Weekly Writing – March 4 2023

“Oh, that?” He cast an unconcerned glance at the painting looking back from beside the desk. “That’s just a phylactery. Pay it no mind.”
Of course she paid it even more mind then. As much as she could while still sitting straight and proper in her chair on the supplicant’s side of the desk and still mostly meeting his eyes.
Still with her hands folded tight in her lap and every hope that this meeting would end with him producing the elaborate, illustrious contract that bound a master and apprentice together. Though her idea of what she might learn from him had just tilted a little ways into shadow – everyone knew about phylacteries, obviously, how to make them in theory and destroy them in practicality, but she had never seen one herself, or heard anyone admit to actually using one.
A piece of his soul, right there in that painting. A large one, maybe, to need that gilt, massive frame. She would have expected it to be a portrait of him, but its lavish greens and greys and blacks and golds wound instead into the image of a snake, which wound in turn through the dry, clean hollows of a human skull. Its eyes were as brightly fractured as the real thing, and seemed to catch every glance she sneaked at them.
“It’s- it’s very beautiful,” she said, when she couldn’t think of anything to say next that didn’t have to do with it. “Those are first-century runes around the frame, aren’t they?”
Far older and more complex than the ones that bound any of the spells she’d been allowed to learn yet. The gorgeous, intricate little pictograms had always fascinated her, but it would be decades before she was allowed to do anything more than admire them on the rare occasions they weren’t hidden well enough from her. How brazen, not just to have a piece of his soul hanging there in the open, but to bind it that way.
His eyes glittered as brightly as the snake’s. His fingers wound together like coils through an empty skull.
“They are,” he confirmed. “Not many appreciate them anymore. The second-century runes have more utility, they’ll say, while the third have more refined control. But something is lost in the focus on utility and control, isn’t it? Like a river bricked up into a straight canal – it flows better in our service, certainly, but what wild beauty and life, life in the margins, in the silt and weeds, have we destroyed to make it so?”
“My mother had a bracelet with a first-century rune on it,” she said. Babbling, he couldn’t possibly care about that, but she’d never met anyone before who had met her interest in the runes with anything but chilly disapproval or outright disdain. “The Stone Castle. It had been broken deliberately at the bottom right corner, so the protection wasn’t perfect, but she was thrown from a carriage once while wearing it, and she only ended up with a tiny bruise on her hip.”
“Even a castle with a missing brick is a mighty defence,” he said. And, with that sparkle still in his eyes, “Had – I take it the bracelet is no longer an heirloom of your family?”
Her cheeks burned with the memory. With the sense that two sets of eyes were watching her regret bringing it up.
“My father sold it,” she muttered. Then, remembering herself, sitting straight and speaking across the desk to him again, “It had been a bad year for silks. We needed the money. But it wasn’t four months after that my mother died, and we all knew it wouldn’t have happened if she’d still had the bracelet.”
The funeral had been a fine one, money hadn’t been quite so scarce then, but was it worth it? She’d sketched that rune in the corner of every one of her books until a second-year professor had noticed and stopped her.
She’d cut it into the soles of her shoes, with the lower right corner properly closed. It was the only one she’d ever had the chance to study – the only one she could draw perfectly.
Paper whispered on the desk. She’d let her gaze drop again, and lifted it to see his fingers spread across the grand ten-page contract, pushing it across the desk towards her.
Her mouth fell open. She’d barely taken that seat five minutes ago, and hadn’t had a chance to list any of the academic achievements or desperate hopes she’d hoped would convince him to take her on.
“Sir?”
He smiled across the desk and contract at her. “I’ve had ten would-be apprentices in the last two weeks try to convince me they wouldn’t be a waste of my time,” he said. “When asked what they hoped to learn from me, all of them listed things any mouldering textbook or second-rate conjurer would be able to teach them. You, however – you have a curiosity I am uniquely qualified to satisfy. And-” He glanced down at where he surely couldn’t see her feet tucked together between the chair’s legs- “-a talent I am uniquely qualified to nurture. If you put your name to this contract, I guarantee that, within five years, you will know more about first-century runes than most learn in five decades.”
A promise that tremendous – it had to be a lie. But her heart raced to hear it. Her heart seemed to expand to hear it, spreading as tremendous as that promise. Even if it turned out to be only half-true, no other potential master would offer her even half that much.
Her face flushed with joy. Her hand trembled on its way to the pen.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and spelled her name eagerly onto the last page of the contract.