Guild Mage: Apprentice

“Observe,” Archmagus Caspian Loredan instructed, and Liv couldn’t help but lean forward in her chair. “Aluthō ais’veh Novis perae Mae,” he incanted, the words clear and forceful, carrying easily across the library.

It was a spell that Liv had both seen and heard before, going as far back as the day she’d met Master Jurian for the first time. A round shield of glowing blue light, striated with veins of pulsing gold, appeared in the air before the Archmagus, then winked out a second later.

“A mana-shield is traditionally one of the first spells we teach our students,” Loredan continued, pacing back and forth as he lectured. “It is both useful, and safe. Unlike an attack spell, it is difficult to harm someone accidentally with a shield. At the same time, in the event of an emergency - an unexpected eruption, stray mana beast, or even bandits on the road - this spell might save an apprentice’s life. Some of you can cast this already.”

Liv couldn’t help but smile as she recalled Master Grenfell scolding Jurian for his choice to teach her an attack spell right away. The archmagus repeated his incantation, but at half the volume. Again, the shield flickered into existence, then was permitted to fade. For the third casting, Loredan whispered, and Liv strained to hear the words at all. On the fourth repetition, he moved his mouth only, but did not utter a sound. Still, the shield came. Finally, without the slightest motion, the spell was completed for a fifth time.

“That is the progression you will follow,” the archmagus told them. “Begin by lowering the volume of your voice, while still focusing on your intent, and using your breath to resonate with your word of power. Practice lowering your voice each time you cast, until you can perform the spell with a whisper. Then, speak not at all, but allow your lips to move in the accustomed patterns. Finally, discard even that.”

“You will fail repeatedly,” he cautioned them. “It is a frustrating, exhausting process. You are training your mind to discard the verbal incantation, while still focusing on the words internally. There will be days you wish to rip your hair out,” he admitted, with a laugh.

Liv raised her hand. “Do we need to wait until we’ve imprinted Aluth, or are we permitted to practice this with another word of power?” she asked.

“Some of the people in this room will never imprint Aluth at all,” he answered. “Those who have their own words, and must preserve their inheritance rights. If you can use Aluth, my very strong recommendation is that you use the shield spell for practice. In combat, you won’t wish to be hampered by speaking that incantation aloud, in any event. Silent casting makes it orders of magnitude more useful.”

“If you come to us with your own word,” the archmagus continued, “my advice is this: choose an incantation you are already very familiar with. Like any other skill, magic is a matter of repetition and practice. The more practice you’ve had with a spell, the less difficult the process will be. It will not be easy - never that. Make no mistake. Silent casting is giving up flexibility for speed. In a crisis, that is often useful and sometimes necessary, but unless you are very dedicated, you will likely only ever learn a handful of spells well enough to cast them without an incantation.”

“Now, for those who have never cast the shield spell before, record this incantation,” Loredan said, and began to write on a clear piece of his slate. Liv copied down the words with only half her attention: with the rest, she began to consider and discard potential spells.

She could practice an icewall. It was the closest spell she had to the kind of shield the archmagus had used in his demonstration. There were key differences, however, that left Liv doubtful it would be the best choice. For one thing, she didn’t actually end up using the spell nearly as much as some others. It had limits a mana shield did not: once cast, it remained a permanent obstruction on the field of battle until it was either destroyed or melted.

On top of that, Liv already had a contingent wall loaded into her wand on a regular basis. If she needed to cast one quickly, she could always use that. For a moment, she tried to picture where she would even practice. She doubted Master Jurian would appreciate having half a dozen walls, in various stages of melting away, blocking a whole section of his training yard.

No, it seemed best to begin the process with a spell that wouldn’t litter wherever she was practicing. Her elegant flowers and vines spellwork, while certainly the magic she was most proud of, didn’t seem very suitable either. It would leave even more melting wreckage in its wake, after all, and part of its strength was in adaptability. Liv could cast one rosebud, three, or half a dozen, depending on needs of the moment, and she didn’t want to give that up.

The only two spells that wouldn’t leave an extensive amount of frozen detritus around were her blade of ice, and frozen shards. Of the two, the sword was the most constant. Liv never conjured half a dozen of them - whatever trick her aunt had used to perform that particular feat, she didn’t know it yet, and her father had put off every attempt to learn. If she was looking for a spell that would lose nothing by sacrificing adaptability, Liv knew she should choose the sword.

And yet, her frozen shards spell was the first she had ever learned, and the one she consistently fell back on in a fight. She’d used it to kill a stone-bat when she was only a child, and more recently during the eruption of the Bald Peak Rift. When formed of adamant ice and shaped into needles, the spell was an assault that could punch through a shield, or jack of plate, as easily as a crossbow bolt at point blank range.

When the archmagus dismissed the class, Liv lingered behind. A few of the other students had questions, but she had nowhere else to be, so she waited them out. “Yes, Apprentice?” Caspian Loredan asked, when all the others had left and she finally approached, her book tucked under her arm.

“I was wondering if you would give me your advice on choosing a spell to practice with,” Liv began.

“You had better come out into the courtyard, then,” the archmagus said. “I don’t want to trouble our staff with cleaning up puddles of water in the library. Walk with me, and tell me what you are thinking.” As they left the library, Wren peeled off from where she’d been waiting, and fell into step behind them.

“You’ve actually hit what I was thinking right on the head,” Liv said. “If I’m going to be practicing this a lot, I don’t want to leave walls of ice all over campus. Mana shields dissipate, but ice remains until something melts it. So I thought I should choose something small, at first.”

“Your reasoning is sound thus far,” Loredan agreed. “You are also in the position to know more spells than most of your contemporaries, and too many choices can be paralyzing. What have you narrowed it down to?”

“Either an ice blade, or my frozen shards,” Liv said. “The blade is simpler, and I don’t really ever have a cause to change it - but I also don’t use it as much,” she admitted. “The shards I use all the time, but I also modify them depending on the situation. A volley of them, for instance, rather than just one.”

The archmagus led her out into the central courtyard of the campus, but did not stop there. Instead, he led her around the back of Blackstone Hall, to a smaller courtyard that had been set up with archery targets and other training paraphernalia.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“We often have occasion to practice combat spells before a student is ready to put them to use down with Professor Jurian,” Loredan explained. “Show me both of the spells you are considering now, please.”

“Celet’he Sekis,” Liv intoned, holding out her left hand rather than her right. She let the word of power vibrate through her body, carried along by her exhalation, and formed the blade of adamant ice, shunting the waste heat off into her hand, so that she wouldn’t give herself frostbite. Then, she held the sword out for the archmagus to examine.

“Fascinating,” Caspian Loredan muttered, leaning in to look more closely. “That is anything but normal ice. And does your word grant you immunity to cold, Apprentice?”

“Not as such,” Liv explained. “But freezing anything means removing heat. It has to go somewhere, so I put it into my hand. And the ice is arranged differently - stronger. It will stand up to metal.”

“I never managed to get far enough north to spend much time with your father’s family,” the archmagus admitted. “But now I wish I had. I can see that your time has not been wasted. I daresay there isn’t a fourth year student here who has mastered a word to the extent that you have. Show me the other, now.”

Liv thrust the blade of ice into the ground, point first, and left it there. Then, she drew her wand, pointed it at one of the targets, and spoke: “Celent’he Aiveh Trei Aimāk Scelim’o’Mae!” Three needle-thin shards of adamant ice manifested, hovered in the air before her for just long enough to be observed, and then shot off, impaling her target. The spell not only knocked an explosion of straw up into the air, but also continued on, with the shards finally shattering against the old stone wall that ringed the courtyard.

“You vary the number and shape of those, I presume?” the archmagus asked, and Liv nodded.

“I know that makes it more complicated,” she said. “But it's also the spell I use most in combat.” Liv almost continued on to say it was the first spell Master Jurian had ever taught her, and then thought better of it. “The sword, on the other hand, I don’t use very often at all. It’s never to my advantage to get in close, because I’m so small. I try to avoid it.”

“If you want my advice,” Archmagus Loredan said, after a moment’s thought, “it is this: the sword.”

Liv frowned, and realized that wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. “Can I ask you to explain why?” she said.

“A few reasons. First, I don’t want you making an already challenging task more difficult for yourself,” the archmagus advised. “Once you’ve succeeded in mastering your first silent spell, you will have a much better understanding of the process, the advantages, and drawbacks. At that point, you’ll be ready to make a good choice for your second spell without any help from me.”

“I thought you said most people didn’t ever learn more than two or three?” Liv pointed out.

Loredan waved a hand as if slapping away a bug. “Your Elden blood will give you the time,” he pointed out. “The second reason is this: you need to shore up your vulnerabilities. You were disarmed and injured by a boy who is in no other way your equal. I know you don’t like fighting up close, but you need to get good enough that you can survive when placed in that situation. Having an instant weapon to hand whenever you need it will go a long way. You’ll use the modifier to form the blade more quickly, of course. Little point otherwise. I not only want to see you able to form one of those blades silently, Apprentice. Your goal is this: I want you to be able to instantly form a blade and parry in response to an attack. Consider that an assignment - one which I will hold you to accomplishing.”

Wren chuckled, and Liv shot her a glare. “You asked for his advice,” the huntress said, with a shrug. “Can’t complain at being given more work.”

“This is the bodyguard, I presume?” the archmagus said, rounding on Wren. “You should probably let that purple grow out of your hair, if you don’t want to tell everyone with half a brain where you come from,” he scolded her. “You have your own part in this training. Get yourself a practice blade from Jurian - tell him I sent you. I want you to hone her reflexes until she can parry an attack from an assassin, with no warning.”

“Now that, I can do,” Wren agreed, her grin growing wide enough to practically split her face. Liv groaned.

“Off with you both now,” the archmagus said. “Believe it or not, I do have other things to do with my afternoon.”

☙

“Where are we going, exactly?” Wren asked, on their way down from the bluff and into town.

“I need the ingredients for a pie,” Liv said. “Flour, sugar, salt and butter. And then a filling. Apples would be good, but I don’t know if we can find them this far south. Berries would work, as well.”

“Follow me,” Wren said, took the next turn, and led her in the general direction of the docks. “Why not just tell the kitchen to bake what you want? Not used to being a fancy lady, yet?”

“It wouldn’t mean anything if I did it that way,” Liv explained. “Edith. I want to do something nice for her, to make peace. I’ve got to live in the same place with her for at least the next year. If we’re going to see each other every day, I’d like us to at least be able to get along.”

“I don’t know that giving her a pie as a present is going to make up for the fact she’s jealous of you,” Wren said.

“It may not,” Liv conceded. “But I need to try something, and I’m not sure what else to do. It’s not like I could tie Cade up in a bow and give him to her, even if I wanted to.”

“Here.” Wren led her into a great square, a block back from the wharf, that reminded Liv of the market at Whitehill. There were open air stalls in every direction, with cloth awnings overhead to shield customers and shopkeepers alike from the sun. Liv had difficulty squaring the time of year with the weather, this far south: back in the mountains, she’d have been bundled up in a warm cloak, and buying hot cider.

None of the ingredients she was looking for were difficult to come by, and wrapped packages quickly began to pile up in Wren’s arms: a small sack of flour, a square of sugar wrapped in cloth, and then a sack of apples, shipped south from orchards in the central lowlands of Lucania. “Cinnamon from Lendh ka Dakruim,” Liv muttered, casting about. “And then we’re done.”

“You could probably have gotten everything but the apples from the kitchen at High Hall,” Wren pointed out.

“I don’t know their ingredients,” Liv said. “I’m sure they’re fine, but it isn’t the same. There!” She spotted a stall selling spices and silks from the east, and it made her think of Arjun. She wondered if it might be possible to visit his home someday.

Even after the trip to town and back, Liv and Wren managed to get down to the kitchen before the dinner rush had begun. “Good afternoon,” she said, smiling in spite of herself at the familiar smells that permeated the room. There was a great hearth, a stone counter for chopping, and everything else that would be required, Liv saw.

The kitchen staff jumped to attention, putting aside their work the moment she entered.

“I don’t want to interrupt you or be a bother,” Liv said. “Please, go back to what you were doing. If I could just talk to the cook for a moment?”

To her surprise, rather than any of the women, a portly man with a neatly trimmed mustache made his way over. “I hope that your meals have been satisfying, Lady Brodbeck,” he said, lowering his eyes instead of meeting her gaze.

“They’ve been wonderful since the proper ingredients have arrived,” Liv assured him. “And I’m sorry for being a bother about that; it’s for my health, you see.”

“You are not the only one who requires special meals,” the chef admitted. “It is our honor. My name is Lambert. How may my staff and I serve you?”

“I want to make a present to one of my roommates,” Liv explained. “So I went down to the market and picked up ingredients for an apple pie.”

“I can have one of my girls get right on that,” Lambert assured her. “You can leave the ingredients here, m’lady.”

“Oh, no,” Liv exclaimed. “I’m sorry. I meant that I need a bit of space to cook it myself, and I wondered if you had the room for me to do it here? I’ll do my best to stay out of the way.”

“Cook it yourself?” Lambert repeated, as if the words had been in another language entirely. “There’s no need, m’lady, we can do that for you. I promise it will be up to your standards.”

“I’m sure it would be,” Liv said. “But if it’s my gift, I should be the one to make it.” She could tell that he was doubtful, from his expression. “You needn’t worry - I know my way around a kitchen. My mother is still the cook for Duchess Julianne at Castle Whitehill.”

“Your mother is - a cook?” If anything, Lambert only looked more astonished.

Liv grinned. “Before anyone knew I could do magic, I spent years as a scullion,” she told him. “Just a place to work? Please? I’ll even clean my own dishes after, if that would help.”