Prisoner (The Scarred Mage of Roseward #2) - Sylvia Mercedes Page 0,27
was obliged to break up one word and fit the rest of it on the line below. Oh well. She kept going until she reached the end of the spell.
Silveri didn’t bother to pick up the page for inspection this time. He bowed over her shoulder, his breath tickling her ear, one hand planted on the table beside her resting arm. “Hmmmm,” he said again in the same inscrutable tone. Then, “Again, Miss Beck. Just there, in the space underneath.” He stood up and backed away from the table, his hands clasped at the small of his back. “Precision is everything, Miss Beck. Everything.”
She sighed but set to with a will. This time she got the size much closer, and the shape of her letters was more precise. But if Silveri noticed he said nothing. After another quick inspection, he uttered another brisk, “Again,” and she was back at it.
She copied the line seven times before running out of space on the parchment. Only then did Silveri pick it up and look at it, turning it this way and that. She watched him, the first two fingers of each hand rubbing circles into her throbbing temples. She was fairly certain her eyes would fall out of their sockets any moment now.
At long last, Silveri lowered the parchment and looked at her again. “Precision is everything,” he said.
“Yeah. So you said.”
“Except . . .” He held up a finger. “Except when it is not.”
She slumped in her chair and made a face at him. “That ain’t really helpful, you know.”
He set the parchment down in front of her again. She looked at it dully, and several silent moments passed before she realized he’d placed it upside down. She reached to turn it, but he said, “Ah, ah!” so sharply, her hand froze. “Look at it again, Miss Beck. Tell me . . . what do you see?”
Nelle frowned and turned her eyes to the parchment, studying the backwards and upside-down lines of gibberish. At first there was nothing. Nothing but her own frustration weighing down on her, making her eyes cross with fatigue.
Then there was . . . something.
A shimmer. A vibration, a pull.
An energy . . .
Her breath caught. She couldn’t speak, but her whole body tensed. The headache that had been pounding her skull vanished in a flash. Was she imagining things? Yes, she was, she certainly was. But maybe . . .
Maybe that was the point.
Silveri whisked the parchment out from under her, leaving her staring intently at the tabletop. She opened her mouth to utter a protest, but he placed yet another blank page in front of her, his silver hand planted firmly in the center of it
“Try it again, Miss Beck,” he said. His eyes were mere inches from hers, his face down at her level. She stared at him but hardly seemed to see him. That energy still shimmered in the air, invisible, yet utterly distracting. “This time don’t try to be precise. Write as fast as you can. As fast as you can, do you hear me?”
She didn’t need to look at the book. After seven times copying, she knew the assortment of letters, or at least close enough to recall the essence of them. She took up the quill dripping with ink, shook it out, and held it poised for a moment while she gathered her wits.
Then she bowed to the work, scribbling as fast as she could, careless of the shapes, careless of the blots she left on the page, careless of everything. And as she wrote, she felt vibrations of power rise around her in shimmering streams of energy she had no words to describe. She could feel the spell wanting to work, wanting to take shape beneath her pen, and she poured into it, thrilling with the sensation of such power at her fingertips.
At the end of the parchment, she stopped and looked. A gasp caught in her throat. “What a spittin’ mess!” she cried, dropping her quill into its well and clapping an ink-stained hand to her cheek.
Though it had required seven copies to fill the last page, this single copy took up the whole of the parchment. How could that be? Her vision spun, trying to chase the characters, which wouldn’t quite sit where they were meant to on the page. They seemed to flee her gaze, shifting, scuttling, avoiding all attempts to read or follow them. They shifted and . . . and . . .