I obliged, weaving the rune around him this time. I probed cautiously into his head but encountered an unbreakable barrier separating our thoughts. I tried pushing forward to no avail.
“I guess it works with familiars too.” I felt the door he was holding in place shift but remain strong. “It would be a good way to keep you and your three-headed pet out of my head for a change.”
“Can you sense him?”
“Just around the edges. It gives me some mild discomfort, like shoes that are getting a little too tight.”
“How are you not distracted enough to let go of your wall?”
Fox grinned. “Might have something to do with being dead. You’re not too prone to stray thoughts, and it’s easier to concern yourself with the bigger picture. It’s always been easy for me to compartmentalize.”
“You would have made a fairly good Deathseeker, Fox.”
“Perish the thought. Let’s see how long I can hold this up. Any other rune we can take a stab at?”
We tried the Heartshare rune next, to little effect. “Only for spellbinders, I suppose,” Fox conceded. “Or for the living anyway. What’s next?”
I cleared my throat, trying not to act too excited. “Well, there was this one spell I’ve been meaning to talk to you about…”
He glared at me. “We agreed you wouldn’t snoop without me around.”
“I made no promises about reading them.” I placed the book on his lap. “See for yourself.”
“You know I don’t understand half the gobbledygook in this.”
“This one’s straightforward enough.”
I was impressed. His face turned pale as he read, but he never once let the shield in his head lapse. Finally, he looked up. “What does this mean, Tea?”
“Exactly what you think it means.” It was one of the most complicated runes I’d ever seen, a tangle of crisscrossed lines and convoluted angles that made it resemble a thornbush run amok or a spiderweb caught in an inkblot.
While other runes were spelled out in diminutive cursive, this was sprawled across the page in heavy block letters, as if the writer himself was aware of its importance.
Resurrecting Rune, it said. A rune capable of bringing familiars back from the dead in the truest way possible.
I didn’t care if the rune had twenty times the complexity of Yadoshan architecture, if I were worth my salt as a bone witch, I was going to learn that spell, whatever it took.
Fox shared neither my enthusiasm nor my excitement. He read the page again with furrowed eyebrows and a clenched jaw. “This is too dangerous, Tea.”
“The chance of it succeeding is worth the potential risk.”
“No, it isn’t!” He stabbed at the page with one finger. “Have you read what this requires?”
I knew. I had spent many hours that morning staring at the page, as if looking long enough could make the task easier on my conscience. Distill the juices of the First Harvest into a familiar’s heart to take back what death had decreed. Beware, for the First Harvest is poison and kills all it touches, asha and familiar, save for those who possess the black. Reap its fruit and suffer death.
“We can ask Khalad to help. It’s possible that—”
“It says it kills everyone who tries to take it, Tea! It’s implying that whoever uses it would require their own life as a sacrifice!”
“Well, we don’t know what a First Harvest is yet. I’ve been looking everywhere, but there’s been no mention of it in the books here. But like I said, I’m sure we can find a loophole—”
Fox slammed his hand on the table with enough force that the wood splintered. “Don’t play semantics with me, Tea! Willing or not, you’re asking someone to die, and I know exactly who you’re volunteering. You are under no circumstances allowed to risk your life for me, Tea. Do you understand?”
“I wasn’t…” That was a lie, and he knew it. But the Veiling barrier slipped, and I sensed a hodgepodge of his emotions: shock, worry, determination, anger—more anger than I had ever felt from him. And fear—crippling fear, which I had never felt from him so keenly.
Impulsively, I reached over and hugged his middle. “I won’t. I promise. It’s not like we’re pressed for time or that you’re in any danger. Hey, I’m protecting you too, right? I can’t do that if I’m dead.”
There was a pause. Fox’s fist unclenched slowly, and he sighed but returned my hug. “Remember that, brat. You know I’d be lost without you.”
? ? ?
I was a fast learner and soon committed most of the runes to memory. For six days, we practiced; when we weren’t testing the extent of the book’s magic, I was fast asleep. But the more I experimented, the less exhaustion I felt.
Eventually, we learned to prolong the effects of the Veiling rune, finding it easier to enforce the same shield in our minds instead of creating our own individual barriers. It became a game of sorts, figuring out how long we could maintain it and which of us could do so the longest. Sometimes, I felt the azi’s presence, though it showed only curiosity at our magic.
There was no way we could use the Puppet rune on actual corpses, so we made do with rat bones instead. I knotted the threads of magic together like the book instructed, commanded the rats to run from one corner of the room to the next, and let go. We watched as the skeletal rodents scuttled on their own without any further influence on my end.
The Illusion rune was more complicated. After I learned to bend the spell around an object instead of pouring magic into its essence, I was able to successfully hide it from view. I tried it on Fox.
“I don’t feel any different,” his disembodied voice reported. “Although it’s disconcerting to see that I have no reflection in the mirror.”
“Stop moving around or you’ll be invisible forever.” The spell was a little too good. It took me a dozen tries to draw it right, and I got it just as Fox was beginning to worry.
“The next time we practice this,” he growled as he finally came into view, “we’re going to use a blasted potted plant instead.”
We couldn’t practice the Dominion and Strangle runes given their implications, but I studied them regardless. I also found myself going back to the lightsglass and shadowglass spells, though I knew we couldn’t—shouldn’t—do anything with them. The same held true with the Resurrection rune. “We need to find another way, Tea,” Fox said curtly, and that was that.
Spell practice was a good means to keep me distracted from Prince Kance’s impending engagement. Fox never spoke of Inessa, but every now and then, I would catch a thought, a vision of him and the princess walking down Kion’s market district at night or sharing mint-seasoned doogh at a teashop. I also sensed he would much rather not talk and so kept my silence. Because of all the preparations leading up to the engagement party, Polaire and Althy were constantly busy, much to my relief. I wasn’t quite ready to talk to Polaire after our fight.
Fox had returned to the barracks after our last practice, still keeping a firm hold over the Veiling barrier I’d drawn. I went through Aenah’s book again, but every time I became too engrossed, I felt the barrier starting to slip from my grasp, much to my irritation. It’s odd how the spells that seemed easiest were always the ones that required the most discipline.
I switched to Scrying, determined to master that one. I was still leery of spying on anyone else in the palace, but I finally decided on a target that wouldn’t affect my conscience.
I was wondering when you’d try this on me, Aenah’s voice drawled in my head, speaking from her dungeon. For all her bravado, I could feel her discomfort. That gave me satisfaction.
Why tell me about this book? I asked her. There was nothing for you to gain.
She chuckled. I suppose it was my last card to play. Oddly enough, I like you. You’re clever and resourceful and not yet set in the ways of the asha, though several more years in Kion will surely erode your independence. There are many things asha cannot do that I can, and your problems will not be solved by the paltry runes your asha-ka teaches.