7. Seven
Chapter 7
I was awake before either of them the next day, up as the sun carved its diffuse red path over the horizon. I filled one of the kitchen pots with a hefty scoop of anise seeds, grabbed a cup, and carried it outside to make tea.
Normally I only bothered with the outdoor ovens during the sun season, but Eudoria was a light sleeper, and her rooms were on the ground floor with the kitchen. I set one of my journals on the bench by the oven and gathered materials for the fire.
It took very little power to make a spark. Thankfully, things were dry enough on Nis-Illous that a flicker of fire was enough. I arranged the kindling carefully, knowing I’d have to resort to a striker if I didn’t get a flame from my first casting. At last I drew fire’s short phrasing through the bulky air, carving meaning in shimmering lines. Red bloomed in my tangle of dried Illousian Pine needles. More than I’d gotten last time from the same amount of power; proof I drew it better than before. Shivering, with a bead of sweat licking down my back, I blew on the glow and began to pile twigs into the oven. My chest felt tight, like I couldn’t breathe. It didn’t keep the smile from my face.
If Kalcedon had come out just then and fed me a thread of power I probably would have kissed him without thinking twice about it. No matter how dangerous a proposition that was. Since when was I letting myself think about kissing Kalcedon, instead of pushing the thought immediately from my mind?
I added the other half of the branch, ladled water from the well into the pot, and set it over the fire to boil.
“What did you cast?” Eudoria asked. I jerked around to find her standing just a few feet back. She had been reading a letter as she walked outside. Now she folded it and tucked it away.
“I just started the fire,” I grumbled, suddenly embarrassed, because the thing that had drained me of half my strength was nothing to a witch like her. But she only shrugged and settled on the bench beside my supplies.
“Is there enough tea for two?”
“I’ll get another cup.”
I returned moments later with it in hand. I wanted to ask Eudoria if I could have some of her heat, because I still felt cold and tight from the casting. But it was rude to ask, and unlike with Kalcedon, who was not my employer or truly my elder, I didn’t dare pinch a little off. I’d just have to be cold until Kalcedon woke up, or until my body could replenish what I’d taken from it.
Eudoria was still on the bench, her face upturned to the weak morning sun. She turned to me slowly as I set the cup on the bench beside my own.
“Show me this scrying spell of yours,” Eudoria said.
I drew a sharp breath, nearly falling to the other end of the bench.
“I thought you didn’t want to hear anything to do with it.”
Eudoria frowned at me.
“Have some sense, child. The middle of working, with no warning, is no time for an assistant to experiment. Do you have no idea what happens when a spell is wrong?”
“Of course I do. But it wasn’t.”
“Ah, Meda,” Eudoria sighed.
“Here.” I grabbed my journal flipped through scribbles of sigils, hunting for a page on scrying. This was a safer journal to have out. No Tarelay or other forbidden enchantments. Finding a scrying base, I showed the page to Eudoria.
She studied it with a frown. I wriggled in place, biting my tongue against explaining it before she’d have a chance to take the meaning in.
“What book did you find this in?” she asked at last.
“I made it. From your spell.”
“But why did you take out…?” her fingers traced along the spell, marking the areas I’d shortened.
“This, here?” I sketched a broken sign in the air, careful to feed it no power. “It does the same thing.” I drew the eighth of Eldrezar . “I had the thought that by asking for the vision twice, you don’t make it any clearer. And there’s no way taking it out could make the spell dangerous. It wasn’t adding to the meaning, it just repeated it. Not that they’re entirely interchangeable, of course, but of the two…”
Eudoria looked up from the page and studied me with a disbelieving frown. She turned back a page in the journal, then another. I resisted the urge to ask her to stop leafing through my work. Instead, I watched as her frown deepened. Her eyes widened at one point. She rifled further back and drew a deep breath. She’d never looked at my notes before. Eudoria set the journal carefully aside and stood slowly.
“How did you know they do the same thing?” she asked as she walked over to the oven. She lifted the lid on the pot to peer at the tea.
“Well…” I frowned down at my journal and licked my lips, trying to get my thoughts in order. “It’s like music, isn’t it? You can hear when someone plays a note wrong, or when it sounds good. You can hear when it repeats itself. Nobody has to tell you. You just have to listen.”
“I have never heard someone talk about magic that way.”
“It feels obvious.”
“It isn’t.” She settled the teapot’s lid back in place.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I shrugged. With a sigh, Eudoria continued.
“You should have shown me your journal sooner, Meda. You may not be much of a witch, but perhaps you have something to offer in academics. Maybe you belong at the Temple after all.”
My breath caught. I’d certainly tried to show her my spellwork before, but I didn’t even mind if she blamed me for the delay—not when she’d finally offered a path to my life-long dream. Eudoria had trained at the temple; she knew the head of the Order. A letter from her, even if only about scholar’s pursuits, could change everything.
I saw her fingers start forming the runes for burning and heat, to speed along the process I had started. A simple casting; one of the simplest there was. Predictable. Ordinary. Tried and true. Almost identical to the one I’d done minutes before.
Unfortunately, that was the moment our world came apart at the seams.