CHAPTER 17 – Look, and Look Again

Walking through the village while under a magic spell was quite unlike anything Saphienne had experienced before. She had never tried wine – despite the many bottles her mother kept under the stairs, she had never once been interested – and didn’t really know how it felt to be drunk; but the accounts of drunkenness she had read came back to her as she made her way toward the library. Writers described wine as being relaxing in small glasses, freeing in large ones, revealing when drank by the bottle, and thereafter deluding and destroying in greater quantities.

Saphienne didn’t feel relaxed, nor was she freed — yet she did feel the world around her was revealed more clearly than she had ever seen it before. Was this a form of drunkenness? Almost certainly not… and yet she wasn’t entirely herself as she stood in the middle of a winding grove and stared up at the early morning sunlight shining down through the boughs.

Sunlight was magical. She hadn’t noticed at first, the signs far less substantial than the bright colours she had seen in the wizard’s parlour, but the further she travelled the more she became aware of glimmers that dusted the ground wherever the sun shone. The trees, too, were magical, or at least the larger trees that had been grown into houses, all of which had green threads of magic barely visible beneath the surface of their bark. Saphienne paused for a time, mentally charting the lines in one such home.

“Can I help you?”

A bejewelled woman had opened an upstairs window, perplexed by Saphienne.

“Just admiring your house,” Saphienne called up. “I’m learning to be a wizard.”

“…Right.” The elf was unconvinced. “Would you kindly learn somewhere else?”

Saphienne waved, and walked on.

Some dozen steps further down the grove she paused, glancing back to where the woman was leaning out the window to watch; the rings on her fingers shone in the bright daylight.

Oblivious to how she appeared to the woman, Saphienne changed direction and hurried away. There was someone else she should stop in on, before the library.

* * *

Although it was early in the day, there was a very good chance that the woman Saphienne was calling on would still be awake from the night before, and so she knocked on the door to her workshop firmly.

Less than a minute later, the door opened a crack. “…Saphienne.”

Saphienne grinned. “Hello Eletha. Are you working right now?”

The jeweller let the door open slightly wider, revealing her dark, coarse apron, thick gloves, heavy shoes, and the elaborate braid that swept her hair up above her pointed ears. Though Saphienne couldn’t see, she knew the woman was otherwise only dressed in her drab underwear. “I am.”

“May I watch you work for a few minutes? I’m examining different types of magic.”

Eletha deliberated for a moment, then moved away. “I’ll dress.”

Saphienne walked to the back of the workshop as Eletha went upstairs, not even slightly surprised by her former tutor. Anything other than her jewellery was an afterthought to the elf, a distraction from pursuing her craft. There had been days when Saphienne had been forced to request they stop to eat and drink, and nights when Eletha would have thoughtlessly kept working through — until the next evening.

Fortunately, her singlemindedness meant that Eletha soon returned, decently attired, to settle back into place beside the small wood fire over which she worked. “Choker,” she explained to Saphienne, lifting a hoop of golden metal with her tongs, showing her progress as she selected a pair of long needles and lightly held them between the fingers of her other hand.

The detail was exquisite: the surface of the choker looked like woven fabric. Yet there was no magic to be seen, not at first, and Saphienne only nodded.

Eletha set her feet on the bellows beneath the fire, and began to rock them in rhythm, stoking the flames higher. Into them she thrust the jewellery, holding it so that the yellow tongues could taste and warm the gold.

Saphienne waited, watching the jeweller find her rhythm.

When Eletha began to sing, there was no change at first, her low notes sung so softly that Saphienne would have struggled to hear her over the bellows were she stood in the front of the workshop. Yet, as the song unfolded, the metal began to soften, its surface loosening, not quite flowing and not quite solid, able to be worked. Eletha set about doing this with her needles, and Saphienne was struck by the realisation that the surface wasn’t mere detail — the metal had been spun into strands, woven into a delicate braid, and was now being patterned through precise twists.

Another time, Saphienne would have been absorbed by the craftsmanship.

Green glimmers appeared along the metal, revealed by the spell that her master had cast before she left his parlour. Their specific hue was very similar to the living threads she had observed in the trees, a bright emerald, though the Second Sight showed the magic in the choker as less fixed in place, able to shift and sway. Prolonged study gave Saphienne the impression that the glimmers were like light reflecting off the crests of waves, and when Eletha sang different notes the imagined sea mirrored her tone, growing more or less animate in response to the song.

Perhaps ten minutes passed, Saphienne contemplating the mystery.

“I think I’ve learned enough,” she whispered, not wishing to interrupt Eletha.

The jeweller nodded, waiting for a lull in the song to speak. “See yourself out.”

But as Saphienne walked away, she heard the bellows stop.

“Saphienne.”

Reluctantly, she came back to where Eletha was studying the choker, conscious of her remaining time until the Second Sight expired.

“…You were good. I should have told you.”

Saphienne smiled. “You did. You told me I’d be a jeweller.”

Eletha turned, surprise in the dark seas of her eyes. Then she nodded. “Remember the songs. Return to them. Everything else will change, but the songs remain the same.” She lapsed into silence.

For once, Saphienne was glad Eletha was a woman of few words, for neither of them knew what else to say.

* * *

Filaurel was upstairs in the library when Saphienne found her, and dropped down from the top of a ladder with ease. “Aren’t you a little early?” she asked, clicking off the brakes and rolling the ladder to the end of the aisle.

“I need a favour.” Saphienne squinted at Filaurel as she spoke. “…I need to study the tome in your desk.”

“Oh!” Filaurel smiled broadly. “You’re under the Magician’s Sight, aren’t you?”

“Almon called it the Second Sight. He said there were many spells…”

The librarian nodded as they walked toward the stairs. “Humans call it the Magician’s Sight – except, well, in their own words. I suppose you’ll want me to write a message or two while you watch?”

Saphienne murmured an agreement. She was distracted, having noticed a steady orange glow under the top of Filaurel’s blouse, centred on the dip between her cleavage. Her mentor was wearing something magical.

In due course Filaurel brought out the tome, unbinding it and turning to the most recent page. “Please pay no attention to what’s written here,” she said, hand hovering over the page of neat script, “much of the discussion is frivolous and not intended for the eyes of children.”

That only made it more appealing. “I’m interested in the magic.”

“Thank you.” Filaurel lifted her hand away as she readied the pen that paired with the heavy book. “Pass me that ink, would you? There we are.”

Saphienne stole a glimpse of the passages written on the page, all in different hands, catching reference to an upcoming festival — and questions for what Filaurel had planned for an apparent next meeting.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“The pen is not essential,” Filaurel explained as she wrote a brief, coy reply, “but it helps speed the magic. I won’t pretend to understand how.”

Watching her write, Saphienne witnessed the magic in the pen at work. Indigo light brightened and dimmed with every mark she made, the intensity precisely varying in relation to the movement of the nib across the page. So too the writing on the page glowed with the same indigo, each completed word flashing briefly, the colour exploding outward before fading away.

“There.” Filaurel set the pen down. “Shouldn’t be long. Vaeril is always hovering over their tome. I’m certain they leave it open on their desk. Whenever someone spills ink, eleven times out of a dozen, Vaeril is to blame.”

Saphienne smiled. “It copies the ink stains?”

“Thumb prints, too.”

As anticipated, suddenly the tome began to glitter with a fainter indigo, the sparkles drifting across the page until they stuck in place below the paragraph Filaurel had written, trapped there, accumulating. White luminance – Saphienne supposed it was a Divination spell – flashed across the page, and then green fire snaked through the indigo points, ink racing after it across the paper to fill in the divined message.

“This looks complicated.” Saphienne bit her lip. “I think there’s… three disciplines of magic? Divination, and another two I don’t know.”

Filaurel was familiar with them. “If you can see green, that would be Transfo– excuse me, Transmutation. A deep shade of purple would be Translocation.” She tapped her bottom lip with the end of the pen. “I can’t recall anything else that would be particularly useful, and I don’t want to cause trouble with Almon by explaining more about the disciplines.”

Saphienne’s eyes flicked to the magic Filaurel wore, then back to the page. “What about an orange colour?”

“Abjuration?” Filaurel frowned, and her hand unconsciously clasped against her bosom as she leant over the tome. “Why in the world are you seeing– oh.”

Saying nothing, Saphienne kept studying the book as Filaurel stepped away, the librarian now trying and failing to cover the orange glow with the palm of her hand.

“I should have realised,” Filaurel said. She didn’t look embarrassed, but there was an equally hot emotion in her eyes as she studied the wall. “I never really think about it. Yes, I have magical jewellery on me.”

“May I–”

“No.” Filaurel looked down. “Sorry, but no. Maybe another day.”

Saphienne hadn’t experienced being shut out by Filaurel so bluntly before, and for a moment she felt unspeakably frightened, like she stood on the surface of a frozen lake which had suddenly began to creak and ping as it cracked.

Then her mentor sighed away all tension, and gave her a soft smile. “Oh, Saphienne, you haven’t upset me.” She opened her arms. “Come here.”