not liking the feel of either, though both were favourites. “I believe so, but it’ll be hard,” he admitted. “It feels like a flood behind a dam, Tris. It wants out. It wants to say what it has to say.”
Up went her near-invisible gold brows. Tris pursed her mouth. “It’s your magic, isn’t it?” she reminded him. “It’s time you taught it who’s in charge.”
“It is,” mumbled Keth, choosing a blowpipe he’d never handled before. It felt right in his hands.
“Go on thinking that your power is in charge, and it will stay so,” she explained. “Your single most important tool as a mage has to be your will, Keth. What you want, what you don’t want. Your magic feeds on those things. You have to make it feed only on what you grant it, or it will rule you and ruin your life.”
He nodded.
“Imagine the crucible in your mind, can you do that?”
Keth nodded.
“Now put all of your power in it, but for a single thread that you’ll blow into the globe,” she directed.
He did as she suggested and imagined his power flowing into the crucible. Imagining it, he could also feel his magic disappear endlessly, like an illusionist’s trick, into some part of himself that held it neatly. In his mind’s eye he saw the lone thread hanging from the opening like the loose end on one of his mother’s balls of yarn. After a pause to make sure his grip was solid, he opened his eyes. “Done,” he told Tris.
She nodded. “While you blow the globe, let that thread and only that thread travel with your breath into the glass. Maybe the problem has been that all of your magic is pouring into the globe until it explodes. Give it a try.”
Keth’s hands trembled. This was exciting. This might actually help. He glanced down at the blowpipe in his hands, the one he’d never used before. Set into its sides was a line of Kurchali, like advice from a seer who knew that one day a mage would hold the pipe: “Grant me steady hands, and steady breath.”
Normally he didn’t use an unfamiliar blowpipe on important projects, but this one, with the advice cut into it, seemed like an omen. Keth slid the pipe into the furnace, until its end was firmly set in molten glass. He began to twirl as he withdrew the rod. Up came the gather, a nice, red-orange blob. Frowning in concentration, Kethlun sent breath and power sliding through the pipe. The gather began to spread.
By the third reheating his magic began to fight its way free of the crucible in his mind. Keth clamped down. In that moment of distraction the glass developed an irregular bulge on one side: he’d slowed at twirling the pipe. He controlled its movement and blew, reshaping a perfect globe. A moment later he saw that the merest thread of his magic had thickened.
Then the force that had urged him to blow a globe expanded up and through Keth, filling the glass. The piece was finished.
Keth sighed and cut the globe free of the pipe. A veil of lightnings shimmered softly over the surface, a tamer version compared to the others Keth had made. Inside it was the same, a multitude of lightnings that moved, flashed and split so much it was impossible to see anything.
Tris was reading from her leather-bound volume again. She looked at the globe as he passed it to her. “Some got away from my control,” he admitted.
“Not as much as before,” she murmured as she turned the globe over in her hands. “You know what you have to do now, right?”
Keth sighed. “Wait for that thing to clear.”
“And waste the time while you wait?” she asked.
Keth glared at her. “Slave-driver.”
“A bad name is just a fart with consonants,” she informed him loftily. “Well?”
Once more Keth sighed. “I need to work on my control.”
“For a while. Then you can just blow glass if you like,” his taskmistress said. “From the looks of you, most of your power today went into that globe. I’m going outside to do my own work. I’ll make sure the barriers are sealed.”
She was being an alarmist, Keth thought. He felt just as good now as he had on getting up that morning. Shaking his head over her lack of faith in how much magic he could work at one time, Keth sat cross-legged on the workshop floor. Tris opened her protective barrier and walked outside, Little Bear following.