Page 82 of Her Dreadful Will
“An oath ring doesn’t have to be one of a pair.” He caught her hand, examining the slim ring. “Damn. I wonder—”
“Wonder what?”
“If they’re spying on you.”
Soleil’s stomach dropped. She could feel the blood draining from her head, leaving her faint and dizzy. “Oh god.”
“Hey.” He laid his other hand on her shoulder. “It’s unlikely they’ve been spying very closely, otherwise they would have come down hard on both of us by now. All the same, I’m going to layer a confusion charm over this thing, just to be safe. Hold still.”
He arched his left hand over hers, whispering barely perceptible words. Soleil frowned. “What language is that?”
“Shh.”
A wisp of shadow issued from his fingers and wove itself around the ring, tightening and vanishing, as if it had soaked into the thin band of metal.
“There. That should screw with anyone tracking your magic use, or your movements.” He plunked the broken brick into her palm. “Now, close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s easier to concentrate on what you need to do if you block out visual stimuli.” His palm passed over her eyes, shutting out the light. “Think about the brick. You’ve taken nature perception courses, I assume?”
“Yes—”
“And you have these.” He touched two of her rings. “To enhance perception.”
“I usually use them to enhance perception of human minds,” she said.
“The same skill can work with elements of nature.”
“But a brick’s not nature.”
“It is! Dirt and water, baked hard with the sun. Now stop talking, just for a minute, please.”
Soleil adjusted her stance and held the brick in both hands. She took a moment to sort her internal magic, setting aside the mind-flex affinity and drawing on her underlying fount of radiance. The radiant magic was unfocused, ready to be formed and used however she pleased, though it most readily slanted toward the manipulation of nature.
If magic were gourmet ice cream, nature magic was true vanilla, and affinities were just a swirl of added flavor. Mind-flex magic could be black raspberry, she thought. Chaos magic was brown sugar and ginger, or maybe white peach and bourbon—
“Soleil.” Achan’s voice held a keen edge of exasperation. “Are you thinking about the brick? Can you feel its internal structure?”
“Um, totally.” She was totally in tune with the rough, ugly brick, not salivating for delicious ice cream. In a bell-shaped glass bowl. With a long-stemmed silver spoon.
“Good.” Achan’s voice, intense and persistent, forced her back on task. “Everything tends to disorder, to decay, and this brick is already on its way there—broken and disintegrating. Can you feel the unraveling edges, the cracks in its substance? Find the places where it wants to be unwound and undone.”
As he spoke, Soleil felt them—the microscopic faults running through the brick, the particles of clay ready to fall apart. Achan’s voice faded to a buzz in the back of her head as she pressed slivers of her magic into the brick, working them deeper along those fault lines. If a human will was like music, the molecules and the atoms of the world were music too, singing to each other, circling in a methodical dance, altered infinitesimally by time, temperature, and outward forces. With her magic, she could pluck the strings, vibrate those atoms and break them free, dissociate electrons from their orbits. She imagined what would happen to the brick over the next ten months, or ten years—erosion and weather, water and wind scouring away its surface until finally it collapsed into red-brown sand. Only instead of the slow ravages of time, there was one catalyst, and it was Soleil—her magic rushing into the brick like a clash of cymbals and a deep quaking of drums.
The brick burst, and sand sifted through her fingers.
She thought she had imagined that too, until she opened her eyes and saw Achan’s face, glorified with excitement.
“I knew you had it in you!” He passed a hand through the trail of falling sand. “Try another.”
He gave her a second brick—a whole one.
This time it was the work of a moment to sync her mind to the object, and within seconds she had disintegrated it. She opened her eyes, grinning at Achan. “This is fun.”
Her gaze latched onto a piece of the old mill wall, nearly as tall as she was. Casting a mischievous look at Achan, Soleil approached the wall and splayed her hands against it.
This structure was more complicated, with many bricks joined by mortar, and it took her several minutes to weave her way into it and send out enough jagged chords of magic to break a chunk of it away. Sweat seamed her forehead and glued her hair to her temples. She looked at her trembling fingers, and then at the array of half-crumbled bricks on the ground.
