Page 53 of A Tower of Half-Truths

Alain’s cloak rustled as he pulled his notebook from his pocket.

His movements were slow and careful so as to not frighten the kinchins.

Mavery kept her eyes forward, focused on the beasts; beside her was the energetic scratching of a pen.

But the kinchins didn’t notice a thing. The slightly smaller one—a female, presumably—had stopped to groom her mate, who looked displeased to be given the attention.

Then again, kinchins always looked displeased, which was why Mavery found them so entertaining.

“Oh, this is amazing!” she whispered. “And to see two of them together outside of mating season…”

While most demonspawn traveled in packs, kinchins were solitary creatures. Once they reached adulthood and left their mothers’ dens, they would pair up during their brief mating season but otherwise spent the remainder of their lives in isolation. This pair was an exceptionally rare sight.

Alain chuckled softly. “It all makes sense now.”

“What does?”

“Your reaction to Enid’s hellhound. I should have known you were a cat person all this time.”

Mavery stifled a laugh, then peered at what Alain was recording in his notebook. He’d made a rough sketch of the kinchins. He was now working on a more detailed sketch of Mavery’s profile. He stilled his pen once he realized she was watching him.

Somewhere off in the distance, a tree branch cracked and plummeted to the ground.

A thud rippled through the forest, and the kinchins sprung onto all fours.

Before sprinting away, they emitted screams that sounded like the cries of human children; every variety of demonspawn had at least one unsettling trait.

They scampered into the underbrush and vanished.

Alain moved off the path and sat on a fallen log, where he resumed his sketching.

Mavery sat beside him. Instead of hiding his work, he angled his notebook toward her.

She inched closer to him, thrilled to not only be his subject again, but that he no longer felt compelled to keep this hobby private.

“I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “I’ve never seen you look at anything quite like that.”

He added the final touches, then handed her the notebook. Even with rough pen strokes, he’d managed to capture her awe and delight from watching the kinchins. He waited patiently while she assessed his work, though his eyes were eager for her approval.

“I love it,” she said, passing the notebook back to him. “And you managed that while you were working…technically speaking. I’d say that’s proof that your hobby isn’t a waste of time.”

He smiled, then slipped the notebook into his pocket. He turned to her, and his gaze softened as it drifted from her eyes, down to her mouth. Mavery’s breath hitched as everything—the breeze, her heartbeat, even time itself—seemed to go still.

But then Alain turned his head and stood up. “It’s getting late, and we still need to find a suitable place to work on the spell. Let’s get moving.”

They found a small clearing deeper in the forest. Scorch marks in the dirt, flanked by a pair of logs, indicated it had been used as a camping spot somewhat recently.

While Alain filled their canteens in the nearby stream, Mavery sat on one of the logs and bound together the persilweed she’d picked along the trail.

Unfortunately, they’d found nothing else of note; the forest floor had been cleaned of Ether-sensitive stones, and the other alchemical ingredients were too poisonous to handle safely.

When Alain returned, they laid out everything they would need for the experiment: his notebook, a handful of anchors, a vial of anti-Sensing potion, a stopwatch, and a syringe pre-filled with resurrection serum. Same as yesterday, Mavery hoped the latter wouldn’t be necessary.

She took a swig of potion while Alain set up the protective barrier. He’d stayed up half the night making revisions to the incantation, and he planned to practice it a few more times before the true demonstration began.

Though Mavery could Sense no violet auras, she could still detect a faintly flickering veil encircling the campsite alongside the gentle pulsation of magic in the air.

Even with the potion, both seemed stronger than usual.

Breathing in the pure forest air—rather than the stagnant, dusty air of Alain’s apartment—must have cleared her head and sharpened all her senses.

Alain paced in a wide circle as he practiced the incantation. Mavery, meanwhile, tracked him with the stopwatch.

“Forty-three seconds,” she announced after his fifth recitation. “That’s your fastest yet.”

He sat beside her on the log and took a generous gulp from his canteen. Even without the full effects of the Ether, simply practicing the incantation had been enough to leave him parched.

“Thanks to you and that brilliant suggestion you made yesterday,” he said. “You may not have a conventional education, but you certainly think like a scholar.” At that, she smiled. “Why did you leave university?”

“Oh…” Her smile faded as a dark cloud threatened to consume her thoughts. “It…wasn’t by choice.”

It had been years since she’d told anyone about this part of her past. As she considered whether to reveal it to Alain—if she was even capable of it—he placed his hand on her knee.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. You don’t—”

“There was a fire,” she said softly. She recalled Alain’s words from the other night.

Though she didn’t want to speak of this, maybe it was what she needed.

She slipped her fingers in the gaps between his.

“A few weeks after I started at Atterdell, a group of boys got drunk and wandered into my family’s orchard.

One of them got the bright idea to start a bonfire. You can guess what happened next.”

Alain gasped. “Gods, that’s horrible.”

“It was the smoke that killed my parents and brother, not the fire.” She laughed darkly.

“A small blessing, I suppose, after I lost my family, the farm, everything. With no means of paying my tuition, I had to drop out and move in with my only remaining relative—my uncle, who hated magic so much, he forbade me from practicing it so long as I lived under his roof. He definitely wasn’t going to spare a single copper to send me back to Atterdell. ”

Alain squeezed her hand. “He never…hurt you in any way, I hope?”

“Never physically. He was too afraid of my magic to lay a hand on me. But he made it very clear that I wasn’t wanted—and my magic surges, even less so.”

“I’m sorry. I can only imagine how awful that must have been.”

Mavery shrugged. “I only lived there for a few months, and I wasn’t forced to perform any hard labor.

Not after a particularly gory incident involving the rooster.

” Alain’s eyes widened, and she laughed halfheartedly.

“I’ll need several bottles of wine before I tell you that story.

Let me put it this way: a broken mirror and sprouting floorboards are among the least damaging things my magic surges have done.

“Anyway, since my uncle didn’t trust me around the livestock, he had me manage the bookkeeping.

Every week, I’d make a few changes to his ledgers, skim a little off the top for myself, until I’d saved enough to strike out on my own.

I suppose my life of crime began well before I got caught up with the Dragons. ”

“You were resourceful. I can’t fault you for that.”

Speaking about this had always brought about magic surges, which was why she tried to avoid doing so at all costs.

At times, even thinking about it for too long had been enough.

Now, there was no roiling arcana, no fire thrashing in her veins.

Maybe enough time had passed, this chapter of her life no longer had that effect on her.

Or, maybe it had nothing to do with time, but with her present company.

“If you need a moment, the spell can wait,” Alain said.

Mavery shook her head. “I’m ready. Let’s do it now, before it gets dark.”

She followed him to the center of the campsite. He turned his wrist to disable the barrier of protective wards, then turned to the page in his notebook where he’d written the incantations Mavery was to perform. She’d practiced them earlier that morning, under the same protections he’d just removed.

With the notebook in hand, she approached the nearest tree, placed her palm flat against the bark.

She began with the fireproofing ward, as she’d succeeded with that spell twice already.

The resonating ward, though more complex, came to her easily, as did the soundproofing spell.

She rattled off the runes without stumbling over a single one.

The anti-Sensing potion once again dampened the sensation of Ether, turning it into a cool but tolerable breeze.

And then came the detonation ward. At fifty-six syllables, it was the most complex of the lot, with the greatest consequence for failure.

Her pulse quickened as she carefully spoke the incantation.

In her head, she sounded less like she was reciting a poem and more like she was butchering a nursery rhyme.

Once the final syllable escaped her lips, she tore her hand away from the trunk as her heart continued to pound against her ribcage. Though she knew this was the same harmless ward Alain had used yesterday, she still didn’t want to risk setting it off accidentally.

Speaking Etherean for longer than usual had rendered her mouth and throat cold, her tongue numb. She turned to Alain, whose broad smile warmed her by several degrees.

“You’re a natural,” he said as she gave back his notebook. “That was expertly done.”

“Even the detonation ward?”

He shrugged as he paged through the book, returning to the Sensing spell. “If you made a mistake, I didn’t hear it. And from the amount of magic I can feel in the air, the Ether didn’t, either.”

He took a stone from his pocket, then stepped away to place the augmentation that would replicate her spells to all the trees within a small radius.

Without the potion, Mavery would have seen colorful tendrils spanning from tree to tree, encircling the campsite.

Instead, all she sensed was fatigue from having expended so much of her arcana all at once.

It would take her months—potentially years—of practice before she could match Alain’s stamina for spellcasting.

“All right.” He returned to her side and took a deep breath. “Here goes nothing.”

He began the spell, and the Ether answered him immediately.

Light erupted all around them as if Alain had conjured a hundred pure-white orbs all at once.

Mavery instinctively squeezed her eyes shut and threw up her arm.

But then she slowly blinked her eyes open to watch the colors bleed in.

Gold, violet, red, and pink swirled around the trees, turning the bark incandescent.

Though tears stung her eyes, she couldn’t look away. She was as awestruck now as she’d been upon seeing Alain’s tapestry of warding magic for the first time. It was then she realized: she had placed this magic. She had created this beauty.

Alain nudged her shoulder. “Don’t forget to summon your protective ward.”

This spell—the most natural of all—required only a raise of her hand. Under the effects of the Sensing spell, the ward appeared before her in a burst of white, then faded to blue.

“And now, for the augmentation,” Alain said.

He turned and placed his palm flat against her protective ward.

He spoke a brief incantation, similar to the first one she’d ever heard him recite.

Seeing the magic up close confirmed what she’d suspected before: the base incantation alone was enough to reveal the ley lines.

A thread of white light tethered itself to Mavery’s ward and trailed to the stone in Alain’s trouser pocket.

He then reached through the aura as easily as passing his hand through a stream of water, and touched his palm to hers. He hadn’t told her how he’d planned to augment her ward, and so, this was a pleasant surprise. The magic rippled at his touch but did not falter.

“This is what you see?” he whispered. When she nodded, he shifted his hand slightly, interlaced his fingers with hers. “This is… Well, I actually can’t find the words.”

She laughed softly. “I’m glad to know I have that effect on you.”

He smiled. “More than you realize.”

A moment ago, the illuminated trees had enraptured her completely. Now, they were simply part of the background, all but forgotten. The only thing she could focus on—the only thing she cared to—was his face, cast in soft blue light.

Her ward rippled again as Alain took another step forward, crossing through it completely.

Before now, she’d never fully appreciated how they stood eye to eye.

It made it all the easier to see the flush of his skin, the desire in his eyes that matched her own.

Her lips parted, but not a single breath escaped them as he leaned in and kissed her.

It was the softest brushing of lips—too brief for her to return the kiss, much less close her eyes and savor it.

Alain broke away instantly, released her hand as he stepped backward.

His eyes blinked rapidly, his skin was the reddest Mavery could ever recall seeing it—save for his knuckles, which were bone-white as he clutched his notebook to his chest.

“I-I’m sorry,” he stammered, looking at his feet. “Forgive me, I don’t know what came over me just now. I shouldn’t have—”

Mavery lowered her hand, dismissing her protective ward, then grasped Alain by the lapel.

He emitted a small gasp as she pulled him back toward her.

Close enough for their breath to mingle, for her to sense the tea-and-parchment aroma that clung to his skin, as though it had long become a part of him.

“Don’t you dare apologize,” she whispered.

She drew him even closer and pressed her mouth to his.