Chapter Eleven
Eleven
When I went into the living room the next morning, Daziel was already awake. A pot of coffee steamed on the narrow counter, and a plate piled high with fluffy pancakes stood beside fig jam and ricotta cheese.
“Wow.” I sank onto one of the counter stools, admiring a new plant, a strange spiky red thing with a white flower blooming out of it. Did this flower look like it could kill me? Maybe! I decided to ignore it and inhaled the buttery scent of the freshly made pancakes. “This smells delicious.”
Daziel looked nervous. “I have never made pancakes before. But your aunt’s housekeeper gave me the recipe, and I think they came out all right.”
“You asked my aunt’s housekeeper for a pancake recipe?” I echoed, baffled. “When?”
He looked down. “When you were in the restroom. I wanted to make up for showing up at your aunt’s unannounced.”
I was startled and touched. I hadn’t expected another apology after last night—I hadn’t needed one—but I appreciated it.
“Thanks. I guess I don’t mind if I get pancakes out of it.
” I pulled several of the steaming flapjacks onto a plate and covered them in the ricotta and fig jam.
The combination of sweet and savory on the buttery pancakes were decadent.
“It tastes amazing. Do you cook at home?”
Daziel laughed, louder than usual, seeming relieved I’d liked them. “No. Maybe I’ll try more when I return.” Relaxed now, he tried his own bite. His eyes widened. “These are good.”
We ate and drank our coffee companionably.
I gazed out the window, at the blue wind flag indicating an eastern breeze, before my attention dipped to my living room, which now hosted a veritable forest along with new mirrors, paintings, and what I suspected was the beginning of a rock garden in the corner.
“Are those new cushions?” I asked, noticing the velvet pillows tucked into Daziel’s blanket nest: deep-jewel-toned with buttons, nothing like the faded old things I’d owned.
“Hm?” He glanced over at his nest. “Oh. No. I just encouraged them to be their best self.”
I raised my brows. “What?”
He shrugged, feeding Paz a tiny square of pancake. “You know. I asked what they wanted to be.”
“I do not know. Are you saying those are my old cushions? What did you do to them?”
“I told them to be what they desired.” He picked up my empty coffee mug. “This mug, for example, wants to hold lots of coffee and be a soothing shape.”
Before my eyes, the coffee mug doubled in size. It bulged in the middle, forming a pleasing round body, and its handle developed a pretty little flourish. The chip in the lip disappeared.
“There,” Daziel said, sounding satisfied.
I stared at the mug, astonished, then at the beautiful couch pillows. I didn’t know inanimate objects had opinions. “Do all inanimate objects have shapes they want to be?”
“To a degree.”
My mind ran wild. Did my bed yearn to be elegant, or my rug brighter and thicker?
Or…
I caught my breath. Could Daziel ask the scroll fragments to be what they wanted? “Do you know in advance what form they’ll take?”
“Nope,” Daziel said cheerfully. “It’s whatever they want. Sometimes it goes poorly.”
Oof. What if the scroll fragments didn’t want to be scrolls but dust instead? That’d be a disaster.
But it was an interesting way to think, considering what an inanimate object wanted. We’d kept trying to force the fragments back to scrolls, but they didn’t budge. Could they want to be anything else? What did scroll fragments want to be except scrolls?
Maybe being a scroll wasn’t enough to draw on. What if there was something stronger? Something with more energy than being a scroll, something the fragments would like more? Something more alive?
Like being alive.
The fragments were made of parchment.
Parchment was skin.
I froze, unwilling to move, barely willing to breathe until I’d finished thinking this through. Until I’d determined if this was as big as I thought it might be. How was parchment made? Was the parchment of a scroll made from multiple animals or one?
“Naomi? Are you all right? You look—”
“Shh,” I said. “I’m figuring something out.”
Say it was the same animal. How much parchment came from one animal? I had no idea. Even so, imagine…“I could ask the parchment to be calves again. We keep trying to make it return to its shape as a scroll—but what if we asked it to return its skin to its shape as a calf?”
Daziel raised his brows. “It’s worth a shot.”
“How do you ask things to take the form they want most?” Though human magic was wildly different than shedim magic, perhaps I could draw on his style, use its influence to write a letterform spell.
“I know you said you can’t tell in advance, but if you wanted to influence their form, how would you try? ”
Daziel considered. “I’d suggest…trying to awaken the fragments’ memory of their former life.
Something like ‘Go back to when you were a young calf. Feel the stretch of your skin across your muscles, the shiver in the wind, the dryness in the sun, itching, smoothness. Be aware.’ Then ask it to come back together.
Though I shouldn’t try it, because they might literally turn back into a calf. A zombie calf.”
His phrasing sounded so different from the technical way I was used to spells—different enough, maybe, to work. I gripped my coffee so hard I thought I might break the brand-new mug. Certainly all the spells we’d been trying so far hadn’t worked. What if this did?
He watched me sharply. “Do you think you have something?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling heady with hope. “I do.”
~ ~ ~
Monday morning, I headed toward Professor Altschuler’s office before classes started.
Everything was soaking wet; the rainy season had arrived in earnest, with another storm sweeping in during the night, the strong wind wrenching branches from trees and scattering leaves on the ground.
More worms than usual covered the pavement and lawns with no birds to eat them up.
And a fog covered everything as I crossed campus, thick and heavy, swirls of mist hanging low to the ground, the world around me gray and blurred.
I entered the Keep, spiraling up to the professor’s office and knocking.
My stomach ground against itself. Daziel had looked worried when I barely ate breakfast, but I’d been too nervous.
He’d offered to come, but I’d told him to go back to sleep; Paz, instead, had curled up in my shirt pocket, his warmth welcome against my chest.
“Enter.”
“Hi,” I said, trying to sound confident, instantly undercutting it with an apology. “Sorry to show up so early. I wanted to talk to you about something?”
The professor gestured me to a seat before his desk.
I took it, my back very straight. Professor Altschuler looked like he’d been up for hours, his hands stained with ink, his coffee mug empty.
“I have a theory about the scrolls. We’ve been trying to call them back to their original forms as texts, but…
what if we called them to their forms as calves? As parchment?”
The professor stopped looking at the paper in front of him, lifted his head, and stared at me.
“Sorry,” I said nervously. “Is that stupid?”
“No,” he growled, his thin face getting thinner. “It’s obvious.”
“Oh.” The word snuck out of me, timid and embarrassed. Did “obvious” mean he’d already tried it? “Sorry—”
“Obvious, yet we all missed it.” He shook his head, then focused his dark gaze on me. “Good work, Miss Bat Yardena.”
Oh. Phew. I almost sagged with relief at his compliment. Then elation filled me. He liked it. He thought it had potential. Hopefully this would go toward convincing him to renew my scholarship for a second year. I wasn’t ready to go home yet.
I handed over a folded piece of paper from my satchel. “I wrote a spell to try it. It’s unorthodox,” I admitted. “More poetic than usual.”
He scanned the paper. His brows didn’t shoot up—he rarely showed so much emotion—but I could see an arch to them, a slight purse of his lips. “Very pretty,” he murmured. “Very…different.” He pinned me once more with his eyes. “I hear you’re still spending time with that demon.”
“Shayd, sir,” I said. “That’s what they call themselves.”
“I hope you understand that the work we’re doing is confidential. Not to be shared with anyone.”
“Of course,” I said, though discussing the work with Daziel was what had gotten me this far. “I understand.”
“Yet he had a hand in this? It has the—theatrical flair—one associates with their kind.”
I stiffened, offended both on Daziel’s behalf and at the idea I would claim someone else’s work. “I wrote it. I asked what his jumping-off point would be. He thinks about magic differently than I do. It makes me more creative. He’s helpful, you know.”
“Hm.” Professor Altschuler held on to my paper, and I began to regret not having made a copy. “I’d hate to have to take you off the project because your loyalties were unclear.”
So much for impressing him enough that he’d renew my scholarship on the spot. “They’re not unclear, sir.”
“Good. See that they remain so.” Professor Altschuler circled several sections in red.
“Rewrite this in a technopaigniac form and add refrains here and here. That will strengthen the magic. Your beginning is too long, and your middle bridge too short. I’ll expect a revised version in two weeks. ” He extended the paper back.
I tucked it inside my folder. “Thank you. I’ll have it done.”
He gave me a brisk nod of dismissal, and I left, walking through the mist toward the campus boulangerie. I still felt the high of Professor Altschuler’s all-too-rare praise, but it was dampened by his brusqueness and his disdain for shedim.
As I left the boulangerie, Daziel fell into step from nowhere, taking one of the croissants from my hand. “Did it go well?”
I didn’t startle as I led him up the steps to the library. Apparently I’d gotten used to his appearances. “Well enough. He likes the idea.”