out. And into Saturday night, Violet sat with some of the neighbours looking out, watching the lights in the town going dark, and dark, and dark, and dark...
Until, like an hour or so before sunrise on Sunday, a big bonfire lit up on the Hill, and Easter proper started. There was a service in the morning, with a bunch of happy singing, and a big breakfast, but then Violet and the other kids went to take a nap straight after — they'd been up all night for the vigil, she was so sleepy. The rest of the day was all partying, there was a lot of food, and games, and songs, and people putting on plays, and all kinds of things, the whole town just exploding into a festival after a couple cold sad quiet days, which was kind of exciting? Violet didn't know. Like, everything being sad and slow for a couple days beforehand made the party breaking out seem more sharp somehow? Or maybe that was just her. She'd been jittery enough with it she'd kind of run around making a nuisance of herself, but a lot of the kids were acting up, so that wasn't really anything special. She did lose Mum pretty early on, but Violet knew where they lived, so she found her way back. The party continued on into Monday, if a bit more calm and lazy and relaxed. Síomha appeared late on Monday from her own family's thing — normally she'd be at home the whole week, but she left early this time so she could go to Egypt with them.
Their portkey left on Tuesday morning. Violet didn't like portkeys. That her sleep was still kind of messed up from staying up all night on Saturday didn't help.
Mum's duelling stuff was just over the weekend, from Friday to Sunday — it was Saturday now — so they got here super early. That was on purpose though, because there was a lot of neat stuff in Egypt, Mum wanted to show Violet (and Síomha) around. Mum had been to Egypt before, a few times, so she kind of knew places, but they went to other places she hadn't been before, all over the country. (Not the muggle side though, they'd stick out more here than in Austria.) They landed in Alexandria, which was the old capital...or one of the old capitals, anyway — Egypt was very very old, and went through a few capital cities. Alexandria was a big city, like two or three million people on the muggle side, and the magical side was pretty big and complicated too, with a bunch of different places you could get to with the floo (the idea borrowed from Europe) or these enchanted doorways which were very neat, Violet's favourite way of getting places with magic ever.
(Except flying of course, because it turned out flying was awesome.)
How complicated Alexandria was was a hint of what the rest of Egypt was going to be like. That was what the city was called in Greek — there were some Greek-speakers in Egypt, but they mostly came over after Secrecy. A lot of the mages in Egypt were Arabs, who called the city the same name but pronounced Arably (which sounded different enough Violet could only tell it was the same name after Mum said so), but the other big group of mages in Egypt were Egyptians — they called the city Rakodi — which was confusing, because Violet thought the Arabs here were Egyptians too? like Egyptians were Arabs, right?
Mum said that was complicated. See, Egyptians had been living here forever, they're the people who made the pyramids and all the old tombs and stuff — the oldest Egyptian stuff was like five thousand years old, it was mad — but then the Greeks conquered the country, over two thousand years ago now. For some hundreds of years, you kind of had a mixed Egyptian and Greek thing? where you had Egyptians and Greeks living in the same city and sharing stuff and passing ideas and words around, the Egyptians kind of borrowed the alphabet and everything. And then the Arabs conquered the country like fourteen hundred years ago, and Greek slowly died out (there were always more Egyptians than Greeks anyway), and slowly over time more Egyptians converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic, but Egyptian was still really common outside of the big cities. And the Christians still used Egyptian, mostly. Like, nine hundred years ago the mages of Egypt got really big on their super long history, and learning old stories and figuring out old magic that was lost in the Greek and then Arab invasions, and they all spoke Egyptian, because it was their language, but outside of magical places Egyptian got less and less and less common. On the muggle side, the language was almost dead, it was mostly just used by the tiny number of Christians in the country now, for religious stuff — kind of like Latin for Catholics, she guessed.
But, after Secrecy, Egyptian spread on the magical side until it was the most common language in the country. Mum said the languages spoken in magical Egypt were, like, seventy per cent Egyptian, fifteen percent Arabic, ten percent Nubian (Violet still didn't know what that one was), and five percent Greek. Which was weird because, like, Violet didn't even know Egyptian was a language until this week. Okay, obviously all the neat drawings and stuff were a language, but she didn't know people still spoke it, Egypt was old...
And, kind of like how magical Britain had different languages, but they also had all kinds of different religions, magical Egypt did too, and it was very confusing. There were Christians, but there were different kinds of Christians. There was the very very old Egyptian church, going all the way back to the first years after Jesus (way before Christianity got to Rome) — all their Bibles and prayers and stuff were even in Egyptian, or sometimes Arabic — but then there was also the Greek church which the Greek people brought with them. And there were also a bunch of Muslims too, of course, lots of them, Mum said which religion was bigger went back and forth each time they counted, about even. And there were also Jews, who'd apparently also been here for almost two thousand years — Violet was kind of getting the feeling that there were more Jews in the magical world in general, she didn't know what was going on with that. Some of the people more serious into studying old Egypt also did stuff with their gods from before the Christians and the Muslims showed up, a thing with a bunch of different gods who did different things kind of like the Gaels, but Mum said they were actually mostly atheists — they didn't believe those gods were real, she meant, that they were just stories that these people liked, and they kept studying them and doing art and old rituals and stuff mostly just trying to be very Egyptian.
Violet thought that was silly, but other people's religion (or not-religion) wasn't her business.
So, Egypt was complicated, with a lot of different kinds of people speaking different languages with different cultures and stuff, and Egypt was old — people had been building things on top of older things on top of even older things for thousands and thousands of years. When they went to Memphis (another old capital city), Mum said that, when the Romans conquered Egypt like two thousands years ago, Memphis was older to them than Rome was now, which was, just...
Some monuments from waaaayyyy back then, over two Romes old, were still around — like those big pyramids near Memphis (Violet was pretty sure she saw a picture of them in a muggle book before?), those things right there were almost twice as old as actual Rome. Violet didn't...
Brain. Broken. That was all.
(Mum said there was a metamorph in Ireland who was, like, three Memphises old. Violet couldn't wrap her head around that kind of time, that was, just, she couldn't.)
So, it was hot here, and it was...overwhelming? with how complicated and old the country was. (Just, too old to even think about, really, Violet's brain couldn't handle it, it was mad.) But it was also so pretty! The country was, yes, on the river all sweet and thick and green, and the desert parts were hot, and bright, but once you got used to it a little (and Mum did a spell for Violet that blocked off some of the light), it was, just, big, and more colourful than she thought it would be, yellow and orange and gold and white and pink and red, glowing all warm and pretty.
And the art was cool! They used a lot of glass, and gemstones, and the walls on both outsides of buildings and rooms inside would be painted with bright, intense colours, nature stuff or things from stories, sometimes with coloured glass set into the wall instead of paint, glinting in the sun, or other places had mosaics, a bunch of tiny tiles made out of ceramic or glass or sometimes even gemstones, tiny ones, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, fit together to make pretty patterns, sometimes super super complicated, seeming to move when you turned your head, and they were shiny and sparkly, and so pretty! (A religious difference, Mum said — the mosaics were a Muslim thing, Violet didn't know why but they were super super cool, so she didn't really care.) Egyptians seemed to like to put art on everything, the walls and the floors and the ceilings, even a lot of the streets were big mosaics instead of just normal brick, and people had super pretty jewellery, and everything was soooo pretty. It got really annoying when Violet started to get a headache from everything being so bright, because everything was so pretty, and she couldn't see any of it when her eyes were dying...
They stayed the first night in Alexandria (Rakodi), and the very first thing they did was get different clothes. Because Egypt was hot, on a normal day hotter than Britain ever got, none of them owned clothes that were comfortable to wear here — they knew that, so they hadn't packed very much, getting Egyptian clothes soon after landing was always the plan. They had some cotton here, especially for, like, jackets and scarves and stuff, but they used a lot of linen for everything, because apparently they grew a lot of linen here? More than cotton, anyway. The fabric was thin, smooth and soft, all baggy and drapey and really cool, actually, like you could feel the wind through it, which Violet guessed was the point. A lot of the cotton stuff was dyed, but the linen stuff mostly wasn't, bleached a pure white that glowed in the sun — it was usually embroidered though, colourful patterns worked along the hems or the laces or sometimes across the entire thing, so it wasn't too boring. Some of the work was actually really complicated, it must have taken hours and hours to do all of that stitching...
No wait, they had magic, you could do it much faster with a wand than by hand. Never mind.
The clothes were a little awkward, at first, because Violet felt kind of...underdressed? There were thicker things, like robes done in a couple layers of cotton — for the people who needed the protection from the sun, she guessed, Síomha had gotten a couple of those — but Violet and Mum had gotten the more Egyptian Egyptian stuff, which Violet thought the people who started trying to learn ancient stuff had copied from old drawings and stuff and started making again. (Violet saw old drawings, later, they weren't exactly the same but she still recognised them.) There was a wrap-around skirt thing that Violet thought of as the same thing as a slip, except only from the waist down, about knee-length, and then there was a dress that went over that — sometimes sleeveless, sometimes with loose billowy sleeves, sometimes only going over one shoulder (though Violet didn't get any of those). There was also a shawl (cotton) that you could wrap over your head and shoulders, especially in the middle of the day when the sun was straight overhead and super super bright and hot...and that was it, really. The skirt counted as underwear too, you technically didn't need even need to wear pants under that (though most people did).
It was comfortable, the linen all soft and nice and cool, but it was a little flimsy? It didn't help that, back in magic Britain, linen this nice and soft was normally just used for underwear, so, at first, Violet kind of felt like she was walking around in her underwear. She felt a little awkward, walking out of the clothing store, like she was going to get in trouble for being in public not dressed properly. (Or that people would notice that she was a girl and be mean about her being a freak, even though she was supposed to be a girl — those moments didn't happen as often and they weren't as bad as they used to be, but they still happened.) But, as the three of them walked around in the magical part of Alexandria, and nothing happened, the nerves slowly went away, and Violet just felt normal again. She still had a flash of awkwardness now and then, but it was mostly fine.
Sometimes Síomha just kind of stared at Mum in her flimsy white Egyptian dresses — one time, when they were sitting out in the sun having tea, she was so busy staring she completely lost track of what they were talking about. Violet was pretty sure Síomha thought Mum was pretty, which was super cute? So cute she had to try really hard not to laugh at her, didn't want Síomha to think she was thinking mean thoughts.
After a day in Alexandria, they moved to Memphis, the super old city with all the big monuments and stuff. The muggle side of the city had mostly died out a long time ago, ancient ruins dotted with villages here and there, but there was still a magical town here. (Or there was a magical town now, Violet thought it was kind of new.) They spent a couple days at a cute little hotel here, their room with a balcony looking over the river, checking out old ruins and stuff in the area — or sometimes outdoor museum things where mages had built what they thought the thing looked like when it was new, miles away from the actual ruins (which had muggle archaeologists all over them anyway) — and popping all over the country checking out markets and going to whatever restaurant Mum heard about talking to the locals. (Mum couldn't speak much Kemetic, what she called the Egyptian Egyptian language, or any Arabic, but some of the locals knew enough French to get advice about where to go.) They were doing kind of a lot, Violet was usually pretty tired by the end of the day, but everything was so interesting and pretty and new, and Mum's excitement was catching (Violet quickly learned Mum liked Egypt), so she was always ready to go again when morning came.
Síomha was less excited to get going in the morning than Violet and Mum, but Violet thought the sun and the heat were just harder on her. She mostly avoided sunburn, but she also just seemed to get hotter than Mum and Violet. They needed to take breaks for her now and then, Síomha all red-faced and sweaty...even with magic to help, which was kind of silly, Violet didn't feel that bad. Was the linen stuff Violet was in that much better in the heat than Síomha's cotton stuff? or was it another metamorph thing?
Then they moved to a place called Payom, which was the capital now — on the magical side, anyway, the muggle capital was somewhere else. Payom was on what used to be the shore of a lake, feeding a big green patch in the middle of the desert, but Mum said it was a lot smaller than it used to be. It didn't rain enough here to keep a lake full, a random low flat spot turned swampy by floods from the river a few miles away, but a long long long time ago the ancient Egyptians made canals here from the river to fill it up proper. Since then, people not keeping up the canals all the time and tinkering with the flow of the river in other places made it so less water was coming into the lake, and it slowly got smaller and smaller and smaller. It was still there, but littler, and kind of salty now for some reason? And the big green patch was still alive too, kept watered by canals and stuff from the river, they grew a lot of stuff around here.
The mages had cheated with magic to refill a part of the lake with proper freshwater, hidden from the muggles, and built their city on the remade shore. The city was super super pretty, all the buildings painted bright colours with geometric patterns or scenes with plants and animals on them, the streets lined with palm trees and super tall grasses and ferns and stuff, some of the buildings had vines or herbs crawling over them. Very alive and colourful, Violet liked it. All the green things were kept alive by canals cut through the city, sometimes you had to take little bridges to get anywhere, and the blocks right on the shore were technically islands, surrounded by canals on all sides. Their hotel was on one of these islands — not on the shore, but you could kind of see it from here. It was the biggest hotel they'd stayed in so far, a bit busier and noisier than the smaller, more private places they were staying in before, but it was still super nice, wide and open, enough big windows and doors to keep a nice breeze running through the whole place. There was some kind of magic that kept it from getting too hot in here, but still let the wind come through, and it smelt all green and spicy from the plants and the restaurants in town, so.
The arena was in Payom, a bit away from the shore near a hill where the government buildings and stuff were. It was made out of the same reddish-yellowish brick a lot of things were, in some places just the plain brick left out, in others covered up with plaster or with more pretty tile mosaics. The floor where Mum and the other duellists did the fighting in was open to the sky, with no cover at all, the rectangular field covered with yellowish sand that glowed in the sun, rising and falling in little frozen waves. The benches rising in rows around all four sides were covered, protected by heavy canvas tarps hung on poles over their heads — which was good, Violet didn't think Síomha would survive sitting out in the sun that long. There were special seats for the families of people in the thing, a box of seats at the front in the middle a little separated from the rest, with some extra curly carvings and stuff along the edges of the benches to make them look special.
The most special seats was a chair at the front, more than wide enough for two people, colourfully-embroidered cushions and stuff covering the seat, the poles holding up the tarp over it glinting with fine, curly gold carvings. It was obvious that chair was supposed to be super important, and it was extra odd because the whole time the first day it was left empty. Violet was curious, so she asked who that was for, and got a very weird answer — first a shorter version from Síomha, who didn't know as much about it, and then a longer talk with Mum after the duelling was done. That chair was saved for only the Red and Green Ladies of Egypt, there were seats like that in a lot of public buildings.
And that story was very very weird. The short version went, a long long time ago, before Egypt was even united into one country — so, like, over five thousand years ago — there were two metamorphs who'd lived long enough to get super powerful and super scary. They both spent time being local rulers of some kind at some point, but both decided they didn't like ruling themselves, so both ended up picking tiny kingdoms that they liked, protecting the king and giving him advice and stuff. Over time, because they were so old and so much more powerful than everyone else, people started worshipping them as goddesses, which was a thing that used to happen with metamorphs a long time ago.
The kingdom the Red Lady was taking care of ended up uniting Egypt in the first place, which actually meant conquering the Green Lady's kingdom...or, mostly, anyway. Apparently, the Green Lady was super super famous for basically inventing enchanting? and wards and stuff, so, the Red Lady's people didn't actually want to attack the Green Lady's king's castle if they really didn't have to. Not to mention, the Red Lady wasn't sure if she could actually beat her in a fight. But they could surround the castle with their people, and cut them off from supplies — it was obvious that they were going to lose, so the Green Lady convinced her king to make a deal. Egypt was united, and the Two Ladies went on the be protectors and advisers to the king for thousands of years afterward.
Though, they didn't stay with the king all the time — doing the same job for centuries and centuries in a row could get boring, so sometimes they would go away to do something else for a while, before coming back to help out again. They happened to be away when Egypt was conquered by the ancient Persians, and were still away when it was next taken by the Greeks. There were stories of one or the other popping up now and then, but most people thought they were gone for good.
Around eight hundred years ago, when Egyptians were doing their whole thing about trying to rediscover their old stuff and be properly Egyptian again, they set up a big pretty fancy place for a couple people to live — the building also had a big library and enchanting and potions stuff and dorms for their student-priest people — and sent out an invitation as far as they could for the Two Ladies to move in, to come back and teach them. A few years later, they did — just, casually showing up for lunch one day without any warning, which was kind of funny. One or the other might disappear for a couple decades at a time, off doing who knows what, but for the most part the Two Ladies were back in Egypt again, teaching and giving advice to their leaders (elected now) and whatever else.
Mum said they weren't goddesses, not really, just metamorphs like them, but they were stupid old and super super powerful and very wise, so if she got lucky enough to meet one of them she should still be careful to be polite and respectful. And they were some of the most famous mages in history, because of how super important old Egypt was for all kinds of reasons, and since the Green Lady had basically invented enchanting and warding all by herself — the whole magical world needed enchanting to do anything, it was how even wands worked — and the Red Lady was really big in figuring out how to get potions to work the same for different people and making healing a thing people could actually study and all. They weren't the oldest, most powerful mages in the world, that was probably an Mhorríoghain in Ireland (Violet heard the name before but didn't know much about her, other than that she was super scary) or someone Mum called the Queen Mother, but they were pretty close, so, super important people.
Today, the second day of the event, a couple minutes before the first duel started a vulture came gliding into the arena, the chatter in the stands going quiet as people noticed. It flew right up to the big chair at the front, slowing down with a back-flap of its wings — vultures were big in person — and then the vulture blurred, the air seeming to twist, like water down the drain, and then a woman was standing there. Violet wasn't super close, couldn't see her that well, but she could see a little. She was black, with maybe a little bit of a reddish tint to her skin (or maybe that was from the sun?), wearing a skirt a deep blue stitched with designs she couldn't make out in gold. Instead of wearing a proper shirt she had a sash of some kind, deep red stitched with more gold, wrapped around her upper body a few times, which Violet guessed mostly worked. Her head was shaved bald, gleaming in the sun, gold and silver and green jewellery glittering in her ears and around her neck and wrists. Also, she had a curving sword, decorated with silver and red and green gemstones — which was funny, Violet thought they didn't use swords anymore...
The woman, just, appeared, and sat down, all casual. Violet thought there was some kind of announcement that one of the Two Ladies (the Red one, maybe?) had shown up — the announcing wasn't in English, Violet didn't understand it — the woman raising a hand in a little wave for a second. And then they just moved on.
It was kind of hard for Violet to pay attention to the duels today, her eyes kept going back to the Red Lady (she was pretty sure). She didn't know why, it wasn't like Violet could even see her very well. But, just, she felt big, important, it felt like something was happening over there, so she had to look. Except there wasn't anything going on, the woman was just sitting there, watching the duels. It was a funny feeling, she didn't know what that was about. And, she was pretty — not only the Lady herself, but everything around her was all bright and colourful and sparkly, like her magic was leaking rainbow glitter or something. Like how after a frost there might be ice crystals stuck in the grass or on trees or whatever, and when the light caught it right, everything sparkled... She didn't know, just, it was super pretty was all.
(She would ask, later, Síomha and Mum said they couldn't see it, they didn't know what that was either.)
Anyway, after a little bit of stuff happening, they took a break — so the fighters could rest and get a little healing done, and the audience could get lunch. The noise in the arena picked up as dozens and dozens and dozens of people started moving, shuffling around to talk to neighbours are starting to move for the exits. There was a little bit of a hush as the Red Lady (probably) stood up too — she magicked herself into a big vulture again, and flew away, might come back later? — getting louder again after she was gone.
Violet suddenly understood why the Two Ladies just disappeared for a while sometimes. Seems like people acting like that around you all the time would get old.
The arena was in the middle of the building, rooms and halls and stuff looped around it. Parts of it were private, for the fighters — changing rooms and bathrooms, salons where they could wait between matches and maybe get snacks, that sort of thing — and parts of it were for everyone, places to hang out and talk and also places with food. A tunnel by the special person seats at the front ran through the seats above and behind them, coming out the other end into a hall. Big, about as long as the arena on the other side, but a little narrower, a big rectangle in the middle of the ceiling was cut out, sunlight sparkling on pools of water, little rainbows forming in the mist flung up from a couple fountains, grasses and ferns and flowers and a couple trees growing near the water. A lot of buildings had bits cut out to let in the sun, with little gardens around fountains, and some places had indoor fountains — Mum said the moving water helped keep the air from getting too hot and dry. Yesterday between matches Violet had played around with some other kids for a bit — they didn't speak the same language, but you didn't really need to just to mess around in the water for ten minutes — so she knew there were even little fish in there. Violet actually managed to catch one, with her bare hands, but Síomha (laughing) just told her to put it back.
(Violet had to go straight to the toilets to wash her hands, because it turned out fish were kind of slimy.)
Around all four sides of the garden part were rows of columns, holding up the ceiling, and past them were long open halls — these were covered, the brick of the ceiling wall and floor hidden with plaster and covered with pretty geometric mosaics and the occasional drawing. There were curtains hanging between the pillars, the cotton (probably?) thin enough that it glowed in the sunlight, but it cut off the worst of the glare, the halls around the garden lit indirectly, warm light soft enough that it was easy on the eyes. There were doors leading to the exits and toilets and stuff, but there were also...well, not restaurants, exactly. Here and there all around were what were basically food stands, but more permanent things built into the walls, the stuff they sold was just quick simple street food kind of stuff.
Of course, it was magic Egyptian street food, so it wasn't what Violet usually thought of as "street food". Violet kind of had mixed feelings about Egyptian food. It was good, yeah — though a lot of it was very new, more foreign than in, like, Austria — but it could be very spicy, and that took some getting used to. Violet wasn't picky— Well, she was picky, but not about things being foreign, you know. (She had to wonder if the Dursleys would eat anything here.) There were some things she came across that she just couldn't eat, either because there was a funny sour taste to it, or one of those weird vegetable-y aftertastes she couldn't stand, or it felt bad in her mouth, or it had a combination of things that would be fine on their own, but were just too much when they were mixed together. Also, it turned out there was a lot of offal in stuff, and Violet did not like offal, most of the time — if it was ground up and in something she mostly didn't notice (unless there was a funny aftertaste to it), but bits of it were bad, hated it...
There was still a lot of things she could have, though, so it wasn't a big deal. The spices could be a little bit too much for her, sometimes, especially since some of them were kind of new spices. Two years ago, she might have had way more trouble eating a lot of it, but Mum liked curry, and some other more interesting foreign stuff — Petunia's cooking seemed even more very English by comparison — so she was more used to different things now, it wasn't too hard to figure out. Beans, rice, bread, chicken, all good stuff. And, there was this sauce, that Mum said was made with sesame seeds and garlic and lemon juice, they put it on all kinds of things, and it was good! Or most of the time, sometimes they put too much lemon in it...
And the deserts were great, but you really couldn't go wrong with flakey pastry and honey and cheese — that would be pretty hard to screw up.
Violet and Síomha wandered around the halls for a bit — now that they were indoors, Síomha had pulled back her hood and opened up her collar a bit, floppy hat tipped back to hang from its strap, Violet had taken off her shawl-scarf-thing and tied it around her middle for safe-keeping — looking at the different food stands and stuff. Mum had a rule, that when you were in a country you didn't know very well, you should get food from places the locals seemed to like — they knew things you didn't, so if a place didn't have much of a line it might just be because it was bad. And in a country like Egypt, definitely avoid a short line if there were only white people in it. (Unless the signs were in Greek, anyway.) The food here mostly seemed okay, they only had so much room so they wouldn't let bad food stands set up here in the first place, so that wasn't as important, but they still went around to see if anything seemed different from yesterday. Not really, looked like, even smelled the same, all spicey and baking-bread-y — though there were musicians here playing, strings and drums and a flute and something that kind of sounded like an oboe? and a singer, a woman. Like the food, the Egyptian music she heard so far was different, but she didn't mean that in a bad way. Actually kind of liked how the instruments stacked on each other, and how they would play with a melody through a song, never sounding quite exactly the same twice, but close enough you still knew it and could follow along, if that made sense — super catchy sometimes, even though she couldn't understand the words at all.
The food stands did have signs up, the names of everything in Kemetic (which looked kind of like Greek) and Arabic, which Violet and Síomha both couldn't read. Some of them had pictures, though, or they could watch to see what people came away with. Síomha stayed close to the musicians, listening, looking at the food stands nearby, how about that one? They could get a few of those bean fritter things, and one of those chicken sandwiches — she subtly pointed at someone going by to make sure Violet knew what she meant — but those were kind of big, especially with all the rice that came with, so, how about they get one plate, with the sandwich and the fritters, and split it in half. (Violet would get less than half of the sandwich, probably, because she was so small, but split it in two, anyway.) And then they could go to that stand to get one of those flakey honey pastry things. Sound good? That did sound good, yeah, they could do that — Síomha had moved up to get a better look at the stands, so they had to go loop around to the back of the line. The line was pretty long, but it looked like it was going fast, it shouldn't take forever.
Standing in line with nothing to do — Síomha even went quiet, watching the musicians — Violet found herself thinking.
Violet knew metamorphs didn't age like normal people. She'd always known that, ever since she had a word for what she was — Mum mentioned it in their talk the day they met. Mostly she, just...didn't think about it. She kind of forgot about it until she stopped ageing, and they had to deal with that.
Looking back on it, she kind of remembered (it was a long time ago) that she thought that was... Like, it didn't matter if she was a freak and she was going to hell, because if she lived forever she never needed to actually go — and that made it easier to try to do freakish things, because it was, like, the consequences for being freakish didn't apply to her. If that made sense, she wasn't sure it did. She didn't really think about that anymore, at some point between then and now Mum or Shannon or both of them together had gotten her to believe it was actually fine to be the way she was, and also she wasn't sure about the hell thing anymore? She never knew there were so many religions before. When she lived with the Dursleys, they went to church, and, she was aware that Jews and Muslims existed, but they were away, and she didn't really know anything about them — what they talked about in church was, just, the stuff everyone believed, so she never really thought about it. But there were a lot of religions, and they were super complicated? Like, they all believed different things, and... Some of them didn't even believe there was a hell — the people around town mostly did, but she knew Mum didn't, or Aunt Narcissa and the mos maiorum people — so, she guessed she really didn't know what to think anymore...
So, she knew she wasn't going to age, that if she didn't have an accident she was going to live basically forever, but she didn't really think about that, ever. Even though Mum was super old, but didn't look super old, because she stopped ageing too, and she could make herself look like a little kid, when she did that she was a little kid, she actually got younger, because age was fake for her, just like it was fake for Violet. She knew that, but she didn't really think about that. Susan could feel, say, Olivie's death, even though it was like two hundred years away or something (even normal mages could live for a really long time), but she couldn't feel Violet's death at all, but she didn't really think about that.
She didn't think about what that meant.
Until she saw the Red Lady, a real person standing there, and it suddenly seemed real.
She remembered the old monuments and stuff they saw a few days ago, the big big pyramids which were built as tombs for kings a long long time ago. The super big ones, that she was pretty sure she saw a photo of in one of the books back in her muggle primary school, Mum said those were built forty-five hundred years ago. Like, Violet thought the House of Black was crazy old, but those buildings, still standing, were twice that old. (Two Romes.) It was hard to believe how old they were, older than anything Violet had seen before.
That pretty sparkly black woman who just flew in to watch the duels had been there when they were built. In person, she was there.
And Egypt was united in one country five hundred years or so before that — five thousand years ago. And she was there too.
And by that point, she was already old. Old enough she was already so old and powerful she was worshipped as a goddess, had been for generations. They really had no idea how old she'd been, then, because there was no writing back that far, and she forgot. She was so old, even she didn't know how old she was.
People hadn't invented calendars yet.
Everything she knew was ruins, or so old there weren't even ruins left. Everyone she knew dead, thousands of years ago, the language and the culture gone. There were still Egyptians, sure, but Egypt wasn't the same, the country she knew was gone. Like how, the Blacks from when they were first tribal chiefs in Brittany were very different from the Blacks now, teleport one of them from the past to today and they wouldn't recognise the House of Black as their people at all — this was the Red Lady's homeland, but at the same time it wasn't her home, not really. Her home was gone, had been for thousands of years.
And Violet found herself thinking.
Would she live to see a time that Little Whinging, the Refuge, even London, were just ruins? Or a new town built over top the ruins, you could see little signs of it here and there, but the old town was gone and forgotten. A name some people who studied this stuff knew, but most people didn't care about, too long ago. Until England was just a word some people knew, the country died out long ago — dead for longer than it was alive. And everyone she knew, all of her friends, Susan and Lasairín and Damhnait and Olivie and... Even her memory of them gone, too far away...
Mum would live, and Dora. But everyone else. And if Violet had kids when she grew up, they would get old and die too — and her grandkids, and her great-grandkids, and her great-great-grandkids... Maybe not some of them, Mum said metamorph mums were more likely to have metamorph babies than normal mages (not always, but a lot more often), but a lot of them, everyone, everyone she knew, they would all get old and die, and Violet, just, wouldn't, keep going on...
She never really thought about it before. But it sounded...lonely.
"Hey, Willow, come on."
Violet blinked, glanced up. "Huh?"
"Here, take my hands." Síomha had moved around in front of her, holding her hands down to Violet. Confused, not sure what this was about, but it was only Síomha, so Violet set her hands on top of hers. Síomha pulled her hands back, but not all the way, hooking their fingers together. "Look at my feet."
"...What?"
Síomha smiled, a little bit of a giggle on her breath. Tugging her hands a bit back and forth, she said, "I want to show you something. Look at my feet."
Um, okay. Violet looked down, and Síomha's feet started moving. Counting under her breath, up to six again and again, Síomha shuffled to the side, her weight shifting from one foot to the other, Violet could hear the light slap of her sandals against the tile — in time with the music, she noticed now. The song had changed, something a bit quicker and bouncier, Síomha's steps mostly lining up with this rattly hand-drum thing they had. She shuffled back, and then she took a step backward, her feet crossing, and—
"Oh! I've seen this, around." It was a lot slower than Violet was used to seeing, but the same basic idea, she thought.
"I bet you have, I imagine there was plenty of dancing going on around Easter. Come on, follow me. When I go to the side, you go the same way, but when I go forward or backward you go backward or forward. Right?"
"Rrr– Um, okay." Violet had never really done stuff like this before, and she didn't know why Síomha got it in her head to do this now, but it didn't look so hard. Simpler and way slower than most of the stuff she saw around the Refuge — must be a basic beginner's dance, for children — she could follow this, she thought. She waited for Síomha to finish another loop of side-side-backward-forward, and started the first step to the side with her this time — step, tap tap, step, tap tap, cross— Violet and Síomha both stepped backward at the same time, a tug on Violet's fingers as they moved farther apart. "Oops, um, that's backward, sorry."
"That's all right, let's try it again. Three, two one..."
This time, after sidling side to side, Violet remembered to step forward first, and then back, to where they started, and then to the side — left first instead of right, so after going through the whole loop twice they ended up on the same spot they started, more or less. Violet noticed the people in front and behind them in line had backed off just a little to give them room, which was nice of them. Especially since Síomha was being very silly right now, didn't know what this was about...
"Okay, you got it." Violet wasn't looking, still staring at their feet, but she thought she could hear Síomha smiling anyway. "Now, when I go to my left, you're going to go to your left — we'll keep facing each other, so we'll kind of turn a little, see?"
"Um, yeah..." Front, step step, back, step step, left — a little bit of a tug on her fingers, they took a quarter turn around, and then, right, step step, a quarter turn the other way...
"Now, we're going to break up the sideways and front-back ones. You'll step left, forward, right, backward, left. Got it?"
"Think so." They came back around to the beginning of the loop, left, step step, forward, step step, right, step step—
Smiling at the spinny feeling as she took a left step again, her skirt tickling at her legs and the beads in her bracelets and necklace jingling, Violet suddenly realised she wasn't being all sad about everyone else dying anymore. Was that why Síomha decided she was going to learn how to dance out of nowhere? Had she noticed Violet was quiet and mopey and wanted to distract her? That would make sense, she guessed...
"Yeah, you got it! Come on, take an extra step this way, the line's moving." They actually took two extra steps that way right in a row, to catch up with the line. Violet almost went the wrong way when they started the loop again, but she felt through her fingers the way Síomha was going — she'd looked up from their feet for the first time, to watch where they were going — caught herself at the last second and kept following along. "Good! That's great Willow, you picked that up fast. Okay, try this one now." Síomha paused for a second, and then started counting up to six, once, again...twice as fast.
Feeling the rattle of the drum shaking through her, the strings and oboe-thing vibrating in her chest, the voice singing in Kemetic (Arabic?) warbling in her head, Violet stared down at her feet. Bobbing her head, she started muttering, "One-two three-four five-six one-two three-four five-six," kind of bouncing on the balls of her feet on the twos and fours and sixes...
"That's it. Ready?" Violet nodded. "Okay, on left."
Her breath catching in her throat, Violet tensed up as the beginning of the loop came again — and then she stepped right into it, moving twice as fast in a blink, left-step-step forward-step-step right-step-step back-step-step left— "Ah!" she nearly tripped over herself, kicking her ankle as she uncrossed her feet. "Sorry." She stumbled for a second, but Síomha hadn't stopped, Violet shuffled up as she stepped backward, and then right-step-step back-step-step left-step-step...
"Perfect! Sometimes you might trip up a little, just gotta find your way back whenever you can. Another step this way, come on." Trying to move along with the line while doing this super fast, especially with the spinning making her dizzy, was kind of hard, Violet tripped over herself again, but she caught up after a couple beats, giggling. She didn't know why she was giggling, just, couldn't help it, felt all light and spinny. "How's that feeling? Good?"
"Yeah! It's spinny! And fwish!" Violet hissed going into the next left step, the skirt of her light Egyptian dress swishing as they turned, let out another breathless giggle.
Giggling with her, Síomha muttered, "Silly. You picked that much up fast — I thought you would, clever girl. I told your mum we should go to a dance sometime, but she thought you might be too shy. What do you think, want to try that sometime?"
"Sure! This is fun, fwish!" going into another right step, her skirt swishing some more, beads rattling. "With Susan or L-L-L-Laisairín." Locking up with the stammer made her mess up a step, she glared down at their feet, caught up again.
"I'll ask some friends when we get back, see if I can find a nice one coming up. Do you want to try the last step?"
"What's that?"
"Watch my feet again." Um, okay, she looked back down, and when they came back to the beginning of the loop, instead of stepping to the left Síomha hopped — both of her feet left the ground for a blink, Violet could feel the slight jerk on her fingers, and then doing the step-step Síomha put in an extra cross-over that wasn't there before. And then she hopped backward, step-step, and then hopped to the right, the step-step with the same extra cross-over... "Think you can do that?"
...Um...
"It's all right if you can't."
"No, I wanna try." She might trip, but she saw some of the dances people around town did sometimes, like at holidays and parties and stuff, and this was starting to look a lot more like those. She couldn't stop before she actually learned it properly.
"All right, we'll try. Ready?"
"Er... Yeah, okay."
"Okay. Three...two...one..."
Violet messed up the first one a little — she hopped straight to the left, instead of the angle she needed to go to keep facing Síomha, oops. Biting her lip and frowning down at her feet, humming along with the singer — she had the melody memorised by now — Violet caught up, kept stepping like normal, closely watching Síomha's feet, and, hop—
Síomha's grip on her fingers tugged a little harder, Violet's angle wasn't quite right, she had to turn into the step-step a little, but close enough, and hop forward and then when she went right her hop was aimed better, and she remembered to put the extra cross-over in the step-step, and then back—
The spinning starting to make her feel a bit dizzy, the beads clinking and her skirt going all fwish, Síomha smiling down at her, Violet couldn't stop giggling.
They kept going for a few minutes, Violet had no idea how long, just hop-step-stepping, a little thrown off now and then when she got a step wrong or Síomha pulled them along as the line moved. Violet was starting to get a little out of breath, her face feeling very warm, but she was still giggling, feeling all light and bouncy and full of the foreign music coming from nearby, she didn't want to stop. But, just as she was starting to think she might have to stop — the hopping was starting to make her legs a little tired, and she forgot how hot it was, she was sweating already — Síomha squeezed her hands. "We're almost at the front of the line, we have to stop."
Violet had to take a couple breaths to find her voice. "How?"
Síomha laughed. "You just stop. Three, two, one..." Digging in her heels at the silent zero, Violet came up short, all dizzy and bouncy — if Síomha wasn't holding onto her she might have fallen right over. Síomha tugged Violet a little closer, dipping down, and oh, they were hugging now, okay. Violet looped her arms around Síomha's neck without really thinking about it, her breath coming a little hard, and practically shivering with energy, she could feel it in Síomha's arms squeezing around her. "You picked that up so fast, Willow, good work."
Violet just giggled, trying not to bounce on her toes.
After a couple seconds Síomha quick kissed the side of her head, let go and stood up. Grinning, she reached down to run her fingers through Violet's hair, "You stole a little of mine."
"What?" Violet grabbed a bit of her hair, moved it in front of her face so she could see. There were slashes through the blonde, in the same deep fiery orange as Síomha's. There was even a little bit of the ocean green-blue of her eyes, that was kind of funny-looking. "Oops."
She was deciding if she actually wanted to do something about that — the green-blue did look funny — she heard someone talk at them, twitched. A woman and a man, in Egyptian-style clothes, both locals (skin a sort of lighter brownish with a hint of reddish, the man a little darker than the woman). The woman was saying something, in what Violet thought was Kemetic...or it might be Arabic, hard to tell. Asking them a question, maybe.
Síomha said something in very awkward-sounding French — Violet knew she learned some in school, but never really used it much before she started travelling with Mum and Violet. The woman said something in French back — about as awkward-sounding as Síomha's, but it was French — Síomha said something back. There was what Violet thought was another question, but Síomha didn't understand it, so the woman pulled out her wand and cast an illusion. Glowing lights in the air, a heavy green — lines drawing out a map of Europe and the Mediterranean. Síomha pointed at Ireland, so, the woman must have asked where they were from. The map faded away, there was some more French talking...
Soon they were at the front of the line, and Síomha had to stop talking to the couple(?) behind them so she could order their food. She tried to stumble through, pointing at the inside of the simple kitchen — Violet could kind of see parts of it, standing on her toes with her arms folded on the counter — and saying the names in Kemetic or Arabic or whatever as well as she could remember. The bloke looked a little confused, but then the man from behind them came up, talked to Síomha a little in (super awkward) French before chattering away with the food bloke in Kemetic. Helping with the order, she guessed, that was nice of him.
Once they had their food going, and Síomha paid, they stepped a little to the side — it would be quick, but they still had to wait a couple minutes for them to put it together. A couple plates and bowls were set on the counter, there was some shouting, but that wasn't for them, a local woman walking up, checking over them quick, and then floating them up with a flick of her wand and walking off. And then another group, the couple Síomha was talking to walking over...
Violet was a little surprised, twitching, when the woman from before walked really close up in front of her, crouching down over her. She held up one of these little doughnut ball Violet had seen before, a toothpick-looking thing stuck through it so you didn't get your fingers messy, smiling at her all nice... "Um, is that for me?" she asked Síomha.
"Looks like it."
...Okay, then. Violet carefully took the toothpick around the woman's fingers, trying to remember... "Ti, ti, ti-shèphĕmot? Is that how you say it?" She was told a few basic things in Kemetic, your pleases and thank yous and stuff, but it was a funny-feeling language and hard to remember...
It must have been close enough, because the woman just smiled at her some more, said something in...probably Kemetic. She stood up again, said something to Síomha in French, before going aside to wait her turn with the man from before. Okay, not sure why she was just given this, but whatever. She pulled the doughnut off the toothpick before biting into it — she was going to get her fingers messy, but Síomha could magic them clean, and she hated getting wood in her mouth.
The doughnut was really good, fried crunchy on the outside and smooth and syrupy on the inside — tasted like cinnamon and honey, mostly. Violet had no idea what she did to deserve this, but it was very nice of that random lady anyway.
There was a light touch on her head, she froze for a second, but it was only Síomha. Fingers curling through Violet's hair, pulling it back, she asked, "Are you feeling better now?"
Violet blinked, glanced up at Síomha over her shoulder. "What?"
"You looked like some dark thought had you, before."
"Oh." So Síomha had noticed, then — the dancing must have been to distract her. That was a little embarrassing, but it was only Síomha, it was fine. "Yeah, I'm okay. Um. Thanks. For, helping." She almost wanted to say something about what she'd been thinking about, but it wasn't really something Síomha could help with. Also, talking about how being immortal sounded like it was going to be kind of lonely to someone who wasn't seemed...not nice. Maybe she was thinking about it too hard, but.
Besides, there was time to think about that later. The whole point was that she had a long time for stuff, after all. She didn't need to bother about it right now. They were having lunch right now, that was more important at the moment — the bean fritter things were great! And this doughnut was great, and it was so bright and pretty here, and Síomha was fun and pretty and nice. She was back to having a good day all of a sudden, she didn't want to make it weird and sad.
(She didn't want to think about Síomha dying. She knew she would, in time, but it was sad.)
"My pleasure, Willow. Ah good, this is ours here." Síomha walked up to the counter to take their plate, called out thank you to the people in the kitchen with a wave of her other hand — she said it in Gaelic, but Violet guessed it was the feeling that counted. "All right, sweetheart, come on. Let's go get our baklawa and some tea and go find a seat..."