Let's get out of here!

12-year-old Princess Velena Dushana was dying.

Not literally, but if boredom were a blade, she had been run through several times already. The inscription on her tomb would read, in elegant script: HERE LIES VELENA DUSHANA, SLAIN BY A LECTURE. Her private tutor, Magister Veyne, stood across the room from her as he wrote more words that she could not care less about on the chalkboard.

"Resonant transference," droned Magister Veyne as he pointed his magic rod at the word written before her, "is the principle by which a Key Tone, an instrument once channeled through a properly tempered conduit, produces a stable and repeatable magical effect."

Velena's chin sank another half inch toward the desk.

"Are you listening, Princess?"

"Every word." She snapped upright at the speed of someone caught exactly this many times before. "Resonance. Transference. Tempered conduit. I could write the textbook myself, Magister. Mine would have pictures, though. And jokes to make it more entertaining!"

"Magic," said Magister Veyne, in the tone of a man who did not believe magic and jokes belonged anywhere near each other, "is not a subject for jokes."

"Magic is exactly a subject for jokes. You're simply doing it wrong."

"Then perhaps you would care to explain it properly yourself?" He sighed.

Velena opened her mouth. A long pause followed, the specific pause of someone who knew several enormous words and not one single small one.

"It's... a note," she tried. "An unchanging note. Beneath everything."

"That is the exact definition I gave you eleven minutes ago."

"I… was… testing whether you'd notice!" Her voice lilted upwards, as though it could convince anyone at this moment.

Magister Veyne pinched the bridge of his nose. "Princess. If I asked your beloved kitchen cat to explain resonant transference, do you imagine it would understand one word of what I just said?"

"My kitchen cat Elfie doesn't understand most things, Magister. It bit the tax assessor an hour ago."

"Precisely my point. Explain it to me as though you were explaining it to that cat of yours."

Velena considered this with the enormous seriousness she reserved for problems with actual stakes. "Fine," she said. "Everyone, even my cat, has their own secret song stuck inside them. Nobody else in the whole world has the same one. You can't hear it by itself. It just sits there, being yours."

"...Continue."

"A conduit is an object that can release magic on its own. It's like a whistle. Blow into your own whistle, and your secret song comes out, and it does something. Blow into someone else's whistle, and nothing happens. Or something happens that isn't supposed to, because it's the wrong song trying to come out of the wrong hole."

Magister Veyne stared at her for a long moment.

"That," he said slowly, "is, give or take several technical inaccuracies, essentially correct."

"I told you I was smart enough that I could write a textbook!"

"Do not write that."

"Too late. I've already titled it!"

He sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a man underpaid for this much theater, and reached unto the table for his small brass rod, no longer than a quill, fine looping script etched along its body.

"Since we have apparently moved on to demonstrations," he said, "watch closely. I will only do this once."

Velena sat up so fast her chair scraped the floor.

He held the rod loose, almost careless, between two fingers, and murmured something low under his breath, a tuning fork finding its note. The air around the rod seemed to thicken, just slightly, like heat over a summer road.

Then it rang.

A feeling that arrived in Magister Veyne’s chest a half second before his ears caught up with it, low and round, and the brass rod glowed faintly silver along its grooves. A small orb of pale light lifted off the tip, hovered, spun once, and dissolved into a scatter of cold sparks that vanished before they hit the floor.

"Whoa! That’s sick!" Velena said. Strictly speaking, they aren’t words a princess was supposed to use, but it covered the moment adequately.

"That…" said Magister Veyne, tucking the rod away with the smugness of a man who had been waiting the entire lecture for an excuse to do this, "was my song, coming out of my whistle, exactly the way it's supposed to. My song is very steady. Low and reliable. A louder song would have made something brighter."

"Do it again!" Velena cheered, eyes slightly widened from excitement.

"I will not."

"Do it again and I will pay attention for the rest of the lesson!"

"You are required to pay attention for the rest of the lesson regardless."

"Hmmm… do it again and I will pay attention enthusiastically?"

The Magister's mouth twitched, the closest thing to a smile Velena had ever successfully extracted from him, and for one brief, shining moment she thought she had him.

"No," he said.

"Magister Veyne, you wound me!"

"I will recover from the guilt." He picked his chalk back up. "Now. Resonant transference requires three things to create a good Key Tone. A conduit bonded to you and only you that you will use to relay the magic. A song steady enough to come out clean. And a caster who has learned the difference between playing a song on purpose and simply making a great deal of noise."

Velena slumped back down, already mentally seeing her own tombstone again, but she kept one eye on the little brass rod in his coat pocket the entire rest of the lesson, and for once, she actually was listening.

---

"He did magic!" Velena announced the second the door shut behind them, striding down the corridor as if she'd just witnessed the founding of the kingdom. "Actual magic! There were sparks! And a glow too!"

"I heard," the elf maid, Maya, said in a calm manner. "I was standing in the room."

"It was extraordinary…!"

"It was a very small light."

"It was the principle of the thing that counts, Maya."

They turned a corner. The sides of Velena's formal dress fluttered behind her.

"I require your assistance." Velena orders.

"You always require my assistance," Maya deadpans.

"This time it's urgent!"

"It's always urgent."

"This time it's urgent and delicious. It’s about the bakery on Coopers Row! I want a boatload of those burnt sugar twists! Today is the day. I can feel it. I shall get those burnt sugar twists today once and for all!"

Maya stopped walking. Velena, three steps ahead before she noticed, turned around to find her looking unconvinced in a professional way she always managed. Her brows tightly knit together.

"Your mother asked yesterday if you'd been keeping to the grounds."

"And you told her?"

"That you'd been keeping admirably close to your studies."

"Excellent! I was studying just now."

"You were asleep at your desk for half of it." Maya gave her a stare.

"Studying with my eyes closed. An advanced technique."

Maya almost smiled. 600 years of life, give or take, and she still hadn't worked out how one twelve-year-old human managed to make a pastry run sound like a declaration of war.

"If anyone asks," she said, already moving toward the servants' stairs, "we were in the east garden. Discussing botany."

"We are always discussing botany, apparently. One day someone is going to ask me a real question about plants."

"Then I suggest learning one fact about plants. Just in case."

"Trees are tall," Velena offered. "Some of them have leaves."

"What a devastatingly thorough perception you have there, Your Highness."

They made it down two flights and across the courtyard with the usual three small performances required, a nod from the guard who'd long since stopped questioning the girl, a quick word from Maya to the gate steward. The girl quickly hid against the wall when her brother Mikhail's voice carried down from a window above.

"Tell Mother I was studying botany!" Velena called up.

Her brother leaned out, sixteen and already permanently tired in the way that came from being heir to a kingdom that had opinions about everything. "You weren't studying botany again, were you?!"

"I will have, by the time I'm back. That’s for sure!" And if Father asks where I am, tell him I am an excellent, dutiful, extremely indoor princess!"

Mikhail looked at Maya. Maya looked back with a placid expression.

"You're both going to get me in trouble," Mikhail muttered as he pulled his head back inside, which both of them understood, correctly, as permission.