The Choice of Magic - Michael G. Manning Page 0,190

saying it was too easy.”

Selene held out her hands, and runes began to rapidly appear, too quickly for him to follow with his eyes. Over the span of a minute they built up into a complex spherical web above her palms. She gave him look of pride when the spell was complete.

“What does that do?” asked Will.

“It’s a spell to clean a room.”

His mind was boggled. “That’s all it does? Why is it so complicated?”

“You’re letting your ignorance show,” she told him. “The most powerful magic isn’t necessarily complicated, and sometimes a minor magic requires a lot of complexity to work properly. A cleaning spell has to have a lot of rules built into it; otherwise it will make a mess instead of doing what you want. It has to differentiate between dust and dirt and things that ought not be removed. Hard floors are not like rugs, and fabric can’t be cleaned like dishes. This spell can handle all those things. Still think you can take it away from me?”

Will ignored the question. His mind was occupied by thoughts of all the hard labor he had done at his grandfather’s request. The old bastard could have cleaned it all in a minute, he realized. He knew for a fact that the old man must have known the spell, for he had seen how clean Arrogan’s bedroom had been.

He held out his hands, putting them on either side of her spell. A second later, the glow of the runes began to flicker, and Selene’s eyes went wide. No, that’s not it, Will told himself. I don’t want to absorb it; I want to take it. He tried to remember the sensation he had felt when he drew the heart-stone enchantments out of the dead sorcerers’ bodies.

Unlike those occasions, he felt a stiff resistance. Selene wasn’t dead; she was very much alive and still holding onto the spell. What had his grandfather told him with the candle? He needed to change the color of the flame to regain control of his turyn. This was similar. He had to convert the turyn within the spell to his own type before the spell would be his.

Pushing aside his distractions, Will focused on the turyn within the spell. He didn’t want to absorb it—he needed to change it. He felt his will tremble as something opposed his desire. Clenching his jaw, he bore down, refusing to accept the outcome.

And then it happened. The spell tore away from Selene, connecting itself to him instead. He took a step back, and the magical construct came with him, anchored between his palms. Selene’s face was damp with sweat, and she stared at him as though he had grown a second nose.

Will began to speak in a nonchalant tone. “Now all that’s left is to take it apart.” With one hand he began plucking at the individual runes, tugging them out of position until the entire thing fell apart and dissolved.

“That’s how you got rid of the ward around my tent,” she sputtered. “It wasn’t a spell anomaly.”

Not exactly, thought Will. That had happened because he had accidentally absorbed the ward. What he had just done was much harder, but he didn’t feel like being nit-picky about his victory. “It was similar.”

Selene’s expression was grave. “Listen to me, Will. What you just did—you can never do that again, not in front of anyone. The magisters at Wurthaven would kill to possess such an ability, and any sorcerer that knew you had it would stop at nothing to see you destroyed. Do you hear me? Every mage in the kingdom would become your enemy, for one reason or another, and they would turn the world upside down to either learn or destroy such knowledge.”

He nodded. “I’ll keep it a secret then.”

“Teach me,” she said sternly with a strange look in her eyes, a look that made him uncomfortable.

“I don’t know if I can,” said Will, waving one hand vaguely.

“Why not?”

“First you have to learn to control your source, then your body has to learn to absorb turyn from around you. I think that’s where it starts,” he explained. His grandfather’s strange method of teaching began to make sense to him. While he had been busy complaining that the old man wasn’t teaching him spells Arrogan had built a foundation in him to enable him to achieve greater control, not just of his own spells, but of others’ spells as well.

She frowned. “Absorb turyn? Like I do from my elementals?