CHAPTER FOUR
One week had passed since he’d posted his ad, and Sy had spent all of it in his bedroom, which was his entire apartment.
He’d left strict instructions, and a gold sovereign, with the building’s superintendent, a solid woman in her late fifties: excepting the grocer’s delivery boy, or anyone responding to his ad, let no one come up to his room.
No one had. No intrepid hunters. No nosy well-wishers. No one.
Perhaps he should have been more specific in his advertisement.
No – less. He relied on David’s skepticism about the phoenix’s very existence being endemic to the city.
If he was forthright, most who read it would think him mad, but some would intuit he was after it for the king’s contest. Such intuitions may lead them to go after it themselves.
Sy did not welcome the competition. But he had hoped he would catch some adventurous huntsman’s attention before they all left the city for the summer.
Finding the bird on his own would be… difficult.
Especially in the state he was in now. Though he kept careful estimate of how much blood he used – for billing purposes, of course – it was nearly impossible to predict the toll on his body until he actually felt it.
On any given month, one pint of blood could drain him as much as three.
Part of a scribe’s training was to test their limits, to get to know them intimately.
But that was ten years ago; he was no longer nineteen.
And, ten years of wear aside, there were too many mitigating factors – how much and what he had eaten, if he’d been getting enough water, enough sleep.
How many cigarettes he’d smoked. In the intervening ten years, he’d also learned the mental strain could have much the same effect on his body as plucking out a vein and pinching it dry.
But it was possible to estimate. By his guess, after Abigail and Edgard’s combined efforts, if he rested enough, it would be another two weeks before he could draw more blood and not risk permanent damage; a month before he could return to regular work – charity work –without feeling the effects at all.
It was a massive inconvenience, but one most spellscribes, who took work far more sparingly, need not worry about. In training at Sangfeder, he’d proposed a paraglyph for detecting how much blood the body contained and had nearly been laughed out of the room.
“What would you do?” his instructor had chortled. “Turn someone’s skin translucent?”
Perhaps. Sy had long suspected magic’s full capabilities were not being fully explored.
Suspected there were limitations that, unlike the limitations of his own body, were not being fully tested.
Once he had space of his own to practice in, he had tested them himself, on himself.
He’d noticed some clients got a bit twitchy when he applied magic to their skin, and a spell written for a fading hairline accidentally applied to the ear could have…
undesired effects. The spell he composed, Still, used only when asked, kept them frozen in place but perfectly functioning so he could work on them without worry.
Though it did not technically violate their oath as spellscribes to tamper with established magic, it skirted dangerously close to it, so he told no one – not even David, since he was particularly evangelical about it.
Even so, he begged clients not to share this secret with other spellscribes, and since his clients tended to hire him and him alone, it hadn’t yet earned him one of Sangfeder Academy’s renowned punishments.
The Still spell’s creation was punishment enough. The first iteration had nearly killed him, stilling his lungs as well as his limbs. Luckily, he had also miscalculated the length, and it lasted less than one tortuous minute.
Later versions were less traumatic.
It was just possible, however, that some limitations should remain…limited. Like changing a man into a bird. A magical bird, at that. Was it possible to transfer such innate magic to another being? To solve such a puzzle, he must take for granted the phoenix was even real.
Though he checked the Chronicle daily, delivered with his food from the grocer every morning, and had seen no other ads like his, he knew he could not be the only scribe considering such a thing. The prize was too enticing.
But he didn’t need to be the only one thinking about the phoenix – he needed to be the first to find it.
Once it was in his possession, he would experiment, push the bird to its own limits if need be – limits which, since it supposedly could not die, were farther than Sy suspected he might want to follow. But he must.
In the past week, he’d been over all his books countless times, paying the grocer’s boy a sovereign to visit Sangfeder’s library and fetch him a handful of others – and, with a pang at the expense, another sovereign to assuage the boy’s fears of being tongue-tied or blinded for daring to request entry, even with Sy’s official letterhead and seal on hand.
Somehow, those books proved even less helpful.
Aesthetic changes, the most popular work for a spellscribe, were not merely superficial; the magic was an altering of the substance of the body.
Duchess Abigail’s eyes did not merely look pink; they became pink.
And then, as Sy well knew, the more complex spells – those requiring more blood and oftentimes seemingly endless repetition – were those that healed the body’s hurts.
In theory, changing the entire body should not be so different from changing the color of one’s eyes, from healing a grievous wound. Making one.
Undeniably, one obstacle stood above the rest: there was no glyph for phoenix, or bird, or anything like it.
The natural world had no place in inscription; even rudimentary spells practiced on animals produced no effect.
Scribes practiced on each other for this reason, which had the added benefit of encouraging precision.
Sangfeder taught that glyphs were developed hundreds of years ago to contain and channel magic’s power; that the human mind was the best conduit for magic, and glyphs the only way to capture it, to direct it.
All related to the human body; the most complex glyphs, the most difficult and most costly magic, referred to the human body’s inner workings.
But then there was the spell on his palm. Quite unlike any other spell in its intricacy, in its use. It was difficult to decipher individual glyphs once they were merged, but he had certainly tried over the years, arranging and rearranging with pencil or with ink.
Not to undo it; even if he could, he wouldn’t attempt it.
He was told if he tried to remove the spell, or his hand, to sever the bond himself, a risk a previous indenture had evidently taken, the spell would cause a pain worse than the pain of summoning, worse even than the pain of disobedience.
A pain with no end. A pain that had driven the previous indenture into taking his own life.
When it was carved by the Master Scribe with his golden pen into the soft skin of Sy’s palm, it was not with the scribe’s blood that it was written, or even Sy’s own, but with Edgard’s.
Sy was not permitted to watch its carving; he had been temporarily blinded, a red spell scattered into his corneas, to ensure he saw nothing of its making.
Now, he turned his left hand over, studying the paraglyph once more. He might convince himself he could see the glyph for heart, but attempting to unravel the knot of the spell was as impractical as making shapes in summer clouds.
All indentures received the same brand. So it was said – there weren’t any others to compare.
The king only offered the indenture when the kingdom endured a shortage of spellscribes, which was, considering how long they lived and how enviable the position was for a certain set with money to spare, not often.
Younger children whose inheritance was lacking, the spawn of new money who wanted unaccustomed access to the old.
Those who simply felt called, like David.
And then there was Sy.
The King’s Grace, he called it. A contest to pay for one underprivileged prospective student’s magical education, a golden opportunity for the less fortunate – as well as a siphon for application fees and an enticement for students with more heavily lined pockets to apply at full cost. Sy had reached the age of majority just as Edgard had announced a new grace.
If he had been born a year later, or taken up poetry as a boy instead of drawing, or not had the funds for the application stashed in his pillow, he would have missed his only chance to move up in the world.
Good luck, Sy thought, wiggling his fingers and watching his muscles shift beneath the glyphs. A thing of perverse beauty, really, the cuts and slashes and swirls a tattoo of renown and of disrepute, proof of both his skill and his fundamental unworthiness to wield it.
He’d taught himself to draw and paint, lured to it as a fish to a hook when he was old enough to clutch a pencil, a plentiful tool in his parents’ shop.
His mother complimented him, and his father thoughtfully indulged him, letting him leave the shop early to practice, spending his spare pennies at the end of every month on charcoals, cheap canvas.
Watercolors. Eventually, for his sixteenth birthday, a set of oil paints.
He still had them, buried somewhere in his vanity.
His father bought them just in time, too, for he and Sy’s mother both died shortly after, swept away by plague, and Sy had to give up his parents’ debt-ridden bookbinding shop.
For the next two years, he waited tables by night to pay for a shabby room in a boarding house, and to cover the expenses of lessons at the Royal Art Society of Gescany by day.
After that, he’d spent a desperate year trying to live off his painting alone. And then the King’s Grace was announced. Good luck again.