Tempered by the Will

13 - Appearances

She could be bitter, Vica thought. She could tell him to drop whatever he was doing and make himself useful. And if he really was in the middle of something already, she could tell him that she didn't need him anyway.

But it irked her to think that she was putting so much effort into being angry. She'd promised herself already that she was done with his attitudes and done with trying to make things right between them when he was the one who ought to be groveling at her feet. Who else but Vica would have tried to mend fences when she was the one who had been captured, kidnapped, and forced to endure every one of his torments? Was there anyone in the world as easily manipulable as she was?

"I'm doing runework," she announced when she reached the darkened lounge room where she could sense Constantine's presence. She couldn't actually see him yet - his presence filled the room, making it hard to pinpoint which shadow he was hiding in. But she was sure he could hear her, and that was enough. "If you get on the roof, you can tell us if anyone's coming."

There. She was offering the opportunity, but not asking him to take it. It was up to him whether he -

"You need my help?"

"No," she said automatically. "On second thought, never mind."

But before she could spin around on her heel and march away, Constantine spoke up once more.

"I'm on your side, Vica. I'm not the one you need to worry about stabbing you in the back."

Excuse him? She stopped mid-stride, foot hovering in the air for a second before she decided to set it back down. She shouldn't bother. She should just walk and pretend she hadn't heard a thing, should just forget -

"Not that I'd be surprised if you did," she said, voice waspish and unimpressed. "But it's a little less about backstabbing and a little more about you being an asshole. I don't have to act like I like you. So don't think I'll be trying very hard."

"You don't have to like me to know I'm the only one you can trust right now."

She turned around to see him sliding out of the darkness from wherever he had been lurking. She didn't understand why he hadn't lit a lamp, at least - or magelights, whatever it was that Felix had called them. Sitting here in the dark, didn't he think it was just a bit creepy? Despite herself, she eased back one more step as Constantine glided forward, his every footstep silent on the wooden floor. That was another thing that unsettled her about him: how quiet he was. He used to have a quip ready at any given moment, but it had been a while since she'd heard anything clever from him.

Good. She didn't feel like being friends right now.

Still, it was a little sinister.

"Trust you?" she repeated. "Sure. I think you'll help me for as long as you feel like it. So either do it or don't, I don't care."

"You should care."

"It's not a discussion."

She didn't like this. Trying to act friendly and approachable now, after weeks of treating her like so much garbage? Not an ounce of respect when he had wanted things his way. She didn't care what he said his motives were; was she so cheap that a pretty face and a hard body made such disrespect acceptable? No wonder he had no allies. Not many friends, either. Obviously, there was something wrong with Yezia to have fallen in love with a man who treated even the ones he cared about with such scorn.

Constantine was standing directly in front of her now, and she grimaced and narrowed her eyes as she stared up into his face. It said something that she believed he really did care about her - but how sad and miserable of him to not know how to act like it.

"Go. The only mages in the area are you, Felix, and your elf. They're already outside."

How handy of him to know where everyone was at all times. She raised one shoulder in a half-shrug and turned away.

"I preferred it when you took my help for granted," he said suddenly. "You''ll need to lean on me sooner or later. Save yourself the trouble, make it sooner."

To think that she had just been on the verge of fractionally forgiving him. Good thing she hadn't been so hasty. "Don't ask me to lean on you after you worked so hard to let me down. And you did it so well, too."

She moved away, leaving him behind in the hall, but she granted him one last sharp reprimand over her shoulder.

"Just so you know, your cockiness is only endearing when I'm in the mood for it. And I'm not."

* * * * *

It was refreshing to be able to speak the way she wanted to. When he'd first taken her captive, she'd learned quickly to keep her mouth shut and speak only when she thought it was safe. As time went on, she'd opened up - but had become different, weaker. She had become twisted and bent, eager to please. And then she had ended up falling for the very man who had attacked and degraded her, all because she was too soft in the head to resist his seductions.

If she told anyone, if she confessed the whole story without hiding a thing, she knew whoever listened would ask how she could humiliate herself that way. And she wouldn't have an answer.

But things were going to be different now. This wasn't about his anti-magic, his manipulative charms, or even about her pride. This was about her - and what she wanted, not him.

"You look angry," Bren noted, and she looked up from where she'd clenched her fists in her lap. He, too, was sitting on the grass just across from her, although he was kneeling while she had chosen to settle down on crossed legs.

"No," she lied. "Just thinking. Anyway, what now? And where's Felix?"

"He mentioned something about a message. I believe he's been summoned." He sounded unconcerned as he straightened his pale blue robe around himself and pushed his sleeves up to his elbows, but Vica narrowed her eyes and frowned.

"You think it has to do with me or Constantine? Maybe someone saw us." She waited for him to react, but when he did nothing but shrug in response, she hesitantly pulled off her borrowed green robe and left it folded on the ground beside her.

"...It's possible," the half-elf conceded a few seconds later. "But it's nothing to worry about yet. No one will invade until they are absolutely sure, and there are few seers who can penetrate the wards around the manor in this short a time. So I would say we are well protected from farsight...at least for now."

"How long would it take to, um - penetrate the wards, then?"

"I can't say. It's been years since I've been here, and seers are rare enough that I haven't met another since I was a child. But I can say with confidence that with my weather magic, it would take me at least several days to be able to read the energies coming and going through this domain with any real clarity."

Seers, wards, weather magic - for the first time, a nervous thread of apprehension snaked through her and pooled in the pit of her stomach. She'd grown up ignorant, learning only the things that Philio deemed harmless for her to know, things colored by his...what had Felix called it? His dogmatic ways. And now she was trying to plunge headfirst into unknown waters, trusting in her strength as she had never done before.

But brawn, even magical brawn, couldn't possibly be enough to overcome everything that would crowd the path ahead of her. Surely she needed - experience, wisdom, or at least some raw talent and intelligence. She had none of those. She had been an awful student and slow to learn from her mistakes, but here she was, watching Bren bend over and begin tracing his fingers in an invisible shape on the grass.

...Actually, what was he doing? He was drawing a slow swirl with the forefinger of his right hand while making jagged lines next to that with his left thumb, but nothing was appearing under his touch. Constantine's fault, probably. She could still feel him vaguely within range of her senses, and maybe Bren was more vulnerable to his anti-magic than she was -

"You need to train yourself to be able to see magical signatures," he said suddenly. "Duke Aventine probably has a stronger one that's more suitable for this, but you'll have to make do with mine until he returns. Do you see what I've written here?"

She narrowed her eyes and peered hard at the flattened grass. "...No?"

"Understandable. This is ordinarily one of the first things human mages are taught, well before they learn to do anything else, and for good reason. It's not easy to learn backwards. But you have old magic instincts in you, so you should be able to manage with a little time and effort."

Old magic instincts. Something about that sounded right even though she had next to no idea what that really meant. But still, she wasn't seeing anything at all. She bent over and planted her hands firmly on her knees as she stared hard at the empty space where Bren had apparently drawn some rune.

...Nothing.

"Well, what do I do now?" she asked. "Nothing's happening."

"Touch it." Bren drew his hand away and nodded down at the ground. "Trace what I wrote and it'll help you learn the shape of it. And in time, that will make it easier for you to open your mind's eye, since you'll know what to look for."

"But I don't remember what you drew. It would be upside down for me, too - oh!" Vica jerked her fingers away from the grass when she felt a faint tingle dancing at the tips like moving needle points. She hadn't known what to expect; she couldn't recall ever feeling someone else's raw essence this way.

She held her hand to her chest and grimaced. She didn't like it. It felt unpleasantly intimate, like digging around in someone's drawers and finding their underclothes folded inside.

"Why don't we fetch a stick so you can draw it in the dirt," she proposed a moment later. Her eyes darted up from the grass to Bren's face; he hadn't said anything while she worked out her discomfort and was simply watching her. "It would be better than looking at nothing. I mean, I can I'd learn faster that way."

"This is a joint exercise in rune literacy, visual memory, tactile memory, and magic sensing," he said with a neutral smile, and he gestured at the grass again. "If you try to make this easy, you'll never learn it the way you need to. Does a baby learn to breathe, nurse, and cry separately? It does all these things together, and you'll do the same. If you are patient, it will come."

"...A baby's born already knowing how to do those things. How am I supposed to learn runes so quickly? I can't even read that well in Common. I wrote a letter for the first time in ages to a friend not too long ago, and it took me a good hour to pen that one page -"

"Oh? Then that's something else we'll need to work on while we have the chance. Assuming you'll try the diplomatic approach before resorting to violence, you'll need to be able to articulate your demands on paper, not just through speech. Which we'll also need to work on, to be frank."

She swallowed a reluctant groan and pressed her fingers back down on the ground. She didn't like this - didn't want to give him any other ideas about how to better 'educate' her. This was already challenging as it was, not to mention embarrassing. She had put on a confident facade ever since entering the Capital, but what did Felix really think of her? What did Bren think of her? A 'bush mage' whose literacy even in one tongue was lacking, not to mention in the language of power: the only thing she was good at was hurting others.

"What is it supposed to look like?" she asked. "What color is it?"

"Your perception of magical signatures is uniquely filtered through your own experiences and no one else's. It will be a combination of all your senses and others as well - senses you have yet to unlock but will soon. What feels one way to me will feel a different way to you, and the same goes for what it 'looks' like, so there is no way to guess how you will perceive it."

"So I just - wait? How long does that take?"

"Well...ordinarily, you would be seeing something already, but your circumstances are -"

She did groan aloud this time. It was too much to have hoped she would turn out to be an unexpected talent at this; she should have known she would be worse than the norm. Then again, there was the other issue too, and she was sure that it was holding her back -

"Constantine is coming closer now," she griped. "Why's he not on the roof? Where is he, do you see him?"

Bren peered up somewhere past her while she continued to focus her attention on the grass. "You can feel him at all times?" he queried, his tone casual and light - but her gaze flickered up to zero on his pale eyes for a second.

"Yes," she said. "I still don't understand how you can't."

"When I am channeling a spell, I can feel my power weaken and dissolve in his aura. But I sense nothing otherwise."

"What about when you're drawing runes?"

"I imagine that his presence would make it impossible for me to invoke power with them, or to leave a signature behind the way I did now with this." He gestured down at whatever invisible mark he had left on the ground between them. "But he must not have been close enough to negate it entirely. I find it strange that you are more sensitive to his Resistance than I am."

She shrugged. "I - it's hard to explain. I feel him from a distance, but it doesn't mean he's suppressing me from there. It's like when you, um...I don't know. When you smell something cooking on the stove but you're outside the house, and it's wafting toward you on a hill. I can still use magic if he's far away enough without an issue, it's just - irritating."

"Ah."

"Like now. He's coming closer again." With a grimace, she twisted around and put her hand over her brow so that she could squint against the light as she searched the eaves of the manor's sloping roof. Nothing. But he was definitely hovering nearby, maybe he was using some kind of sneaky assassin trick to hide himself even in broad daylight.

"I believe he's on the balcony."

The balcony? She followed the direction of Bren's pointed finger to the estate's third floor, it's highest - and found that he was correct. There Constantine was, leaning on his forearms over the carved white railing as he watched them from a distance. She scowled.

"I can't focus," she muttered, but just as she planted her palms on the ground to push herself up to a stand, Bren stopped her with a steadying hand hovering over her lap.

"You will need to learn to focus too, then." He smiled as she reluctantly settled back down. "Constantine is not the only Resistant around. Some mages keep one on hand, in the shadows....You have an advantage in that you can sense their presence before they render you completely powerless, but that blade seems double edged: hone your focus, keep trying."

She threw another glare behind her, knowing that Constantine would be able to see it even from this distance. He'd better. And why was he just standing there in the first place? He was supposed to be watching for intruders, prying eyes, unwanted guests, not watching her. Useless. Useless, and an i***t.

It took her a few more seconds to admit to herself that there was another reason that she didn't want him watching her: she didn't want him to see her at her worst, struggling with even the most elementary aspects of magic principle. During their time together, she could blame her weakness on his anti-magic, but here, now...

"Focus, Vica. This is important."

She dragged a rough hand down her face to drag herself out of the stray thoughts that had threatened to crowd her mind. She didn't have time to worry about appearances, least of all one that she was putting on as a front for Constantine. Grudges could come later; now was not the time.

"Right," she said. "On it."