The Sword and The Mountain (Kathardra book 1)
Testing

“Show me,” Cinder’s voice stirred Lessa. She pulled the blankets higher over her head, willing him to go away.

The blankets wrenched from her body, suddenly flung free to the ground. On reflex Lessa curled into a tight ball, she grabbed a pillow and pulled it over her head, hiding from Cinder and his demands.

“Stubborn girl,” he said, and pulled the pillow from her grip.

Lessa sat up lethargically. It felt like she had only just crawled into bed after spending the entire night lighting his stupid candles. Dragon flame, she had barely gotten in bed. The sunrise was just barely starting to leak light through the window behind Lessa. She’d only been asleep for an hour, two tops.

“Light it,” Cinder said at her bedside, thrusting a candle toward her.

Lessa took the candle from him, grasping it in her left hand. She looked at the candle for a moment, then, without positioning her right hand, she looked at Cinder and said “Ilstayum.”

She set his beard on fire.

“Gah!” he exclaimed, at once stroking his beard, water pouring from his hand through his facial hair.

“Alright. You’ve had your revenge. You’ll need to let go of your grudge if we are to get any serious work done.”

“It would help if you didn’t wake me up,” she said through her teeth.

“Lying about is for those who don’t have purpose in their lives. You have plenty. Get up, get dressed.”

As he left Lessa chewed her lip, very seriously debating on pulling her blankets back onto her bed and ignoring him. But he would likely just pull them away again. And she wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.

Cinder was waiting just outside of her room. “Follow me,” he said and swept down the stairs. He led her through a side door Lessa had been through many times. She had done a lot of exploring the first week here. But the door Cinder now opened had always been locked before.

It led down a steep staircase, the wood steps gave way to stone. They were now under the manor. The natural stone walls were so smooth they seemed to have been cut by a knife.

“This one.” Cinder opened a large, heavy wood door. The room revealed was smaller than Lessa’s own, all stone and no windows. Lit dimly by candles that wooshed to life, seemingly, on their own as Cinder stepped in.

Shelves lined three of the four walls, and each shelf was covered in devices and curiosities of all kinds; a dome made from interconnected wire hexagons was rotating by itself, what seemed to be a glass horse stood in frozen motion, a glob of copper wires, a bronze creation that had columns leading to a holed top, and so many more things Lessa didn’t know where to look.

“Have a seat there,” he pointed to a table at the far side of the room, it was long, with three seats on one side, and a single on the other, where Cinder had indicated.

Her eyes narrowed at his tone, the sneer was missing. Cautiously, Lessa eased around the table. It was large enough that there wasn’t much room to get around it. She sat, her back against the only wall with no shelves.

“Now that you have found your magic we need to run some tests, to discover where we must begin. We will start with this.”

He took a plate from a shelf and set it before Lessa, it was shiny and seemed to be smooth obsidian. Inlaid in the plate were slim silver wires, forming concentric circles. Four lines shot through the circles, outward to where they met with four gems, equidistant from each other along the outermost circle. The gems were each about the size of Lessa’s pinky nail; a ruby, a diamond, a sapphire, and a gem Lessa did not recognize, it sparkled black.

“Place your hand flat in the middle of the disk and open your magic. Don’t do anything else.”

Lessa obliged and then pulled her hand back immediately, the silver lines in the plate were hot.

“It won’t harm you.” Cinder nodded at the plate, urging.

Now that she was expecting the heat it wasn’t so shocking, it was maybe as warm as Storm's throat. Lessa opened her magic, odd how instinctual it was now, the red, black and white gems started to glow.

The red was clearly the brightest, black was half as bright, followed by white, which was rather dim. The sapphire was unaffected, remaining dark.

Cinder sat back and stroked his beard, his eyes locked on the disk under Lessa’s hand.

“What does that mean?” Judging by his expression, it wasn’t good.

“Red means you are inclined to be a mage. Which is not a surprise in your case. Those with any martial training before coming here often lean toward magery.”

“And the others?”

“Any inclination toward white is not so uncommon. And in your case, not a surprise considering your little stunt upstairs with ilstayum.” He touched the blackened ends of his beard.

“It represents an affinity to use magic on an instinctual basis. It is a surprise that you did not use magic before now. No doubt, had you been raised in Kathardra you would have come into your magic young.”

“And black?” Lessa prompted when Cinder had gone quiet for an extended moment.

He sighed. “You have a predisposition to use dark magic.”

Lessa pulled her hand from the disk and rested it in her lap. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not. Had you come to us here a couple centuries ago we would have blocked your magic and turned you away.”

Panic coursed through Lessa, she tried to squash it down. “But now?”

He was still stroking his beard, staring at the now empty and dark disk. “Now we have so few users of any renown that I cannot turn you away and keep a clear conscience… Not to mention I just effectively taught you how to break a block spell. No, the only path available for us is to move forward.”

Relief washed through Lessa. Zar would be so disappointed if they came all this way and the only mage available refused to teach her.

“But with a strong word of caution. Dark magic is also known as blood magic. You must swear to me that you will never use blood in a spell. No matter how tempted you are. Blood is powerful when combined with magic. But the power it grants is heavily addictive. Once you start, you are not likely to stop.”

Lessa nodded.

“Swear it!”

She jumped a little, eyes wide. “I swear I won’t use blood magic.”

Cinder solemnly nodded.

"What does blue mean?"

"That is Sorcery. Spell casting. One might typically display blue if they are blessed with good memorization and an inclination to be very precise. Blue and red are often trade-offs here."

"So I can't be a... sorceress?"

"Not necessarily. I'm guessing you have trouble with memorization and attention to small details?"

She shrugged.

"What it means is you will have a harder time with spell work than someone who has displayed blue."

“For the next test…” He took the disk from the table, put it back on the shelf, and came back to Lessa with a crystal mounted in wire that circled around it to form little thumb-sized handles.

“This time you will open your magic, and link it with the crystal. This will provide us with a visual representation of the extent of your power. I will demonstrate.”

Cinder took the crystal device and held it gently, fingers and thumbs of both hands pinching the wire handles.

The crystal started to glow brightly, it rose with intensity until it cast the entire room in a brilliant white light.

The light cut out, leaving Lessa’s eyes rushing to adjust to the, once again, dim room.

Her stomach tightened. All this time Zar had been insisting that she had a lot of power. But could that really be possible? He had been right about her having magic in the first place…

Lessa pinched the crystal’s wire frame just as Cinder had. She huffed out a breath, bracing herself, and then grasped her magic.

There was immediately a tug on her power, instinctually she fed her power to the tug. It did not consume her power, but it felt like it started circulating between her and the crystal. The crystal brightened, again, and the room was lit up with white light. Lessa pushed more power into the crystal, the white light coming from Lessa’s fingers cut harsh and distinct shadows. Lessa fed it everything she could, the shadows in the room vanished, and she had to look away, Cinder brought his hand over his face and leaned away, trying to prevent blinding himself.

“That’s eno-”

A crack reverberated through the room and cut off Cinder’s words.

Lessa had to blink furiously to clear her vision, her eyes struggled to adapt back to what seemed a black room.

Once she could see again she looked down to see a crack down the middle of the crystal between her thumbs.

“Sorry,” she said, sliding the crystal back across the table to Cinder.

The frown that spread across Cinder’s face was deep. “I think I know where we must start.”

He pocketed the broken crystal as he stood and scanned the shelves until his eyes alighted on what he was looking for.

“Ah ha!” he said and grabbed what looked like nothing more than a metal ball hanging from two A-frames, anchored on a wooden base.

“This is a tool for learning control. It applies certain incentives. The goal is to move the ball as little as possible. Observe.”

The old man leaned down and focused on the ball. Almost imperceptibly it wobbled.

“Now you.”

With narrowed eyes Lessa focused.

“Stop. First, we shall go outside.”

Cinder snatched the pendulum from the table and marched from the room, Lessa followed with a confused shrug.

In the entrance hall of the manor they found Zar and Worran, just coming down the stairs.

“You started early,” Zar said.

Lessa glowered pointedly at the back of Cinder’s head.

“No time to waste!” he said chipperly, having missed Lessa’s look.

“Our young pupil here has just completed the first exams every student must undergo. She is onto her next lesson.”

“Already?” Zar asked, impressed.

“I didn’t actually do anything,” Lessa clarified before he got too hopeful with her abilities.

“Right,” Cinder placed the little pendulum on the grass and backed up a couple steps. “Proceed.”

He was a little too cheerful and had taken too many steps back.

“What does it do?” Worran asked.

“Teaches control.” Cinder was happily cryptic.

Storm had wandered over, lowered her nose to the pendulum, and smelled it.

“It doesn’t seem harmful.”

“It’s definitely going to do something to me.”

“It didn’t do anything to him…”

After one final frown at Cinder Lessa opened her magic and touched the ball with as little magic as possible. The little metal ball swung violently backward, when it hit its pinnacle and should have swung over the top it behaved as if it had stuck a barrier. It came back down toward Lessa. But she was unable to continue watching its progress because the moment it started dropping Lessa was flung backwards several yards.

The air was lost from her lungs and Lessa’s lips worked, trying to find air again. She finally gasped, getting oxygen once more, but her diaphragm protested painfully, causing her to take several shallow breaths. She felt like a fish left out on shore.

Suddenly, Zar was kneeling at her side and Worran was standing, looking down at her.

A groan crawled up Lessa’s throat, and she realized Cinder was laughing.

“I hate him,” Lessa wheezed.

“Is this really necessary?” Zar snapped at Cinder.

His laughing cut off. “Boy, I have been running this academy since before your grandfather was born. Don’t presume you can question my methods.”

“Before his grand… Wait,” Worran said frowning at Cinder. “How old are you?”

Lessa struggled to sit up, her left shoulder had seemed to take the brunt of the fall. Rolling it to confirm it wasn’t dislocated or broken in some other way she brushed off Zar’s worry.

“I’m… Actually, I haven’t thought about it in quite a while.” Cinder turned pensive for a long moment, looking to be doing some mental math. “About four hundred and thirty. Give or take a few years. I’m not sure which way.”

Lessa’s jaw dropped. And from the way Zar and Worran were also staring this wasn’t something that was common, maybe even heard of in Kathardra.

“How?” Zar asked as he rose to his feet.

“I was cursed,” Cinder grumbled.

“Cursed?” Worran asked. “That doesn’t seem like much of a curse.”

“Bah! Want me to do the same to you and you can watch everyone you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve ever loved, grow to old age and die while you remain?”

Worran recoiled.

“When you can move the ball as little as I did, come to me.” Cinder turned and went back into the manor.

Lessa sighed deeply.

The next time she tried to gently nudge the pendulum was no better. She was thrown back but managed to roll into the fall, it didn’t hurt nearly as bad.

Breakfast floated out to the three of them after Lessa’s third attempt. Her mood improved slightly after eating, but it was going to be a long day.

Sᴇarch the FindNovel.net website on G𝘰𝘰gle to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.