Abaddon's Call

Chapter Forty-Three

"It worked," Naena groaned as she eased herself into the seat across from Selifer. "Good call on the ink."

"Tastes better," Selifer said with a nod. "Makes it easier to dispense with it quickly. Why are you up?"

The whipping had happened just the day before. Naena should have been laid up in bed still, resting. Instead she was upright and in full uniform as if it were any other day.

"Oh, they came to fetch me," she said in a half-hearted attempt to be sassy. "It's amazing we invented clothing because there is nothing kind about those damned men."

"They have their uses."

"Mm, speaking of, Theon asked again about you staying over for winter break."

Selifer hesitated, knowing he couldn't tell her the truth. He wasn't allowed to leave the university.

"I'm still thinking. Can we go back to it worked? Do you know how?"

Naena had used the banker spell on her hand to move something and push an item through it and into her pocket. She had created a bridging branch, which was so close to a topic he desperately wanted to talk to someone about.

"Don't know the how yet, but looking at it, I think I could use it on a person."

"You don't know your whole body would go through."

"No, put it on a person's back, like Graydon's or mine, go out to retrieve someone and slap them through the spell and into the bound area. Aiming is simple if it's on your skin. I just told it where to go."

She meant to ink her back with the spell to bridge into Pan's prison cells. It was absolutely brilliant, but the spell had so many more uses.

"Yeah, that can't be normal."

She could also retrieve keys to escape tricky situations, steal whatever other items she might want, and deposit items inside confined spaces to set off magic and end a fight before it ever began. To say nothing of her discovery of how the spell actually worked: using the band as the barrier and boundary required to launch the spell.

Once she did that, no one would be able to stop her.

He just needed her to look at the spell differently. The best way to do that was to tell her that her view was odd.

"Why are you saying that's not normal?"

"Well, I shouldn't say not normal. I suppose telling the hand where to appear in the air over there is the base function of that bit of the spell. All you did was shift the direction. But you managed it without figuring out how it actually works. Someone knows magic you can't alter, which puts you at risk of the magic being used on you."

"Good point," she muttered.

"Could you send something into the sun with that spell?"

"And how big of a thing could I send?" she asked. "Or does it need to be on the palm of the hand because in order to use this magic, it has to carry your exact imprint? Maybe a back wouldn't work. So I might be able to send a small item into the sun."

"Just start tossing Trathor's stuff in there," Selifer said as Naena smiled. "Every time he calls you for one of his stupid visits, just walk in and take an item. Toss it in. See how long it takes him to realize anything is missing."

Naena frowned at Selifer.

"What?" he asked.

"I don't have meetings with Trathor," she said. "Are you thinking of someone else?"