Things got harder after Willow’s arms were reconnected to her brain. What progress she’d gained in controlling her hands was lost as the much larger muscle groups of her arms writhed out of her control. What use was it to have dexterity when she mostly flopped around like a fish? Sometimes, when she was having trouble even getting the straps of her bag around her shoulders, she harbored the thought that perhaps going off on her own and getting Annabelle to heal her hadn’t been the best idea in the world.
Carl knew immediately, of course. She didn’t know if Annabelle had told him or if he could just tell from the way her arms jerked and she winced in response, but he sighed heavily when she arrived for her first practice session after the procedure. They didn’t get much done that day as Willow couldn’t hold her arms up for more than a couple of seconds at a time to finish a casting and Carl refused to let her sit and do the castings in her lap. They were—as he explained—much too dangerous to weave that close to her body.
But Leopold understood. He understood why she needed this even if he didn’t agree. He spent long hours massaging her never-used muscles, working blood around the tissues even as she winced and gasped in pain. They were so stiff, so weak, so useless. In most ways she was more disabled than she’d been before the procedure.
He suffered with her in silence, and slowly her strength grew from nothing to slightly more than nothing. She picked up a fork again for the first time two days after the procedure. Bryan and Margaret both noticed, but they didn’t say anything as she brought the small bite of meat to her mouth and just managed to get it in. Leopold rubbed her back as she caught her breath, satisfied.
Even Benny was better at using silverware than she was, and he decided to mimic her regression on the fifth day. He stopped after a sharp word from Margaret.
A week after the operation, Willow could write in her notes for class again. She’d feigned an injury for inscription class, but a half week after that she attempted work with the hammer and engraving chisel again. It was somehow even worse than the first time she’d picked them up, but she doggedly persisted in the project even after everyone else in class had left after the bell. In the end, a small vortex of her essence flitted above the graven surface of the copper plate in much the same effect that had been described in their assignment. Willow sighed in relief.
Two weeks after the operation she was finally able to hold her arms up for long enough to weave a three-layer spell in the practice room. This one was a gust of wind shaped by a supplementary layer into the shape of a vortex, to keep it from losing power as it spread out from the casting point. The layers locked into place at the same time as Willow’s arms shook from holding up their own weight.
She let go of the spell in her mind’s eye, letting it finally execute its intended purpose. The spinning sphere exploded away from her into the tunnel of nullification rings and the room itself rumbled with the passage of so much wind even for just the few inches it was exposed.
Carl walked around to the other side of the nullification setup and probed the rings with his fingers.
“You’re getting to the third ring,” he said. She’d started off only activating the first, with his assurances that as each ring was overloaded the next would take any spillover. There were five rings in the device.
“Pretty good then,” Willow wheezed as she let her arms fall to her sides. She was exhausted from holding up their weight, and it felt more like she’d been hauling a bale of hay than just standing there arms outstretched for a few seconds.
“Not good enough,” Carl responded, and came around the device.
“What!? Not good enough my ass! I’m pumping as much essence into these spells as I can.”
“And they’re still not strong enough,” Carl said. Willow looked at the nullification setup and saw a heat haze in the air above it. They had to wait for it to cool down between casts now, limited more by the device’s recovery time than Willow’s.
“So what if I can’t win on the first cast. I can try again.”
Carl shook his head. “Some enemies you only get one cast at. Some enemies have enough resistance to block all but the most concentrated of essence attacks. What if you were to come up against Durum’s warbeast? It once withstood a blast from a wall cannon. That’s thirty em right there, concepted as pure force, right into its side. And it shrugged it off. What then? Do you think it’s going to let you get in a second shot?”
“Um, have you seen that thing,” Willow asked, even though she hadn’t herself seen it. She’d seen a drawing of it once though, in the market. It was a truly detestable creature.
“I don’t think it shrugged that attack off as well as you think.”
“If you’re talking about the rot, that happened to it in the decades following. They’re not meant to live forever, they’re not even really meant to live for more than a few months. It’s a miracle its lasted so long.”
“When do you imagine I’ll be facing down a warbeast all by myself,” Willow asked. “They can just use the cannons. That’s what they were made for.”
“It’s natural resistance was too high,” Carl continued as if she hadn’t said anything. “The essence from the cannon couldn’t get through, couldn’t penetrate to scramble its organs. The cannon blasted it back, but that did almost nothing to it. If you want to overwhelm resistance like that, you have to overload your spells even more.”
“I’m not,” Willow said, then stopped herself. What did she really want to say, what did she really feel?
“I’m not interested in killing warbeasts,” Willow said. “I don’t want to fight. Once this… process… is over, I want to live a normal life. Once I have my body the way it should have been, I want to be a normal mage. Work in something boring.”
“Willow,” Carl said, and walked over to her. She took a step back reflexively, but bumped up against the chair and just barely managed to keep from sitting down hard. He reached out toward her neck and touched the amulet he’d carved for her after the disastrous metrology experiment.
“You will never be normal. I can only protect you for so long, but once people find out what you are, they will never stop trying to get at you. I’m just trying to keep you alive until you can fend for yourself. Like a little chick who can’t yet fly from the nest.”
“Do you mean the Arcanum,” Willow asked, and Carl’s lips went tight. “Would they do something to me?”
Carl sighed. “Let’s put it this way: if you were to find an inconceivably powerful inscripted device just stuck in the ground, would you leave it alone? Or would you take it, damn what anyone else said. Damn the law, because it wouldn’t matter. Not once you had the weapon.”
Willow opened her mouth to answer, but she realized that it didn’t matter what she’d do. It mattered what Durum would do, what Carl would do. What his unnamed master would do.
🜛
That evening when Willow got home she received a letter with the wax seal of the Arcanum on the back. She broke the seal in her room with Leopold and unfolded a letter from the Dean of the school.
“The Dean Dean,” Leopold asked as she was reading the letter. “Corinth Weatherby?”
“Dr. Corinth Weatherby,” Willow said, reading the signature again as if to assure herself that this wasn’t some unfortuitous prank.
“Well, what does he want?”
“He wants to meet with me, tomorrow,” Willow said, and handed the letter over to Leopold.
“To discuss the events in the metrology lab,” Leopold read out loud from the letter, and returned it to Willow. She smoothed the paper, then folded it, then smoothed it again, unsure of what to do with her hands. They were shaking and sweaty.
“What do you think he wants?”
“I don’t know,” Willow said, and she hated the hitch in her voice. Carl had scared her, and now this letter from the Dean? What if it was clearer to him what had happened in the lab than Carl imagined? What if he figured things out? What would happen to her? Was it really as bad as Carl made it seem?
“I guess you have to go,” Leopold said as Willow finally made a decision and folded the letter up for good, setting it on her bedside table. “I mean, he is the Dean.”
“I’m going to make you something,” Willow said, and turned on her bed until she was facing the wall toward the street. If anything went wrong she didn’t want to destroy the part of the house with Margaret, Bryan and Benny in it.
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“Make me what,” Leopold asked, and Willow looked up at the ceiling. The pale magelights were still floating up there, swaying softly on the invisible currents of natural essence.
“Something for emergencies. Just in case,” she said, and started in on the spell. It was the same spell Leopold had tried to cast on the deathworm a lifetime ago, but she shoved an unnatural amount of power into it. The spell-core shined brighter than any of the magelights along the ceiling, and finally above the layer giving direction she laid down an encompassing layer of steadfastness, just like the hovering lights.
It had been easy, but Leopold’s eyes were wide with fright at what she’d done. He could sense the essence she’d poured into that destructive concept, and at some point had scooted away from the bed to stand against the wall. The spell was safely encapsulated and Willow patted the bed beside her. Leopold sat back down.
“Here,” she said, and handed the closed spell to him. He took it gingerly and peered at it. Within the misty glass of the final layer was a small, whirling firestorm. It moved of its own accord, as if it were a raging tempest responding to a hurricane they couldn’t feel.
“You’ve preserved a spell,” Leopold said, fascinated.
“Temporarily,” Willow said, and touched the glassy surface of the sphere. “I’ve left a crack in the protective coating. Do you feel it?”
“That’s dangerous,” Leopold said, staring down at the sphere, his face lit yellow from the whirling fire.
“It’s for you,” Willow said. “If you need to use it, just force your essence into the crack. It should open up then—let loose what I’ve stored inside.”
“What could possibly need this much essence to destroy,” Leopold said, and looked at Willow. His eyes asked another question: what do you know that I don’t?
“I don’t know,” she said, and put her hand on his leg. “Just keep it with you, okay? I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“It’s you I’m more worried about,” he said, but she saw him pocket the spell-core anyway.
🜛
The meeting with Dean Weatherby wasn’t until after Willow’s introduction to essence manipulation class, and she found it difficult to pay attention to Professor Brandeweiss and his instructions as worries flitted through her head. They were working in groups to attempt their first multi-mage spells, and Willow nearly blasted her partner across the room when their combined gust of air got away from her. Carl gave her a warning look as she helped her stunned classmate back to his seat.
“Willow,” he said to her as the class was emptying out. “Can I see you in my office.”
“Sorry, Professor Brandeweiss,” she said. “I have a meeting with the Dean.”
That caught his attention, and he jerked up so fast he spilled a sheaf of notes onto the floor. Willow smiled and nodded against the rolling nausea in her stomach. She tried to affect nonchalance as she left the class, but the way he was staring at her only made her more frightened at what might be to come.
The Dean’s office wasn’t with the other professors, which Willow supposed made sense considering that she wasn’t sure if he actually taught any classes. She went back to the main hall and continued down the opposing wing, which seemed to house a lot of rooms with administrative names. She’d never been down this way before, but she found the Dean’s office easily enough at the end of the wing.
Willow knocked on the arched door, but when she couldn’t hear a reply over the general commotion of the changing classes down the hall, she tripped the latch uneasily and pushed inside. The interior was much brighter than Carl’s office and the room she stepped into was much larger as well. There was a woman sitting behind a desk a little bit away beside another door.
“Hello,” Willow asked. “I thought this was Dean Weatherby’s office.”
“This is,” the woman said. “Do you have an appointment?”
Willow nodded her head. “Willow Tremont,” she asked, as if she were unsure of her own name. The woman looked down at the blotter on her desk, made a note, then gestured to the door.
“He’s available now,” she said. Willow crossed the anteroom to the indicated door. She took the latch in her hand and looked back at the woman to make sure she was doing the right thing, but the woman had already dismissed her and was busy writing something down.
Oh well. Willow tripped the latch and opened the second door. On the other side was a richly furnished office, probably the nicest room she’d seen in the whole place, and sitting behind a large wooden desk was a portly man with a bushy mustache.
“Ms. Tremont,” the man said, and Willow nodded from halfway behind the door.
“I’m Dean Weatherby. Please, take a seat,” he said, and gestured to the several plush chairs set out in front of the desk. Willow softly closed the door behind her and took in the room as she lowered herself into one of the smaller chairs. There was a window which featured a small stained-glass portrait of someone raising their hands up to the sky below a ball of blue fire. Heavy curtains draped to either side of the window, and around the edges of the room were bookcases and trunks which surely stored innumerable knicknacks and folios. She imagined that Carl’s office would look a great deal neater if he had so much storage space.
“Well, how has your week been Miss Tremont,” Dean Weatherby asked. He leaned forward as if he hung on her every word, which did a great deal to quiet her jangling nerves.
“It’s going fine,” she said. “Homework, classwork, all that.”
“Your professors keep you busy.”
“Yeah,” Willow lied. The fact was that she’d never felt particularly busy with her coursework. Even now with her increased training with Carl, it felt like she was breezing through school.
“The reason I called you here today has to do with the incident in the metrology lab,” Dean Weatherby said, and steepled his fingers under his chin. The effect in part made him look serious and contemplating, but Willow couldn’t help to notice that the posture also hid his mouth. He could begin concepting at any time and she wouldn’t know.
“‘Incident’ is an interesting word for it,” Willow said, dodging his open-ended statement. She wasn’t sure what he was getting at or what he wanted from her, and until she was sure she didn’t want to give anything away. He looked at her steadily, never taking his eyes from her face to glance at her neck or rake down her arms.
Dean Weatherby sighed. “You’re right. ‘Incident’ is much too trivial of a word to describe it. Disaster, more like. Near-lethal cock-up. Academic negligence. Criminal negligence.”
Willow startled. “I’m not sure I’d call it those things.”
“I would,” the Dean said. “You may not be aware of what those former students had set up in that lab, but they’d primed the tanks with enough essence to fry you to a crisp. They were under the insane impression that they could extract some ungodly amount of essence out of your body, and from Professor Brandeweiss’s report on the incident they nearly injured you in the process.”
So, Carl had done some creative accounting in his incident report. ‘Nearly injure’ wasn’t at all what had happened, and she’d in fact been injured by her own stored essence, not the top-up amount they’d procured initially for the tanks. She needed to play this close to the vest.
“I didn’t know I was in any danger.”
The Dean shook his head. “Nobody knew what they were planning to do. Believe me, if we had, it would’ve never gotten so far. Why they remained so secretive about it, I have no idea. They fabricated research projects to several different professors in order to obtain materials. Professors, I might add, who had no idea of each other’s involvement. All of which have been disciplined, I’ll have you know.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s—,” Willow began, but the Dean cut her off with a wave of his hand.
“As for Steph and Daniel, they’ve disappeared without a trace, but we’re working with the city guard. We’ll find them soon enough, and they’ll be tried for their crimes.”
“Wait, crimes?” It appeared that Carl hadn’t been entirely honest with her. ‘Disappeared’ wasn’t exactly ‘expelled’. Were they even with his old mentor?
“Reckless endangerment,” Dean Weatherby ticked off on his hand. “Misappropriation of Arcanum materials. Conspiracy. Academic fraud.”
“But they just had an idea,” Willow objected. “They were just testing a theory.”
“Completely out of bounds of the normal academic process,” the Dean said. “We have panels, Miss Tremont, especially when it comes to new processes involving humans. Panels to ensure safety, to maintain ethics. They bypassed all of these, and if things had gotten out of hand someone might have been terribly injured. It’s not just your life that was in danger, Miss Tremont. They could have been killed too.”
A fragment of memory came back. A chair with leather straps holding a body. But the body wasn’t hers. The chair was, and she shattered the chair with her will alone. The body tumbled to the floor.
The flesh body.
“Miss Tremont,” Dean Weatherby prodded, and Willow shook her head. The reverie dispelled like cobwebs from the end of a broom, and she was back in the Dean’s office again.
“Sorry, I just…,” she said, but she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. She just what? Was that a memory? It didn’t seem real.
“You’ve been through a lot regarding this matter,” Dean Weatherby said. “If it wasn’t for Professor Brandeweiss, well, I’d hate to think what might’ve happened. I wanted to invite you here to clear the air, to explain what steps the Arcanum will be taking to ensure nothing of this sort ever happens again. And to ensure you of your place here, and your continued safety.”
Willow nodded slowly, but there was still something bugging her.
“They… Steph and Daniel… got those tanks from different professors, right,” she asked. “If there are panels and such, how did they get access to that kind of equipment.”
“That’s where the fraud came in,” Dean Weatherby said. “They told the professors that they were going to extract essence from a captured magical creature.”
“And that would’ve been okay,” Willow asked. “To just… drain something like that?”
Dean Weatherby nodded. “They’re not human, Miss Tremont. You are.”