No! thought Will. Not again, not so soon. Are you trying to kill me? Unfortunately, he was unable to voice his objections.
Again the old man sucked the very life out of him, and Will was overcome with a bone-deep fatigue. A few minutes later, he did it again. “You would have been incapacitated for days after this when you first came to me,” lectured the old man. “Now you can recover most of your turyn from the environment in just minutes, and you can do it over and over again. I’ll show you something even more interesting this time.”
He drew out Will’s turyn once more, but this time rather than dispersing the energy, he brought it close to Will’s body and released it. Rather than fading away, the cloud of turyn was drawn back into his body, as though a wind was blowing it toward him. Seconds later, Will’s exhaustion faded.
“In the presence of higher concentrations of turyn, you can recover much faster,” declared his grandfather. He snapped his fingers and released Will then.
Sitting up, Will brushed the dirt from the back of his tunic and gave the old man a sour look. “Every time we have a discussion, I wind up frozen while you perform experiments at my expense.”
“All in the name of education,” said Arrogan. “Besides, training an apprentice is a real pain in the ass. The only bright spot is that I get to have a little fun now and then.”
Back on his feet, Will still felt tired, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t deal with.
His grandfather pointed at the jar that supposedly contained troll urine. Will still hadn’t decided whether he believe him on the identity of the contents, though. “You’ve had enough training for one day. After you spread the troll piss around the garden, you can rest for the afternoon.”
“Yuck,” commented Will. “I think I’d rather train.”
The old man shook his head. “So far we’ve only talked about turyn and its source, but there’s another important factor, something I call ‘will.’ Your will is a lot like a muscle. Training it to control your source makes it stronger—performing magic makes it stronger—but it has a limit. Push yourself too hard for too long and your self-discipline will crumble.”
“How do you know when it’s running out?” asked Will.
“You get irritable,” said his grandfather. “Easy things seem difficult. Your mind feels fuzzy. That’s if you’re lucky enough to notice in time. Sometimes it falls apart so quickly that by the time you realize you’ve overdone it, it’s too late.”
“What happens then?”
“Depends on what you’re doing at the time. If it’s something big, the result can be bad, or even fatal,” said Arrogan.
Chapter 18
Summer passed into winter, and Will turned sixteen without much fanfare. He wasn’t even sure if his grandfather knew when his birthday was. The old man had never asked, and Will never brought it up.
Will went through two more cycles of having his turyn forcibly reduced, and while it was unpleasant each time, it was never as bad as the first had been. The flame on his candle was no longer even a flame—it more resembled an ember, much like his grandfather’s. He hoped that meant he wouldn’t have to go through any more compressions.
“We’re done squeezing the life out of me, right?” asked Will, as the next summer drew to a close.
“Yeah,” said his grandfather. “No one’s ever gone farther than that, though I’m tempted to try since I have you as a test subject.”
“Why haven’t they gone farther?”
“They all died,” said Arrogan in a bland tone. Then his eyes lit up. “I’m game to try, though, if you want.”
Will gave him a sour look. “No thanks. Does this mean you’ll be taking the spell-cage off soon?”
“Hah!” barked his grandfather. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You lazy little prick.”
Will sighed. “I knew it was too much to hope for. What’s next then?”
“Well, since you’ve got enough nerve to ask, you must be ready. Next, you’ll learn how to increase your available turyn,” said his guardian.
“You have to take the spell off then,” said Will. “I have to keep my source tightly clamped off as long as it’s in place.”
“That’s where you’re mistaken. The turyn you use now doesn’t come from your source. Your body has learned to maintain itself without your source. What you’ll do next is increase what you draw from your environment.”
“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” said Will bleakly.
“It shouldn’t,” said Arrogan, “but I wouldn’t put it past you to screw it up somehow.”
“Can I ask what the point of this is?”
“You can ask, but it won’t help you succeed, and you wouldn’t understand either, so don’t bother. It will make sense later. What you need to do is push your turyn outward, sort of like you did when you healed that boy.”
It sounded simple. “That’s it?” said Will.
Arrogan just smirked. “Try. We’ll see how far you get.”
An hour later and Will wanted to pull his hair out. No matter what he tried, nothing happened. It wasn’t that he was struggling with a difficult task—he couldn’t even begin, and his grandfather’s advice was worse than useless.
“Imagine it flowing out through your hands. That helps some people,” said the old man. When that didn’t help, he offered different instructions. “Think of it like an empty wineskin. You’re trying to push your breath out and inflate it.”
After the second hour, Will was ready to give up. “Why don’t you just take control like you did before? You do it and I’ll learn from that.”
The old man shook his head. “What I did before was compress your turyn, so it would fit within the spell-cage. You had to learn how to keep it that way on your own. This is almost the opposite of that.”
That gave Will an idea. Forcing himself to release his inner grip on the source of his turyn might give him more power to work with. He was rewarded moments later when a sensation of intense pain built within him. He clamped down on his source immediately.
“Fool,” remarked his grandfather. “You have to use the turyn you’re absorbing, not the turyn from your source. That’s why the spell-cage stays on, so you don’t develop sloppy technique.”
“I hate you sometimes,” said Will honestly.
The old man grinned. “Time for some staff sparring, then. You can try this again tomorrow.”
He didn’t have any better luck the next day, the next week, or even that month, and to make matters worse, his grandfather delighted in taunting him about his failure. “The first-year students at Wurthaven learn to do this during their first week. It’s the most basic step to creating magic. They don’t even let them start learning the runes until they manage this,” teased the old man.
Will was sitting down in the yard in front of the house, doing his best to concentrate. He was sweating in the heat, and a swarm of gnats seemed to have decided he would make great company. “Can you leave me alone?” he complained. “I can’t focus.”