but I couldn’t. After everything else I’ve been through, losing you would be the death of me.”
She kissed him again, and nothing more was said for a short while, then he tried to pull away. “I should get the stove ready.”
Selene held onto his hand. “Jeremy is cooking.” There was a mischievous smile on her lips, and she glanced out the door in the direction of their bedroom. Will understood her meaning immediately.
Later, after they had risen, eaten, and retired again, Will left her alone and went to the study by himself. He closed the door and activated the limnthal. “Selene’s impatient.”
Arrogan picked up his meaning. “It has been a while.”
“You made me wait a year or more.”
“Her case is different,” said his grandfather. “She’s well past the proper age, and she’s already an accomplished practitioner. I don’t think waiting will improve things.”
“Can I really do this?” asked Will.
“You? Definitely, your part is easy. You just put the spell on her and watch her suffer. When it gets to the really bad part, you’ll have to restrain her, as I did with you. The real problem is that you can only paralyze her, no more.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember me telling you that masters who taught their apprentices some magic early on sometimes took decades to train them through the first stage of turyn control?”
The thought of that horrified him. “Is that going to happen here?”
“Selene knows very well how to use her turyn. Once it starts to put pressure on her, to hurt, she’s going to want to vent some of it. Eventually she’s almost guaranteed to start using spells, and that will set her back to square one. She’ll never learn to compress her source if she gives in to the impulse to use magic. You can use a source-link to paralyze her, but you can’t separate her from her source, otherwise she won’t be able to learn to control it.”
“But if she can touch her source, she’ll be able to use spells,” muttered Will.
“Exactly,” said the ring. “That’s why it’s so hard after they know how to use magic. You can’t stop them, or they won’t learn, but at the same time, they almost can’t help themselves once they feel as though they’re going to die from the turyn building up within them.”
Will still vividly remembered the sensation, locked inside his body while it felt as though his flesh was on fire. The pressure had gotten so great that he was sure he was about to die at any moment. If he had known how to cast a spell of any kind, he would have started doing so compulsively to lessen the pressure. Imagining Selene going through that torment bothered him immensely.
“One thing in your favor,” said Arrogan. “If she’s strong-willed enough to nearly kill herself fighting her father’s control through the heart-stone enchantment, then she ought to be strong enough to hold out long enough to learn this.”
“I hope so,” said Will. “What do I need to do first?”
“You already know the spells. The only thing left is to make sure she isn’t pregnant.”
“Excuse me?”
“I didn’t have to worry about that with you, but make sure you remember it for all future female students,” added Arrogan.
“I didn’t mishear you then.”
“No. It’s another benefit to younger apprentices. They’re less likely to be married, or otherwise engaged in activities of that sort. Remember how sick you were after you first compressed your source?”
“I do.” Will had been weak and lethargic for nearly a month until his body had learned to adapt to the lack of turyn coming from his source. It wasn’t until later that he’d learned that he was actually beginning to absorb environmental turyn to make up for the missing energy. “Will she be able to have children later?”
“Think about that for a minute, then explain to me why you’re such an idiot.”
He wanted to smack himself. “Aislinn was your teacher, and you had children much later.”
“Exactly. Once her body adjusts to whatever level she eventually reaches, everything will be fine, but until then, it’s important she does not get pregnant or she’s almost certain to miscarry.”
“So how do I check?” asked Will, feeling suddenly nervous. His grandmother’s previous injunction against them being intimate suddenly made sense. Before she had gone into hiding with Aislinn, Selene had used a spell to prevent pregnancy, but during the months since her return, they had been enthusiastically making up for lost time. And she hasn’t been allowed to use spells.
“There’s