“I don’t understand. I’ve watched you do magic. High magicks.”
“And I was running on instinct most of the time.” Tori wanted to cry or curl up in the corner and ignore Baldewin.
But the man deserved to know what he was risking his life to protect. Tori wasn’t sure if he was worth it. He kept his eyes trained on the back of the driver’s seat as he spoke. “In order to do magic, properly do magic, you need to know exactly what power levels are involved. To calculate things out to the second decimal point. I have dyscalculia and can’t begin to do the math on the spells. I work on theory and instinct, and no one trusts me to do magic because of it.”
There was a ruminative pause.
Warin growled from the front seat, “This makes no sense to me.”
“Nor me,” Baldewin agreed, also growly. His dragon side was clearly in his vocal cords, and he was not happy. “You know your magic. I saw you defend us from four mages while working with a spell element you had no experience with. You adapted the spell on the fly and did so brilliantly.”
That was…true. “But I was working on instinct. It’s not proper—”
Baldewin overrode him, voice growing harder and more clipped. “When I offered either breath or flame for you to work the masking spell with, you knew instantly that it was wrong. That it would unbalance the spell. You knew the power levels wouldn’t be right, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes,” Tori admitted slowly, eyes daring to come up to see Baldewin’s expression. It wasn’t a happy one. “But that was theory. I know in theory what it takes for the spell to be balanced and work.”
There was a hard light in those grey-green eyes. The ring of gold around the iris seemed to thicken, as if the dragon inside Baldewin was demanding the right to go pound someone. “I have never, in all my years, seen a mage demand another to calculate a spell to death like you just described. I have never seen a master mage demand of a student to do so. I do not understand the methods of your clan, Tori, nor do I think they suit you.”
“It is the sign of a poor master when they cannot adapt their teaching methods to their student,” Warin pitched in from the front seat. “A true master can find different methods to teach. If they only know of one way, then they are not a master. They are a student reciting by rote what they were taught, and that is all they are.”
Baldewin gave Warin an approving nod. “Well said. If your masters insisted on this insanity, Tori, it’s because they are not true mages. They don’t trust their magic, or themselves, which is why they double and triple check everything before they invoke a spell. If they cannot trust themselves, then of course they can’t trust you. They can’t trust anything.”
Tori’s magic-starved soul pounced on Baldewin and Warin’s words, gobbling them down. He reflected on all the times he saw the mages around him double and triple check their ingredients, weighing them to the ounce before enacting a spell.
It had never made sense to him, that caution. There was no reason for it. If an element weighed 0.03 instead of 0.02, it had no visible effect on the spell. The one time he’d questioned it, he’d been smacked, told that he didn’t understand magic at all, and forbidden from doing even a basic spell for a full week.
But Baldewin and Warin were both right. He’d done more magic in the past week than he had in months, and never once had he calculated things to death before doing a spell. Hell, often he didn’t even have the right ingredients with him, and he’d had to adjust things on the fly. The spell he used to blow up the car engine was meant to ignite a candle, for heaven’s sake. It was never meant to spark an explosion. He’d done nothing but instinctual magic for days now.
And it had turned out as he intended. Every. Single. Time.
A choked laugh escaped him, slightly hysterical as he realized what it meant. His clan had turned obsessive about their magic because it was all they had left. They’d gone into a no-man’s land, hidden away from the world, closing ranks to the point that they’d had nothing better to do than turn on each other. They’d created an insane system to work magic in to make themselves superior. There wasn’t any other reason for it.
Tori bent forward, trying to gain control over himself. He was so incredibly mad. At his clan, his family, himself. All for believing in that falsehood. Another lie.
Why had he ever let himself believe them when he’d known better? He’d snuck away when he was a teenager and cast spells, just to prove he could, time and again, all without their calculations. He’d had ample proof that their methods weren’t the only way to work magic. So why had he internalized that lie?