I took a breath, then tugged on the door’s handle, only to have it open easily.
I walked into a room that was still dim, but brighter than I’d ever seen it. Lanterns hung on hooks along the walls, lit for the first time I’d been inside. He’d covered half the floor in thick pads, and I saw heavy bags and practice dummies I didn’t remember from my other visits.
Bones glanced over as I walked in, in the middle of wrapping one of his hands with a long strip of black cloth. I’d never seen him like this anywhere but in his room the previous Saturday. He had on long black trousers like me, but his were form-fitting, and he wore nothing else, not even shoes. He seemed to have given up hiding his scars from me altogether because they stood out visibly on his skin, even in the dim light.
“You shouldn’t wear clothing that loose,” he said, after giving me a cursory look. “Not unless I have you specifically practicing in street clothes. We won’t do that for a while,” he added, giving me another appraising stare. “But eventually, yes, I’ll test you in a number of outfits that are comparable to what you wear outside. For today, I just want to conduct a basic skills assessment, and maybe show you a few things.”
I blinked, a little taken aback.
I guess I’d expected some kind of preamble.
Possibly a few complaints about being stuck with me.
At the very least, I’d expected a half-threatening lecture on how I was supposed to describe these lessons to anyone who asked.
“Quicksilver said you had an incident in class a few weeks back?” Bones commented. He pressed the end of the last coil ofwrap to the back of his hand and murmured a spell. He released it, and the cloth bandage held in place. He glanced up. “A hydra? He said it was pretty impressive for someone with only a year of magic under their belt.”
I scoffed. “That’s not what he said to me.”
A bare twitch reached Bones’s lips. “I imagine not.”
He motioned me deeper into the room. “Do you know how to wrap your hands?”
I blinked at him again, then shook my head. “No.”
“I’ll do it this time,” he said, his voice still flatly neutral. “Pay attention to each step in the process. The order is important. Next time, you’ll try it yourself and I’ll correct you. The third time you’re here, I’ll expect you to do it on your own… to try at least. You’ll have to fight with whatever fucked-up result you get, so I would recommend making an effort to learn to do it properly. If you end up having to ask me to show you again, I’ll require payment for the service.”
At what must have been a startled look from me, he quirked an eyebrow.
“Don’t get paranoid, Shadow,” he mocked. “I didn’t mean I was going to beat you up. Or demand a blow-job. I meant push-ups or running or something else you won’t like. Something that will make it hard to get out of bed the next morning.”
I frowned but only nodded, somehow completely lacking my usual impulse to roll my eyes or toss words back at him. I walked over to where he stood and noticed he already had two coiled wraps tucked under his left arm. He pulled one out, then motioned me closer.
“Hold out your hand,” he said. “Flat. Fingers spread.”
I watched intently as he wrapped first one hand, then the other. I tried to memorize the order in which he wrapped each part, starting with the strap over my thumb, then the wrist and then the palm and thumb, before wrapping all of my otherfingers, then crossing the back of my hand, then back around the wrist. He worked precisely, methodically, seemingly unbothered by having to do it all upside down.
“Where’d you learn the hydra?” he asked casually as he worked.
“Alaric.”
Bones’s fingers stuttered briefly, then resumed their precise movements.
“What did you use?” he asked, just as casually. “For the transmorph?”
I flushed enough to feel it in my cheeks.
One thing I’d learned the hard way: magic followed a lot of the same rules as physics did in Overworld. Meaning, you couldn’t generally make things appear out of nothing. To create a mug with magic, you needed enough matter to make it out of something else. To transform yourself into an animal, you generally had to turn into an animal roughly your human size, using the same amount of matter, only with that matter redistributed.
There were ways to make yourself into more than one animal, or make yourself larger, usingotherliving matter, but that was generally considered incredibly risky to experiment with, and could end up with you dead or permanently disfigured, like that Earth movie,The Fly.
Some things could be pulled out of the air, like fire, or those ice shards Bella Chalmers had thrown at me in Quicksilver’s class, by transmorphing water molecules. You could even knock someone out that way, distilling certain gasses.
But everything had to come from somewhere.
Dark magicks allowed one to pull whole beings from other dimensions, but that generally required a ritual, which wasn’t practical in most sparring situations.
If one were to cast something big, like, say, a giant, six-headed, fire-breathing hydra in the middle of an experimental magic shed, it required a fair bit of matter to produce. Possibly even all of the sitting cushions and half of the sparring dummies and heavy bags in the massive, football-field-length room, along with an oak table, four heavy targets for combat spells, and your instructor’s favorite chair. Just for example.
