Page 107 of A Tower of Half-Truths
“Forty-three seconds,” she announced after his fifth recitation. “That’s your fastest yet.”
He sat beside her on the log and took a generous gulp from his canteen. Even without the full effects of the Ether, simply practicing the incantation had been enough to leave him parched.
“Thanks to you and that brilliant suggestion you made yesterday,” he said. “You may not have a conventional education, but you certainly think like a scholar.” At that, she smiled. “Whydidyou leave university?”
“Oh…” Her smile faded as a dark cloud threatened to consume her thoughts. “It…wasn’t by choice.”
It had been years since she’d told anyone about this part of her past. As she considered whether to reveal it to Alain—if she was evencapableof it—he placed his hand on her knee.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. You don’t—”
“There was a fire,” she said softly. She recalled Alain’s words from the other night. Though she didn’twantto speak of this, maybe it was what sheneeded. She slipped her fingers in the gaps between his. “A few weeks after I started at Atterdell, a group of boys got drunk and wandered into my family’s orchard. One of them got the bright idea to start a bonfire. You can guess what happened next.”
Alain gasped. “Gods, that’s horrible.”
“It was the smoke that killed my parents and brother, not the fire.” She laughed darkly. “A small blessing, I suppose, after I lost my family, the farm,everything. With no means of paying my tuition, I had to drop out and move in with my only remaining relative—my uncle, who hated magic so much, he forbade mefrom practicing it so long as I lived under his roof. He definitely wasn’t going to spare a single copper to send me back to Atterdell.”
Alain squeezed her hand. “He never…hurt you in any way, I hope?”
“Never physically. He was too afraid of my magic to lay a hand on me. But he made it very clear that I wasn’t wanted—and my magic surges, even less so.”
“I’m sorry. I can only imagine how awful that must have been.”
Mavery shrugged. “I only lived there for a few months, and I wasn’t forced to perform any hard labor. Not after a particularly gory incident involving the rooster.” Alain’s eyes widened, and she laughed halfheartedly. “I’ll need several bottles of wine before I tell youthatstory. Let me put it this way: a broken mirror and sprouting floorboards are among the least damaging things my magic surges have done.
“Anyway, since my uncle didn’t trust me around the livestock, he had me manage the bookkeeping. Every week, I’d make a few changes to his ledgers, skim a little off the top for myself, until I’d saved enough to strike out on my own. I suppose my life of crime began well before I got caught up with the Dragons.”
“You were resourceful. I can’t fault you for that.”
Speaking about this had always brought about magic surges, which was why she tried to avoid doing so at all costs. At times, eventhinkingabout it for too long had been enough. Now, there was no roiling arcana, no fire thrashing in her veins. Maybe enough time had passed, this chapter of her life no longer had that effect on her.
Or, maybe it had nothing to do with time, but with her present company.
“If you need a moment, the spell can wait,” Alain said.
Mavery shook her head. “I’m ready. Let’s do it now, before it gets dark.”
She followed him to the center of the campsite. He turned his wrist to disable the barrier of protective wards, then turned to the page in his notebook where he’d written the incantations Mavery was to perform. She’d practiced them earlier that morning, under the same protections he’d just removed.
With the notebook in hand, she approached the nearest tree, placed her palm flat against the bark. She began with the fireproofing ward, as she’d succeeded with that spell twice already. The resonating ward, though more complex, came to her easily, as did the soundproofing spell. She rattled off the runes without stumbling over a single one. The anti-Sensing potion once again dampened the sensation of Ether, turning it into a cool but tolerable breeze.
And then came the detonation ward. At fifty-six syllables, it was the most complex of the lot, with the greatest consequence for failure. Her pulse quickened as she carefully spoke the incantation. In her head, she sounded less like she was reciting a poem and more like she was butchering a nursery rhyme.
Once the final syllable escaped her lips, she tore her hand away from the trunk as her heart continued to pound against her ribcage. Though she knew this was the same harmless ward Alain had used yesterday, she still didn’t want to risk setting it off accidentally.
Speaking Etherean for longer than usual had rendered her mouth and throat cold, her tongue numb. She turned to Alain, whose broad smile warmed her by several degrees.
“You’re a natural,” he said as she gave back his notebook. “That was expertly done.”
“Even the detonation ward?”
He shrugged as he paged through the book, returning to the Sensing spell. “If you made a mistake, I didn’t hear it. And from the amount of magic I can feel in the air, the Ether didn’t, either.”
He took a stone from his pocket, then stepped away to place the augmentation that would replicate her spells to all the trees within a small radius. Without the potion, Mavery would have seen colorful tendrils spanning from tree to tree, encircling the campsite. Instead, all she sensed was fatigue from having expended so much of her arcana all at once. It would take her months—potentially years—of practice before she could match Alain’s stamina for spellcasting.
“All right.” He returned to her side and took a deep breath. “Here goes nothing.”
He began the spell, and the Ether answered him immediately.Light erupted all around them as if Alain had conjured a hundred pure-white orbs all at once. Mavery instinctively squeezed her eyes shut and threw up her arm. But then she slowly blinked her eyes open to watch the colors bleed in. Gold, violet, red, and pink swirled around the trees, turning the bark incandescent.
