A Practical Guide to Sorcery
Chapter 255: Advent [BOOK 6 START]

Siobhan

Seven Years Before

Month 4, Day 3, Thursday 4:00 p.m.

The advantage of being thirteen years old, Siobhan reflected as she calibrated her homemade periscope toward the tower’s east-facing window, was that adults systematically underestimated your capacity for elaborate espionage. In all other ways, it was miserable.

She peered into the viewing lens of the periscope, but quickly deflated as she realized that, even kneeling three meters off the ground on the roof of her treehouse, the device wasn’t quite tall enough to see directly through the window. She’d already scavenged the longest rusty pipe she could find in the scrap heap down by the shore.

She carefully lowered the device back down through the branches above, leaned over the edge of the treehouse roof, and shoved it through the empty window hole leading to the space within.

That was alright. She had a backup plan. “This is your own fault, Grandfather,” she muttered to herself as she checked the cinches on the climbing rope she had prepared. Siobhan's plan to breach the tower had begun with, “ask nicely.” If not for him, she wouldn’t have had to evolve it to the point of “inventive heist involving two pulleys, a stolen harpoon, and possibly a set of lock picks repurposed from some old hair pins.” She didn’t know if the tower window was locked.

Since Mom’s death, Grandfather had been spending even more time than usual in his forbidden tower workshop. Siobhan suspected that he was hiding something in there. At first, she had brushed this funny feeling off. But she kept having strange dreams about the room, and though Grandfather insisted it was nothing, over time she had stopped believing him. There was something about the heaviness of his footsteps as he approached the lead door on the second floor and the distracted look in his eyes when he came back down, as if his mind were caught somewhere oceans away—somewhere dark and painful that left him with a kind of uneasy fixation.

He was up there so much that some days, she didn’t see him at all.

Siobhan couldn’t get in through the lead door because of the wards, and since she also couldn’t peek through the window from a distance, she would have use the harpoon to catch the weather vane that doubled as a lightning rod atop the four-story tower. She would then anchor the knotted rope attached to the harpoon to the makeshift harness she had repurposed from an old backpack, and from there to the tree. The evenly spaced knots would make climbing the rope much easier.

She bundled it all up and began to climb. The top of the tower was a good distance away and even taller than the backyard tree, so she needed all the height she could get if she hoped to hook the harpoon around the weather vane.

Siobhan looked down and froze, closing her eyes as she suppressed the sudden vertigo that had slammed into her as she realized how far away the ground was. She continued up, but moved more carefully after that. Finally, she made it to the highest branch of the old oak that could still support her weight without swaying dangerously.

Siobhan’s breath fogged in the air as she weighed the harpoon in her hands and eyed the tower’s pointed roof. She hesitated for a moment, partially from nerves, and partially from guilt. Was it possible that Grandfather just went into the tower workshop to cry by himself? Siobhan had her own secret places to cry—the treehouse being one of them. If that was the case, then it would be intrusive and cruel of her to intrude into his personal space. If he found out, he would get angry, but it would be because he was hurt.

Except, Siobhan didn’t understand why they couldn’t be lonely and sad together.

“It’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t find out,” she assured herself. Grandfather was off to pick up a parcel from the next town over, which had a small dock that received deliveries. He wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours yet. If the tower workshop was innocent, Siobhan would just pretend like nothing had happened.

If she found something incriminating, she wasn’t sure what she would do. She wasn’t even sure what she thought she might find. Perhaps it was only the fact that the place was forbidden that made her so determined to break into it.

She scooted out a little farther, hugging the branch tightly between her legs. She made a few practice tossing motions with the harpoon, and then finally wound up and hurled it underhand with all her might.

She had been worried it might catch on one of the tree branches, and so had trimmed them as undetectably as possible to give herself a clear launch area. The harpoon didn’t catch, but the knotted rope unfurling behind it seemed to drag it down more than Siobhan had expected. The harpoon reached the apex of its arc much too low, and as it continued forward, her eyes widened in horror.

She fumbled for the shrinking pile of rope in her lap, hoping to yank on the trailing edge and stop the harpoon, but was too slow to avert disaster.

The harpoon crashed through the lower left-hand pane of the tower window, shattering the glass and landing with a surprisingly loud crash against the floor within.

In her panic, Siobhan’s legs lost their grip on the branch. She flipped upside down, clinging desperately to the rope—which she had yet to anchor to her backpack harness or the oak tree—as her ankles failed to hook the branch properly and she began to fall. The harpoon caught on the window edge and the pendulum of the rope pulled her slightly outward, but didn’t keep her from smacking into several branches with barely budding leaves on the way down.

Her breath exploded from her lungs as she hit the ground, and she lay stunned for a single second before the pain hit. She twitched a little, unable to even muster the coordination to roll onto her side as tears sprang to her eyes and her mouth gasped open in a plea for help that wouldn’t come. She had broken herself, shattered her body like an egg dashed against paving stones.

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When worn leather shoes appeared in her cloudy field of view, she stretched out trembling fingers toward them. They remained still.

Suddenly, a tiny sip of air returned to her lungs, which was soon followed by several shallow breaths. She pressed her left hand to her aching chest and braced her other arm against the ground to lever herself up, her long braid slipping over her shoulder. She tensed her muscles experimentally, then stood up. Apparently, she hadn’t broken herself irrecoverably, though she thought she could be forgiven for thinking so. She would definitely have several nasty bruises.

Siobhan frowned up at the man who had been standing over her with his hands in his pockets, staring.

He looked a bit like one of the People, with his dark hair and brown skin, but his eyes were a light brown, and the underlying tint of his skin was slightly different than Siobhan’s. She opened her mouth to complain about how rude it was to just ignore someone in desperate need of help, but he spoke before she could. “Are you a thief?” he asked, his tone conversational despite the accusation. His voice was cultured and high class, nothing like most of the people around the village, and nothing like Mom’s usual visitors, either. She hated to admit it, but he sounded even a bit more posh than Grandfather, whose pronunciation Siobhan had taken great care to imitate until it was second nature. “While it’s true that a sorcerer’s home might have quite a lot of value, I should warn you that it will also have wards.”

Siobhan closed her mouth.

“Additionally, I feel that you may be lacking in the skill and experience necessary to target this kind of mark. I am not sure that Raaz Kalvidasan will be lenient with you merely because you are a child.”

Siobhan pressed her lips together, closed her eyes, and rolled her shoulders back. She opened her eyes and stared cooly down the bridge of her nose, despite the fact that this man was more than a foot taller than her. “I live here.”

“Ah. And you were trying to break into the house because…” He tilted his head to the side like a curious bird. “You locked yourself out and don’t have your key,” he guessed, though his tone made it seem like a statement.

Siobhan gritted her teeth. “Obviously, if that were the case, I would have tried any of the ground-floor windows around the rest of the house.”

He took one hand out of his pocket, snapped his fingers, and pointed at her. “Right. That makes sense. So you were breaking the window as…an act of rebellion? I’ve heard teenagers can act like wild beasts. You seem about that age.”

Siobhan bared her teeth at him.

He smiled in return, completely unperturbed. “No? Then perhaps you are a young thaumaturge, hoping to steal forbidden knowledge? I am sure Raaz has plenty of that, but you should know that without the Will, his powerful spells and ancient rituals would be useless to you. In fact, even trying to cast them could endanger you. You know what an Aberrant is, don’t you?”

“Of course I—” Siobhan’s shoulders sank. She bowed her head and rubbed her forehead, where she would no doubt soon develop wrinkles from stress and anger. “I was trying to break into the tower because I think Grandfather is hiding something bad in there. I assure you, this is not my ideal way to spend a Thursday afternoon, but Grandfather has left me no choice. He won’t admit that anything strange is going on. I just wanted to take a look. I didn’t mean to break the window. And I’m not some ninny who finds a random spell to call down lightning or shoot fireballs and goes about actually trying to cast it.”

“Grandfather?” the man repeated. He put his hand back in his pocket and eyed the broken window, from which trailed the knotted length of rope.

“Are you a friend of Mom’s?” she asked. “Miakoda Naught, I mean.” She and Mom hadn’t lived among the rest of the People, though every once in a while one of Mom’s old friends would come to visit. They all had judging eyes, but were often fascinating despite that, with wonderful stories and sage advice learned from experience.

He tilted his head to the other side, a habit that she was quickly finding annoying. “I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

“Well, you can’t, now,” Siobhan said bluntly. “She’s dead.”

“Ah. I suppose it’s lucky that I did not come to see her?” They stared at each other in awkward silence for a moment before he looked back to the tower. “What do you think Raaz is hiding?”

Siobhan hesitated and finally spoke softly. “Something that makes him unhappy.”

The man let out a low hum. “Happiness…so ephemeral, so hard to define. Does it really matter, in the end?”

Siobhan raised her eyebrows and gave him a more assessing look. “I…think it does?” She looked back to the tower and added in a very small voice, “People who aren’t happy enough might kill themselves. Or just…not try very hard to avoid dying.”

“Ah. Then it is quite important.” The man nodded, as if she had convinced him.

Siobhan squinted with annoyance. “Why are you here?”

“Your grandfather sent me a letter inviting me to participate in some fascinating research. And my old job became…”—he cleared his throat—“unviable.”

Siobhan’s squint grew even deeper. “Unviable” was almost certainly one of those polite fictions that Siobhan called lies. The man meant that he had been fired. “You’re going to be around for a while, then?”

“I hope so.” He turned to her and extended a hand. “Claudio Tierney, though I’ve always thought Claudio sounded a bit pretentious. My friends call me Claud.”

Siobhan shook his hand with the perfect firmness and decisiveness that Father had taught her. “Mr. Tierney,” she greeted. “I am Siobhan Naught.”

“You can call me Claud.”

“Claudio,” she said instead, deadpan.

His lips twitched with amusement. “So what should I tell Raaz about the window?”

“Claud,” she amended immediately. “Since my intentions weren’t nefarious, perhaps you could avoid mentioning that it was me who broke the window?”

“I am certainly not going to take the blame for it.”

Siobhan held up a palm and shook her hand rapidly. “No, no! I’ll say it was one of the village kids. They were doing some stupid dare to throw a rock through the window. You don’t even have to lie. Simply don’t mention anything to my grandfather.”

Claudio stared down at her silently, his light brown eyes gleaming with amusement. “Shall we pretend we never met, then?”

Siobhan crossed her arms. “That would be best.”

“You will need to retrieve your…device. And actually throw a rock through the window. If you fail to get it through the same pane, and end up breaking a second one, then you’ll have to throw two rocks through to leave consistent evidence.”

Siobhan pursed her lips and stared at her right hand, which had failed so badly with the harpoon as to make her doubt her aim. “I will use a spell,” she decided. “I must know something that can manage it.”

“I will supervise,” Claudio decided immediately.

In the end, he had to help her shake the rope with enough force to dislodge the harpoon, and Siobhan could only hope that it hadn’t left any distinctive marks on the floor or wall of the workshop during the process.

She took a moment to think about how to get the rock into the window with magic. If she could make a big enough Circle so that the window would still be contained within the apex of its vertical boundary, the float spell seemed perfect for this. But Grandfather had warned her against trying to cast with huge Circles until she was a bit more experienced. In his mind, that probably meant she had to wait until she was thirty or forty.

She could try to lift the rock with the gust spell, but she probably didn’t have the capacity to manage it once the rock got more than a few feet off the ground and the air began to disperse.

She had her hand on her chin, deep in thought, when Claudio stepped up beside her and gently lobbed a rock through the empty window pane.

He shoved his hands back into his pockets and spun on his heel. “Remember, I was not involved in this vandalism, and we have never met.” He walked off toward the road, shoulders slightly hunched as he rounded the house and caught a gust of wind from the northwest. Then he tripped on a rock and almost fell flat on his face.

Siobhan rolled her eyes so hard it hurt.