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to inflict these medical procedures on him.
    Magnus tried to escape several times, and had to be forcibly restrained. Later Catarina and Ragnor liked to act out the time he tried to take the guinea pigs with him, reportedly shouting “Freedom!” and “I am your leader now.”
    There was a distinct possibility that Magnus was still a tiny bit drunk.
    At the end of the whole horrific ordeal, one of the guinea pigs was cut open and its entrails examined to see if the cure had been effected. At the sight of it Magnus was promptly sick again.

    Some days later in Lima, after all the trauma and guinea pigs, Catarina and Ragnor finally trusted Magnus enough to let him have one—just one, and they were watching him insultingly closely—drink.
    “What you were saying before, on That Night,” said Catarina.
    Catarina and Ragnor both called it that, and in both cases Magnus could hear them using the capitals for emphasis.
    “Don’t fret,” Magnus said airily. “I no longer want to go be a cactus and live in the desert.”
    Catarina blinked and winced, visibly having a flashback. “Not what I was referring to, but good to know. I meant about humans, and love.”
    Magnus did not particularly want to think about whatever he had been babbling piteously about on the night when he’d gotten his heart broken. There was no point in wallowing. Magnus refused to wallow. Wallowing was for elephants, depressing people, and depressing elephants.
    Catarina continued despite the lack of encouragement. “I was born this color. I did not know how to wear a glamour as a newborn. There was no way to look like anything but what I was then, all the time, even though it was not safe. My mother saw me and knew what I was, but she hid me from the world. She raised me in secret. She did everything she could to keep me safe. A great wrong was done to her, and she gave back love. Every human I heal, I heal in her name. I do what I do to honor her, and to know that when she saved my life she saved countless lives through the centuries.”
    She turned a wide, serious gaze to Ragnor, who was sitting at the table and looking at his hands uncomfortably, but who responded to the cue.
    “My parents thought I was a faerie child or something, I think,” Ragnor said. “Because I was the color of springtime, my mother used to say,” he added, and blushed emerald. “Obviously it all came out as a bit more complicated than that, but by then they’d gotten fond of me. They were always fond of me, even though I was unsettling to have around the place, and Mother told me that I was grouchy as a baby. I outgrew that, of course.”
    A polite silence followed this statement.
    A faerie child would be easier to accept, Magnus thought, than that demons had tricked or hurt a woman—or, more rarely, a man—and now there was a marked child to remind the parent of their pain. Warlocks were always born from that, from pain and demons.
    “It is something to remember, if we feel distant from humans,” Catarina said. “We owe a great deal to human love. We live forever by the grace of human love, which rocked strange children in their cradles and did not despair and did not turn away. I know which side of my heritage my soul comes from.”
    They were sitting outside their house, in a garden surrounded by high walls, but Catarina was always the most cautious of them all. She looked around in the dark before she lit the candle on the table, light springing from nothing between her cupped hands and turning her white hair to silk and pearls. In the sudden light Magnus could see her smile.
    “Our fathers were demons,” said Catarina. “Our mothers were heroes.”
    That was true, of course, for them.
    Most warlocks were born wearing unmistakable signs of what they were, and some warlock children died young because their parents abandoned or killed what they saw as unnatural creatures. Some were raised as Catarina and Ragnor had been, in love that was greater than