“Planning to tune all of us out today?” Julien asked, nodding at the chunky headphones around his neck.
Cinn snorted. “Only if you’re annoying. But music helps me control my episodes. Well, it can help stop them. And I know that’s the opposite of what we’re doing today, but…” He shrugged.
“If you’re into music, why don’t you put something on?” Julien gestured to the radio’s scan and seek function as Maz’s engine purred to life to drive them out of Cinn’s quiet street.
Cinn flicked through the channels, bypassing anything German, French, or Italian until he hit something English. Julien glanced over to see his face light up. The vocals were a bit too squeaky for his liking, and the bass too loud, but Cinn was soon bobbing along and mouthing along with the lyrics. Most of the words seemed to be ‘hello’, aside from some notion of the singer’s demands to be entertained.
Julien certainly wasn’t. Well, not by the song, anyway.
Cinn must have seen something in his expression, as he said, “Don’t you like Nirvana?”
“Who?”
With a shake of his head, Cinn went back to enjoying the music, tapping his foot along to the beat. Several headache-inducing songs later, they arrived at Darcy’s cottage. Cinn would never again be allowed control of the radio.
A white picket fence enclosed Darcy’s overgrown front garden. It was getting harder and harder to battle your way through it to reach her door.
“Darcy’s not in, so we need the spare key.” Julien grinned mischievously and pointed to an ornate, antique-looking lantern hanging by the door. “I invented this for her.”
As Cinn raised an eyebrow in question, Julien tapped a hidden sigil on the lantern, causing it to flicker with a gentle glow. Moments later, there was a bright blue burst of light within the lantern’s glass enclosure. Julien unlatched one panel and it swung open to reveal the spare key waiting for them, a few remaining blue sparks—veilmotes—still fading out.
Julien motioned for Cinn to retrieve the key, at which point Cinn may have mumbled something about key safes being perfectly adequate, which Julien may have ignored.
Once they’d closed the door behind them, Cinn hovered, wrapping his coat around him like he didn’t want it to be taken away from him. “Where are the other two?”
“Elliot exists in the magical world of Elliot-time, where nobody else’s schedules are important. Darcy said she had to run out to get something.”
Julien ushered Cinn into the kitchen. He poked around in Darcy’s cupboards, looking for any breakfast tea to offer Cinn, who hadn’t enjoyed his chai experience last time. However, he couldn’t make head nor tail of Darcy’s stock, arranged in mismatched jars with undecipherable codes scribbled on them.
Cinn, meanwhile, paced up and down the kitchen, hands in jean pockets, radiating discomfort. Just when Julien was going to ask what the matter was, he burst out with, “Do you have any smokes? I tried to find a shop last night, but I was too knackered. But I got an envelope with a few hundred francs in it through my letterbox, from Madame Sinclair’s assistant. So I can pay you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Julien didn’t really smoke much—albeit occasionally in social situations with a glass of red wine—but he knew exactly where Darcy’s supply was. He opened the bronze tin in her bottom drawer and took out the packet of Gitanes. “These okay? They’re what we all used to smoke in Paris.”
Removing two, he gestured for Cinn to follow him into Darcy’s tiny back garden. The warm hues of the last wave of autumn foliage blanketed the ground. A black iron bench, that ivy was attempting to claim for itself, lay at the far side of it. Once seated, Julien passed Cinn a cigarette. “These might be a tiny bit stale.”
He took it gratefully. “I usually smoke roll-ups.”
“Really? They’ve always looked rather inconvenient to me. Too many elements to obtain to make them.”
Cinn raised his eyebrows, his piercing glinting in the light. “They’re cheap though.” He lit his cigarette from the lighter Julien flicked on and offered him. When he took his first deep drag, his eyes rolled back in euphoria before closing completely, and Julien had to suppress a laugh.
For a short time, the pair sat in peaceful silence. Julien lit his own cigarette before leaning back into the bench, listening to the sound of the wind and the distant twittering of birds.
“I thought it was just you that came from Paris,” Cinn said at last.
Caught off guard at his sudden interest, Julien took a second before replying. “I was the only one born there. I first met Elliot when I was twelve, at this international summer camp for moteblessed teenagers. And yes, it was as awful as it sounded,” he said, laughing at the grimace on Cinn’s face. “Then we attended La Sorbonne together in Paris. We met Darcy there. Béatrice joined the university the year after me, and then,voilà.” A nostalgic collage of images of the four of them lounging around in Paris’s parks and cafés during the summer breaks distracted him from saying more.
“Okay…” Cinn said slowly. He tipped his chin back and blew a series of impressive smoke rings into the air, to watch them disappear. “So it was a coincidence that you and Elliot found anothermoteblessedfriend there, or…?”
Julien laughed. Cinn knew so little about his tiny corner of society. “Non, definitely not. There are a handful of universities across Europe that tend to attract groups of moteblessedstudents. There’s a slightly different admission pathway, admittedly. But we all studied alongside ‘normal’ students and completed what is equivalent to your master’s degree, alongside some extra-curricular, invite-only classes.”
Julien winked at him. Cinn returned a weak smile that didn’t meet his eyes, before his gaze wandered and he twirled a strand of hair poking out of his beanie. Were the intricacies of Julien’s world overwhelming him?Well, it was Cinn’s world too now, so the quicker he was up to speed, the better.
Cinn finished his cigarette and flicked the butt into an ashtray on the ground. Julien offered him the end of his—he’d found the first few puffs more than enough—and Cinn quickly accepted it before asking, voice strained, “So what did you study then, at your fancy university?”
“Engineering and art.”
