I asked Torvi on the first night of winter.
The passes had closed that week. The last caravan had gone down the mountain in a hurry, ahead of the snow, and the Hold had settled into the long, quiet dark it keeps until spring. The forges ran hotter. The great hall was always full. Everyone drank more of the bitter brown drink and told longer stories.
I had been thinking about it since the mithril. I could still feel the warmth in my palms most of the time, low and steady, like a banked fire. Fifteen points of it, the Registry said. I had no idea what to do with any of them.
So after supper, while Torvi was fitting a spring into a clock no bigger than a walnut, I said, "Torvi. How do I use my mana?"
She stopped.
She set down the spring very carefully. She set down her tweezers. Then she turned on her stool and looked at me, and her face did something complicated, and she started to laugh.
It was not a polite laugh. It was the big one, the one from the ravine, the one that made the brass birds chirp and the clockwork crow ruffle its feathers. She laughed until she had to hold onto the edge of the bench. She laughed until there were tears in her beard.
"Lad," she said at last, wiping her eyes. "Lad. Look at me."
I looked at her.
"What am I?"
"A dwarf..."
"A dwarf." She spread her thick, scarred hands. "I haven't got a single point of attunement. I haven't even got the line for it. I couldn't light a candle with magic if the whole Hold was falling and the candle was the only way out." She started laughing again. "You've gone and asked the one person on this mountain who knows less about spells than the goats. You might as well ask a fish how to climb a ladder."
I felt my face go hot. "I didn't think."
"No, you didn't." She was still grinning. "It's the first stupid thing I've heard you say in a year. I'm going to treasure it."
She picked up her tweezers again. I thought that was the end of it. Then, without looking up, she said:
"Wait for spring."
"For the caravans?"
"For the humans." She seated the spring with a tiny click. "They won't bring spellbooks up here to sell to us. Nobody would buy them. But they don't only come to trade with the Hold, lad. Half of them come because every merchant from every kingdom is up here at the same time, all in one hall. They trade with each other. Silk for wine, wine for salt, salt for books." She glanced at me. "You'd be surprised what changes hands in the great hall that's got nothing to do with dwarves at all."
"Books," I said.
"Books, maps, debts, gossip, the odd stolen horse." She shrugged. "If there's a book of spells within a hundred miles of here in the spring, it'll come up that road sooner or later. Keep your eyes open."
She went back to her clock. I sat there with my hands in my lap, feeling the warmth in them, and thought about spring.
It was a very long winter.
I did not waste it.
The Baron Aldwick's portrait had arrived with the last caravan: a small painting in a heavy gilt frame of a stern old woman with a long nose, a lace cap, and a mouth like a closed purse. I hung it on the wall above my bench and started on her face.
It was harder than Rosamund. With Rosamund I had been free to make whatever face I wanted. Here, every line had to be hers. I spent a week just on the nose. I spent another on the mouth, trying to find the place where a stern old woman's lips stop being cruel and start being tired. Torvi looked at the portrait once and said, "I'd make her prettier," and I said, "He didn't ask for prettier," and she said nothing else about it, which I took as agreement.
I started the Marchioness's doll in the evenings, when my eyes were too tired for the old woman's wrinkles. I worked on the little string-play stage Corva Lisse had ordered for the summer: a new set of puppets, a new play. This one was about a cat who wanted to be a knight. I gave him a helmet made from a thimble.
I went down below the Bellows Gate with Gudrun's party every month, through snow on the mountain and stillness under it. In the deep cold, the galleries were quieter. The gnawers slept. The stonelings did not move. We went deeper than we had gone before, into a level of old Khazrund where the walls were carved with faces worn smooth by time, and met things I did not have names for until Harek told me. In the second month of winter, against a pale, slow thing called a mire-slug that Harek said should not have been that far from water, I reached level twenty-one.
And every night, before I slept, I sat on my cot with my hands open on my knees and tried to feel my mana.
I did not know what I was doing. I had no teacher and no book. I only knew what I had felt with the mithril: the warmth in my palms moving, flowing, like water finding a channel. So I sat in the dark with the clocks ticking around me and tried to make it move on its own.
It did not. Not once. All winter.
But I got better at feeling where it was. By the end of the winter, I could close my eyes and find the warmth in my palms in a single breath. I could feel it thin out when I was tired and grow stronger when I had slept. That felt like something. Not much, but something.
The passes opened in the spring, and the caravans came up the mountain, and the great hall of Khazrund filled with human voices again.
Corva Lisse came on the third day. I saw her sea-green coat across the hall before I saw her face. She walked straight to Torvi's table, and before Torvi could open her mouth, she said:
"They started fighting over it."
I did not understand. "Over what?"
"The string-play." Her sharp face did not smile, exactly, but something around her eyes was very pleased with itself. "I put it in my cousin's tavern on the harbor. The first night, forty people came. The second night, a hundred. By the end of the month, the taverns on either side were trying to bribe my cousin's puppeteer to come and work for them instead." She set a fat purse on the table. "I have three troupes now. I need two more stages, and more puppets. And a new play. They've seen the dragon one eleven times. They still laugh at the goose. But they're asking for something new."
I had to sit down.
"I've got a cat who wants to be a knight?" I said.
"I'll take it," she said. Get faster updates on g.com.
While Torvi argued with her about the price, I asked, as casually as I could, whether she knew of anyone at the fair who might be selling books.
She raised one eyebrow. "What kind of books?"
"Any kind," I said. Then, because I could not help it: "Books about magic."
She considered me for a moment. Then she pointed across the great hall with her silver-ringed thumb, toward a corner by one of the great pillars, where a cart had been backed up against the wall and a man was sitting on a crate beside it, reading.
"Ellery Quill," she said. "Out of Mirrin. He buys up the libraries of dead scholars and sells them to living ones. Half of what he carries is rubbish. The other half is worth more than my harbor." She turned back to Torvi. "Tell him I sent you. He'll charge you less. Or more. With Ellery it's hard to say."
Ellery Quill was a thin, stooped, ink-stained man with a long gray ponytail and a pair of round spectacles that sat so far down his nose they were nearly off it. He did not look up when I came over. He was reading a book with no cover, holding it very close to his face.
Human Lv. 13 Scholar
"Corva Lisse sent me," I said.
"Then you'll pay double," he said, without looking up. "What are you after?"
"Spells."
He lowered the book an inch. He looked at me over his spectacles. Then he looked at my tag, and his eyebrows went up.
"A Puppet Maker," he said. "Buying spells?" He lowered the book another inch. "Do you have any attunement at all, Puppet Maker, or are you buying them to look at the pictures?"
"I have some."
"Some." He set the book down. He studied me for a long, uncomfortable moment, the way Torvi studied a gear. Then he sighed, got up, and began rummaging through the cart. "I don't sell grimoires to just anyone. All mirrin would have my hide. But I'm not going to sell you a grimoire, because I haven't got one, and you couldn't use one if I did." He dug deeper. "What you want is the bottom of the ladder. The first rung. Where everybody starts."
He came up with a small, battered book with a cracked brown cover and a broken spine, tied shut with string. He untied it and opened it on the crate between us.
The pages were thick and soft with age. They were covered in circles.
Not simple circles. Each one was drawn in black ink, perfectly round, filled with lines and angles and tiny symbols arranged in rings, one inside another, like the face of a very strange clock. Under each circle, in a cramped hand, was a line of words in a language I could read without knowing how. Beside them, in the margins, someone had written notes in pencil. Too fast. Breathe first. Don't push, LEAD.
"Formulae of the First and Second Circles," said Ellery Quill. "An apprentice's primer. The one every student at the Arcanum copies out by hand in their first year. This one belonged to a young woman who died of a fever before she ever finished her studies. Those are her notes." He tapped the margin. "She was quite good. Better than her teachers thought."
I looked at the pencil notes. Don't push, LEAD.
"It's missing four pages," said Ellery Quill. "The Circle Two wards, I think. Someone tore them out to use as spill-paper. Barbarians. But the rest of it is all there. Spark. Light. Mend. Gust. Detect Magic. A few others." He closed it. "Three gold crowns."
"Corva Lisse said you'd charge me less."
"Corva Lisse," said Ellery Quill, "is a terrible liar. Two and a half."
I paid him two and a half.
I read the whole thing that night.
I read it twice, which is my habit. Then I read the parts about Spark a third time, slowly, with the lamp turned up.
It was not like anything I had expected. I had thought magic would be a matter of saying the right words. It was not. The words were part of it, but only part. The words were the formula: the order in which the mana must move, like the steps of a recipe. The circle was the shape: the pattern the mana must take as it moves, like the mold you pour metal into. You had to hold both in your mind at once, perfectly, and then you had to lead your mana through them. Not push it. Lead it.
The primer said that most apprentices could not hold even a first-circle spell in their minds for the first few years. That was why they wrote them out on scroll-paper, slowly, line by line, until the shape was in their hands, even if it was not yet in their heads.
I looked at the circle for Spark. It was the simplest one in the book: three rings, eleven symbols, a single line of formula. I looked at it for a long time.
Then I closed my eyes, and it was there.
I could see it. Every ring, every symbol, every angle, perfectly, the way I can see a joint I have carved a hundred times. I did not have to try to hold it. It simply stayed, as if it had been printed on the inside of my eyelids. I opened my eyes and closed them again, and it was still there.
I did not understand why that was so easy for me, when the book said it took most people years. I only knew that it was.
I held out my right hand, palm up, in the lamplight. I found the warmth in my palm, the way I had practiced all winter. I held the circle in my mind. I said the formula, very quietly, so as not to wake the crow.
And I pushed.
Nothing happened.
I tried again. Nothing. I tried until my palm ached and my head throbbed and the warmth in my hand was thin as paper, and nothing happened at all.
I sat back, frustrated, and my eyes fell on the margin. On the dead girl's pencil note, written in a hurry, underlined twice.
Don't push. LEAD.
It took me nine days to understand what she meant.
I will not describe all nine of them. Most of them were me sitting on my cot with my hand held out, failing. Torvi pretended not to notice. Bolli noticed, and asked if I was trying to catch flies.
On the ninth night, I stopped trying to push the mana into the circle. Instead, I thought about the mithril. About how the mana had moved on its own, the moment it found a path. It had not needed pushing. It had wanted to go.
So I did not push. I held the circle in my mind, and I said the formula, and I simply... opened the path. I let the warmth in my palm find the shape, the way water finds the cracks in a stone. I followed it. I led it, the way you lead a nervous horse: gently, without pulling.
There was a sound like a twig snapping. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
A spark jumped from the tip of my index finger. It was tiny. Smaller than a grain of rice. It lived for less than a heartbeat, a single bright orange point in the dark, and then it was gone, and there was a faint smell of something burning, and a very small black mark on the blanket where it had landed.
I stared at my finger.
Deed recorded: Cast a spell (Spark).
MP 14 / 15
I sat there for a long time, holding my hand very still, as though the spark might come back if I did not frighten it away.
Then I did it again.
And again.
By the time the moon clock struck midnight, I had made twenty-two sparks, and my MP was nearly empty, and my head was pounding, and there were eleven tiny black marks on my blanket. I lay back on my cot and laughed, very quietly, so as not to wake the crow. I could not stop.
I think it was the happiest I have been in this world.
The flame took longer.
A spark is a spark. It lives for a heartbeat. But the primer said that if you held the formula open, if you kept leading the mana through the circle instead of letting it go all at once, the spark would stay. It would become a flame. A small, steady flame, sitting just above the palm, that you could hold for as long as your mana lasted.
It took me most of a month. I burned my fingers twice and singed my eyebrows once. Torvi made me practice over a basin of water after the second time, and moved her clocks to the far side of the bench.
But at the end of the month, on a hunt below the Bellows Gate, I got to use it.
We had stopped to rest in the old fountain hall, deep in Old Khazrund, where the light-runes had all gone dark. Ottil was fumbling with his flint and steel, trying to light the little camp-stove we carried for tea. His hands were cold. The tinder was damp. He swore at it under his breath.
"Let me," I said.
I held out my hand, palm up, over the tinder. I found the warmth. I held the circle. I said the formula, and I led the mana, gently, and I kept leading it.
A small flame bloomed in the air above my palm. It was no bigger than a candle flame, orange and steady, and it lit up the faces around me in the dark. I tipped my hand, and it slid off my fingers and down into the damp tinder like a drop of water rolling off a leaf. The tinder hissed, smoked, and caught.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Bolli said, very slowly, "Counter. Did you just magic the tea?"
"I suppose I did."
He stared at me. Fenna stared at me. Gudrun, across the fire, looked at me over the rim of her dented shield for a long, thoughtful moment. Harek began, very quietly, to laugh.
"A Human puppet maker who hunts with a starsteel sword," he said, "and lights fires with his hands." He shook his white head. "You're a strange one, lad. I've been down here a hundred years, and you're the strangest thing I've met in these tunnels."
Ottil put the kettle on. My little fire burned under it, steady and warm, and we made tea in the dark heart of the mountain.
It was surprisingly Good tea.
That night, I wrote in the ledger.
Day 1,078.
Level: 21.
MP: 15. Attunement: three.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 18.
Book: Formulae of the First and Second Circles. From Ellery Quill. Two and a half crowns. Four pages missing. Someone's notes in the margins.
First spell: Spark. Nine days. Twenty-two sparks the first night. Eleven holes in the blanket.
Second spell: a small flame. A month. Two burns. One eyebrow.
Lit the tea in the fountain hall. Harek says I'm the strangest thing in the tunnels.
Corva Lisse: three troupes. They fight over the string-play. She bought the cat.
Don't push. Lead.
I looked at the last line for a long time. Then I opened the primer to the first page, where there was no name, and wrote in very small letters, under the title, in pencil:
Thank you.
I did not know who she was. I probably never would. But it seemed like the right thing to do.