Mageborn The Line of Illeniel Michael Manning (novels to read for beginners txt) 📖

After he mentioned your father I thought you might burn him to a cinder on the spot.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted his help anyway,” my mother added. On that point everyone agreed, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the baron’s men might wind up being a deciding factor in the coming war. It wasn’t as if we were sure of completing the dam on time.

Chapter 23

The next day I returned to working on my new explosive enchantments. Since my father’s suggestion had worked so well I decided to stick with iron for all my future experiments. I used several pieces to get a more precise feel for how much power could be placed in a specific amount of iron without risking a premature explosion. I was very careful to protect my ears before each test.

Once I had pinned down the amount of energy I could use I switched to my second task, finding a way to set them off from a distance. I could easily do so myself, if the piece was within a range of about five hundred yards, but for our plan to work they would need to be used over much greater distances. The gem Cyhan had used during my bonding ritual had given me the idea I needed.

It was a simple concept; I would include a gem in the initial enchantment to contain the energy within the iron. Afterwards I could presumably remove it and use it to detonate the iron by crushing it. The real problem was that gemstones were in short supply; in fact I had none other than the diamond set in Penelope’s engagement ring. I had a feeling she wouldn’t be too keen on the idea of me crushing it for a test of my new spell. In any case diamonds aren’t known for being easily destroyed.

Eventually I picked glass beads. As far as I could tell there was no reason the activating gem had to actually ‘be’ a gem. It just needed to be something strong enough to avoid accidentally breaking and brittle enough to be easily crushed.

Oddly enough, glass beads were almost as difficult to come by as gemstones. Washbrook hadn’t had an actual glassblower in decades. The small town made do with wooden shutters on windows and handmade pottery for dishware. After a fruitless search and asking various townsfolk I gave up and went inside for lunch.

Penny was studying me as we ate. “You seem deep in thought,” she remarked.

I realized I had been silent during most of the meal, “I’m sorry. I’ve just been trying to figure out a problem with a new spell.”

“Perhaps you should bounce your ideas off of me. Let me be your sounding board. Besides I’d like to know what you’re thinking before you kill yourself inadvertently.” It never ceased to amaze me how much faith she had in my magical experimentation.

Penny had a quick mind and it didn’t take her long to understand my problem. “So you just need some glass beads?”

I nodded affirmatively.

“Does it have to be a bead? What about faux jewels, you know... cut glass?” she suggested.

“That would work just as well,” I replied, “but I haven’t seen much jewelry of any kind around here. Have you?”

“No, but there is at Lancaster Castle,” she reminded me.

I was feeling a bit dense. “Where?”

“The chandelier in the sun room, it used to be my job to dust it once a week, it always took me forever,” she said. The sun room was an upstairs reception chamber, the same one where I had my original ill-fated conversation with Devon Tremont. I had never paid particular attention to the furnishings.

“Do you think the duchess would part with it?”

“She’s already given you every able bodied man on her estate... at harvest time, I would think the chandelier would be a small price to pay,” she told me.

“I hate to ask her,” I said uncertainly.

“I’ll do it. I can ride over there this afternoon,” she offered. “I’ve been cooped up here for days now with nothing to do. I’m starting to feel useless.”

“You can’t,” I reminded her, “Not unless I go as well and I have other things to work on today.”

“Why not?” she replied before she remembered our bond. She glanced down at the sword she wore ruefully. “I never thought this would be so inconvenient.”

“Who wouldn’t want to be stuck with me twenty four hours a day for the rest of their life?” I said sarcastically.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just strange not being able to move about on my own. I guess you’ll just have to send a messenger.”

That reminded me, I still hadn’t set up any regular messengers. The only people I had available to me were the townsfolk, those few that weren’t involved in preparing the foundation for the dam. It seemed I was doomed to be perpetually short-handed. “Dorian can handle it. It will sound almost as good coming from him anyway.”

Since I couldn’t try my next experiments without the glass I spent the afternoon reading the books I had brought from my new ‘home’ in Albamarl. It had been over two weeks since we had left and I had yet to spend any time perusing them. I found a quiet corner in my room and settled down with ‘A Definitive Guide on the Creation and Maintenance of Teleportation Waypoints’. It turned out to be every bit as interesting as the title sounded, which is to say not at all.

I forced myself to focus and spent the next several hours wading through the basics of teleportation magic. I had assumed it would be easy, but it appeared that creating a pair of linked circles was fiendishly difficult. In theory a mage could teleport without using a circle of any kind, but in practice it required a prohibitive amount of complex mathematics to precisely arrive at any given location.

It would never have occurred to me before that the motion of the world itself would be a factor, but it was.