Page 24 of A Tower of Half-Truths
Only an hour ago, she would have accepted any excuse to avoid tolerating Aventus’s company for gods knew how much longer. It was too soon to know for certain, but Alain seemed significantly more tolerable.
And, with his guard lowered, robbing him would be significantly easier.
Seven
By the end of her first week as a wizard’s assistant, Mavery had made two crucial discoveries.
First, herrealtask was proving more difficult than tracking down hundreds of library books. With Alain constantly around, her casing had been confined to book pages. While searching the libraries of the wealthy, Mavery would often come across bond certificates and currency used as bookmarks. Somehow, the affluent couldn’t resist flaunting their wealth in subtle ways, even in the privacy of their own libraries.
Alain tended to use whatever flat debris had been closest at hand: scraps of paper, playing cards, silk ribbons, the occasional tea envelope that left a hint of herbs and spices on the pages. Mavery had been removing these as she came across them and adding them to a pile that now resembled a magpie’s nest. An eccentric, but completely worthless, collection.
Her second discovery was that wizards’ books were incrediblyboring.Alain had told her she could borrow anything from his personal collection that piqued her interest. But she was more likely to find a sack of jewels than an entertaining book. Most of them were so full of complicated diagrams and scholarly babble, she couldn’t read more than a paragraph or two before her eyes glazed over.
The books Alain himself had penned weren’t much better. Mavery had come across one of his recent texts,On Etherean Metaphysics. It had more to do with the philosophy of magic than the mechanics of it, but she had only tolerated a single page of jargon-filled sentences before setting it aside.
Presently, she was leafing throughThe Historical Uses of Gardemancy Spells on Merchant Marine Vessels. She landed on a chapter devoted to barnacle-repelling wards. With a scoff, she turned to the book’s front matter and made some notes for the new cataloging system she was in the early stages of developing.
“What is it?” Alain asked from his armchair. Her sounds of boredom had been louder than she’d realized.
“Just wondering why you wizards insist on stripping all the magic from, well,magic.“ She held up the book she’d just cataloged.
“I think a colleague gifted me that one,” he said.
“Seems less of a gift and more of a punishment.”
He chuckled. “Such things usually are.”
Her lower back twinged in protest as she rose from the floor. Gods, what she wouldn’t give for proper seating. But the room was too cluttered to move any of the furniture, not even Alain’s spindly desk chair.
“I have another stack for Chitterton College,” she said. “When did you say their courier was coming?”
“Next Trisday, if memory serves.”
“We should move these to the storage room, get them out of the way until then.”
She lifted the stack, then inched her way across the room. Alain closed his book and sprung from his armchair.
“Oh, no, it’s already filled to bursting,” he said quickly. “Let me fetch one of my transmutated bags. Stay right there.”
He unlocked the door with one of the keys he wore around his neck. Sparing a glance over his shoulder, he opened the door just wide enough to squeeze through the gap, but not an inch more. From the little Mavery could see, the room hardly looked “filled to bursting.” There was no avalanche of forgotten belongings, no floor-to-ceiling stacks of crates, nothing keeping him from openingthe door all the way—other than his desire to prevent her from looking in. Whatever valuables Alain owned, they had to be in that room.
He returned with what appeared to be an ordinary satchel, until he showed her the iridescent void that filled the inside. He offloaded the books from her arms, but no matter how many he placed in the satchel, the canvas didn’t stretch, and it didn’t become weighed down in the slightest.
“It’s a rather basic spell,” he said, apparently noticing her raised brows. “Well, ‘basic’ for the Transmutation School, at any rate.”
“I definitely skipped those lessons.”
“Transmutation spells have the highest risk of fatal accidents, and so they are only taught to sixth-year students. Judging by your reaction, I assume you didn’t make it that far in your studies.”
She’d only made it sixweeksinto her education—a far cry from the six years required for prospective wizards, or even the four years required for everyone else. Instead of admitting to that, she only shook her head.
“If you can make a bag larger on the inside,” she said, “couldn’t you turn that small room into limitless storage space?”
He laughed. “You reallyhavegotten rusty if you’ve forgotten Elymor’s Law of Proportions.”
“Let’s pretend that I have.”
“Well, in essence, the larger the spell’s area of effect, the larger the anchor required to power the spell. This satchel requires only a tiny anchor.” He tapped one of the silver buckles on the shoulder strap; it glowed with a silver aura, and a ley line tethered it to the enlarged pocket. “To transmutate my storage room, I would need an anchor, oh, at least twice as large as this satchel. But an Ether-sensitive boulder wouldn’t just be absurdly expensive; it would completely clash with my décor!”
