I can picture his lithe grace and hear the echo of his velvety voice in my head too easily. “I suspect you’re equally dangerous either way. As long as you don’t infuse your magic into my grove, we won’t have a problem.”
The footsteps behind me stop for a long moment, before he rushes to catch up.
“You win,” Nathaniel says. “I’m intrigued.”
“I’m falling over myself with pleasure at the thought,” I say absently as he snorts again, because we’re here.
MyBear Creek grove is a very small clearing surrounded by a circle of mostly evergreen trees but one deciduous one right in the middle. I’m not a tree expert—for the type of magic I do it’s not relevant.
What matters is that it’s big enough to be sturdy but small enough that I can climb it and break off small branches without severely damaging it.
Nathaniel sucks in a breath. “I feel it. This can’t all be yours.”
“No, this was a power spot before I found it.”
I step inside the circle and take a deep breath as the feeling of magic surrounds me.
Magic gathers naturally in places and in people—but not all places or all people. The people it gathers in are wizards. The places are power spots.
People can draw power from places full of magic, and they can also imbue places with more magic. Any person or place that attempts to contain more magic than it has capacity for will overflow. In people, that generally manifests as sudden random organ failures and death; in nature it tends to be more dramatic. Unanticipated earthquakes, floods, that sort of thing.
Fortunately, a place can only accumulate too much magic if a person causes it—that can’t happen on its own. Like if you try to imbue a place too fast, with a lot of people working together or with a spell amplifier.
Unfortunately, people absolutely can gather too much magic into themselves without trying.
The whole point of what Low Earthers learn in High Earth is to send magic safely back out of ourselves into the world so we don’t die.
But the reason High Earth teaches us is because what magic we expel, they can absorb into their world, draining ours dry.
I used to come here to just feel at peace, whole again.
Today, the familiar magic is like electricity on my skin.
Today, I’m not choosing peace.
Nathaniel is staring around intently but doesn’t make any move to enter the grove, so I ease my death-grip on Evram’s wand and get to work, shifting leaves off the forest floor to make myself a canvas.
“Why are the stones arranged around the edges like that?” he asks.
So, he knows enough to spot a spell anchor, but not enough to know what it does—or at least he’s pretending to. Interesting, but that doesn’t give me any more information on what his background actuallyis.
“An experiment. It’s a containment spell.” One that took meagesto set up, especially given that I couldn’t just spend magic to make sure the goddamn stones didn’t blow away in a strong wind.
That won’t be a problem today.
Nathaniel sucks in a breath, andthat’smore interesting, because it means even without knowledge of spell mechanics in an instant he’s recognized the implications.
“You’re testing the world’s capacity,” he says wonderingly. “You don’t believe what you’ve been taught.”
I glance back at him. “And you don’t either, do you?”
Slowly, he shakes his head. “No. I’ve always believed this world can hold as much magic as any other. You proved it?”
A more loaded question than he realizes. “To my satisfaction, yes. The containment keeps the magic from flowing into the surrounding forest or away to High Earth, and I’ve been infusing my natural magic here as much as possible for the last ten years. This tree, and the ones at the edge of the circle, flourish with no ill effects.”
“No mini-ice ages, no plagues?” Nathaniel’s voice is gently mocking, but it’s not directed at me. His obvious disdain makes me like him better, which is dangerous since I don’t know if I can trust him and he clearlywantsme to.
But “for our own good” is supposedly the justification for why High Earth started sucking away our world’s natural magic, back around the fall of Rome.
