A Week without Word

“Breathe, Jack. You’re doing good. You’re almost at five minutes now.” Eleanor said.

The two of them were back in the field again. Jack stared at the small white sphere of energy floating between his hands, rivulets of sweat running down his face and arms as he struggled to maintain it. Upon seeing the relative lack of magical fitness he had, Eleanor insisted that he also spend some time every training session working to build it up. This was one such exercise. Conjuring a sphere of light in and of itself took almost no effort. In fact, the incantation for it was only a single syllable: “Ne”. But, according to Ellie, this very simplicity also made it excellent for training one’s body to handle sustained magic use. Apparently, the simplicity or complexity of a spell was not what actually determined its cost in physical energy. Rather, it was the intensity, duration, and purity of the forces composing the spell that determined that. The fundamental essence of light, which he now struggled to suspend between his hands, was one of the purest forces. As a result, controlling its intensity and duration was so easy that he didn’t even have to use additional spellwords to change them. All he had to do was internally control the level of magic he allowed to leave his body. The more he allowed to leave, the more intense the light would become, and the faster he would deplete his magic reserves, much like using much higher weight in a gym would make the workout harder and have a smaller amount of reps before exhaustion. The first day they’d started this, he’d tried for high intensity and low duration and managed to instantly knock himself out. After that, Ellie had insisted he take things slower, and build his spell fitness through sustained duration marathons, rather than intense bursts. They’d been at it almost a week now. First time he tried this method, he’d lasted about twenty seconds. Now, even a couple minutes felt perfectly comfortable.

After another minute or so, Jack began to feel himself getting light-headed. Trying to accept his own limits for a change, he took a final deep breath and dismissed the sphere in his hands. He dropped his arms to the side and plopped to the grass, his breath heavy. He grabbed the front of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face as he let his heart rate slowly return to normal.

“How’d I do?” He asked.

“Almost seven minutes.” Eleanor said, taking a seat across from him and folding her legs beneath her. “You’re making excellent progress.”

“You think so?” Jack asked, reaching for the water jug beside him and downing half of it before coming up for air.

Eleanor nodded.

“I do. You’re currently building your spell reserves faster than I did, and I was considered a bit of a prodigy.” She said.

“Careful, Ellie. Your humility is showing again.” Jack said, giving her a smirk as he tossed the clay bottle to the grass beside him.

The girl adopted a haughty air, looking down her nose and inspecting her fingernails.

“What humility? It’s objectively true that I’m perfect in every way. You just need to learn to accept reality.”

Jack snorted.

“Yeah, okay. Whatever you say.”

Eleanor cocked an eyebrow at him, visibly struggling to maintain her snooty demeanor.

“You doubt my inherent perfection?” She asked, her voice getting shrill. “How dare you!”

“Oh, and what are you going to do about it if I do, Miss Prodigy?”

Eleanor’s expression shifted suddenly from haughty to mischievous, and she raised her fingers.

“Oh, I dunno… this?”

There was a sudden flash of energy, and Jack felt his nose beginning to grow. It swelled and lengthened rapidly, until it felt like it dominated the better part of his face. It finally settled on something long enough that he could see the tip clearly without his eyes crossed. Fortunately for him, at least, the change in size hadn’t changed his ability to smell. A good thing, too, because the animal smells and manure were already enough to make him want to gag as it was. He looked at her flatly, his lips a thin line as Eleanor fell over giggling. He concentrated for a long moment until the spellwords fell into place.

“Tintodora.”

With a small flash the spell took effect, and Eleanor’s voice changed suddenly from a girlish laugh to the bray of a screeching donkey. Her eyes went wide and she snapped her mouth shut as she shot up from the ground and glared at him.

“What?” He asked innocently.

She opened her mouth to speak again, but only more screeching came out. She folded her arms and frowned at him, pouting dramatically.

“Don’t worry. I honestly think it’s an improvement.” He said.

Her eyes and nostrils flared in mock fury, and with a flick of her wrist she sent another wave of spell energy through his body, this time causing his ears to stretch until they were bigger than his hands. Ellie’s face flushed purple as she struggled to suppress another fit of laughter. Jack smacked his lips, his voice coming out in a hyper-nasal wheeze.

“You do realize this is just gonna keep going until one of us gives up, right?”

Eleanor nodded, her face wicked. She made a little motion towards herself that seemed to say “bring it on”.

Rose joined Madeleine behind the house, leaning against the siding and crossing her arms as she watched the two figures in the distance.

“How long have they been at it, now?”

“Do you mean practicing, or flirting?” Madeleine asked, picking the seeds off a grass stalk one by one.

“They’re flirting? How can you tell?” Rose asked.

Madeleine flicked the seedless grass stem away, and pulled another green stalk from the ground to pick at. It smoked gently as she did so.

“You mean you can’t?” She said, flicking a seed. “It’s blatantly obvious to me.”

Rose shrugged, scrunching her brow.

“I guess I’ve never really had much of a sense for that sort of thing. Ellie just seems the same with him as she does with everyone else to me.”

“This is different.” Madeleine said, tearing off another seed. She held it between her fingers until it burst with a faint pop. “She likes him. I can tell.”

“Do you think that’s going to be a problem?” Rose asked.

Madeleine looked up at her sister, studying her.

“You tell me.”

Rose looked at her for a moment, then turned away and cleared her throat.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I have more important things to worry about.”

“Like?”

“The fact that Papa’s been gone a week now without word.”

Madeleine nodded, a bit of a cloud crossing her face.

“I noticed it too. Normally he would have hired a Sending explaining the delay by now. Incidentally, since you bring it up, that’s one of the ways I know.”

“Know what? Oh, you mean-”

“Out of the three of us, which one would be most likely to notice Papa being late first? I know it wouldn’t be me, being perfectly honest.” Madeleine said, flicking the empty stem away.

“I haven’t heard her say a word about it.” Rose said.

“She hasn’t. I’m not even sure she’s realized it yet.” Madeleine said. She stood and brushed off the back of the calico sundress she was wearing.

“Do we bring it up to her, do you think?” Rose asked.

“She’s the only one of us who can send a message via spell without having received one first. We need to know what’s going on. I don’t like that he’s been gone this long without a word.”

“Me either.” Rose admitted.

Neither one of them spoke the obvious implication hovering between them. There was only one of a very few reasons Simon wouldn’t have returned or messaged by now, and almost none of them were good.

Rose leaned away from the house and turned to leave.

“We do it tonight, at dinner. Let me know when those two are done.”

Madeleine nodded but said nothing, her attention still focused on the pair in the field in the distance. She hoped that when they did message that they got a reply. If not, then- no. She wasn’t going to entertain that thought. She turned and walked towards the barn to collect things for dinner.

Jack was the one who gave up first. He hadn’t wanted to, but unsurprisingly, Miss Prodigy was quite capable of living up to her self-ascribed reputation. In this particular case, she’d turned him into a tree. Well, mostly. She kept the giant nose and ears. Being a tree was not wholly unpleasant, although it was highly unsettling to have sentience but absolutely no way to do anything with it besides stand there and rustle gently in the breeze. After what she deemed an appropriate amount of time, she declared his lack of a response as tacit admission that she’d won. She dismissed the spells on him with a flourish, and he popped back into existence, his arms held at weird angles where his main branches had been only a second before. He lowered them to his face and checked it. Everything felt in order.

“...I’m going to beat you next time.” He said, grimacing.

Eleanor skipped lightly past, her face smugly gleeful. She’d already dispelled everything he’d cast on her. It had taken her such little effort that he couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a schmuck.

“Oh, I’m sure you will, Mister Hero. I’m sure you will.”