Smoke, as if a fire had burned, though only a hint of smoke remained.
“Was this you?” she asked, glancing over to Eva.
She stepped over to Jayna, biting on her lip. “It was not.”
2
Jayna made a steady circuit around the clearing, sweeping her gaze around as she worked, holding her hand out from her as she pushed power beyond herself. She used sorcery this time, not the Toral ring, though it would have worked better to detect what was out there.
Eva remained motionless standing between the trees, breathing in and out slowly. There was an energy within her, and it seemed almost as if she was trying to test the smoke they had encountered, as if she was afraid of it.
“Do you detect anything here?” Jayna asked.
Eva opened her eyes. There was only a faint swirling smoke around Eva, but as usual, Jayna didn’t perceive anything from it. It was simply there. “No. There is nothing here.”
“The smoke looked like—”
“I know what the smoke looked like,” Eva said.
“And it wasn’t yours?”
“If it were mine, I would have told you.”
Jayna nodded slowly. She was right, but that didn’t make it any easier for her.
She wasn’t at all sure what to make of this. The only thing she knew was that there had been some pressure, some smoke, then . . .
It had been nearby.
That mattered.
“They weren’t that far from us,” she said.
“They were not,” Eva agreed.
“I don’t like it.”
She made another circuit around the clearing, pushing out with a tracking spell. It was a matter of using a burst of energy that flowed out from her, cycling it in a steady pattern, but there was nothing.
“I don’t . . .”
Jayna leaned down. There was something on the ground.
A footprint?
She shook her head. Not a footprint. It did look like some sort of animal print though, and it was near enough to where they detected the energy that she thought it couldn’t be coincidental.
“Come over here,” she said to Eva.
Eva gave her an annoyed look, and she relaxed her hands. The smoke began to ease away, drifting a little. She joined Jayna, looking down at the ground. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“Whatever is down here. Do you see anything?”
“I see a scuff mark on the ground.”
“What do you think of it?”
“I don’t know. Some sort of animal came through here. Maybe a wolf. There are other creatures that prowl through the forest—as we both well know.”
“There are,” Jayna agreed. “But do they prowl so close to where we detected this strange magic?”
Eva shot her a look. “Now it’s strange magic?”
“It’s something. Not dark, or I would have felt it differently.” She looked up. “You can’t deny that you felt power within it.”
“I felt some power, but I don’t know what it means.”
Jayna shook her head, looking around. Now that she had seen one of those markings, she looked for others, but she found nothing as she circled the clearing.
“Maybe it was nothing,” she muttered to herself.
She flipped open the spellbook and began to sort through the pages.
“What are you doing now?”
She glanced over to Eva. “I was looking to see if there might be a way for me to track more power here. Given that we know there was something here, I wanted to see if I can find anything left behind.”
“I see,” Eva said.
“You don’t have to be so supportive.”
“Obviously.”
Jayna had studied the spellbooks enough since Char had given them to her that she knew where to find the type of spell she wanted.
It would be a bit more focused than what she had used before. Then, she had come up with a spell to track the resistance to power, but now she wanted to search for a particular thing.
She could use that marking on the ground for her search and see if she could follow it.
If she had some way of capturing some of the smoke before it had drifted away, she might’ve been able to use that to track, but unfortunately, it had faded too quickly. Following that smoke was an opportunity Jayna couldn’t pass up. Not for herself, though. Eva wanted to know more about her kind of magic.
She found a spell that might work.
She started reading through the spell, whispering the words. It involved hand movements in the air rather than anything placed on a concrete sort of substrate. The distinction fit the purpose. With this spell, she wanted to let the energy dissipate away from her, to be carried out on the wind, and to do that, she had to place a marking, a binding of sorts, onto the wind and then push her power out through it in order to carry it.
“Grab me a bit of dirt from where we saw that paw print,” she said to Eva. As Eva collected it, thankfully not arguing, Jayna held on to the pattern. This was a flicker of several lines of energy that she pushed outward, and as soon as Eva brought a fistful of dirt, Jayna nodded. “Throw it right there.”
“Throw it?”
When she nodded, Eva tossed the fistful of dirt at the pattern Jayna held.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then she surged power into it.
She could feel the spell taking hold. It was incredible. There was something quite relaxing about drawing upon the magic she had learned at the Academy, using power like she had once used, and now that she had the books, she would much rather use that kind of magic when she had the opportunity rather than pulling through the Toral ring.
The spell took hold.
She pushed outward, away from her, and let the energy carry on the wind.
Jayna wasn’t sure what to expect, but as that spell began to sweep away from her, she detected its energy. It flowed. Strangely, it seemed almost as if there was something within the spell that was designed to ignore her urging. There was something that pushed against her, sliding away from her.
Jayna fought, and she added more power into it. She found that she needed even more power, and ultimately had to add some of the painful energy from the Toral ring.
“What are you doing?” Eva asked.
“I’m trying to—”
“Release it.”
“What?”
Eva came over and a bit of smoke swirled around her hand as she grabbed Jayna’s wrist, then it began to swirl up her arm, into her chest. The energy rubbed up against what Jayna was trying to hold, as if Eva were trying to combat her.
“Release it,” Eva said.
“What are you doing?”
“Something’s not right,” Eva said. “Can’t you feel it?”
“I can’t feel anything.”
“It’s burning.”
Jayna looked over, holding Eva’s gaze for a long moment before shaking her head. “Fine. I’ll release it, but you’re going to help me search for whatever was here.”
She withdrew her power, and the remainder of the spell drifted away. It faded completely, leaving her with nothing.
“What was it burning?” Jayna asked.
This was new territory for them. They’d never found anything like this, and Eva had never had such a struggle.