Taking Flight

“That’s right,” Irith agreed. “Except it wasn’t exactly an improvement after all, it’s just different. It lets you carry about a dozen spells, if you do it right, and you can use each one over and over, as many times as you like-but they never come out. And you can’t learn any more magic, ever.”

Kelder blinked. He thought that over.

“And there isn’t any counter-spell, at least not that anyone’s ever found. Which is why there wasn’t any Third Augmentation-because Javan tried out the spell, and loaded a dozen spells into his head, or maybe a dozen anyway, and from then on he could use them all as easily as snapping his fingers, but he could never get them out, and he couldn’t do any other magic, ever, and no other wizardry would even work on him, he was so charged full of magic, and since he hadn’t used any youth spells or immortality spells or anything in his experiment, that was the end of him-he lived about another thirty years, I guess, and he could do those ten or twelve spells all he wanted, but he wasn’t any use for anything else.” She grimaced. “Anyway, he’d written the whole thing down, so anyone who wanted-I mean, any wizard who could work high-order magic, because it’s not an easy spell-anyway, anyone who wanted to could see how the spell was done, but nobody ever tried it again.” She took a deep breath.

“Except me,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-One

Irith had paused in her story, but Kelder and Asha just waited, and after a moment she began where she had left off.

“It was … well, I’d heard the story from Kalirin, about how the great Javan went and ruined himself, and I was worried about the war, and I didn’t want to be a wizard, and I was really sick and tired of being an apprentice-I mean, for three years I had worked the skin right off my fingers, doing all this weird stuff,” Irith said. “And it seemed like a good idea, to go ahead and do the spell, and then I’d know some magic, but I couldn’t go into combat because I wouldn’t know the right kind of magic, and I’d never be able to do research-I wouldn’t be able to do any other magic, ever. So I started picking out the spells, and practicing up. The book said that Javan’s Second Augmentation was a seventh-order spell, but it looked a lot easier than that, and I was doing fourth-order spells without much trouble, and I figured that if it didn’t work I wasn’t any worse off. I mean, usually, when a spell doesn’t work right, nothing happens at all. Sometimes it goes wrong, and all kinds of horrible things can happen when that happens, but usually it doesn’t, you see?”

Kelder nodded.

“So I started picking out the spells I wanted, and collecting all the ingredients for everything. I can still remember what I needed for the Augmentation-maybe one reason I liked the idea was that there wasn’t anything really yucky in it. I needed three left toes from a black rooster, and a plume from a peacock’s tail, and seven round white stones, six of them exactly the same weight and the seventh three times as much, and a block of this special incense that had been prepared in the morning mist of an open field, and then I needed my wizard’s dagger.” Irith smiled dreamily, leaning on one elbow. “You know, I haven’t thought about this stuff in ages! All that stuff, to work magic!”

“You don’t have a wizard’s dagger now, do you?” Asha asked.

“Of course not,” Irith said, sitting up again. “I had to break it as part of the spell. I cut my knee doing it, too.”

“Go on,” Kelder said.

“Well, it took a couple of months to get ready,” Irith said, “and then an entire sixnight to work all the spells together. They didn’t all work-I’d picked some that were too hard for me. And some that sort of worked didn’t work right, like the invisibility spell. It was supposed to be Ennerl’s Total Invisibility, but it doesn’t act the way Kalirin’s book said it would; it’s a fifth-order spell, and I didn’t really know how to do stuff above fourth-order, but I figured I could give it a try.” She shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”

“So what other spells did you try?” Asha asked.

“Oh, I picked all the best ones I could find,” Irith said, “but not stuff that the army would want. And I didn’t make Javan’s silly mistake; the very first one I did was a spell of eternal youth, and if that hadn’t worked I wouldn’t even have done the rest, I don’t think. I’m not really sure, because the magic messed up my memory a little bit-but anyway, the spell worked, so I was fifteen then, and I’ll always be fifteen-I can’t get any older unless something breaks the spell, and there isn’t anything that can break the spell!” She smiled brightly.

“What else?” Kelder asked.