Page 9 of Minor Works of Meda

Eudoria had looked down her nose at me. “You could not possibly begin to understand the sigil-work within those tomes.”

The wrong thing, perhaps, to tell me.

I memorized where the bookshelf’s ladder rested—its right edge just covering the impossibly thick Tales of Earth and Fire—then ran it swiftly along the wall until I reached the desired shelf. The forbidden books lay near the ceiling, grouped together and untouched for who knew how many years. I flipped the ladder’s wheel lock and hauled myself to the top. With tender care I reached over the backs of the volumes, nudging the first towards me. When it parted from its friends I gripped it carefully at the edges and eased it off the shelf into my hands.

I must have spent half an hour balanced on the ladder, teasing out one book after the next and examining their cracked, yellowing pages before carefully replacing them. The Medomenos, one was called. Aether’s Undoing, another proclaimed. The title of the next, not written on the spine, was in the sigil-symbols, carefully broken as any spellbook’s so that no flood of magic would awaken an enchantment.

The seventh book I pulled from the shelf was thin, bound in red pebbled leather. No text marked the cover or spine, nor sigils. But gold lines traced its corners, and on the cover, somebody had inlaid, with gold and silver wire, three concentric circles. Feeling nearly overwhelmed by the riches around me—I ought to pick one, and start studying, before I wasted any more time—I eased open the red book and ran my eyes gluttonously across the title.

The Minor Works of Tarelay Sorrowsworn.

“What?” I whispered. My hands trembled so badly I put the book back on the shelf for a moment, and leaned my forehead against the ladder’s rail.

Tarelay. The Tarelay? Who built the Ward?

The rest of the books instantly forgotten, I tucked Minor Works under my arm and rushed down the ladder. From below, you couldn’t tell anything was missing from the thin shadow where the red book used to rest. I wheeled the ladder back to where it had been, carried the book to my chamber, and began to read.

It was like no casting I had ever seen before. Minor work, my toe. The enchantments in that book may have accomplished little, but the phrasings were as gnarled as a thicket. Tarelay spoke a whole different language of magic. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from the faerie who was perhaps the greatest enchanter of all time.

Everybody used known phrases. You could draw the same ones that had been written for centuries, and know what they would do, so long as you drew them correctly. You might rearrange them; take one out and put another in. But you used the blocks every other witch used.

Tarelay had not.

The first spell alone, which proclaimed in archaic words that it could ‘restore a tree dead from inside to out’ was made of ten unrecognizable phrasings. A breath of laughter escaped me as I leaned closer into the book, hunting desperately along the lines of each sigil’s curves and spikes and whorls as I carefully copied the first spell into a journal.

I had a headache by mid-afternoon.

I wandered outside to the garden for a break, annoyed to need the rest. A rosemary bush standing nearly as tall as me claimed the ground to the left of the door, perfuming the air. A lazy bee tumbled past.

I tugged a fig off the fig-tree. Then I froze. A spell to revive a tree. What would such a spell do? I had watched Kalcedon tend this one. He watered it at the height of sun season; piled mulch, fish-heads and bird shit over its base mid-way through each harvest to feed its roots.

All living things needed food and water. Might sigils for either be hidden in Tarelay’s spell?

Back inside I hunched over the kitchen table, scrutinizing my journal for any sign of the coiling slopes that made up water’s base rune. I found two, buried in a thicket of angular strokes. With a steady hand and a frantic heart, I re-drew the same phrasings without the marks for water and studied what remained.

By nightfall I needed another break. I rolled my stiff neck and went to stand in the tower’s doorway, peering in the direction of Missaniech. The world was dark, the moon unrisen. Red lights in the distance must have been the celebration.

I’d only been to one wedding before. I was twelve. My cousin had, in an unusual feat, married someone from all the way on the other side of the isle. My mother hadn’t minded because there was good pottery trade to be had there anyways, being near Pilkonos city. I remembered the dancing, and how my father got too drunk and couldn’t stop laughing, and all the uncles and aunts pinching my cheeks. I’d gotten too overwhelmed and spent half the night crying. The music had kept going into the small hours of the night.

The image of Kalcedon dancing with some village girl came unbidden into my head. She’d be a beauty who had no business living in a sleepy town along the coast. They’d spend the night walking on the shore and picking out the light of the twelve stars bright enough to shine through the Ward’s barrier, and even if he couldn’t love her he’d fall madly infatuated with her beauty and that would be that. They’d raise slightly-gray babies and Kalcedon would probably outlive every last one of them.

Which would be fine, I tried to tell myself. It would be fine if Kalcedon found some pretty girl to play at love with. He’d never look at me that way, and I couldn’t afford a distraction anyways. Some day, I was going to join the Temple Order. I’d been dreaming of it my whole life. In my heart I felt certain it was a place where I’d finally be accepted; where nobody would care if I didn’t know when to laugh, or what to say, or how to meet another’s eyes. Nobody would notice there that I only wanted to talk about spells, because they’d all be doing the same. So it didn’t matter what Kalcedon was doing right now, or with who.

This self-pitying daydreaming was useful for one thing, which was to remind me that I was very far from being accepted to join the Temple. The only man knocking on my door so far was a pointless one with flowers and unknown intentions. The job I had now, assistant, wasn’t even one that required magic—in fact, it had mostly been held by normal villagers over the years, until Kalcedon drove each and every one to quit and Eudoria finally agreed to give me a chance.

I wasn’t going to get a step closer to my goal by wondering whether anybody had caught Kalcedon’s powerful gaze. All that mattered was that I had work to do. I retreated to my room, lit the candles, and kept reading.

As the night deepened every noise made me sit up straighter, expecting them to be home. Glad you enjoyed yourselves, I imagined myself saying airily, as I emerged from my room, glorious secrets hidden well away. I had a most productive evening. Because I’d made the right choice, after all. I didn’t have the time to go to weddings of people I didn’t know or care about. I had work to do. Glad you enjoyed yourselves. Glad you had a nice night. Oh, was it pleasant? Glad to hear it.

Of course, it didn’t happen that way. I was sitting up in bed, deliriously running my eyes over the spells in the second half of the book, when I heard footsteps just outside my door. With a gasp, I shoved Minor Works and my journal under my pillow.

It was good I moved fast, because just then Kalcedon pushed open my bedroom door and buried me under a wave of power.

Chapter 6

“You’re supposed to knock,” I told him breathlessly.

The storm-gray man leaned against the doorframe and studied me with heavy-lidded eyes. His clothes looked no worse for wear than when he’d left the tower.

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