BY THE FOURTH FLU VIRUS he’d given himself, then cured, Fort was starting to hate Healing magic. “Utri cor,” he whispered, casting Cause Disease on himself, then read over its twin, Cure Disease, as quickly as he could, before the fever set in again. Both spells appeared on the page, so apparently they were meant to be learned together.
From the benches, Rachel sighed dramatically. “Why does Healing have to be so boring? You should see me practicing.” She pointed her fingers like guns and made little pew pew pew noises. “It’s awesome.”
“I got a personal viewing of that earlier,” he said, wincing at the pain in his chest before casting Cure Disease. “Nenutri cor,” he whispered, and the chills he was starting to feel disappeared. “And if you’re bored, no one’s forcing you to stay.”
“I leave when you leave, New Kid,” she told him, but she didn’t seem as sure as she had been earlier. “I’m still waiting for you to acknowledge how I kept my promise and didn’t protect you when the Chads were bullying you, by the way. You’re welcome for that.”
“You definitely kept your promise, yes,” Fort said, giving himself the flu again. “I can’t tell you how much that helped.”
“That’s the problem with Destruction magic, anyway,” she said, ignoring him. “There’s no real good way to defend against it. That means if you want to beat someone, you always have to be on the attack.”
Is that why you threw me down the stairs earlier? Fort thought, before considering what she’d said. “There’s no way to shield yourself, or, like, take control of someone else’s magic missile and send it back at them?”
Rachel snorted. “Destruction at its core is about tearing things down, not a battle of wills. If someone shoots a magic missile at you, you jump out of the way, then shoot three back at them.”
Fort cured his flu and read over the page again. “That doesn’t make any sense. You can hold fire in the palm of your hand, which means you’re controlling it. Why couldn’t you do the same thing to someone else’s fire?”
“Is one of those diseases making you deaf? Did you not hear what I just said?”
“I heard it, it just doesn’t make sense!” Fort said, giving himself another case of the flu. “This might go faster if you were quiet, you know.”
“Talk to me about what makes sense when you’ve been here longer than two days,” Rachel growled at him, then turned away to mutter quietly to herself.
For the next few cycles of his spellcasting, there was silence, until Rachel leaned backward to lie down on the bench, putting her feet up on the next higher one. “Look,” she said. “I’m just saying that every kind of magic is different. You’ve only learned Healing so far—”
“And had Telepathy used on me.”
“Ugh, fine, whatever. But you don’t get it. Each type of magic is thematic, you know? Healing rebuilds, Destruction tears down. That’s why we’ve got those two books here, so we can practice both of them in the same place. The cool students break some bones, and you boring guys fix them.”
“If Healing rebuilds, then why am I learning how to give people diseases?” Fort asked, wishing every time the chills set in that his shirt didn’t have a hole in it.
“I always figured that was so you could practice the curing spell.”
“No, I mean why would it be in the Healing book to begin with? We’re not just learning how to cure things, we’re learning how to cause them too.” He paused, ignoring the fever for a moment. “You know, I bet there’s an opposite spell in the Healing book for, well, healing, too. Like a Cause Harm spell.”
Rachel laughed. “Uh-huh. Or it could just be that Healing’s completely lame, and you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Fort rolled his eyes, then looked back at the book. “We’ll never find out for sure unless someone learns every spell in the book. And that takes way too long.” He ran his eyes over the spell words for Cure Disease, “nenutri cor,” then raised his hand over his arm, only to pause.
“Cor.” The second part of the spell. He’d seen that word before. And since the spell words disappeared from his head as soon as he cast them, it could only be in one other spell.
Heal Minor Wounds. Those spell words were “mon d’cor.”
That had to mean something, didn’t it?
“Have you ever looked at the spell words?” Fort asked, turning to look at Rachel, who was staring at the ceiling.
“Maybe I could make, like, a shield of fire,” she said, ignoring him. “That might stop a fireball. Or would it? Maybe the ball would just plow right through.”
Fort picked up the Healing book, then dropped it, letting it hit the podium with a bang. Rachel immediately looked at him upside down. “What did I say about hurting the books?”
“Have you ever thought about what the spell words mean?” Fort said again. “I’m seeing the same word pop up in the first two spells. That has to mean something.”
She shook her head. “You can’t exactly study them that easily, since they disappear. And once you have the spell mastered, you can’t write them down, either. Same thing happens. Only the books will hold the spell words, for whatever reason. Makes learning whatever language it is a bit harder.”
“Okay, but they’re all in your head,” Fort said, feeling a bit dizzy now. “Like this same word, ‘cor.’ ”
She looked at him weirdly. “What word?”
“Cor.”
She paused again, like she was still waiting.
“You really can’t hear me say it?”
“Have you said it?”
“Fine,” he said. “There’s a word that appears in both Heal Minor Wounds and Cure Disease.” He paused, then turned back to the third spell, “Utri cor.” “And in Cause Disease! What do they all have in common?”
“That you’re not going to have mastered any of them at this rate?”
He stuck out his tongue at her. “I guess they’re all about the body in some way. That would make sense, right?” He ran over the next two spells in his head, noticing another repeated set of letters that wasn’t in Heal Minor Wounds, “utri.” “If we figure out the language, we could come up with our own spells,” Fort said, feeling weirdly excited about this, though the fever might be to thank for that. “Do you know what we could do if we knew the language of magic?”
“Get sent home for failing your test tomorrow?”
“My dad gave me something,” Fort said, then braced for the wave of sadness he expected to feel upon mentioning his father. Weirdly, though, it wasn’t as bad as usual. “This brochure, from the Lincoln Memorial. It listed the Gettysburg Address in a bunch of different languages, and my dad thought that’d be a fun way to learn foreign words, you know? Like pick out which ones fell in the same places as the English words, or repeated in the same way. You could do that with magic words, too.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re even talking about?”
Fort couldn’t exactly say yes, not yet. But if that “utri” word was in both of the disease spells, Cure and Cause, then maybe that was what it stood for? “Disease,” or something like it? And if Cure Disease was “nenutri cor,” then that “nen” had to mean “cure,” maybe.
Unless “nen” didn’t mean anything, and was just like a “not”-type word. Don’t cause disease. Or reverse cause disease, maybe? “I think I might be onto something,” he said, his mind whirling with ideas, as well as soaring in temperature.
“Is this what you’re going to tell Dr. Ambrose tomorrow instead of casting your spells?”
“Okay, fine,” Fort said, annoyance derailing his train of thought. He quickly cured himself of the flu, feeling less excited even as his body healed. “Enjoy destroying everything, if you want. Once I pass this test—”
“If you pass, which you won’t—”
“Then I’m going to figure this all out,” Fort said. “Think about it. We could make up our own spells, if we knew what the words meant. We wouldn’t need to wait to master the smaller stuff, and we could jump to the more powerful magic!”
“Are you almost done?” Rachel said, closing her eyes. “I’m getting kind of sleepy, and I don’t have all night.”
“I’m not even a little tired,” Fort said, giving himself the flu again. “I’ll be wide awake all night, just watch!”