Gavin listened as Envy listed his options. He had expected some sort of judgment. After all, he too was an elf and a Kartaian, and Kire must have told him about what the Gemini had been doing. But there was no chastisement, and, even more surprisingly, no forbidding of magic. He was surprised to know the elf was proficient in other arts. He had only known what a Kartaian was normally capable of, and while they were very skilled with what they have, it seemed crude to Gavin nevertheless, bent only to one purpose. It had been why Ikegai had managed to make dolls out of them in the first place, though it had cost the man dearly. 

“I don’t mind being the errand boy too much,” he answered after thinking it over, an exercise he hadn’t had much of a luxury to do before. “It’s not so exciting, and it gets tedious—but sometimes, you see the look on older people’s faces when some boy like me speaks to them like they’re equals, and it is a bit funny.” He hadn’t admitted that to anybody out loud, and now saying it gave him an almost giddy feeling, like he was gossiping about something. Gavin cleared his throat when a laugh threatened to bubble out of him. 

“The magic they put in my head and brought out forcefully—I wanted it at first. Because they said it was my birthright. But when they forced me to do the—other things, I hated it. But.” He remembered that desperate moment after Kire killed Ikegai, that mad scramble to recall all he knew to use it to get her heart pumping again. “Healing. That—that sounds good. That sounds like something I can learn. All they ever taught me about blood magic was how to twist a body, if there’s a light side to it, I think that’s where it is.”