Page 25 of The Sundered Realms

He eyed me. “You are upset.”

She shrugged. “A little, yeah. More that I didn’t even know a spell like this existed, which seems like it should have come up in my training. But I get it, the lighter you travel, the less you have to worry about your gear getting lost in demon battles.”

She was still mad about it, though.

Liris gulped down the whole ladle of soup to keep her mouth shut.

She knew what happened when she started questioning the ways of her elders and why people accepted the world as it was rather than trying to change the paradigm.

Still watching her closely, Lord Vhannor said, “The rest is all yours, but go slow. We have a long day ahead of us.”

“Is that why you let me sleep in?” He didn’t seem like a man who was content to sit around.

“That,” he said, “and you needed to recover from your first spell. The first magic we work always takes a lot out of us. By tomorrow you won’t keep dropping off without warning, and it won’t hit you like this again.”

That was a relief—though if she did, how long before he decided she was dead weight, slowing him down, or too much to be worth carrying? Liris tried not to inhale the soup and didn’t entirely succeed. “Where are we?”

“Still Etorsiye, into the mountains a bit. We have a hike ahead of us today.”

Liris looked at him over the ladle. “The way to the nearest Gate in Etorsiye—other than the one in the swamp—is not through the mountains.”

Lord Vhannor arched his eyebrows—come on, the locations of Gates at least was very much covered in Serenthuar ambassador training—and nodded shortly. “As long as I’m here, there’s another report I want to look into personally, given how the last one turned out. I’ll prepare more spells while you finish up.”

So, she needed to hurry after all, despite what he’d said. Familiar frustration flashed through her, though she consoled herself that her training had ultimately been good for this too, figuring out when people didn’t mean what they said. If she’d understood those nuances younger, she’d have saved herself a lot of trouble, but at least it would serve her now.

Lord Vhannor did seem to actually need to replenish spells, though, so she’d have to keep from being a burden he didn’t want to bear in other ways. Liris hadn’t had etiquette training applicable to camping, but since he was occupied she could help clean—though of course this took more of his directions, since neither camping nor indeed cleaning were particularly in her repertoire.

But Lord Vhannor seemed like the kind of man who enjoyed providing directions.

So once that was done, and he wasn’t, she figured it couldn’t hurt to ask, “Now can I help copy the spells?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “For someone who accused me of never taking breaks, you are no better.”

Lord Vhannor did actually look relaxed now, or near to. In fact, with the strong lines of his jaw bathed in the soft morning light as he leaned casually back and confidently prepared magic, he looked impossibly attractive.

She focused on the microexpressions that still left his demeanor looking remote, but she was beginning to read as his version of faint, hidden amusement—which unfortunately did not make her feel less warm. “Clearly I have the experience to recognize the signs, then.”

He rolled his eyes and waved her over. “Fine. Try this one. The important thing is to start with the outermost circle and make sure you don’t close it.”

She took the pen he offered her. “That can’t be all.”

“No,” Lord Vhannor agreed dryly. “I want to see what you’ll do without further instruction. If you err in a way that could become dangerous, I’ll stop you.”

Ah. A test. She could handle that.

Liris sketched the outer circle and paused to study the spell. She could discern different patterns, but not why anything was arranged the way it was—the order, the length of the equation, why that notation and not a different one, why so many additional nonverbal patterns at all. She could read the words but had no idea what anything meant—a poetic form, a spell grammar completely outside her knowledge.

She filled it in the way she’d expect to perform it, working her way around one section at a time, all the layers mixed together.

“If all it takes to write a spell is closing some text in a circle, surely anyone could do it,” Liris noted as she got into the rhythm of copying each glyph out identically.

“Anyone can. Fortunately, a spell without both clear parameters and without sufficient power simply doesn’t work. Have you seen love charms?”

Liris blinked, pausing in her work to look at him. “What?”

He waved off her appalled look. “No, obviously they don’t work. No one expects them to. They’re popular trinkets—take something circular, like a wood cutout, write that two people will be in love forever, decorate with something trite from a basic spell language, give it as a gift.”

“Oh.” She turned back to the paper. “Yes, Serenthuar makes versions of those—glass ornaments and small hanging tapestries. I didn’t realize that was the most common use—or that people would memorialize commitment so frivolously.”

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