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Chapter 17

Unfortunately for Willow, all the dormitory rooms had already been claimed by students and their overflow admissions. Fortunately, Bryan and Margaret didn’t seem put out at all by the prospect of lodging her for the rest of the semester. Willow found it difficult to express the depth of gratitude she felt, but Bryan seemed to think it was all in due course. To hear him tell it, he’d never really be out of her debt for that one strange night in the caravan.

She was so elated at passing her exam that the moment she saw Leopold she kissed him full on the mouth, right there in public. She could feel the other students’ eyes on them, but she didn’t care. She was in, finally; out of probation. Carl had swung it so that she didn’t need the capacity measure, so she was a fully-honored student. She hadn’t felt such relief in weeks.

Willow stopped by Carl’s office before her inscription lecture to let him know. Immediately he noticed the pale sphere she carried in her hand.

“Is that…” he trailed off, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“Oh, yeah,” Willow said, holding up the magelight. It was as light as air and stayed wherever she put it, but its surface was solid like warm glass. Leopold told her that none of his magelights had ever been corporeal like that. When he tried to touch them, his fingers just slipped through.

“My passing grade,” Willow said, and grinned.

“May I?”

“Here,” Willow said, and handed the magelight over. Carl cautiously grabbed it and the expression on his face said more than words. It said she’d done something weird again, something impossible.

“How did you make this,” Carl asked. “It’s really magelight?”

“It is,” Willow confirmed. “I couldn’t get my right hand to cooperate by Thursday night, so I decided to cheat a little.”

“Cheat a little,” Carl asked, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I laid down the light core with my left hand, then used my right for the layer of steadfastness.”

Carl’s eyes flicked from the magelight to Willow, then down to her right arm. She wondered if he could sense that she wasn’t wearing the band at the moment. She’d decided after the exam that if she was going to really be in the school now, she’d have to step up her training on looking and acting normal. That meant dealing with her hand seizing up. That meant gaining conscious control over her psychokinetic spells.

“You layered both… at the same time,” Carl said. Willow nodded.

“I figured I couldn’t keep the core stable if I finished laying it down before I started on the steadfast layer, so I…” she trailed off.

“That’s not normal, is it?”

Carl sighed. “You’ve never done it before, have you?”

“It just seemed like a good idea.”

“It would be,” Carl said, and rubbed his face. “It would be the best idea, if anyone else could do it. Spells could probably have twice as many layers if others could apply two layers at the same time instead of having to maintain the more and more unstable core layers after they’re done depositing. But no—no one else can do this.”

Willow looked at the magelight, which had benefited from the extremely active steadfast layer in a way she hadn’t expected, and wondered if the only way she’d been able to apply the much stronger layer had been because she was actively putting down the core at the same time. What would normally feel like another way she was different and broken was now starting to feel a lot like a benefit.

“So, how can we take advantage of this,” Willow said, holding her hands out.

“I’ll start thinking,” Carl said, and handed the magelight back. “Congratulations, scholar Willow.”

🜛

When they got home, Willow and Leopold discovered that Bryan and Margaret had prepared a celebratory feast. An entire side of boar, potatoes, some kind of delicious leafy green, all roasted to perfection. Margaret must have been cooking ever since Willow had finished the exam. How they’d found out about her passing grade before she got home, Willow never discovered.

They called for magelights again and again, and Willow delighted in producing the little baubles and watching Benny chase them around the dining room, batting them into the ceiling to bounce off the rafters. For dessert Bryan extracted a tub of whipped, chilled cream from the icebox. It was the first time Willow had eaten the delicacy. He served her up a healthy dollop and she savored the rich, strawberry flavored cream bite by bite.

It was, if at all possible, the best night of her life.

They talked late into twilight, and then even more after Benny was put to bed. Bryan wanted to hear everything about the tests, about her tutor, and about the exam. Margaret seemed to delight in Willow’s animation, and Leopold would every now and then put his hand on her back. But eventually it was time even for Bryan and Margaret to call it a night, and after Leopold and Willow helped them clean up, they found themselves alone in the dining room under the twinkling canopy of magelights.

“Help me shepherd these into my room,” Willow asked, and they spent an enjoyable half hour jumping in silence, trying to snag them from the rafters using any tool they could manage. By the time they were finished, Willow’s feet were sore and her back ached something terrible, but she closed the door to the bedroom and pulled Leopold in for a kiss.

“Congratulations,” Leopold said when she finally pulled away. She fingered the ties on his jacket, then pulled one until it came undone. Leopold’s eyes went wide.

“I’m not ready for the night to end,” she said, and pulled another tie undone. “Are you?”

“Gods no,” he said, and gently slipped the toggles from their loops in her stiff overcoat. It slipped free of her shoulders and she shrugged it to the ground. She pulled off his jacket, then ran her fingers up his chest as she stripped off his shirt. He seemed to hesitate, and for a moment she became self-conscious.

“I wish I hadn’t made so many magelights,” she said, suddenly aware of the brightness of the room and how she would look to him. The effect she had on people. What would he think when she saw all of her?

He tugged the hem of her undershirt gently, then raised it over her head. She closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted of initiative. Suddenly afraid.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, and hugged her gently to his chest. She rested her cheek on his collarbone.

“Thank you,” she said, and they moved to the bed.

🜛

If Bryan and Margaret were surprised to see Leopold there in the morning, they didn’t make any sign or mention of it. It was the weekend, Willow’s first weekend where she didn’t have the exam hanging over her head, and Leopold had promised a trip as they cuddled together in bed before falling asleep. Willow had barely heard his words, caught up in post-coital bliss, and had drifted off to sleep even as he spoke.

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But he had been serious, because after they ate a hearty breakfast—they needed it—Leopold practically shoved Willow out the door in his excitement. They held hands as he guided her down the street toward the giant wall which encircled the city.

“I found out about these only last week,” he said as they got in line behind a few guards and another couple who looked as though they were also sightseeing. What looked like an iron birdcage large enough to hold eight or so people descended from the tall, dark wall, lit from within by inscribed lights.

When it reached the bottom, a porter inside swung the door out and the guards, the couple, and Willow and Leopold all gathered in the cage, where the porter closed the gate and latched it. He slid a little brass lever up on a heavily inscribed plate and the basket began rising. Willow looked up and couldn’t see any rope hauling above them.

“Is this thing floating,” Willow asked in a whisper.

Leopold nodded. “They have larger lifts down the wall for supplies and such. This is just one of the smaller people-movers for the guards and anyone else who wants to reach the top.”

The view out of the birdcage was equal parts enthralling and terrifying. The city of Durum spread out beneath them, shadowed by the large protective wall into almost perfect darkness until it began to rise toward the center. The Arcanum, surrounded by a warren of streets half-hidden by double-story shops, stood at the central crest of the city. The very tops of its spires gleamed with morning light.

As the cage rose higher, the city began to take on the aspect of an anthill. Thousands of tiny tunnels—the streets of the city, once her eyes adjusted, were the same way. They twisted and wove with a logic all their own, islands of houses and shops in the scurrying stream of early-morning risers. She saw a cemetery near the wall and knew that Bryan and Margaret’s house had to be nearby on one of the connecting streets.

The ascent began to slow and Willow hoped that they were near the top of the wall. The city had grown so minuscule beneath them that, while she hadn’t considered herself a person fearful of heights before, she was beginning to feel a definite queasiness in her stomach from the sight. Looking up, she did see the crest of the wall slide past the top of the cage, then down until it locked level with the floor. The porter moved across the cage along the outside bars and swung an opposing door open onto a paved path.

The guards left first, followed by the sightseeing couple, then Leopold practically had to pull Willow over the small gap between the cage and the wall. Once on firm ground, she let the size of the city wall impress itself on her for the first time. She’d been unconscious when they made their way from the wilds through the warded tunnel and under the fortification, but she’d heard her whole life of the impressive walled cities in fairy tales. Those stories didn’t seem to do justice to the wall she stood on now.

At least forty feet wide, a stone-flagged road wide enough for passing carriages ran down the center. Willow turned slowly on the spot and took in the ancient weapons of war mounted every two hundred or so feet along the rim, pointed down at the outside world, and the broad sweep of the wall’s hard line as it encircled the city for mile after mile. Truly, something so massive could have only been made by magic, and only by the combined spellwork of hundreds of mages.

“What do you think,” Leopold said, his own voice a whisper in the morning hush. Further away guards were changing shifts with a smattering of chatter and the clanking of equipment, but for the moment they seemed to be in a little bubble of quiet.

“It’s incredible,” Willow said. “Magic built all this.”

“In a single year, so they say,” Leopold said, and pulled her toward a battlement on the far side of the wall. The crenelation was waist-high at its lowest with stone spires rising up to either side. She supposed they might give some kind of protection from attacks launched from below, although she couldn’t imagine anything powerful enough to land a blow this many hundreds of feet up.

The sun rising over the rolling hills was incredible—it was as if the world itself was on fire from the clouds above to the waves of piedmont below. From this height Willow could even make out the ancient winding tracks of generations past; an elder civilization whose roads one could still find in quieter parts of the world. Sometimes farmers in her own town would turn up shards of glass when ploughing, or stringy wisps of ancient flimsy. These artifacts were all that remained of the world that existed before the discovery of magic.

“It’s beautiful,” Willow said, and she felt Leopold’s arm encircle her waist and gently pull her close. She leaned her head against his shoulder and looked out on the dangerous wild that had nearly claimed her life before it even started.

“Where’s the warded tunnel,” she suddenly asked, barely leaning over the battlement to scan the miniature world at the base of the wall. She had to grit her teeth against the vertigo, but she searched anyway.

Leopold leaned in beside her, scanned the base for a moment, then pointed.

“There’s the gate,” he said, and sure enough Willow could just make out a disruption on the seamless structure of the wall to her right. To be visible from so far away she thought it must be over fifty feet wide, or maybe even larger. She couldn’t make out much detail, but something bugged her.

“I don’t see anyone coming into the city,” she said, and looked out again. It was as if the world outside the walls was entirely barren of animal life. Tracts of grass grew here and there, but even into the piedmont the ground was mostly covered with great gouts of upturned earth.

Tracks.

“You can’t see them once they’re in the tunnel,” Leopold reminded her. “The invisibility wards are the main defense against the warbeast.”

Willow scanned the ground again, but she couldn’t see anything moving down there.

“Could you see it from up here,” she asked, suddenly eager to see the enormous magical creature. From this high, behind the battlement, it didn’t seem nearly as terrifying as, say, a death worm up-close.

“I think so,” Leopold said, and looked out again. “Maybe it’s on the other side of the city.”

“Huh, damn,” Willow said. “I don’t know why I wanted to see it so much.”

“You’ll see it someday,” Leopold said, and smiled. “I’ll make sure you do.”

“Missed my chance, I guess,” she said, and remembered a half fever-dream of Leopold telling her about the warbeast as they trundled into the city. She felt cheated of the experience, especially if she was going to spend so long within Durum’s wall. She had no reason to leave, and another caravan ride was going to be expensive. She only planned to return home once her studies were complete in almost two years. Until then, she’d be on her own.

Willow pushed back from the battlement and began walking toward one of the ancient weapons which rose above the wall-top road, dragging Leopold behind her.

“What do other students do for money,” she asked as they passed guards newly relieved of duty, sporting sweaty mops of hair from the helmets they’d recently relinquished.

“For money,” Leopold asked.

“I can’t be the only one here who’s been sent without a full ride,” Willow said. “I assumed there would be some way to make up the rest of what I need.”

“I suppose you can try to find a job doing whatever you’d like in the city,” Leopold said. “As for magework, I haven’t heard of anyone doing spellwork outside of class for pay. But… it must happen, right? We’re in too high demand for it not to.”

“Maybe its a big secret,” Willow mused as they came up to the war machine. It resembled nothing so much as a giant cannon, of which Willow had only seen illustrations in books. Great iron plates adorned the outside of the device, deeply inscribed with what she recognized now as essential inscriptions.

“They must have fired essence through this,” Willow said, and touched the cold, black surface gently with her hand. “To battle the warbeasts.”

“Can you even imagine,” Leopold said, coming up beside her and searching the surface of the cannon. “I can’t find any commemorative plate saying what it did.”

“That’s because its still active,” a guard said as he came around the other side of the cannon. “Hasn’t been fired in centuries, but it could be powered up again in a jiffy. We’d need twenty mages to work it, and a whole team of guards to aim the thing, but it once took out a giant salamander before it reached the city’s wall.”

“And this is your charge,” Willow asked, trying to imagine what firing such a device would even look like. The guard nodded.

“It has to be manned at all times. Though the bloodless pact is still in effect, better to be prepared than too trusting.”

“Of course,” Leopold said. The guard took a step closer and lowered his voice.

“As for what you were talking about before, a scholar at the Arcanum can make a mite more than pocket change if you know the right places to come calling.”

“Oh,” Willow said, and couldn’t help a conspiratorial smile creeping across her face. Leopold looked taken aback, but she leaned in closer. “And where might a scholar at the Arcanum peddle their fledgling skills, might I ask?”

“Do you know Geoff’s, in the market square,” he leaned in to meet her. “I would speak to him. Tell him you’re a student and you’re looking to fatten your pocket. If you’re not a’feared of doing some abnormal work, there’s plenty to do.”

“Thank you for your recommendation,” Willow said, and went back to Leopold, who had taken an unusually strong interest in the casing of the cannon.

“Would you like to take a stroll to the market square?”