“I didn’t mean youtechnicallycan’t,” Yael said impatiently, ruffling her fine hair in a clear sign of stress. “I meant it’s unsafe to work magic you don’t understand.”
“It’s not safe to wait, either,” Daziel said. Unlike my cohort, he’d lit up at my suggestion. Energy coiled in his body like he might spring forward any moment. “It might work.”
“No,” Yael said. “There’s no reason to go racing off. We can wait a week, a month.”
“Can we?” Support came unexpectedly from Gidon—but then, he was from a farming family. “We need the Maestril now. If we wait another month, the growing season will be ruined.”
“So everyone suffers another year—that’s better than an unknown spell. We don’t even know where the Ziz is or what measurement the fourteen means.”
“True,” I said. “But maybe we can present it to the Council and pressure them to look at our possible locations for the Ziz and work on the translation in the meantime.”
“We do know the measurement,” Stefan said. “Language X phonetically spells out ‘troyil’—I bet that’s ‘troyelle,’ an ancient term from the Maudeli. It translates to roughly ‘five swimming pools’ worth of neshem.’ ”
We all stared at him.
“Five swimming pools?” I finally said.
“Yup.”
Gidon looked like he might faint. “That’s a lot of power.”
“The kind used to level cities,” I agreed.
“Where are we supposed to get so much power?” Gilli asked nervously, gnawing at the end of a braid.
“We’re not,” Yael said. “The Sanhedrin is. They have reserves they can use.”
“I dunno if the Sanhedrin is going to be willing to use so much,” Stefan said doubtfully. “Especially if we don’t know the spell will work. I mean, that’s a fuckton.” He turned to Daziel. “Can you give us power to use, like you did for putting the scrolls together in the first place?”
“Not that much,” Daziel said.
“Can you cast the spell yourself, then? You guys have more power than us, right?”
“We can’t direct it the way you do.” Daziel looked at me. “The only way…”
A horrible, tingling sensation skittered across my shoulders and down my spine. I knew what he was saying, could feel the realization inside me, sick and poisonous.
If you bound a demon—or a demon bound you—you could have the kind of power that raised temples and leveled cities.
“I need food,” I said abruptly. “Hot food. Daziel, come with me.”
The others looked startled. “Right this moment?” Gidon said doubtfully.
Yael, on the other hand, narrowed her eyes. She, at least, guessed what Daziel had meant.
“Yes.” I grabbed Daziel’s hand. Never mind I’d barely touched him for the last couple of weeks; this was urgent, and everything else fled my mind.
We didn’t speak until we’d left the Keep. The Corisoc had coated the campus with its red dust, and in the dawn light, the marble buildings looked like dull embers.
I led us to the river, where rushing water frothed white around the craggy rocks jutting above the surface. I stepped across them, and Daziel followed, until we were isolated. Wind whipped around us, sprays of water spattering against our calves and arms. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon, turned orange gold by the Corisoc.
“You think we could cast the spell if one of us bound the other,” I said flatly.
Daziel nodded. “We’re greater as a whole than as two separate parts.”
“I’m not binding you. Nor am I a huge fan of being bound again.” I had no desire to relive the experience at the Rocks, with overwhelming magic rushing through me, making me dizzy and sick and unable to breathe. “Neither of us should be able to control the other.”
He squinted toward the rising sun. “What if we couldn’t? What if we could maintain our independence?”
