Had the Jaeggi actually reached him after all? Hit him in the head? Maybe he was lying unconscious somewhere and dreaming all this. It would explain a lot.
“Warin, you up to driving?” Baldewin suddenly asked.
“Yes,” Warin answered. His tone changed to something else, as if he realized what Baldewin meant by that question. “Yes, I see. Tori, pull over. I’ll take the wheel for a time.”
“Yeah, sure,” Tori agreed faintly. He didn’t feel up to driving just then. His head was too crammed and spinning, he could barely focus on the road. At a large, open parking lot to what looked like a supermarket, he pulled in and parked toward the back.
It took him two tries to get out of the driver’s seat, since he forgot his seatbelt and had to stop and undo it first. Then he got out, letting Warin take the wheel, and climbed into the back seat. To his surprise, Baldewin clambered out of the front seat at the same time and joined him in the back. Warin adjusted the seat a touch, his legs longer, then he started up the car and got them in motion again.
“The ward you put on the car is still fine?” Baldewin questioned.
Tori blinked, turning to look at him. “What? Oh, sure. As long as the doors are closed, the ward’s up.”
“Good. I wasn’t sure if us getting in and out disturbed it.”
“No. No, we’re fine.” Seriously, this trust with his magic was throwing him. It was turning his world upside down more than the truth bombs Baldewin had dropped on his head about dragons, male mages, and the Jaeggi. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or rage at the old teachers who’d denied his abilities for so damn long.
Baldewin’s voice gentled to a soothing rumble. “Tori, something about speaking with Lisette disturbed you. Will you tell me what that is?”
He looked at this man, this incredibly patient man he was attracted to, and felt like the worst imposter ever. It almost made him ill to think that Baldewin trusted his magic. That he didn’t doubt Tori for an instant. When really, all Tori had was theoretical knowledge and a little practical experience in low-level magic. That he’d managed to safeguard them so far was more luck than design. He felt nauseous at the thought, his chest cramping, stomach churning bile.
He couldn’t look at Baldewin as he confessed brokenly, “I’m not the magical expert you think I am.”
Baldewin’s tone remained soothing, low. “Why do you say that?”
“Look, part of the reason I left my clan is because I’m a piss-poor mage.” Tori ran a hand over his face, feeling sicker with every word. And still, he couldn’t seem to keep his mouth shut. Couldn’t seem to keep himself from blowing the opportunity to be seen as a true mage. “No one in my old clan would let me work more than basic spells.”
“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?