“I had no idea dryad politics were so cutthroat.”
“You have no idea.”
“What about the backlash?”
“Backlash?” Melcori rolled a pen between his palms. “In what way?”
“You burned down a Sacred Grove. You’ve often mentioned that there are repercussions for acts against fellow magicals.”
“But I got permission.” Melcori’s gleeful smile only made Xavier more anxious. His Master, who had trained Xavier in extinct and obscure magic and the effect specific actions had on his magic, had lost his damn mind. Melcori must know the curse that would befall anyone for daring to destroy a Sacred Grove. Dryad magic was nature magic, and Mother Nature was a vicious bitch.
He held back a frustrated scream. This wouldn’t be the first time Melcori had outsmarted himself. “Do you think that will be enough? Permission from one dryad?”
“It should be. It was enough for me to overpower the runes. Besides, I’m only following your rule.” Melcori’s self-righteous tone distracted Xavier from the subject of imprisoned dryads and his Master’s lack of morals.
“My rule?” Since when did he have rules? “What rule?”
“The one you insisted on when you were ten.”
Xavier, not surprisingly, couldn’t remember demanding anything that long ago. Instead, he lamented that Melcori couldn’t wait until after Xavier’s apprenticeship ended before losing his tiny connection to reality and trying to drag Xavier along with him.
Melcori sniffed. “I remember it clearly, brat. You looked at me with those big doe brown eyes and said in a snotty tone that if I were to gamble to make sure and not lose your only home.”
“Oh, fuck!”
“Language,” Melcori taunted gleefully.
Xavier sighed and concentrated on not strangling his master. It would look bad in his recommendation letter. “Who did you gamble with?”
Melcori winced. “I might have lost a large sum gambling at the Chimera’s club.”
“No!” Xavier didn’t have to fake his horror. No one knew where the Chimera had come from. Still, rumors abounded that he was the result of a failed experiment and had escaped from being destroyed by killing everyone involved in his capture. Whether those rumors were true or not, everyone agreed that you didn’t cross the Chimera or cheat him and survive. “Why would you gamble with him?”
“I had a good hand,” Melcori whined.
Xavier groaned and tugged at his hair. It was moments like this that he wondered which of them was older. When he was a traumatized eight-year-old, Melcori had seemed like an all-knowing mage. At twenty-three, he was now convinced that his mentor was a child in a man’s body—an immature child with a gambling addiction.
I must not punch my Master.Xavier chanted in his head while his magic bubbled beneath the surface of his skin like a cauldron primed to explode.
He wanted to be supportive, but at that moment, he only wished to hide in his workshop and not come out until this situation was resolved. Deep down, he knew that without Melcori’s impressive blood magic experience and groundbreaking spell work, the ancient mage would’ve been drummed out of the Blood Mage Guild years ago.
“Do you remember the rules for a Grove?” Melcori asked as if he hadn’t upended Xavier’s plans to work on his project for the next week.
“Mostly,” he muttered. Whenever Melcori gave him a book, practical lessons soon followed. He’d been dumbfounded at the enormous volume ofNature MagicMelcori had given him two weeks ago. He’d wondered at the time why he had been given such a pointless text to study, even as he read it thoroughly. It now made horrifying sense.
“The rules?” Melcori’s smug expression grew stern, a sign his patience was wearing thin and would soon result in punishment if Xavier didn’t come up with the correct answer. He had to clean the novice ritual room without magic for his last punishment. He still had nightmares over that.
Novices were idiots, and demon blood was hard to get out and smelled terrible.
“I’m assuming you mean the ones regarding leadership.”
“Stop stalling, or I’m going to think you haven’t read it.”
Xavier shifted from foot to foot. “If I remember correctly,” he stalled further while mentally sifting through the facts he’d absorbed. “If you remove all the dryads without killing any of them and have permission and voluntary blood from at least one member, then you can create a new Grove at an appropriate location, and whoever’s blood you add first will be the new Grove priestess.
“If the old Grove were at least one hundred years old, the dryad magic would replenish at the new location, and Mother Nature would grant them enough extra magic for a one-time tree replacement. The Old Grove would remain barren, and its magic would recede after roughly seventy-two hours, upon which it will spark and transfer entirely into the new Grove.”
“And what else will happen at the Old Grove,” Melcori prompted with all the patience of a mentor with his student.
