Chapter 12 #2
“First lesson about magic use: Without fuel, you’re powerless,” he said, not quite looking her in the eye. “So fill your pockets. Please.”
She put leaves in her hip pockets and the two directly below.
“Show me your spellcasting stance, if you would.”
She straightened her spine and held out her right arm.
“You need to lock your elbow. You’re a conduit—you want magic to flow out of you without unnecessary pit stops. You should lock your knees, too, and tuck your hips, assuming you’re not already doing that.”
Thanks to her coat and dress, it was impossible for him to tell. She made those adjustments and raised an eyebrow.
“The positioning of your hand changes with the type of spell,” he said, pacing in a way that reminded her eerily of Lydia when perturbed.
“If you’re acting upon an object, you want to aim your palm at it.
Brewing ingredients sitting on the table below you, palm down; lamp hanging from the ceiling not working, palm up.
Otherwise, aim it sideways—like shaking hands with the universe, except for the leaf you have to hold between your thumb and forefinger. ”
A recitation of the instructions he received at age thirteen, no doubt.
“Your hand needs to be just as rigid as your arm,” he added. “The trick is to extend the fingers not holding the leaf. All right?”
She nodded.
“Good. There’s a five-pound weight,” he said, gesturing behind him. “Try to levitate it, if you please.”
“With what spellword?”
“The same one you used yesterday.”
So he’d seen that, too. The thought of how meticulously he’d arranged things to box her into this position made her want so much to hurt him, she tasted pomegranate.
Awful, awful fruit.
He cleared his throat. “āhebban—lift. Be sure to say it clearly and firmly without raising your voice to the point of yelling. And concentrate on the weight, or you run the risk of levitating everything in sight. Intention is a critical part of casting.”
She concentrated on breathing instead, trying to tamp down anger and suppress an embarrassing feeling of inadequacy. She didn’t want to cast magic in front of him. Even setting aside the performing-monkey aspect of the situation, she cringed at the thought of failing as he watched.
But what she wanted had nothing to do with it. She plucked a leaf from a full pocket, extended her right arm, tucked her hips, locked her knees and elbows, turned her hand palm down, flexed her free fingers and fixated on the weight. “āhebban!”
The satisfying zip of magic traveled up her spine and down her arm. First try. She was elated—until the object of her spell stopped well short of the height she’d achieved the day before.
“About a foot.” Blackwell cast a spell of his own and the weight lowered itself to the floor. “You can do better. Try again, if you would.”
A foot—one-twentieth of what he could do at thirteen. Humiliating. She re-contorted herself and called out the spellword again, more demand than request this time.
“Eighteen inches,” he estimated.
In more than a dozen additional attempts, she only once needed to repeat herself to get the spell to take. But she couldn’t levitate the weight above two feet. All her muscles ached with the effort, as if she’d been lifting it the normal way.
“Do you think the telephone directory weighs less than five pounds?” she said, trying to catch her breath.
“A bit more. I checked this morning,” he added by way of explanation.
“Why can’t I reproduce the results I got yesterday?”
“Well—you’ll never be the same as you were then.”
“No,” she said heavily. “I won’t.”
He grimaced, as if he actually felt some amount of guilt for what he’d done. “That’s not—I’m not talking about the Vow.”
She could hear the capital letter in the way he said it. That vow certainly made all others look flimsy by comparison.
“What I’m getting at is that the first spell a person casts is …” He waved a hand, searching for the right word.
“Magical,” she said. “In every sense.”
“Yes,” he murmured. And in that moment, there was something between them—an almost tangible connection formed by the same life-changing experience—that pushed everything else aside.
She looked away.
“Next lesson—spellcasting during brewing.” He sounded tired. “Shall we?”
Topping the to-do list was an anti-arthritic brew. Which happened to be one of the few that required aconite.
She chopped ingredients on her side of the table and studiously avoided looking at Blackwell, pulverizing ginger on his side.
This was horrible in a way the previous afternoon had not been.
Yesterday, she could detest him in peace.
Today, he seemed to be reverting back to the man she’d started to like and respect.
She didn’t want to see that Blackwell anymore.
She couldn’t afford to forget what he was when he let the mask slip.
Every fresh ingredient in the brew they were making needed a preservation spell before stewing on the stove. The book didn’t explain why the spells had to be cast separately in this case, just that they did, and she didn’t want to know the reason badly enough to strike up a conversation.
But eventually they finished the pre-spell prep work.
“These ingredients can’t be allowed to go bad before the brew is used up,” Blackwell said.
“The amount we’re making is meant to last one month, split between the dozen people who want it, but the preservation spell had better give it a shelf life of at least three months to account for patients who don’t suffer every day.
Six would be better. So cast like you mean it, please. ”
She arranged her body into position, arm trembling from nerves and fatigue.
It wasn’t even noon yet, and she felt as drained as she had at the end of her first day, when he’d put her to work scrubbing the house.
She thought of the warning in the top-secret report that got her into this mess: “Many were exhausted by the effort.” She’d disregarded that originally, chalking it up to sexism.
Now she was forced to consider that it might be the unvarnished truth, which did not bode well.
She glared at the feverfew leaves. “Healdan.” The spell gathered steam through her body and burst out, but if it had any effect on the leaves, she couldn’t see it.
“Here,” he said—so much closer than she expected that she reared back, adrenaline surging. He took a step backward himself, hesitated and laid on the worktable the instrument he’d apparently been trying to hand her. It looked like a thermometer, except about twice the length.
“There’s a window of a few minutes when you can measure how long a spell will last—really, the strength of it,” he said, circling back to his side of the table. “Hold that incantometer right over the feverfew.”
The mercury—or whatever was in the tool—rose sluggishly upward, 1, 2, 3, before giving up at 4.
“Four as in four months?” she asked, unable to keep the frustration out of her voice.
“Four moons, technically, but it’s essentially the same. We’ll just put an expiration date on the bottles before delivering them. Give the next ingredient a try—please.”
She did. That spell measured in at only three moons.
The next one she cast—on his ground-up ginger—couldn’t get past the two-moon notch. She leaned against the table for support, thinking it a bitter irony that she was so upset about her ineffectiveness at a task he was forcing her to do.
“I’ve overtaxed you.” Blackwell sounded almost apologetic. “You’ve cast, what, nearly twenty spells this morning? You’d better have something to eat, then go home. Take a nap, perhaps.”
This was her opportunity—to say she wasn’t up to the job, to beg him to let her go free. I was wrong, Omnimancer. Women are meant to be treated differently than men.
“I’m not frail” tumbled out of her mouth, all sharp edges and elbows. She wouldn’t say those other words. Not even if they were the only keys to freedom—though she doubted she could say anything that would change his mind.
As if to confirm that suspicion, he said, “You walk two miles through the forest every day. Of course you’re not frail.” He held her gaze, assessing her. “Spellcasting is demanding, Miss Harper. Magic isn’t jumping to do our bidding.”
Except for her magic, which instantly did whatever he wanted. If he’d ordered her to cast those preservation spells, rather than asked her, she probably would have managed. Right before passing out.
“Come on,” he said. “Into the kitchen.”
Perhaps he’d forgotten that if he didn’t add “please,” her muscles would spring into action, propelling her there. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.
The silence pressed against him as he made Miss Harper a sandwich, his back turned so he didn’t have to look at her.
What a disaster.
His self-righteous anger had dissipated an hour after she’d stalked out the day before, leaving chilly regret in its wake.
The original plan—blackmail—looked benign by comparison.
What he’d intended to propose was that he would keep quiet about what she had done, and in exchange, she’d shoulder the lion’s share of his duties.
That should have been sufficient. She could have no incentive to rat him out for violating the magic-instruction law if she knew he had evidence on film that would land her in prison for a long time, too.
Instead, he’d transformed Miss Harper from a woman whose motivations clashed dangerously with his, but who probably didn’t want to do him any harm, into a perfectly obedient employee who wished him dead.
If he destroyed the contract now and set her free, that wouldn’t change what she thought of him—only her ability to do something about it.
He’d trapped himself as neatly as he’d trapped her.