In the workroom, however, he watched every move Arkoniel made with alert, solemn eyes. One day, for reasons known only to himself, he shyly offered to show Arkoniel how to make a luck charm out of a bunch of dried thyme and horsehair. It was not the sort of thing most eight-year-olds, even wizard-born, knew how to do. His weaving was a little clumsy, but the spell held firm. Arkoniel’s honest praise earned him the first smile he’d seen from the boy.
After this small success Wythnir truly began to blossom. It seemed only natural to teach him, and it only took a few lessons to discover that Kaulin had done a better job with the boy than Arkoniel had guessed. Wythnir had been with the man less than a year, but already knew most of the basic cantrips and fire charms, as well as a surprising amount about the properties of plants. Arkoniel began to suspect that it was not boredom or disappointment that made Kaulin neglect the boy, but resentment of the boy’s obvious potential.
The discovery of Wythnir’s quickness made Arkoniel more cautious in what he let the boy see of his own studies. What he’d learned of Lhel’s witchery was still forbidden knowledge among the free wizards. They worked together each morning, but the afternoons were reserved for Arkoniel’s solitary labors.
Since Ranai’s spirit gifting, Arkoniel had discovered that certain types of spells—summonings and transmutations in particular—came more easily than they had before. He saw spell patterns more clearly in his mind and found he could hold the wizard eye for nearly an hour without fatigue. Perhaps it was thanks to her, as much as to Lhel, that he finally achieved his first success with what he’d come to think of as his “doorway spell.”
He’d given up on it a dozen times or more since he’d first conceived of it, but sooner or later he’d find himself with the old salt box in front of him, trying to force a bean or stone to materialize inside it.
Wythnir was sweeping the workroom one rainy morning in late Klesin while Arkoniel was making another attempt, and wandered over to see what he was grumbling about.
“What are you trying to do?” Even now he spoke in the hushed tones of a temple novice. Arkoniel often wondered what a few days with Ki would do to change that.
Arkoniel held up the recalcitrant bean. “I want this to go inside this box, but without opening the lid.”
Wythnir pondered this a moment. “Why don’t you make a hole in the box?”
“Well, that would defeat the whole purpose, you see. I mean, I might as well just open the—” Arkoniel broke off, staring at the boy, then the box. “Thank you, Wythnir. Would you leave me for a while?”
Arkoniel spent the rest of the afternoon and the night cross-legged on the floor, deep in meditation. As dawn broke, he opened his eyes again and laughed. The pattern of magic had come to him at last, so simple and clear in its workings that he couldn’t imagine how it had eluded him for so long. No wonder it had taken a child to point it out to him.
Going back to the table, he picked up a bean and his crystal wand. Humming the tones of power that had come to him in the night, he wove lines of light on the air with the tip of his wand: whirlwind, doorway, traveler, rest. He hardly dared believe it, but the pattern held and the familiar cold prickling of energy ran down from his brow to his hands. The pattern brightened, then collapsed into a small blot of darkness. Shiny and solid-looking as polished jet, it hung in the air in front of him. Reaching out with his mind, he found that it was spinning. He was so surprised that he lost concentration and it disappeared with a sound like a cork coming out of a wine jug.
“By the Light!” Composing himself, he sketched the pattern again. When it was fixed in the air, he tested it more carefully and found it malleable as clay on a potter’s wheel. All it took was a thought to make it expand to the size of a keg head, or shrink to a hummingbird’s eye.
It was not a stable spell, but he found he could weave it with ease, and experimented with a succession of them. He could change the position with a thought, moving it around the room and tilting the axis from vertical to horizontal.
Finally, tingling with anticipation, he visualized the salt box without actually looking at it and dropped a bean into the little vortex. The bean disappeared like a stone into a tiny pond and did not fall out the other side. The hole collapsed on itself with the usual dull pop.
Arkoniel stared at the empty air where it had been, then threw back his head and let out an elated whoop that carried his joy all the way to Lhel’s camp.
Wythnir, who had evidently gone no farther than the floor outside the door, burst in. “Master Arkoniel, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
Arkoniel swung the startled child up into the air and danced him around the room. “You’re a luck bringer, my boy, do you know that? Illior bless you, you put the key in my hand!”
Wythnir’s baffled smile made Arkoniel laugh again.
Over the next few weeks Arkoniel armed himself with a handful of beans and put his new magic to various tests. He successfully sent beans into the box from across the workroom, then from the corridor, and finally, thrillingly, through the closed workroom door.
He also inadvertently made a crucial discovery. If he was careless or hurried, if he didn’t visualize the destination carefully and concentrate on his purpose, the unlucky bean simply vanished. He tested this repeatedly and was unable to recover any of the lost ones, or discover where they’d gone.
Doubtless trapped in whatever middle space they occupy between the spell pattern and their final destination, he noted in his journal that night. It was nearly midnight but he was too excited to worry about ghosts. Wythnir had long since been packed off to bed, but Arkoniel kept the lamps burning, unwilling to stop when things were progressing so well. He was more tired than he wanted to admit, however.
He decided to try sending something heavier into the box. A lead fishing weight Ki or Tobin had left behind was just the thing. In his excitement, however, he carelessly brushed the black disk with his hand and felt a distinct tug as the hole closed. For a moment he could only stare stupidly at the spurting stump that was all that was left of his little finger. It was gone, cut clean as a sword stroke just below the second knuckle. It began to throb painfully, but still he stood there, watching the blood flow in disbelief.
The pain soon brought him to his senses. Wrapping the finger in a fold of his tunic, he raced to the table and opened the salt box. There was the lead, intact as expected, but the inside of the box was a spattered mess. The flesh of his finger had been torn from the bones and mangled to bloody gobbets. The bones were undamaged, however, and the nail had survived intact; it lay like a delicate seashell beside the weight.
Only then did the enormity of what he’d done hit him. Collapsing on the stool, he rested his forehead on his left hand. He knew he should call for help before he fainted and bled all over the floor, but it was a moment before he could make himself move.
Lhel warned me never to touch the window spells, he thought, as a wave of nausea rolled over him. No wonder she’d been so hesitant to trust him with this sort of magic.
Because the wound was so clean, it took a bit of doing to get the bleeding stopped. Cook stitched up the end of his finger, smeared it with honey, and tied it up in a bit of clean linen.
He cleaned the box out himself and said nothing of the incident to Kaulin or Wythrin, but he was more careful than ever to keep others away as he cast the spell.
Rather than dampen his zeal, however, the accident spurred him on. He spent the next few days experimenting with different objects: a slip of parchment, an apple, a cloak pin, and a dead mouse from the kitchen traps. Only the metal pin survived. The parchment was shredded to bits, but not burned. The apple and the mouse carcass arrived in very much the same state as his severed finger; the flesh and delicate bones were mangled, but the mouse’s skull survived intact.