4.39: Precision

“Are you looking at moving up a graduate level soon?” Max asked.

“Huh?” I sat cross-legged on the floor, scrawling a letter to my parents at a slightly awkward angle, hoping it wouldn’t affect my handwriting too much. “Not all of us are trying to speedrun out education, you know. At this stage, schooling literally could not matter less. Why, are you ready to move up to craftsperson and don’t want us poor little acolytes cramping your style?”

He smiled. “Can’t move up to yellow robes until I’ve spent six months in orange, you know that. Turn your arm?”

I did. The reason I was writing my letter at an awkward angle on the floor instead of on my bed or at my desk like a normal person was that Max was painting an extremely complicated network of runes all over my left arm. The runes were so extensive that I’d worry that he might run out of ichor, except that he was using mine and I always had plenty. Most mages had to moderate their ichor extraction lest their bodies overproduce it to make up the shortfall and make their spells more powerful and more dangerous to cast, but my spell was well and truly chained down in my heart, so that didn’t matter. I always drew and used as much ichor as I wanted, meaning my spell tended to make tons of it.

The whole thing was kind of gross, if I thought about it. I didn’t think about it.

“Huh. That’s kind of a pity, actually.” I said.

“What?”

“Forgive me if the maths is wrong, but that means you can’t graduate in less than seven months, right?”

“No, it would take nine months, minimum, for me to graduate, assuming I didn’t stay on for wizard or master levels. Why?”

“You have a lot less than seven months, right?” I didn’t want to say anything too explicit (Max was still paranoid about us being spied on in the school, although I was pretty damn sure he was wrong; nobody eavesdropping on our private conversations would have reached the conclusion that Kylie and I were bad influences on Max and removing us would settle him down), so I tapped his mage mark to make my point. If we wanted to save the world before Kylie and I left, then we had seven months to do it, meaning Max had less than seven months to ‘break his soul’, so to speak.

He stopped painting my arm and stared at his mage mark for a bit. “Huh. That’s… only just occurring to me right now.”

I frowned. “You’re the one who said the whole… thing… is necessary. Are you having regrets?”

“No, I just.” He laughed. “It didn’t occur to me that I, of all people, would never graduate from high school.”

He didn’t stop laughing. (It was a pretty funny concept.) His laughter made me laugh. He settled down, but I couldn’t, and watching me laugh made him laugh again. It was a good ten minutes before we could get a hold of ourselves and Max’s hand was steady enough to get back to work. I started to proofread my letter while he finished the runes.

“Alright,” he said, “I’m going to activate them.”

“Go ahead.” I didn’t look up from my letter. Should I tell my parents about Fionnrath? No. It required far too much backstory on all kinds fo things that would freak them out. I hadn’t even told them I was a familiar and I didn’t want to start now. Anyway, if we saved the world, it probably wouldn’t come up. Unless it did. I had only the vaguest idea how we could expect destroying the Pit to affect Refujeyo, socially.

I felt the familiar uncomfortable tingle of foreign magic flow through my skin. It only laste a second. Without looking up from my letter, I put two fingers on the two specific spots on my arm where there had been no magical flow. “These two spots here are dead.”

“Hmm.” Max was silent for awhile. Long enough for me to glance up from my letter and see him watching me, considering.

“You know it’s super creepy when you stare at me like that, right?”

“Sorry.” He looked away, but only down to my rune-covered arm. “Just thinking. You touched two runes perfectly.”

I shrugged. “Okay. So you’ve got two dead runes in your circle. What’s your point?”

“You didn’t look at the pattern at all. You knew exactly where they were.”

“So? It’s my skin.”

“Kayden, when we first started this, you could only indicate the vague area of your arm that wasn’t getting foreign magic.”

Oh. I was getting more precise. “Sweet. Practice makes perfect, I guess.”

“Mmm.” He went back to staring thoughtfully. I raised a brow at him. He looked away. “Hey, do you mind if I try something? I want to test another runic circle on your other arm. It’s not dangerous but it might be a little bit uncomfortable.”

“Sure.” I shifted around to offer him my other arm. “What are you testing? Actually, never mind,” I said when he opened his mouth to explain. “You can explain afterward.” That way, if it worked, he could tell me the interesting part, and if it didn’t, we could both save ourselves the explanation entirely.

I expected Max to dip his brush into the little pot of my ichor and start painting, but he didn’t. He disappeared behind his bedcurtains for a bit, returning with clean implements, and drew some of his own ichor. “Controlling variables,” he explained when I looked at him curiously.

Okay, whatever. I got back to rereading my letter. I didn’t want them to freak out and try to pull me out of school again so it had to be as boring as possible.

“I’m going to activate it now,” Max warned me after a little while.

“Alright.” Maybe I should tell my parents about Dr Peterson? No, then I’d sound like I needed thrapy, they wouldn’t like that –

“Fuck!” I yelled, leaping to my feet. The letter skittered across the floor as I desperately tried to rub feeling back into my tingling, aching, stinging arm.

“Sorry, sorry!” Max waved his hands frantically. “Sorry, I didn’t think it would – are you alright?”

“Well, I’m not injured,” I said, inspecting my arm for burns to make sure I was telling the truth. “But that felt like plunging my arm into stinging nettles. What did you do?” I frowned at the runes. They were the normal kind of runes, the kind that Refujeyo taught. I recongised almost all of them and they were harmless enough, although the pattern was weird – way more complicated than it needed to be.

“That’s the very first runic circle I ever drew on your arm,” Max said. “From an old homework assignment, remember?”

I vaguely remembered that. But… “It didn’t hurt last time. Certainly not like that. I’m sure I would have remembered.”

“I’ve been getting better at efficient runes over time, meaning I’ve been using less and less magic when we do this. But you can always feel it. That runic circle channels the amount of magic I used the very first time. It’s not your precision that’s increasing, it’s your sensitivity that’s increasing.”

“Is that… bad?” That sounded pretty bad.

“For most people I’d be worried, yeah. Your body changing the way it interacts with magic is a real problem for a mage. You should probably see Malas, but I have an alternate theory.”

“Oh?”

“There’s no real reason why your sensitivity to outside magic should change. That’s… not a normal thing to happen, but then, being able to detect magic isn’t normal either. You detect it by feeling how it interrupts the magic already in your body, right?”

“Yeah…”

“So, most likely, the amount of magic in your body is what’s increasing.”

Ah. Hmm. That… probably wasn’t good. “Should I stop drawing so much ichor?”

“No. I mean, yes, probably, but that’s not it. Your spell is pretty firmly bound in your heart, right? The magic in your arms…”

“You’re saying that Fionnrath’s Destiny is getting stronger?!”

“Unlikely. It’s a very old spell, it’s probably about as powerful as it’s ever going to get, and it’s already technically too powerful for Kylie and you. I’m saying that you’re carrying more of the magic. I’d need to ask Kylie to be sure, but I think you’re becoming better at being a familiar.”

“That can happen?!”

Max shrugged. “I’ve never heard of it happening. I’ll look into it, but I think this is new. My guess is that your body is adapting to carrying magic over time, the same way you can adapt to low oxygen or high pressure or new temperature ranges. Or how a new mage adapts to their spell, I guess. Magic interacts with humans much better than other animals, so my guess is that if this is normal familiar behaviour, the difference probably isn’t enough for it to be noticed by most mages. Or it might be unique to human familiars; it’d be interesting to test some other familiar bonds and see if it’s normal or not. Either way. I think this is nothing to worry about. But you should probably see Malas just in case.”

“Hooray, more medical checkups!”

“Have you noticed any change in how long you can stay away from Kylie without discomfort?”

Oh. Fuck. Hadn’t thought of that. “No, but I haven’t been away from her for long enough to notice. We live together.”

“Hmm. Holidays are in a month, so…”

So it could be a really, really uncomfortable couple of weeks. “So we’ll have data then, I guess. What are you doing for the holidays? Splitting between Kylie and me to avoid your family again?”

He grimaced. “I can’t. There are too many people I need to make nice with at home. I do want to come and spend a few days in your town, though.”

“Ah, getting in some quality time with your girlfriend,” I said. I’d meant it as a joke, but Max’s face was carefully neutral. “Wait, really? You went for it?”

“You knew I was going to ask her!” he said, blushing.

“I didn’t know you had, though! Or that she’d said yes! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Not all of us are compelled to brag constantly about our dating lives,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Are you going to let this go?”

“I think you already know the answer to that question.”

“We were talking about you having an unexpectedly large amount of magic that could possibly endanger you – ”

“This is way more interesting than that.”

“How could this possibly be more – ?”

“Does she know you’re coming? Oh, or is it a surprise? Are you going to surprise her? She likes lavender blossoms.”

“I’m not encouraging this.” Max gathered his runecrafting tools and walked away.

“Lavender and lilies!” I told him as he retreated behind his bedcurtains. I grinned. At least some good things were happening.