He crosses his arms. “Measuring cup.”
“Repeating isn’t an explanation.”
“If you’d let me write it down, I would’ve written an explanation, too.”
“So, again,tell me,and I’ll—”
“I’m allowed to talk to you now?”
Oh,fuckno.
He’s not going to point out our weirdness when this is the exact weirdness he once pushed for, all mature and collected.
My jaw clamps, muscles bunching near my ears. “What’s your idea, Tourael?”
He holds long enough that I think he won’t tell me.
“The research I was doing on Kojyngilla,” he says. “Her spell to braid several pieces of magic together wasn’t one spell; it was several variations that she used depending on the other spells she wanted to combine. That’s a common idea in a lot of conjuration work, having variations on the same spell to fit different wizards. Since the conjurer is the source of energy, we make room for differences from person to person.”
I lower the marker and look at him, listening.
“And it got me thinking, how it’s like cooking,” he continues. “If a recipe calls for two and a half cups of an ingredient, you wouldn’t make a two-and-a-half-cup measuring device. You’d use a cup and a half cup, and double up the cup. Same for your spell.” He waves at the whiteboard. “You can create baseline energy caps for different expectations. Wizards could select the combination they’d need for their individual spells, butyouwould only need to create a handful of variations rather than shove thousands of options into one single-use spell.”
My face slackens.
Holy shit.
I use the sleeve of my sweater to scrub a clean space on the whiteboard and scribble out his idea.
A handful of general capping spells of different sizes rather than something that targets the exact amounts of everything.
Oh my gods.
Oh my gods.
It’s so dumb. So dumb and so obvious. Why didn’t I see it? I was going too big with the idea, trying to get it to fitperfectlyin every spell. But it was never about fitting the safety net to every single spell; it’s about fitting each spellto the safety net.
I stumble back from the board, my body vibrating like a hummingbird having an anxiety attack. “Oh my gods.”
“We’ll have to test it,” Elethior says, staring at my chicken-scratch handwriting like it wasn’t his profound idea. “We’ll need to develop a few variations on it, but—”
He turns away from the board with a smile.
That smile plummets off. “Sebastian?”
I’m shaking. Gods, I’m shaking; haven’t stopped shaking since—since the cocktail party, with him out under the snow and the way the individual flakes stuck to his eyelashes, and how he’d told his cousin not to kick me off the grant.
He might’ve given me a way to cap spells so no one has to risk draining their components.
Elethior Touraelmight’ve given me what I’ve been wanting for six years. Since—
Is that all you’ve got?
My vision goes spotty and I throw the marker on my desk, start pacing. We haven’t tested this idea yet. It might not work.
“Sebastian?” Elethior steps into my path. “Are you—”
I bump into him. That solid chest and the smell of green plants and flowers. Those stupid lip rings—
