Spiral Path (Night Calls Series Book 3) (33 page)

The boy was high-strung, sensitive, and keenly interested in
getting things “right.” I wondered at Professor Tonneman’s icy verbal
discipline. I hated to be publicly embarrassed, and it made me less likely to
listen to whoever caused that embarrassment.

Could I get James to relax in the herbal class?

I planned to try.

“Mr. Smith, I noticed that you did not want to help in
preparing and boiling the mint and ginger,” I started, leaning back against the
heavy teacher’s desk. “Do you not care for the lab classes?”

He stared at me.

I considered the day. His first attempt at the flowing water
spell had caused a geyser of water from his wand, spraying himself and others
close by him, and drying the snow around him to light powder. “Or were you
worried that you are so tense that we’d have mint tea everywhere?”

A pause, and then a small nod.

“Well, the business with the water spell was uncomfortable,
but if you can figure out how you did what you did, that version of the spell
might come in handy one day,” I said.

“But I never know how I do it,” he answered, his voice soft.
“Things just . . . happen.”

“Perhaps we can figure out a few things about . . .
how you work. For example, I would like to know how the biscuits last week
ended up so . . . fierce.”

If possible, the boy looked even more miserable.

“
In
trade, I will teach you how to make wonderful biscuits. No one will ever laugh
at you again about the biscuits, except your friends when they’re just jesting.
No one will want to be stricken from the list of people invited over for your
biscuits!”

“D—Mr. Williams would like to learn how to make biscuits,”
he said promptly.

“And Saturday morning I will teach you all how to make
biscuits for dinner,” I replied. “I meant that I am willing to trade my special
tea biscuit recipe for your biscuits with teeth.”

“
Why?”
he asked, and then looked stricken.

I suspected that he had remembered that I was also a
teacher.

“I want to make my brothers laugh,” I answered with as much
sincerity as I could. Under no circumstances could he know that I felt sorry
for him, and wanted him to feel better. He would be appalled.

I also thought I’d be a better teacher for him if I could
figure out how he saw the world, and what formed his spells.

And my brothers
would
like the biscuits with teeth!

“Have we a bargain?” I asked.

“I . . . I will try to remember,” he said.

“Good.” I stood up straight and moved over to the shelves by
the working fireplace. “I have small amounts of ingredients here to use for
making biscuits. Tell me how you did it.”

Silence. I looked over my shoulder.

In the fading day, Mr. Smith actually looked pale. “We’re
not going to try it again, are we?”

I blinked. “Of course we are. It’s the only way to know if
we’re on the right track. Now, how did you begin?”

“We used much larger amounts of things,” he said doubtfully,
looking at the containers that I set on the worktable.

“Yes, but we don’t want to be chasing an entire pan of
biscuits around the house, do we?” I gestured to the small cast iron Dutch oven
I had borrowed from Mrs. Gardener (She had acted very disapproving, but I think
she secretly wanted to know how he had made the biscuits.) “We will make twelve
square biscuits. That will keep them from rolling, at any rate. If we don’t let
them get to another energy source, they won’t be able to do something like hop
up the chimney.”

“Oh.” This thought seemed to reassure the boy. Then, he
asked shyly: “Should we write down what we’re going to do?”

“An excellent suggestion. That way, if it doesn’t work, we’ll
know what not to do next time.”

Mr. Smith got his workbook, and I started setting the
ingredients on the table, measured into small containers. “Flour, butter, milk,
salt, baking soda, cream of tartar, eggs—”

“Eggs?”

I turned toward him. “You didn’t use eggs in your recipe?”

His expression was puzzled. “I didn’t know eggs went into
biscuits. I didn’t know any kind of cream went into biscuits.”

I remembered the smell of yeast when that biscuit
burped . . . there was no yeast in biscuits. “Tell me what you used,” I said, opening
my own notebook and picking up my square English pencil. “I’ll write it down.”

That James could do. Far from not knowing how he had done
it, Mr. Smith immediately rattled off the list of what he had tossed into his
biscuit recipe. He’d used several teaspoons of cane sugar, and had no eggs or
cream of tartar.

Looking at the list, I was not sure where to begin, because
without a proper mix of soda and cream of tartar, or even eggs, there was no
way to get these biscuits to rise.

“How did you mix these ingredients up?” I started.

“I stirred the big spoon into the butter and sugar, until it
was soft. Then I added the milk, and finally the other things.” James reached
to set each item next to the other as he spoke.

I stared at him as he worked his way through the
ingredients, wondering if he’d gotten the idea from watching his mother bake a
cake, and then added more flour.

“Did you grease the pan?” I asked when he paused for breath.

“Oh, yes! Greased and floured it. But that wasn’t until the
next morning.”

Oh, really?

I felt like a hound quivering at a scent. “So what did you
do with the dough?”

“I dumped it out on the bread board, and covered it with a
clean towel.”

Or perhaps he’d wandered through the kitchen and spotted
someone baking bread . . . .

“When did you continue?”

“The next morning.” Now James looked unhappy. “The dough had
barely risen at all! That’s when I panicked. I poured more sugar into it,
because when things are sweet people usually don’t care much about the rest.
And then I . . . took my wand and . . . encouraged
the heap of dough.”

“Encouraged,” I repeated. “Do you remember what you said?”

“I told it to rise.”

Ah.

I didn’t know a lot of Latin, but I knew enough to feel
uneasy.

“Which word for
rise
did you use?”

The boy kept his gaze on the bowl. “I was in a hurry, and
afraid it wouldn’t work? So I commanded it. I said
resurge
!”

I thought about what to say next. If he had left the mess on
the breadboard, there was always a chance of a few crumbs of leftover yeast
there . . . or even wild yeast, which was always in the air. But wild yeast usually
took a few days to start to work on the sponge of dough. Even if he’d used
baking soda and cream of tartar, by waiting overnight the dough would have been
dead and the gas long escaped.

“Mr. Smith,” I started. “The Romans had several words for
rise. The one my father taught me when we talked about bread rising was
oriri
, like our English word for Orient.
In the east, the sun rises, and in the west—the Occidental lands—the sun sets.
But when you want a person to stand up quickly, the command is ‘Surge!’ You
added the prefix ‘Re’ to the word . . . which means
back
or
again
.”

“Again rise. To give it more emphasis,” the boy said.

I was positive he was not a Catholic.

I wasn’t sure if he was a Christian.

“
Resurge
is what
the English word ‘resurrection’ comes from,” I said, waiting to see if he would
understand.

James stared at me.

“Had you noticed that there was no yeast in your recipe?
Biscuits don’t need yeast, that’s why they are so handy to make quickly. There
are no hours of preparation with biscuits. You mix the proper amounts of baking
soda and cream of tartar, a reaction occurs, and the biscuits rise.”

“So the biscuits should not have risen?” James asked
faintly.

“No, they should not have risen. But you may have
accidentally rolled some yeast crumbs into your dough. Or some wild yeast may
have landed on your towel, and gotten on the dough that way. Not enough to
matter. The yeast would have bloomed, but not enough to expand the dough.”
Probably collapsed happy, if yeast can be
happy
, I thought. “But you took a magic wand, channeled all your power to
the dough, and told it to resurrect. You ordered it to rise.

“And it did,” I finished, watching his face. “At least, I
suspect that’s what happened. It rose with the force of resurrection.”

The boy blanched. “I’ve . . . blasphemed,” he
whispered.

“No! Not at all!” My words rolled right on top of each
other. “You ordered something—yeast—to do what it does naturally. You told it
to rise, and it did! You didn’t try to make something dead come to life. Yeast
is a . . . a seed, in a way. Under the right conditions, it
starts to grow. You just rolled that seed into very good soil!”

I wasn’t sure that I’d convinced him, but he didn’t look
quite so stricken. “Should we try this again?” he asked, his voice doubtful.

“If we’re going to get the same result, we need to mix up
your dough recipe, and then leave it a while with a towel over it. I should
also get a few grains of yeast to insert in another lump of dough.” I considered.
“We can cut the dough in half—yeast in one ball, none in the other. I’ll get
another Dutch oven as well. Then, this evening, we can see if we can get a
response from either lump of dough.”

“It doesn’t have to rest overnight?” he asked.

“Most yeast dough only needs to rest until it doubles in
bulk,” I explained, separating his dough into two balls so we could cover them
separately. “A few things rest overnight, but I don’t think that had anything
to do with your biscuits, except for making you panic. We’re going to start
where you did—find dough that hasn’t risen, add sugar, and then you can try
your command again.”

“So, after supper, then?” he said, his tone distracted.

“Yes. Can you come here at that time?” I waited, because he
had not expected this, and if it were a problem, I would try his choice of
words myself.

“May I bring Mr. Williams?” he asked.

“Yes, if he sits quietly and watches. At least until the
biscuits need catching! But only Daniel,” I added quickly. “Let’s keep this a secret
for now.”

I could just imagine my cousin’s face if I had a herd of
children conjuring scraps of dough all over the place.

Nodding his agreement, Mr. Smith helped me tidy up the table
and hearth. While we cleaned, I decided to start my other little project.

“Mr. Smith,” I said as I swept the hearth. “Why is it that
you end up serving kitchen duty so often?”

The boy was carefully scraping dough off the wooden table
with a small wood paddle. “Well . . . D—Mr. Williams usually
ends up on kitchen duty,” he said vaguely.

“Yes, I’d noticed that. He’s not volunteering, is he?” I
asked.

James looked surprised. “No, Miss, he doesn’t volunteer . . .
really.”

“So how do you end up on kitchen duty? You don’t get in
trouble because he gets in trouble, do you?”

James actually looked alarmed. “I . . . get
in fights.”

“I see. Do these fights have different reasons for starting,
or are they usually about the same thing?”

Silence.

“You do realize that if you continue to end up on kitchen
duty, Professor Livingston will notice.” James stiffened; he was clearly
alarmed at the idea of Professor Livingston noticing. “How are you disguising
the bruises, by the way? Arnica?”

“Oh, one of the students is good with bruises. Fixes us up
right away,” he said with a fair attempt at sounding off-handed.

We have a touch healer
among us
? That was rare, and needed to be carefully nurtured. Touch healers
could burn themselves out quickly if not careful with their gifts. I’d have to
ask my cousin about that.

“If you need to talk to someone about the fights, just know
that I will listen,” I said, matching his tone. “I was raised with four
brothers. I know how these things happen.” I flicked the last of the debris
into the fireplace, where it would either burn up in the cinders or be shoveled
out during fire tending.

“They keep fooling around with their wands,” James said
slowly, his back to me. “They want me to burn things. They don’t understand.”

“That you don’t want to burn things?” I said.

“No! I
want
to
burn things! It’s easy to burn things! The problem is stopping!”

Ah. So . . . better to be a fighter than
known as someone who had no control, or feared loss of control. That made a
kind of sense.

“I understand that some of the professors give private
lessons,” I began. “Have you asked—”

“No! He’ll keep me from doing any magic at all!”

“Are you sure of that? Why would that be a bad thing, right
now?”

The boy’s pale face flushed, and smoke rose from the top of
his head.

A pitcher of water remained on the table next to the dough. Any
weapon at need.

“It sounds like you need some advice,” I said slowly. “I
could inquire for you, without using your name.” Of course I had at least two,
and possibly more fire mages in my class. It could not be kept a secret
forever. “Is this something that you are afraid of happening, Mr. Smith? Or
something that you are afraid of happening . . . again?”

The boy seemed to get a grip on himself—the smoke began to
dissipate. He studied me for a long moment, as if weighing something. “This is
a secret,” he finally said.

“I’m good at secrets, unless someone could die if they’re
not told,” I replied, gesturing toward the chairs around the big table. “So
weigh that in your telling.”

“It already happened,” James went on, sounding defeated. He
pulled out a high-backed spindle chair and sat down.

I sat down across from him and waited for him to continue
speaking. “We were helping to set up some hams in my uncle’s smokehouse. He was
showing us how he built layers of wood to direct the smoke. I wanted to help by
lighting the fire. I’ve done that before, just laid my hand on a faggot of
wood, and the thing bursts into flame like a torch.” He fiddled with the wood
utensils in the bucket on the edge of the table.