Her room was so far away, near the city wall and gate, and she had so little time between the end of her half-tardy inscription class and her first tutoring session that Willow opted to stay near the Arcanum and scrounge up something to eat. As it turned out, there were plenty of establishments on the street outside the campus proper which catered to the student rush between classes.

That was where she ran into Leopold.

“How did your first classes go,” Leopold asked with an expectant smile. Willow groaned and proceeded to tell him about the strange events of the morning after their class together, complete with the deadly evil-eye she’d received from the inscription professor.

“Well that doesn’t really seem to be your fault, does it,” Leopold said as he sat munching on his meat pie. Willow was on her second of three.

“Has anyone ever told you that you eat like a horse?”

“No, not like a horse,” Willow said. “Like a cow once before. I think I hit him with my cane.”

“Ah, well I’m glad you haven’t got one of those yet.”

“I’m not. My back is killing me.”

Leopold glanced around at the alleys radiating off the Arcanum’s border street. “I’ll see what I can get after lunch.”

“What? No, you don’t have to do that. I’ll go out and get one—”

“You’re tutoring with Brandeweiss after and it’ll be too late by the time you finish. It’s the least I can do.”

“Oh. Okay,” Willow said, and she couldn’t help but smile. When had he gotten so helpful?

“And besides, it’ll give me a chance to choose your weapon,” he said. “I’d rather have a nice light caning than a fatal beating with that metal rod you had before.”

“Gods, how I miss my old cane. My father got that for me. It must’ve cost a fortune, but he wouldn’t tell me how much he paid for it. I cost them a lot over the years with my disease. They hired a traveling healer, a mage, to fix me once. She couldn’t do anything; she said there wasn’t anything wrong with me. Still charged them though. Bullshit. Of course there’s something wrong with me.”

“Hey,” Leopold said, and Willow looked at him. He looked down, almost abashed. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he whispered.

Willow couldn’t stop herself from laughing in his face. “Are you joking? What do you see, when you see me? A waif, someone on the edge of death. What do you think when you see this?” She pushed up her sleeve, exposing a forearm so shrunken that the skin fell into the gap between her ulna and radius.

He winced.

“That’s what I thought,” Willow said, and lowered her sleeve. “I always thought… They told me I got the Wasting, that I survived. I guess I thought I was special, that it could’ve been worse. It turns out I didn’t even get the Wasting. I’m just sick.”

Leopold scooted closer to her. All at once she realized how ridiculous she was being.

“Gods, listen to me. I sound like a child.”

“You’re shook up is all,” he said. “The demonstration, the tests. You’ll be back to being pissed off at me soon enough.”

Willow chuckled. “Yeah, I guess,” she said, but she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t felt so low in years.

🜛

It was with a fuller stomach but lower spirits that she made her way back to Professor Brandeweiss’s office. She knocked on the wooden door and heard his muffled voice from the other side.

“Come in, I’m sort of trapped back here.”

Willow opened the door to see the office completely rearranged from the last time she’d been there just a few hours before. Gone were the stacks of folios and thickets of yellowed pages which had formerly crammed every inch of the room. It would have looked almost clean if it weren’t for the several small tables Professor Brandeweiss had crammed into the office. They separated his own desk from the door and each sported a dark crystalline device. A lone chair stood on her side of the barricade.

“Professor?”

“Carl, please,” he said, and motioned as best he could to the chair to her side. She gently shut the door and took her seat.

“It doesn’t feel right to call you Carl.”

“Well, I’m not your professor right now. I’m your tutor, and hopefully I’ve constructed something that will help your essence flow.”

Constructed? Willow looked at the tables again and, sure enough, thin strips of copper connected each of the obsidian half-spheres. The strips were crammed with inscriptions and the whole room felt like it was buzzing.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“What is all this?”

“This is how I plan to get your essence flow high enough to finish a magelight spell,” Carl said, and gestured to the domes. “Each of these is an essence capacitor, and they’ve all been maxed out. Would you mind to guess why I’ve arrayed these five capacitors before you, unfortunately blocking off any means of my escape should this office burst into flame?”

“Um,” Willow said, and sure enough she realized he was right. He would definitely be trapped back there if one of those should explode, or something were to catch on fire. The thought made her slightly queasy.

“I really don’t know. If they’re charged up… are you planning to inject me with them?”

“Oh no, no,” he said, then frowned. “I suppose I did make you miss the first half of your inscriptions class. A full essence capacitor has an extremely high resistance to being overloaded. Overloads can occur, and are dangerous, but the steep rise in resistance makes them virtually unheard of in inscripted constructs. However, that’s exactly what we’re going to do here, but on a minor level.”

“But… they’re dangerous, right? You just said that.”

He waved her complaint away. “Dangerous for high essence flows. But from your test results earlier today, it appears that’s a problem we won’t have to worry about.”

Willow felt a moment’s pang of shame, but gritted her teeth together. If she was going to stay in the school she’d need all the help she could get. And Professor Brandeweiss—no, Carl—was freely offering it.

“So it’s a good thing,” she said.

“For now,” he said, and directed her attention to the capacitor at the far left.

“This is where we’ll start. I’ve wired all these together to absorb any extra essence that might spill out, just in case you push too hard. What you’re going to do is put your hand here and try to push as much essence as you can into the capacitor. I’ll be monitoring the numbers.”

“Okay,” Willow said, still unsure about how this was supposed to help. She put her hand on the farthest left capacitor dome and visualized the essence in her body. It whirled and swirled like disturbed water, and on the whole it felt like there was a lot less than during the tests earlier that day, but she visualized anyway. She forced the essence to flow from her heart, down her arm, and sluggishly exit her hand into the capacitor.

It felt like she was pushing essence into a rock. The device was completely unaccepting of more essence, but she put her back into it, choosing to believe Carl that the dome would eventually yield and accept a small trickle.

It took sweat-drenched minutes before she felt the first wisp of essence flow into the dome, and Carl sighed in relief.

“Got it. The first dome is registering an overcharge. Now you’re going to slowly lessen your push and accept that overcharge back in.”

“I’ve… never pushed with anything less than my full force before.”

“There was never a reason to, but now there is. If you would…” and he gestured to the dome again.

Even though she was damp and sticky with sweat under her overcoat, Willow focused on her essence and attempted to attenuate the push she’d been sustaining. It was difficult at first, but she eventually got the essence to flow backwards in fits and starts.

When the capacitor finally stopped pushing against her, Willow let out a gasp and dropped her hand from the dome. She was drenched from crown to foot with sweat, and a headache was setting up behind her eyes. When she looked at Carl, he was beaming.

“I’m seeing we’re back to one hundred percent capacity,” he said, pointing down to the crystal plate she hadn’t noticed before. “You pushed into an overcharged capacitor and accepted the pushback. I’m extremely happy about this result.”

“Why… so,” Willow panted, rubbing her left hand with her right. Strangely, she still didn’t feel any of that buzzing quality that she’d gotten from being injected earlier.

“Because it means that this training method will probably work,” Carl said, and began disconnecting the metal strips connecting the capacitor to the rest of the chain. “Take this home, don’t use it’s capacity on anything other than training, and I want you to train like this as much as you can every morning and night as many times as you can manage.”

“How am I supposed to cast anything in class with a schedule like that,” Willow panted.

“Willow,” Carl said, and his face became deadly serious. “If you can’t do this, you won’t have class two weeks from now. Schoolwork can be made up. Expulsion… not so much.”

Willow swallowed, then nodded.

🜛

When she got back to Grave street, Leopold was already there waiting for her. Dinner had long ago been set out and taken up, but Margaret had saved her portion and the leftovers in the inscripted icebox. Willow wondered if Leopold had said anything about the way he’d watched her ravenously devour lunch.

Well, she wasn’t going to complain. Leopold peppered her with questions about Carl’s training as she ate her second helping of shepherd’s pie, then examined the capacitor dome she retrieved from her sack.

“Do you know its capacity,” he asked as she was finally beginning to feel stuffed.

“No, just that its full.” Leopold shook his head.

“What?”

“Just… I have no idea what it actually means unless we get a read on its capacity. Its overcharge resistance could be anything.”

Willow shrugged her shoulders.

“You’re not even a little bit curious about what you’re pushing? A hundred and fifty rems isn’t… well, it isn’t normal. To say the least.”

“It isn’t helping me, is it,” Willow asked. “If anything it seems like its partially to blame for my problems.”

“I don’t think so,” Leopold said. “Or Professor Brandeweiss wouldn’t be training you to increase your pressure, would he?”

“I suppose not,” Willow said. Leopold set the capacitor down and crossed the room to the corner, where he retrieved a wooden cane.

“Oh, Leopold,” she said, when he handed it over. After her torturous day the gesture was almost too much, and she had to blink back tears. The cane was light, the wood hollow on the inside and segmented.

“It’s made of something called bamboo,” he said and shrugged. “I thought you might like it after… well, how heavy your other one was. I’m sure Bryan can cut it to size.”

“Bryan’s not the only one handy with a saw,” Margaret chided over washing up at the basin.

“I won’t make the mistake again,” Leopold said as Willow got up from the bench and put her weight on the cane. It barely bent at all even with its lightness, and it was only a little too long. It felt… good. To have a cane in her hand again, to take the load off her feet for even a half-step.

“Thank you,” she said, and Leopold smiled.

“No problem. What are friends for?”