The break between lessons felt longer than usual.
Hermes sat with his back against the corridor wall while his dormmates did whatever his dormmates did during free time and tried to identify what was different about him.
Something had shifted since this morning.
The strange hollow distance that had followed him through the divination lesson was receding, slowly, like fog burning off in morning light. The classroom had felt unreal. Abano's voice had reached him from somewhere far away. Even the rune stones in his hands had felt like props in someone else's story.
He had assumed it was exhaustion.
He checked his soul essence.
Oh.
It was returning. Slowly, steadily, trickling back the way water fills a vessel left out in rain. He was perhaps two thirds recovered now. By the time the runes lesson started he would be close to full.
Which meant this morning he had been running on almost nothing.
The tower, he realised. Last night.
Roland had told him to pour a small amount of soul essence into the array. He had done exactly that — or what he thought was a small amount. What he had apparently failed to account for was that the array in the tower was not a single rune or even a paired combination. It was a complex interlocking construction of multiple runes working simultaneously, each one drawing its share, the whole array consuming considerably more than the sum of its parts.
He had activated an emergency evacuation system and then gone to bed wondering why he felt strange.
A small amount, he thought flatly. Relative to what, exactly?
He leaned his head back against the wall.
Next time ask how much it costs before agreeing to demonstrate it.
He waited for his essence to finish recovering and tried to feel like this was a lesson learned rather than just a mistake made.
By the time the runes lesson started Hermes was close to recovered.
Not fully — there was still a faint hollowness at the edges of his soul essence, the last remnants of last night's mistake draining away — but close enough that he felt like himself again. Present. Grounded. Aware of the weight of the day pressing down on him from all sides.
Tonight, he thought, taking his seat in the front row. It happens tonight.
Charles entered without ceremony and the room went quiet with its usual reflexive efficiency.
"Tablets out."
The familiar scratch of desk lids opening filled the room. Hermes retrieved his tablet and stylus and waited.
Charles surveyed the class for a moment. His gaze passed over Hermes and moved on without particular expression, which meant nothing — Charles's face never betrayed particular expression about anything.
"Continue from yesterday," he said. "Paired runes. I will come around."
The class bent to their work.
Charles began his circuit of the room, pausing here and there, correcting a rune or redirecting an intent with the economical precision of someone who diagnosed problems at a glance and fixed them in as few words as possible. He worked his way methodically toward the front.
When he reached Hermes he stopped.
"Mr. Gaemond."
"Sir."
Charles looked at him for a moment with the flat evaluating gaze that Hermes had come to understand was not hostility but simply the way the man looked at everything he was genuinely thinking about.
"Put the tablet away."
Hermes blinked. Around him several students looked up from their work.
"Sir?"
"You have nothing left to learn from paired runes," Charles said, in the tone of someone reporting a meteorological fact. "Put it away."
Hermes put it away.
Charles produced a piece of chalk and turned to the small board mounted at the side of the front row — not the main board at the front of the room, just the smaller one, close and personal. He drew four runes in sequence, each one clean and deliberate.
Water. Flow. Strength. Natural Disasters.
"These four," Charles said, tapping each one in turn, "are the foundation of this spell. Water for the medium. Flow for direction and movement. Strength for the accumulated force behind it." He paused at the last rune.
"And Natural Disasters — not destruction for its own sake, but the principle of natural force in its most concentrated and patient form. Water does not break stone through violence. It breaks stone through persistence, through pressure, through the simple refusal to stop." He set the chalk down. "Together they invoke that principle and compress it. What comes out is not a flood. It is a river bottled into a single point."
Hermes looked at the four runes and thought about that.
A river bottled into a single point.
"This spell belongs to me," Charles said, to Hermes and incidentally to the entire class which had stopped pretending to work. "I have used it for thirty years. I am teaching it to you because you are ready for it and because wasting your time with exercises beneath your ability would be an insult to both of us."
He set the chalk down.
"The technique is different from what you have learned. Watch carefully."
He held both hands out in front of him, pressed flat together in a prayer position, fingers pointing forward. He poured soul essence into the space between his palms, shaping it around the intent of the four runes he had drawn.
Then he thrust his joined hands forward.
The water that shot from between his palms hit the stone wall at the back of the room with a sound like a crack of thunder. A clean line appeared in the stone where it struck — not a scratch, not a dent, a cut, precise and deep, as though someone had taken a blade to solid rock.
The class was absolutely silent.
Charles lowered his hands and turned back to Hermes as though nothing remarkable had occurred.
"You carve the runes first," he said. "Pour the soul essence into the carving and feel them activate — but do not add your intent yet. Then raise your hands, clasp them, and imagine the stream shooting out from between your palms. The intent comes with the gesture. The gesture shapes the intent." He paused. "Understood?"
"Yes sir," Hermes said.
"Attempt it."
Hermes picked up his stylus and carved the four runes into his tablet as carefully as he could manage — Water, Flow, Strength, Natural Disasters, each one placed close to the next in a tight cluster. He placed his palm over them, poured in soul essence, and felt all four activate simultaneously with a pull that was noticeably heavier than two runes had been.
He raised his hands joining them together, forming the praying gesture. Felt the soul essence gathering in the space between his palms, shapeless and waiting.
He then thrust them forward and imagined a stream of water shooting out from the gap.
Water shot from between his palms.
It was — fine. Functional. A steady pressurised stream that arced across the room and splattered against the back wall in a wide wet circle, more enthusiastic than destructive. Several students in the back row leaned away from the spray.
It looked exactly like a decorative garden fountain.
Hm.
"Again," Charles said.
Hermes activated the runes again, raising his hands.
This time he didn't just imagine a stream. He thought about what the runes actually meant — the river that doesn't stop, the pressure that accumulates over decades, the water that turns stone to sand through sheer patient insistence. He held that image clearly and clasped his hands.
The stream that came out was different.
Thinner. Faster. It hit the back wall with a sharp crack and left a white gouge in the stone — not as deep as Charles's cut but unmistakably there. A student two rows back made a small involuntary noise.
Hermes stared at the mark on the wall.
"Better," Charles said simply.
He was looking at Hermes with the expression he sometimes got — the one that had no name but sat somewhere between assessment and something warmer that he would never acknowledge out loud. Then his eyes moved, just briefly, to Hermes's hands.
"Stop there," he said quietly. "Rest."
Hermes lowered his hands. He checked his soul essence and found it considerably lower than it should have been for two spells — the four rune combination was hungry in a way paired runes had never been. He had perhaps four casts left at full essence.
Maybe less.
"Sir," he said. "How many times can you cast it? Before you're depleted?"
Charles considered the question.
"At my level? Many times." He picked up his chalk. "At yours? Four. Perhaps five if you are careful." He turned back to the main board. "Which means you do not waste it."
He returned to his circuit of the class without further comment, leaving Hermes alone with the gouge in the back wall and the fading warmth of his recovered soul essence and the quiet awareness that tonight was coming whether he was ready or not.