I close my eyes. I’m biting my lip so hard I can taste blood. But I have nothing to lose if he already knows what I am. What I cando. “Then... help me. Show me how all this”—I jab at the books—“can teach me to control it.”
“Very well,” he says easily, as if he had been waiting for me to ask. “Come with me.”
I eye him suspiciously, wondering just what else he’s seen, what else the gods have supposedly told him.
We stand, and he takes me to an annex beside the library. It looks like an old storage room with a few desks on the far end but otherwise empty. Reaching for a crystal sliver of jadu hanging from a necklace inside the collar of his robes, he sketches a triangular rune in the air that I recognize—the symbol for fire—and a small ball of flame appears in his hand. My eyes widen in awe.
“Much of magic is intent. When you forge your blades with smelted jadu and etch the runes, what do you feel?”
I narrow my eyes. “How do you know I’m a bladesmith?”
“The commander told me.”
I blink, reminding myself that Aran is the commander’s man. He’s part of the Dahaka—part of the commander’s inner circle according to Roshan—and I’m not naive enough to put all my trust in him, even if he is helping me. “After the blade cools, I draw the elemental runes for fire, ice, earth, or air. They focus the energy and activate the magic in the weapons.”
He points to the other room. “That book you just read said that the runes extend beyond the elemental. Have you ever seen or crafted other runes?”
I think about the unintentional runes on my dagger—the starburst and the moon—as well as the binding ones I’d seen on the azdaha, and give a stiff nod.
“True magic, powered by akasha, is infinite in its uses, thoughthere’s always a cost. Even the magi of old saw depletions in their internal source when they tried to do too much.”
“But I’m not a magi,” I say stubbornly.
A patient sigh leaves him. “A leaf is a leaf no matter what name you call it. Its purpose remains the same.” He hands me a crystal on a cord. “Hold this. Close your eyes.” His instructions are nearly monotone. “Feel the flow of your breathing in and out of your lungs.” Obediently, my lungs expand and contract. “Feel your heart pumping life through your body. Feel the power of that crystal connecting to you.” Each pulse of my heartbeat echoes in the sliver of jadu I’m grasping in my palm.
But it’s not enough.
My fingers tighten around the jadu shard, but the more I concentrate, the more my control fragments. “I can’t,” I gasp, eyes flying open.
“You can. Magic is intent, remember. Now, look at me and focus.” His voice is mesmeric, his eyes like pools of dark coffee. “Envision the fire rune. You can sketch it in the air, if it helps.”
With my pointer finger, I draw the triangle that I’ve etched a hundred times on different blades for Vasha, but there’s no response from the crystal... or any sign of a flame. I exhale, clench my jaw, and try again with the same result. “Maybe I’m a dud,” I say dejectedly.Or maybe all you can do is randomly incinerate people with starfire.
I swallow hard.
“Magic is also like a muscle,” Aran says. “It requires diligence, strengthening, and practice. Let’s try a different rune.”
“Magic is a leaf, magic has intent, magic is a muscle—magic sure is an overachiever,” I grumble. But following his lead, I draw the inverted triangle for water and then a triangle with a line through it for air, but nothing happens with either. We walk through the exercise a dozen times, even switching crystals after I insist that my jadu shard is broken. The effect—or despairing lack of one—is the same.
By the end, I’m exhausted and my body aches as if I’ve just fought inan arena, sweat dripping down my skin. “This is useless,” I say, flinging the crystal away and slumping to the ground where I lie panting.
Aran, ever patient, studies me. “Perhaps we’re going about this the wrong way. What does your magic feel like to you?”
The simurgh inside of me lifts its head for the first time all day. “It feels like my skin is lifting off my body, like I’m too full to keep whatever it is inside. Like it wants to be free.”
He ponders this for a moment. “And if you reach for it? What does it do?”
I shake my head and half-heartedly dig down into my center. This is ridiculous, this is never going to—
Magic surges up toward me, and I gape. “It... wants... it wants to fly.”
“Then let it.”
“How?” I ask.
His voice is hypnotic. “Close your eyes and let the light of Saru flow into and through you.”
I don’t know how to feel about invoking the old god of creation, but I reach for the vision of the simurgh I’d seen before. Magic curls toward me as if happy for my touch, and I let myself sink into it. I feel that light is flowing along my veins, my skin tightening, a deepening pressure testing the limits of every fragile organ. It won’t hurt me, but it feels like a flood.
