“Yep.”
He waited for her to elaborate, and when she didn’t, he asked, “And how’d it go?”
“Fine.” She walked past him to the kitchen to prepare a plate for herself of something plain. She wasn’t really hungry, but it was a convenient excuse for trying to dodge this conversation.
The old man followed her. “It went ‘fine’? What does that mean?”
Skate opened cabinets at random, looking for a platter or dish to hold the bread and cheese she wanted. “It means it went fine. She got the book, safe and sound.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“Where are the plates?”
He pointed to one of the cabinets she hadn’t opened yet. “Skate, did anyone see you?”
She pulled out a plate from the identified cabinet and set it on the table, which put it at just about eye level for her. She sighed before she answered. “Yes, Ossertine saw me.”
The wizard’s eyes went wide. “Did she recognize you?”
Skate rubbed her forehead and eyes. “Yeah. We talked.” She explained how she’d been caught, and the direction the conversation had taken regarding her situation with Belamy. He looked relieved that she’d been able to cover for him so easily.
“She has no idea I was the one who told you to steal the book? Oh, that’s fantastic,” he said, opening the larder door and handing Skate a plate with a few light, fluffy bread rolls.
“No, she thinks you found me out and sent me back with it.”
“It all worked out then, didn’t it? Smart thinking, Skate, really. You can think on your feet, and that’s no small skill.”
Skate smiled at the compliment, though that was purely for Belamy’s benefit. She did not feel like smiling as she thought of the conversation that had followed about honor and dignity. He doesn’t need to hear about that. Something about her smile must have come across as less than sincere, because Belamy’s smile faltered somewhat after a moment. “Is everything all right?” he asked, concern clear in his voice.
“Sure, why wouldn’t it be?” To cover the awkward moment, she took a huge bite off of a roll.
Belamy frowned but pressed no further. “As I said, a job well done. And that’s another week of room and board.”
Skate nodded, not able to get around the bread in her mouth just yet.
“More to come when you take care of Jack. A while to go before then, though. This business with his criminal acquaintances has cut into my reading time considerably. I’m sure I’ll be done with at least one of the books by the time your store of weeks runs out, though, so don’t fret about that. And if I’m wrong, there are always more books to steal, eh?”
Skate smiled, a genuine expression this time, and shrugged. She was finally able to swallow. “Lesson went okay without you today.”
“Oh? The blending of letters and the new sounds didn’t throw you?”
“Nope. Try me.”
He considered her for a moment and nodded. He left the desk and moved to the fireplace. “I don’t have any writing materials handy, so this will have to do.” With a roll of his hands and some rhythmic chanting she couldn’t follow, he spread his arms toward the fireplace.
The flames streamed toward his hands like water poured from a jug. His hands worked in circles, packing the fire into a ball much like Skate and the other street kids sometimes did with snow to harass passersby. The result was charred wood smoldering in the hearth and a ball of orange flames in the wizard’s grasp, burning on nothing and not harming the old man at all.
“Now then,” he said, pulling one hand free of the fire, “show me.” He drew in the air with the free hand, and behind the finger the flames trailed out the exact path he made. When he was done, there were two symbols she couldn’t read in tongues of orange and red.
She tried to puzzle out the letters and failed. It was not that she was having trouble recognizing them, but that they were letters she had never seen at all. “I don’t know what those are.”
He screwed his face up in confusion. “Skate, you know all your letters. I know for a fact you—oh,” he said with his eyes widening in understanding. He stepped back and swept his arm across the face of the unfamiliar letters. They spun in the air and then Skate understood, too: she’d been looking at them backwards.
“C H. Ch.” The recitation was in the pattern they’d practiced, and Belamy nodded. He pulled his hand back, and the fire returned to the ball. He wrote again. “S T. St.” He nodded again, pulled back again. He wrote a third time. “A N. An.”
Satisfied, Belamy pulled the fire back into his hands a final time, and then lobbed the whole ball back into the fireplace, where it latched back on to the wood and began devouring it once more. “Rattle is a reliable tutor in my absence, as expected,” he chuckled, wiping his hands against each other as if removing dust from them. She was surprised when dust actually did fall from them, gray and flaky chunks that wound their distracted way to the ground.
“Ash,” he explained, seeing her confusion.
“What’s the point of something like that?” Skate walked forward and toed the ash that had formed a tawdry little pile in front of Belamy. “Why would you know magic that lets you write in the air with fire? When would you need to do that?”
“It’s got a number of uses,” he replied, placing his hands on his hips. “As just demonstrated, it can help when you’ve got no paper and ink directly handy.”
“All right, but that’s really specific. That can’t have been the original use of it, right?”
“No, I suppose not. It’s much more commonly used as a way to send messages over large distances. I made them very small, but writing with fire can be as large as you need it to be, so long as you’ve got the fire to write it all and can get to where you’re writing.” He pointed a finger toward the wall facing south. “The harbor master keeps a wizard on his payroll just for this spell. If he ever needs to send a message to ships at sea at night, that’s how he does it.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” Skate said, starting to doubt the story. “I’ve lived here all my life, spent plenty of time by the docks.”
“He hasn’t needed to do anything like that in years; it’s an emergency measure, not something to be done all the time. Anyway, you asked for the purpose of such magic, and now you have it. It’s enormously useful for sending a written message to groups across open spaces, like a harbor.”
“Or a battlefield.”
His eyebrows twitched upward. “Yes. It is useful in the chaotic din of battle to send messages to commanders quickly. That’s an odd observation to make on your part. Why bring it up?”
Skate shrugged and avoided eye contact.
“Oh, I see. Petre’s been telling tales again.” He walked past her, his gait stiffer than usual, and took his place again at the desk.
“He said you were a war hero.”
Belamy grimaced and shook his head, like a horse shaking off an irritating fly.
“Is that why you know that magic?”
He nodded once—a jerking, clipped motion. “Yes. As you pointed out, it’s very useful.” He was frowning slightly, and she wasn’t sure whether it was in concentration on the glass sphere or irritation with her.