Over the course of three bells spent under Master Grenfell’s instruction, Liv realized just how hopelessly lost she was.

The first hour consisted of studying what the master mage called ‘grammar,’ and she found the entire thing twisted her mind into knots. She had never really had to think about language before: people just talked, didn’t they? Sometimes you learned a new word that you’d never heard before, but that was normal. What was there to study?

But no, apparently words were sorted into different categories, and those categories had names. Why anyone would possibly need to know those names, Liv couldn’t understand. She supposed Master Grenfell must have a reason, and she was willing to take it on faith he thought it necessary, but she had never heard any of this before.

When the mage understood just how lost she was, he set the two older girls to drawing strange diagrams of words and lines on their slates, and then pulled a chair up next to Liv and her desk. “We will begin with parts of speech,” he said. “Let us talk about pronouns.”

Personal attention from Master Grenfell helped to calm Liv’s rising panic. She’d never attended a class on anything, before. Everything she’d ever learned had been from working with her mother, or Gretta, or one of the other servants in the kitchens. She tried to ignore whatever Mirabel and Griselda were whispering about, and did her best to stuff her worries about the sheriff at the back of her mind.

“I imagine your mother has taught you to cook a few things, hasn’t she?” Master Grenfell asked. Liv nodded. “Tell me something you know how to cook well.”

“Oatcakes,” Liv said, after thinking for a moment. Mostly, she was only allowed to help in small ways: measuring out ingredients, rolling dough, or mixing batter. But Gretta had taught her how to make oatcakes from beginning to end the year before, so that she could make a birthday breakfast for her mother.

“Good,” Grenfell said. “I don’t know that I have ever made oatcakes, Miss Brodbeck. Tell me, what ingredients do you need to use?”

“Oats, of course,” Liv said. “And good cinnamon from Lendh ka Dakruim. And then egg whites. Butter to fry them in, and some fresh fruit or preserves to put on top when you serve them.”

“Cinnamon is a spice, I believe?” the mage asked, and Liv nodded. “There are other spices that you use in the kitchen as well. Mace, pepper, clove… would the oatcakes taste right if you were to use clove, instead of cinnamon?”

“No!” Liv shook her head and made a face. “Ew. Why would you do that?”

“But they are both spices, aren’t they?” Grenfell said. “What difference does it make?”

“Different spices have different tastes,” she said. “You can’t just put any spice in any recipe. It doesn’t work.”

“I would like,” Master Grenfell said, “for you to think about different kinds of words as different kinds of ingredients. Like spices, you cannot simply use any pronoun you like. You cannot make an entire meal of spices, either - you need vegetables, meats, and what have you. Nor can you make a sentence of only pronouns, or only verbs. Making a functioning sentence is like following a recipe.”

Liv hadn’t thought of it like that before - in fact, she hadn’t even realized that you could think of talking in that way. “Some ingredients bind others together,” she mused, thinking through the comparison. “You need yeast to make bread rise, or butter to fry something in. Otherwise it doesn’t work.”

“Correct,” Grenfell said. “And without the right kinds of words, a sentence doesn’t work. Which is why your magic went completely out of control, and nearly killed you.”

“I only had one ingredient,” Liv realized.

“Which meant that you were doomed to failure. I need you to learn how words and sentences work, before you use your magic again,” the mage continued. “But I cannot have you learning using Vædic. You must learn and practice the principles using what you already know, because that is how we teach safely. Once you understand, you can begin learning Vædic. And to begin with, you are going to memorize a chart of pronouns.”

It was still daunting, but at least what she was being asked to do made sense after that conversation. Liv didn’t actually have to learn new words - she already knew every one that was on the chart. She had to learn a new way of organizing them, of thinking about them. First, second and third person, singular and plural, male or female. There were categories within categories, like foods that were savory or sweet. She thought that she might be just beginning to get the hang of it when Master Grenfell moved the three girls on to doing something else at the top of the second hour of class time.

That something else, as it turned out, was a skill that Liv felt much more comfortable with: singing. She’s been joining her mother and Gretta in cooking songs for as long as she could remember, and even Archibald agreed that she had a nice voice. Again, however, Master Grenfell approached things in a way that was entirely strange to her. Instead of just starting a song and encouraging her to sing along, he had them breathing in all sorts of odd ways.

“Breathe in and hold,” Grenfell commanded, pacing around the three girls. “Hold. Hold… and exhale.” Liv gasped out, and struggled to follow along when the master mage instructed them to breathe in again. He had them use the muscles in their stomachs, or their lips and their nostrils, and to make specific sounds that he said would help them improve.

Liv would have preferred just singing, especially because all of these exercises and tricks seemed to be things that Mirabel and Griselda were familiar with. They were able to do what Master Grenfell asked perfectly, the first time, while Liv often needed the mage to show her again, or take time to correct her. By the end of the second hour, she was no longer panicked about grammar or the sheriff, but simply frustrated at how much the mage could complicate something that had always been simple and fun for her.

It was the third hour, however, that finally made Liv feel as if she were really learning about magic. Ending breathing and voice exercises with the striking of the horologe at eleventh bell, Master Grenfell extracted a large, leather-bound book from one of his shelves, opened it, and placed it on his lectern. That was another new word that Liv had learned over the course of a very long morning.

“This,” he began, probably for Liv’s benefit, “is a bestiary produced by the mage guild - specifically, by Master Blackwood at the College of Vædic Grammar. It is the responsibility of every guild member who participates in the culling of a rift to submit a report on the beasts encountered during the culling, so that guild records can be updated. Those notes make their way into new editions of this book.” He patted the tome with one hand. “We have been covering beasts commonly found in or around the rift at Bald Peak. We have extensive notes due to the Summerset family's many culling expeditions over the years of their reign here.”

“Like the bat on the wall of the Room of Curiosities?” Liv asked, speaking before she could stop herself.

“Indeed,” Grenfell said. “In fact, since we have such a convenient example, why don’t we take that as our subject for the day. Come along, girls,” he said, hefting the book into his arms. “Follow me.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Liv sprang up from her chair, and then followed the mage out the door of the chamber and down the hall. She wanted to know about the strange stones and bony growths on the enormous, stuffed creature, and she was so excited about learning that she didn’t pay attention to the two young women behind her.

Liv had just set the tip of her crutch down, and was about to lift her good foot, when someone stepped on her heel from behind. With a cry, Liv fell forward and tumbled down onto the stone floor of the hallway. The crutch went clattering out of her grasp, and a sudden shock of pain pierced her bad ankle. Liv winced, and felt her eyes beginning to tear up.

“Watch your step,” Griselda sneered at her as the two girls went by, stepping around her.

“You’re so clumsy,” Mirabel added, kicking the crutch as she went by so that it skittered even farther away, where Liv coldn’t reach it without crawling. “Ooops. Better hurry up, cripple.”

Master Grenfell paused, turning to look back and frowning when he saw Liv on the ground. “Are you injured, Miss Broadbeck?” he asked.

“I’ll be alright,” Liv said, reaching her crutch and using it to help her get to her feet.

“You may need to slow down so that she can keep up,” Mirabel remarked, with an innocent expression on her face.

The mage frowned, and for just a moment Liv thought that he was going to do something to punish the awful girl. Surely he could see what they had done. Instead, he shook his head. “My apologies, Miss Brodbeck,” Grenfell said. “I should have measured my pace in consideration of your injury. If you are ready, we shall proceed.”

This time, Liv deliberately lagged behind, keeping the two older girls ahead of her where she could see them. She had no intention of giving them another opportunity to hurt her. Unfortunately, doing that meant she was the last one to arrive in the Room of Curiosities, and she had to crane her neck to see past them. Somehow, Griselda and Mirabel always seemed to be in the way, no matter where Liv tried to stand to get a better view of the great bat mounted on the wall.

“Take a good look,” Grenfell invited them. “Visitors to the castle are not generally permitted into this room to view the collection - not without the baron’s express permission. I have special dispensation to make a study of the room’s contents, but if you were not my students you would not be permitted to enter. Be certain you touch nothing while you are here.”

“Are you going to tell us why it has those stones on its body?” Liv asked. Now that they were here, her excitement had returned. She wasn’t going to let those awful girls ruin this. “What did you call them - A-loo-thet-stay-ah?”

“Aluthet'Staia,” Grenfell said, correcting her. “Whitehill’s most valuable natural resource and export,” he explained. “Our agriculture supports our population, and we do produce an excess of cattle suitable for trade. Our miners even find a bit of silver, from time to time, but none of that would be enough to support a town of this size, or to have built such an extensive castle for defense. Who can tell me what these stones are used for, and where they come from?”

Griselda spoke up before anyone else could. “They’re manastones - at least, that is what most people call them. The Mason’s guild mines them at Bald peak.”

“Good,” Master Grenfell said, with a nod. “You can think of each of these stones like a bucket - they can be filled with mana, and then emptied again when that mana is needed. Anyone capable of using high magic will find them valuable, for that reason. While the mage’s guild is probably the single largest consumer of Aluthet'Staia, most noble houses want them as well. This demand, combined with the danger of mining the stone and its rarity, means that what our mine at Bald Peak produces fetches a high price.”

“But how did it get onto that bat?” Liv asked. She kept her eyes on the master mage, doing her best to ignore the looks the older two girls shot her. “Did it just grow there?”

“Something very like that,” Grenfell explained. “Beneath Bald Peak, down in the lowest level of the mines, is a minor rift. Based on artifacts recovered from the shoals, Baron Henry’s late father believed that the Vædic Lords once mined the mountain for these stones, just as we do now. Like many places where the old gods once walked, the lowest depths of the mines spill wild mana out into the world. That mana changes the animals that live in the caverns, or around the slopes of the mountain.”

“Look how large the wingspan of this bat is,” the mage continued. “Over six feet, at full extension. This is not some special species that naturally grows to a monstrous size; it is a normal cave bat, the kind that could be found all throughout the kingdom, in any cavern of sufficient size. It is the transformative effect of the uncontrolled mana which has caused the bat to swell and grow into what you see here. The stones protruding from its skin, and the bone casque along the top of its skull, are produced by the same cause.”

“What is a casque?” Liv asked. She didn’t care what the other two girls thought of her, or what they said - this was what she’d been hoping to learn the day before, when she came to the room with Master Grenfell’s breakfast. It was a magic bat. “You said the mana affects everything that lives on the mountain. Does that mean there are magic mushrooms in the caves? And worms, and spiders?”

“All of that and more,” Grenfell confirmed, with a smile and a laugh. “But let us stick to the bat, for a moment. A casque, Miss Brodbeck, is a bony growth that is porous, nearly hollow, on the inside. Beasts such as this develop them as a way to store mana. The stones, in this case, function more as a sort of armored hide, being too small for any other purpose. No, the casque is what gave this bat its power.” He ran a finger along the ‘v’ shaped bone protrusion atop the monster’s head.

“Those things have killed two miners since last flood,” Griselda remarked. For once this morning, she was saying something that Liv was interested in. “Daddy says the baron is going to have to cull the entire place soon, or the mining won’t be able to continue.”

“That is a discussion for the baron and the guild,” Grenfell stopped her, “and I will not comment on it today, save to assure you all that we are monitoring the rift closely, and there has not yet been an eruption. You may trust that everything is under control. The Bald Peak Rift has been the responsibility of the Summerset family for a very long time, and they are quite familiar with the dangers.”

“In addition to raw size, an armored hide, and the ability to store mana,” the mage continued, “these creatures have a highly developed sense unique to rifts like the one under Bald Peak. They are capable of perceiving the flow of mana itself, which makes them particularly suited to tracking mages in the shoals of the rift.”

“They always roost around the best deposits of manastone,” Griselda agreed, with a nod.

“We actually suspect they feed on it,” Grenfell said. “I have dissected no few of these monsters, and their bellies are often full of small pebbles, emptied of mana.”

“Do they have a name?” Liv asked.

“Most of the miners call them stone bats,” the mage answered. “And Master Blackwood judged that sufficient to use in their entry within the bestiary. It is fortunate we have an example here; you can learn a lot from this. Most of the mutations common around Bald Peak are displayed in this specimen-”

The horologe in one corner of the room chimed noon, interrupting Master Grenfell. “Good day, Master,” Mirabel said, and curtsied. Griselda followed her, and then both women left.

“Liv,” the mage said, “stay behind a moment.”

“I need to be downstairs to resume my duties,” she told him.

“I know. I simply want you to understand something,” Grenfell said, crouching down next to her so that they were nearly on eye level. “Those two girls are not going to be mages.”

“They aren’t?” Liv frowned. “Then why are they here?”

“Their fathers pay for my instruction so that they can attend the College of Vædic Grammar when they turn eighteen,” Master Grenfell explained. “Where they hope to catch a husband. They are merchant girls, Liv, and their families have no magic of their own - only the magic licensed to the guilds. What they do have is youth, beauty, and money. Applied correctly, those things may be enough for them to marry into a noble family, and the College is the best place to meet the sort of young man they are looking for.”

“Oh.” Liv wasn’t quite certain what to say to that. “Is that why they came late?”

Grenfell laughed. “Very perceptive. What I am trying to explain to you, Miss Brodbeck, is that they don’t really care to learn what I am teaching. They need to know just enough to be admitted to the college for a year. You, on the other hand,” he continued, “absolutely need to learn what I am going to teach you. For your own safety, and for the safety of others. I hope that you will remember that, and not allow them to distract you from what you’re here to do.”

“I won’t, sir,” she promised. “About the sheriff-”

“You let me deal with the sheriff,” Master Grenfell told her. “Now go on down to the kitchens. As you said, your duties are waiting for you.”