“If she happened to merely observe you performing the basics, you wouldn’t be teaching her,” Bertrand put in, to Anya’s surprise. “There’s no violation in that. And who’s to say how she’ll use them?”
“She did!” Clearly wavering, David turned back to Anya. “I can’t possibly teach you all you need to know. Our own education takes years.”
“I don’t need to know all that,” Anya insisted. “Just enough.”
David licked his lips and folded his arms over his chest. “I know you don’t respect what we do, Miss Degen, but–”
“It isn’t that,” she rebuffed, frustrated. “It’s…different. The forest’s magic. It affected all of you, didn’t it?”
No one responded. But she could see their experience haunted them. They, too, now knew things they could never unknow.
“Well,” she went on, “I’ve been living on its edge my whole life. Hunting in it, eating of it, feeding it, protecting it. Surviving it. That magic is in me, too.”
David waved a dismissive hand. “Why don’t you use that, then, and leave us out of it?”
“Because I haven’t the slightest clue how,” she answered readily. “Your magic, the glyphs. They’re not the only way, but they’reaway, a powerful way, to channel it. If you teach me, I can merge them, somehow – your magic and mine – and stand a chance against her.” Probably.
Well. Possibly.
“Say you save him from the witch,” Bertrand put in. “What then? If word gets out that he’s got that power, won’t this all start over?”
“It might,” she assented. “But if the phoenix’s magic can change forms once, it can again. We’ll put it back in the forest. Hide it, like it was hidden all these years. That’s all we can do.”
They were all quiet, considering her words.
Sabina, her voice small, broke the silence. “Therearesimple spells.”
“That does not sound like asimple spell,” David said.
“If you teach me what I need to know, then I won’t be doing that one on my own,” Anya returned.
With a heavy sigh, David rubbed his forehead. “What are you proposing?”
“I have a plan. All I need from you is to teach me how to write a spell without blowing my hand to pieces.”
“No.” At the reminder of what she risked, he cut his hands through the air, adamant. “No, no. It’s too dangerous. If you botch it–”
“I don’t care. And he won’t either.” She caught his eye and held it. “You know that, don’t you? Knowhim,better than anyone else.” Her throat burned. “We can’t leave him there. Like that. I can’t.”
David turned his back on the room, approached the foreman’s window. For a long time, he was quiet, watching the wheels and levers spinning, repeating, below them. “I’m coming with you,” he said finally. “You can’t do it alone.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I go alone. I won’t be able to save him if I’m worrying about anyone else.”
“Very well,” he relented. Sensible man; she admired that about him. “I can see you’re determined, and if I let you go without teaching you the basics, you’ll risk doing even greater harm. That would certainly be a violation of our oath, of the highest magnitude.”
“Certainly,” Bertrand agreed, amused.
David ignored him. “But forest magic or no, it will take time to teach you the fundamentals.”
Anya sighed. She’d been afraid of that. “Two days. That’s the best I can do.”
“Twodays,” he repeated, the end of the word lost in an incredulous sigh. David exchanged a glance with Sabina, and rubbed a hand over his forehead. “I’m running the factory, watching over my sister, my father is ill…”
“I do not mean to be unkind,” Anya said, as gently as she could muster, “but can you not heal him?”
Sabina answered for him, quietly. “Healing illness of the mind is beyond our capabilities.”
“But turning oneself into a magical creature is not,” said Bertrand.
