A refrigerator-sized stone from the battlements had fallen from its perch to land end-up on the ground. It projected almost six feet from the soil like the end of a broken tooth. And when I asked about what happened, I got the oddest reply.
“How the stone fell from above is pas important,” Destry declared. “What matters is what it has become thanks to its plunge to earth.”
“Okay,” I said, “then what has it become?”
His dark face brightened with his flash-bulb smile.
“Your midterm.”
“Great,” I said, without enthusiasm. “How long do I have to study for it?”
“As long as necessary. However, that does not mean you have all the time in the world.”
With that, he walked off to leave me befuddled. Yet again.
I didn’t necessarily want to take all the time in the world either. True, I didn’t have any kids, cats, or goldfish awaiting my return. On the other hand, I didn’t want to put my career on hold indefinitely.
So I did everything asked of me without complaint.
This thing was, trying to understand sorcellerie wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
In fact, it was downright maddening.
The ‘Will and the Way’ didn’t have an author’s name listed anywhere on the manuscript. But I swore that if ever met the person who wrote it, I’d kick them hard in the shin. Both shins, if possible. And I’d have started wearing down my shoe toes if I included the other texts Destry had me reading.
These included delving into the long tomes on the nature of magic. And while I didn’t have to take any quizzes or timed exams, I did have to write a string of papers. That was to prove that I’d retained at least a smattering of what I’d read.
Over the next several months, I realized that all my books had one overriding theme. That if you exerted yourself properly, you could get the laws of physics to shut up and do a ‘time out’ in the corner. Okay, that was fair enough.
Things started getting tricky around the ‘how to exert yourself properly’ part. Rules and techniques flatly contradicted each other. Worse, it didn’t seem like any of the ‘magically astute’ people who wrote the books quite understood the laws of nature to begin with. I wasn’t expecting them to cite math or physics equations, but I didn’t encounter anything more than basic chemistry formulae sprinkled here and there.
Given my background, I did understand organic chemistry pretty darned well. Here, the discussion of chemical compounds focused less on ‘what the items were’ and a lot more on ‘what they could do for you’. And even that was frustrating.
For example, a grade-school book on elements might discuss how sodium and chlorine, when fused, became table salt. The books Destry had me reading told me more about how something like sulfur could be used as a precursor to the creation of fire. The closest analogy to my forensics training would have been a textbook on reagents. But no one used things like ‘powdered rust’ or ‘essence of cinnamon’ as reagents!
And that was the final straw that tested my patience to its limits: the terminology. I suppose I had less to complain about than most people. Mention things like luminol or fluorescein in polite company, and you’d be lucky if anyone knew what you were talking about.
But it annoyed me to no end that in addition to all the bad physics I had to wade through, I had to remember that ‘shaded air’ was carbon dioxide. That when ‘black lead’ or ‘plumbago’ was mentioned, the author was talking about plain old carbon. And worst of all, I had to remember that ‘spirit of salt’ meant hydrochloric acid!
Between the studying and composition, Destry assigned me what he called ‘contemplative activities’. A couple were standard meditation exercises. But an awful lot of the others involved doing home maintenance on the château, or gardening outside of Destry’s turret.
On those days, he would start up the little motorboat he had moored to the island’s sole dock and go putt-putting out to a neighboring island. He’d come back in the afternoon loaded down with groceries and a vacuum-sealed brick of the best French Roast coffee I’d ever tasted, so I didn’t complain about doing the gardening.
Besides, I usually had help.
I sprayed an eco-friendly insecticide soap on the plants in the garden that grew up to waist level, mostly focusing on aphids. Perrin would take care of the larger bugs in the higher plants as he flitted about. It was easily some of the cutest entertainment around.
He interrupted me in mid-conversation with Holly as he gave me the latest kill count.
“That’s three cutworms, one feathered moth, and one leaf hopper,” the little owl reported, before flutter-lunging behind a higher branch. A crunch. “Okay, that’s two leaf hoppers.”
“Any more, and you’re going to ruin your dinner,” I warned him, as I worked the spray bottle’s trigger. “Destry said that he’d ask for some mice to cook for you, and he’d be hurt if you had no appetite for them.”
“No way would that happen!” Perrin settled in on a branch above me, his tufted head bobbing excitedly as he spoke. “It would be so great to have mouse again. We can’t live on just fish all the time!”
“Of course we can!” Holly said, from off to one side. The reeve carefully dug around the base of a stump that she was helping me excavate. Where I had to use a pick and shovel, she just ripped through earth and root with her mighty talons. “Eating fish is how you grow into a mighty warrior! You want to be one of those, don’t you?”
“If you say so, Miss Holly,” Perrin said, as he went back to hunting bugs. He grumbled under his breath. “Bet I could grow mighty by eating mice too.”
“As you were saying, Dayna…” Holly prompted, trying to steer us back to our conversation.
“As I was saying, the latest books Destry had me read are just plain odd,” I said. “They’re about the laws of nature versus the laws of sorcery, and how they interact. If I was playing a video game, it would be like entering in a cheat code so I could warp things the way I wanted.”
“What is a ‘cheat code’?” Holly asked.
“What’s a ‘vid-ee-oh’ game?” Perrin put in.
I did my best to explain, but the conversation didn’t get much further.
And that summed up my first year on the Île de Rêverie.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Time continued to pass. Destry took over cooking duties to let me study, which improved the quality of the meals that came out of the kitchen. I even decided to let my hair grow out. After all, I wasn’t examining bodies for a living right now, so I didn’t have to stuff my locks inside an elastic-band cap.
While I was still driven to distraction by the non-sensical textbooks I had to study from, they weren’t my main source of frustration anymore. More than once, I wished to God that I still had the ruby ring that Destry called my ‘training wheels’.
It took me months after he took the ring away for me to figure out how to duplicate the ‘fire zap’ trick again. What helped me was learning from one of the books about how crystals could be used to concentrate magical energy. Where the crystal made it easy, I had to learn to concentrate my ‘Will’ and store it inside of me, like a compressed coil spring.
The night that I finally got a candle on the dining room table to light, I woke Perrin and Holly up with my ear-splitting WA-HOO!
The two came charging downstairs, convinced that I was under attack. At least Perrin’s charge didn’t damage anything. Holly’s talons, on the other hand, left gouges on the wooden stairway and tore up the rugs where she rounded a corner.
Before she could come to a stop, the reeve knocked over the table while I was still trying to snuff out the candle with my amazing mental powers. Instead, the damned thing’s flame flared even higher. As soon as the table went over, the candle flew across the room and lit the window’s rice-paper curtains on fire.
Luckily, Destry had a hand-held extinguisher on a mount in the kitchen, so I made quick work of putting the fire out. The next morning, when we sho
wed him the remnants of the château’s curtain, he just shook his head with a muttered Mon Dieu. Then, he ordered me to follow him down to the boat dock.
“It seems that you have figured out how to concentrate and activate your Will,” he remarked, as we strolled down a slope carpeted with vines bearing bright fuchsia blooms. “The next step is for you to see the lignes. That is, the lines of force that surround everything.”
I restrained myself from asking him whether I was supposed to look for the ‘Dark’ or ‘Light’ side of this Force. He was being serious at a time when I wanted information. Also, it was a pretty obvious joke to make.
“Everything has its own set of lines that attach it to the world,” he went on, as we emerged from the trees down by the dock. “The lines that denote natural, inanimate forces like wind, gravity, or kinetic energy. Others are animate forces. The life essence from living things. These look completely different to those trained to see them. For example, imagine you took the temperature of a human, and then the temperature of a pot of water heated on a stove to body temperature. What would the instrument read?”
“The exact same thing,” I said, as we stepped out onto the dock. Destry climbed down into his little motorboat and started working on the dock lines. “But you’re saying that I would see a different ‘signature’?”
“If you wish to think of it that way, yes.” He completed untying his craft and sat back in the stern next to the motor. The six feet of clear water underneath his keel looked like luminescent blue glass. “I want you to spend the rest of the day up on the ridge by the waterfall, but not in meditation. Close your eyes and see…if you can see.”
“What will you be doing?”
“Moi? I’m heading into Tongatapu to do some shopping. It looks like we need some new curtains for the living room, no?”
He pulled the cord on the rust-rimmed outboard motor. It coughed to life in a little cloud of gasoline exhaust. Destry gave me a final wave as he steered the craft out to sea.
I did as my mentor told me and sat close enough to the waterfall to head home after dark with a thin sheen of moisture coating me from head to toe. But I didn’t ‘see’ anything that day. Neither did I see anything the next day, at least after I’d helped Destry hang the new curtains.
Week after week, I spent part of my study time up by the falls. I stubbornly practiced drawing in my Will, then holding it inside of me for longer and longer. Until finally, one day, I saw it. A tiny ripple in the air, one that described a perfect parabola of a droplet bouncing off a slanted rock.
From then on, it was easy. Well, not easy, but easy-ish.
It was a little like the first time one saw through an optical illusion. Once the veil was pierced, there was no un-seeing it. Faintly colored lines emanated from all objects. Straight and regular ones for things that weren’t mobile. Elegant tracery surrounded falling water or leaves blown in the wind. Living things had a multi-colored jumble that blurred into a rainbow mess if they moved too fast.
Things like this turned me into a studying maniac. Even though the books drove me half-crazy with exasperation, I had to know more. I wanted to know more. I was naturally something of an overachiever, and let’s be honest here: Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to learn magic?
We were alone at the end of the world on the Île de Rêverie, so much so that we didn’t have a television, telephone or radio connection. A satellite dish set atop the roof, flanked by two large solar panels, was all Destry needed to go online for weather information. He explained that these were just so many distractions that would hamper my learning.
To my surprise, I found that I didn’t miss these things at all.
Unless I wanted to be alone, either Perrin or Hollyhock were always there to accompany me. I came to depend on their companionship more than I cared to admit, for studying alone on this beautiful island would have been lonely and eventually depressing.
In the late evening, when the dim light was easier on his eyes, Perrin usually asked if we could play catch. Destry had a ball of wrapped twine that was easy for the little owl to get his claws into, so it got used almost daily. The kid also made a good roommate, as he dutifully woke me up every morning with a series of cute owlish hoots.
Holly preferred the beachfront and ocean. Sometimes we’d let the morning sun rise as we lounged on the warm sand. Other times we’d spend an afternoon searching tidepools on the rocky parts of the shore together.
Occasionally, she would be gracious enough to let me ride her when she went aloft. She would make wide, lazy circles as she took advantage of the thermal updrafts over the island’s central peak. The château turned into a bright green patch and the stone turret a gray thimble sticking out from the tropical tree line.
She once took me up as high as she could go. Her wings strained, and her breath came out in gusts of mist as the air got shockingly cold. The world fell away into misty curves. Far below, the island was like an emerald embedded in a dome of swirling sapphire.
Holly had a tree platform for her sleeping quarters, but she insisted on sleeping in my room. Unlike Perrin, she had no need to perch, so she curled up on the woven rug at the foot of the bed like a golden furry hill. She didn’t snore much, thank goodness. When she did, I would kneel at the end of the bed and lean over to scratch her on top of her feathery head.
Her snores would melt into rumbly purrs. Those purrs were seventeen different kinds of satisfaction and joy rolled into one. Life didn’t get any better than that.
That’s probably why the nightmare shook me so badly.
I’d been at the Île de Rêverie for a little over a year and a half when it came.
Somehow, my dream-wanderings pulled me back into the cavern shaped like a cathedral. Cries of pain pierced my ears. They were my cries. A horribly strong, malevolent force pinned me down. Agony flared from broken bones as I tried to move, tried to breathe.
And everything was drenched in pulses of hellish ruby-red light.
I woke with a start. Sweat dappled my forehead like heavy dew. I frantically looked about the darkened bedroom.
Perrin was asleep on his perch. He made a little ‘hoo!’ in his sleep, but otherwise didn’t stir. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, put my feet on the floor, and leaned over to see if I’d woken Holly up.
No such luck. The reeve had flipped over on her back, sleeping in an undignified position that made her look like griffin roadkill. I shook my head and walked over to the east-facing windows. I put my hands on the sill and looked out to where the sun was about to crest the horizon.
Then it happened.
For the blink of an eye, so quick I almost thought I imagined it, the sky flashed red. Not lipstick red or merlot red or even candy-apple red. Dried-blood red. Ruby red.
The exact same shade of red as the one in my nightmare.
Then the oncoming sunrise shifted back to its promising hues of pink and ghostly orange.
After almost a minute, I realized that I was holding my breath. I let it out before I keeled over from lack of oxygen. It took longer for me to pry my white-knuckled fingers from where they gripped the sill.
But I didn’t move.
I waited by the window, flesh goose-pimpled from scalp to toe, to see if that same ruby red flash would rip apart my world once more.
Chapter Fifty
Destry took the news of my nightmare seriously. His normally good-natured Gallic stoicism gave way to a concerned frown that spoke volumes. The porch’s wooden floorboards sent up a chorus of creaks as he paced back and forth.
“This has to be connected with that abreaction I had last year,” I reasoned. “What I can’t understand is how my dream seemed to bleed over into this world when I awoke. If I was awake. What does it mean?”
“What does it mean?” Destry stopped pacing and turned to look at me. “It means that you cannot study books seulement anymore. We must accelerate your practical knowledge. If we can.”
“All right, I’m up for–”
I began, before realizing what he’d meant. “What do you mean, ‘if we can’?”
“Chère, when it comes to studying magic from texts, you are brilliant. You’ve learned and retained more than I had hopes for. Yet one can memorize the tables of multiplication without truly knowing how to do mathématiques.”
“I don’t think that’s even possible,” I retorted.
Destry raised an eyebrow. “You think not? Perhaps I have a better analogy. I am sure that you have grasped the key. The key made of knowledge. I am less sure that you know how to turn it in the lock.”
In response, I reached up and yanked a dry reed from the roof’s grassy fringe. I held it upright between two fingers and away from anything flammable. Then I did the gun-firing thing with the fingers of my other hand.
A little zap of electricity ran through me and the reed vaporized in a flash of flame and smoke.
“If I can turn that key even that much, then I can go the rest of the way,” I said, with more confidence than I really felt.
“Maybe you can,” he said, as he gave me an appraising look. “What is it that you feel, right before you release your power?”
“I feel…like a coiled spring. Like all my concentration and drive is focused on that one thing, to release the energy needed to burn the item in my hand.”
His lips curled at one edge, catlike. “Concentration and drive. That sounds a good deal like will, n'est pas? That tells me you understand the Will.”
“If that’s right, then all I need is the Way.”
Destry nodded and rubbed his hands together as if he’d finally made a decision.
“Perhaps so, perhaps so. Let us talk of the Way of magic then. But let us do it as we walk to your midterm exam.”
That brought back memories from grade school, when the teacher would gleefully announce a pop quiz. But I didn’t say anything as Destry stepped off the porch and turned to head uphill. I fell in beside him as we made our way up the path towards his residence.
Dragon with a Deadly Weapon Page 25