The Spell Realm (10 page)

Now it was Blaise who couldn’t restrain his curiosity. “But how did you learn?” he asked, studying Liva. “I’ve never met anyone who simply dabbles in sorcery.”

“I learned from my father,” Liva explained, stirring the vegetables in the skillet. There was a hint of nostalgia in her voice. “He was an apprentice who got his arm blown off during his first test in the Tower. He also injured another apprentice. To punish him, they made him perform menial tasks around the Tower, and he chose to leave instead. He had a lot of pride, my father did. He continued learning some spells on his own, and even though he wasn’t very good, he still taught me some things in secret.”

“Why didn’t your father take you to the Tower then?” Blaise asked, frowning. “If you had an aptitude for sorcery, then you could’ve become an acolyte.”

“By the time he started teaching me, we were already here, far away from the Tower. Besides, he hated them, and he wouldn’t have been happy if I’d left to go to Turingrad. Not that I would have—it’s a miracle we made it here safely in the first place.” And she busied herself with food preparations, looking uncomfortable with the topic.

“Can I help?” Gala asked, approaching the woman. From her time at the inn, she knew how to cook, and she wanted to lend a hand if Liva allowed it.

Liva shot her a wary look. “If you want, child. Are you a sorceress, like this one here?” She jerked her chin toward Blaise.

“Something like that,” Gala murmured, starting to chop up mushrooms. “I’m not very good, though—”

“Not very good?” Esther snorted. “Right, sure.”

“I’m still learning,” Gala insisted, and Blaise frowned at Esther in warning, causing the old woman to fall silent. Blaise didn’t want these people to know about Gala’s unpredictable powers, Gala realized, and she was in agreement with that decision. Given what had happened before, she understood the importance of discretion now, and she was determined to do her best to fit in at this new place.

“So you gathered all these plants in the woods?” Maya asked, changing the subject, and the older women began discussing the best ways to find edible mushrooms. Listening to them, Gala worked quietly, not wanting to draw any more attention to herself.

Before long, the meal was ready.

They sat down to eat at a large wooden table. “Your house is quite large for the two of you,” Blaise remarked, noticing that the table had room for six people.

“It seems large now—” Liva smiled, “—but when our three sons lived with us, it was quite crowded. The boys have now grown up and married, living in houses of their own, so we have some extra room.”

“The food is wonderful,” Gala said as they began to eat. “I’ve never had anything so delicious before.” And it was true—even Esther’s stew paled in comparison to the rich, hearty mix of flavors she was tasting now.

“The food is fresher than what you would get back in the territories,” Liva explained. “The soil here has not been abused as much.”

“Plus she’s probably famished,” Esther muttered, shooting Gala a frosty look. Gala blinked, startled, and then she realized that she had inadvertently offended the woman who had fed her several times.

“Your stew was delightful too,” she reassured Esther, trying to make up for her blunder. “And you’re right—I’m very, very hungry.”

Esther’s expression thawed out. “I know, child. And the food here is pretty good, I must admit. Look, even Blaise is eating.”

Turning to look at her creator, Gala noticed that he was wolfing down the dishes with signs of obvious enjoyment.

When they were done, Gala felt comfortably full and relaxed. Before long, she began to get sleepy and was overcome by a yawn.

“You must all be tired from your journey,” Liva said. “I have two extra rooms.” She paused, looking at Blaise and Gala. “Perhaps the two of you can share one, and Maya and Esther can take the other?”

Blaise looked taken aback, but Gala liked that idea quite a bit. “Sure,” she said brightly. “I’d love to sleep with Blaise.” The idea of sleeping near her creator was very appealing to her.

Maya and Esther burst out laughing, and Blaise looked uncomfortable for some reason. Liva grinned. Gala frowned at them, unsure what she’d done wrong this time.

“Sure you would, child,” Maya said after a bit, wiping away tears of laughter. “If I were young like you, I would too.”

“Of course you would, you strumpet . . .” Esther looked like she would die from laughter.

“Strumpet?” Gala asked, her frown deepening—and then it hit her. In the books she’d read, sometimes ‘sleeping’ was used as a euphemism for sexual relations. They must’ve thought she wanted that with Blaise.

They weren’t necessarily wrong, but that wasn’t what she meant. She had a feeling, though, that if she tried to explain herself, she would just make things worse. One didn’t admit to wanting sex so bluntly, she knew that much, and she felt slightly embarrassed that she had inadvertently broken that societal taboo.

At that moment, Blaise stepped into the conversation. “That’s enough,” he said quietly, his serious tone cutting through the hilarity that reigned in the room. “Gala is tired, and we need to rest. Liva, thank you for your hospitality, and we’d love to take you up on your offer of the room.”

And with that, he followed Liva toward the back of the house, with Gala gratefully trailing in their wake, even as Maya and Esther resumed laughing at the kitchen table.

When they reached the room, Liva pointed out the bed—a straw-filled mattress on the floor—and quickly departed, stifling a smile.

Gala yawned again, feeling tired, and Blaise turned toward her. “Gala,” he said softly, reaching out to touch her cheek lightly with his fingers, “let’s go to sleep, all right?”

She nodded, her lids growing heavy. As intrigued as she was by the possibility of sex with Blaise, at the moment sleep was quite appealing too.

Blaise stepped away, taking off his shoes and outer tunic, then sat down on the bed. Gala followed his example, joining him there. Yawning, she lay down and saw Blaise stretch out beside her. In the last few moments before she was overcome by sleep, she felt him put his arm around her, drawing her closer . . . and then she slept, warm and content in his embrace.

* * *

When she woke up, Blaise was already gone. Entering the kitchen, Gala saw him sitting at the table, talking to Liva.

“Good morning,” he said warmly, seeing Gala come into the room. “Come have breakfast, and then we can maybe go for a walk, see the surrounding areas.”

Gala grinned at him, excited at the idea, and began eating the berries Liva had prepared for breakfast. Now that she wasn’t so tired, she couldn’t wait to spend more time with Blaise.

A few minutes later, she was done with breakfast and ready to explore.

Exiting the house, Gala and Blaise walked down a broad path made by the villagers. It was a street of sorts, the only street in the village. After passing a few houses, they turned off the main path and headed into the woods.

As they walked through the greenery, Gala stared at the gorgeous nature surrounding them. “This is beautiful,” she said as they entered a small clearing in the woods. “Not as beautiful as yesterday’s lake, of course, but still quite nice.”

Blaise smiled at her. “Would you like to go back there?”

“Sure,” Gala said, smiling back at him. “But isn’t it far away now?”

“Not if we fly there,” he said and began chanting the words of a spell. When he was done, he explained, “This will summon the chaise to us. It should get here shortly.”

Gala grinned at him. “Great. What should we do while we wait?” She had one idea . . .

“How about I try to teach you how to control your magic?” Blaise suggested.

It wasn’t exactly what Gala had in mind, but she wanted this too. “Of course, I’d love that,” she said earnestly. Maybe if she had better control of her abilities, Blaise wouldn’t feel like he needed to protect her all the time.

“I have a couple of ideas for how to go about it,” he said, sitting down on the grass. “I think, for starters, I can teach you how to do sorcery our way, with verbal and written spells. It might help you understand it better, so you can gain control over that part of you that does something similar.”

That made sense to Gala. She sat down beside him and gave him her attention.

“I do wish I still had access to my house,” he said ruefully. “It would make things a lot easier.” He seemed sad for a moment, then shook it off. “Regardless, I should still be able to show you verbal spell casting, and I also brought some written spells with me when I rushed to your rescue. Those will have to do for now.”

Gala nodded, an idea beginning to form in the back of her mind. Perhaps Blaise wouldn’t need to be without his house for long . . .

“Another thing we could try is for you to learn to control and understand your emotions, since you seem to do magic when you experience strong feelings,” Blaise continued. “This might be a bit harder. Unlike the sorcery code, emotions are very imprecise.”

“I would love to learn more about human emotions in general,” Gala said, giving him a warm look.

He smiled. “Well, why don’t we begin with spells,” he said, “and see where we go from there. As you probably already know, both verbal and written spells require that you learn a new language. Two related languages, strictly speaking. One builds on the other, so once you master speaking spells, learning the written part will be easy.”

“I find it strange that oral casting is harder, but written casting lets you create more complicated spells,” Gala observed, remembering what Blaise had told her once.

He nodded. “The best analogy is to compare doing complex arithmetic in your head, which would be like using the spoken spells, to writing out equations on paper. Doing math in your head is much harder, and the complexity of the math you can do is much less.”

Gala cocked her head to the side. “Actually, I’m not sure if that’s true for me . . .”

He laughed. “Right, of course. I almost forgot that your mind can do any kind of math. But I can assure you, for most people, my analogy would work. You see, with written spells, because the coding language is simpler and more powerful, one can weave greater complexity into the spell. For verbal spells, the longer and more complex they are, the greater the risk of error—of saying something wrong. There have been a lot of accidents and unfortunate deaths as a result of that.” He paused, then added wryly, “Spells have gone awry because of something as simple as a sneeze.”

“A sneeze?” Gala found that absurdly funny.

He grinned briefly. “Indeed. Also, another powerful feature of written spells is that you can mix and match existing spell components—or even short, simple spells that had already proven themselves. That allows one to prepare ahead of time instead of always having to recreate the spell from scratch by speaking it—and that obviously saves time as a result.”

Gala nodded. This all made sense to her. She was impressed that Blaise had been the one to come up with the simplified language that enabled them to do the written form of sorcery. She recalled him telling her about himself and Augusta inventing the Interpreter Stone, and she felt an unpleasant twinge of some dark emotion. She didn’t like the idea of him being so close to that woman, she realized—of having worked with her . . . having loved her.

“Why don’t we start with teleportation?” he said, interrupting her thoughts. “Over short distances, it’s actually a fairly simple spell. You have done this without conscious control, but I will teach you how to do it using a verbal spell.”

“That would be amazing,” Gala said eagerly. Of all the feats she’d done, she had the least understanding of how she’d been able to get herself from one place to another in a blink of an eye.

“Great.” He smiled. “Before we go into the details of the actual language, let me tell you the spirit of what you would be doing. You need to be thinking of the world surrounding you as a set of coordinates. Think of the three-dimensional space around you as little cubes or spheres, whichever suits you, and establish a mathematical convention for naming each location.”

Gala visualized a grid ahead of her, picturing the meadow covered by evenly placed, tiny pebbles, where each pebble had its own unique name. The names were not fancy: pebble one was next to pebble two and so on a million times around the area of the meadow. She could also easily picture a whole meadow filled up with these imaginary pebbles and name them around the volume of the space. If she wanted what Blaise called a coordinate, she just needed to name the right pebble.

“I have it,” she told him. The entire process took her only moments.

He raised his eyebrows, looking impressed. “I was just beginning my explanation.”

Gala grinned at him. “Well, you can move on. I understand these coordinate things.”

“All right then, teleporting requires you to pick a coordinate you want to end up at. You need to plan your spell carefully. If you are going someplace outside your line of vision, you had better plan for what happens if there is an object already at that coordinate. That’s why long-distance teleportation is so dangerous.” He took a breath, then continued, “You need to picture your own body split into the same sub-units as the coordinates, so you can specify exactly the space you will occupy when the spell is done.”