I tossed the crystal to him, and he caught it deftly.
A slight frown developed as he turned the crystal over in his hands. “Curious.” He raised his head toward me.
I showed him a handful of other crystals. “If you think that’s impressive, you should see the sword.” I tapped the hilt of the weapon at my hip.
Father didn’t take the bait. Instead, he turned to Sera and handed her the crystal. “You’ll need to retrieve something more impressive than this on your next trip in the tower.”
She nodded curtly.
I set my backpack on the ground, folding my arms.
Apparently, I was setting the low, low bar for being considered a child of Magnus Cadence.
Father probably expected me to fight back, to compete, to try to prove myself… and for Sera to have to try harder to measure up to that.
He’d never understood.
His approval had stopped being important to me the moment he’d written his elder son off as dead.
“Well, this is all very exciting.” I tried to sound as unenthusiastic as possible. “But, as you’ve both made it clear you understand, I’m an exhausted coward who wants nothing but luxury, so I’m off to bathe and bed.”
I gave Sera one last look as I walked past her. Her expression had shifted from playful to contemplative. I gave her an exaggerated wink.
I wasn’t going to compete with her for Father’s approval, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find a way to make this into entertainment of my own.
Chapter V — Orientation
I had a couple weeks between earning my attunement and the start of the academic year, and I intended to make good use of them.
My first matter of business was trying to figure out how to use my attunement. We had a number of books on attunements in the library. Unfortunately, we didn’t have many on enchanting. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first Enchanter in the family. That wasn’t exactly an honor. We’d made our family name in battle, not as crafters or merchants.
From what I could glean from the more general texts on attunements, most people could use their attunements intuitively. If I was a Shaper or an Elementalist, I could already be hurling bolts of raw mana. According to a book called Styles of Spellcasting, the methodology would depend on where I received my mark.
Hand marks are the most common, which begat our tradition of wearing gloves to hide them. Those attuned with hand marks excel at accurately directing spells at distant targets.
Leg marks allow for instantaneous delivery of powerful spells through physical contact. They are the favored marks for Guardians and other physically adept attunements.
Heart marks can channel mana through the entire body before dispersing it through a spell. This requires intense focus and slows the casting of the spell, but increases its intensity.
Lung marks allow the attuned to fill the air with mana as they speak the words of an incantation, directing their spells across a broad area. They are exceptional in large confrontations, such as siege warfare.
Finally, mind marks enhance the attuned’s ability to sense and manipulate the mana inside their body. This can potentially allow mind-marked to construct spells inside their own bodies purely through focusing their minds. This is an excellent attunement location for Menders, who can heal themselves simply through concentration, as well as shadows, who can use it to cast illusions without any warning.
That description made my own mind mark sound pretty interesting, until I read a bit further and found out that Enchanters could only enchant items, not people.
That was disappointing. I’d been looking forward to permanently enhancing myself somehow. Maybe an enchanting-specific book would give me a better idea of what I could do.
I did pick up a few more things about enchanting from the few books we had, but not enough that I could actually practice it at home. They were more about theory and history, written mostly for non-Enchanters who wanted to learn about the basic concepts. That was frustrating — whenever I walked by Sera’s room, I could hear her practicing some kind of spell incantations, presumably already mastering her Summoner abilities.
Occasionally, I’d even see an icy glow emanating from her room or see water dripping down the side of her door.
Aside from studying my attunement without success, I had another thing to research: the symbol on the glove I’d found on the body in the prison. That, fortunately, was simple enough. We had a book on heraldry, and it was one of the first entries. House Cornell.
I wrote them a letter explaining what I’d found, apologized for my failure to save their child, and enclosed the glove.
I left the letter anonymous and paid a courier to deliver it. I gave the courier explicit instructions not to identify me as the sender.
It was a coward’s approach, and I knew that. They would have questions. Perhaps they’d be angry at me for coming back alive when their child had not. Maybe they’d want to thank me for giving them some closure.
Maybe if my mother had received a letter like that one about Tristan, she’d have stayed with my father. Or maybe it would have just made things worse.
All I knew was that the uncertainty of Tristan’s fate had eaten me inside for years, and I wouldn’t condemn another family to that same condition if I could avoid it.
Maybe I was a coward, but a coward’s gift was better than no gift at all.
Before I left on the train to the Lorian Heights academy, I spent one last morning sitting in a grassy field where Tristan and I used to play, and I remembered.
He was tall. So much taller than I was. Taller than our father, even at fourteen. At nine, I hadn’t quite hit my growth spurt yet.
With his long, thin limbs, climbing the tree must have seemed like a trivial effort.
To me, it was an exercise in terror just to scramble up to the lowest branches.
“C’mon!”
I looked around uncertainly. Inside the house, Sera was playing a game of Valor against Father again. Lately, she was even starting to win a few rounds here and there.
Mother was out on business again, and our other retainers were all inside, tending to various chores.
There was no one nearby to catch me if I fell.
Tristan was already a good ten feet above me. High enough that looking up at him made me feel sick. Could I survive a fall from that height? Maybe hitting the branches on the way down would slow me enough that I’d just crack some bones open.
But he smiled brightly at me, encouraging as he always had been, and I fought past the fear.
My arm muscles were pretty strong for my age. Even then, I’d spent a lot of time practicing with weapons. Mostly the traditional ones like sword and spear. I didn’t have enough mana at that point to use a dueling cane with any degree of seriousness.
So, pulling myself up wasn’t a problem; it was just a matter of being able to reach a good branch in the first place.