Bookworld Online: Marsh Man

Bokuboy

I studied for several hours with Sara and Hope encouraging me and helping me reference through the huge list of ingredients as I looked at the next series of potions in the book. Just like the first one, there were a few things in each recipe that I just didn't have the mental references for. I was sure that it must have been intentional, just so that non-mages couldn't pick up the book and start making stronger and more powerful potions without having at least some prior knowledge.

After that was a nice bath that both of my maids helped me with, then Sara performed the after bath ritual that she enjoyed and I was dressed and tucked into bed. The night passed by in a flash and I was up and getting dressed by Hope. She had changed the books in my bag for the two classes I had that morning. The funny thing was, I had the entire afternoon off. I wasn't going to question it, either.

I had detention after that and would have to go to the potions classroom and spend even more time with Mage Marks. If she knew that I had the afternoon off, she might have required me to go to her classroom and stay there until suppertime, so I wasn't going to enlighten her.

After the walk to the academy's main building, I met up with the other students. Several of the girls gave me bright smiles for some reason. I didn't ask what had changed from the day before.

“Good morning, David.” Vanessa whispered as she moved through the crowd to walk beside me.

“Good morning.” I said in a normal voice. She smiled at me and her arm twitched to wrap around mine, as if she wanted me to escort her, then she let her hand drop. I held out my elbow for her and she beamed a smile at me, then held on tightly as we entered the building. She didn't say anything else as we went to the assigned classroom and there was a note there as well. I wrote down the classroom change and we left there and walked down a different hallway to the new classroom.

“Ah, I see that the rumors weren't too exaggerated.” A man's voice said as Vanessa and I entered the classroom with twenty girls piling in behind us. The teacher wore the standard mage robes with the academy logo on them, as expected. What wasn't expected was that he had a woman wearing mage robes sitting at the teacher's desk behind him.

I ignored his comment and led Vanessa to the desk in the same position that she usually used in other classrooms, sat her down properly, and sat beside her. The other girls settled down in their chosen seats as well.

“I would normally wait until the bell rings before I started talking and introduced myself; but, with all of you being so efficient and settling down so quickly, why should I make you wait?” The teacher asked with a chuckle.

No one laughed.

“Well, then.” He said and coughed. “My name is Mage Black Montgomery and I am the basic enchantment teacher for this class.” He stepped slightly to the side and waved at the woman, who stood. “I would also like to introduce you to my beautiful wife and the love of my life, Mage Heather Montgomery.”

The woman gave him a bit of a glare and he smiled and waved at the class. The woman sighed and looked at us. “As my shamelessly and inappropriately complimenting husband has conveniently forgotten to tell you what I will be teaching, I will do so now.” She said and that earned a few laughs from the girls. “I am the basic runes teacher and this year, I will help all of you budding mages try and make sense of both the runic language and its practical use with enchanting.”

One of the girls raised her hand and the teacher pointed to her. “I thought we had enchanting first class and runes second class.”

“That wasn't a proper question.” The woman said and the girl blushed a little. “I understood the implied question, however. Both the runic language and enchanting go hand in hand. Without one, the other is handicapped. You can still do both; but, both will be less than effective without the knowledge of the other.”

Lorna put her hand up. “Is that why most enchanters have dual specialization?”

The woman smiled. “Excellent question. Yes, they have to have extensive knowledge of both fields to be the most effective.”

The man sat on the front of the teacher's desk. “I can see by your faces that only a few of you will actually choose to continue these subjects for the second year intermediate and the third year advanced courses.”

I glanced around and saw that he was right. There were not a lot of interested faces looking back at him. I looked back at him and both he and his wife were looking right at me. Just then, the bell rang to start the class.

“Although, one of you seems to have already passed all of the basic courses and probably thinks this is a waste of time.” The man said.

I put my hand up and he nodded. “I have to see what you're going to teach me first before I decide if you're wasting my time.”

A few of the girls gasped, Vanessa grinned, and his wife barked a laugh before she could stop herself. Her husband gave her an angry glare.

“What? That was a great answer.” His wife said. “At least he's not dismissing you immediately.”

The man's glare softened and he sighed as he looked back at me. “We've been informed of your work history for the army and we know you were one of the construction workers building Mage Lukas' kracken tubes.”

I put my hand up again and he nodded. “I was the one who invented them.”

The man looked surprised, as did everyone else in the classroom.

“How dare you claim...” His wife started to say.

“It was my idea to make them to fight the marsh dragons and Mage Lukas endorsed it. He didn't know there could be a movement enchantment still usable until I showed him. The mages at the time were all surprised the first time using my boat and the movement enchantment I used.”

She closed her mouth and didn't say anything else.

“I also only made the cylindrical tubes and not the base, since the construction crews at the time could build the mini-catapults without my help. I was also the primary enchanter for nearly all of the ammunition until I trained up several mages to help me.”

Everyone looked even more surprised at my words.

“My tools and magic touched every single one of the projectiles until two weeks before I was discharged.” I said. “I was in the stockade then.”

“What for?” The man asked.

“Refusing an illegal order that could have gotten thousands of soldiers killed.”

Vanessa gasped beside me, as did several other girls.

“I was only supposed to get a week in the stockade; but, the Colonel thought I was making fun of her when I finished my essential work and accepted the punishment. She gave me two weeks instead.” I said. “It made her happy how much I suffered for those two weeks.”

The entire class fell silent.

“I was a conscript in the army and wasn't allowed to claim the invention of the kracken tubes myself, because no one would believe that something like that came from a conscript, so Mage Lukas assumed responsibility for it and they were adapted into the army's normal weapon deployments right away.”

It took several minutes of silence to pass before the man spoke.

“The kracken tubes ended the war.” The man said. “Mage Lukas is famous for it now.”

“Oh? Did the peace accords go through?” I asked.

“No, it's just a temporary cease fire while they work out what the reparations are going to be.” The woman said and gave me an intense look. “How did you know they were suing for peace?”

“Mage Marks mentioned it yesterday in potions class.” I said and she looked at the other students, some of which nodded in agreement.

“We're going off the class subject with this conversation.” The man said. “Who can tell me what an enchantment is?”

Several of the girls put their hands up to answer.

“One that's not word for word from the book.” The man clarified and they all put their hands down. His eyes went right to me. “Mr. Drake, if you would. Tell us what an enchantment is.”

“It's the physical written instructions to power, direct, and form your magic to do specific tasks that don't require your input, past powering them up initially with an infusion. Depending on the task, they can be powered by other mages to repeat those written instructions.”

Both the man and his wife looked surprised at my answer.

“You haven't read the book, have you?” The man asked as he crossed his arms.

“No, I've been too busy.” I responded.

“That was the best answer I've ever heard and I've heard a lot of answers.” The man's wife said and wrote it down on the papers in front of her. “It was both simplistic and got the point across exactly.”

The man nodded. “As Mr. Drake said, an enchantment is a specific set of written instructions that when powered, will perform a task.”

One of the girls raised her hand and he nodded to her. “What kind of tasks?”

“All kinds. There are several practical uses from wards to repelling charms, the newly rediscovered movement enchantment that the Henrietta Family have brought back into existence...”

“No!” Vanessa gasped, except it was only a whisper. “They claimed your work!”

“I know.” I whispered back as the man kept describing different enchantments. “It's only the same limited one that's on the kracken tube ammunition. Only Helena has studied the full enchantment and she gave me her word that she wouldn't share her knowledge of it until we were married.”

“Oh, that's a relief. I thought they robbed you.” Vanessa breathed and we both put our attention back on the teachers.

“Unfortunately, over time a lot of the old enchantments have either degraded in their teachings as they have been passed down through the mage families or have become too complicated for someone to power them properly, since the knowledge on how to do it has been lost.” The man said. “Scholar mages have been working on them for years and are no closer to figuring them out.”

Another girl raised her hand. “If the old enchantments are being lost, how are we going to keep using them?”

“That's where my lovely and intelligent wife comes in.” The man said.

“The runes.” The woman said. “We've deciphered a lot of the older enchantments and discovered that runes play a huge part in their creation. What we can't reproduce from the old ones, we write out in the runic language and create new enchantments.”

“We're going to be able to make our own enchantments?” One of the girls asked, clearly surprised.

Both of the teachers laughed.

“No, you're much too young right now to create your own enchantments. You'll need years of practice and expertise to be able to pull apart an enchantment to decipher its secrets and then recreate it to do what you want.” The man said. “What you'll be learning this year is the proper techniques and procedures to copy out existing enchantments and then trying to get them to work.”

“Meanwhile, I'll be teaching you the basic runic language that will let you understand what is going on inside the simple enchantments in the book and will make it easier for you to enchant.” The woman said, her voice full of confidence.

I put my hand up. “What if you can already do that without knowing the runic language?”

“Ha! You can't figure out what an enchantment entails until you know what...”

“I made the simple movement enchantment on the kracken tube ammunition from a more complicated one.” I said and everyone in the room stared at me, except for Vanessa.

“You made...” The man shook his head. “Grand Mage Henrietta introduced it to the army through his daughter, Mage Henrietta.”

“I'm betrothed to her and her father wants the full enchantment from me. That's why he's allowing me to marry her.” I said. “He even told her that he and his brother want to take enchanting lessons from me, so they can learn it directly from the source.”

The man's face seemed to drain of color and he sat back on the top of the teacher's desk. “No wonder he arranged for you to pass all of the core classes. Considering how powerful the limited one is, if the Grand Mage gets his hands on the full enchantment, he could revolutionize our whole society.”

“Not really.” I said and he looked at me. “It can only handle so much mass. You would need multiple enchantments for anything large and also need a mage to power each of them.”

“But...”

“They would also need to concentrate and want the enchantments to do the same thing. If they aren't in sync, they could tear a ship apart if one mage tried to go left and another tried to forward at the same time.”

The man went quiet and no one spoke for several minutes.

“We're losing essential class time.” The woman said and the man seemed to shake himself.

“Right. Let's start from the very basic things, since most of you have no idea what we've been talking about the last few minutes. Myself included.” The man said and a few of the girls laughed uncomfortably. “I'm going to first introduce you to an enchanter's best friends. His tools.”

I kind of tuned out the man and sat back in my chair. I knew the first few lessons in enchanting were going to be more of a review for me and had expected to at least read along; but, introducing the runes teacher at the same time and combining the two classes had thrown off my estimate.

I knew nothing about the runes themselves, except that they were components in most enchantments. A few of them were unnecessary and in some cases redundant. The thing was, if there was an entire language of them, I needed to know what the language stood for and what each rune meant and could do to an enchantment. I suspected that certain combinations would vary the effects on an enchantment, so I definitely had to pay attention to the runes teacher.

Almost as if she knew what I was thinking, the woman turned her head to look right at me. I felt a bit of a tingle on my skin, so I cast Dispel. She let out an 'eep' sound and jerked slightly, which got everyone's attention.

“Honey, are you all right?” The man asked. “I thought you liked the half-swirl carving tool.”

The woman blushed slightly and waved him away. He shrugged and went back to describing each tool and their use and I kept my eyes on the woman. She didn't try again with whatever it was she had tried. In fact, she wouldn't even meet my eyes for the rest of the class, even when it was her turn to speak.