Raven's Strike (Raven #2)(103)

"Yes."

Seraph leaned back, assessing the situation. She had in front of her the greatest wizard of Colossae, and she was going to make good use of him.

"Man is made of spirit, mind, and body," said Seraph, "To see spirit, the wizard must push past the barriers that block his sight." She set the book down with an ill-tempered thump. "Nonsense," she told it - and her new instructor - irritably. "Moreover, it is useless nonsense. No real details, nothing except a collection of high-sounding poetical nonsense. I have done everything it says to do, and I cannot see anything other than my Order - which is not spirit."

"It isn't nonsense," said the illusion Hinnum wore mildly. "And if you are to keep your husband alive until I am capable of working magic, you need to know how to see spirit. All it takes is a little study and self-discipline."

She turned to look at him, and he smiled at her - just like Tier. No one else laughed at her temper.

For Tier she would learn how to do this or die trying. And Hinnum, she reminded herself firmly, was the only wizard who could teach her - unless Hennea suddenly recalled herself. Seraph thought it would have happened already if it were going to.

It would probably be a kindness, Seraph thought, if Hennea never remembered. From what Hinnum had told her, Hennea had no more power now than any other Raven: her memory of what she had been would gain her nothing but pain.

Hennea wasn't the only one who had lost when Colossae was sacrificed. He hadn't gone into detail, but the damage he'd sustained from the spell had been bad enough he'd chosen to stay here alone rather than go out into the world.

The illusion he'd built to house his intellect - his spirit, he'd said, tapping the miserable book she was slogging through - was not capable of much magic. Which was why he'd begun the process of awakening his proper body as soon as he'd seen Tier and the Order-bound gems. Hinnum knew something of how to fix both problems, he'd told her, but he didn't know how long it would be before his body would recover. For the gems there was no rush, but Tier did not have much time left.

Thus she found herself sitting at a table like a fledgling solsenti wizard under the tyranny of his master.

"It's not that difficult," he said now, and handed her the piece of chalk she'd thrown across the room. "An apprentice of thirteen would be able to master this easily. But not if she was too busy throwing tantrums to listen."

Seraph simmered with ill temper as she drew the arcane glyphs across the gleaming surface of the table again. She hadn't had a teacher since her own had died, and Hinnum seemed to take particular delight in being obscure.

This was worse than learning the runes for warding - at least then she could feel the power gathering under the runes so that the runes themselves told her if she'd drawn them correctly or not. This was just scribbling nonsense.

"That figure turns the other direction," said Hinnum, tapping the drawing in the book. "See there? And the little bit right here needs to be a hair longer."

"If you told me what we were trying to do," she said, not for the first time, "this might not be necessary."

"It's in the book," he told her. "But you told me the book doesn't make sense to you - thus the figures." He leaned over the marks as she made them. "That's better. Only three more figures, then I'll teach you the words."

"Could Hennea do this?" she asked.

"I don't know," he told her. "You can, of course, wait for someone else to fix all of your problems if you aren't willing to put in a little time and effort."

If he hadn't been an illusionary construct, if he weren't the only hope she had of saving Tier, she would have done something unpleasant to him.

She started trying to reconstruct the next random assortment of squiggles and angles.

Hinnum gripped Seraph's cheeks and pushed, forcing her mouth into an unnatural position. "Like this. If you don't get the sounds just right, they won't work."

She jerked her face out of his grip and tried again. Rhythm, tone, pitch, pronunciation, no wonder solsenti wizards were a nasty bunch.

Staring at the meaningless shapes she'd drawn on the table, she once more focused all of her attention on getting the words just right. It sounded to her exactly as it had the first twenty times, but this time something happened. Magic rushed through the chalk marks and into her in a stream of power that pushed the stool she was sitting on back a few inches.

It was different from the runes. The runes were hers, and they did as she bid.

The shapes and words of this kind of spell weaving distracted her, then stole her magic and twisted it into a new shape. She didn't like it - a Raven controlled her own magic. She didn't like it, but she saw and understood the pattern the symbols and sounds were trying to make of her power. There were flaws here and there, and she fixed them as she tugged her magic until it was once more hers.

"I've got it," she said, turning to Hinnum.

But instead of the half-grown Traveler boy, she saw instead a net of magic, a complex pattern of strings and knots that gave form to the Scholar. The violet fabric she'd always seen as the Raven Order was there as well, beneath the netting - or so she thought at first. She got up from her chair and walked toward him. She could see now it wasn't the same as the Order, not quite.

"It's not the Raven Order, but it is akin to it," she said.