“Nope,” Daziel said cheerfully. “It’s whatever they want. Sometimes it goes poorly.”
Oof. What if the scroll fragments didn’t want to be scrolls but dust instead?That’d be a disaster.
But it was an interesting way to think, considering what an inanimate object wanted. We’d kept trying to force the fragments back to scrolls, but they didn’t budge. Could they want to be anything else? What did scroll fragments want to be except scrolls?
Maybe being a scroll wasn’t enough to draw on. What if there was something stronger? Something with more energy than being a scroll, something the fragments would like more? Something more alive?
Like being alive.
The fragments were made of parchment.
Parchment was skin.
I froze, unwilling to move, barely willing to breathe until I’d finished thinking this through. Until I’d determined if this was as big as I thought it might be. How was parchment made? Was the parchment of a scroll made from multiple animals or one?
“Naomi? Are you all right? You look—”
“Shh,” I said. “I’m figuring something out.”
Say it was the same animal. How much parchment came from one animal? I had no idea. Even so, imagine…“I could ask theparchment to be calves again. We keep trying to make it return to its shape as a scroll—but what if we asked it to return its skin to its shape as acalf?”
Daziel raised his brows. “It’s worth a shot.”
“How do you ask things to take the form they want most?” Though human magic was wildly different than shedim magic, perhaps I could draw on his style, use its influence to write a letterform spell. “I know you said you can’t tell in advance, but if you wanted to influence their form, how would you try?”
Daziel considered. “I’d suggest…trying to awaken the fragments’ memory of their former life. Something like ‘Go back to when you were a young calf. Feel the stretch of your skin across your muscles, the shiver in the wind, the dryness in the sun, itching, smoothness. Beaware.’ Then ask it to come back together. Though I shouldn’t try it, because they might literally turn back into a calf. A zombie calf.”
His phrasing sounded so different from the technical way I was used to spells—different enough, maybe, to work. I gripped my coffee so hard I thought I might break the brand-new mug. Certainly all the spells we’d been trying so far hadn’t worked. What if this did?
He watched me sharply. “Do you think you have something?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling heady with hope. “I do.”
~~~
Monday morning, I headedtoward Professor Altschuler’s office before classes started. Everything was soaking wet; the rainy season had arrived in earnest, with another storm sweeping in during the night, the strong wind wrenching branches from trees and scattering leaves on the ground. More worms than usualcovered the pavement and lawns with no birds to eat them up. And a fog covered everything as I crossed campus, thick and heavy, swirls of mist hanging low to the ground, the world around me gray and blurred.
I entered the Keep, spiraling up to the professor’s office and knocking. My stomach ground against itself. Daziel had looked worried when I barely ate breakfast, but I’d been too nervous. He’d offered to come, but I’d told him to go back to sleep; Paz, instead, had curled up in my shirt pocket, his warmth welcome against my chest.
“Enter.”
“Hi,” I said, trying to sound confident, instantly undercutting it with an apology. “Sorry to show up so early. I wanted to talk to you about something?”
The professor gestured me to a seat before his desk.
I took it, my back very straight. Professor Altschuler looked like he’d been up for hours, his hands stained with ink, his coffee mug empty. “I have a theory about the scrolls. We’ve been trying to call them back to their original forms as texts, but…what if we called them to their forms as calves? As parchment?”
The professor stopped looking at the paper in front of him, lifted his head, and stared at me.
“Sorry,” I said nervously. “Is that stupid?”
“No,” he growled, his thin face getting thinner. “It’sobvious.”
“Oh.” The word snuck out of me, timid and embarrassed. Did “obvious” mean he’d already tried it? “Sorry—”
“Obvious, yet we all missed it.” He shook his head, then focused his dark gaze on me. “Good work, Miss Bat Yardena.”
Oh. Phew. I almost sagged with relief at his compliment. Thenelation filled me. He liked it. He thought it had potential. Hopefully this would go toward convincing him to renew my scholarship for a second year. I wasn’t ready to go home yet.
