“Oh!” She got to name a language! She tapped her chin. Most of the magical languages were named for what they reminded people of—Worm, for example, the language of earth and stone, was a moist, slippery, undulating language. Briar, the language of plants, sounded sharp and unpleasant. She remembered the words slithering across the page of the book, and how they had chilled her.
“Shiver,” she said quietly.
Julian accepted this with a nod. “All right. Let’s hear a few words.”
Noa hesitated, then opened the book. As before, she understood at once that she was looking at a dictionary, that the strange symbols on the page were arranged into lists of words. An odd sense of calm washed over her, and she no longer felt afraid.
“Flower,” she read. “Flicker. Florean Archipelago. These are just normal words! There’s nothing magical about them. This really is just a dictionary.”
She looked up and found Julian’s blue eyes narrowed in a wince. Mite, who sat dripping in the leafy shade, had her hands over her ears. “I don’t like that,” she said with finality.
Noa blinked. “Was I speaking Shiver?”
“Yes, you were.” Julian seemed to make an effort to relax his face.
“What did it sound like?”
“Awful,” Mite said.
“I don’t really know how to describe it,” Julian said, after a moment. “Sort of . . . dry. And crunchy. Like walking on dead leaves.”
“Leaves don’t sound like that,” Mite muttered.
“It’s normal to slip into a magical language without realizing it,” Julian said. “At least at first.”
Noa nodded. After all, some of her earliest memories were of gazing out from her crib at a dark-haired boy babbling nonsensically at her.
“I find that thinking about the element can help,” Julian said. “When I say something in Spark, I picture fire. Try picturing the ghosts, or something else you saw in Death.”
Noa would rather not picture the things that had dragged her from the castle. She tried thinking of the otter, and imagined she was speaking to it. She waved her hands about as she had sometimes seen Julian do. “I command you to leave me alone!”
She knew she had spoken in Shiver, now that she was paying attention. But she was also aware that something was off. It was like trying to speak a foreign language—her mouth couldn’t form all the words properly, and she had to guess how some things sounded.
“Good,” Julian said. “What did you say?”
Noa told him, and he nodded. “As you already know, or I hope you know, whether a spell is successful or not depends on a mage’s fluency in the language they’re using. All mages are born able to speak at least one language of magic, but that isn’t the same as speaking fluently. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Noa said slowly, for she had always been a little fuzzy on that point. “But I don’t understand why some mages are more fluent than others.”
“No one does,” Julian said. “Some people are just born with a talent for magic, I suppose in the same way that certain people are born with a gift for music or speaking. However, even if you aren’t naturally gifted, you can improve with practice, just as a poor orator can. Take Asha, for example. She’s one of the most powerful light mages in Florean, but when she was a child, she could barely speak Hum. She had to work hard at it.”
“She’s still not as good as you,” Noa said. She wasn’t trying to flatter him; it was just a fact.
He shrugged. “Like I said, no one knows exactly how it works. But you shouldn’t be discouraged if it takes a while before you can cast effective spells in Shiver.”
“What kind of spells? Can I kill people? Or summon the ghosts of the ancient mages?” She asked the question that had haunted her since she found out about her magic. “Could I . . . could I talk to Mom?”
Julian’s face softened. “I don’t know.”
Noa was frustrated. Julian was supposed to know everything about magic. “Why not?”
“The records relating to Shiver—or whatever it was called in ancient times—were destroyed. It’s anyone’s guess what your powers entail. We’ll have to work it out as we go. One thing we do know is that you can cross great distances quickly in Death. When I looked for you that night, the blood spell told me that you were somewhere in the Ferral Sea.”
Noa’s jaw dropped. “That’s hundreds of miles away!”
“Yes. It makes sense, though—in the stories, ghosts pop up wherever they feel like it.”
Noa liked this. It was a little like having a magical doorway that could take her anywhere in the thirteen seas. “What about the shadows? Is every shadow a doorway to Death? Or out of Death?”
“I suspect so,” Julian said. “I guess they’re all connected somehow, even if Death is more compact than the living world.”
This was convenient, if creepy. So Noa could use any shadow to get into Death, if she wanted. “So what are we going to do?”
Julian scanned the courtyard. He motioned to a passion flower vine dangling from a trellis. “Let’s try to answer your first question.”
Nervously, Noa approached the vine. “You want me to kill it?”
“Start smaller. Try just one flower.”
Noa focused on a large bloom at eye level. It was a rich orange with delicate yellow stamen. It was hard to think about the flower and the otter at the same time. She ended up picturing an orange otter. “Ah, all right,” she stammered in Shiver. “Die. Please?”
The flower did nothing. A bee alighted among the petals and dug around hungrily. Noa considered trying to kill the bee, but she knew Mite was watching.
“No, no,” Julian said. “You’re asking a question. You have to tell it what you want it to do. Here.” He let out a stream of words in Briar that snagged at Noa’s ears like thorns. The vine sprouted dozens of new flowers and coiled along the stones.
“What did you say?” Noa demanded. “That was more than just one command.”
“I told the vine to grow.
