“What did you get yourself into this time…?” Jake whined, hands and face draped over Mrs. Chandler’s table, “Why is it always like this with you…? Why can’t you cut me some freaking slack?!”
He shouted his last question, slamming down his fist to emphasize his point.
“Sorry…”
“Sorry, he says! He practically sells himself in slavery to a sadist and all he has to say is ‘sorry’! She must be a real cutie!”
“Hey! That murder-head is too much trouble even for me!”
“Oh! So now you have common sense!? Tell me again, where was it when I explicitly told you not to get involve with those people?!”
“Come on! What was I supposed to do?! Leave Jane to be stabbed in the eye? Let go the opportunity of a job that would have solved all our problems? Tell the count to his face that I wouldn’t be respectful to her granddaughter? Give me a break!”
“No! You give me a break! All this would have been perfectly avoidable if you haven’t gone out of your way to be such a jerk about it!”
“Seriously!? She goes around stabbing people and I am the jerk!?”
“Oh, you know perfectly well what I am talking about…!”
“Boys! No shouting on my kitchen…! Here you go sweety.”
“Thanks Mrs. Chandler…” The both of us muttered, somewhat abashed, as she served each of us a steaming plate of beans and eggs.
“No need to thank me. That chicken of yours has been laying twice per day, and I am not about to throw perfectly good food. Still, I would verry much appreciate if you stop behaving like a couple of cats in a bag.”
She gave us a searching look, that we sheepishly averted, then nod to herself and left with a self-satisfied little huff.
I awkwardly cleared my throat in the silent room.
“I am sorry… I mean, you are right; I shouldn’t been… I haven’t been on my… ahem… best behavior lately…” I said, “I think I never got down from the excitement of being alone in the big city, and I didn’t take the noble’s kids seriously enough because of the age gap...”
“Well… What’s done is done… I too am at blame. I know how you can get, and still I let you by your lonesome. I should have been around until you settled…” Jake sighed, “though, it is funny you say you couldn’t take Lady Richia seriously because of her age. For what I heard she waited a year before enrolling in to the academy, much like you did.”
“Wait! She is seventeen too?!”
“I guess so.”
“Wow… Well, at least I didn’t get my ass bitten by a younger girl… Now that was an experience… Did I told you she almost impaled me with a fork? I mean, who does that? What kind of lady goes around practicing how to kill with cutlery?”
“Wait, you were serious?! I thought you made that up to distract Mrs. Chandler from the state your clothes were in!”
“No man! That girl is a menace! She wiped the floor with me! It just so happens the floor was full of cake.”
Jake gave me a dubious look.
“This is starting to sound like another of your weird fetishes… Where you two fighting or hitting on each other?”
“What do you mean weird fetish!? I’ll have you know there is no such thing!”
“Sure there isn’t.” the jerk rolled his eyes.
“Oh! Come on!”
“Fine, fine,” he chuckled then, while placing a few beans in a napkin for Dermatrix, mused outloud, “you say she beat you up? Maybe count Aprabat got her some martial training like dad did with the three of us…? Still, I agree with you, that is not normal for a noble lady.”
“Wait! Hould on a second! What do you mean the THREE OF US had martial training? Last time I check you weaseled out of every single class and Drake and I had to cover for your sorry ass so dad didn’t find out.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“I told you many times! My muscles get all crammed up and unresponsive! It is a serious condition!”
“And I told you that’s just soreness for exercising! It happens to everybody!”
“Mine is different, it hurts more than everybody else’s.”
“Oh, that is bullshit!”
“Language!” just like that, an irate Mrs. Chandler came out of nowhere and proceeded to give the both of us a twenty minutes long ear full for swearing in her house. Still, the whole proses might have been shorter if Jake stopped trying to convinced her he didn’t say nothing wrong. He never learns; when a woman rants the only peaceful option is to shut up and nod, it doesn’t matter whether you are wrong or right.
The verry next morning after that dinner, I had to woke ludicrously early to receive some of the castle staff and arrange with them to move myself in. The whole process was fast since I had few belongings to begin with and most of them were still unpacked.
One of the servants that came for my luggage gave me a bag with twenty-five denarii as payment in advance for my services, twenty of which I gave to my brother to ease a bit of our finances. After Mrs. Chandler made a huge tower of pancakes for my last breakfast at her house, we joined for a teary-eyed farewell at her porch.
“I know it has only been a few weeks, but I will miss you dearly,” I sniffed in our fierce hug, “I don’t deserve you… If only you could come with me…”
“For the last time Blake, you can’t bring your chicken to the castle!” Jake grown.
“But…!”
“But nothing! You are already walking on thin ice here! You can’t further antagonize the count! I am sorry, but Henriette has to stay.”
“My Henriette!” I sniffed, looking into her beautiful, uncomprehending biddy eyes, “I will come back for you one day!”
“There, there.” Mrs. Chandler patted my shoulder, “You have nothing to worry about deary. I will take good care of Henriatte for you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Chandler. You are a kind soul…”
“All right already,” Jake rolled his eyes, “We are running late for class.”
*
“On your own words, what do you think Enchantments are?” Professor Kragmad asked with a genial smile.
I was quite surprised when the older man and his translucent dragonfly appeared in place of professor sour-butt’s lecture. As I saw his spirit companion draw figure eights I couldn’t repress a smile of my own; I liked the guy, and not having to start the morning with sour-butt droning for hours on end about some lost civilization or other was always a plus.
Jane later told me that at the beginning of the class I missed, sour-butt had explained our class itinerary for the semester, and apparently we only had classes with him twice a week, though he was still in charge of our course this year, so we would see him often than that.
“Go on,” he encouraged the silent crowd after a few minutes, “I am just asking for your guesses. There are no wrong answers.”
“Aren’t, enchantments just spirit-crafted enhancements?” someone asked from my back.
“Well, yes. That is an adequate description but, it doesn’t tell us much about the nature of enchantments, does it? For example, if a magus with the power to manipulate metal used his spirit to sharpen a mundane blade, therefor enhancing it, would this blade now be enchanted?”
“Of course not!” someone gasped pompously somewhere to my right.
“Oh? And why is that?” the professor enquired.
“Well, because it would be still just a normal blade. You wouldn’t need to channel spirits to make it work as it is supposed to. Anyone would be still able to used it!”
Oh? Was this chin-face talking? I had taken her for a violent murder-hobo, but it seemed that big ass head of hers wasn’t just for show.
“Verry astute my lady! Enchantments, just as every other form of spirit-craft need spirits to work. Hence, all enchanted items need magus to be work them.”
“B-but what about the city lifts and the cart railway system?” another voice asked timidly, “I haven’t see magus operating them, unless… Is count Aprabat powering it all by himself?”
I leaned forward curiously but, Richia snorted at the idea and professor Kragmad gave de student a sheepish grin.
“I am afraid not, young one. Even though it is not the first nor the last time I have to correct this misconception, our fair city owes its peculiar landscape to the ingenuity of our lord and his engineers and not, as many believe, to his spirit’s power.” Then, perhaps remembering lady Richia was attending the class, he hurried to add, “Not to say his lordship spirit isn’t plenty powerful! Far from it! B-but if you care to study the subject, you’ll see that most of the process animating Aprabat’s rails and industry is fairly mundane… ahem… No. To summarize, those are not enchantments. But I digressed. With all this said, can any of you tell me what enchantments are…? Maybe is there some other thing you are familiar with, that feels oddly similar to enchantments…? No? No one?”
“Are you perhaps talking about Rituals, professor?” I asked innocently. You know, not to let my man hanging.
“Yes! Exactly right, master Grahamson! An enchanted object is nothing more than a pre-prepared little ritual waiting to be activated. For example, the blasting wands used in the arena are just highly compressed and streamlined versions of the force-dart ritual you can found in your study books. The reason they have to be recharged after a fashion is to replenish the consumables used by the ritual. And thus, we arrive to the object of these lessons: Rituals are flexible! An able magus can compress, enlarge or otherwise modify them to suit their own purposes! It comes without saying, but Mastery of this skill is a most for any magus, for it is allows the practitioner to harness the power of his contracted spirit in many different ways… Though, of course, you won’t worry about that for the rest of this semester… But, enough chit chat, let us begin! Who remembers the rune framework for the force-dart ritual…?”
I’ll admit the next two hours were a fascinating experience; apparently professor Kragmad’s spirit specialized in manipulating light, so the older man was able to demonstrate the changes in the runes by drawing illusory lines of white light in the verry air and making them change in real time from the ritual we knew from our books to a much-compacted form, only a few steps removed from the minute runes carved on the blasting wand I appropriated from posh-guy.
The good professor had already dismissed the class for the lunch break, and I was still engrossed on my notes, idly wandering if those illusory runes of his could substitute the chalk draws commonly used, when someone approached me.