Chapter 14: Chapter 13: In which Iwy makes grass invisible and tries to follow steps one to five of the guide

The town’s last surviving rooster crowed a throttled crow in the distance. Iwy opened one eye and hoped to find the room dragon-free.

“Mooorning. Here’s your task for today!”

Triand threw a book at Iwy’s face.

It was a small book, but the apprentice was still annoyed enough to fling her pillow in retaliation. “What the ... Pocketbook of Invisibility, why?”

“You’re gonna learn to vanish things until you’re blue in the face!”

“Again: why?” Iwy said as she checked the rest of her bedding for signs of charring.

“‘cause it’s useful. Don’t worry, we’ll also try and see if the dragon blessing has taken hold already.”

They left Dragontown after breakfast; Triand had never bothered to learn the actual name of the place. Iwy had left some letters home with the innkeeper who had promised to pass them on to the next courier or coach that drove in that direction. Now that the town was mostly destruction-safe, they might actually stop here again instead of barrelling past.

Right outside the town wall, they passed a dozen or so uprooted trees, sorted into a neat pile. It had not been there the day before. This must be a present courtesy of the newest citizen. The dragon must have known that humans built and rebuilt their caves with wood. It probably made no sense to her, but she was trying.

Well, the town would survive, it was a bright morning, and Triand had a full flask of brandy. This might be a decent day for travelling north. “Well. Lesson time!”

Iwy groaned.

The principle of invisibility was simple, Triand explained. The trick was to look at an object and imagine it gradually fading away into the background. She made Iwy try with a blade of grass for their entire march until midday.

“Look, it worked.”

“The wind blew it away, d’you think I didn’t see that? Try again. Check what the book says.”

The book was not exactly helpful. It was chapter after chapter of bending the arcane waves and blending the object to its surroundings, with very little instruction how to ... do that. The jokester of an author had also decided to make the later pages invisible so only advanced students could read them after mastering the essential skill of re-visibility.

“Tell me again why I need to know this?” Iwy said as another blade of grass fell victim to a breeze.

“It’s useful. You’ll need it someday.”

She got on by millimetres. The book talked a good deal about ‘feeling the energy’ and ‘guiding the flow’. Iwy had no idea what that was supposed to be like. She tried to pay attention as the next hair-thin part of grass blade became slightly transparent. It felt surprisingly similar to the coin nonsense, part pinprick, part breeze in her brain. And sort of like her foot falling asleep, but in her fingers.

Triand wasn’t good with invisibility; it probably went against her nature. She compensated by combining with simple illusions. If anyone got close enough to see her – and most of the time everyone could – it was not as her. A simple illusion made the onlooker see what they expected in a particular environment, like a tree in a forest, a stone along the path, a scarecrow in a field. Complex illusions made the onlooker see what the mage wanted them to see. Like, as she added cackling, a staff where they had left one.

By the end of the day, grass stalk number fifteen looked at least a little see-through. Triand was satisfied enough to give her a break. “I’ll just put the pocketbook in your bag, yes?”

“You got so many pockets, use those.”

“You’re my apprentice.”

“Apprentice, not packmule.”

It was getting too dark to travel. Triand was brooding over a book on advanced spell breaking before bed, or rather, before forest ground, while Iwy tried to light a fire. She would have to resort to matches again.

“Try to feel like you did when you used it the first time around,” Triand kept saying.

Iwy didn’t dare.

What she couldn’t tell Triand was how she’d really felt. She had been angry, that much was true; and she had felt warm. Not hot, warm. When the red mist of anger lifted for a moment and she noticed the flames ... it had felt comfortable. It had felt right. It had scared her enough to get her head back on.

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There had to be a better way to do this.

“I’m still stuck. What do you do when that happens to you?”

Triand waved the question away without looking up from her book. “Oh, that never happens for me. I’ve always had the opposite problem. Too much power.”

“I always feel so much better after talking to you.”

“It wasn’t as great as you think. Mam used to tell me when I was little she had to shoo me off the ceiling with a broom.”

As hard as it was to imagine Triand as a child, the second part felt almost natural. “What were you doing on the ceiling?”

“Playing? Relaxing? Telling gravity it’s overrated? How should I know, I was two.”

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Something was burning. Iwy sat up before she had even woken up. She opened her eyes into painful early morning light and checked her arms, her clothes, the tree behind her.

Nothing.

She looked to her right to see Triand swatting at the grass.

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, morning. Good to see you up. Just occurred to me we never got into the theory of magic. I get a feeling we should have done that first.” She turned around briefly and messed with the front of her robes.

Iwy yawned. She didn’t feel able to argue ten seconds after waking up. “Fine, what is the theory of magic?”

“There isn’t one.”

“Huh?”

All of a sudden, Triand was in a hurry and packed up. “There’s fifty-two popular ones and ... two-hundred and seventy-four that have been debunked.”

“Alright, but ...”

“There was a theory for a while that everything in the world has its own consciousness.”

If that was true, Iwy thought, Triand’s skill was probably due to her annoying absolutely everything in existence until it caved.

“Come on, pack up, got a bit of a walk ahead of us.”

“Slow down, will you?”

“Never. Anyway, theory of magic. You still got something to write?”

The landscape became flatter as they moved further into the valley. Dragontown was a day’s travel away now. It was hot, and Iwy was starving. She stumbled after her master, trying to sneak bites of bread out of her bag in between taking notes. Why did Triand need to eat so little? Did she have a spell for that?

“Are you listening?”

“Mhm.”

“So, particles. Write that down, it’s important.”

Iwy stumbled over a stone trying to find a free spot on the sheet of paper. “What particles?”

“We know there’s particles because there’s residue. But we don’t know how those particles work. Or what they look like. Or if they’re different in the magic types. Haven’t found a way to look at them. Some say they look like strings and some say they look like dots. Still got a long way to go. Who knows, we might be wrong about everything,” Triand added dreamily.

Iwy stared down at the paper. “So, no one knows how magic works?”

“Yep. That’s the best part!”

“So, we could be wasting our entire time with these books because it’s just ... trial and error.”

“Maybe. Possibly. I’m going to be the first to find out. Right after I’ve survived this. Think of the possibilities!”

If she had to list all of these, she would need a new sheet of paper, and Triand didn’t wait, which left Iwy hopping on one leg as she tried to balance her bread loaf, her water bottle, her notes, and the bag as she peered inside.

Sometime during the night Triand had loaded even more books into her bag. She could have just said the things were getting heavy. Considering her thin frame, Iwy wasn’t even surprised.

Iwy was about to mention it when a title caught her eye. She leafed through the volume.

“... at the university of Seyaneyout is convinced that there is a connection between everything that can be strengthened or weakened, but no one is sure how ...”

“Why don’t we teleport there? To that city you want to go to?” She waved Teleportation Made Simple hopefully. Triand was temporarily rendered speechless but recovered within two seconds.

“Forget it, teleporting is for emergencies. It’s too easy to track what with all the residue.”

Iwy didn’t know what she meant by easy to track but it sounded like an excuse. “Let me guess: You’re not good at it.”

“I’m very good at it. I’ll throw up all of last week’s lunches, but I’ve never ended up where I didn’t want to. Now, where was I ...”

On the road, Triand had her go through the well-worn copy of the Beginner’s Guide to Pyromancy and became very interested in the details every time Iwy brought up teleportation again. Steps one to five – Getting in touch with the flame within you without burning your fingers – were already doomed to fail. There wasn’t even a fizzle, unless of course Iwy had somehow managed to make that invisible. Without producing a flame, it was impossible to move on to the chapters on fire control (“I shan’t want to set the world on fire”), the shapes that magic flames could take (Ring of Fire, Great Balls of Fire, Hanging Fire), and how to deal with opposing kinds of magic (How to set fire to the environment: 1. Rain).

“Now, we know that they come out when you’re in danger,” Triand mused.

“Sometimes,” Iwy said warily. It hadn’t worked with getting shot at.

“But you weren’t in danger in the barn, where you?”

“No. Just sort of ...”

“So angry you blew the roof off.”

“Um ...”

Triand had tried to light a match under Iwy’s hand to give her powers a hint. She’d even made her take a few puffs on her pipe, but all that accomplished was a coughing fit. Getting in touch with her inner flame would have been easier if the thing didn’t have a mind of its own.