Chapter 58. She’s Having a Great Time
Grit looked up at Falar, mouth opening and closing.
“Well, what is it?” he asked.
“I was wondering if I could join your workshop, lecturer? I can’t wait to get started?”
“As you wish, but I won’t accept any less from you even if you are a newer student.” He turned and continued walking. Grit held on to his robes and got dragged all over the table, before sliding to the ground on the other side.
Falar stopped after a few steps and sighed, shoulders rising and falling as he looked toward the ceiling. “If you can’t even stand up, my workshop might prove too taxing for you. Do you have the endurance to go all night if required?”
“Oh, you bet your—“
“Don’t you dare finish that thought!” I shouted at Grit.
They both glanced at me, Falar looking confused and Grit smiling like a cat that had found a way into a butcher’s shop. She rose up and dusted her robes. Falar marched out and Grit loped behind him, keeping close enough to touch.
Minnelil pressed a finger to her nose. “I do worry about her sometimes.”
“Naaah, she’s having a great time. She slid all over my lunch, though,” Fek said. “Do you think I can still eat the meatballs? Blasting those guys with light worked up an appetite.”
“You blasted me too,” I said. I had snatched my plate out of Grit’s path, so my lunch had stayed mostly intact. “There’s a lot of unfinished plates that nobody slid through, take one of them instead.”
“Please, don’t,” Minnelil said. “I’ll have to find a group to handle the assignment with. I’ll talk to you later.”
I liked the sound of that. Later was perfect as it gave me time to figure things out. I had grabbed her the moment she came back, but that had been right after getting flared by Fek, rattled by Lombarte.
But she had said the people of our dorm needed to look out for each other. She was the only elf in the whole school and even if no one was dumb enough to risk antagonizing the elves directly, she was still different from all of us. That was often enough. “Are you going to find the group?” I asked.
She stood up. “I’ll have to see. Thanks, Lina.”
I watched her walk away, willing her to look back. She flicked her hair, and glanced at me over her shoulder, smiling her smile that reached almost to the edge of her jaw.
I smiled back.
Fek cleared his throat. “You’re tipping meatballs into your lap.”
The platforms were bustling with students. People had clattering sacks and wheelbarrows filled with bones that they tried to wiggle up or down the stairs. Seemed like the Bursar had really set the wheels into motion while we were stuck in the corridor.
I scratched at my head as another wheelbarrow slipped off the stairs and smashed to the ground. “So, we’re just going to be sitting around until tomorrow?”
“Seems like it!” Fek said. “Nice.”
“You read that book about reanimating skeletons earlier? I didn’t start on it yet. What should I expect?”
“It’s pretty basic, don’t worry,” Fek said as we walked down the stairs. “Can you channel Null now? It would make everyone jealous if you could really reanimate one yourself.”
“Thanks for warning me.”
“Heh, we can go through the theory this evening if you want? Maybe it wouldn’t be so boring that way.”
“Sure,” I said. Maybe that would make sense. I didn’t want to show off and draw more attention to myself, but we would have been in trouble if Lorn hadn’t known how to get the angry skeleton moving again. “How did that guy know how to do it? In the corridor, I mean.”
“Must have taken the workshop earlier, but getting an old one moving again is simpler than making one from scratch. It just needed to be reinforced.”
“Could you have done it?” I asked, pulling open the door to our dorm. It was empty, with Grit having made Falar drag her off and Minnelil out looking for a group.
“Nah, I’m not good at that stuff. You need to weave the new stuff with the old, but it’s hard for me to pick up on how others do their spells. I bet you would be great at it, though.”
I grunted. Maybe he was right. He was boiling over constantly, so it made sense he couldn’t feel anything happening outside of himself even if he could focus for a moment. It would probably be like standing in a pyre and trying to feel if someone had a fever. I wiped my hand over my face. Could the opposite be true as well?
“I want to try something,” I said, quieting my mind and planting my feet on the floor.
“Sure! What is it? I can—“
“Just shut up for a moment,” I said, shutting my eyes. The dark red behind my eyelids—
“Okay!” Fek said.
I groaned.
“Sorry, sorry, I’ll sit down.”
The blobs of light floated lazily behind my eyelids. They weren’t real light, but what was always there. I let the thought wander away, felt the magic buzz and tingle everywhere around me. Fek moved away from me, toward his bed. He sizzled like an egg thrown onto a red-hot pan. I could almost smell it.
Where did all this stuff keep coming from when I was trying to focus? Especially as I had just eaten.
I sighed, bringing my focus back to the magic. There was still Null clinging to my bones, patches of cold, inert and dead, but there was also life, simmering at the bottom of my stomach and around my chest.
“When you focus, what do you feel inside?” I asked, still eyes closed.
“Sort of a spinning feeling?” Fek said. “It’s pretty loud, whips all around. I get dizzy if I sit around for too long.”
I could feel it all the way from across the room, the power roiling inside him, barely contained by his skin. “Have you ever checked if you glow in the dark?” I muttered.
“That sounds unhealthy,” he said.
“Forget it.” The mana inside me was a whisper compared to him. A trickle. I opened my eyes and drew the light rune. The blue lines hung in the air, glowing and holding steady. I shut my eyes again. “I’m going to try this out.”
I opened myself wide, stayed out of the way. I was a conduit. The dark cold clumps inside me were like rocks in a forest stream, but I massaged them, smoothed them over my bones to keep the dark out of the way. The simmering turned into boiling, power rolling along my arms, bubbling out from my fingers.
“Nice. Good control,” Fek said. “I always make it too bright.”
I opened my eyes. The rune shone almost as bright as the orb of light hovering near the dorm ceiling. I blinked and the rune guttered out, the shape fraying and starting to fade. “That was as bright as I could make it,” I said.
“Oh, okay,” Fek said. “Well, I guess the light was pretty steady?”
I cut my hand through the fading lines, dispersing them. I’d suspected it, but getting confirmation didn’t feel great. “So, I can feel stuff so well because I have so little of it inside me?”
“You are really good at a lot of the other…” Fek said, but I glared at him and he shut his mouth.
“Enough with the handouts.” I sat down on the bed, kicking my boots off my feet. “It’s fine.”
“It actually is, you know,” Fek said. “Mana capacity is a skill too. Normal people don’t have much at all.”
I stared at the ceiling. A faint smell of ozone wafted around me. “How’d you know?”
“Minnelil told me. She should know.”
Well okay, she should. I sighed. And it wasn’t like I could do anything about it. Maybe I didn’t need to blast people with light so hard the walls had unscorched areas where their shadows had been. I had ripped a tiger in half. That had to count for something, right?
“Don’t worry about it,” Fek said.
“I was just about not to, but you ruined it!” I said.
Fek chuckled nervously and so did I. One step at a time. I grinned. I could ask Minnelil to help me practice more, hee hee.
I patted my cheeks, rolling my eyes at myself. Get a grip. I didn’t want to start acting as dumb as Grit, even if I had to admire her determination. “Anyway,” I said. “Talk me through the skeleton stuff, okay?”
“Sure!” Fek said, patting the chair next to him. “The trick is to understand the control matrix is sort of a manifestation of your personality. I bet yours is going to look spiky.”
I had been going through Fek’s notes. They were surprisingly good, but almost impossible to decipher. Lines of scribbled text crossed with each other and the whole thing was filled with stick figures casting spells or exploding or shouting grr. The last one was probably supposed to be Falar. It was getting really late, or almost early, but I wanted to see if Minnelil came back.
The door opened and I startled at the sudden sound. I whipped around, but it was Grit who dragged herself into the room. She leaned her forehead on the door to close it.
“Well, how was it?” I asked.
“Mnrglg,” she said.
I stood up and slung her arm over my shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you to bed. He drove you that hard?”
“I wish,” she muttered. “But yeah, we did a whole skeleton each. I’m so tired I’m going to fall into coma.”
“Did you at least get dinner?”
“He said we could make the skeletons fetch something for ourselves if we managed to reanimate them in time. I couldn’t do the legs in time, so the food tasted like ash when it finally made it all the way back. And the eggs had slid off because the skeleton tried to balance the plate inside its ribcage as it crawled around.”
I groaned.
“The Chancellor slipped on them. He crashed right through the stairs and Hector had to fix them before we could get down.”
“No, stop. This is too stupid. I don’t want to hear anything more or I’ll be too angry to get any sleep.”
“I’m going to sleep until next week,” she mumbled.
I tipped her into her bed and pulled the slippers off her. I tugged on the duvet, but she was already asleep, lying on top of it.
“Maybe we could roll her off it together?” Fek called from his bed.
“She still has her robe on. She can tuck herself in if she wakes.”
Grit snored quietly. Poor, dumb thing.
“Where’s Minnelil?” Fek asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
It bothered me more than I was ready to admit.