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Lenna

“W hat exactly is so special about you or your magic that only you can teach me about Taking?” Lenna inhaled sharply, crossing her arms.

She had agreed to be in an empty room with Arabella D’Arcy, but she would not waste a second of her day giving the woman the benefit of the doubt. Miss Blond Bitch had made her points very clear about how deeply Jake and she knew each other and what a pleasure it had been to know him for Fifth knew how many years. But the advice about letting Lenna’s hair loose because Jake liked it more when fucking? That gained her some extra points on the scale of nasty, vile bitchiness. Period.

Could Lenna be behaving quite immaturely? Probably. Did she give a royal fuck? Probably not.

“How does your inner scale react?” Arabella asked, unmoved.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t want to tell you that.” It wasn’t even personal. Why would she want to share her biggest panom weakness with a stranger?

“Then we might as well finish now. From what Jake told me, you’ll be expected to use the Taking power a lot on your ordeal. If your inner scale is unbalanced for a long time, you could die.”

Lenna tried to find all her faith in Jake by making her learn from this woman. It could have been that, or the actual curiosity to know what was so unique about Arabella’s approach that not even Jake could teach her. “When I use my powers unevenly, I get dizzy, my mind blurries, and I faint.”

“Not one of the rarest symptoms by any means,” Arabella said. Lenna couldn’t decide if it was better not to be unique in this sense. Ayla’s and Jake’s symptoms seemed equally incapacitating.

“To Take without limit one must Give in the same capacity. Correct?” Arabella paced the empty room, the sound of her high heels breaking the silence.

“Yes. Unless I want the inner magical balance tilting to the point that I can’t continue.”

Arabella looked at her, narrowing her blue eyes. “What if you Took, and could Give at the same time?”

“Simultaneous use of opposite powers? Is that a thing?”

“That is my thing.”

“Your thing as in . . . You invented it?” Lenna lifted an eyebrow. Surely Miss Nasty couldn’t be some sort of magic prominence.

The eye roll that followed was completely unnecessary and completely annoying. “Of course not, you fool. Panom magic is so ancient that nothing is new anymore. This simultaneous use of powers is how I use my magic. My balance threshold is very low, so I cannot allow my inner scale to tilt even one bit. Ever.”

“What would happen if you did?” Could it be truly that bad, or was Arabella exaggerating?

“I would be moured away against my will. Until I mastered how to use two sources of magic at the same time, it happens all the time, every single time. One day I was moured to the cave of some wild beast who wanted to feed me to her offspring. Another day, I appeared in a club between two men stabbing each other. I don’t fancy disappearing from where I am meant to be to appear Cardinals know where.”

“Fair play. How can I do it?”

Arabella smiled in a now-we’re-talking kind of way, and Lenna tilted her chin slightly upwards. Maybe she even gave her the smallest smile. Now, she was interested and intrigued by what Arabella had to teach her.

“When you use two powers at once, each hand leads on one. One hand will Give, and therefore you will open as usual. The other hand will Take, and therefore you will close it at the same time. The opposite side of the brain will focus on pulling the respective petal of your panom mark. For example, if you use the right hand to Give, the left half of your brain will be leading on how the North Petal of your panom mark is used. If you use the left hand to Take, the right side of your brain will ensure that happens.”

Lenna frowned, recapitulating on what she had just heard. “The brain part is confusing, but I think I get it.”

“It is very interesting, that’s what it is. It’s easier to do if what you Give and Take is the same.”

Arabella put her hands in front of her, one open and one closed. She Gave a drop of water into the air and at the same time she Took the drop away, making it visible for less time than it took Lenna to blink. She continued opening and closing her hands, and a drop of water appeared every time before vanishing and reappearing again.

“Taking a drop, Giving a drop. Same amount of magic required. If you Take a drop of water and Give a lake, your inner balance will still tilt. Which for you, is not the end of the world,” Arabella said, and Lenna could have sworn there was a tinge of jealousy and frustration in her voice. “But you could Take a drop of water and Give a pinch of sand, and it would still be even. Different products, same amount of magic.”

Lenna inhaled deeply. Cardinals guide her to the uneven tilt.

This use of magic sounded clever, useful, and very fucking complicated.

She wasn’t sure she had ever seen two types of panom magic being used by the same wielder simultaneously. She wasn’t even sure she would be able to do it herself, or if it would help her in her ordeal, but she was definitely going to give it a go. Or, most likely, a hundred goes.

Lenna placed her hands in front of her, ready to start the first of surely many attempts to master this synced use of powers. It was then, when her forearm tickled, and the red ink of Hope’s handwriting threw all her plans out of the fucking navia.

Lenna read the ink, and reread it, and re-reread it, unable to process her rapid heartbeat and the whirl of fear overwhelming her.