“Then why did she lunge at you?”

  Will looked down, feeling mildly embarrassed. “To touch my skin. She—we—it’s been difficult for both of us. I think it’s beginning to fade, but there are still moments when the pull becomes very strong.”

  Selene’s face remained smooth, but the tips of her ears shaded ever so slightly toward a brighter pink. She understood Will’s problem on a rational level, she trusted him, and she loved Laina, but somewhere deeper down, beyond her control, the situation irritated her. “She’s as stubborn as you, and the fact that she managed to get through the first compression without magical compulsion shows just how strong her will is. I doubt she would have a sudden lapse.”

  “He’s playing mind games,” suggested Will. “What if he’s ordering her to forget things?”

  His wife’s eyes lit up. “Giving her commands then making her forget them? If he had ordered her to kill you, we would have seen it. She nearly killed herself trying to communicate with you just a short while ago. She would have resisted an outright order to kill you from the outset.”

  Will shook his head. “Imagine yourself in her place you can’t—”

  “I’ve been in her place,” snapped Selene.

  “—then you know you can’t fight every command. You didn’t even know what he was doing until he gave you an order you absolutely wouldn’t obey. Suppose he contacts her in the middle of the night, tells her something, or demands information, then tells her to forget the conversation, what would she do? Is she going to fight his control and die, or accept it? It gets even more complicated if he gives her a command that feels natural.”

  “Or he tells her something she feels you have to know,” said Selene, following the argument to its conclusion. “What happens if your skin touches?”

  “Nothing if we fight it, but it’s difficult. Our souls start to fuse again and our thoughts get mixed up together.” Will ground his teeth. “It makes sense now. She was trying to get around his compulsion not to tell me whatever she had learned. Now that I understand, it won’t be a problem. You’ll just need to keep an eye on me and make sure we don’t lose control…”

  “No,” said Selene brusquely. “Don’t fall into the trap.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s layered,” she replied. “He knows exactly how the heart-stone enchantment works. He’s had who knows how many years to learn all of its intricacies. He used it to make her put that ring on and then forget it. He told her other things and let her remember them, knowing she would be desperate to tell you. My father knew exactly what she would do.”

  Will nodded. “And she failed, so now we can find out what she wanted to tell me.”

  Selene sighed. “Killing you would have been a happy accident for him, but he expected this to fail. The real trap is in whatever information he’s trying to pass to you through her.”

  Will groaned, putting his face down and grabbing hold of his hair with both hands. “I am so sick of these stupid games.”

  “Welcome to my entire life,” said Selene wryly. A moment later, she moved closer and slid under his arm. The two of them remained that way for a while, quietly drawing comfort from one another. Finally, she spoke again, “Are you starting to regret letting her learn?”

  Because of Laina’s unique situation as the only person in the household who was directly bound to the king via the heart-stone enchantment, Selene and Will had had a long discussion regarding whether she should be included in the new wizardry training. In the end, it had been Selene’s own moment of defiance, when she had resisted her father’s command to kill Will, that had been the deciding factor. Neither of them thought the king could successfully give Laina such a command, but as always, reality turned out to be much more nuanced.

  “No,” said Will after a short pause. “Whatever happens, whether we live or die, I’ll feel better knowing she’s better equipped for the future.”

  “Even if she’s the one that kills you?”

  He squeezed his wife harder. “I had the same thought about you once, remember?”

  “Doesn’t mean it will work out as well this time.”

  A rustling came from the direction of Laina’s bed, and they both turned to see that she was awake, watching them silently. Laina’s eyes were puffy and red, but there were no visible tears. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. Lifting one hand, she rubbed her face, then stared at her palm. “Why didn’t you tie me up?”

  Before Selene could answer, Will replied, “Because you aren’t a threat to me.”

  His sister coughed. “I think I just disproved that theory.”

  “You proved the opposite,” argued Will. “Not only do you lack the power to harm me directly, but your loyalty is so strong that even the heart-stone enchantment can’t compel you to do so.”

  Laina glared at him for a second before making a face of disgust. “I don’t know whether to be angry or nauseated by what you just said.”

  Selene laughed softly, then looked at Will. “Stop provoking her.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Laina.

  “Nothing,” said Will. “This was meant to produce a hasty response. We won’t give him one.” He glanced at Selene, and she met his eyes with a look of agreement. He could imagine her silent thought, We stick to the plan. Then he continued, “Soon we can start the third compression, and then—”

  “I want it now,” interrupted Laina.

  “You need to finish recovering,” urged Selene. “It’s only been a month and a half. Most of the others are still struggling.”

  “I was ready two weeks ago,” said Laina waspishly. “Don’t make me wait just because the others are slow.”

  It was subtle, but Will saw the trace of annoyance that passed over his wife’s face at that remark. She had taken months to recover from the second compression and even longer after the third. Laina’s offhand remark cut at her pride. “There’s no reason to hurry,” said Will.

  “Sure there is,” argued Laina. “I’ll be exhausted, weak, less able to do you harm. I don’t know what you have planned, and I know you can’t share it with me, but perhaps it will make me less of a useful tool to Lognion in the short term.”

  “Get some rest,” said Will. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

  As they started to leave, Laina made one last request, “At least lock me in the room.”

  Will laughed but didn’t give her a response as he closed the door. A few minutes later, when they were down the hall, Selene turned to him. “That was a rather reasonable request. It might be foolish to ignore it.”

  He raised one brow. “Stop testing me. You would have chosen the same thing.”

  She smirked. “Why?”

  “Because you’ll give orders to Darla and a few others to keep an eye on her, both to prevent her from harming us or herself, but also in the hope of finding out what your father would order her to do.”

  “You’re learning fast for someone who says he never wanted to be a royal,” she observed.

  “I still don’t like it,” he declared. “If I had my way, we would leave all this behind and start fresh in some out-of-the-way place where no one knows either of us.”

  “And do what?”

  “Make medicine, help people, deliver babies, that sort of thing.”

  Selene gaped. “You expect a princess to become a midwife?”

  “You’re overqualified,” scoffed Will. “I could be a midwife, though. You can be the town doctor.”

  She shook her head. “You underestimate yourself.”

  He puffed up his chest. “Your ignorance is showing. In most small towns, people trust the local midwife a lot more than some fancy doctor.”

  Selene didn’t laugh—her face had become wistful. “You’re not the only one who wishes for something like that. Trying to escape the circumstances of my birth probably motivated many of my choices, including the ones that led me to meet you.”

  “If you were going to marry a hayseed to escape being a princess, you could have chosen better.”

  She sighed. “True. If only I’d known you were actually the son of a baron…”

  They talked a while longer, and even though Selene protested, Will returned to his study. There were quite a few hours left in the day, and he hadn’t gotten as far as he had by wasting them. Lately he’d begun practicing his spellcasting twice daily, both in the morning and again in the late afternoon, before supper. In between, he worked on projects, studied, and supervised his students through the misery of their mild exercise routines.

  Studying the arcana that Aislinn had given him regarding the Wayfarer’s Society was currently one of his top priorities, so he didn’t want to waste what little time he had before his second casting session of the day.

  The cat was nowhere to be seen when he returned, though it appeared that one of the servants had already come in and cleaned the meat and grease off his desk. Will resummoned the journal and his notes, and since he couldn’t seem to get in the mood for reading, he instead decided to try out the new version of the teleport spell.

  Over the past couple of years, he’d greatly expanded his ability to construct complex spells, so much so that learning a new one was far easier than it once had been. Memorizing it might take a few days, but following the written diagrams and instructions to build the spell construct took him less than an hour, even though it was his first time with the spell.

  He looked it over with eyes that some might consider to be expert, though Will wasn’t sure if he would claim such a thing about himself yet. Casting the spell would be foolish, since it might contain an error, so Will employed an advanced technique he had learned during his spell theory classes. He injected a tiny amount of turyn into the construct and then observed the turyn resonance that began to emerge. A second later, he removed the energy and let the spell construct disintegrate.

  Keeping the output resonance in mind, he began carefully reconstructing the spell. This time it took less than half an hour, and once it was finished, he repeated the process, pushing a small amount of turyn into the construct and observing the output. He disassembled the spell and started building the spell for a third time.

  In his classes, Professor Dulaney had taught them to use a specially prepared crystal to record the output resonance, but Will had abandoned the practice almost as soon as he’d left the classroom. Unlike modern wizards, his ability to reproduce—and more importantly in this case—to precisely remember magical resonance patterns was practically flawless. Arrogan had told him that it was something to be expected with third- and even second-order wizards.

  Finishing the spell construct for a third time, he tested it again and compared the output resonance it produced to his memory of the first two tries. It matched perfectly. That meant it was unlikely that his spell construct contained an error, unless he had made the same exact error three times in a row.

  “Which means I probably won’t die if I actually cast it,” he mumbled to himself. Probably. There was still the fact that no one currently living had ever used the spell before. Unless one counts the goddess of magic herself, thought Will. He no longer trusted his grandmother, but he knew she couldn’t lie, and as far as he knew, she didn’t have any current plans that would benefit from his accidental death.

  So the spell would probably do what it was purported to do.

  Steeling himself, Will looked through the open balcony doors and fixed his gaze upon a spot beside a stone statue of Temarah. It stood some fifty yards from the house and was flanked by several neatly trimmed bushes. Keeping it firmly in sight and mind, Will began filling the spell construct with power.

  That was another aspect of casting a new spell that could be dangerous for a novice—using the correct amount of turyn. Some spells were infinitely variable in their ability to take in small to large amounts of magical energy, but others were binary, meaning they required a certain minimum threshold of power in order to produce the desired effect. Such spells weren’t usually dangerous if the minimum turyn requirement wasn’t met, but they could potentially be disastrous if the maximum turyn was exceeded—explosively disastrous in simple cases and weirdly dangerous in an almost infinite number of ways for more complex magics.

  For a teleportation spell, that could mean having his body scattered, torn apart, sent to unanticipated destinations, or any number of other possibilities.

  And those were problems associated with purely binary spells. Reality was even more complicated, because some spells didn’t fall neatly into the category of binary or variable effect spells. Some had a minimum threshold but didn’t necessarily have a maximum and vice versa. Because of this, the wizards at Wurthaven had adopted certain standards for documenting new spells, and they had carefully curated older works to include notes that clarified important things that had been omitted by the author. All modern spell copies included notes regarding turyn requirements and whether the spell was binary, variable, etc…

  The journals that Aislinn had given him from the Wayfarer’s Society were written before such things were standardized, and new members probably had the benefit of verbal explanations when learning Flandry’s original and more efficient teleport spell.

  Will had never even used the current overcomplicated version, but he suspected that might be an advantage, since he didn’t have to unlearn anything. He was also fairly confident in his skills after the past few years of rapid and intense spell acquisition. He wasn’t the same young novice who had once nearly blown himself up with a new spell construct.

  Slow and steady wins the race, Will thought as he gingerly fed turyn into the spell construct, being careful to keep his eyes and concentration fixed on the location he had selected. He felt the transition when the spell activated and instinctively stopped the flow of energy. The spell construct he had been holding was gone, and though he hadn’t felt anything physically, his eyes were already registering the change in light. He was standing beside the statue.

  It was disorienting more for the fact that it wasn’t disorienting. There had been no sense of motion or change. In his memory it was more as though the world had simply changed around him. Will let his breath out explosively, then followed with a deep inhalation as he collected his thoughts. That was amazing.

  He immediately started to repeat the spell, but his journal was still open on his desk, and he didn’t know it well enough to reconstruct it purely from memory. Instead, he cast an elemental travel disk, which had recently become yet another of his growing repertoire of spells he could cast instinctively. As he floated up on it to hover a few feet above the ground, he noticed the cat he had recently fed was sitting nearby, watching him with apparent interest.

  “Want a ride?” His question was more a joke than anything else. Will didn’t really expect the strange cat to join him, but he lowered the disk beside her and paused for a moment anyway, just to entertain himself.

  The cat hopped aboard and sat down as nonchalantly as though it were something they did together every day. Mildly astonished, Will pretended to be unsurprised and gently took off. The cat never batted an eye, and when he reached the house and lowered the disk, she stepped off as though it was the most natural thing in the world. The cat darted away into the bushes off to one side without so much as a glance back in his direction.

  “You’re welcome for the ride,” remarked Will, smiling faintly.

  Rimberlin House was a big place, and there were several back doors. The one Will had chosen was usually called the west garden door, and before he could put his hand to the handle, it flew open. Sammy and Tabitha stepped out with more animation in their steps than he had seen in weeks, though they still showed signs of fatigue in their expressions. In another week or two, they would probably be fully acclimated to the second compression.

  “When did you go out?” asked Sammy.

  “A minute ago.”

  Before he could say more, Tabitha asked a fresh question. “Was that a cat with you?”

  Will could only surmise that they had seen his approach through one of the windows. He nodded, glancing at Sammy to see her reaction. His heart tightened when he saw the sudden hope in her eyes, and he immediately shook his head. “It was just a stray.”

  His cousin had been devastated when her adopted pet cat, Mister Mittens, had disappeared and failed to return. Sammy had never found out that her cat was actually a demigod, or that he’d sacrificed his life to save Will’s. He had been torn on the matter of whether to tell her the truth, but one of the goddamn cat’s last requests was that he stay silent and let her think he had merely run off.

  Personally, Will thought that leaving Sammy with some hope was worse than giving her the truth, but he abided by his savior’s last wish.

  “It was pretty,” said Tabitha. “I’ve never seen a stray with such a fluffy tail.”

  “It was fluffy?” asked Sammy.

  Tabitha nodded. “Like a feather duster.”

  “It’s a she,” Will informed them. “If you put some food out you might be able to coax her inside.”

  The girls went looking for the cat while Will returned to his study. Deep down, he would have liked to go with them, but he couldn’t justify letting his schedule slip. Train, study, train, exercise, teach, study, train, he chanted mentally. These days, he didn’t even give himself time to play in the kitchen. His anxiety grew with every day that passed, bringing King Lognion’s death closer to him. If things went according to plan, he wouldn’t need to lift a finger, but in his heart he didn’t believe it.

  He needed more: more power, more versatility, more offense, and more defense. He needed more of everything, and it would never be enough, not until his power was great enough to defeat his own nightmares. Despite his recent successes, what dominated his mental landscape was how close he had come to failing. The demon-lord had been too much, his grandmother was too strong for him, and most of all, Grim Talek the lich had perfectly demonstrated how powerless he truly was. The lich had handled him like an adult handles an unruly toddler.

  Chapter 4