Don’t you dare say anything, Tal!
You can’t preemptively yell at me.
“You’re talking to Talis, aren’t you?” Kieran grinned. “Care to share with the rest of us what you two are discussing?”
Do not! I ordered Tal while raising my left hand to punch Kieran, but Roth snatched it back and started drawing a glyph on my palm.
Kieran grinned at me, and I stuck my tongue out at him before looking at my right palm. It was hard to make out what Roth had drawn because the blood was messy and most of it had blurred together. Even though I couldn’t cast magic, I understood the concept behind it.
Moroi used their blood to draw glyphs and Furies used their shadows. In both cases, they poured both their magic and intent into it. The latter was the tricky part, and it was something I would never fully understand since I couldn’t do it. Samara had described it to me as holding an idea close to your soul and focusing on it and only it while you were creating the glyph.
It meant crafting glyphs was as much an art as it was a science. Some Moroi were better at it than others. Roth was easily the best, with Samara and probably Draven closely behind them.
Maybe Roth was trying to create a spell similar to Samara’s recall? She had a pair of daggers she could throw and then call back to her hands. While that was useful for Sam, I didn’t see how it would help me since, when I was in my wolf form, I wasn’t carrying weapons around with me. Roth never did anything without reason though, so I waited.
“Done.” They set my left hand back on my leg, palm up so the blood wouldn’t get smeared, and then they quickly drew something on the handle of each of the axes before offering the weapons to me. “Here. Hold them so the glyph on the handle is pressed against your palm.”
I did as I was told. “Now what?”
“This might burn a bit.” A small smirk stretched across Roth’s mouth.
Awesome. I held still as Roth placed a hand over my heart, where they had painted the glyph, and words started spilling from them. It was too fast for me to keep up with, but I recognized it as Seelie. Something about belonging . . . hiding.
My skin started to tingle beneath their palm, and I gritted my teeth yet held still as it spread outward and became more of a burning sensation.
Roth’s words quickened until they were more like a chant. My fingers squeezed the handles as the pain increased. I had a high pain tolerance, but even I wasn’t sure how much more I could take. It felt like I’d shoved my hand directly into a burning pile of coals.
“Fuck me,” Kieran murmured.
I realized I’d closed my eyes at some point and opened them to gape at the axes. They were shimmering and almost transparent, but I could still feel the weight of them in my hand.
“Írfil, írfil, írfil!” Roth demanded.
Conceal.
The axes snapped out of existence, and I let out a long breath, sagging in the chair because the burning was gone too. I glanced at my chest and palms. The blood had also vanished. In its place were runes. It was hard to make out the design on my chest, so I looked at my palms instead. There was a repeating pattern of stylized axes. The base of each handle was in the center with the axe-head towards the outer edge of my palm, and it repeated, as if the axe was rotating around the circle.
Like it’s in motion, I thought. As if it were spinning.
It’d been hard to make out what Roth had been drawing, but it definitely hadn’t been this.
“I layered together the glyphs,” Roth said smugly, clearly seeing the confusion on my face. “Normally, if we need two or more glyphs to work together, we just create a new glyph that is a combination and pour our intention into it.”
I nodded. We’d never exactly been able to get the Fae’s hot water glyph working, so instead, we’d made our own glyph. It was a crude combination of water and fire, but what mattered was the intention we’d backed it up with. That tactic had never worked for anything more complex, and even for simple spells, sometimes it didn’t work.
“So you, what?” I studied the glyph more. “Drew the glyph for conceal and then . . .” I trailed off.
“Harmony. Recall. Conceal,” they said. “I drew each glyph individually, pouring my intent into them—that was the tricky part. I held on to my desire for them all to work together while also pushing intention for the other two glyphs. This is why we’ve never been able to get some glyphs to work. We were just reusing the glyph as we saw it, but really, we needed to be using multiple glyphs in the casting, which would then become the new glyph.”
“Why the fuck didn’t I think of that?” I stared at the glyphs in wonder, even as my mind immediately started thinking about the more complex spells we’d never been able to figure out. “Have you told Drudonia yet?”
“No,” they said, “because up until this moment, it was only a theory.”
I lifted my gaze from the axes to arch a brow at Roth. “So you experimented on me. Is what you’re saying?”
Roth rolled their eyes before grabbing my tunic and tossing it back to me. “I was reasonably sure it would work, and if it didn’t, it wouldn’t hurt you. I only got the idea in the last few days because of some stuff in here.” They grabbed the book from my lap. “Plus, Velesians soak up magic, so you were a good candidate.”
They weren’t wrong. Velesians might not be able to cast magic directly, but magic worked extremely well on us.
