Mirrored in Evergreen
by B. Pigeon
Chapter One
Rosemary stood on his toes in front of the wizard’s floor-to-ceiling bookcase, searching, running his fingertips along the books’ spines as he scanned their titles.
This entire wall of the library, and the wall opposite, were both lined with hundreds of books on the practice, potential, and limitations of magic, but he was disinterested in most of them.
During the first two weeks of his apprenticeship he had passed countless hours exploring the library, surveying the titles and pulling books down at random to flip through them. Nearly all of them were incomprehensible to him; they were far beyond his rudimentary grasp on magic, or else they were written in languages he couldn’t read, or contained pages of proofs and symbols and equations that meant nothing to him.
At one point, on his second day, he collected a small stack of reference materials on the properties of plants, including an illustrated encyclopedia that he consulted every day as part of his homework assignments; since then, he had found nothing of use or interest to him.
For the first time, this morning— the fifteenth day of his apprenticeship— he was combing through the wizard’s book collection with his own intention in mind, seeking out knowledge for its own sake. After only a few minutes he came across something promising; his fingertip grazed the spine of a thin green tome, which read in simple bold black text: Dream Symbology.
When he pulled it down he flipped to the table of contents, and smiled to himself with the discovery that the book contained a glossary of meanings. This was exactly what he was looking for.
Rosemary knew, of course, that he wasn’t having prophetic dreams. Precognitive dreaming required powerful magic, and even those who were capable weren’t supposed to experience them spontaneously; they were induced with herbs, rituals— magic he couldn’t manage if he tried.
But there was no denying that his dreams had a distinctly strange quality. Every night at the wizard’s house so far he had been plagued with identical nightmares in which the wizard was a shadowy, threatening presence that followed him through the forest surrounding the house. In the dreams Rosemary was incapacitated by a looming anxiety, running away without thinking.
It was all emotion, with no concrete symbols to analyze, so he had no reason to assume that the book would suggest they were remotely precognitive, or meaningful at all, but he was compelled to investigate.
He sat in his favorite armchair— plush and deep, emerald green with dark wooden legs— next to the side table where he had done his homework the night before, and flipped the book open.
In the glossary he found entries that were similar enough in concept to what he was searching for (he scanned a long list of terms following trees, and ghosts, since there wasn’t one for haunting), but these broad categories narrowed down into more concrete images which didn’t appear in his dream.
Of all the possible meanings, he only found the relevance in one; under ghosts read being trapped in an inescapable situation. This was, perhaps melodramatically, a summary of his feelings on his apprenticeship.
From the hallway that led to the library Rosemary heard the wizard’s quiet footsteps approaching, so he shoved the dream book under his chair and picked up the notebook he used for his assignments.
The wizard walked over, and the two of them exchanged awkward greetings as Rosemary yanked out several pages of homework to hand in. As always, the wizard examined each of the papers in silence and then nodded with apparent approval before folding them up to place in his jacket pocket.
In return, Rosemary expected to receive more of the same: more lists of herbs, the measurements and ratios scratched out, for him to analyze the properties and interactions of.
Instead, the wizard went to the bookcase opposite the one Rosemary had just been perusing and located a book, which he handed over wordlessly. It was entitled Histories of Failed Magic. Rosemary, who could himself be considered a failed magic user, took a slow and measured breath to keep from rolling his eyes or cringing at the insult.
“Read the first two chapters,” the wizard said in his flat monotone, “and write a thousand words.”
“About what?” He flipped miserably through the book, which was several hundred pages long, printed in text so cramped it approached illegibility.
“Your analysis,” the wizard said, uselessly vague as usual, and swept out of the room without another word to Rosemary.
His studies until that day had been two weeks of the same: the uncomfortable morning meetings, the daily stack of notecards to assess, the hours spent consulting the encyclopedia and barely paraphrasing its entries until his hand ached. Other than the bookwork, his responsibilities involved tending to the wizard’s garden and labeling the contents of the hundreds of jars of dried herbs and flowers and powders lining the kitchen cabinets, some more easily identifiable than others.
All evidence led him to believe that he would continue with the study of herbalism until he progressed from theory to practice, but this assignment was something else entirely.
Two weeks into his training, with five left to go, Rosemary wondered whether he would ever learn anything of value.
Either the wizard was wasting his time, or waiting for him to prove something. He had yet to figure out which.
* * *
The day of his arrival was the first and last time Rosemary was invited to perform actual magic.
The wizard instructed Rosemary to draw a triangle in chalk on the water-stained wood of the kitchen table and place candles on each of the corners: two red candles on the points closest to him, a green one on the corner facing away, which pointed toward the wizard. He wondered if the colors and their placements mattered; the instructions were specific, but the wizard provided no explanation for any of them.
At the exact center of the triangle sat a small glass bowl of roughly chopped mixed herbs with a long sprig of his namesake plant resting on the top. At the wizard’s instruction, he lit each candle and started a flame on the rosemary with a series of quick motions using his fingers.
“Why do you do that?” the wizard asked, imitating the hand motion. It was a fast movement, the tip of the middle finger running swiftly down the back of the index finger— reminiscent of striking a match, Rosemary had always thought.
“This is how I was taught to do it,” he said.
“Your father taught you this?”
“No,” Rosemary said, “my mother. I learned when I was young.”
“Ah,” the wizard said, frowning in apparent disapproval. “I understand.” He motioned towards the side of the triangle closer to Rosemary and told him, “Put your hands— palms down— in front of these two corners. Your middle finger should be almost touching the candles.”
Rosemary pressed his hands to the table’s surface, aligning his middle fingers with the wicks of the candles closest to him, wondering where this was going.
“Spread your fingers a little more.”
Rosemary obliged, fanning out his fingers. “Is this right?”
“Yes, that's right. Now focus your intention into the space.”
“I don’t know how to do that, exactly.” The wizard fixed him with a blank stare— deep set blue eyes focused on his and unblinking— and said nothing, so he added, his voice halting, “I don’t actually... have any experience with, like, ritual magic.”
“This is like any other magic. Concentrate your energy inside of the lines.”
“But...” There was so much he didn’t grasp that he didn’t know where to start. He breathed in deeply, inhaling the sharp scent of the smoldering rosemary, and asked, “What am I focusing on? What does this do?”
“Focus on the process, not the result. The setup does the work of determining the outcome, and you’re providing the magic to make it happen. Understand?”
He understood nothing, in fact. The words were all meaningless to him, but it was immediately apparent that pushing back against the wizard’s vagueness was a waste of time, so Rosemary screwed his eyes shut, pressed his palms flat to the wooden table, and tried to clear the frustration from his mind to the best of his ability.
A moment of concentrating on nothing passed— and then, to his amazement, he felt something shift. His eyes shot open to see each candle’s fire flare up, stretching a foot above their wicks in narrow snakes of flame. The wizard startled and backed hastily away from the table, but the little fires were already shrinking gradually back down before going out entirely, leaving wisps of smoke behind.
“That wasn’t it, was it?” Rosemary asked, his face flushing with embarrassment. The wizard shook his head, scowling.
If it was a test, he had failed miserably, and so began the menial book work, the gardening, the labeling, fifteen days without another chance to try again or prove himself.
* * *
That morning, instead of starting the failed-magic book Rosemary paced the edge of the clearing and guiltily chain smoked his frustration.
The forest surrounding the wizard’s house stretched out endlessly in every direction. It consisted of tall, long-needled conifers which eluded identification despite Rosemary’s best efforts. In almost every way they resembled the subalpine larch, larix lyallii, except that in late October they were still dark green and not the golden yellow they should have been for weeks by then.
Only once, sometime earlier in his apprenticeship, Rosemary had asked where they were and the wizard avoided naming the location, telling him that the house was located near the exact center of a sprawling forest, several kilometers away from any other human presence.
Under the best of circumstances, forests intimidated Rosemary; this one, in particular, was vast and unfamiliar, and his daily nightmares about darting around the dense, dark mass of trees with the wizard following close behind didn’t help matters either. He stayed near the clearing’s edge, as he always did: pacing circles as he smoked, peering between the anonymous evergreens with mingled curiosity and trepidation.
His parents had raised him to respect forests, instilling in him a sort of reverent fear of their power, as well as a specific and possibly superstitious set of rules for interacting with them.
So when his boredom finally overpowered his hesitance, he stomped out the last of his cigarette under his heel and approached the boundary of the forest like his mother had taught him. He gently tapped his knuckles against the bark of the closest tree, looked up into the branches, and said, “I mean you no harm.”
The trees, still, silent, and unchanged, neither welcomed nor rejected him, so he inhaled a slow, deep breath to steady his nerves and started walking.
He marked each trunk he passed with an unobtrusive line of white chalk he had pocketed from the wizard’s kitchen, mumbling an apology every time he did. The formality was probably unnecessary, but felt safer than saying nothing.
A short distance into his walk he saw on a tree ahead of him the telltale white line visible against brown bark; the one directly in front of it, too, had a matching streak of chalk. Somehow he had gotten lost, circled back to where he had been before.
In order to reorient himself, he turned to retrace his steps in the direction of the wizard’s house, which was still barely visible through the trees, and then turned back around again to progress deeper into the forest. But although he was certain he was moving away from the house, and shot a couple of glances over his shoulder to confirm, he never stopped passing by the same chalk-marked trees, like he was being pushed backward as he tried to move forward.
To test this theory he drew an additional parallel line to each of his marks as he passed by, and discovered that he really was walking past the same four trees repeatedly, ending up next to the first again as soon as the fourth left his peripheral vision.
The experience of circling through space was disorienting enough that he paused for a second, leaning against the first of the repeating conifers, trying to breathe slowly and deeply to calm his pounding heart. Through the buzzing in his head he realized with horror that perhaps the forest was rejecting him, and he turned to exit before it responded more aggressively.
Luckily the loop he found himself in didn’t trap him when he traveled in the direction of the clearing, and he reached the forest’s edge again after a few minutes.
Rosemary pulled another crushed cigarette from his pocket, which he lit with a match and smoked while staring wonderingly into the expanse of evergreens. Belatedly, he shouted his thanks into the trees, who really weren’t obligated to let him walk free.
As he sat in the grass and contemplated his experience, he began to wonder whether the forest itself could even be responsible for the magic he encountered inside of it. A strong protective spell, or set of spells, surrounded the wizard’s house, he remembered; they could extend out beyond the boundary of the clearing, too.
He couldn’t place what the magic did, but whatever it was had blacked him out upon his arrival two weeks earlier, causing him to forget how he had gotten to the house in the first place.
This was part of the appeal of identifying the trees: he had no idea where he was.
With a renewed determination to better understand the forest, he circled the clearing to collect a few fallen clusters of needles and small cones. He mumbled another quick apology as he scraped off a section of scaly light-brown bark from an especially tall tree with his folding knife, and carried his samples inside.
Despite his disinterest in the books, the library had become his favorite place to work in the wizard’s house; it was brighter and cozier than his attic bedroom, and the wall between the opposing shelves featured several tall, narrow, west-facing windows that filled the room with natural light most hours of the day.
He placed his collected materials on the side table next to the green chair that he always did his reading in and began his research.
The black-and-white illustrations in his favored plant encyclopedia were too small and indistinct for the task at hand, so he revisited the bookshelf, pulling down every book whose spine hinted at plants until he found one focused on conifers with full-color illustrations and pages of detailed identification charts.
Rosemary grabbed the mortar and the scale from the kitchen and got to work. He counted the needles in each tiny cluster, cut cross-sections of the cones with his knife to survey their patterns, carefully measured every sample….
Again, all evidence pointed towards the subalpine larch, but still they were green, a full month after they should have started yellowing. And the climate was far too temperate anyway, not nearly cold enough.
He was studying the spread of intricately illustrated branches in the book and comparing them to the cluster of needles resting on his palm, on the verge of giving up hope again, when the wizard entered the library, so quietly that Rosemary didn’t notice.
“What are you doing?” he asked in his low, flat voice.
Rosemary jumped and let out an embarrassing squawk of surprise, which elicited no reaction from the wizard. He cleared his throat and answered, “I’m trying to identify the trees.”
“I can see that.” The wizard walked around to lean over the side table. He picked up the mortar and tilted it to inspect the ground bark inside, expressionless as always. “And what did you conclude?”
“Nothing. I mean, subalpine larch is the closest, but it’s October, and they’re not yellow, so I guess I don’t know. What are they?”
The wizard knelt next to the table, examining his efforts, gingerly turning over cross-sections of cones. “Did you finish your work today?” he asked, without answering the question.
“Only the reading and writing,” he lied. “I haven’t been out to the garden yet.”
“Make that your priority, then. You only have a couple hours of sunlight left.” He stood to leave. “It’s been dry, too. The nettles in particular need watering.” Without looking at Rosemary he started to walk away, pausing at the entrance of the library to add over his shoulder, “And make sure you clean this up.”
“I will.”
But the wizard was already gone.
* * *
Rosemary wrote letters every day. All of them were for Rowan.
He got into the habit of writing in his attic room, at the desk which he had pushed across the floor to sit under the one circular window. This was the only piece of furniture in the attic other than a twin bed and an empty dresser; when he first arrived there wasn’t even a chair for the desk, and he had to carry one up the stairs from the kitchen.
Every time he composed a letter he did it in fragments, a couple paragraphs or a page at a time. Something about adding to each one gradually, sharing more every time he thought of something new to share with Rowan, almost made up for the inability to talk to them, but the resulting letters were rambling, disjointed, and certainly very dull. Rosemary produced one every few days, which he handed off to the wizard to send— how, and from where, remained a mystery, but he was by now familiar with the futility of asking questions.
Rowan had not yet responded to one of them. Still, Rosemary kept writing.
He had finished his work watering and trimming the garden, but was continuing to stall on starting the book on failed magic when he sat down to add to a letter he had started the previous day. As always, he recorded the date and time before beginning to write— he had been tracking the days almost obsessively, and this was the only occasion where they had any meaning— and then, for the first time, he described to them in thorough detail the layout of the wizard’s house.
Only this, he thought, could convey how trapped he felt.
There was the library, of course, with its walls of books, tall windows, the soft chairs he spent endless hours reading and writing in.
A short hallway separated the library from the kitchen, which was scarcely big enough to fit a stove and a stained wooden table, but which also contained impossibly deep cabinets packed with those glass jars and cork-stoppered bottles he had been tasked with labeling. From there a door provided access to the garden, a small patch of plants surrounded by walls of moss-covered brick.
Maintaining the garden was Rosemary’s job, too: weeding, watering, cutting back the rapidly-growing rosemary and camellia bushes so that they wouldn’t block out the sunlight from the more delicate herbs below. He had, at first, resented the menial labor but he found that he enjoyed being outside for a reason other than anxiously smoking, and that he liked working with his hands, seeing the plants flourish in his care.
Next to the kitchen, behind a narrow door, a steep flight of creaky stairs led up to his sparse attic room, which was so depressing he mostly just stopped in to use the attached bathroom, and otherwise only stayed long enough to write portions of letters and roll cigarettes and sleep.
This was the extent of the part of the house available to him: library, kitchen, attic, garden.
The wizard’s study, which Rosemary had never seen, was inaccessible behind a door opposite the attic stairs. The room was explicitly off-limits to him, a rule established on his first day, but boredom had driven him to try and sneak in a week earlier. The door was locked, not physically, but magically: an invisible barrier, only a centimeter wide, surrounded the doorknob, preventing him from reaching it.
Three rooms, a walled garden, the very edge of an unnavigable forest, and nothing else.
He concluded the letter with the sheepish confession that he had started smoking again a year after having quit. Rowan, who had never even tried to quit as long as they’d known each other, was in no position to judge, but he nagged them so much about their habit that they could consider him a hypocrite if they wanted.
He reread the letter in its entirety— the strange and semi-coherent patchwork of disconnected thoughts— and decided dejectedly to hold onto it for now, at least until he heard back. If Rowan was ignoring him, or overwhelmed by the volume of letters he was sending— certainly five or six by now— it would be either annoying or deeply pathetic to keep trying.
Rosemary sighed and put the letter in the empty top-right desk drawer, then opened the one beneath to retrieve the cigarette roller again.