The morning came in cold and bright, and Greymoor went back to work as though nothing had happened.
The kitchen was already loud by the time Adrien crossed the yard. Two grooms were arguing about a horse. Somebody up on the east roof was hammering. Whatever the house had felt yesterday, it had put it away overnight and gone back to the business of feeding three hundred people on a mountain.
Ariane was waiting for him on the training ground with her hair tied back and her breath showing.
"Right." She had brought a stool out and had not sat on it. "Before you get excited, we need to talk about how this actually works, because you’re going to be insufferable in about four minutes and I’d rather get ahead of it."
"I’m listening."
"You’re a mage. Same as me." She held up a finger. "That doesn’t mean you get to cast whatever you like. There are eight Affinities. Pyro, Aqua, Gaia, Zephyr, Lumen, Umbra, Vita, Spirit, and a few more but less common. Everybody leans toward one on the bare minimum, maybe two, and inside your Affinity you’ll have an Aspect, which is the shape it takes for you."
"And yours is?"
"Aqua. Frost." She said it the way other people say their surname. "Which means water spells come to me quickly and ice spells come to me before I’ve finished thinking about them. Everything else is uphill."
"How uphill?"
"Depends who you are. A normal mage learns two or three Affinities in a lifetime and one of them badly." Ariane shrugged. "Talent decides how far you get and how much it costs to get there. You can push past what you were born with, but it takes years."
’Every mage in this world is carrying a ceiling and knows exactly where it is.’
Adrien turned that over and put it next to the line that had been sitting in his head since the training hall.
[Unique Path: Absolute Magus]
No affinity listed. No aspect listed. No limit written anywhere on it.
’So either the system is being generous with its wording, or I’m the only person on this continent standing outside the fence.’
"Well," he said. "We won’t know until we try."
Ariane closed her eyes.
"Don’t." She pinched the bridge of her nose. "Don’t say it like that. Say something normal."
"What did I say?"
"You said the thing men say right before they hurt themselves." She stepped out onto the frozen grass and rolled her shoulder. "Fine. One spell. And when this takes you three weeks, do not tell me I didn’t warn you first."
She lifted her hand toward the practice post at the far end of the ground.
"Watch the whole thing. Not just the ice, everyone watches the ice. Watch what my hand is doing before the ice."
Mana moved.
[Frost Lance]
It came out of nothing about a foot from her palm, a spike of pale blue as long as her forearm, and it crossed forty paces before Adrien had finished registering that it existed. The post cracked. Frost went up the wood in a spray and hung there.
And Adrien saw all of it.
Absolute Comprehension came awake the moment the spell began to form, and it did not ask his permission. The whole structure opened in front of him like a machine with the housing taken off. The way she gathered ambient mana and compressed it in three stages. The point where water became cold instead of the other way round, which was backwards from what he had assumed and which was the entire trick. The shape she held it in for a fraction of a second before release, and why that shape and not the obvious one.
He saw the flaw in it too. The taper at the back of the lance was doing nothing except costing her mana, and she was doing it because whoever taught her had done it, and whoever taught them had probably had a reason four hundred years ago.
The understanding arrived complete, in about the time it takes to blink.
The bill arrived a second later.
It went in behind his eyes and sat down hard. His vision went grey at the edges and something in his skull started up a deep, thick ache, like a hangover compressed into one instant and paid up front. He put a hand out and found the fence rail without particularly meaning to.
’Ah. So that’s the price.’
’Fine. Cheap.’
"I think I’ve got it."
Ariane turned around.
"You’ve got what?"
"The spell."
"You’ve got the spell." She looked at him. Then she looked at the post, and then back. "You watched me cast it. Once. Thirty seconds ago. And you’ve got it."
"That’s what I said, yes."
"Adrien, it took me eleven days." She was not shouting, but she was getting there by a route. "Eleven. And I’m Frost. I had the Aspect for it and it still took me a week and a half to understand what my hand was supposed to be doing, and another four to get it out of my palm without dropping it on my own boots."
"I believe you."
"You believe me." She waved at the whole training ground. "Go on then. Show me. And when nothing happens I want you to remember that I was kind about it."
Adrien pushed off the rail, turned to the second practice post, and raised his hand.
[Frost Lance]
The mana came in three stages, and he left the taper off the back of it because the taper was a waste, and the lance formed a foot from his palm and went.
The post did not crack. The post came apart, and the top half of it landed eight feet away in the grass.
Frost climbed what was left, and the sound of it settling was the only thing on that ground for a moment.
Ariane’s mouth was open.
She closed it. Then she opened it again.
"It was thinner at the back," she said.
"It was."
"Why was it thinner at the back?"
"Because the part you’re putting there isn’t doing anything." Adrien lowered his hand and shook out his fingers, which were cold in a way he had not expected. "It costs you about a fifth of the mana and it makes the flight worse, not better. Somebody built that in a long time ago and everybody’s been copying it since."
His sister stared at him for a good while.
"I hate you," she said, with feeling. "I want that written down somewhere. I have hated you since yesterday afternoon and I intend to keep it up."
"Noted."
"Eleven days." She turned around, went to the stool, and picked up a bundle she had left underneath it. "Right. Well. I taught you a spell, which is what you asked for, so I’m done. I’ve got my own work and I’m already behind on it because I spent two days being sick about you."
She threw the bundle at his chest and he caught it against his ribs.
It was a book. Thick, worn at the corners, bound in blue-grey leather with frost patterns tooled into the spine.
"Ice grimoire," Ariane said. "Everything from One Star up to Three. Father bought it for me when I awakened and I’ve had the useful parts memorised for two years." She was already walking. "Don’t lose it and don’t be smug about it. Those are separate requests."
"What are you going to work on?"
She stopped at the edge of the ground and looked back, and for the first time that morning there was something in her face other than annoyance.
"Four Star. [Winter’s Reach]." She said the name carefully, the way you say the name of something that has beaten you before. "Fifty paces of ground in every direction. Every ice spell inside it hits half again as hard, and the earth starts freezing the moment it lands and keeps going until the whole circle’s solid."
"That sounds big."
"It is big. It also takes most of what I have to hold it and about forty seconds to reach full ground, which means anybody with a brain kills me in the first fifteen." Her jaw did something. "So I’m going to go stand in a field for four hours and try to make it thirty."
She went.
Adrien watched her go, and thought about a girl of fifteen who could hold a Four Star spell for forty seconds and had decided that was a personal failure.
Then he opened the grimoire, and then he closed it again, because there was something he wanted first.
He walked out to the middle of the ground and picked the third practice post, which was the furthest one, and started throwing.
[Frost Lance]
The first went two feet wide and buried itself in the turf.
[Frost Lance]
The second went high.
The third and fourth hit the post square, and the fifth went wide again because he had got interested in the trajectory instead of the target, and the sixth split the post at the shoulder.
’Understanding it and putting it where I want it are two separate problems.’
He kept going. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, and somewhere around fifteen he stopped counting, because the thing his talent had promised him was turning out to be true in the most practical way possible.
His arms were tired. His fingers had gone numb. His head still ached from the learning.
And the core under his sternum was as full as it had been when he started.
He was lining up the twenty-second when he heard the boots.
Garrick came onto the training ground faster than that hip had any business carrying him, and he did not slow down, and he did not bow.
"My lord. The farms."
Adrien’s hand was already down.
"How many?"
"Enough that they’ve stopped counting and started running." Garrick got a breath in. "They’re through the lower fences and into the outer holdings. Your sister’s gone ahead."
Adrien looked once at the grimoire lying in the grass by the fence, and left it there.
"Then let’s go."
...
AN: Add the novel to collections and send support if like it ;)