The next morning after she awoke and practiced with the capacitor, Willow set off for class early. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t pack away a double breakfast before leaving the table, but that she scarfed both down as quickly as she could. She didn’t want to rush to class and be even more fatigued by the time she reached the Arcanum, especially with training later in the day. Bryan and Margaret waved her goodbye with confusion evident on their faces, while Benny bid her farewell with a ditty which somehow rhymed her name with the word ‘ham’.

Willow ran into Leopold as she turned a corner halfway to the Arcanum. He stumbled and looked a little embarrassed, as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.

“What are you doing this far away from campus,” Willow asked, and looked around at the darkened shopfronts surrounding them. There was nothing that he could possibly be doing in this part of the city this early in the day.

“Well,” he said, looked to those same closed shopfronts, then set his jaw. “I wanted to walk with you to class.”

“Walk,” Willow asked, confused. “But your room is right beside the Arcanum. Why would you…”

And just like that it hit her. Was it the dawn sunrise just peeking over the border wall that highlighted the blush on his cheeks in the morning chill? Or was it the way he’d let her lean on him all the way to Bryan’s house last night? Then there was the cane he’d gotten for her which she was holding at that very moment.

He felt something for her. It wasn’t anything she’d had experience with before—everyone else in Bridgewater had known her since she was a little kid, watching her grow up frailer and thinner than they could have ever imagined. They’d always known that she was sick, that she probably didn’t have long to live. The doctor’s kid, who even the doctor couldn’t fix. She was pitiable. Someone to be helped, but never looked upon with anything other than charity.

And maybe it was all those childhood crushes that had gone unrequited, the way those she dreamed of looked at her—like a freak, like a corpse—that had buried her feelings of desire, but she felt them stir again for him.

Had she always thought of him that way? Surely not that first night in the caravan. After? In the hospital? Maybe that’s when it had started.

“Okay,” Willow said, and felt a blush rise to her cheeks. “Yeah. Thank you. That would be nice.”

And when he offered his arm for support on that long trek up the hill she still batted it away, but with a smirk. She wasn’t helpless, after all.

🜛

It was weird to see Carl—no, Professor Brandeweiss—in a teaching role again after seeing him for so many hours over the last two days out of class, but when she sat beside Leopold in the classroom, the professor didn’t even give her a nod.

Their class that morning had them all going over the eight basic spell-forms, and the sixty-four intermediate forms, which were usually a combination of two of the eight but sometimes seemed to be completely unrelated to the forms they were charted under. Each had its own name and they were expected to have the whole table memorized by Friday for their first exam, which elicited a chorus of groans from the class. But not from Willow—memorization and studying was something she could do, silver girl or not.

When it was time for a demonstration, he picked someone else from the class without his eyes ever meeting hers. She tried not to let herself redden with the resurging embarrassment of the last debacle.

However, when class was dismissed and she was packing up her things to leave, he very obviously caught her eye and nodded to his desk. She’d been about to rush out to the metrology lab, but she veered off course to meet him across the wooden surface.

“Metrology needs a day to set up their next test,” he said. “So you get a break today from getting injected with high-pressure essence or whatever the hell they’re going to do.”

“Oh, goody,” Willow said deadpan.

“We’ll be using the time to practice magelight,” he continued, which did make her heart sink. If five casts had absolutely stripped her yesterday, what would he expect of her with double the amount of time?

“Right,” she said. He nodded, gathered his things, and she followed him out the door and toward his office.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

🜛

Another five milli-ems gained with the capacitor, and Carl actually used his strip of copper tape to get an official reading of her push force for the record. It came out to a tenth of a run, which according to some quick calculations tracked pretty closely to the corollary reading from the emmeter of a hundred and fifty runs to push essence into her resistive body. It was weird seeing two numbers on her official record—only one left to go—but she wasn’t allowed to dwell on it for too long before they started casting magelight.

Seven casts is what they managed to do, with a break between the fourth and fifth for lunch. Carl treated her, and then bought her seconds after he saw how fast she scarfed down the meat pie. Then it was back to the office where they cast another three before the hourglass indicated that outside the Arcanum walls twilight would be coming on.

When Willow left Carl’s cramped and humid office, she found Leopold sitting on the ground across the hall, nose deep in a book. She managed to walk all the way up to him and tap him with the foot of her cane before he realized she was there.

“Oh, hey. How was tutoring?”

“Strenuous, difficult. Impossible. So pretty much like yesterday and the day before. Why? How was class?”

“Oh you know… sort of boring. More boring than I thought it’d be. You think all of these things about inscribing magic into copper, but when it comes down to it there are a lot of calculations and math to make sure you don’t give someone a nasty injection or melt the copper strip.”

“Tedious in another way, then,” Willow said, and Leopold got to his feet. Sitting down, getting up, it was all so easy for him. He was at school, the way she’d always wanted to be. In the Arcanum, and she was playing catch-up. If she could just keep up with him, things might be different.

Things might be nice.

“What is it,” Leopold asked. He was looking hard at her eyes, and Willow shook her head.

“Nothing, let’s get home or I’m going to pass right out.”

The hot-iron sky faded to violet while they walked the close-fitted stone streets down the hill from the Arcanum. Willow didn’t talk much and Leopold took up the silence beside her. It wasn’t until the door to Bryan’s house that he finally spoke up.

“Are you too tired to practice more tonight,” he asked. “I know I said… but I didn’t know you’d be working on it all day.”

“No, I just need to get some food in me,” Willow said, and walked through. Bryan was already home, the house suffused with the smell of roasting meat, and he seemed overjoyed to lay eyes on Leopold again. They ate elbow to elbow at the small table, and before Willow could object Margaret gathered up the leftovers and made a second plate for her.

It was strange how quickly a place and people became like a second home. There hadn’t been much time for her to stop and think, but she found that touching the memories of Bridgewater didn’t produce the acute sting of homesickness she was expecting.

After dinner, Leopold and Willow retired to her room to practice. Margaret gently nudged the door shut behind them.

“And this is how you’re supposed to group cast,” Leopold asked. Willow had molded his hands into the shape she remembered Carl making, showing him the way each individual finger swirled to produce eddies and whorls in the essence sphere.

“That’s what it looked like at least.”

“This is way beyond the classes we’re in,” Leopold said. “This is at least second year, maybe even graduate level stuff. You only hear about mages group-casting in stories, and I suppose they’d have had to group-cast to raise the walls around the city, but you never see it anymore.”

“Well, it’s what he has me doing,” Willow said. “He said it would help me cast the steadfast layer more intuitively.”

“It may do so, but you won’t get to a point where you’ll be able to cast it without making a spell-form or intoning the concept, which it seems like you can barely handle now, not even adding another spell on top—”

“I know,” Willow snapped, and Leopold lowered his hands from the spell-form and squeezed his lips shut. Willow took a deep breath and tried to get a handle on her emotions.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just… it’s that resistance reading. I can’t fathom how you’re producing half a magelight. You’d need twice as many runs to layer on top of it, maybe even more than twice as many. It just seems cruel to expect you to be able to do it.”

“I can’t give up,” Willow whispered. “Not now that I’m finally here. After everything I’ve been through.”

Leopold looked at her a long time. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“What do I know,” he said. “Obviously Professor Brandeweiss has tons more experience with this, he said so himself. I’m nobody, I’m just a student. It’s just… I don’t like seeing you run yourself ragged.”

Willow let out a bark of laughter. “I’m always running myself ragged,” she said. “I’m always pushing myself to walk faster, to last longer, to stay awake, stay strong, just like everyone else. If I didn’t, I’d just be a little invalid back in Bridgewater. I’ve gotten here by running myself ragged.”

Leopold almost reached out to her—she saw his hand move to the elbow of her coat, then drop back down. He looked away.

“Oh, come on,” she said, grabbed him by his thin blouse and pulled him into a kiss. He froze for a moment, mouth hard against hers, before his lips softened and his tongue probed hers. She responded in kind, breathing hard and smelling the sweet scent of his face.

She never wanted to forget it.