Page 135 of The Alchemists

* Pax per potestatem: Latin, “peace through power.”

SEB

He was going to lose.

He hadn’t realized until the Pax the extent to which Danielson knew what was happening. Seb was sixteen points behind, exhausted, sinking into noxious mud. The pain in his ribs was starting to flare, and he had no magic.

He had no magic.

The thought ricocheted around his skull, bringing him back to last summer, bringing him back to Lapland, threatening to drown him in the acid of his own anxiety.

“I have no magic.”

“But you do have magic,” a smugly superior voice—Biret’s—reminded him.

His Words.

Frantically, he cast about for them, worried that they had gone too, but they were there, steady as a heartbeat. Spontaneous magic wasn’t illegal in Cantrèa; it was just never used, on account of its difficulty and the fact that you couldn’t score points with it. Spontaneous magic seemed useless when you had an Orb loaded with spells. Except that Seb didn’t have an Orb loaded with spells.

“Magic is a river,” Biret reminded him.

Seb stepped into the current.

LILY

“What the hell is he doing?”

Asher’s grip on her arm tightened so hard that she winced.

Down in the ring, sinking slowly, Seb had stopped moving.

What Sebastian Allsaires was doing in the moment, she had no idea. Even from this distance, she saw his eyes going glassy. For a horrible second, she thought he might be having a panic attack.

Then he did the unthinkable in a Cantrèa match—he sheathed his foil. A gasp rippled through the stands. Down in the ring below, as perplexed as anyone else, Evan Danielson lowered, but did not sheathe, his weapon.

Seb closed his eyes.

SEB

Seb closed his eyes.

His hands shook as he sheathed his foil. As he did it, a tiny part of him wondered if it was legal to do that in a match. If it wasn’t, it didn’t matter.

He pulled his Words around him like a blanket, like impenetrable armor.

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

Like memory of music fled,—

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

“You think you’ve lost your magic,” Biret had said. “That is so like your kind, to think that Magic is something that can be owned. To think that it is something finite that can be parceled out.”

In that clearing, he’d been too exhausted, too much the husk of his former self to protest. Instead, he’d crouched, his chest bare and dripping with sweat, hunched into himself, winding his fingers into the moss below his knees. He’d watched a bead of sweat drip off his hair and land in it, slipping down into its roots.

“Your ‘Æther’ is in everything, Sebastian. It is in this air, this dirt, your sweat. Magic is not a pond. It is a current, and it is everywhere.”