Chapter 126. Three Rules of Borrowing Magic, and I Broke Two of Them Before Lunch

Chapter 126: 126. Three Rules of Borrowing Magic, and I Broke Two of Them Before Lunch

A thread of white frost slid up my arm, cool and tingly, and I felt it settle in my hands. I held them out in front of me, palms down, the way Sylvara had shown me, and thought of a clear, crisp, cold winter morning.

I froze my own boots to the ground.

I did it perfectly.

A great, glittering sheet of ice burst out of my palms, raced across the sand, and wrapped around my ankles in a solid, gleaming clamp.

It rose to my shins... It crackled.

I tried to lift my foot, and it didn’t move. I tried the other, and yet it still didn’t move either.

"I’m stuck," I said.

"I observe."

"I mean it... Really... really... stuck."

"Yes."

"Can you, uh..."

"No."

I stood there with my feet encased in a block of ice and my arms flailing.

Somewhere on the wall, a rider fell off her post. I heard a muffled shriek of laughter and the sound of someone being very firmly shushed.

Elsbeth had sat down heavily on a step, with a hand pressed to her forehead. She looked suddenly pale.

A thin sheen of sweat stood on her brow. When she spoke, it was in a low, level voice, with a trace of weariness.

"That," she said, "is the last time I lend you anything without supervision."

"Are you okay?"

"I am tired."

"I’m sorry... I took too much."

"You took what I gave." She waved a hand. "It is the cost..."

"Sylvara has explained... I did not understand how much it would be." She breathed out slowly. "I will recover."

I felt like the worst kind of idiot.

"Velora next," said Sylvara, who had been taking notes, in a perfectly innocent voice.

"I would prefer to be last," said Velora.

"You are not last... Magnara is last."

"I am last," said Magnara, from the wall.

"Velora."

Velora sighed. She stepped in front of me, took a very deep breath, and unclasped her hands.

"May I borrow..." I started.

"Wind," she said. "Just a little, and nothing more."

"I will be extremely angry if you do anything foolish."

"Understood."

She held out her palm, and a faint, cool breath of air moved against my skin, like the first breeze on a summer morning. I closed my eyes.

I thought of a gentle puff, a tiny gust, a little flutter. I lifted my hand and breathed out.

A gale came out of my fingertips.

It hit Sylvara full in the face. Her wide-brimmed hat leapt from her head like a startled bird, spun twice in the air, and went sailing across the yard.

A dozen riders ducked. And a stray banner whipped out of its holder.

Sylvara gave a muffled shriek and lunged after her hat, laughing so hard that she couldn’t run in a straight line, and the hat skipped along the sand and bounced over the wall.

Velora covered her face with both hands.

"I said a little," she said, behind her fingers.

"That was a little!"

"That was a hurricane."

"I’m still learning, okay!"

She lowered her hands. Her face was pink, and her eyes were bright, and I saw her lips quiver.

She had just lent me a breath of wind, and I’d sent Sylvara’s hat over a wall, and it had been, apparently, the most wonderful thing that had happened to her all week.

Sylvara called us together afterward, under the shade of the old wall, and gave the lesson that I’d needed.

"There are rules," she said.

She sat on an overturned bucket, with her hat back on her head and a few bits of grass stuck in her hair. "Three, I think... I will give them to you now, and I should like you to remember them."

I nodded.

"First, you must ask... Always!"

"You must never take." She held up a finger. "The thread is a gift... If you reach for it without leave, you will drain it."

"You may even harm them."

"Got it."

"Second, you must never borrow more than you need... Every loan costs the lender."

"Even a small one leaves its mark." She held up a second finger. "And a loan of power is not like a loan of coin."

"It is not repaid by returning it... It is repaid by rest."

"They will be weakened for hours or longer."

I looked at Elsbeth, who was sitting quietly with her knees drawn up, still a little pale.

"Third," said Sylvara, and her voice dropped, "you must never, ever borrow from a partner who is wounded, or exhausted, or ill."

She met my eyes. "I do not know what it would do... But I believe it would be very bad."

"I’ll be careful," I said.

"I know you will."

"And I can’t borrow from Magnara," I said slowly, "because she isn’t..."

I stopped.

Everyone had turned to look at Magnara.

She was sitting on the wall with her arms crossed and her chin lowered. She had been silent for some time.

Her face was blank, but her ears had gone dark, and there was a faint tremor in the line of her shoulders.

"It is nothing," she said.

"I didn’t say anything," I said.

"You were about to."

"I’m sorry."

"It is nothing." She pushed herself off the wall. "I will see to the horses."

She walked away, with her axe across her back and her head very high, and I stood in the yard watching her go.

I felt Velora’s hand settle on my shoulder. And Sylvara’s lights dimmed.

’Soon,’ I thought. ’I’m going to fix this... I just didn’t know how.’

...

We were having our last breakfast in Elarune.

It was a small thing, a gesture I’d made without thinking.

After the testing, after the dust and the shouting and the ice, I’d suggested we all sit down together at the long table in the dining hall.

Nobody objected.

The food was plain, hot, and plentiful: porridge, brown bread, cold roast, and a jug of milk. Light poured in through the tall windows, gold and clear, and the sky outside was a deep, cloudless blue.

For one moment, it felt almost like peace.

I sat between Sylvara and Elsbeth, with Velora across from me and Magnara at the end of the table, hunched over a plate of cold boar.

We’d fallen into an easy, comfortable rhythm.

Elsbeth was dryly narrating a long, scathing review of my performance with ice, in the tone of a woman reading a coroner’s report.

Sylvara was laughing. And Velora was pretending not to.

"And in conclusion," Elsbeth said, "his boots."

"They were cold."

"They were frozen."

"It was a creative interpretation."

"You were stuck to the floor for eleven minutes."

"I am going to remember that forever," said Velora, to her porridge.

I was reaching for the bread when the doors of the dining hall flew open.

They didn’t swing, but they fucking burst.

They crashed back against the walls with a sound like a thunderclap, and everyone at the table went still. I dropped the bread.

A little way off, a startled serving girl dropped a tray.

Someone stumbled through the entrance.

It was a minotaurkin. I knew it at once from the horns, which were thick and curved and dark, though one of them had been snapped off halfway down its length, leaving a jagged, bloody stump.

She was a big woman, broad-shouldered and heavy-boned, but she moved like she was made of rags. Her armor hung in strips.

One eye was swollen shut. Dried blood caked her hair, her hands, and the front of her tunic, and she left a trail of dark prints across the marble as she lurched toward us.

She had run for two days and a half. I found that out later.

At the time, I only saw the way her knees shook, the way her chest heaved, and the great raw wound in her side that she was clutching with one hand.

In the other, she held a horn.

It was a long, curved instrument of silver, as long as my forearm, engraved with a pattern of twisting vines.

It was dented, blackened, and streaked with blood. And as she came closer to the head of the table, it began, very softly, to sing.

It was a low, deep, quavering note, like wind across the mouth of a cave. It rose and fell.

It trembled in her grip. And it was turned, unmistakably, toward the woman at the end of the table.

Magnara stood up.

She did it slowly. Her chair scraped back.

Her axe, which had been leaning against the wall, slid and clattered onto the floor, and she didn’t look at it. She stood with her arms hanging at her sides, and her face had gone gray as ash.

"Gate-Horn," she whispered.

The wounded woman fell to her knees. The horn rang in her hands, a low, shuddering tone that filled the room like the toll of a funeral bell.

She lifted her ruined face, and her one good eye found Magnara’s.

She spoke first in a language I didn’t know, a rough, guttural, rolling tongue, and then, as though she’d remembered we were there, in the common speech. Her voice cracked and broke and went on.

"Redhorn Hold," she said, "is under attack...!"