The next day I found myself sitting once more in Mistress Iliana’s chambers confronting the wax tablet with the glyph of light on it. I stared. It seemed like an age since had last done this. I had barely thought about the glyphs over the past few weeks. I felt as if I was looking at it fresh. And I knew somewhere deep in my heart that things were different.
“Are you ready?” Mistress Iliana said.
“Yes, mistress.” And I was. My eyes traced the pattern as they had done that night on my father’s farm what seemed a lifetime ago. Red scampered over to the tablet. At first, I thought he was going to lunge at it and try and bite it but he did not. He inspected it solemnly, his gaze following the pattern in exactly the same way as mine.
Was he simply parroting my movements or was he studying the tablet himself? I sensed something in his small mind but I could not tell exactly what it was. I recalled how I felt back when I first cast the spell almost perfectly. And the lines of the glyph lit up as my gaze fell upon them. I closed my eyes feeling an odd sensation spiral within my head. I recognised it as how it had felt on the previous occasions when I’d been able to cast the spell. I opened my eyes. The glyph glowed.
“Very good, Mistress Iliana said. "You have made some progress."
The glow continued to intensify and I started to laugh, pleased with my efforts. It seemed, after all, that I was still able to work magic.
The light was so bright that it hurt to look directly at it. I felt myself growing weaker as if the spell was draining my strength. I wanted to stop it. It was then that I realised I did not know how. I had never thought past the moment of casting the spell itself.
I tried to will the light to stop but nothing happened. It glowed brighter. I felt the strain inside my head increase. “Mistress, how do I stop it.”
“Work the spell in reverse,” she said.
“And how do I do that, mistress?” There was a note of urgency in my voice now because I was dizzy once more. It might have been the after-effects of my long illness that also might have been the side effect of the spell casting.
“Picture the glyph in your mind,” she said. “And then erase it. Start with the last part that you imagined when you were creating it and slowly make the thing disappear.”
I grasped what she was saying and tried to visualise the glyph. When I closed my eyes, it burned in front of my vision. It was like looking at a bonfire. I did not see how I was going to be able to reverse it. Nonetheless, I tried what Mistress Iliana had suggested.
I imagined that one small corner of the glyph had disappeared among the last lines with which I completed the pattern. I focused intensely on looking at that and willed a small black spot to appear. Something happened. I did not know whether it was a floater in my vision or whether it was an effect of my concentration.
I made it move and the line it touched vanished. I traced through the entire pattern and it winked out. The process grew faster and faster the more I did it.
In the beginning it was very slow but the final effect happened in less than a heartbeat. I opened my eyes and the glow was gone.
I had done it! I had not only cast the spell but had reversed it. I was glad I was sitting down at the desk. My legs felt weak and rubbery as they had when I had the fever. I could not have stood up at that moment if I had wanted to. It was as if the casting had drained me of all my strength.
“I’ve done it,” I said. “I’ve done it, mistress.”
She said, “Indeed you have.”
I felt like cheering, like throwing my hands in the air. I could not lift them from the desk. Red moved sluggishly over to me and began to lick my face with his rough tongue. It was his way of congratulating me, as much of a celebration as either of us could manage.
“I can see you are very tired,” Mistress Iliana said. “We shall take a break now and see if your strength returns.”
I was hoping she would offer me some of the blue elixir but she did not.
She walked around me as if she wanted to see me from every angle. I felt her invoke power and it flowed around me. She was working a spell although I did not know which one. Red whimpered and crawled up to me and took his place on my lap.
“How do you feel?” Mistress Iliana asked.
“Weak, mistress,” I said. I wanted to be honest. “But happy. I have finally been able to cast the spell you were teaching me.”
“Finally?” She laughed. “You have learned in weeks to do a thing that took me months to master. You’re too impatient, boy.”
“I’m sorry mistress but I cannot help it. I am who I am.”
“That you are.”
She moved back in front of me again and I could see that she was smiling. The white paint and the red that accentuated it gave her an eerie, rather frightening look but there was no mistaking the fact it she was happy. “You have done very well.”
“I feel very weak, mistress.”
“That is normal. You will continue to feel weak after you cast such spells for a long time. It takes years to build your strength up to the point when it comes easily.”
“You have achieved it mistress. I watched you cast that spell every night when we were travelling.”
“I have practised that spell for many years and I have adjuncts to aid me.”
“Adjuncts?”
“Things like this,” she said. She reached down and pulled a small amulet from within her tunic. It dangled around her neck in a chain so thin as to be almost invisible. I could see that it was a small glyph moulded from what looked like copper. I recognised the shape of it immediately. It belonged to the rune I had just cast.
“Does such an amulet grant you power, mistress?”
She shook her head. “It simply makes it easier to focus and ensures that I use the minimum possible energy when I cast the spell.”
“Would it help me?”
“It would probably make it easier for you to cast the spell once I showed you how to use it but that would be very far from helping you. You need all the practice you can get. You need to keep casting the spell again and again until it becomes second nature and until your power adjusts to the strain.”
“What do you mean by that, mistress?”
“The more you cast spells, the more your power develops. It’s like lifting weights. If a man lifts a heavy stone once, he might get nothing from it but a sprain. But if he lifts it a hundred times every day for a year, he will eventually get stronger. That is what you must do although the muscles are in your mind and not your body.”
“Thank the Light for that, mistress. I do not fancy shifting rocks every day.”
“We may have you doing that soon anyway,” she said.
“Have I offended you, mistress?”
“No. But having the power to cast the spell is only part of the process. You need a healthy body too. Casting spells puts a strain on your metabolism. You have already seen what that ends up doing.”
I thought about my fever and I could see that she was right. “How will exercise help that, mistress?”
“It will make you stronger. It will give you more endurance. Casting spells is not just about mental endurance, it also puts a strain on your body. You need to develop both in parallel if you intend to be a powerful wizard.”
“I see, mistress,” I said. I could not keep from sounding sullen. It seemed never-ending. Nonetheless, happiness still filled me. I had cast the spell. There was no way she was going to be able to cast a veil over that achievement. “You’re saying that if I cast the spell a hundred times, I will get stronger.”
“A hundred times. A thousand times. I don’t know. It varies from mage to mage. The way you’ve been going I would not be surprised if it happened after you cast it ten times.” She laughed. “But no. Not even you could be that strong.”
I wanted to be told differently. I looked at the glyph again and I had to resist the urge to try casting the spell. The glyph sat there taunting me, daring me to make a second attempt. Before I knew it, the light started to glow.
“What are you doing?” Mistress Iliana said.
“I’m going to have to do this a thousand times I might as well make a start.”
She looked as if she wanted to contradict me, thought about it for a few moments and then said, “you’ll learn.”
The spell was much harder this time but I was determined to prove her wrong. I focused all of my attention on casting it but the more I tried the more it seemed to slip away from me. It was like going back to what I had been before. My frustration must have showed on my face.
“You’re trying again too soon,” she said. “Give yourself some time. And try to rest. You would not run ten leagues after you’ve just jogged ten, would you?”
“I don’t think so, mistress.”
“When you have just done is the magical equivalent. Don’t judge your strength by mine. I have been doing this for decades. It will be a long time before you are capable of casting spells the way I can. But never doubt that you will be able to, providing you don’t burn yourself out or do yourselves an injury. Remember what happened when you got the fever. Don’t push yourself too hard.”
It seemed very strange to hear her exhorting me to behave in such a manner. She had pushed me to repeat the exercise with the glyphs again and again and again with endless patience. Now she seemed to be saying back away from it.
“I will do my best, mistress,” I said. “It’s just that… It’s just that I really want to be able to do this. I want to be a wizard.”
“We all start out that way. There is nothing quite like the sensation of casting your first spells. Sometimes I forget that myself. You can take the rest of the day off. Your concentration is going to be short anyway.”
I could not quite believe what I was hearing. I looked up at her and said, “There’s only one problem, mistress.”
“And what would that be, pray tell?”
“I can barely get my legs to move, mistress.”
I think part of me was hoping that she would offer me some of the blue potion. Once again that part of me was destined to be disappointed.
“Take your time,” she said. “What you’re feeling is natural. Like I said it’s as if you have just run a very long race. You’re young. You will recover.”
She was right, of course. As I sat there looking at the wax tablet and exalting in what I had done, my strength slowly returned. My limbs no longer felt quite so rubbery and my heartbeat slowed down.
Red stirred as well. I looked down at him and he looked up at me and opened one eye, sleepily. I wondered why he was tired. He was not the one casting spells. Perhaps he simply took his cue from me.
Mistress Iliana sat there reading her books. She did not seem to pay any attention to me but I knew she was aware of what was going on. She always was. Eventually I placed my hands palm down on top of the desk and pushed myself upright. “I shall go now, mistress.”
“Good,” she said. “Be on your way.”