raked a hand through his thick black hair and scribbled a note in the margins. “That’s what I get for drawing in pen.”
“Hey, that’s still really impressive! I can recognize a lot of runes and design units from all the random books I’ve read, but putting them together is definitely way harder than it looks. Did you design the whole thing yourself?”
“I based it off of Greene’s Wheel,” Darshan said, eyes lighting up. “I can’t take all the credit.”
Behind me, Aegis was shifting uncomfortably, no doubt displeased by my apology and baffled by our arcane discussion, but I couldn’t care less. It felt like I’d been waiting for a conversation like this all my life, a conversation with a magical equal who was just as fascinated by the possibilities of the art as I was. And Darshan, I thought, was the same. “Oh, I see, you kept this part from the original but added in the changes here with the linkages. Still, I never would’ve thought to use an extended clause on this spoke! That linkage must have terrible friction, though. What if you…” I took out my own notebook and a pen and started drawing up an alternate linkage.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” Darshan breathed. He sat down, took out his own pen, and then we were off to the races.
It took the school bell to return our attention to the real world, clutching sheets of torn-out drawings in ink-smeared hands. “So that fixes the linkage, but you’d still need this here… okay, okay, we need to go to our next class,” I sighed unwillingly. “I have Artifact Analysis next period, what about you?”
“Alchemy,” Darshan said, looking equally regretful, and also surprised at his regret. “I guess we’ll have to leave off now, but I’ll make a neater drawing with our changes tonight.”
“I’d like to see that.” I wished I could give him my phone number, so he could send me a photo when he was done. But my captors had taken away my own phone, and Cly hadn’t given me hers. Not to mention things could go really, really badly if Darshan tried to strike up a text conversation with the real Cly. “I’ll keep an eye out for you in my other classes,” I said, as we tossed our things into our backpacks and rushed out.
Aegis kept pace with me as I strode rapidly toward my next classroom. “You shouldn’t have done that. It’s unseemly for a Redbriar to apologize.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s more unseemly for a Redbriar to bully a nerd and get publicly knocked on her ass for it. I could’ve doubled down, or I could’ve done damage control, and won House Redbriar the friendship of an incredibly talented mage. He’s ludicrously good with magic circle design. Did you see the three-point clauses he was incorporating?”
“I don’t know what that is,” said Aegis, but he backed off. Aegis was born to a vassal mage family, but his Spellbreaker tattoos meant he couldn’t do any higher magic, so naturally he knew very little about it. Still, it didn’t take a scholar to tell that Darshan’s intricate drawings took an impressive amount of skill. “He could make a good ally,” Aegis conceded at last.
“I can hope,” I said, as I walked in the door to Artifact Analysis.
Chapter 8
Artifact Analysis was the biggest let-down of my day.
Artifacts were a form of applied inscription magic: instead of being on a flat surface, the inscriptions were applied to a three-dimensional object, which caused a whole bunch of incredibly tricky interactions with the object itself. Artifacts could do things that no inscription could, but the process of making them, even with today’s advances in magecraft, resembled buying a thousand lottery tickets and hoping one hit the jackpot. It was hugely expensive and risky, to the point where even Great Houses couldn’t control the process reliably; that was why having a giant collection of heirlooms collected through the ages was so valuable.
But I didn’t need the class to teach how to make artifacts, just how to break them. I’d hoped that the class would give me the sort of knowledge that I could use to disable the necklace or the shackles. Cly and Aegis were never going to leave me alone without at least one of the two on me, which would put a serious damper on my ability to escape. If I wanted to get anywhere, I needed my magic undrained.
Sadly, the professor dashed my hopes as he shuffled onto the podium.