“You still have your magic, Grier.” He set down his glass then watched until the ripples stilled. “The drugs and disuse have stunted it, but it’s like a muscle. The more you practice, the more you learn, the stronger you’ll grow.”
Torn between disappointment that it wasn’t a quick fix and relief it was repairable at all, I nodded.
“Now.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Time for a pop quiz.”
The milk in my mouth soured. “I heard you should wait thirty minutes after eating before taking a test.”
The look he shot me confirmed his professorial status. It said he’d heard every excuse in the book at least three times, and hearing them a fourth wouldn’t do me any good. I sat up straighter while he cleared the table and hoped I didn’t make a total fool of myself.
“We’ll start off easy with a review of material you should have covered with Maud and go from there.” He placed a thin stack of graph paper in front of me then passed me a pen, the plain, black-ink kind. Not one of his modified ones. “Draw me four basic defense sigils for a home.”
For a home. Those three words cemented his promise to help me restore the wards around Woolworth House, and I sat a little straighter in my chair.
Despite the wording of his request, sigils didn’t fall into animate and inanimate categories. They were singular, and it was up to the practitioner to modify them based on their application.
“Here goes nothing.” Summoning the designs from my rusty memory, I worked to get the fine details correct as I blocked each one out in its own grid. The pen was slippery in my hand when I finished. “There you go.”
He slid on a pair of black-frame glasses that made the blue of his eyes that much darker then lifted the paper.
The silence while he graded my work left me bouncing my leg under the table.
“Explain each of these.” He placed the paper back in front of me and tapped the largest one. “Start here.”
“This one protects against attacks both physical and magical.” I pointed out the next with the pen cap. “This one is for strength. It’s a combination that boosts the power of any other sigil.” The next was a nifty modification to the one I had used during my escape from Volkov. “This is an obfuscation sigil. It doesn’t disguise a home as much as it makes the residence so uninteresting no one notices it. Or, if they do, they don’t remember it for long.” The last was a staple in my arsenal. “This one is for healing. It can’t fix a cracked foundation or physical damage, but it can bolster failing wards until repairs can be done.”
Poor Woolly was covered in them.
“Interesting.”
I set the pen down before my sweaty grip sent it flying. “What does that mean?”
“Your technique is superb. You were trained with a brush, and some students can’t divorce the sensation from one medium to the next, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t proceed with an altered pen like the one you used to heal my nose. Unless you have a personal preference?”
“Having a pen like yours might come in handy.” For homework, it would mean less drying time for my notes too. “You once mentioned using a brush for resuscitations and other ritualistic work. I think that would be my choice too.” He hadn’t stopped staring at that paper. “What did I do wrong?”
“The sigils you’re using, the way you’re drawing them, is nonstandard. I don’t recognize the style at all, even though I can read it well enough to tell what it does.” He braced his palm on the table, tracing the curves with his fingertip. “It’s not wrong. It’s personalized in a way you don’t typically see in fledgling necromancers. It’s like a signature. Are all your sigils drawn this way?”
“I…guess?” I rubbed my thumb over the tabletop. “I copied them down the way Maud taught me.”
“Maud didn’t teach you this.” He canted his head toward me. “Has anyone else seen your work?”
“Amelie and Boaz.” I had no other necromancer friends, no High Society friends at all.
“They would have no reason to recognize the symbols, correct?”
A few Low Society necromancers were self-taught to maximize what little power they had inherited. Even rarer was the prodigy whose natural power propelled them to High Society status. But, as much as it pained Amelie to have any limits imposed upon her, that was not the case for either of my friends.
“No.” I propped my elbow on the table and my chin in my palm. “Why would that matter?”
“Let’s try an experiment before I answer.” He sketched out an unfamiliar design on a fresh sheet of paper. “This sigil muffles sound.” I winced at the reminder of how I woke him. “The most common usage is insulating the walls of homes in predominantly human neighborhoods. I want you to draw it for me.”
I shook out my hand and gave it a go. The lines were simple, and it only took a minute to complete and then check against the original. “Ta-da?”
Linus claimed each paper then held them in opposite hands while he compared the finished products. His brow creased as his gaze flicked back and forth. “Do these sigils look identical to you?”
“I’m out of practice,” I groused, “but it’s not that bad. You’re acting like you can’t tell they’re meant to be the same thing.”
“No, I’m trying to understand.” He held them up, side by side, facing me. “These are not identical. They’re the same at their core, but yours incorporates a flourish. Mine are standard, unembellished. It’s a habit picked up from teaching that makes it easier on my students.” He flipped the pages over, facing him, and studied them again. “Fascinating.”
“Is fascinating a good thing?” Right now, it sounded like a polite way of saying Maud had been right to condemn me to a life as an assistant rather than as a practitioner.
“Mother was wrong about your blood,” he said distractedly. “It’s not just that, it’s this too. Your mind…” He shook his head then tucked the papers away, no doubt saving them for later deliberation. “I’m starting to understand why Maud kept us separate even when we studied the same lessons.”
“She didn’t want anyone else to see what I see.” A frown sank into place. “Do you think this is the reason she enrolled me in human school?”
As much as I longed to hear him say yes, that her decision was a protection and not a condemnation, I couldn’t shake those engrained insecurities that came from being told by one of the world’s most gifted practitioners that I wasn’t enough.
“No one can know for sure, but it seems likely given what we’ve learned.” He crossed the room, and I lost track of him behind the trunks. “I wish we had access to her library. She must have made notes about your condition. She could never leave a good puzzle unsolved. Reading those would help us understand how your brain functions, how your blood works. We could save time building on her knowledge.”
“The basement won’t open for me.” I hammered my heel against the nearest chair leg, but it did nothing to dispel the frisson of unease shivering through me. “It’s the one room Woolly can’t manually unlock.”
Going down there hadn’t ranked high on my priority list until the Grande Dame explained what it meant that I was goddess-touched. That’s when it hit me that whatever Maud had known, I had to know too. I hadn’t tried breaking the wards. Yet. Assuming they could be jimmied. Given how determined Maud had been to hide my nature from me while she was alive, I was willing to bet the extra layers of security activated after her death wouldn’t crumple under a lock-breaker sigil and a few swipes of my brush.
Odds were good Linus could batter his way into her inner sanctum. He was an apt pupil, after all. But once the wards came down, I had nothing to replace them, and I couldn’t afford to leave the library vulnerable.
“That’s too bad.” Wood scraped over metal in the direction Linus had gone. “We can add that to our to-do list.”