CHAPTER 7: THE GRAMMAR OF MAGIC

  Time in the tower came to a standstill, but for the coming and going of the days.

  Mornings came with dreary grey, scant light slipping through arrow slits in narrow blades. Irena woke to the ache in her shoulders. To old bruises finally healing. To the distant, ever reliable sound of Lira working below: kindling being coaxed aflame, water being poured, and pots set on hooks.

  Days of study blurred together. Twice, the Marchwardens came again with their carts and their sheep and their banners bearing the ridiculous winged rabbit. Twice, Irena watched from the tower slit as they fed the dragon, as the ward flared and settled, as the pattern of their comings and goings resolved in her head into something she might one day prise apart.

  Beyond the walls of the tower, the weather shifted. Snow dusted the peaks one day and melted the next. Wind howled relentlessly, only to fall away into an unnerving stillness as the weather broke over the mountain. The dragon slept through it all, only reminding the world that it existed with intermittent rumbling from deep in its colossal throat, no storm nor hail able to interrupt its dreaming slumber.

  And throughout all this, Princess Irena Vaudrin hunched over her table, and her world shrank down to ink and parchment.

  She lived in that room now as much as in her bedchamber. The old wizard’s parchment lay spread on the sturdy table, still pinned in place, now her most prized possession. Around it, her notes multiplied.

  At first, there had been only one sheet. Then three. Then ten. Now, they bloomed across the tabletop in organised chaos. Columns and arrows. Little drawings of sigils copied from the scrolls. Phrases written twice, once in the old script and once in her own familiar language, as plain as she could make it, with additional context tentatively scrawled around them.

  But at some point, without her even noticing the exact moment of the shift, Irena stopped seeing the scroll as a single solid wall of unfamiliar language and started seeing it as… sections. Individual components of the whole.

  She only realised it had occurred when she found herself drawing four headings across the top of a fresh sheet of paper, with the same calm certainty she’d once brought to studying treaty clauses.

  CONJURATION, she wrote in quick strokes.

  LEVITATION.

  GLIMMER.

  ANIMATION.

  Under Conjuration, she listed every phrase, every sigil cluster in the scroll that clearly called something: lute, pipe, drum, “array of strings,” “percussive circle.”

  Under Levitation went the sections that always appeared when those things were supposed to hang or move unanchored: words that translated roughly to suspend, maintain, stabilise. Sigils that shared a distinctive loop-with-a-hook shape with the ward-stone markings outside.

  Glimmer she gave to the sections that spoke of light. Star, halo, corona, shimmer. Sigils with many intersecting lines and small radiating strokes, like little drawings of the sun.

  Animation was the densest part of the text. The places where the wizard’s hand had clearly worked hardest, passages stacked on passages. These were the instructions: rise at this pitch, fall at that, echo, ascend in sequence. The grammar of movement, wrapped around the other components like a conductor’s hand guiding a chaotic orchestra.

  She copied, circled, drew arrows, and underlined.

  She realised that the same levitation cluster cropped up, unchanged, whether the scroll spoke of lutes around the circumference or “lanterns” in the air. That the glimmer complex appeared attached to “string” and “wall” alike, whenever anything was meant to shine.

  Her earliest lessons about wizards, such as they’d been, bubbled up. Sour remarks from councillors about unpredictable hermits who refused the King’s coin. Concord sermons that spoke of sorcery as a dangerous, chaotic temptation.

  But this didn’t look like chaos. It was language. Not one she spoke yet, but she recognised it for what it was instinctively.

  Words. Repeated. Recombined. Sigils. Shared, reshaped. A system of recording magic into text. She bent forward again, heart beating faster for reasons that had nothing to do with physical exertion.

  “I can do this,” she whispered to the parchment. “ I just… have to learn how to speak the language first.”

  On that second visit, Auralie remembered her promise.

  The carts had been unloaded, Ralfus was double-checking his tally with the air of a man who would rather give his life at war than miscount a crate, and Lira stood a little apart with an armful of folded cloth, doing her best impression of being part of the furniture.

  “Princess,” Auralie said, catching Irena’s eye as the last sack went past. She reached to her belt and produced a small wrapped bundle. “As promised. A reward for good behaviour.”

  Irena stared at it and tried to look nonplussed. Tried not to look like she’d been thinking of this moment time and again.

  “What is it?” she managed.

  “Contraband,” Auralie said, with a flash of teeth. “From a friend in the city. Don’t worry, Harrow, it’s not on your list.”

  Ralfus looked up, saw only the neat parcel, and sighed. “As long as it’s not fortified spirits,” he said. “Or anything that bites.”

  “It only bites if you’re allergic to roses,” Auralie said, and pressed the bundle into Irena’s hand.

  The paper crackled under her fingers. Inside, when she cautiously unwrapped a corner, lay two small glass vials, stoppered and wax-sealed. Even through the wax, a heady and delightful scent escaped: warm and floral, a blend of rose and something sharper, like citrus and crushed herbs. They were bath oils, the sort that had once been poured for her by the cupful into steaming marble tubs in the royal baths at her palace home.

  Heat flared in Irena’s face, ridiculous and immediate. “You didn’t have to—” she began, then heard herself and flailed for hauteur. “This is unnecessary. I manage well enough with— with soap.”

  “I’m certain the King’s daughter ‘manages well enough,’” Auralie said, amusement softening her words. “Consider it a courtesy. Nothing more.”

  Irena’s mouth opened and closed. “Thank you,” she managed to say at last, all but blurting it out, and wanting to die immediately afterwards.

  Auralie’s gaze dipped, just for a breath, to the place where Irena’s fingers curled protectively around the little vials, then back to her eyes. “You’re welcome, Princess.”

  Behind them, Lira stood very still, the folded cloth pressed against her chest. She watched the exchange with wide eyes, jealousy and something more complicated knotting under her ribs.

  Bath oils. For the princess who had once had an entire staff of attendants to heat and scent her water, now exiled to a tower with a single halfling maid and a dented copper tub. From a knight who was supposed to be part of the lock on her prison, not someone sending small luxuries through the bars.

  Lira said nothing. At first.

  When Auralie turned away to mount up, Lira stepped forward quietly and took the parcel from Irena with careful hands. “I’ll put these somewhere safe, Your Highness,” she murmured.

  She did not meet Irena’s eyes. But she held the vials a little too tightly as she carried them inside.

  Irena, left with the ghost of rose and crushed herbs on her fingertips, watched her go and felt an absurd, prickling awareness settle in her chest… It wasn’t guilt, precisely. It wasn’t even quite embarrassment to have been seen just so. Something else settled under her ribs whenever she remembered Auralie’s flash of teeth, the low, easy confidence of her voice when she’d said contraband like it was a joke they shared.

  She tried afterwards to bury that feeling in her studies.

  “Ascendens,” she muttered, tapping the page with a quill. “Could be ascending, could be rising. But the way it has been paired with chorda…”

  She flipped to another one of her sheets. The one she’d labelled Shared Roots.

  CHORDA. Literal? string, cord, gut. Metaphorical? line, tension.

  Elsewhere, she’d recorded the potential purposes of the scroll, citing where in the original text she'd derived these insights.

  “‘Star and string in concert,’” she read under her breath, tracing the ink with the tip of the feather. “‘Autonomous ascending notes, each possessing its own motive force.’”

  Satisfaction coursed through her veins. Even these short sentences had been hard won, the words teased out by comparing the script on the scroll to phrases drilled into her since childhood.

  Old hymns in honour of her ancestors had used similar constructions. She remembered having to copy them out in the royal chapel as punishment for calling a picture of one of the Concord’s lesser saints “a remarkably ugly man with a remarkably long nose.” Elene had been scandalised, but she’d giggled until they were caught, and the priest had made them both write the verses ten times over until their wrists had cramped.

  He would be similarly scandalised to know that, in the end, those lines had taught her how to decipher wizardry.

  “‘Autonomous ascending notes,’” she repeated, something about it feeling right to her. “A performance…”

  The phrase that had cinched that concept for her was one buried two-thirds of the way down the scroll, in a section so dense with sigils that it had taken her three days just to copy them out without making any obvious mistakes.

  There, in one of the inset texts that seemed placed to explain a component of those sigils, the old wizard had written of “the song that plays itself.”

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  No mere reference to chords and rooms and the summons of motive forces.

  The phrase, the name, The Song That Plays Itself glittered at the heart of it all, laden with meaning that Irena had only just started to grasp. Irena imagined a concert of stars and strings.

  A hall filled with music, with celebration. Answer to the wards that kept her here. No key to her prison. A mere party trick.

  And yet, disappointment never came, because that party trick was very intentionally designed. It seemed to be written to obey rules. Its sigils and diagrams were set on the page according to a very logical scaffolding. It suggested that there was something more at play here than a little music.

  “If you can summon a lute,” she murmured one afternoon, tracing the lines, “you can summon anything built along the same pattern. If you can make one thing float, you can make another. It’s all… it’s all the same rules. Probably.”

  She sat back, rubbing ink-stained fingertips against her temple.

  “Your Highness.”

  Lira’s voice, soft but firm, disturbed Irena’s train of thought. She blinked and looked up.

  The halfling stood in the doorway of the library with a bowl in her hands. Steam curled from it. She had flour on her cheek and worry at the corners of her mouth.

  “You didn’t come down,” Lira said. “It’s past midday. Again.”

  “I confess, I must have lost track,” Irena said automatically. She glanced at the arrow slit, noticed the sun was much higher than she’d realised, and grimaced. “Fine. I may have lost several tracks.”

  Lira stepped closer and set the bowl down carefully on the only clear patch of table she could find. Her eyes quickly flicked over the scroll and Irena’s notes with the same mix of superstition and reluctant fascination that they always carried when magic was mentioned.

  “Have you eaten at all?” She asked, even though she already knew the answer.

  Irena opened her mouth to say yes, just so she could justify her time at the desk. Her stomach answered first with a loud, traitorous growl.

  “... Not recently,” she was forced to admit.

  Lira sighed. That tiny exhalation somehow carried more exasperation than any lecture Irena’s tutors had ever given her.

  “Then eat first,” she said. “And stare at wizard scribbles after.”

  “They are not—” Irena began.

  “— ‘wizard scribbles,’ yes, I know,” Lira said. “They’re important. But so is not fainting when you stand up.”

  She picked up the bowl again and held it out, eyebrows raised. Irena surrendered, took it, and perched on the edge of the stool. As she ate, she caught Lira still glancing at the scroll out of the corner of her eye.

  “It shan’t bite,” Irena said between spoonfuls of porridge. “It is merely on parchment. I assure you, there is no curse.”

  “So you keep saying,” Lira murmured.

  “Do you want to hear what I have learned, or not?” Irena asked more sharply than she meant to.

  Lira’s gaze snapped from the scroll to Irena’s face. Her eyes softened a little.

  “Yes,” she quietly admitted. “I do. I like it when you talk about it…”

  Irena swallowed her mouthful a little too hard, almost choking as her chest did something strange, but did her best to hide her fluster.

  “Very well,” she said, setting her spoon to one side. “Listen, then, because I believe that I have managed to discern what this scroll is actually for…”

  It took the day to explain every little detail she had uncovered so far. It wasn’t until that night, when they’d retreated from the library, down to the kitchen so that Lira could serve their proper dinner of stew and coarse bread, that Irena finally got to her most recent breakthrough.

  Lira watched her warily over the rim of her bowl as Irena spread one of her cleaner sheets on the table between them, smoothing it with the flat of her hand.

  “I thought when I first prised that thing open, that it might be some grand magic spell,” Irena said, “Or a key I could turn. To open the wards. Something inherently useful to us in our current predicament.”

  “And it isn’t?” Lira asked.

  “It is,” Irena said. “Eventually. But not like that. It is a spell for a… party.”

  Lira blinked. “A party.”

  “Not the sort that you would care for,” Irena added, a remark which made Lira look particularly incredulous. “Unless you really like listening to lutes. I have discerned that it is a ritual to fill a room with music and light. Instruments that… appear, somehow. That float. That play themselves.” She tapped the page. “The Song That Plays Itself. That is what the author, presumably Thalen, called it.”

  Lira’s nose wrinkled. “The mad wizard?”

  “Thalen the Archmagus,” Irena said automatically, then grimaced. “Yes. The mad wizard. And he was not mad, not in the way they tell stories about. From what I can tell, he was… meticulous. Pedantic. Arrogant, certainly, but look—”

  She pointed to the four headings she’d written.

  “You see, I have broken it down into its constituent parts. This section calls upon the instruments. That section makes them hang in the air. This one paints them with light. And this—” she circled ANIMATION briskly “—tells everything where to move and when.”

  Lira leaned in despite herself, eyes following where Irena pointed.

  “I’ve seen this pattern of organising text into logic structures before,” Irena went on. “Not with magic. I have certainly never seen text that is supposed to represent magic before. With laws and treatises. And, later, when those same proclamations were adapted into Solar Hymnody and musical theology so that it was easy for the smallfolk to remember.” Irena winced, remembering who she was talking to. She glanced at Lira, who was still focused on the sheet and didn’t seem to have taken offence, so she continued. “You do remember the proclamations that the King’s heralds read out at festival?”

  “Only when they droned loud enough to be heard over the crowd,” Lira said.

  “They reused phrases,” Irena said, warming to her subject. “Lines about loyalty, about taxes, about the sanctity of this or that. Such as what to eat and when, which shifted from civic ordinances and supply management to moral conjecture over the centuries. Always the same phrases, just rearranged to fit the new text. This is like that. The same little phrases are used over and over wherever they are needed. Like how each generation of scribe learns by copying from the last to be certain they have made no mistakes.”

  She flipped the sheet, showing where she’d copied a levitation sigil from the scroll and then drawn the same shape beside a rubbing she’d taken from one of the ward-stones outside.

  “Here,” she said. “This hooked loop. It repeats wherever something is to be held off the ground, on both the scroll and on the stones around the tower. I believe it to represent a verb. Lift. Or hold. Or both. I think.”

  Lira’s gaze flicked between the two drawings. Her brow furrowed.

  “It looks like a child’s drawing of a duck,” she said doubtfully.

  “Well, language has to look like something,” Irena said. “The letters in your prayer book are hardly any prettier.”

  “That’s why we add pictures to the pages,” Lira muttered.

  Irena huffed a laugh despite herself.

  “The point is that, if I can work out which parts of the song spell are which, which ones are conjuration, which are levitation, which are glimmer, which are animation, then I can start thinking about how to apply those pieces. Use them and apply them separately. If you can summon and float a lute, I can hardly imagine what would stop you from floating a chair,” she said.

  Lira went very still.

  “A… chair,” she repeated.

  “Yes,” Irena said. “Or a stone. Or a crate. Or—”

  She stopped herself, remembering she had an audience who thought her grandmother’s stories about wizard-madness were medical advice. She softened her tone.

  “I shall not throw myself off the tower and hope the spell catches me,” she said, holding Lira’s gaze. “I am not that stupid.”

  Lira looked unconvinced.

  “I am going to start small,” Irena said firmly. “A pebble. A spoon. A stool. If it will hold a stool, it will hold a person, but that does not mean we test it that way first.”

  Lira relaxed a fraction. “You make it sound very simple,” she said. “Like baking bread. First you mix this, then that, and in the end you get a loaf.”

  “It is more like writing a song,” Irena said. “First you decide the rhythm, then the notes, then the words, and in the end you get something worth listening to. Or at least something that does not make people cover their ears.”

  She sat back, forgetting her stew entirely now, hands moving as she spoke.

  “Think about it, Lira. If I can pick out the part of the spell that makes things light up, perhaps I can use it to see the wards instead of only feeling them. If I can see them, maybe I can better understand how they work. If I can understand that…” She laughed once, sharp and bright. “Well. The locks are all likely built from the same few principles. The more you know about one…”

  Lira watched her, spoon suspended halfway to her mouth.

  “You really believe that,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question.

  “I have to,” Irena said simply. “It is that, or accept that I will rot in this tower forever.”

  The words hung between them for a moment. Lira’s eyes dropped to the table, to Irena’s ink-stained hands.

  “You sound different when you talk about this,” Lira murmured.

  “Different how?” Irena asked, caught off guard.

  “Less…” Lira’s nose wrinkled as she searched for the word. “Less like you’re arguing with people who aren’t in the room.”

  Irena blinked.

  “I am addressing you,” she said. “Who else would I be arguing with?”

  “The King. The baron. The priest. The… everyone else,” Lira said. “When you talk about them, you get so angry. When you talk about this—” she gestured at the notes, at the product of her study “—you sound like you did when you told me about your great-grandmother’s war. Like you’re… there. Like there’s nothing to worry about. Even when it’s just ink and paper. It’s nice.”

  Heat bloomed in Irena’s chest. It was not the same intense heat that Auralie’s smirk sparked, or the furious blush that came with her humiliation at the hands of the Baron’s men. It was slower, deeper, edged with something like appreciation and something else she couldn’t quite name.

  “No one ever cared that much about my studies at court,” Irena said lightly. “Unless it was to ask why I had fallen asleep on the chancery balcony again. It always felt like a punishment. Like something I had to do. Like, only my brothers’ education really mattered.”

  “They were idiots then,” Lira said.

  The words came out without hesitation. As soon as they were spoken, Lira seemed to realise what she’d said. Her ears went pink. She ducked her head quickly, as if retreating from the audacity of calling the royal family and their retainers idiots.

  Irena found, to her own surprise, that she was smiling.

  “Eat your stew,” she said gently. “If I am to throw myself out of the tower with wizardry, I would prefer my accomplice to be well fed.”

  Lira made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh.

  “I am not your accomplice,” she said.

  “We’ll see,” Irena answered.

  “And you’re not throwing yourself from the tower!” Lira realised, huffing.

  “We’ll see.”

  Irena picked up her spoon again. The stew had cooled, but she barely noticed. Her mind was already turning back to the mechanics of magic, fitting them together like puzzle pieces.

  Across the table, Lira watched her, the soft lamplight catching on the curve of her cheek and the line of her jaw. There was fear in her eyes still—of wizardry, of dragons, of the sheer audacity of what Irena proposed. But threaded through it, more and more each day, was an odd little glimmer of pride.

  She did not yet have words for that, either.

  Later, when the bowls were stacked and the embers banked low, they climbed the stair together. Their footsteps echoed in the spiral well, Irena’s longer stride and Lira’s quicker, lighter one falling into an awkward but familiar rhythm. At the level of Lira’s small chamber, the halfling paused with her hand on the latch.

  “Goodnight, Your Highness,” she said, dipping a little curtsey that had become less rigid in the past weeks. The corners of her mouth lifted, just a little. “Try not to start any magic parties without warning me. It’ll be hard to sleep.”

  “I shall blow a horn first,” Irena said, meeting her smile. “… Sleep well, Lira.”

  Irena turned to climb the remaining steps to her own room—and stopped.

  She’d climbed these stairs a hundred times in the last month. Always with her attention either behind her, checking that Lira had gone safely in, or ahead, thinking of the scroll and the notes and bruises that left her debating herself into exhaustion.

  Now, for once, she let her gaze turn upwards. The stairway wound up two more levels before ending. She had been to the top of the stairs before. Of course she had. The last step led to the landing, where the narrow door and the rotten, collapsed passage were located.

  The stretch of undecorated stone wall above. But tonight, something about the lamplight caught her eye in a different way. She stepped across the small landing outside Lira’s door, then back one pace, craning her neck.

  The ceiling above the final landing was not smooth. Above where the stairway terminated, a circular opening yawned, rimmed with carved blocks. It wasn’t large—perhaps the width of a banquet table—but it was part of the architecture. A hole, but not some collapsed part of the roof. A stone oculus set directly above the stair’s end.

  Through it, in the nighttime gloom, she could just make out the suggestion of another space. Not the night sky outside the tower. Another interior space. The faint curve of a railing, tracing the oculus’ edge like the lip of a balcony. The regular shadows of beams or shelving beyond. Dust motes floated in the air, catching the thin spill of moonlight that had found its way down from some unseen higher slit.

  There was a room up there.

  “I’ve never…” she murmured, and realised, with annoyance, that she truly hadn’t simply looked up. In all the time she’d spent exploring the tower’s accessible levels, she had never once thought to stop here and actually look up.

  The tower had a ground-floor hall, the kitchen and various servants’ quarters, Lira’s bedroom, her own bedchamber, the gutted library, and the dilapidated, collapsing floor. She had endlessly fixated on the sealed door to the lower passages, walked the circle of stones on the tower’s perimeter, and mapped the cracks in the walls where drafts snuck in. She had assumed, without realising she was doing it, that you could simply walk to everything worth reaching.

  Now, staring up at that half-visible balcony, she knew better.

  She climbed to the very top of the stairway and moved carefully, pressing her palm to the cold stone of the wall. She walked around the narrow landing, looking for… something. The hint of a removed ladder. Holes in the wall where rungs had once been set. A seam in the stone that might mark a hidden door. A ring, a hook, anything.

  There was nothing.

  The oculus gaped above. The tower’s higher reaches waited just out of her grasp, a smug silence.

  “Of course,” she muttered under her breath. “A tower without at least one unreachable room would hardly be worthy of a tale.”

  Her mind raced, already slotting this new information into the list of problems she faced. The sealed door below: a downward mystery. The oculus above: an upward one. Between them, the scroll: a set of magical instructions regarding lifting, light, and movement.

  She imagined, for a ridiculous moment, herself drifting harmlessly up through that opening, hair floating around her like a saint’s halo in a Concord fresco, borne by magic. It was such an absurd image that she almost laughed out loud.

  “Not yet,” she said to the space overhead. “I have not so much as worked out how to get this spell off the page… You shall have to wait your turn.”

  The tower did not yet answer. She picked up the lamp again and, with one last look, turned to go to bed.