“Only when I’m doing heavy work,” Anne said. Anne might be thin, but she eats enough for two or three normal people. It’s one of the side effects of life magic—life spells, especially healing, use a lot of energy, and the easiest way to supply it is from the body’s natural energy reserves.
Right now, though, I was thinking less about food and more about Anne. She was leaning back on the rock, gazing down over the valley as she ate, and I found myself noticing how the wind ruffled her hair, remembering the feel of her hands on my chest. It wasn’t the first time either, and since we’d started training, it had become harder and harder to ignore. A part of me didn’t want to ignore it, and I felt a flash of guilt. Right now Anne was in almost as much danger as me, and it was mostly my fault. Taking advantage of the fact that we’d been thrown together felt wrong . . .
I cast about for something to distract me. “Something I was wondering,” I said. “When I was in that fight yesterday, I took a hit from a lightning spell. The reason electricity has the effect that it does on the body is that it’s running along the parts that conduct electricity anyway, right? Like the nerves?”
Anne hesitated. “Partly.”
“So could you do something so that electrical shocks wouldn’t affect me?” I said. “Changing the layout of my body so that it grounds safely, or . . .”
I trailed off; Anne was shaking her head. “That’s not how it works.”
“I’ve heard of weirder alterations than that.”
Anne sighed. “Okay, rephrase: there are other mages who’d do it. It’s not how I work.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not what I do,” Anne said. “I heal bodies and I help them. I don’t modify them. I know it seems like my spells do a lot, but they don’t, not really. I don’t do anything that your body can’t do on its own.”
“I don’t think saving someone from death really counts.”
“Yes, it does,” Anne said. “Your body can recover from almost anything. The reason people die from injury isn’t because their bodies can’t fix it; it’s because they get overloaded. When I heal someone, all I do is apply a little first aid, then I channel extra energy to their body’s regeneration and guide it to make sure it heals cleanly. Your body knows how to fix itself. All it needs is a little help.”
“Okay, but what about what you’ve been doing with me? I mean, we’ve only been at this a few weeks, and already I went through two fights yesterday without getting out of breath. Even when I was training every day, I wasn’t this fit.”
“Do you know why exercise makes you fitter?”
“Uh . . . not exactly.”
“When you stress your muscles, you create micro-tears in the tissue,” Anne said. “Your body reads that and overcompensates, building the muscle back so that it’ll be stronger next time. Cardiorespiratory is the same. You strain the system and your heart enlarges, your arteries spread out and develop so that they can pump more blood and oxygen. Normally you have to take a day or two off to let your body rebuild, but if I’m here I can give your body a boost so that you’re ready to go again right away. So you can do one workout with me and get five times as much effect as you would from doing it on your own.”
“And five times as much muscle pain.”
Anne smiled. “No such thing as something for nothing. But the point is, I’m not actually doing anything that your body couldn’t do already. You could get this strong and this fit on your own, the way athletes do. It would just take you longer.”
I thought about it. “So what about the major modifications, then? Electrical shielding, bone claws . . .”
“That’s completely different. You’ve got a blueprint in your body that’s the working model for your cells—that’s how your body knows what to build and replace. To make those kind of changes, you have to actually redraw the blueprint. I’ve seen much worse things than claws. Gills, extra organs, extra limbs . . . They’re a really bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re working against your body’s design,” Anne said. “Say you want claws. Okay, so you grow some out of keratin and set them in the fingers, that’s easy enough. Then to make them retractable, you need a muscle to flex them. Except that your finger doesn’t have enough space for those muscles, so you’re going to need to enlarge it. You’re going to have to put in new nerves too, and the person is going to have to learn to use them from scratch, the way a baby does. Then on top of that, now the nerves and blood vessels to the fingers are being overstressed, because they’re having to support twice as much activity as they were designed to, and so you’ll have to modify them too, and that modification means you have to do more modifications, and so on. It’s never just one thing. Everything in your body is connected, and everything has a knock-on effect on everything else. And that’s just for a small change. The really big changes, the person has to keep coming back to get more treatments and checkups, over and over again to make sure that nothing’s going wrong. That’s why shapeshifters can’t really transform anyone except themselves. It takes so much maintenance to keep everything working right that if they did it to someone else, they’d have to stay with them twenty-four hours a day. And you don’t want to know about the side effects.”
“So, I’m guessing you don’t like the idea.”
“I don’t like the idea of modifications at all,” Anne said. “I mean, if someone’s seriously disabled, that’s one thing, but people who are perfectly healthy? Your body is fine the way it is. Why do you want to change it so badly?”
I made a noncommittal noise and Anne flashed me an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to complain. I just don’t feel as though I’m doing enough.”
“You’re helping me.”
Anne paused. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What makes someone effective in a fight?”
I looked at Anne in surprise. “As in, what qualities?”
“More or less.”
“If we’re just working off what makes someone more dangerous . . .” I stopped and thought for a second, then shrugged. “Most important is aggression and willingness to hurt the other person. Second most important is willingness to be hurt yourself. Third would be skill and knowledge, fourth would be strength and power.”
“Only fourth?”
“Who’s scarier?” I said. “A tough, six-foot, two-hundred-pound man who’s trying to steal your phone, feels guilty about it, and doesn’t want anyone to actually get hurt? Or a five-foot-nothing, one-hundred-pound woman who’s never been in a fight in her life but who honestly believes that you stole her baby?”
Anne nodded. “Why is skill above it?”
“That’s more of a judgement call,” I said. “If you’re outclassed enough in terms of power then it doesn’t matter how much skill you have. But most of the time knowing what to do’s more important than brute strength. The dumb muscle types usually end up getting into fights they can’t win.” I looked at Anne curiously. “Why are you asking?”
“Well,” Anne said. “If I’m going to be your physical trainer, do you think you could teach me how to fight?”
“Seriously?”
“I’ve never actually learnt,” Anne said. “I can run fast, but I don’t really know how to hit people or use weapons.”
“Uh . . .”
“Is there something wrong?”
“Well, I could do it,” I said. “It’s just . . . isn’t it kind of pointless? You picking up a weapon is like a soldier using a machine gun to bash someone over the head.”