I rolled my eyes, leaning back from him and extracting my wrist with a jerk.
“You’re really asking me that? You’re in my class.”
“Then, as you and I both heard in lecture this week, you’ll already know it’s illegal to read the mind of a fellow Magical without their permission unless it’s an emergency. Which is difficult to prove in court, by the way.” He gave me a flat-eyed stare. “Are you saying that I find the contents of your mongrel mind sointensely stimulating,I’d risk expulsion and possibly a criminal sentence, just to get a glimpse?”
“Right,” I scoffed. “Of course not.”
Even so, my lips pursed.
Hewasreading my mind pretty constantly, though, wasn’t he? It certainly seemed like he was. It was avery smallpart of the reason why I’d decided I absolutely couldn’t drop this class, even for a single term. Why would he risk doing that, if he was worried he might get caught?
It’s not like he’d made much effort to hide it from me.
“You try me, then,” he said, his voice all business. He motioned me forward with a graceful wave. “Come now. You want to learn this. You said you want to learn this.”
“I didn’tsayanything,” I muttered.
“I’m giving you my consent.”
Again, I scoffed at him.
I faced him more squarely, though, both daunted and tempted to try.
I blanked my mind carefully, and focused on my primal. I still had to remember to keep my attention mostly on the one below my chair, rather than the one over my head, at least in front of other Magicals. The monocerus had its legs folded under it, but I could feel that it was alert, and paying attention. More importantly, I felt the gold-white sun ripple through it, and the presence I was slowly getting more and more acquainted with.
Unlike most of my classes, Seeing Arts required very few spells.
From what Professor Underwood said in her opening lectures, most of our homework would involve meditation and other sight exercises, and documenting what we found. She’d recently started giving us assignments that included attempting to find things and people through the magical space my professors called The Aether.
She’d said the next set of assignments would involve us attempting to find and witness important incidents that occurred in the past, something that obviously appealed to me.
“You can see anything through The Aether,” Professor Underwood had intoned when the class settled down on that first day. “Bones, muscles, plants, blood, under the soil of Magique, the filament structures and archaic symbols that make up a large or complex chimeric field. Not to mention the most well-known and notorious targets of sight work: the thoughts, emotions, faces, and conversations of your fellow Magicals. If you grow proficient in these arts, you will be able to explore distant lands without leaving your house, witness events and people in the past, present, and sometimes even the future. And yes, you will be able to spy on others from across the world, assuming they aren’t shielded well enough to thwart you. You will be able to see lies as tangibly as you see truths, without your targets voicing a single word…”
I had to admit, that all sounded interesting.
I was used to hiding my thoughts, at least.
From what I’d read ahead in my textbooks so far, that would help me when we got to psychic shielding and subterfuge, which apparently we’d be starting work on next week. It turned out that shielding in the Seeing Arts wasn’t so different from hiding a thought from my own mind, or keeping an emotion off my face.
“Will you try?” Bones asked. “Or not?”
I let out a breath, rested my hands in my lap, and focused on him for real.
For a long few seconds, nothing.
I could feel a sort of wall around him, confusing his presence and making the location of his mind unclear. It operated almost like a dense, impenetrable fog. I swam through that for a few seconds, looking for some way in, but found nothing. Knowing this had to be some kind of shield he’d erected to keep people out, I felt my frustration grow when I couldn’t get past it. Trust him to go out of his way to keep me from learning anything new.
Before my frustration had quite boiled over, a thought occurred to me.
I partitioned my mind carefully.
Separating my awareness into distinct, walled-off areas was one of the exercises I’d been practicing since summer, after I found it in one of my books and asked Alaric about it. Impulsively, I used the new section I’d created to send Bones an image of himself, exactly as he’d appeared to me in that tube station in London that day, and in my dreams since.
I pushed it out carefully, just enough to possibly get him to react.
“Clumsy, Shadow,” he murmured.
I felt my face grow hot.
