Spell Blind Read Online Free

refusal, and also to indicate that I was kidding. Namid’s expression didn’t change. He understood few of my jokes. He never found them funny. “Another time,” I said, knowing this wouldn’t satisfy him. My stomach had started to feel tight and hollow. I wasn’t sure why; I knew only that I got this feeling whenever Namid demanded that I work on my craft. “Later,” I said. “I promise. I’m wiped right now. I had an encounter with a myste this morning.”
    “You will tell me about that when we are finished. Now, we work. You have much to learn.”
    “Yeah, well, you’re not going to teach me all of it in one day. It can wait.”
    The runemyste stepped to the middle of the room and lowered himself to the floor, his movements liquid and graceful. He eyed me expectantly. This was where he always sat when instructing me in the use of magic.
    “No,” I said, sounding like a whiny kid. “I’m not doing this right now.” We’d had this argument too many times before. There was still a part of me that feared the powers I possessed. Though I had been casting spells for years, I understood little about the Runeclave and even less about Namid himself. And it was possible—likely, even—that I avoided these sessions because I’d seen what this same magic did to my father.
    The phasings, those periods of each moon cycle when magic takes over our minds and bodies, turning us into crazed animals, are no picnic. The line between sanity and insanity, which much of the sane world takes for granted and thinks of as clear cut, feels disturbingly insubstantial to weremystes like me. Because while I consider myself sane most of the time, I also know what it’s like to be insane. I’ve been tipping over into madness every month for half my life. And as bad as the phasings are, the long-term effects are worse. Turns out—big surprise here—putting one’s mind through a psychic meat grinder every month takes a heavy toll. Most weremystes wind up permanently insane; a good number of them take their own lives before the descent into irreversible madness makes even that single act of will impossible. So, for good reason, I saw my magical powers as the source of my greatest weakness.
    Whatever the root of my reluctance to train, I knew that sooner or later Namid would get his way. He always did.
    “Is your scrying stone here or at your home?” he asked.
    “It’s at the house.” Maybe there was a way out of this after all.
    I should be so lucky.
    “You can scry without the stone. Bring out the mirror from in there.” He pointed toward the john.
    “Namid . . .” I stopped, shaking my head. Then I got the mirror from the bathroom.
    I hate scrying. People think of magic, and one of the first things that comes to mind is gazing into a crystal ball. That’s scrying—or rather, that’s Hollywood’s take on scrying.
    Except that scrying doesn’t require a crystal ball, or even clear quartz. All you need is a smooth, lustrous surface. I use a piece of polished sea green agate, about the size of my hand, with a small crystalline opening at the center that’s surrounded by thin, sinuous bands of blue and white. I didn’t choose it because there’s anything inherently magical about that piece of agate; I found it several years ago in a gem store at a Phoenix mall. I happen to think it’s a beautiful stone, and I know its patterns and colors as well as I do the lines on my father’s face.
    Namid was right, though. In the absence of my stone, the mirror would work just as well. I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him and laid the mirror across my lap.
    “Look. Tell me what you see.”
    I gazed down at the mirror. “Is there really a crack in my ceiling?” I asked, peering up at the sheet rock above me.
    The runemyste let out a low rumble, like the distant roar of flood waters.
    “Sorry.” I stared at the mirror again, concentrating on the surface of the glass, trying to ignore the inverted reflection of my