Prisoner (The Scarred Mage of Roseward #2) - Sylvia Mercedes Page 0,33

she did so, and immediately all the blood rushed from her cheeks.

“Oh, bullspitting heavens,” she moaned, and curled over, her face buried in her hands.

“Miss Beck.” Soran returned to the alcove in a few strides and knelt beside her again. His hand hovered in the air above her back, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch her again. “Miss Beck, you must remain still. You’re suffering from fatigue brought on by the manipulation of magic. It’s best you do not try to speak or—”

“Bullspit,” she muttered again and pushed her hair out of her face, looking up at the mage. “Did I do it? I thought I did, but I can’t remember. Did I fix it?” Her eyes burned into his, bright and eager.

Slowly, Soran nodded. He dared not trust himself to speak, dared not let his voice betray his own excitement. It would not do to encourage her overmuch.

But her face broke into a brilliant smile. Then she closed her eyes and lowered her head back into her hands, muttering, “Boggarts.”

Soran fetched the tea and poured it into a wooden mug. When he returned, she was upright again, turned so that her back pressed against the cold stone wall of the alcove, her legs drawn up in a crisscross beneath her silken skirts. “Drink this,” Soran said.

She accepted the mug. Eyes closed, she inhaled the steam deeply, then breathed out in a sigh. Her lips pursed to blow gently before she took a tentative sip. It must have been more bitter than she expected, for she made a face, one eye squinting half shut. But she bravely took another sip before turning her gaze up to him.

“So,” she said, another smile curling the corners of her mouth. “What are you going to teach me next?”

The days fell into something like a pattern.

Every morning, Nelle rose before the sun and prepared a hearty breakfast. Silveri joined her in time to eat and then, while she cleaned up their dishes, he would set out the writing implements.

Several hours of lettering practice and repetitive copying followed. For the first two days she spent all her time on that same line of written magic, never quite bringing it to fruition, never even getting as close as she had that first day. She grew frustrated, and her precision suffered. So Silveri gave her fresh lines to copy.

This was better. But also its own version of frustrating. Each line began as total gibberish to her and remained gibberish no matter how many times she copied it. But as the days passed, she began to almost feel the sense behind the senseless. As though a part of her mind she’d never known existed might be unlocking.

At the end of each session, Silveri always had her write out whatever spell she was practicing in a mad, slap-dash manner. Most of the time this resulted in nothing more than a mess on the page, but sometimes, sometimes she felt the energy increasing. Intuition intensified until her fingers and her mind could play along the edges of understanding that juxtaposition of precision and madness that made up magic . . .

By midday, Silveri would declare their lessons ended and send her out of the tower again. Come rain or come shine, she found herself wrapped in her purloined cloak and out in the open air, trekking along the cliffside, her face numb with cold, her mind numb with all that she’d learned or almost learned that morning.

Once she simply walked for hours until it was near enough to sundown that she might safely return to the tower and expect to find the door unlatched. A few times she ventured back to Dornrise to fetch spices or delicacies from the larder, and another time to find a fresh gown. Every time she offered to walk the boundaries with the mage to check the ward stones, he refused—and refused with such finality of tone that she didn’t dare press him.

On the sixth day of training, Nelle threw down her pen before she’d gotten halfway through the final spell for the morning. Her eyes burned and her neck was sore, and the enthusiasm she’d felt when first setting out to learn magic had faded to almost nothing.

“I don’t get it!” she groaned, pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. She could feel the mage’s gaze on her. Part of her was embarrassed to indulge in a sulk in front of him. But most of her didn’t care anymore.