Page 117 of Turncloak

The grand library in Tarth’s house became their classroom. A small pair of desks were set up facing each other, topped with parchment and ink and quills.

“It is about time,” Tarth said, “that we see what you’re really capable of. You are reluctant, I know. But such raw power cannot go unchecked, unmastered. The effects could be cataclysmic. We need first to understand the depths of what we are working with, and then we must move on to said mastery.”

The boy stared dully at the unopened wand box, self-loathing spreading inside him like oil. “I’d rather never use it at all. I’ll keep myself wiped clean, I promise. I will not want. I will not hurt. I will be nothing. It’s the only way to keep the world safe. I managed for months on the streets of Novarin, didn’t I? And I’m older now, better at controlling my instincts and impulses.”

Tarth sighed. “There are many instincts and impulses you are yet to experience—instincts and impulses that are not so easy to tamp down. No mage in Ascenfall can control their every thought. Oftentimes, they rear up from the subconscious between one split second and the next.”

“But—”

“We could go back and forth for several minutes before I order you to do as I ask, or we could cut straight to the part where you obey.” A taut beat. “Open the box.”

The boy opened the box.

“Pick up the wand.”

As the deep red wood met his skin, again came that rush of cold, that roiling darkness.

Tarth leaned back in his chair. “Command me to do something.”

This was, in itself, a command. A command the boy had no choice but to obey.

“Blow a raspberry.”

Tarth—his immaculate, self-respecting mentor—made a noise of rather profound flatulence.

Despite himself, the seven-year-old fought to keep the smirk from his face.

Ten years went by.

The boy grew in confidence and diminished in self-loathing, although every time he was ordered to compel his mentor, a small part of him flinched and retreated. Their lessons grew in intensity until, around the time the boy turned fourteen, their epic clashes of will became an exercise in self-flagellation for Tarth. The boy’s power was simply too strong.

Eventually, the boy became entirely resistant to Tarth’s orders. He could no longer be compelled into compelling. For a time, he worried this would render him obsolete, a research endeavor that had run its course, but Tarth made no moves to evict the boy from the estate.

In fact, it seemed the mentor had grown rather fond of the beggar he’d plucked from the streets, a familial texture knitting between them, and so Tarth turned his attention to a more rounded education. Enchanting, brewing, several hideously executed attempts at wielding, plus a woefully inaccurate session of foreseeing that predicted a foreign species would rise from the shadows of the world and take over all central forms of government.

When his mentee was seventeen, Tarth enrolled him in a set of local examinations, and the boy emerged with a Mage Practer certificate—having intentionally botched his compelling tasks.

On the day the certificate arrived in the post—along with a ludicrously luxurious black cloak, now that the boy was fully grown and his mage class was set in stone—Tarth took the boy to the finest parlor in the house and asked him, over a pot of ambertea, what he planned to do with his life.

“I don’t want to use my compelling.” The boy’s voice was rough and gravelly now, more brusque than he usually intended. He cracked his knuckles in his fists; a nervous habit. “Ever.”

Tarth took a sip of too-hot tea through pursed lips. “I did not ask what you don’t want to do with your life. I asked what you do want.”

Want.

That impossible word. The one that still caused the boy such immense turmoil.

“Why did you rescue me, all those years ago?” The question he had longed to ask for over a decade. “It can’t just have been academic curiosity.”

A nonchalant shoulder jerk. “An endeavor can start as one thing and end up as quite another.”

“Tarth,” the boy sighed. “Answer the question.”

It was not a command, but it had the timbre of one.

“You were just a project.” Tarth softened his voice, his usually rigid posture. “And then I grew to love you.”

The boy bowed his head, willing away the tears beading at his waterline. He’d never told his mentor about his life in the Havenwood, about that fateful night in the Bank of Almere. Perhaps if he had, the mentor would never have allowed that love to take root. He had tricked yet another person into caring for him.