~Chapter Eleven: A Not-So-New Helping Hand~

Eola’s days blurred into each other.

In the mornings, she ate a breakfast that she remembered enjoying, but that had lost its flair ever since the stew. Nothing held a candle to it except for Instructor Tarik’s cookies, and she had no idea where he’d hidden them. Her time in his office correcting runes was far too busy, and far too interesting, to spend time hunting for the elusive tin.

Then there was an hour—or close to it, since Madame Reyanna rarely used all of her time—of Mana Studies. None of the techniques the wide-eyed gnome taught were as good for Eola as exhaustion was, but Eola paid attention to them anyway. Different methods had different advantages, after all, and with a newfound appreciation for the need to expand her soul, she was willing to put up with the waste of time most turned out to be in the hopes that one would stand out.

She tried her best to pair with Colin whenever possible. He might not have been good at fighting, but he…wasn’t actually any better at most of the soul exercises Madame Reyanna taught, either. But he was one thing Eola desperately needed: a way to avoid Catrine.

And he was also a friend. Not the sad, pathetic kind of friend he’d been a few months earlier, either, but a real friend. He was surprisingly insightful, and if it hadn’t been for their weekly dinners at the Chubby Saber or a half-dozen other taverns across Varin’s Town, she’d never have realized it. He seemed to know exactly who to talk to—and who to befriend—in every restaurant, inn, and shop in the town, but she’d never so much as seen him try to make friends with the other students at school.

One day, she asked him about it.

“People are just patterns,” Colin said, shrugging. “My mum taught me who to talk to to make the pattern look the way it should.”

“That sounds…big-headed,” Eola replied.

He laughed. “It does, doesn’t it? It’s not like that. I told you that my attunement makes me think about all the steps in magic, right? It’s like that. I can’t help it.”

“Right.”

“When are you going to introduce me to your cat?” Colin changed the subject. “She’s always hiding when I knock on your door.”

Eola didn’t have an answer. She just shrugged.

The truth was that binding with Atta had gone ridiculously smoothly, and after less than a week, they were, indeed, mistress and familiar. But Atta wasn’t the kind of cat who took to someone easily. It had taken her weeks to reveal herself to Eola, and Colin wasn’t a consistent enough presence for her to get comfortable with him.

It was nice to have two friends, though. Colin was the more public one, while Atta was the best kind of friend—the kind she could carry in her robe pocket like a book or scroll, and the kind who knew things.

Granted, Atta couldn’t share much. Even after the binding ritual was completed, the burgundy collar covered in tiny runes stayed fastened around her neck, and whenever Eola tried to fiddle with its locked latch, the cat swatted and hissed until she stopped. “There are some secrets that are better buried,” she’d say.

She couldn’t—or more accurately, wouldn’t tell her anything about the test rune she spent an hour or more a day on, every single day. Apparently, to Eola’s frustration, “that would be cheating.” If anything, Atta was more of a hindrance than a help; the middle of the rune was becoming her favorite napping spot. That hadn’t stopped Eola from painstakingly breaking it into its components, though. She’d discovered eight modifying marks so far, as well as three things that could be modifiers she didn’t know, in the month she’d been working at it independently.

The days blurred into each other, but at the end of each of them, Eola could tell she was really making progress. It was slow, but it was there.

Eola was working on a rune at her desk, and Colin was sitting on her perfectly-made bed reading one of the books they’d acquired from the library, when it happened.

It was a special rune, because once she’d taken it apart, it’d be her fifth First Order-equivalent spell. That was half of the standard by which mages gained the rank of Journeymage. The other half would be trickier still. She’d have to cast all five in one session, without an opportunity to refill her soul with Mana.

“But still, I’m halfway,” she murmured to herself.

“Huh?” Colin peered over the cover of his book. So did Nera, the yellow-gold weasel he’d bonded with.

“Working on spells again, that’s all.” Eola bent further down, nose almost to the parchment as she traced the most likely third modifying mark on the vaguely scroll-shaped rune. The Journeymage trials weren’t a big deal for most mages. A few members of the class had already passed them, in fact. Catrine, Bannoque, Garreth, and a handful of others all had the pointed hats and decoration on their badges to prove it. None of them had done it with flying colors, though—and none of them had done it with Eola’s method of casting.

The easy half was almost done, though. She just had to finish separating these last two modifying marks from the Child’s Magic symbol in the center and figure out the correct way to chain the four marks and the rune together for maximum efficiency, and then do it one more time.

Colin’s book snapped shut, and Eola pulled her nose out of the parchment as he slid off the bed and looked over her shoulder. “What are you trying to do, anyway?”

“Nothing.” Her hand covered the half-traced modifying mark, and she turned to stare Colin down, face flushing.

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged. “But anyone who’s spent any time with you knows you’re not working with traditional ideograms, and you haven’t been to Instructor Tarik’s class in a long time. You’ve got that independent study, too.”

“Oh.” Eola flushed a little more. She hadn’t realized…that is, she’d thought what she was doing looked enough like Ideograms homework to a casual observer. Then again, Colin wasn’t a casual observer. He understood people in a way that was shocking for someone so quiet, and that…probably applied to her, too. “Well, uh, what I’m doing is—“

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

A weight left her pocket, and a hissing ball of blue feline fell from the loft and landed between Colin’s shoulders. Nera reacted instantly, growling and throwing himself at Atta as Colin flinched and yelped in pain. Eola whirled. The chair clattered to the ground, and she grabbed Atta by the waist. The cat and weasel scratched her hands. “Oh, Y’aer curse you both!”

She hurled the cat into the silvered cage and shut the door. Atta could get out any time she wanted, of course, but she doubted the cat would. That’d give her powers away to a stranger, and Eola was surprised the cat had even revealed herself to Colin.

Colin. He was staring at the cat, eyes wide and face pale. Nera stood on his shoulder, teeth bared and eyes glaring at Atta with an almost human expression of anger. “That…that is your familiar?” Colin asked.

Eola’s face burned. She looked at the floor. “Yes. I didn’t want to tell you because…”

“Because your familiar is the monster that stalked us in the library?”

When she didn’t say anything, Colin cleared his throat, glared at Atta one more time, and picked up the chair, then sat down. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

He waited a moment, but Eola still didn’t say anything. “Okay. Fine. I’ll start with a secret of my own. My attunement is order.”

“As in, putting things in order?”

“No. As in the concept of order. Of everything being in its place, at its time. It makes every spell in my spellbook harder to sketch, and that’s not all. There are no order-attuned spells in the First or Second Orders. There’s one, total, and it’s a Fourth Order spell to construct walls at a city scale.” Colin sat in the chair—backwards—and put his hand on the half-traced modifying mark before Eola could stop him. “There. I’ve told you my secret. Now, what’s your attunement, and why did it give you a monster for a familiar?”