Spellmaker

Elsie glanced at Bacchus, who seemed interested in the lecture, but perhaps he was simply better at pretending. I know, Elsie wanted to say, yet she forced the words into her stomach, where they boiled and popped. Miss Prescott was going to cover every single basic premise of spellbreaking, and Elsie would have to take it all in without complaint. Because if she complained, then her story was flawed, and she would go to prison.

“Miss Camden?”

Elsie’s eyes shot to Miss Prescott. “Oh, yes, it’s incredibly interesting!”

Miss Prescott smiled. “Now, I’ll show you what I mean. Master Kelsey, if you would freeze this.”

Bacchus leaned over and touched his hand to the dish. Magic tickled Elsie’s senses as the water froze and pulsed with a glimmering blue rune. Changing the state of water was a novice-level spell. Bacchus could have placed a stronger enchantment on it—a more complicated rune that would be more difficult to break—but he’d gone for the simplest option, knowing Miss Prescott would expect to start with something elementary.

Elsie could have untied that rune with a sneeze. Instead, she said, “It’s so lovely.”

“Isn’t it? I’ve always thought so.” Miss Prescott slid the dish to Elsie and then began explaining how the rune held, and how spellbreaking could be applied to it, and how all spells were like an algebraic equation—

Algebraic . . . what? What nonsense. Elsie had always seen runes as knots to be untied, not numbers to calculate. Miss Prescott was making it far more complicated than it needed to be. The sum of this and the division of that to determine where to start . . . Elsie just tugged at the thing until she found a loose end. She highly doubted counting and equating would make the process any faster.

She’s still talking, she thought with dismay. She was overexplaining. Even Bacchus would know how to pull the spell apart at this point.

“Now, find the same rune in the book,” Miss Prescott said.

Trying not to grit her teeth, Elsie opened the book. She found the novice freezing rune right away, but acted like it took her a moment. “Here is it.”

“Very good. Now, I want you to study the rune, do the calculation, and tell me where you think you should start.”

Elsie resisted the urge to grumble. Top right, she knew. But she paced herself, her remaining patience slowly unraveling, and played along.

It took another quarter hour, a quarter hour, before Miss Prescott let her try breaking the rune. And again, Elsie purposefully made a mistake and started over before turning the ice back to water.

And then she had to do it again. And again. And again.

Elsie was going to lose her mind.

The lesson lasted two hours, with Bacchus hardening a tea cake and turning a coin translucent, all novice physical spells. Each and every time, Miss Prescott explained how it all worked, and each and every time, Elsie played the unknowing yet fascinated child, enough so that Miss Prescott praised her as she cleaned up her supplies. They bid farewell, and Elsie waited several minutes after the spellbreaker’s footsteps left the room before crossing to the far corner, where a tapestry of a field of sheep hung along the wall.

Bacchus followed. “Bravo,” he said.

“That was the most maddening thing I’ve ever had to do,” she hissed. “Even as a child, I would have thought it ridiculous.”

His lip quirked into a smile. “But you performed well.”

Elsie folded her arms, annoyed at the way her wrists were starting to itch. They hadn’t broken any large spells, but she’d unwoven more small ones than she could count. “She said years, Bacchus. That I’d be training for years. I can’t do this for years.”

“Perhaps you will be a very quick learner.”

“But I can’t.” She dropped her arms. “I can’t be a quick learner, Bacchus, because I can’t give them any reason to suspect.”

The smile faded. “I suppose that’s true.”

Sighing, Elsie looked out the window. There was a nice walking path down below, along with a garden sporting orange and pink flowers. Beyond that, Elsie knew, were the woods she had crept through the night Bacchus had caught her in an act of illegal spellbreaking. The assignment had been to break a spell on the servants’ door. She’d thought she was freeing them from an oppressive master, but in truth Merton had sent her there to strip the house of protections, probably with the intention of killing Bacchus. Thank God he’d stopped her. Thank God he’d given her a chance to redeem herself instead of turning her in to the authorities.

“But why did she want you?” she wondered aloud.

“Pardon?”

“When the Cowls—Merton—sent me to dis-spell the servants’ door.” She gave in and scratched her wrists. “You were only an advanced aspector, and a new arrival. You didn’t know her previously. So why was she after your opus?”