he burst out, as he sometimes did when pressed past his limits by the obvious dreadfulness of my magic. “You aren’t maintaining the spell at all—no chanting, no gesture—”
“I’m still giving it magic. A great deal of magic,” I added, unhappily.
The first few spells that didn’t yank magic out of me like pulling teeth had been so purely a relief that I had half-thought that was the worst of it over: now that I understood how magic ought to work—whatever the Dragon said on that subject—everything would be easy. Well, I soon learned better. Desperation and terror had fueled my first working, and my next few attempts had been the equivalent of the first cantrips he’d tried to teach me, the little spells he had expected me to master effortlessly. So I had indeed mastered those effortlessly, and then he had unmercifully set me at real spells, and everything had once again become—if not unbearable in the same way, at least exceedingly difficult.
“How are you giving it magic?” he said, through his teeth.
“I already found the path!” I said. “I’m just staying on it. Can’t you—feel it?” I asked abruptly, and held my hand cupping the flower out towards him; he frowned and put his hands around it, and then he said, “Vadiya rusha ilikad tuhi,” and a second illusion laid itself over mine, two roses in the same space—his, predictably, had three rings of perfect petals, and a delicate fragrance.
“Try and match it,” he said absently, his fingers moving slightly, and by lurching steps we brought our illusions closer together until it was nearly impossible to tell them one from another, and then he said, “Ah,” suddenly, just as I began to glimpse his spell: almost exactly like that strange clockwork on the middle of his table, all shining moving parts. On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around. “What are you—” he began, and then abruptly we had only a single rose, and it began to grow.
And not only the rose: vines were climbing up the bookshelves in every direction, twining themselves around ancient tomes and reaching out the window; the tall slender columns that made the arch of the doorway were lost among rising birches, spreading out long finger-branches; moss and violets were springing up across the floor, delicate ferns unfurling. Flowers were blooming everywhere: flowers I had never seen, strange blooms dangling and others with sharp points, brilliantly colored, and the room was thick with their fragrance, with the smell of crushed leaves and pungent herbs. I looked around myself alight with wonder, my magic still flowing easily. “Is this what you meant?” I asked him: it really wasn’t any more difficult than making the single flower had been. But he was staring at the riot of flowers all around us, as astonished as I was.
He looked at me, baffled and for the first time uncertain, as though he had stumbled into something, unprepared. His long narrow hands were cradled around mine, both of us holding the rose together. Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song. I was abruptly too hot, and strangely conscious of myself. I pulled my hands free.
Chapter 7
I avoided him all the next day, stupidly, and realized too late that my success in doing so meant he had avoided me, too, when he had never let me miss a lesson before. I didn’t care to think why. I tried to pretend it meant nothing, that we had both simply wanted a holiday from my laborious training. But I passed a restless night, and went down to the library the next morning sandy-eyed and nervous. He didn’t look at me as I came in; he said shortly, “Begin with fulmkea, on page forty-three,” a wholly different spell, and he kept his head bent over his own book. I gladly dived for the safety of my work.
We lasted four days in near-silence and might have gone a month without exchanging more than a few words a day, I suppose, left to our own devices. But on the morning of the fourth day, a sledge drew up to the tower, and when I looked out of the window it was Borys, but not alone; he was driving Kasia’s mother Wensa, and she was huddled small in the sleigh, her pale round face looking up at