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These were unusual circumstances: altogether too unusual for the magi of the Clock Tower. It turned out they had no protocol whatsoever for handling something like this. Waver discovered it at the end of an altogether-sleepless transcontinental flight, bearing a suitcase of his things, Iskandar's artifact, and Kayneth Archibald Lord El-Melloi's ashes in an urn, bundled in cloth, swaddled again in different cloth, put in a box that he held morbidly on his lap until they landed. He'd naively thought he was making a few-day stop--escorting remains, more of a gesture to honor than anything. It quickly turned into an informal detainment--sort of a comfortable house arrest in a four-star hotel with two puzzled magi for sentries--and then something like a hearing.

They confiscated the urn. This was fine by him. They also took some of his things--books of magic, chalk even!--but left him his personal possessions, even his durable Nokia burner mobile.

They left him the red cloth too, but that was probably because he had tucked it between two of his shirts.

Waver passed two days watching hotel TV, which had more channels than he'd ever seen accessible on one set. He watched more BBC One than he ever had before and probably ever would again; he spent time staring at the flashy colors of American cable news channels, not really absorbing anything, until he discovered he could purchase movies. This would've tempted him less if he'd been the one paying for the room. As it stood, he passed the remainder of his sort-of-arrest watching Immortal Beloved (this didn't cheer him up) and Pagemaster (this did, sort of) and sleeping, curled up on his side on a too-big bed, until they called him in to talk.

There were three questioners in the hotel conference room: a dean he recognized, a government official he didn't, and a man in a bishop's stole. Their questions were straightforward; even so, Waver realized halfway through that they weren't examining him for guilt of some charge--they were trying to figure out what they should be examining him for at all, and hoping the process would shed light. He was the only witness they had. More than anything, they were just trying to sort his story out.

Waver shut his eyes while one of them spoke.

Who was the Servant Rider?

--He was King Alexander III of Macedonia, called Alexander the Great. I knew him as Iskandar.

How did he come to be your Servant?

--He was not my Servant, sir. He was King Alexander the Great. And when this flummoxed the questioner: I stole the opportunity to summon him from my teacher, Kayneth Archibald, Lord El-Melloi. We'd, um--we'd quarreled over how he'd marked an essay of mine, and I stole from him. Thus Lord El-Melloi retained Diarmuid ua Duibhne, Lancer.

Some incredulity here. You stole him?

I did. I was ruled by a moment's vindictive ambition and the desire to prove myself against Lord El-Melloi's disregard. I did not know what to expect. It was a dishonorable decision, but I believe it is my most honorable remaining option now to admit to it.

This was true. He'd given it a small amount of thought on the flight--it was one of the few things he had premeditated on his way here--though the truth was, even if he thought he would honor Iskandar by lying (he would not), there was not much point. More than one living person knew that Kayneth had desired to summon Alexander of Macedonia, and he'd certainly had the resources to do so. And Waver hadn't: how else could he explain anything?

Were you witness to Lord El-Melloi's murder?

--I was not.

Was Alexander?

--He was not.

Do you know anything of what became of him and why?

--No more than the coroner's report. I learned later that he and his fiancee were murdered by gunfire. That speaks to a conflict beyond my understanding. ... I, I'd come to join in a contest of magi and heroes. I now realize it was much more and less than that, but I don't know what Lord El-Melloi was doing. I only want to restore his remains to the United Kingdom.

They conferred, shockingly openly, in front of him; if he'd strained to eavesdrop while looking away, he might have overheard them. He didn't. He was counting the triangles on the pattern in the carpet. After a minute or two of this, it was just:

Was Alexander victorious?

--No, sir.

How was he slain?

--In battle with another Heroic Spirit, sir. Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian hero. He met his end there. I witnessed this.

And they stepped out while he worried the edge of his jumper with his fingers and tried to make sense of the green-and-pink carpet; they chattered, and then they let him go.

The school let him stay in the hotel for a week, which wasn't so bad. There was a lot of free toast in the mornings, and given that it was a four-star hotel, it was nicely toasted: not burnt, just golden, held butter and jam sturdily. They probably would have paid for him to stay longer as they sorted out anything further to do with him--autumn's term wasn't going to commence for another few months--had the house of El-Melloi not stepped up, to his tremendous surprise.

Waver was watching another movie (Leon - ... well, anyway) when the telephone rang, and his first reaction was startled and defensive--and, well, stressed. He'd just got done with answering for himself to the authorities, which felt like a rock-bottom martyrdom from which he'd been spared by some unnameable grace; having to go from that to answering to the El-Mellois seemed patently unfair.

But he packed up and got into the car they sent, and promptly discovered no one wanted answers from him just yet. They were just stowing him away in a guest house on Archibald family grounds in Knightsbridge. It took him longer to surmise that word had gotten out (where? Whose word? He never did learn) of his awkward quartering in a hotel and that this had been embarrassing for the Archibald family.

He passed three nights under a patterned duvet in the most beautiful house he'd ever seen; on the fourth night he was haunted by the stupid twin realizations that Kayneth Archibald had lived here, and that Kayneth Archibald was dead. It wasn't guilt, just childish fear: Kayneth hadn't even died here. The two facts weren't connected. It was his ancestral home, though. If anyone would haunt Waver Velvet here angrily for daring to rest his head, Waver was sure it would be him.

Banishing thoughts wasn't easy. There were a lot of thoughts. Sleeping was worse. He had nothing to get up for, nothing exhaustion would ruin, and somehow this made the exhaustion even worse--and one night, he took out Iskandar's fabric and bundled it in all he had, which was two of his shirts, and he curled around it, too tired for shame.

He did sleep that way. (In the morning he panicked and packed the relic away, in the unlikeliest-looking panel of his suitcase.) That day his usually solitary guest house teatime was joined by three people--a woman in her forties, an older male solicitor, and a young girl, maybe a few years younger than Waver. While Waver blinked, the solicitor introduced the other two as further-branching cousins of the El-Melloi family: Reines Archisorte and her mother, her trustee.

There was a legal battle over succession ongoing. Waver was surprised to hear it--he hadn't even thought about it, certainly hadn't imagined a Kayneth who didn't have a heir in mind. Then again, he was getting married, wasn't he? He was expecting to have a son.

Waver felt ill and pondered the most graceful way to ignore the scones, when the reason for his presence in the conversation came up: "Are you a magus, Mr Velvet?" said the girl delicately.

The little room was very silent. Waver disrupted it by hitting his teacup with his spoon, accidentally, and went wide-eyed. Somehow this made it easier to speak, actually. "No," he said. "I mean, no, miss. I have an interest in magic in a lesser capacity, and scholarship of magic more broadly. But I am no magus, miss."

It was harder to think about saying than to say. More noteworthy, though, was the blink and then almost simultaneous ease in tension in the room; and Waver observed them all take him carefully out of the category labeled 'potential threat.' The girl Reines smiled almost condescendingly.

At the end, she took a chequebook from her mother's purse; "I am favored as heir apparent to the El-Melloi line," she informed him. "Consider this a gift of my gratitude."

Waver was taken aback: enough to speak plainly. "Your gratitude for what?"

He was given a frosty look, maybe for prolonging this interview. It reminded him more of Kayneth than anything else in the house did. "For going away."

"What do you mean?"

"For never speaking of this again," she underlined, with her voice. Her mother sat impassive next to her. "For putting this entire sorry business to rest. I don't wish to hear my uncle's name dragged further through the mud, and it certainly doesn't need any further association with you. This should be enough, shouldn't it?"

Waver looked at her directly, which took her a few moments to notice. The weight of his gaze wasn't much to hers or Kayneth's. But the King of Heroes had regarded it enough.

"I didn't promise to never speak of this again," he said.

Both aristocrats and the solicitor frowned at him: not dramatically, but like they hadn't prepared for this eventuality. The moment felt electric, like he had to seize it for something; Waver was frantic to think of what it was, then spotted and picked up a scone. While they frowned, he broke it in half and stuffed one half into his mouth. "And I would need more to go away," he said through it.

"What?"

"I said my silence can't be purchased, but I'm happy to go away, at a more realistic price. --Did you want to talk about that?"

He didn't have to brainwash anyone this time. He just rented a flat near Termini Station in Rome: and, when he grew weary of the city almost immediately, a vacation house some ten minutes' drive from Tivoli. --Or so he estimated. Waver could not drive in Italy--or in the UK, or anywhere else, for that matter, and walked into town on his own two loafers when he had to, called the only taxicab company in town when he didn't feel like it. These were the real things to learn first in a new language: not how to find a toilet, because who couldn't find a toilet?, but how to get a taxi.

This was hilly landscape, carpeted over with vineyard land and olives. He'd come in a wet season. He was accustomed to this weather, and in fact it made this whole Italian-sojourn enterprise less obtrusively exotic: wet and middling-cold was familiar. Hilly was less so. He'd seen many dramatic hills in photographs, which had convinced him the concept had nothing left for him. Walking around on them, however, was not entirely the same. Walking past them wasn't the same. Even the experience of seeing the terrain change as you walked from house to town to buy eggs was disruptive to most kinds of melancholia.

Waver wasn't sure if this was a good or a bad thing. More often than not he would buy food, anyway; eating your own incompetent cooking while staying in Italy felt like the most idiotically stubborn thing. He took a panino once to the Cascata dell'Aniene to sit and look at the Aniene fall.

He'd promised Iskandar that he would continue on. This wasn't the first time he'd thought about the opposite. It was not the most serious thought--sitting with a sandwich in his hands purchased with a sliver of Archisorte money, thinking about how stupid and gauche it would be to kill yourself in a scenic Italian tourist attraction--but they flitted in and out sometimes.

Trying to aggressively dismiss them tended to bring more in to roost. He didn't have anything left in the tank for moments of maturity, or grand revelations. He did have a panino, however.

It was acting like a tourist (which he was) that brought Waver into contact with his most English-speaking neighbors, in fact: his rented house had long adjoined a hedgerow belonging to a wealthy European family, but he'd been too antisocial to know this for some time. Also, Waver Velvet was not someone who stood out in the social context of English magi. It still hadn't really registered with him that this was contextual.

He went to visit the Temple of the Tosse, trying to remember who the hell the Tosse were and why this was important, rather than just cool: and here he met Juliette and Luna. The most important thing to remember about Juliette and Luna was that they were twelve. When he mentioned a guess of 'eleven,' and stupidly assumed this was inoffensive, he almost lost their acquaintance immediately. The other thing was that they were his neighbors.

"You must be mistaken," he said, upon being approached by the two children outside the visitor center. He wasn't sure why he felt so certain about this. He didn't have a perfect track record of remembering his neighbors in other places.

"I'm not," said Juliette, who was the taller one. "There aren't so many antisocial Americans around here that we can mix them up."

"I'm not American." Waver was slightly offended.

"See, I told you he wasn't American." Luna--the other one--sounded faintly superior, and glanced at apparently-her-cousin; "Now ask him if he's a writer. I bet he's a writer."

Waver was not a writer. Juliette and Luna were still curious, though, and chit-chat did ensue; their extended family had a such a blend of European nationalities that it was hard to tell was theirs were, technically, but they'd gone to such posh international schools that they were edge-of-Received-Pronunciation all the same. Wealthy, multilingual, twelve--utterly unmagical. When Waver became tired of humoring kids and tried to excuse himself on the pretense of gelato, they followed; and Luna in particular pressed him.

"You're not a writer?" She dug her little plastic spade into her stracciatella, consumed a gob of it, and gestured at him. "Then what are you doing up there?"

"I'm... on holiday?" Waver stood with gelato in hand. He was ambivalent on the gelato, and still not sure what he'd generally done to deserve this.

"What, on holiday moping up on a hill?"

"Don't be like that," said Juliette, as though the next worst thing from being badgered by children wasn't being white-knighted by other children. "You shouldn't say that. Come on, maybe he has a good reason for being British and brooding--"

("--a good reason for being...")

Luna was having none of it. "Yeah? Like what?"

"Like maybe someone died, Lulu. Have a little taste."

The Temple of the Tosse wasn't a very convenient place to take your own life, but Waver was regretting not having looked harder. "Shouldn't you be in school?" he said, as the last resort of the cornered adult.

Luna wrinkled her nose, with defiance. "Shouldn't you be in school?"

At this Waver Velvet stared genuinely aghast. "I'm fucking nineteen." --and immediately regretted this, with all the more bewilderment when the two girls went away, giggling.

This was of little consequence to his daily life for several days. He bought groceries and ate restaurant meals in Tivoli. He worked on his Italian, both through book (unhelpful, but comforting) and conversation (educational, but horrible). At a certain point Juliette's mother, Noemi, came over and introduced herself and gifted him what he could only describe as a 'pity brioche,' ascertained that he was awkward and harmless, and stamped him with her tacit approval for talking to the kids. Not before she sat down in front of his coffee table, though, sized him up bluntly, and asked: "You're gay, right?"

This took Waver aback, but frankly not nearly as much as it would have at any other time of his life. He hunted for a surface so he could put down the pity brioche. "Yes?" And then, aware he'd voiced this like a confused question, tried to think of something more to say. But it hadn't been much of a conversation-starter.

Noemi smiled at him, not nearly as apologetically as she might've. She welcomed him, belatedly, to Tivoli and to Lazio; she asked him what he was doing ("A dissertation."); and she left again, having exchanged pity brioche for nonthreatening stamp.

Waver did the only thing that could be done after a week of mortifying conversations, and tried to start his first vegetable garden.

Luna came back to trespass when he was trying to dig up a suitable plot. This was something he could've asked the Mackenzies for help with, he was aware, if he'd thought of it--but the Mackenzies were still living in Japan, and he was still not really making friends through non-mind-control processes, so he'd have to work out what to do with the spade and the hoe himself. Until, of course, God dropped a fucking tween on his head again. "Bonsoir. Hi. Mum says I am allowed to talk to you after all. You have sort of a weird name, you know. No offense?"

"Your name is literally the word 'Moon.'"

"That is a fair point." The girl pondered and he dug.

Every task was worse in front of an observer. In a sense, though, that rock bottom seemed to have passed--with Luna and the rest of her relatives--and Waver was surprised how unconcerned he was about humiliating himself. That was why he was getting into this, anyway; it was the sort of thing Iskandar--okay, it was not the sort of thing Iskandar would do, but it was the sort of thing he would approve of Waver doing. Getting out of his head for a moment.

Technically Luna-his-neighbor also did this. Just not on purpose. After he'd grimed himself up for a bit, she sat down on the ground and ventured, "So what are you really doing here? Really-really? I know it's not a dissertation. No one ever shuts up about their dissertation."

Something about the point struck him. Maybe because it was familiar. He smiled, and realized it felt unfamiliar; and that held him up a moment. But he went on. "That's a white lie. I'm just here on a holiday trying to live my life and learn how to have fun."

"Why here?"

"People in the movies always pick Italy," he said, candidly. "Also, it isn't terribly cold."

She made a face and nodded in the sort of fair cop, fair cop way of a seasoned betting man talking odds with a friend. "Did you escape from something bad?"

"Yeah," said Waver.

"Did somebody die?"

"Yeah. Someone I loved."

She was as sincerely riveted as she'd been maliciously amused before. This struck him as the most infinitely twelve-year-old thing. At twelve he believed he was 'amoral,' identified as a 'skeptic,' and still would've been hunched over with enormous eyes over a mysterious nineteen-year-old attesting without irony to the tragedy of his love. It was not lost on Waver, though, that there could be some awkwardly strange questions here; so he dug spade into earth and elaborated, "His last wish was that I try and learn to live my life and have fun and do what I really want to do. I also got a--uh, huge settlement--so I thought I would start out with a nice holiday, really for a while, and figure out what I want to do."

The girl rocked back in a crouch; kids crouched all the time, everywhere, before they got inflexible and life demanded chairs of them all the time. Oddly, Waver missed that. Just that goblinlike slice of childhood: not the rest. "That's sweet," she said, measuredly. "How's it going?"

Waver stared at the spade in his hands.

"I mean, the whole holiday thing? The going on without thing? Sorry."

"I mean, honestly, it's great," Waver came out all at once, in a strange rat-a-tat of peculiar and monotone honesty. "I don't know how I would've gotten on without things like this. Trying to garden. Walking around. Panini."

"Uh, that's good then--"

"But also it really sucks. And I'd honestly rather learn to bring him back from the dead, which believe it or not, I think I could probably do. Because I am really fucking obsessive, in a way that this garden does not reflect. --But also that would be insane. You should try, um. Try not to have people die. It's genuinely the worst. --People tell you to accept things. I hate accepting things."

She leaned forward. "Oh, no, you should do that," she said, enchanted. "The whole necromancy thing. That's way better. I mean, fuck moving on, it's stupid."

"Language."

"Even if you're crazy it's better," she said, genuine. "I mean, if you're delusional, then what? That's still really romantic. And if you actually do it--"

"I'm really not taking advice on this. Sorry to you."

"Come on. You just said it. You said you wanted to figure out what you wanted to do."

Waver stared at her. His hair was getting shaggy, as he'd neglected to cut it in some time; it was pulled back in a ponytail, though he'd never seen himself previously as a ponytail sort of person. Now it was falling out messily, falling in his face, and he had to take a moment to pull it back again. Luna's hair was also ponytailed, though this had a very different fashion significance; she was wearing shorts, sort of the preppy tennis kind, and had already made the cuffs all grimy with red brick dust before now undertaking the process of making the seat muddy by sitting in his front garden. While he re-composed himself, she watched him quizzically in the brief conversational silence, and then shrugged her shoulders. "Or don't," she said. "Or just keep moping in Italy. Are you thinking about it?"

"I'm thinking about whether I should erase your memory with a mind-altering spell," said Waver, tying off his hair with the weariness of Sisyphus with his stone.

"Hey. That's uncalled for. I probably won't tell anyone."

"Please go away," said Waver; and then, when this failed to have an effect, "Go away or I'll tell your mother. Shoo." He didn't have a particular idea for what he was going to tell her mother; yet the effect was still universal. She scuttled off, leaving him wondering again at his vegetable bed. Though it wasn't fully the last time he saw Luna or her family, he never did learn their family name.

He was not going to give up on the vegetables. He decided that much. They were the only thing he had really instituted in his life; he couldn't assign them any deeper meaning than that, but that much was true. One didn't have to tend vegetables all day, anyway, particularly not with out-of-towner money; he had other things he wanted to do, and could do, and was going to do. He had a collection of books half-unpacked upstairs, some sealed to unlock only by the brush of his palm, some sealed against all but a word or a gesture. But one did have to tend those vegetables, so with dirt under his fingernails and trepidation in his soul, he went into town.

The first thing he did was look for gardening books in English. In retrospect, he was aware this reflected a certain slowness to learn. The second was to look for gardening books in Italian. Waver found a few of the latter, thankfully with illustrations; he would sit cross-legged on his bedroom floor, right under the telephone, and pore over bulbs and bulb boxes and roots, with his English-to-Italian/Italian-to-English dictionary open next to him. When he wearied of bulbs and roots, he passed his hand over one of Kayneth's tomes and read there for a while.

Waver was not Kayneth. When he'd taken them from Fuyuki, the books had rejected him: a painful rebuke that might as well have said, You're not Lord El-Melloi. He hadn't convinced them that he was Lord El-Melloi; but he'd at least convinced most of them that Lord El-Melloi was not coming back.

He spent a week and a half in deadlocked battle with one of the handbooks when he decided to call in reinforcements; he packed it up and walked back into Tivoli to find a cafe owner who spoke near-fluent English, who was nice to him. Who was nice to him even after several dead ends of not getting any conversation out of him. This was Waver's standard of a nice person. His name was Danilo, and he came over obligingly when Waver opened up the book on the table--"You should just get someone up there to help you," said Danilo sensibly and immediately. "It's easier to learn with someone to show you."

Danilo was correct, of course, though Waver hadn't come to terms with this. "Can you help?" he said hopefully and plainly, like this might reduce the number of new people in his life.

This elicited a hearty laugh. "Me? I've never had a garden in my life. No, let me ask around--"

After Waver deterred, or at least delayed, this offer, he found himself scooted back in his chair against the wall, pinned by the sociability of a stranger; but here he did have several captions explained to him, and even more helpfully, several chapter headings and a few basic missing pieces of information--dirt and soil weren't the same things, and the connotation was important. This seemed very basic, but he was having a basic problem.

"I've picked the wrong dirt for my soil," said Waver dismally. "No, it's all right. I'm not sure why I thought just digging anywhere was going to work. ... I guess I'll just have to start over. It isn't as if I have anything better to do. --To be honest once I've got it planted I was hoping to travel."

"Oh yes? Where were you going to go?"

"Uh--various places that used to be the old Hellenic world. Ancient Greece. But that's not just Greece-Greece, that's a lot of places. It was all different back then."

"In Italy we had a lot of the ancient pagan gods in common with them, you know," Danilo informed him, entirely unnecessarily and with obvious pride. "Like Zeus and Jupiter."

Waver put his forehead in his hands. "... Thanks. Look, it's not really a plan. I don't really know what I'm doing. I just really want to find and steal something that belonged to Alexander the Great."

Even with his view obscured, he could see the cafe owner tilt his head in consideration. Then, in lieu of anything more dismissive or concerned, the response came: "Alexander the Great lived a long time ago. It's probably all crumbled to dust now. You should pick something more recent. --Or just talk to somebody about the bulb box. You know, I'll talk to somebody about the bulb box for you. Come on."

Waver relented on the subject of Danilo and the hypothesized bulb box; as for everything else, he lay on his mattress with the red fabric, which he always laid out on the bed next to him, and stared at it.

"Hey," he said to it, pointlessly.

It was fabric, and didn't talk. This was always true, but he rarely tested it.

"Couldn't you have given me something more specific to work with? Is that not something kings do? You don't like details?"

It was never any surprise to him to be crying. He hadn't been a non-crier before this, before All Of This; he'd cried during, and he'd cried after, and it was just more that he went gummy periods of time without crying at all, for no real reason, no ennobling reason, even when he curled up tightly on his mattress and bundled himself in his too-thin-for-his-preferences blanket and had the most sentimental, the most tightly wrought thoughts, the most romantic notions--things you'd want to cry to dignify--and then he wouldn't cry. But the rest of the time it came and went. This time it came to his head like a dizzying rush and then leaked out of his face all at once.

He didn't sob, though. Sometimes he would've liked to sob. No sobbing any more, though. Just stupid head rushes, and tears.

"I don't like details," he told Iskandar's cloak.

After he was finished--longer and shorter than seemed dignified--he left bed and went for one of his books again. By the time the sun was rising he was still awake, his fingernails chewed all the way to the quick, a thought forcing itself through his sticky mind: which was a problem, because he now had to stay up to await a bulb box.

The girls and their family were leaving for the spring, though he didn't know it right away. Luna came back around with Juliette to say goodbye, but they forgot to communicate the central point, so Waver spent most of the encounter worrying they were here to vandalize his new, potentially functional proto-garden. When Juliette went off, distracted because she was sure she'd seen someone's dog, Luna sat down on his steps and dispensed with formalities: "We're going back to Brussels soon. It's been generally nice to meet you."

Waver was distracted by this unusual assertion. "--Thanks? Is that thanks?"

"Brussels is in Belgium."

"I know where Brussels is." This was what it took for him to register the information, and he blinked: "Oh. It's been nice to meet you too...? Tell your mum that I--"

"Yeah, I know. Look." She shook her head scornfully: "Sorry about your boyfriend, or life partner, or whatever. Sorry I'm leaving so awkwardly. It's not on purpose. Good luck with your vegetables."

This wasn't what he expected at all, but then again, life kept doing this to him: little kindnesses from strange quarters he'd invested nothing in himself, shown no grace to. Then again, it'd have to, wouldn't it? Those were the only kinds of quarters that existed in his life. He smiled, abruptly; it occurred to him how little time in his life he'd spent before speaking with anyone younger than him. "Thanks," he said. "Don't be sorry. I'm glad you're leaving, actually. It means I can bring him back from the dead without having to erase your memory."

Luna scowled. "Well, now I'm sorry I'm missing it."

Winter in Lazio hardly passed for winter, but it passed all the same; Waver's little garden yielded garlic and chives and also Swiss chard, the last of which he had no particular idea what to do with. He passed his time by himself, and sometimes with Danilo and Danilo's sister and friends who'd brought the bulb box, shyly and in incredibly halting Italian; and he started to feel the blood back in his own face, and he started to feel properly like the unbelievably mawkish English tourist he was for being here at all. And he peeled back the carpet, and he etched something, a little bit every day, into the floor underneath.

He managed to get rid of the last of the Swiss chard the day before he locked the front and back doors of his house, the door to his room, and then placed a telephone call to his solicitor. The idea of his solicitor was a product of everything with the El-Mellois. He hadn't previously been living a 'his solicitor' class of life.

"Hello, I'd like to review the contents of my will," he said, coming out tight and tinny.

"Of course. Is everything all right?"

"Yes," said Waver immediately. "I mean, hopefully. Isn't everything always hopefully all right?"

When that was sorted, he took a bath: and, stupidly, blew out his hair properly. He dressed in the best he had, which had a minuscule paper-doll-like effect on him. And he opened another cut on his finger and etched the last and sat in the middle of his circle.

There wasn't an incantation for this. He'd had to write it himself; which wasn't so bad, because he could make it short.

"Let my blood be your blood. Let your spirit be my spirit. I am your herald, your vassal, and your tether: Aléxandros, Basileus, Pharaoh, Kyrios--take my hand, if it be your will. Your world awaits you."

He made it through this all steadily enough that some part of his mind was certain it wouldn't work: so it came as some relief, probably, when he felt the world punch a hole in his mind, when the unbearable pain of radiance flooded through, and he vomited and blacked out.

Waver did wake up. He didn't wake up in his own blood and vomit, but upon sinking, naked, into water--hot water, a tub's full, that numbed the senses that had been inflamed just a second ago. A second?

"You know, I really have gotten entirely too used to the amenities of this world," said Alexander, called the Great, from his ungainly seat next to the tub. "Here in my time, we had the most ghastly plumbing. In fact, I think ghastly plumbing was my undoing. And now here I am cursing how long it takes to heat water in this house. In--I'm sorry, lad. Can you hear me?"

Waver nodded, and then nodded again. Seeing was a stranger ask--he was still arranging that part of his mind, or setting it back down again--but he could hear him. He knew him. That was what he wanted to say: I know you. I know your voice. I know you. Instead what he managed to do was sputter bathwater.

"Shh," said Iskandar, and moved his rough hands under Waver's arms, gently, to re-settle him. "Easy."

He closed his eyes against the heat and the tangibility, too dizzy to register his own nakedness; he pushed his forehead against Iskandar's arm on sleepy impulse, like a cat. Accordingly Iskandar stroked it and thumbed his damp hair back.

Waver felt himself react, some sort of wriggle, and Iskandar chuckled low at whatever it was. "I was just saying that this place hasn't got the luxuries of an affluent area like Fuyuki."

"This is affluent," said Waver vaguely, through what felt like cotton. It came out though, and he blinked, blinked water away again and did manage to focus. He was looking at Iskandar. It was hard to mistake him for anything else. He was in some state of undress himself, at least by his standards, cloak and breastplate aside; "It's Italy. Italia. An affluent country. We're just not in a hotel."

Iskandar smiled broadly at that, which made Waver childishly cross in a very fleeting way--don't be proud of me for forming complete sentences!--and sat back. "Then I stand corrected," he said. "I should take your word. You've managed to summon me back from the land of death today. I've managed to operate the hot water tank in your house. This is your house, isn't it?"

Waver nodded again, dripping warm water. He flexed his fingers, then his toes, dragging them through the water.

"I thought so. It's full of your clothes."

He was too close on the heels of a near-death experience to be blushing, so he decided that he wasn't. "I got a settlement from Lord El-Melloi--Kayneth, I mean Lancer's master--his extended family. A lot of money for my troubles, like compensation. I'm using some of it on living here."

"Well, that's likely the best thing you're ever going to get out of your acquaintance with him."

His bluntness had a way of dissolving Waver's guilt, one way or another. Waver grinned, though he had a feeling it looked a bit Nightmare on Elm Street in his current state. Possibly more Child's Play. "I mean, technically that's you," he said. "The best thing I've gotten out of knowing Lord El-Melloi. Technically--that's you."

Iskandar laughed, full-throated; Waver laughed too, or giggled anyway, and forgot that he was naked and half-dead and tried to get up out of the bath, and slipped, and Iskandar caught him in the water; he caught him and lifted him up and out, Waver caught his now-wet shirt in his hands too--and here he was shocked to find that he was crying. Not in general, but he'd been laughing just a moment before, and he was held to Iskandar's chest. And he was crying. In fact, he was sobbing horribly: ugly, anguished, spasmodic crying. Like an animal or an old man.

He was wrapped up fully in Iskandar's arms and Iskandar was saying something to him. It felt like a short time later when he realized that Iskandar wasn't, actually: Iskandar was crying. Some of that animal crying had been his and was his. When he wept, the convulsion shook them both, and it felt like Waver's; every time it wrung something further out of him. Something that needed to be wrung.

After all that Iskandar laid him in his bed and covered him, and sat next to him there too. Only at this point was it starting to register with Waver that he didn't have his clothes on, far past the point where it might've been awkward; in fact it relieved him, as something he no longer had to pretend was awkward. He curled, his back to Iskandar, and adjusted his head on his pillow; he felt Iskandar's fingers thread through his hair again, and felt the same warm glow from it travel down his spine.

He didn't imagine volunteering a query or an explanation. They were both alive.

"I didn't get a bed with you in mind," Waver did say, a little wryly. "Sorry. I wasn't expecting this to happen."

"Happen? You're the one who did it," said Iskandar, reasonably enough.

"That's true. I still wasn't expecting it."

Iskandar thought. He had a very declamatory silent way of thinking, which probably wasn't his fault; Waver could only it imagine driving generals and advisers insane in another time and place. "I suppose I was," he said.

Waver craned his neck to glance back at him: to convey the little upward arc of his eyebrows, definitely, but also to look at him. "While you were dying?"

"Oh, no. But when you released me--I was certainly thinking, I've taken up with a magus, a real one, none of the glamour or the tricks. If he wishes to bind himself to my service, he will."

"Many men have bound themselves to your service."

"Some more sturdily." Iskandar lay his hand alongside Waver's arm; and, once he understood, Waver put his own hand within it. "What did you use? You can't have used the cloak--you'd just have a repeat of our first circumstances."

"Without the language assets, yes. Some interesting ontological questions raised by all of this. --I didn't know you knew that much about how the magic worked," said Waver, slightly chastened.

"I've been known to pay attention from time to time." Iskandar pulled his shirt over his head; the way he smelled was disorienting, a shock of specific familiarity, because he smelled like battle, like horses, like a particular day when Waver rode with him. He had to be disoriented too, surely--but he caught up quickly. He was always landing on his feet, one way or another. "But yes, I was thinking about it before. On the occasion of something like this."

Of course he was. Of course he did. Of course, dying so young, that an Alexander prefigured by himself would think again about what happened to his life after his death; Waver sat up a little, on one elbow, to study him, and wondered if he'd thought about it before, too. Wondered what thinking about it did for him then.

"I used myself," said Waver, steadily. "As your artifact. Your history as it is carved upon this Earth. I see that I don't have to justify it; I see that it worked. There are magics that understand more than human thought or human law."

His deepest tremulous hope was that Iskandar would not find this awkward, or strange, or pathetic. Truthfully, he had a little hope that he would be seduced by it. His fear did not come true here--in fact, for a moment he could observe that his hope did, in its way; Iskandar was taken aback, and then intense, shimmering in the fixed nature of his gaze. It was a particular thrill Waver had never had before--the recognition, the powerful regard in return--and he was surprised by how unshaken he felt by it. Iskandar made sense to him, in a certain way. He responded to passion. He was passion; when Waver revealed it so frankly, there was no way he could not respond to it.

But it passed, in fact, outshone by a deep, melancholy fondness in Iskandar's eyes. "As ever, I am honored by your service and your loyalty. But you must know I have no idyll to give you. Whatever might be ahead of me, there is bound to be pain and hardship."

"I don't like idylls." Waver's blankets had cocooned warmly around him. He was loath to give it up, but nevertheless sat up, letting them fall onto his lap. "This is an idyll. I don't like it. I went up and dug up a conqueror."

Iskandar coughed, in obvious genuine surprise. He regarded Waver with raised-eyebrow consideration. "You would make a desert and call it glory, Waver?"

"Tacitus. Pointedly misquoted. Isn't that after your time?"

"I can read," said Iskandar, eyes creasing.

"Well, all the same." Waver considered the point, and how to answer; and eventually shrugged: "It's not mine to pursue deserts or glory or peace, Basileus. Just the arts of magic. Tell me what you desire and I will advise."

During this, Iskandar was smiling, and his smile broadened; and to this he said, "What I desire is for you to go to sleep, and recover from the ill effects of your ambition. If only we all could. --You may sleep, Waver. I am not an illusion; I will be here."

Waver woke not in the buttery late morning, but in the cold and quiet early. There was a neighbor somewhere who had a very unreliable rooster, who did crow this time: and Waver, possessed of a pinched headache but little else in the way of evidence of blowing out all the magic in his body or anything similarly dire, tucked his feet into his slippers and his body into his dressing-gown and went in search of Alexander the Great. He found him in the back garden, not near the recent site of harvest but on a point where he could look out from their elevation over the waters of the Aniene.

He brought Iskandar some bread and prosciutto and gave him an overview of where they were, ending with trivia: "This is a popular tourist area because of the Roman sites. Particularly those of Emperor Hadrian. He had a personal villa built in this region. It's very attractive, if you like the very old houses of rich people."

"Hadrian?" Iskandar was interested; he was interested in history, always, but there was a part of him that definitely lit up when hearing about other kings. Taking notes, for sure. It wasn't even insecure. He would be a lot less infuriating a person in certain respects if he had the grace to be insecure. "Does he have many works? What is he known for?"

"Well, for this villa. For a wall, actually, which bisected the UK for a while; for a beloved, a young man he loved and memorialized tremendously after his death. Antinous."

Waver pronounced this matter-of-factly, but Iskandar, no fool, gave him a wink--an infuriating one, in fact. As if to say, yes, you're very sly. It was flirtatious, in the exact way of not taking bait. "A very long wall. That's very ambitious, actually."

"It was. He was more invested in strengthening and fortifying what he had than in the acquisition of new things. A builder more than a conqueror. Or at least that's the reductive way the histories put it."

And in that, the slyness was gone; and the melancholy was back. "Not after the fashion of myself, then," said Iskandar.

Somewhere in his chest Waver felt horror, the flutter of a naive mistake: but he didn't leap to assure Iskandar. There was no point in assuring someone about the truth. They could only contend with it themselves. So Waver just bowed his head; there was no rebuttal for it, and it also was no answer to anything that Waver cared about or knew. Antinous was beloved of an Emperor; Waver was vassal to the King of Conquerors.

"So I suppose we'll stay here awhile?" Iskandar's subject had changed, and with it his mood. So he was, as a person.

Waver folded his arms and robe more tightly around himself; now being aware of nakedness felt considerably less seductive. "That's up to you," he said evenly.

"But?"

Always with a point to level. Waver smiled, half to himself, and half up at Iskandar. "But I wouldn't," he said. "I would go to London now and confront the Clock Tower and the establishment of magi. They will find out regardless. And you will cause talk here. If we leave shortly, we will take them by surprise. Surprise is one thing magi are not familiar with, you know. They spend all their lives guarding against it. They ossify. Like Lord El-Melloi. And it pulls anything electric right out of them, in the end. --But we don't have to do that. I think it will set us at an advantage. ... I can't guarantee."

Iskandar studied him, with that way of holding his gaze that brought color back into his cheeks. It wasn't leveraging power over him, not like that; it just had power over him. It was as intense, as seduced as it had been in an instant before; and it was still unambiguously not yet. Waver was a stranger to relationships, but one so directly acknowledged and unconsummated felt even more unfamiliar.

Was it the same to be beloved of an Emperor? Waver Velvet, arrogantly, thought not.

"You've grown very bold," said Iskandar, with a certain considered interest.

"I've found growing vegetables to be a very character-building experience."

"You're going to have to abandon those, according to your own advice."

They went back to the house in amiable, sardonic spirits; but it was not like Iskandar to leave anything unspoken that might be considered a trick, or a lie. It was one of a thousand reasons that men followed him. So Waver was not surprised when Iskandar took him by the terrycloth elbow, and addressed him seriously.

"This is not about a meeting, or about securing ourselves against our foes alone. I am not finished with this world, Waver. Remember that and remember that it is so. Remember that I said so at a time in the future when things feel bitter and uncertain and unnecessary."

"You had best not be," said Waver, unflinching. "You left this world in an unfinished state."

"Then on my head be it," said Iskandar of Makedonia, who took Waver's hand and raised it--anachronistic, perhaps, to either of them--to his mouth for a kiss. His lips were warmer than his hand. Then he let it go again and they went, one by one, inside.