Spells

“I have to—”

“It’s okay,” Tamani interrupted. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I simply wondered, that’s all.”

“Not as long as last time,” she said impulsively.

“When?” Tamani said, and looked at her, his unaffected facade broken, if only for a moment.

“I don’t know,” Laurel said, not meeting his gaze. She couldn’t look into his eyes, not when they were so open and vulnerable. “Can’t I just come sometime?”

Tamani was quiet for a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’ll find a way to make it work. Just come,” he added fervently.

“I will,” she promised.

Both heads turned as they heard a motor turn off the highway and draw near.

“Your chariot,” Tamani said with a grin, but his mouth was tight.

“Thank you,” Laurel said. “For everything.”

He shrugged, his hands jammed into his pockets. “I didn’t do anything special.”

“You—” She tried to find words to articulate how she felt, but nothing seemed right. “I—” This time her words were cut off by a series of short blasts on the horn. “That’s my mom,” she said apologetically. “I have to go.”

Tamani nodded, then stood very still.

The ball was in her court.

She hesitated, then quickly stepped up to him and kissed his cheek, darting away before he could say anything. She hurried up the path and toward the car, which was now parked and silent. She stopped. It wasn’t her mom’s car.

“David.” The name escaped her lips an instant before his arms enfolded her, pulling her to his chest. Her toes left the ground and she was spinning, the same way Tamani had spun her outside the Academy. The sensation of her cheek against his neck brought back memories of snuggling with him on the couch, in the grass at the park, in the car, on his bed. She clung to him realizing — half ashamedly — that she had scarcely thought of him since she’d left. Two months of longing hit her all at once, and tears stung her eyes as her arms twined around his neck.

Gentle fingers lifted her chin and his lips found hers — soft and insistent. She couldn’t do anything but kiss him back, knowing that Tamani must be just out of her sight, watching the reunion with that guarded expression he wore so well.

NINE

“LAUREL?”

The tiny cylinder of sugar glass shattered as she startled. “Up here,” Laurel called wearily.

David strode through her doorway and slung an arm around her, dropping a kiss on her cheek. His eyes shot to the equipment in front of her. “What are you doing?” There was no disguising the excitement in his voice.

Letting the tiny shards of glass tinkle out of her hand and onto the table, Laurel sighed. “Attempting to make sugar-glass vials.”

“Are they seriously made out of sugar?”

Laurel nodded as she rubbed her temples. “You can eat those pieces there, if you want,” she said, not really expecting him to do it.

David looked dubiously at the pile of glass splinters, then picked up one of the larger pieces. He studied it for a moment before licking the flat side — far away from the sharp, pointed end. “Kind of like rock candy,” he said, putting the piece back on the table. “Weird.”

“Frustrating is more like it.”

“What are they for?”

Laurel turned to her kit and removed a glass vial — one Yeardley had made, not her. She hadn’t managed a decent one yet. She handed the vial to David. “Some potions or elixirs or whatever can’t be stored in their final form. So you make them in two parts. As soon as they mix, whatever effect you’re going for happens right away. So you store the different parts in sugar vials so you can mix them at the right time, or crush them in your hand in an emergency.”

“Sounds painful,” David said, handing the delicate vial back to Laurel with care.

Laurel shook her head. “It’s usually not thick enough to cut you. But even if it does, the sugar would dissolve and you wouldn’t have to pick bits of glass out of your hand or anything — that’s why you don’t use regular glass. Ideally you just dump them both into a mortar, or whatever, but you have to be prepared for anything.” I have to be prepared for anything, she added to herself.

“Don’t the potions dissolve the sugar?”

“They don’t seem to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, David,” Laurel said tersely. “They just don’t.”

“Sorry,” David said softly. He pulled a pink padded stool over and joined her at her desk. “So how do you do it?”

Laurel took a deep breath and got ready to try again. “I have this powdered sugarcane,” she said, pointing to a cloth bag of fine greenish powder, “and I mix it with pine resin.” As she talked she followed her own directions, trying to concentrate despite David’s breath near her ear, his eyes studying her hands. She could almost hear his mind whirring as he tried to take it all in. “It gets all thick and sticky like syrup,” she said, stirring the mixture with a silver spoon, “and it heats up.”

David nodded and continued watching.

“Then I get this little straw,” she said, picking up what looked like a short drinking straw made of glass. She didn’t tell David it was one solid piece of diamond. “I dip it in the sugar mix and blow it, just like regular glass.” It sounded easy, and most of the Mixers her age had been making their own vials for years. But Laurel hadn’t quite gotten the knack.

She breathed in, sucking just a tiny bit of the sugar mixture into the tube, and then blew out, very slowly, while picturing — concentrating on — what she wanted it to look like. She turned the tube as she blew, and the small bubble on the end elongated, stretching out — contrary to all laws of physics — not into a round bubble, but a long cylinder. The opaque, muddy mixture whitened, then grew translucent.

Laurel gave the tube a little more air and turned it once more before hesitantly pulling her mouth away. She usually did well up to this point.

“That’s—”

“Shh,” Laurel ordered, lifting a small silver knife that resembled a scalpel. She scored the sugar glass all around the edge of the diamond tube, then pulled on the cylinder, slowly separating it from the straw.

The first side came easily and Laurel painstakingly rolled the cylinder in a circle, detaching the other edges. She held her breath as she pulled the tube away from the final point of connection. The still-flexible sugar bent, then stretched into a long string and, finally, broke away.

As it did, the cylinder shattered.

“Damn it!” Laurel yelled, slamming the tube down on her desk.

“Careful with that thing,” David said.

Laurel brushed his concern away with an annoyed wave of her hand. “Can’t break that,” she muttered.

A long silence followed as Laurel studied the pile of glass shards, trying to decide what she had done wrong. Maybe if she sucked up a little more of the sugar syrup, it would make the vial thicker.

“Can…can I try it?” David asked hesitantly.

“If you must,” Laurel said, although she knew it wouldn’t work.

But David grinned and scooted over to the chair she had just vacated. She watched as he tried to imitate what she had done, sucking a small amount of the sticky syrup into the straw and then blowing carefully. For a second it looked like it would work. A tiny bubble began to form, although it was round, rather than oblong. But almost as soon as it had formed, the bubble popped with a faint blurp and the liquid ran uselessly out of the diamond tube.

“What did I do wrong?” David asked.

“Nothing,” Laurel said. “You just can’t do it.”

“I don’t see why not,” David said, looking at the greenish blob hanging off the end of the tube. “It doesn’t