“You are somehow at once the cleverest, clumsiest, luckiest, and most foolish young man I have ever known, Jaxen Derai.”
Jax sighed dramatically and looked up from the spellbook he was hunched over. “Yes, Flor. You’ve told me that at least half a dozen times since we returned from Lowshir.”
“It doesn’t get any less true,” his mentor snapped. “Honestly, what were you thinking? Bad enough you got yourself caught out in cur’callim territory, let alone letting some--some random mountainling run off with a highly valuable enchanted object!” She whirled from silvered looking glass onto which she was inscribing runes to glare at him. “You’re lucky you weren’t eaten up by a dragon, what with all the other trouble you got into.”
“I gave it to her, she didn’t run off with it,” he replied evenly. “And I was barely even in dragon territory. Just that last night. Besides, they spend summer further into the range, everyone knows that.”
Florianne snorted, tossing her multitude of braids back over one shoulder. “And what have I told you about the things that everyone knows?”
He sighed again. “Everyone is the scholar most often quoted, and yet and most often wrong.”
“Very good.” She returned her attention to the mirror, but he could see that she was watching him in the glass. He glanced back down at the open book in front of him, hoping he looked absorbed in his task. “Gave it to her,” the older mage grumbled, just loud enough that he was meant to hear it. “Three weeks it took me to get the proper components for that enchantment, and he just gives it away.”
“Oh, don’t pretend you wouldn’t have done exactly the same,” Jax huffed. His mentor may have a sharp tongue, but she had a softer heart than she let on--he knew she never would have left Varya to completely fend for herself. So he hadn’t either.
“What I would have done is irrelevant,” Florianne snapped back. “I completed my magical training decades ago. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, should the occasion call for it. I do not need a lifeline to my tutor should I perhaps, I don’t know, somehow find myself fighting off a pack of cur’callim.”
“Aww, Flor.” Jax gave her his biggest, sappiest grin. “You were worried about me.”
She made a noise of disgust in the back of her throat and flapped a hand at him. “Well, the last ten years would have been rather a waste if you’d managed to get yourself killed on a simple training expedition.” She paused, then met his eyes in the mirror. Her lips quirked up just barely at one corner. “...I will admit, it is good to see you back at work here.”
Jax’s eyes widened a bit. “You were worried!” he realized. “I was just teasing! Ah, Flor, it really wasn’t--”
“You hush.” She began sketching out glyphs along the frame of the looking glass, dipping her finger into a shallow bowl of herb-infused water every third shape or so to ensure that the enchantment was spread evenly. “Any student of mine should have found that particular outing child’s play. It would have been foolish to be worried.”
Jax smiled down at his spell book, letting her have that. “Of course.”
They settled into a companionable, working quiet. It was the kind of quiet with the familiarity of an old pair of slippers--not the stiffness that came with true silence, but the warmth and comfort of pages turning, murmured incantations, soft breaths, and the faint sounds of the city street several floors below occasionally gusting in through the half-open window. Jax had known this quiet since he was barely ten years old, when the Court Mage took in her friends’ son as ward and apprentice both; honestly, he barely remembered a home before Florianne anymore, before her rooms and workshop and lessons. He used to feel guilty about that, but in the last few years it had dawned on him that his parents likely would have wanted him to be happy here. Well, they probably would have preferred to be alive, but since no spell to resurrect the dead…being happy with Flor was the best he could do.
“...So. What was she like? This wild mountainling of yours?”
“Mmm…” He considered that as he sketched out a new ritual in his spellbook, constantly checking his work against the images in the older tome Flor had assigned him. “She was…curt, especially at first. I got the sense she…wasn’t much used to social niceties.” That seemed like the politest way of putting it. “But she could certainly handle herself--I mean, anyone who hunts those mountains must be able to. She didn’t have to save me, Flor. It probably would have been a much easier night for her if she hadn’t.”
“Most likely.” His mentor tapped one long, perfectly curved fingernail against the looking glass. “Still, it seems…odd that she was out there alone. I’ve only rarely known hunters to travel those mountains, and always in pairs at the least.”
Jax shrugged. “Like I said, she could handle herself. I was using magic, and she still did most of the work driving off those cur’callim.” He frowned down at his work. Something was off… “Strange that she doesn’t live in Lowshir. I can’t think of any other village even close to that part of the foothills.”
“Perhaps she does,” Florianne replied carelessly. “She’d only just met you--she had no reason to tell you anything truthful about herself.”
He chuckled a bit and conceded that with a nod. “Fair point. Though I’ll point out that not everyone operates in the same manner of intrigue and mystery as the court.”
Florianne snorted. “Mystery. Those bejeweled poppinjays can only wish to be so interesting.”
He smiled down at his work--ah! There it was, he’d missed a downstroke--and gave a vague noise of agreement. He’d lived as the Court Mage’s apprentice for half his life, and he could count on one hand the number of times Flor had had anything good to say about her employers. She wasn’t treasonous, of course, she never insulted the royal family directly–well, almost never–but she certainly had no qualms in voicing her opinion.
“And why shouldn’t I?” she’d demanded once when he’d nervously pointed it out at the age of fourteen. “I’ve worked my whole life to have the power to tell these people exactly what I think of them without fear of retribution. Now that I have it, why shouldn’t I use it?” He remembered how she’d scowled and shook her head, but not at him, though he’d been the only other person in the room. “Someone needs to keep them humble. They forget too easily how their spats and posturing falls onto the heads of the folk they are meant to rule. To protect.”
He hadn’t fully understood what she meant, then. He thought he did now.
Florianne abruptly gave a sharp, triumphant, “Hmph!” and stepped back from her project. “Jax, come here a moment.” She flapped a hand at him, the three gold rings she always wore glinting in the mirror.
Jax set his work aside and moved quickly to her side. “What is it?”
“Stand here.” She placed her hands gently on his shoulders, fussing with his positioning until he stood precisely four handspans away from the mirror, his reflection exactly centered. He met her eyes in the glass, though he had to tip his head a bit to do so; he’d long accepted that his mentor was always going to be a head taller than him. With her hands still on his shoulders, the flowing length of her gilded robe’s sleeves framed his own body in the mirror, so that Florianne herself almost seemed to be creating a halo around him.
“Eyes forward,” she snapped, and he obeyed with a crooked smile. “Now. Repeat after me. Enochia thrise’tarae envoya noxt.”
“Enochia thrise’tarae envoya noxt,” Jax repeated clearly. He didn’t recognize the incantation itself, but he knew enough of the arcane language to know he was saying something about darkness–maybe night–and reflections.
“Very good. Now, with me, three times. As you finish the final incantation, raise your palms toward the glass and direct your magic into the runes I’ve inscribed. Ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Enochia thrise’tarae envoya noxt.”
Jax spoke with her, feeling magic begin to swirl beneath his breastbone as their voices rang out in a familiar harmony, calling forth the power within the both to give it shape, give it purpose. As Florianne instructed, on the third repetition of the chant, he raised his palms toward the glass and gave the slight twitch of his fingers that always helped him cast his magic outward.
The glass went suddenly black, both their reflections vanishing in an instant. It only lasted a breath, though, color and light bleeding back into the mirror until once more Jax was staring at himself and Florianne behind him. But…
“Whoa.” He blinked, then leaned forward to peer closer at their reflections. Flor let her hands drop from his shoulders and took a step back, flexing her fingers in the way she often did after casting. Except she didn’t–not in time with her reflection, at least. The Florianne in the mirror moved approximately four seconds before the Florianne standing with him.
He looked back at her over his shoulder, a thousand questions burning his tongue. “What did we just do? Was this a commission? How long does the enchantment last? Why does it–?”
Flor chuckled, raising a hand to halt his questions. “One at a time, apprentice.” He went quiet, though the curiosity still buzzed in every line of his body. Flor gave him a familiar scowl, the one she always wore when she was secretly pleased with him. “We enchanted an oracular device–the lapse in time you see between our reflections and our physical selves is a side effect of the enchantment. Yes, it was a commission, though it was certainly good practice for you, so I will likely be having you enchant a hand mirror on your own in a similar fashion soon. Without upkeep, it should last several weeks. Perhaps a bit longer, as you assisted me in the initial enchantment.”
Jax nodded, turning over her answers in his mind even as he pressed, “Who commissioned it though? And how do you mean, oracular? What exactly can it predict?” Divination magic was not exactly his favorite school, but he was certainly more than competent–still, he would have expected to feel significantly more drained after a spell that showed such an accurate future, even one that was only a few seconds from the current moment, as a side effect.
“The crown prince asked for it. And it will show what it is asked to show, so long as the question is worded clearly,” she answered briskly, already turning to move back to her work desk. “Of course, as you well know, divination is not a precise science–the mirror will show a possible outcome to a given question. The most likely outcome, as it were, but its reflections are not a certainty.”
Whoa…
For what must have been the millionth time, he found himself silently marveling at his mentor’s power. Florianne truly was the most powerful mage of their generation–she didn’t even seem winded, and he knew she’d powered a majority of that spell herself. The fact that she spoke of such an impressive enchantment so casually…
Jax shook his head, grinning at her back. “You’re really something, Flor.”
Florianne sniffed. “I am quite aware, thank you.” She spread a pile of sketches out across her desk, then glanced sidelong in his direction. “...You are well on your way to becoming something yourself, Jaxen.”
A flush of pride swelled in his chest. He would have thought he’d outgrown the way he stood a little straighter under her praise years ago. Apparently not. He dipped his head in a rare show of true reverence for his mentor.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Oh, you stop that.” She flapped her hand at him again, attention once more on her work. “Return to your studies. We need to be–”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jax saw both their reflections in the newly-enchanted glass turn toward the door. He frowned, opening his mouth to mention it, when there came a hurried, stuttered wrapping on the door on their side of the mirror.
“Madam Mage? Madam Mage, are you in?”
Florianne straightened and turned to face the door as he did–just as they had in the mirror–and folded her arms over her chest with a huff. “Of course I’m in. What is it you want?”
The door creaked cautiously open, revealing a twiggy messenger in palace livery whose neck was trembling with the effort it took them not to peer around the fabled workshop of the grand Court Mage. “Er, pardon me, Madam, but ya see, there was a…Lord Barley was, ahm…”
“Oh, of course ‘Lord Barley was’,” Florianne grumbled. She scooped a satchel up from its place on the floor beneath her desk and began sweeping spell components into it haphazardly. “Yes, yes, tell him I’m on my way. I assume this is a problem with the enchanted doublet he came to me about last week?”
The messenger nodded quickly, their expression caught somewhere between fascinated curiosity and heart-pounding nerves. Jax couldn’t help smiling to himself a bit; he remembered that feeling, though he’d grown out of it after the first few months of Florianne's tutelage.
“Yes, Madam. R-right away, Madam. Er, thank you, Madam.” They began to back away from the door, clearly more than happy to escape back to the more mundane bustle of the rest of the palace.
“Hold a moment.” Florianne’s voice froze the youngster in place. They stared at her with eyes that took up nearly half their face, so intent that they nearly missed the shiny gold coin she flicked in their direction. They fumbled to catch it, staring at the little bit of metal for a long moment before Florianne ordered briskly, “Off with you then, tell him I’ll be with him shortly.”
“Yes, Madam Mage! Thank you, Madam!” Beaming, the messenger took off back down the winding stairs of the tower, their footsteps echoing back up the stone behind them.
Jax chuckled and shook his head. “That’s twice their month’s pay, you know.”
“Is it really? Ah, well. Nothing to be done,” Florianne said with a wide, irritable wave of her hand, convincing absolutely nobody. “Very well, I’m off to help the hapless lord out of his own stupidity. Make sure you practice those rituals while I’m gone. I want you able to transfer mana between unlike crystals without using your own magic by the time I get back to the top of this tower.”
“Yes, Madam Mage,” he responded with a cheeky grin.
Florianne grumbled and scowled at him, but he saw the way the corner of her mouth twitched. “You are far too pleased with yourself, serrah. I would have thought you’d outgrown that by now.”
“Never,” he quipped back. “Now go on. If this is the same doublet you were telling me about, you’d best hurry; using an enchanted doublet as a girdle never works the way Lord Barley wishes.”
His mentor positively growled at that, though it was more a noise of agreement than annoyance, then swept passed him out of the workroom, closing the door behind her with a flick of her fingers and a whisper of magic.
Jax spent approximately seven minutes hunched over the ritual practice she had assigned him before he sighed, admitted defeat, and stood from his chair to instead swing himself up onto the sill of the open window. The city of Glennkade spread out before him nearly as far as he could see–all the way to the banks of the grand Gladecut River on the horizon. A city he’d lived in his whole life, a city whose beating heart he knew as well as his own, and yet he was sure it could still continue to surprise him.
Maybe he wasn’t suited for the wilds. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t an explorer.
He dug into his pocket for a handful of glittering gray dust, then tossed it out into the air in front of him as he summoned up a thread of magic and muttered a spell under his breath. Sliding from the windowsill out onto the narrow widow's walk that surrounded three quarters of Florianne’s workshop brought him right through the cloud of shimmering dust, and he felt the incongruity spell settle on his shoulders like a familiar cloak. It wasn’t invisibility, not by a long shot, but in his experience it had served well enough to help him pass unnoticed.
Jax cast one last glance back into the workshop, debating. He could be to Highmere Street and back by the time Florianne returned–besides, the rituals weren’t that complicated. He’d be fine if she did decide to test his progress.
“Besides,” he told himself as he slunk his way from the widow’s walk down to the sloped roof of Florianne’s personal chambers below, “I promised Natty I’d let them know when I was home. I’m just keeping a promise. Flor can’t fault me that.”
She absolutely could, and would, but he was confident she would never find out. He’d made the climb down from her tower window enough times over the years and snuck back up through back palace halls that he knew how best to manage it without drawing his mentor’s attention.
Grinning, Jax whispered another spell to lighten his steps as he slipped down to the ground and took off into the wilderness of the city.
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About the Creator
M. Darrow
Self-proclaimed Book Dragon working on creating her own hoard. With any luck, some folks might like a few of these odd little baubles enough to stick around and take a closer look. Mostly long-form speculative fiction, released as chapters.
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