Ishigara went over a few of the finer points of the process, then turned us loose to experiment with what she’d taught us.
“This could work,” Hagar whispered to me. “You can’t risk using your techniques, without hurting yourself, anyway. At least with this you’ll get one use per day.”
“That’s true,” I said quietly. I had another idea, though, that might make this discipline even more powerful.
“I don’t like that look in your eye,” Hagar said with a shake of her head. “It’s always trouble.”
“You don’t even know what I’m thinking about,” I said.
“I don’t have to know the details,” Hagar said. “I’m your handler. I know you better than you think. The last time you looked like that you went to war with the Locust Court.”
She was right, of course. The idea that I had was very dangerous. If it went wrong, delamination would be the least of my worries.
But if I pulled it off...
The stitching discipline wouldn’t ever be as good as a cure, and I wouldn’t be satisfied until my core was whole again and I was back in control of my abilities. But, if it worked the way I hoped it would, I wouldn’t just have a single use of the technique each day. I’d be able to use all of my techniques, almost as often as I wanted.
But it was a big, time-consuming gamble.
A gamble I was more than willing to take.
“Let’s try it out,” I said to Hagar.
“Okay,” my handler said cautiously. “I’ve never seen you excited about scrivening before, so I’ll pretend this is a good thing and not a sign that you’re going insane.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and opened the top of my desk to grab some supplies. “Let’s give it a shot.”
The basic theory behind technique stitching wasn’t difficult to comprehend. Putting it into practice, though, was another thing entirely.
Every technique had its own symbolic depiction unique to the scrivener. It was hard for me to let go and trust the process, and even harder to believe that my scrawled loops and whorls on the copper pendant in front of me made any sense.
Hagar helped me as much as she could, though, and near the end of class I finally had something that looked like it might, maybe, actually work.
“That is seriously the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” Hagar nudged the copper talisman with the tip of her finger. “I thought Clem was supposed to help you with your scrivenings.”
“She did,” I grumped. “I’m way better now than I used to be.”
“Oh, man,” Hagar groaned.
She put her medallion down on the desk between us. It really was a lot nicer than mine. Her binding loops were clean and smooth, almost perfect circles drawn freehand. Mine, on the other hand, were sloppy ovals with weird little jagged bits at the end where they connected to the rest of the scrivenings. A moment ago, I thought I’d done a passable job. Looking at Hagar’s work next to mine, I wasn’t so sure.
“At least I understand mine,” I said with a shrug. That much was true. The scrivened vessel was my personal representation of my technique. Nobody else had to like it or even understand how it worked. “Now for the hard part.”
“If you made that much of a mess of the easy part, I don’t want to see how the rest of this goes.” Hagar raised her hands defensively when I glowered at her. “I’m sure you’ll do fine. I was only teasing.”
“Here goes nothing.”
I rested the amulet on the back of my forearm and concentrated on weaving threads of jinsei through its aura and around the sacred energy channel that ran down the middle of my arm. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it didn’t feel good, either. There was a phantom sensation of strings being drawn between my arm bones with every stitch. The jinsei that passed through my skin tingled and unleashed waves of goosebumps across my body. The concentration required to steer the threads of sacred energy around and through my body and the amulet left me sweating.
“That’s pretty neat,” Hagar said. She tapped my amulet with the tip of her finger, and it stayed firmly in place on the back of my arm.
“Whoa, easy!” I shoved her hand away when she tried to pry under the vessel’s edge with her fingernail. I didn’t know if it would hurt, and I certainly didn’t want to find out. “Pick at your own work.”
“I would, but I can’t afford to tie up one of my techniques like you did,” Hagar said with a shrug. “You know how it is. I’m a busy girl, and I never know where the demands of my clan will take me.”
She gave me a quick wink, then bumped her shoulder against mine.
“Yeah, yeah, international girl of mystery.” I rolled my eyes. “Everybody else is trying it out.”
“Everybody else doesn’t have an important meeting with the clan elders tonight,” Hagar said quietly. She looked around to be sure no one was watching us, then leaned in until her mouth practically touched my ear. “We’re getting close, Jace.”
Her words stole my breath. I’d been so focused on the competition and fixing my core, I hadn’t thought much about my other big worry. My mother was out there somewhere. She’d been caught up in whatever it was the heretics were doing. Hirani and Sanrin had promised they’d find her, but there’d been no word from them for weeks.
“Seriously?” It was hard to believe. “You found her?”
“Soon,” Hagar said. “I promise you, it will be soon.”
I leaned back in my chair and pretended to watch the other students practicing the technique-stitching discipline.
In my head, though, all I saw was my mother’s smiling face looking exactly the same as it had the last day that I’d seen her.
Before I’d known she was a heretic.
