Lumière's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

By midday Lumière reached a wide dirt road. Carts rolled past. A woman selling apples looked up and froze. Her eyes fixed on his pink hair, then his pale hands, then his white suit with its pink trim. She whispered to the man beside her. He stared too. Lumière kept walking, but the stares followed him like flies. He passed a well and saw his face in the water. He did not blend in at all. He looked like something from a story. If one traveler spoke of a boy with star-pale skin, word would run ahead of him. Hunters listened for talk like that. He left the road and cut behind a hedge. His heart pounded. The pendant lay cold under his collar. He could not hide his own face, and he could not walk among people looking like this. He needed a mask that stayed on. He needed to look like no one. He knelt in the grass and pulled the old grimoire from his bag. The leather cover was cracked and marked with a pentacle, its edges worn soft from years of use. He turned the brittle pages fast. He passed the binding spell he had used on his staff. Then he found it: a glamour, a spell to lay a false face over a true one. The book warned that a glamour needed power to hold. He had bound all his power into the pendant. Lumière understood the cost at once. To wear a plain face, he had to wake the staff. He gripped the pendant and spoke the word from the attic. "Release." The key grew warm, then hot. Light poured from it, and the staff sprang back into his hand, tall and blazing. The orb burned white. Stars spun inside it. Any hunter for a mile could see that glare. He worked fast. He read the glamour aloud and drew the staff's light into himself. The light sank under his skin. His hands warmed. He felt his face shift, though he did not change how he moved. When the glare faded, he looked into the well water again. A plain boy looked back. Brown hair. Ordinary skin. A common gray coat where the white suit had been. Only one thing remained his own: a single pink streak in his hair. He had chosen to keep it. He would not erase himself completely. He wrapped the burning staff in both hands and spoke the binding word once more. "Conceal." The light snapped shut. The pendant lay dark on his palm again, and the glamour held without it. He slid the key under his collar. Lumière stood and walked back to the road. The apple woman glanced up, then looked away. No one stared now. He could pass through every town on his search, unseen. But the staff's flare had lit the whole hedge for a breath, and somewhere a hunter might have marked the spot.