Chapter 91 Mage Quarter Part 1
The new Mage Quarter, like everything else Brightwater touched, wore its contradictions openly. The council had confiscated the old merchant guildhalls, stripping their walls of gold-leafed peacock emblems and re-facing them with practical brass and battered slate, but they hadn’t gotten around to replacing the stained glass. Daisy Smithson stood at the center of the largest chamber, sun pouring through a riot of panes depicting ancient revolutions: peasants with torches, blacksmiths smelting their chains into weapons, the goddess of Liberty (as imagined by a preposterously sentimental artist) trampling a snake with one sandaled heel. The light hit Daisy in shifting shards, then briefly all at once, a mess of color that turned her hair to fire and made her hands look like they were dipped in wine.
Samuel Thompson circled her with an old man’s deliberate tread, his boots squeaking against the scrubbed tile. Every few seconds, he’d grunt or make a note on the slate he carried, never quite looking at her but never really looking away, either. The air between them stank of chalk, ozone, and the sharp copper tang of blood magic in progress.
Daisy focused on the shape in her mind: a simple sigil, something even a first-year should manage. She pressed the tip of her finger to her palm, and with a practiced flick, drew a thin bead of crimson. It welled fast, her body still quick to respond despite months of near-starvation. She forced the blood into the shape she’d memorized, then whispered the trigger: “Bind.”
The strand of red twisted up and held for half a breath, hovering above her palm like a spider’s thread. Then it spluttered, the shape fraying at the edges. Daisy clenched her jaw and reached for the feeling Samuel had described, the memory of standing alone on the walls with nothing but your own defiance, and tried to pour that into the work.
The sigil glowed, sickly yellow at first, then brighter. Daisy felt the pulse of it in her teeth, in the scar where she’d once caught a broken bottle across the chin. The spell wobbled, then began to grow, branching into a jagged spiral as if it wanted to tear itself free of her control.
She gritted her teeth. “Stay.”
The thread whipped through the air and struck the blackboard behind Samuel. It sizzled on contact, carving a furrow through the chalked diagrams and exploding in a puff of acrid smoke. For a moment, Daisy saw nothing but afterimages, hot and blue on the insides of her eyelids.
When her vision cleared, Samuel stood with both eyebrows smoking, arms folded, and a look of satisfaction twisted with exasperation. He wiped a palm down his face, smearing a line of white chalk across one cheek.
“Better,” he said, voice gravelly. “Not good, but better.”
Daisy wiped her hands on a towel, then pressed the heel of her palm to the cut, watching it close in slow-motion. Her heart pounded, and she felt the aftermath of the spell as a low, humming ache in the bones of her forearm.
“You said the sigil would stabilize at three links,” she managed.
He pointed to the still-smoking furrow in the blackboard. “It would, if you believed it. You think the magic’s about rules. It’s about what?” He jabbed his stick at her chest. “You want to hurt, or you want to heal, but you can’t do both at once.”
Daisy’s skin prickled, not from the cut but from his attention. She almost snapped back, remembered herself in time. Samuel’s history was legendary: two revolutions, a brief tenure as the youngest archmage of Brightwater’s doomed College, a long stint exiled in the poorest of the outer villages. There were rumors he’d lost his own daughter to a failed experiment, but Daisy had never had the stomach to ask.
He gestured for her to try again. “You know what the sigil should do. Show me what you want it to do.”
She started the spell, this time less precise, letting the blood flow in a messier arc. She didn’t try to recall diagrams or incantations; she pictured instead her mother’s hand on her shoulder, the way Delia’s fingers had pressed Daisy’s wound after a fight, the ache in her chest when she’d last seen Oliver’s face, bone-white in the rain. She let those feelings bleed out with the spell.
The thread rose, trembling, and for a split second Daisy felt it want her, wanted to obey, to bind, to hold instead of break. She seized that flicker and pulled. The sigil snapped into place, burning bright gold, and hovered in the air like a coin spun flat on a tabletop.
Samuel grinned, exposing a row of uneven, yellowed teeth. “Now that’s magic,” he said.
At that moment, a voice drifted through the open door: “If you wanted to redecorate, you could have just moved the chairs.”
Oliver Greenfield leaned against the frame, casual as a drunk at last call, his jacket open to reveal a lopsided patchwork of a shirt and a bandage at his ribs. He looked better than the night before, and with both eyes the same size for once, but his expression was the same: crooked smile, one eyebrow arched, hands in pockets, and posture just shy of insolence.
Daisy rolled her eyes, but the flush that came with it was less from embarrassment and more from something else she refused to name. “I’d ask you to help,” she said, “but then we’d have to put you back together after.”
Oliver tsked, entering the room. He picked up a hunk of blackboard from the floor and weighed it in his hand like a weapon. “Always so hostile. No wonder the spells like you.”
Samuel looked between the two and made a show of gathering his papers. “You don’t need me here for this,” he said. “Daisy, take five and try the double-bind when you’re ready.” To Oliver, he nodded with something like fatherly resignation. “No distractions, please.”
Oliver held up both hands, innocent as a choirboy. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”