Prisoner (The Scarred Mage of Roseward #2) - Sylvia Mercedes Page 0,24

Nelle couldn’t begin to guess.

She was itching to get started, but Silveri refused to be rushed. He arranged everything neatly on the table and kept rearranging by slight degrees. Perhaps this precision of display held some magical importance, but Nelle suspected it was only the mage’s obsessive nature getting the better of him. She slumped in her chair, arms crossed, fingers tapping impatiently along her upper arm, and counted to twenty several times over. Somehow she managed to keep hold of her temper.

At last, when all was exactly as he liked it, Silveri turned. “Draw up your chair please, Miss Beck,” he said, hastily adding in a most forbidding tone, “and touch nothing!”

“Right. Not touching,” Nelle muttered, pulling her chair to her usual place at the table. The mage had set out a blank parchment beside a long white quill that her fingers itched to pick up and twiddle. Her palms were suddenly clammy. How many years was it since she’d actually written a word? Not since Mother died, that was certain. And she’d never been one for letter-writing to begin with. What if she thoroughly embarrassed herself?

But after all that pleading and arguing, she couldn’t back down now, so she tucked her hands up under her arms and waited, watching the mage from under her lowered brows.

The mage took his place at the opposite end of the table, steepled his fingers, looked about him, and drew a long breath. “Where to begin?” he said softly.

As he did not seem to be addressing her, Nelle held her tongue.

“Magic,” he said at last, “does not originate in this realm. Not in Eledria. Not in the mortal world. Nor any world of matter and physical reality. Magic is the stuff of the quinsatra—another realm altogether. A realm without matter, a non-physical dimension that lies as close to this reality as your flesh adheres to your bones.”

Nelle swallowed, wide-eyed, and glanced to one side, half expecting to catch a glimmer of this near reality from the tail of her eye. But that was silly, so she focused her attention back on the mage.

After what felt like an endless silence, Silveri plucked up one of the other quills lying before him on the table and held it up by its nib, twirling it slowly first this way, then that. “Do you know what this is, Miss Beck?”

Convinced it was a trick question, Nelle nodded slowly but refused to speak. To her relief, the mage continued without prompting.

“This is the bridge between the quinsatra and the mortal realm. This is the instrument by which we draw the indescribable out from the ether of unreality and transform it into the physical, the graspable, the concrete. By this instrument, the sage may transcribe secret truths of the universe within volumes of holy text. By this same instrument, the mage creates what you know to be magic.”

Nelle nodded. He seemed to be expecting an answer this time. She opened her mouth, hesitated, then said, “Right. Magic.”

One brow slid slowly up the mage’s forehead. Very neatly, very precisely, he set the quill down in front of him and steepled his fingers again.

“Mortal magic begins with the written word,” he said. “The ability to take the airy nothing of ideas, feelings, and sensations, and render them into a concrete and comprehensible form, is a distinctly mortal ability. The fae, though their very veins run with liquid magic, do not understand the power of the written word, cannot be made to comprehend how markings on page or stone or wood can be made to contain words, ideas, worlds, and power.”

This was not entirely new information to Nelle. Mother had explained much of this to her when she was a girl, and most folks in Wimborne understood that mortal mages used writings to channel their magic while the fae did not. It was a simple enough concept insofar as it went.

Or maybe not so simple. As Nelle sat there across from the mage, listening to him talk, she began to suspect that layers of complexity and understanding she had never before fathomed existed. The prospect was thrilling. And terrifying.

“Before writing,” Silveri continued, leaning back in his chair and relaxing into his subject, “there was language. But not a single language. As you know, the mortal world boasts hundreds of languages, possibly more. Many, though not all of them, possess a written form that allows the speakers of those languages to record their ideas and beliefs for future generations. This is a magic