She opened the cuff of her left sleeve and began to roll the cloth back from the skin it hid.
Hope snorted by her ear, but kept the words that snort implied to himself. It wasn’t Hope that she heard, however. It was Sanabalis, in memory.Words or gestures as part of invocation are crutches. They are irrelevant to the use of magic itself.
Do they get in the way?
They hinder speed. If you require words or complicated gestures to enter the correct state of mind, you will find your abilities lend themselves only to the scholarly; you will never make use of magic—legalmagic—in your duties as a Hawk.He exhaled. No smoke, though.Mages learn how to grasp their power, how to recognize it, in entirely different ways. You are aware that those who can see the echoes of magic do not see them in the same way?
She’d nodded. She nodded now, as she tilted her head up, lifting an arm—the exposed left arm—to touch the top of the door frame.
You see sigils. Words. Others see fabric, a weave—loose or tight. Colors. Somehearthe echoes. They hear the names of those who cast spells strong enough to leave those echoes. But all of magic, all of our ability to use it, to channel it, to bend it in the direction we wish it to take, is like that. You attempt to reach the source; how you reach it is not as important.
Unless I’m wasting time with inefficient words or gestures? With a wand?
By the time that is a concern, you will understand how to arrive at your destination, and you may make adjustments, yes.
She touched the door.
The frame was wood. It wasn’t alive. The normal healing paradigm was not going to work here. But elements of that paradigmmight. The ability to heal had come with the marks. To heal, she had to bridge the gap caused by skin. Her skin. Her patient’s. She had never considered the actualhowof building that bridge.
The door was an inanimate object. But...she knew, in the moment she attempted to begin to heal it, that her understanding of the practical and pragmatic—some lucky people called this reality—had overlapped to form a tiny bridge that gave her confirmation of that information. Her arm fell away from the door as she lowered it.
She lifted a hand to touch her familiar and thought better of that. Instead, she called Severn over. She touched his cheek. Severn was alive. If she looked now, she could get lost in the internal details of his body. He suffered from no life-threatening injuries. She lifted her hand from his cheek, breaking that connection, and then gently touched him again. This time, she concentrated on the brief, brief second before she began to look at his physical health.
She exhaled, reclaimed her hand and tried the door again.
“Why are you reaching for the top of the frame? Why not the sides?” Bellusdeo asked.
“Keystones,” Kaylin replied.
“There are no keystones here—this is not an arch.”
“I know. But...humor me.”
The Dragon fell silent, but the rustle of cloth at Kaylin’s back implied that she’d folded her arms.
Kaylin touched the height of the door frame as if it were Severn’s cheek, but with a lot more fingertip and less palm. She felt a flicker of something that wasn’t quite magic; a tremor.
“We’re either going to be in real trouble soon,” she told the Dragon grimly, “or there’s something in the walls here, too.”
“Like what?”
“Never mind. Can you take the entire door frame down?”
The Dragon snorted.
“I mean the way people who can’t breathe fire would have to. I have to be able to touch the stone, and I can’t if you heat it too much.”
“There’s a lot of exposed stone in this interminable hallway. You can’t touch that instead?”
Kaylin shook her head. “It’s the door. I’d be willing to bet on it.”
“With your own money?”
“Yes. Lots of.”
“Fine. I will remove the door the normal way, regardless of any inefficiency.”
It took longer than reducing the door to ash, but she did destroy the central part of the door with fire, weakening its structural stability enough that she could then peel away the frame remaining and toss the wooden bits to the side.
