i. light

On the trip from Toma to find Eursulon, Suvi and Ame see each other summon light many times. Suvi, of course, says a sequence of words in the Lingua Arcana, and moves her hands in precise shapes. At one point in the journey, two nights past the third village where they didn’t find Eursulon, Ame asks, “Do all wizards cast light that way?”

Suvi’s brow furrows. “No? Sometimes we have to summon much more light, to fight back creatures of darkness. And of course I adjust the light depending on how much ambient light is already there, and how much area I need to illuminate.”

“Oh—oh! That’s not what I meant,” Ame says, laughing in the lengthening twilight. Suvi feels tattered at the edges, unprepared with Citadel-approved outdoor kit as she ought to be, but Ame looks just as much herself as she did at the cottage. “I meant, do all wizards cast with both words and hand motions? It seems to me like the spoken part would be hard if you were deaf. And the hand part would be hard if you’d lost a hand for some reason.”

Suvi arranges the kindling for their cook-fire and frowns. “I don’t think a deaf or one-handed person could become a wizard. There are so many variables you have to define for a spell to work. For light, there’s temperature, luminosity, wavelength, the size of the light source… if you used only your hands or your voice to define all that, it would take a minute and a half just to cast light. You need multiple channels of information.”

“Hmm,” says Ame. Suvi looks at her in the mix of twilight and wizard-light, and remembers the last time she cast a light, early this morning. She had dipped her fingertips in a pouch at her waist, and her lips had moved, though no sound came out that Suvi could hear. Next she looked, Ame had a cloud of blinking points of light surrounding her hand: fireflies.

Right now, Suvi doesn’t understand it, and so she ignores it. But later, she will: why command the light to shine, when fireflies already want to?

ii. disguise self

On the boat to Port Talon, Suvi examines Eursulon’s glamoured form. She’s seen him in glamour before, of course, remembers how he modeled it on her. But times have changed since the last time she saw this glamour. For one, his glamour has grown with him, looking just as if his glamour as a child had grown up to be a young man. For another, Suvi now knows disguise self, and knows how hard it was to learn to cast. It doesn’t take a lot of arith, but it takes a great deal of care to ensure that the opacity, shading, and proportions of the illusion look convincing. She would need to learn so much anatomy to age a disguise year by year as Eursulon had, growing the hair at a realistic rate, adding on muscle as he trained, to say nothing of puberty…

“How do you cast it?” Suvi asks, twisting the end of one of his braids between her fingers. It looks like a braid, but the texture on her fingers is a horse’s mane. “How does it work?”

Eursulon blinks at her, owlish. “It is simple. I just remember what it is to be your brother.”

Suvi stammers out, “I—I gotta pee!” and flees to the forecastle. She looks out over the rail at the moonlight on the water, eyes stinging. She practiced until her eyes burned and her fingers ached to be able to change her face, and all Eursulon has to do is remember his sister who he loves.

It must be nice, to have your magic work the way it does in children’s tales.

iii. mending

Two months after Suvi came home from her summer at the cottage, Steel taught her the indicative reflexive.

She was still grieving, but she wanted to learn magic so she could follow in her parents’ footsteps. Steel was happy to hear that Suvi could cast spells on her own, but before she cast anything else, she had to start with the indicative reflexive.

“It’s like the spaces between words,” Steel said. “It doesn’t mean anything on its own, but without the spaces between, words would be hard to read, wouldn’t they? This will make your spells legible to the universe itself.”

Suvi puffed herself up. “I promise I’ll work hard and do it right!”

Steel laughed. “You won’t need to. You’re a smart girl. It’s easy.” She crooked her pinky finger so it pointed back toward her own chest. “Like this. And channel just a whisper of magic from the palm of your hand out along the curve of your pinky.”

It was easy. Easy to incorporate in any spell, which mostly didn’t depend on which way your pinky pointed, and it used up so little arith. She learned in theory class later that all spells needed the caster to be defined, thus the pinky pointing back to the self: indicative reflexive.

Except it turns out it isn’t necessary. How did Stone discover that, and why didn’t she tell anyone? Wizards were defined by their secrets, sure, but didn’t this shake the foundations of magic itself? What did Stone know that Suvi doesn’t?

As she holds the shards of the strange magic mirror in her hands, Suvi has the voices of two mothers in her mind: the one who tells her that the indicative reflexive is necessary, and the one who tells her it isn’t. A strange dread roils inside her. If the indicative reflexive doesn’t make her spells legible to the universe, then what does it do?

She casts mending on the mirror, her pinky finger slack, pointing at no one. A null clef.

iv. owl’s wisdom

On the road to Joras, chasing any hint of Eursulon, Ame found an owl feather, pale and soft as a whisper. “Keep it,” she said, giving it to Suvi. She held it and thought longingly of eiderdown pillows in the Citadel; they’d been on the road too long. “You can cast really useful spells with it!”

Suvi’s curiosity stirred. “Like what?”

“Owl’s wisdom,” said Ame. “It’s a spell you can use to help your friends.”

Suvi’s brow furrowed. “Owls are stupid. A group of wizards once tried to train them as couriers, but their minds are so taken up with their eyes and ears that they just don’t think.”

“I’m sure the owls do fine when they do what they want to do,” said Ame, the corners of her mouth turning up. “But that’s not really the point. The point is: does your friend think that owls are wise?”

“Do you?” said Suvi.

“I think all animals are wise. We have something to learn from all of them,” Ame said, and Suvi almost pressed her on it, almost asked what the wisdom of worms would be, except that she knew, she knew, that Ame would have a frustratingly good answer. “What, do you have any wise animals in mind?”

Suvi considered. She looked around the forest for inspiration, then stopped and pointed at an anthill. “Ants,” she said. “They’re so small, but together, they build things so much larger than themselves. They trust in that. They sacrifice for that. That’s wisdom, isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Ame. She carefully picked up an ant between her fingertips. She pinched the fingertips of her other hand in front of it and pulled back as if unspooling an invisible thread from it, then drew a line with her pinched fingers from Suvi’s forehead to her chin. “And now you have it, too.” She let the ant go, right next to its anthill.

Suvi didn’t understand at first, but after that it became easy for her to find clear footpaths through the woods—as if a fellow ant had left a trail for her. When they settled down to camp, she produced the owl feather and said, “Teach me how to do that.”

Some parts of how the spell worked were familiar. She had to hold the owl feather in a particular way, channel magical energy along its rachis, and then pass it to her other hand through her heart, fingers positioned just so. But other parts were unfamiliar: the way you had to tailor the material component to the person you cast it on, and the verbal component, which according to Ame was “whichever words of encouragement they need to hear.” How was Suvi meant to know that?

Later, on the boat to Port Talon, Suvi toyed with the owl feather and asked Eursulon, “Do you think owls are wise?”

Eursulon considered her question with the same gravity he always gifted her. “Some of my siblings told me as a child that my mother was an owl spirit, and that that is why I have the feathered ears that I do. I do not know if that is true, but I often imagine my mother that way.” He thought some more. “Spirits who become lovers of the Great Bear rise in power and standing in so doing, so I suppose that was a wise move on her part.”

If Suvi’s mother had slept with her father for the clout and then left her behind, she imagined she would have been bitter. But Eursulon stated it as plain fact. He had grown up with many half-siblings who also only knew their father, so to him it was normal, she supposed. Suvi wished she could be so well-adjusted about her own family.

So now, as the responsibility falls to Eursulon to guide a family of Grenaux to safety, Suvi remembers the owl feather she still carries. She holds it just so, one finger at each end of the rachis, and channels magic into it through whisper-soft barbules. She reaches out her other hand to touch Eursulon’s back, shifts the magic through her heart from one hand to the other, and just says, “You got this.”

The outline of great horned owl wings settles on his back, the perfect match for his feathery ears.

v. counterspell

It isn’t just the indicative reflexive.

Waves of clarity break over Suvi as she works with nothing but glass sand and red ink to rewrite the counterspell of the Glass Coronet to suit her own spellbook. The way the Lingua Arcana is used is such a waste.

Some of the precisions she was taught are necessary. If you don’t cap the lumens on your light, you’ll blind yourself; if you don’t specify the acceleration of your featherfall, then you’ll have no idea how long it’ll take you to reach the ground.

But counterspell has a clef to specify how much arith goes into it, and it’s so unnecessary, because it’ll just be the square root of the amount that went into the spell it’s blocking, every time—why bother spelling out how much?

Vandal looks over Suvi’s shoulder at the part of the spell she’s staring at. “Aren’t you fuckweasels always up each other’s asses about how much magic sploodge you use? Looks like a built-in lockout to me. Ask for too much, and BLAM! You’re screwed!”

“Arith rate limits,” Suvi breathed, and in her version, she skips right over it.

The Glass Coronet spellbook says “Target: center of gravity of the caster of the spell countered.” It’s convenient, consistent, easy to write down in a book. But Suvi thinks of owl’s wisdom, and how sometimes it’s ant’s wisdom instead. She thinks of casting identify, and the many different geometries of spells that she’s seen that way. Center of gravity of the caster isn’t a bad rule of thumb, but doesn’t it make more sense to understand the spell you’re countering and aim at the weak points in its structure?

The counterspell that ends up in Suvi’s spellbook is two thirds the size of the one in the spellbook she took. It feels fluid and clean in her hands. How much of her life has she wasted changing magic to suit the Citadel instead of changing the Citadel to suit magic?

“These sniveling smegma sniffers,” says Vandal. “Imagine you figure out the fucking language of the universe, and you use it to write spells like fucking requisition forms.”

“They could have been poetry,” Suvi says.

“You bet your ass,” says Vandal. “They could have been fuckin’ poetry.”

(+) foxfire

Suvi has hardly slept since Carrow. When Ame returns to the cottage on her broom, she must see the exhaustion in Suvi’s eyes. She does a huge, spine-cracking stretch and announces, “It’s been a long ride. I’m turning in early.”

Knowing this to be an invitation, Suvi follows Ame up to their childhood bedroom. They wordlessly take off their outer layers. Suvi makes for her childhood bed, but Ame, sleepy and tousled in her off-white shift, gestures her into her nest on the floor. Suvi has always preferred a real bed, but right now, it doesn’t matter. She gets up and crawls into the nest of crochet blankets and patchwork pillows stuffed with goose down. She stares into Ame’s wind-chapped face. Her lips shine with the grease from sheep’s wool she used at the north pole to protect her hands and face from the cold. She waits for Ame to say something, and when she doesn’t, Suvi asks, “That fire you cast on Steel. What is it?”

Ame’s eyebrows pinch up at the inner corners. “It’s foxfire,” she says, a little unsteadily. “It’s a witch’s curse.”

The green flames surrounded Steel completely, and she’d already been suffering from the curse creeping up her arm toward her heart. Suvi asks the question that’s been keeping her awake. “Does it hurt?”

Ame sighs through her nose. “It’s fire. Of course it hurts.” She does Suvi the small mercy of not asking her why she cares.

“How long does it take to go out?” Suvi asks, in a voice too small for her body.

“Until she rights the wrong she has done me,” Ame says, looking more the Witch of the World’s Heart than Suvi has ever seen her, “or I die.”

Suvi claps a hand to her mouth. She feels sick. Somewhere in the Citadel, even now, Steel is still burning. Her children can’t embrace her. The Citadel still doesn’t understand witch magic, not really. She burns. “Isn’t that torture?”

“Steel isn’t Ghost,” says Ame. “She isn’t trapped in a room or abandoned by the world. She could try to make amends with me at any time, as I agreed to do with Indri. She knows how to reach me. She chooses not to.”

Suvi presses one of the pillows over her face. Steel would rather burn than make it up to Ame. Every day, she chooses suffering over repentance. She probably doesn’t even know that’s what she’s doing. She probably tells herself that there’s nothing she can do but burn.

“I love her,” Suvi says into the pillow, muffled. “It doesn’t make any sense, but I love her.” And a part of her hates Ame for cursing her, no matter how much she did to earn it.

“I still loved my parents for a long time after they gave me up,” Ame says, somewhere beyond the close warm world between Suvi’s face and the scrap-cloth pillow. “Where I came from, you’re supposed to honor your parents for giving you a life and a legacy. I felt like I had to do that, because my parents did give me life, even if they didn’t give me much else.”

Slowly, Suvi lowers the pillow from her face to her chest. She stares up at the ceiling. “When did you stop?” Can you burn it out of me? she wants to ask. Is there a witch's curse for that?

“When I was fifteen or so,” Ame says, “Grandmother Wren took me to this awful port town in Rhuv. Every window had bars over it like a prison cell. The city was full of people who were indentured for the rest of their lives to pay off some debt or other. I wondered how anyone could force someone into servitude for the rest of their lives just to pay off a debt. Then I realized that I was exactly like them. There was some part of me that felt like I had to spend the rest of my life in debt to them. But I had already spent fifteen years like that. And I decided I’d paid off my debt. I was free. Just like all of those indentured servants should have been.”

Suvi rolls into her side to face Ame once more. “I don’t know if I feel that way. Not yet.”

Ame scoots forward and pulls Suvi into an embrace. “I know,” she says. “I know.”