Page 64 of A Tower of Half-Truths
He winced. “Er, yes, though he was only an Elder Wizard at the time.”
“ ‘Onlyan Elder Wizard,’ he says.” Mavery scoffed, shaking her head. “If you worked for the most famous wizard on Perrun, how had I never heard of you?”
“Nothing kills a young wizard’s notoriety faster than a quiet life in academia.” He shrugged. “Now, if I’m not mistaken,Ethereanis the subject of today’s lesson. Shall we begin?”
She nodded, and he lowered himself beside her on the sofa, immediately to her right. He was so close, his thigh nudged hers when he leaned forward to push aside his ink-smeared notes. When he leaned back again, their shoulders were barely an inch apart. Whatever reservations he’d had yesterday out in public, they were no issue here in private.
She caught the scent of bergamot tea in his hair, on his breath. He had a black smudge on his left cheek, and she had an overwhelming desire to reach up and wipe it away. But she remained still, her hands clasped together in her lap.
“Rather than beginning with the alphabet, let’s begin with a number,” he said. “Twenty-eight. What does that bring to mind?”
She nearly sighed with relief for being given something more productive to focus on.
“Time, for starters,” she said. “There are twenty-eight hours in a day, twenty-eight days in a month, two hundred and eighty days in a year. Oh, and I remember that Etherean has twenty-eight letters—sorry,runes.”
He nodded. “The number twenty-eight has mathematical harmony, as it is the sum of all its divisors. But it also has Ethereanharmony. You’ll find many incantations that use exactly twenty-eight runes—each one representing a single syllable—though divisors and multiples of twenty-eight are more common. The one I’m about to teach you requires only seven syllables.”
As Alain leaned forward again to lay out a blank sheet of paper, Mavery tried to ignore the slight pressure of his knee against hers. He wrote a line containing seven runes. Below that, he spelled them out phonetically.
“Etero rah mira shah.” His finger trailed along as he enunciated slowly. This incantation sounded familiar.
“Etero rah mira shah,”she repeated. The wards mitigated the full effects of the Ether; instead of a wintry gust throwing open a door, a draft slithered in through the keyhole.
“Remember torollevery ‘r.’ That’s very crucial.”
She repeated the incantation three more times before Alain nodded.
“I think you’re ready to recite it without the warding magic,” he said.
“Are you sure? Maybe I need one more go of it.”
“Don’t worry.” He placed his hand over hers. “You’ll be perfectly safe.”
She turned her head and met his gaze. As usual, his eyes were a bit sunken and ringed with fatigue. But there was warmth within those pools of deepest brown: a glint of amber she’d never noticed before now, a softness she’d once impulsively turned away from, a reassurance that he wouldn’t let her come to harm.
“All right,” she said.
He unfurled her fingers and lifted her hand, palm facing up. He then raised his other hand overhead and, with a turn of his wrist, the violet-hued wards vanished.
“Remember,” he said, “the Ether is very sensitive. You can whisper the words, or bellow them like an opera singer, if you so desire.” From his soft laugh, she suspected he’d done the latter at least once. “The volumemakes no difference, so long as your pronunciation is spot on.”
She nodded, took a deep breath, then directed her next words to her palm. Her voice quavered as she spoke.
“Etero rah mira shah.”
Instead of feeling it against her skin, the flow of Ether wasinternal. In quick succession, it chilled her from the marrow, filled her lungs with ice, then streamed out with her breath. It left her tongue slightly numb, as if she’d eaten a mouthful of snow from a mountaintop.
She gasped when a small orb of white light appeared above her palm. It was bright enough to make her eyes sting, but it was too beautiful to look away from.
“You’ve just conjured a bit of the Ether itself,” Alain said. “And on your first attempt, no less!”
She tore her gaze away from the orb and back to him. His smile was nearly as brilliant as the light hovering above her palm.
His fingertips remained against the back of her hand, to help her keep the orb at eye level. While she’d been focused on the spell, his free arm had draped along her upper back in a sort of half-embrace, as though he’d sensed that the rest of her also needed support.
“It will remain tethered to you until your arcana is completely expended. It’s yours to do with as you wish. You can sever that connection by making a fist, or you can send the light elsewhere in the room.”
“How do I do that?”
