She wished she had thought of all this much sooner. She really did need to learn to think these things through more quickly. If she had popped up to three or four times rooftop height as soon as she knew what had happened, instead of dashing off almost at random, she might have recaptured more than just the bowl, spoon, and coatrack.
Of course, she couldn’t have done it instantly. The problem with all of these spells-Tracel’s Levitation, Varen’s Levitation, and the Spell of Optimum Strength-was that they required preparation time and specialized ingredients. Putting them in Tracel’s Adaptable Potion would make them all easily portable and instantly available, but the potion itself needed a full day to cool after preparation.
She didn’t remember just how long Varen’s Levitation took; not long, but longer than drinking a potion. Tracel’s Levitation only took about eight or ten minutes, but still, it wasn’t exactly convenient to carry a rooster’s toe, a raindrop caught in midair, and the rest of the ingredients around in her pouch.
And the Spell of Optimum Strength took three hours to prepare.
Out of all her fifty-three spells, though, those were the only ones she could see any possible use for in pursuing and capturing escaped furniture. Light spells and pyrotechnics and protective runes just weren’t going to help.
She turned another page in Ithanalin’s book, past the last spell she knew, and found herself looking at the Spell of the Obedient Object.
This was the one Ithanalin had promised to teach her. She read the description.
It would enchant an object so that it would obey a single command when a specified condition was met-for example, a bell might be enchanted to ring whenever the wind blew from the east.
Perhaps, she thought, she could enchant the furniture to come back home when she spoke Ithanalin’s name...
But then she saw that the wizard casting the spell had to touch the object with his or her athame to complete the enchantment. If she had the furniture where she could touch it, she wouldn’t need to enchant it!
This was all horribly frustrating. She read on.
Fendel’s Familiar, the Servile Animation, Ellran’s Immortal Animation-she couldn’t sec how those would help, even if she could perform them, and glancing through the instructions she doubted she could. Ellran’s took two days of exacting ritual, and about two dozen ingredients ranging from things as prosaic as salt to items as exotic as the mummified left wing of a carnivorous bat.
(Actually, she was fairly certain Ithanalin had the mummified left wing of a bat in the drawer just to the right of where she sat, as she had used it in learning the Spell of Stupefaction, but she didn’t know whether it was from a carnivorous bat.)
The Creeping Darkness-she shuddered at the description of that one. Thrindle’s Instantaneous Putrefaction sounded downright disgusting. Fendel’s Soothing Euphony might help if she had to calm panicky furniture, but she looked at the list of ingredients and despaired of performing it successfully without considerable practice.
It didn’t seem, she concluded, as if Ithanalin himself knew any useful spells in this situation. Cauthen’s looked better all the time.
“Have you found anything?”
Kilisha jumped, and turned to find Yara standing in the doorway.
“I’m not sure,” Kilisha said. “I did have an idea, but I’m not sure it will work.” She hesitated, then added, “I’d need your help.”
“What is it?” Yara asked.
“I could cast a love spell on some of the missing furniture, so that it would fall madly in love with you at the slightest glimpse, or the sound of your voice. I was thinking that if I did that, and you were to walk along Wizard Street calling out for it, it would follow you home.”
“What if it’s not on Wizard Street?”
“Then you’d have to keep looking,” Kilisha said. “But it’s the best I can do with the magic I have.”
“Couldn’t we hire someone else? Pay someone for a divination?”
“Well, I suppose,” Kilisha admitted. “But that would be expensive, and it would be rather embarrassing for the master, don’t you think? I think we should try to fix things ourselves first. We can always hire someone later.”
Yara looked unhappy and uncertain.
“It’s pretty late to be hiring anyone tonight, in any ease,” Kilisha said quickly. “Why don’t we try it my way? And if it doesn’t work, in the morning you can hire someone.”
“All right,” Yara said, frowning. “But right now your supper’s ready.”
Kilisha blinked at her, then realized that yes, she was hungry. She had been so distracted that she might as well have had an enchanted bloodstone in her pocket, but now that Yara mentioned it...
“After we eat, then,” Kilisha said, hopping off the stool.
Chapter Ten
Yara insisted on putting the children to bed before trying any magic. While Kilisha gathered the ingredients for Cauthen’s Remarkable Love Spell and began the preparations, Yara was upstairs, telling the three little ones the next installment in the ongoing and highly unlikely adventures of Valder of the Magic Sword, talking steadily while she brushed out their hair. As Kilisha worked she could sometimes hear Yara’s voice, very faintly, through the ceiling.
Ithanalin’s bottle of mare’s sweat was almost empty, its contents slightly congealed and amazingly malodorous, but Kilisha thought it would be sufficient. The stallion’s tail hair came from a bundle of a dozen or so wrapped in blue tissue. The red wine came from Yara’s pantry, rather than the wizard’s workshop, and the water from the courtyard well out back.
And the faded blue thread came from the floor of the front room, of course.
When the story finally reached a good stopping point Yara tucked the children under the blankets, kissed them good night, and came downstairs and into the workshop, to find Kilisha well into the incantation. The liquid mixture had begun to glow faintly, and Kilisha could feel the magic shimmering in the air. It felt right, just the way she remembered it, and one of the things that made her a promising wizard was her instinctive feel for the flow and shape of wizardry. That was one of the Guild’s secrets; most people believed that wizardry was an entirely mechanical process of assembling ingredients, reciting words, and making gestures, and that this somehow tapped into the chaos beneath the surface of the World and forced it into a specific action, but actually the process was a good deal more dynamic than that. A talented wizard could feel when the magic was working properly and when it wasn’t, and could sense when a gesture needed to be altered, an incantation slowed or hurried, without any conscious understanding of why the change was necessary. A really good wizard could even sense whether other ingredients could be substituted, other words spoken, or the very nature of the spell somehow altered-that was how new spells were discovered.
Such wizards, wizards who could safely change spells as they went, were very rare. The ones who were able to devise multiple useful spells were little short of miraculous. Someone like Cauthen or Thrindle, let alone a one-of-a-kind genius like Fendel the Great, would be remembered for generations through the spells he created. During the Great War the military rulers had tried to force wizards who did not have this incredibly precious natural ability to develop new spells through trial and error, and had wound up with dozens of dead wizards and a good deal of damage to the surrounding landscape-but legend said Fendel could casually invent a new curse or transformation on the spot, and have it work almost every time.
Kilisha doubted she would ever reach anything near that level, but she could feel when a spell was going well, and she knew this potion was going to work exactly as intended.