Monday came all too soon, and that magical first weekend of freedom vanished like so much mist in the morning sun. Leopold didn’t stay with her Sunday night—he had his own business to attend to back at his dormitory room—so Willow slept alone in the house on Grave street and for the first time felt as if it were strange.
But he was there at the end of breakfast, as he’d been every day the last week, and they walked together up the long, low hill toward the Arcanum in the wan morning light. The school seemed to shine in a way it hadn’t before, like it really was a pinnacle of hope in the walled city. She had everything to look forward to, and nothing to be afraid of.
She went to class, her first class as a full student, and sat in the front as Carl demonstrated triple layering on a spell that would produce water from a rock, then set the class to the assignment. Willow slipped on her silver glove, hidden under a tight-fitting leather one, and once again practiced modulating the power which coursed through her right hand. By the end of class the essence she was able to pass through the glove was almost as weak as the essence oozing from her left hand.
Carl left class at the first clanging of the bells and Willow followed closely behind as he dodged students in the corridors back to his office. She didn’t even knock when she reached his door, just burst right on through. He barely looked up as he was arranging a set of documents on his desk.
“I want Annabelle to heal my left hand too,” Willow said, the door barely closed behind her. The wards against eavesdropping weren’t even up, but she assumed this conversation would be so inconsequential that they wouldn’t need to worry about anyone overhearing.
“Don’t you have class to be in?”
“Not until after lunch,” Willow said. “Inscription. I used to have to go to metrology now.”
“Ah, yes,” Carl said, and he smiled. “Poor Burket, I wonder how he’s doing. You sent him into a nervous fit, you know.”
“That’s not my problem,” Willow said, and thrust out her left hand holding her cane. “This is. I can barely push any essence out through it. If we could just heal it like my right hand—”
“Out of the question,” Carl said.
“What? Why?”
The professor turned. “Cast magelight now with your right hand. Go on.”
“Um…,” Willow said, and raised her right hand in the spell-form.
“Without the glove,” Carl amended, and Willow closed her hand.
“I… I can’t do it safely yet,” Willow said.
“And that’s why.”
“But I could just use another glove.”
“I only have the one,” Carl said. “Do you have any idea how expensive that thing was?”
As a matter of fact, Willow had no idea at all. She supposed it would at least be worth its weight in silver. But then the tooling; weaving the silver threads together into a malleable shape. It wouldn’t be cheap, and who would it even be made for? Battle mages most likely, who’d need armor against enemy spells.
Willow set her jaw and kept eye contact nonetheless. She needed to have her hand healed, she needed to keep moving forward. If she had access to the essence in both of her hands, she could really start working on down-regulating their pressure. This high-low shit had to stop, and fast, because she felt intuitively that it was holding her back.
“The time will come, Willow,” Carl said, his voice softer now. Understanding. “You’ll master the essence in your right hand, and we’ll move onto your right arm. It’ll be a long process, but it will come. You’ve spent your entire life like this, what’s a few more years?”
Willow’s mouth dropped. Years? She shut it quickly, not wanting to clue him into her shock and indignance. She didn’t have years. She wanted to master her own body, this body she’d never known she’d had before, and she wanted to do it now. If she could work her muscles, if she could move her body, she’d have access to her full essence capacity and also could begin the long, painful process of building herself up for the first time. No longer would she look like a waif. She would just be normal, like everyone else.
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Willow gave a slight nod, then turned and left the room. She felt Carl’s eyes on her back as she exited, but she couldn’t turn to face him again. Years? How could he expect her to wait so long when it was all within her grasp now?
There had to be a better way.
🜛
“What are you doing,” Leopold asked as they sat together in the high-ceilinged dining hall over lunch. Without metrology breathing down her neck she finally had a proper period of time to enjoy some food, and there was just something special about spending the coppers that she’d received from Geoff for the solid magelights. She’d helped herself to a double portion of the broiled chicken, both plates picked to the bone already.
She was staring at her left hand laying limp on the tabletop. Leopold was also staring at it.
“Trying to…,” she grunted. “Shut it off.”
“You’re trying to…,” he looked around, then leaned forward and whispered. “Disable your psychokinesis?”
Willow nodded. Her left hand laid on the table, but it was harder to surrender control over than she remembered. She supposed it had been a little easier with her right hand because she’d had the band to get her used to not having essence and spells coursing through her body, but she’d left the band back in her room at Bryan’s.
The best she could get were flickers—instants where in her mind’s eye her hand flashed clear, suddenly free of the tortuous turbulence that plagued the rest of her body. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see the psychokinetic spell effects in the mangled flow of her essence. The way her flow twisted around them, slowed and redirected, forming eddies and backcurrents in her stick-thin limbs. It was a miracle she’d been able to cast anything at all.
Her hand flashed clear again, then occluded as Willow involuntarily twitched her palm. She let out a breath of frustration and picked up her fork to push around some of the soggy oiled vegetables on her plate.
“I take it the talk with Professor Brandeweiss didn’t go well,” Leopold said.
“Years, he said. Years! I can’t wait years.”
“Why not?”
Willow looked over at him, incensed that he could even ask such a question. But then again, he knew nothing of living in a body that held its secrets from you. Of always looking the freak, of being crippled both physically and magically. What was it to him, a game?
“They’re reconnecting your spine, Willow,” he leaned over and whispered. “It’s going to take time. Lots of time.”
“I can’t stand it,” she said. “I just can’t stand to wait.”
“Why,” he asked.
“I want to…,” she said. “I want to be me. Me as I was supposed to be. The me that was always under the surface, held back.”
“You’re already you,” Leopold said. “This other stuff, yes, its another part of you. But you’re already Willow. The Willow I love.”
That word. She scooted against his side, gave up her nearly futile experiments on her hand and pressed herself into him.
“I love you too, Leopold,” she said.
He leaned against her. “It’s dangerous too,” he whispered. “It must be. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“What’s the worst that could happen,” Willow asked. “I can’t be even more crippled.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But sometimes… I’m scared.”
“I won’t let anything happen,” she said seriously. “I promise.”
🜛
In inscription class they were practicing graving copper strips adhered to wooden boards with lacquer. The symbology of the inscriptions was easy enough to understand with Leopold’s notes. It was a simple essence-redirection effect which would shunt essence from one location in an inscription to another, or from one side of the board to another once they were done with the graving.
Unfortunately, all of Willow’s studying prepared her little for the realities of handling hammer and engraving chisel. Even though she knew what she wanted to set down, the graving head kept getting away from her and she had to wrangle it back to the symbol sketched on the thin strip of brass. By the end of class she had a mangled strip which weakly shunted essence across its face to the other side of the board while spilling a great deal more essence off to either side.
Luckily this wasn’t a test, because she was pretty sure she’d have failed.
It was strange getting out of class with light still in the sky. For so long she’d been tutoring with Carl until after twilight; now he wanted her to work on her own until she had mastered holding her essence back through the silver glove, and then moved on to regulating it down to something that wasn’t blinding. It meant she had all the time in the world to herself to work, and theoretically she could work on anything she wanted.
There were unused classrooms all over the Arcanum, especially after a class as late as Inscription. Willow found out and boarded herself up inside. The thick stone walls of the college left the sounds of students walking through the halls muted—just what she needed to concentrate.
Willow laid her left hand out on the table palm up and concentrated on letting go. It had been days since she’d felt a twinge in her right hand; she knew she could do it, it was just hard to start again with another limb. But she had no, damn what Carl said. She couldn’t let all of this power just lay on the floor, unused. Pent up inside of her, moving limbs that should rightly be moved by her own muscles. It was a gods damned waste.
Her hand flickered and the clarity lasted for longer than an instant. A half second, a full second, then gone. She began again, paradoxically forcing herself to release control. Now that she was aware of what saturated her bones, she began to feel the psychokinetic spells soften. Begin to give way.
Another flicker. Was it a second? Or even longer? She settled down in the hard-backed chair and steeled herself for a mental workout.