The Spell Realm (The Sorcery Code #2)(24)

“Good morning,” he said warmly, seeing Gala come into the room. “Come have breakfast, and then we can maybe go for a walk, see the surrounding areas.”

Gala grinned at him, excited at the idea, and began eating the berries Liva had prepared for breakfast. Now that she wasn’t so tired, she couldn’t wait to spend more time with Blaise.

A few minutes later, she was done with breakfast and ready to explore.

Exiting the house, Gala and Blaise walked down a broad path made by the villagers. It was a street of sorts, the only street in the village. After passing a few houses, they turned off the main path and headed into the woods.

As they walked through the greenery, Gala stared at the gorgeous nature surrounding them. “This is beautiful,” she said as they entered a small clearing in the woods. “Not as beautiful as yesterday’s lake, of course, but still quite nice.”

Blaise smiled at her. “Would you like to go back there?”

“Sure,” Gala said, smiling back at him. “But isn’t it far away now?”

“Not if we fly there,” he said and began chanting the words of a spell. When he was done, he explained, “This will summon the chaise to us. It should get here shortly.”

Gala grinned at him. “Great. What should we do while we wait?” She had one idea . . .

“How about I try to teach you how to control your magic?” Blaise suggested.

It wasn’t exactly what Gala had in mind, but she wanted this too. “Of course, I’d love that,” she said earnestly. Maybe if she had better control of her abilities, Blaise wouldn’t feel like he needed to protect her all the time.

“I have a couple of ideas for how to go about it,” he said, sitting down on the grass. “I think, for starters, I can teach you how to do sorcery our way, with verbal and written spells. It might help you understand it better, so you can gain control over that part of you that does something similar.”

That made sense to Gala. She sat down beside him and gave him her attention.

“I do wish I still had access to my house,” he said ruefully. “It would make things a lot easier.” He seemed sad for a moment, then shook it off. “Regardless, I should still be able to show you verbal spell casting, and I also brought some written spells with me when I rushed to your rescue. Those will have to do for now.”

Gala nodded, an idea beginning to form in the back of her mind. Perhaps Blaise wouldn’t need to be without his house for long . . .

“Another thing we could try is for you to learn to control and understand your emotions, since you seem to do magic when you experience strong feelings,” Blaise continued. “This might be a bit harder. Unlike the sorcery code, emotions are very imprecise.”

“I would love to learn more about human emotions in general,” Gala said, giving him a warm look.

He smiled. “Well, why don’t we begin with spells,” he said, “and see where we go from there. As you probably already know, both verbal and written spells require that you learn a new language. Two related languages, strictly speaking. One builds on the other, so once you master speaking spells, learning the written part will be easy.”

“I find it strange that oral casting is harder, but written casting lets you create more complicated spells,” Gala observed, remembering what Blaise had told her once.

He nodded. “The best analogy is to compare doing complex arithmetic in your head, which would be like using the spoken spells, to writing out equations on paper. Doing math in your head is much harder, and the complexity of the math you can do is much less.”

Gala cocked her head to the side. “Actually, I’m not sure if that’s true for me . . .”

He laughed. “Right, of course. I almost forgot that your mind can do any kind of math. But I can assure you, for most people, my analogy would work. You see, with written spells, because the coding language is simpler and more powerful, one can weave greater complexity into the spell. For verbal spells, the longer and more complex they are, the greater the risk of error—of saying something wrong. There have been a lot of accidents and unfortunate deaths as a result of that.” He paused, then added wryly, “Spells have gone awry because of something as simple as a sneeze.”

“A sneeze?” Gala found that absurdly funny.

He grinned briefly. “Indeed. Also, another powerful feature of written spells is that you can mix and match existing spell components—or even short, simple spells that had already proven themselves. That allows one to prepare ahead of time instead of always having to recreate the spell from scratch by speaking it—and that obviously saves time as a result.”

Gala nodded. This all made sense to her. She was impressed that Blaise had been the one to come up with the simplified language that enabled them to do the written form of sorcery. She recalled him telling her about himself and Augusta inventing the Interpreter Stone, and she felt an unpleasant twinge of some dark emotion. She didn’t like the idea of him being so close to that woman, she realized—of having worked with her . . . having loved her.

“Why don’t we start with teleportation?” he said, interrupting her thoughts. “Over short distances, it’s actually a fairly simple spell. You have done this without conscious control, but I will teach you how to do it using a verbal spell.”