“Less. Feather your essence, Willow. I need less.”
“I’m trying,” Willow said, sweat standing out on her forehead. Her right hand was covered by a glove woven from silver thread, but even so the first layer of magelight was able to form on the other side in the palm of her cupped, immobile hand.
Suddenly, shooting pain wracked the muscles in her fingers, and the magelight dispersed in a puff of essence. Willow hissed and fumbled for the band, which she quickly slapped around her wrist again.
The pain, as it had before, disappeared.
She didn’t need to ask Carl how she was doing—she knew that well enough. For her magelight to form on the other side of the silver glove, it meant she’d been outputting way too much essence. It should’ve served as an almost insurmountable resistive barrier, but instead it barely felt like a flimsy sheet of onionskin to what she was used to working with.
“Alright. That was less than ideal. Perhaps we should call it a day.”
“No,” Willow said, and shook her head. They were in his office and even though it was lit by magelight as always, the ache in her body told her it was far past twilight on the street outside. Leopold would be waiting for her somewhere on the road back, but she couldn’t leave yet.
“I have barely a week left. Barely. And I can’t even produce a magelight. Notwithstanding I don’t have a capacitance reading yet.”
“You won’t be able to get one of those,” Carl said and waved the idea away. “The way we measure it, you’ll need to not be casting any spells the whole morning before the test, and as we’re now aware, you can’t go a single second without casting a spell.”
“What if you wrapped one of those things around my neck? Then I wouldn’t be able to cast anything, right?”
“If I wrapped a nullification band around your neck I’m pretty sure you would suffocate,” Carl said. “You haven’t had those nerves reconnected yet.”
“Ah.”
“I’ll get Annabelle on it once you’re more in control of your hand,” he said. “There’s no way I can isolate your diaphragm the way I’m doing with your wrist, so it’s going to be tricky.”
He looked at her, seeming to take in the state of her for the first time in hours. “Are you sure you don’t want to call it a night. Start fresh tomorrow?”
“I’m already skipping all my classes, there’s no reason not to work late too,” Willow said and positioned her hand palm-up in the molded pillow on the desk. She took a breath and slipped the nullification band off her wrist as Carl stifled a yawn. For a moment at least, that secondary sensation of feeling didn’t rush in. She was getting used to freeing her hand of the spells that had controlled it her entire life, although the process was a lot like unlearning how to be potty trained.
“Again,” she said, and tried to let out the smallest stream of essence possible.
🜛
Leopold met her at the Arcanum gate and provided her his arm as they walked home. She hated being so weak at the end of the training sessions every day, but if she was going to stay in school she needed to be able to produce a magelight without killing herself and the examiner. Poise came second to that.
Dinner was long-finished by the time they got to the house on Grave street, but Margaret set out their chilled plates before turning in for the night. They ate silently then retired to Willow’s room.
“Here are your notes from history of magic,” Leopold said, retrieving a sheaf of papers from his bag. “And you’ve got an essay due Thursday on the Decade Skirmish.”
“And what is the Decade Skirmish,” Willow said, throwing open her history tome. The book was littered with papers and notes, making it even more unwieldy. That was fine, she did all her work in her room nowadays.
“They went over it in class,” Leopold said, and pointed to a section in his notes. “But you’ll find more on the listed pages.”
Essays, homework, and above all that the exam that would determine if she’d be able to stay in the Arcanum or not. Sometimes it felt like too much, but it was what she’d signed up for, and now she had it. A shot at a normal life, a productive life.
“Thank you,” she said. “For going to all my classes for me. I know its not easy.”
Leopold waved it away. “It’s no hassle, I’ll have to take these classes next semester and now I’m ahead.”
“Well,” she said, and touched his hand. The feeling of his skin through her right hand was almost the same as it was with her left, though more intense. It was as if each hair on his skin stood out in stark contrast, like she was looking at him with a magnifying glass. Sometimes it was too much.
“Leopold,” she breathed, and leaned in. He leaned toward her, their breath hot together, but gently held her at bay. She opened her eyes, surprised.
“You’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said, and smiled. “I don’t think we’ve got time for anything else.”
“No. I guess not,” Willow said, and flipped the page in her history book listlessly. She had wanted all the time in the world.
🜛
“I’ve got something new for you,” Carl said as she came into his office. She didn’t even knock anymore in the mornings, just came in and sat down to work.
“Oh,” Willow asked, and Carl pushed a copper band across the table.
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“Another nullification band, but this one’s intentionally faulty. Flickers of spellwork and essence will be able to travel across it. Now that you’re going seconds at a time without reactivating your spells, it’s time to move up.”
“Thanks,” Willow said, and intentionally focused on relaxing her hand before slipping the old band off and snapping on the new one. It felt much like the old one, but when she moved her hand to test the sensation she felt a twinge of pain in the muscle at the back of her middle finger.
“Damn,” she said, and rubbed it.
“You’ll have to concentrate all the time. Concentrate on not moving your hand the way you’ve always moved it.”
“Yeah,” she said, not looking forward to the rest of the day. She reached into her bag and retrieved the thin silver glove, wincing in pain as her thumb seized up.
“You look exhausted,” Carl observed as she slipped the glove over her hand and laid her arm on the small pillow.
“Cramming all your schoolwork into nights will do that to you,” Willow said.
“I wasn’t aware you were continuing to study,” Carl said. “I just assumed you’d drop this semester and re-up next.”
“I don’t have that kind of money,” she said.
🜛
After lunch she had to postpone her training with Carl in order to take a test in inscription, which she hadn’t attended since her first class. A few of the students did double takes when they saw her walk in, no doubt at her ghoulish appearance, but she sat down in an empty desk anyway and retrieved her inkwell and pen. Even the professor looked startled to see her there.
As it turned out, the half-period lecture she had to sit through before the test began showed her that the professor was much less adept at conveying information than Leopold’s notes were, which was additionally confirmed when she breezed through the test with nearly no difficulty whatsoever. As she wrote a longform answer on engraving depth, her right hand twinging painfully every few seconds, she imagined what it would be like to be any of these other students. Going to lectures, living on campus in the dorms. What did they do with all of their free time when the tests were this easy? When they didn’t have to be worried about being kicked out in two days?
She couldn’t imagine it.
When she got back to Carl’s office he was just finishing up lunch at his desk. Willow sat down and began to arrange herself for further training.
“Willow,” he said, and coughed on the remains of what appeared to be a roll of meat and cheese. “Wait a moment. I don’t know if you know this, but they’re not going to let you use any inscribed materials in the test,” he said, and motioned to the glove she’d slipped over her hand.
“That, or the band,” he said, and pointed to the band on the table.
“Um, okay,” Willow said, not quite getting what he was trying to communicate. He coughed again to clear his throat, then threw away the remainder of his wrappings.
“What I mean is, we’re going to have to get all the way there before Friday morning,” he said. “All the way.”
“So a day and a half left,” Willow said, and fear twisted her gut. “That should be plenty of time.”
Carl nodded. “Just so you know.”
🜛
Leopold sat at the other end of Willow’s bed, watching her whisper the concept for blazing light and carefully twitch her fingers. The key was to not move them so much that her reflexes started up her psychokinetic spells.
A faint glowing sphere spun out into the air above her silvered hand, about the same luminosity as her previous magelights before Annabelle had healed her. Willow sighed and the magelight dispelled.
“The magelight shouldn’t even be visible,” she said, and wiped her brow. It was proving almost impossible to keep her newfound power back.
“It was… barely visible,” Leopold said, but it was clear he was trying to offer her encouragement. She plucked at the silver glove.
“If this thing wasn’t on, we’d probably both be blind.”
“Why not use a different concept,” he suggested. “How about ‘nearly-invisible light’?”
Willow shook her head. “The concept is standardized. I have to use the same one in the text. If I could just change my idea of the concept… but that probably wouldn’t work either. That light’s going to burn the examiner’s eyes right out of their head.”
“Well, just make sure you keep your eyes closed,” Leopold said. “It’s still hard to believe.”
“It’s harder for me,” she said. “I was weak my whole life. Now I’ve got the opposite problem. How am I supposed to deal with that?”
“The same way you’ve always done,” Leopold said. “Raw grit.”
🜛
“Willow Tremont,” the examiner said. She was a middle-aged woman with short-cut hair, wearing a heavy gown stitched with the Arcanum’s symbol: a sphere surrounded by a bricked wall.
“That’s me,” Willow said. She’d just entered the small room—one of the many tiny rooms in the main hall of the Arcanum, similar to the one in which she’d had her first disastrous examination two weeks before. Somehow it seemed like a lot longer ago than that.
The woman motioned to the chair across from her. Besides that, the room was entirely empty. It resembled a storage closet more than an auxiliary classroom.
“Please take a seat and we’ll begin the examination.”
Willow hooked her cane on the chair-back and sat gingerly in the seat across from the examiner. They were hardly three feet separate at the knees, and the examiner turned a page in the sheaf she was holding.
“We’ve only got the spell demonstration scheduled. Which spell will you be casting?”
“Magelight,” Willow said, and shifted in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position. That was proving to be impossible though, so she determined to just settle down get it over with.
“When you’re ready,” the examiner said, pen poised over the sheaf. Willow had the brief thought that being ‘ready’ would require a few more weeks of practice, which she didn’t have. She reached over and slipped the band from her right wrist, the metal straightening out like a ruler as she laid it on the ground beside her. The examiner’s eyebrow quirked up, but she didn’t make a note.
Willow held her right hand loosely, opposite her left, both matching pairs of a sphere-form with her fingers pointed inwards, just as she’d practiced the night before. She closed her eyes, breathed out, and hoped beyond hope that her hand wouldn’t seize up on her now.
“Blazing light,” Willow said, and focused not on her right hand, but on her left. The essence there moved sluggishly, and she pushed it with all the force she’d trained herself to use over the last five years. Even at full strength the essence barely leaked out through her palm into the spell-form. Willow angled her fingertips, coaxing it into a rough sphere-shape—not her best work by far.
She could feel holding together, barely. It wouldn’t hold together with her meager control if she began to push with the same force in her other hand, so she didn’t. Focusing on her right hand, she barely coaxed the essence within.
“Steadfastness,” she whispered, and the surge of essence that exploded from her ungloved hand was almost too much to control while keeping the core intact. She bent her entire will toward encapsulating the steadfast layer around the core of blazing light, manipulating the form around the sphere while still eking out a thin stream of controlling essence from her left hand. She felt, more than sensed, the steadfast layer fully wrapping around the core of blazing light. The spell solidified into its final form.
Willow let out the breath she’d been holding and slowly opened her eyes. Sure enough, hovering right in front of her between her hands was the palest magelight she’d ever seen, but it was magelight nonetheless.
While the examiner made notes on her sheaf, Willow allowed herself to smile. She’d done it. She was in.