They took a light supper around the fire, still not talking much. Then Mirage revealed her reasons for stopping early, outside of a town.
“Right,” she said. “Time for us to work on this magic thing.”
Miryo stared at her. “Work on it? What exactly do you mean by that?”
Her apprehension was justified. Mirage shrugged.
“You say your magic spins out of control because of me. Has it ever actually happened?”
“Only during the ritual itself.”
“And you weren’t paying much attention then, I’d imagine. So it’s worth our time to test it. I’m not saying I think you’re imagining the problem; it’s just that we should have a better idea of exactly what happens. We’re isolated here. We can go away from Eclipse and then the worst thing we can damage will be some farmer’s pasture land.”
“And ourselves,” Miryo pointed out acidly.
“We’ll do something small. Then it won’t cause much havoc if it gets out of control.”
Miryo compressed her lips and stared at her doppelganger. Narika’s words about the time and practice needed to learn fine control danced in her memory. Keeping a spell small wouldn’t be half so easy as Mirage seemed to think.
But you need to do this; she’s right about that. And she’s not afraid of it. Do you want her to think you’re scared?
“Come on, then,” she said at last. “I want to get well away from here.”
, They left the horses and Eclipse behind. The latter seemed none too happy with the situation, but he said nothing. Miryo and Mirage walked through the woods in silence, Mirage leading the way, until they found a small gap in a grove of aspens where a thick carpet of grass had sprung up. A quick circuit revealed they were a good distance from any fields, so they settled themselves on the ground.
“You pick what we do,” Mirage said. “I have no idea how this works.”
Miryo considered it. Small, so we don’t need a focus. And nondestructive. Right, so Fire’s out of the question. Healing Mirage’s face came to mind, but she thought about what could go wrong and decided against it. “Levitation,” she said at last. A brief search netted her a fist-size piece of shale, which she set in the grass several feet away.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’m almost tempted to tell you to do nothing, so we can see what happens with that. Luckily for us, common sense overrides my stupidity. You should probably concentrate on the rock. And me. I don’t know if you’ll be able to feel what I’ in doing, but if you can, try not to interfere with it.”
Mirage answered with a sharp nod. She’s as edgy as I am. But at least I know one thing: she’ll be able to focus well. Nobody could get far as a Hunter if they couldn’t concentrate.
Miryo closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to center herself. Then she opened her eyes and focused on the rock.
It was over in a heartbeat, and Mirage was picking shards of shale out of her hair. “I assume that wasn’t the intended result.”
“Not at all,” Miryo said, disgruntled. It had happened so quickly she could hardly sort it out. She had reached for power, and sung the phrase, but then it had twisted away, like a cat that didn’t want to be held. “Did you feel anything?”
Mirage looked thoughtful. “Not at first. Just that you were concentrating. Then it felt like someone had punched me in the gut, and the rock blew up.”
“Interesting. It sounds like the power snapped sideways into you for a moment. I didn’t know it could do that. You can’t draw it on your own; you don’t have the channel. But it seems it can come into you through me.”
“Maybe if they trained the doppelgangers in magic, then, there wouldn’t be this problem.”
Miryo was skeptical. “I find it hard to believe nobody thought of that. And it’s not just a matter of that one channel; you’re not structured to work magic. I can’t explain how I know that, but I can sense it, like the way I sensed where you were.”
“So that’s how you found me. I was wondering.” Mirage leaned back and pondered the bits of stone on the ground. “It’s still worth a shot, though. If you explained what you were doing, I might have a better chance of not interfering with it—or tossing the power back to you when it slides over to me.”
A disbelieving laugh slipped out of Miryo. “It’s not that easy. I’ve been training my whole life. I can’t duplicate that in a night, any more than you could teach me how to fight.”
“Right, but wrong.” Mirage’s tone was brisk. “I couldn’t teach you how to fight; that takes time and practice. But I could teach you a basic stance, how to hold your hands, maybe some simple blocks and attacks.”
Part of Miryo rebelled against that notion; magic wasn’t that easy. But it was true that the basic principles could be explained quickly. Explained, but not necessarily understood. She’d be drawn and quartered by the Primes if they found out she’d been spilling trade secrets, but she was already on track for that anyway. A little more couldn’t hurt. Too much. “All right. I can try. But it begins with drawing power, and I really don’t think I can describe how I do that. It’s just there; I reach out and take it.”
“It doesn’t begin there at all. Where are you pulling this power from?”
“The Elements.”
“And where are they?”
Only then did Miryo realize how much knowledge she took for granted. She’d known things like this before she was ten. “They’re in the world around us. They’re what the world is made of, really, though each one has a specific prime source. The sun is the prime source of Fire, the sea is Water, the wind is Air, and the ground itself is Earth.”
“And Void?”
“Unworkable. It’s the thing that isn’t the world; how can you touch that? The Primes have a trick of showing you the Void—that’s what they did in my testing—but we can’t go there, or use it, or do anything with it.”
It wasn’t easy, reducing her education to a summary. Miryo was painfully aware of how much she was simplifying things. She could hardly do otherwise, though, so she forged on ahead. “Anyway. That’s basic magic. For bigger things, or more complicated ones, we use a focus. Stones, feathers—you’ve probably seen them.”
“Up close and personal, when I was blood-oathed to the commission.”
“That one’s a complicated spell. It uses all four Elements to bind you, and foci for each one.”
Mirage held up one hand to stop her and closed her eyes. “Earth—the crystal?” She cracked one eye long enough to see Miryo nod. “Was the blood Water?”
“Fire, in that case; blood is one of the rare foci that can serve for more than one.”
“So Water was, what, the bowl?”
Miryo felt proud. “Exactly.”
“Where was the Air?”
“The witch’s breath. Spells themselves are sung, but spoken words are an Air focus.”
“So what exactly does a focus do?”
The answer to that question had filled an entire lecture when Miryo was ten. Since then, though, she had thought of a much simpler explanation than the one Kibitsu-ai had used. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do for now, and no one had to know how badly she was butchering the true complexity of it. “Think of it like juggling. You can’t hold five balls in your hands, but if I were to toss them at you one at a time, you could keep them all in your control, ready to be taken hold of when needed. That is, assuming you can juggle.”