Page 21 of Strength of Desire

“Whew.” He twisted the top off the bottle. “I don’t know how you do that day in, day out. I think I’ve lost twenty pounds in the past week.”

Aside from accompanying the students on runs, Hans hadn’t beendoinganything, but I didn’t point that out. The idea was to make nice with him.

“It keeps me busy,” I said with a shrug.

I sat down in the chair to the left of the sofa and drummed my fingers on the ratty green fabric covering the arm. Hans gave me a quizzical look. So much for my attempt to look relaxed. I wasn’t usually one for casual conversation. He had to know something was up.

Maybe I could use that to my advantage. I paused, letting silence stretch out between us until I judged Hans was on tenterhooks. Right when he opened his mouth to speak, I said, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

His eyes widened. Me asking for a favor was even weirder than me attempting low-stakes chit-chat. I knew I had a reputation for being stand-offish. I hoped that would just make him more curious.

“Of course,” Hans said, leaning forward. “I mean, assuming—well, you know.”

I made myself laugh, nice and easy. It felt foreign in my mouth. “All above board, don’t worry. I was just wondering if you could walk me through how the wards work. Especially this new bit that you all added.”

I’d heard they’d done some tinkering to make the spell more effective. But Hans’s eyes narrowed. Had I sounded too accusatory?

I shook my head, and decided to try channeling Seb. Everyone liked him. How would he handle this?

“Most of this stuff just goes over my head,” I said, doing my best to sound apologetic. “But I can’t help worrying. Not about you guys, obviously. I know you’re doing everything you can. It’s just—those freshmen who were in class when the moraghin attacked. They’re a wreck. I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’d just feel a lot better if someone would walk me through how the wards work. Treat me like an idiot—because I am one when it comes to this stuff.”

“Oh.” Hans blinked, then nodded to himself. “Yeah. Of course. That’s no problem. You see, the basic enchantment principle is predicated on the functionality of the invisibility matrix woven into the fabric of Vesperwood’s physical manifestation on this plane of reality. Given the inherent modularity of the—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, rushing to forestall him before he really got going, “but—another request. Do you think you could show me the ward room, too? Like I said, this isn’t my area of expertise. It might help me grasp it better if I could see it, too.”

He nodded again. “Of course. Yes. I think. Well, I’m sure no one would mind if—that is, it’s just to explain to you how the spell works, right? I don’t see how anyone could object to that.”

“I promise I won’t touch anything,” I said, giving my best self-deprecating grin. God, how did Seb do this every day? I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin. “Could you show me now?”

It seemed best not to give Hans too much time to second-guess himself, and five minutes later, we were on the fourth floor of the manor, standing in front of the door to the ward room. Hans had blathered about moon phases and the effects of minute shifts in gravity on human spellwork on our walk, but now he fell silent.

I’d passed by the ward room before, but had never had cause to look inside. As I watched Hans approach the door, I realized I couldn’t have looked, even if I had wanted to. It was locked to all except the wardkeepers themselves.

He murmured a spell too low for me to hear and passed his hand in front of the door in a complicated motion. I tried to clock it—up, then right to left, back up again, then down, finished with a pulling motion and a flick of the wrist to the right as though he were brushing away a gnat.

Memorizing the motion wouldn’t make any difference if I hadn’t heard the spell, and it wasn’t like I could do magic anyway. But Isaac had told me to watch as well as listen, so I did the best I could.

Finally, Hans opened the door and ushered me inside. I walked three steps into the room and stopped, staring at the scene before me.

The room itself wasn’t large. Maybe fifteen by fifteen feet, with a bay window opposite the door that pushed out and added a few extra feet on that side. That entire wall was filled with windows, through which I could see the cool blue of the winter sky.

The floor was covered with an eight-pointed star, drawn directly on the wood in something liquid and crimson. A glowing green jewel hovered above the middle of the star, just floating in mid-air. Thin lines of light, golden and sparkling, emanated from the jewel, retracing the star pattern in the air. Every few seconds, a bright comet of light shot from one point of the star to another, both in the air and along the crimson pattern on the ground.

This wasn’t subtle magic, and it wasn’t a quick battle spell either. The whole room radiated power, and the air smelled like ozone. The star was massive, taking up most of the floor. I slid sideways around it to the right. I didn’t know what would happen if I crossed into the pattern, and I didn’t want to find out.

Hans closed the door behind us and walked around the star to the left, not even glancing at it. I supposed the sight was ordinary for him, as a wardkeeper. He pulled a heavy book off a shelf beneath the bay window and continued his circuit until he reached me.

He opened the book to a page about two-thirds of the way through, filled with minute, cursive writing in various colors of ink. I squinted. The text was hard to read due to its size, but I also wasn’t sure it was written in English. I looked at Hans.

“Vesperwood’s grimoire,” he said, seeing the question in my eyes.

That was another surprise. Individual witches were supposed to have grimoires. Occasionally large families or clans had them. But not institutions. I was learning more about magic than I’d expected today.

I did my best to focus on Hans’s explanation of how the ward worked. The power that had gone into it, the ritual used to invoke it, the magical theory underlying its mechanism, and, ‘the delicacy of the otherworld-lattice that knits the filaments of spectral energy into the finest lace of double-matrix spellwork.’

That last bit was a direct quote, though God help me if I had any idea what it meant.

Hans flipped through additional pages of the grimoire, filled with yet more minute text, until he reached a page with a diagram that looked roughly like the star pattern filling the room. With a final disquisition on the importance of synchronizing magical coordinates, he flipped the book closed.

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