The Fire Mages Read Online Free Page B

take the test. She doesn’t need it, of course, so long as she only teaches in Durmaston. But you could go anywhere with that.”
    “If I had any desire to teach.”
    “Yes. If that.” He winked at me and laughed.
    The following sun, I handed over all my accumulated coins, showed my certificate, and became a trainee scribe.
    Father’s voice wavered a little as he said all the things that fathers say to daughters when they release them into the world. Work hard. Do your best. Don’t be led astray. Save some money to get you home next summer. “Don’t forget us,” he said, gazing into my eyes. “Don’t ever get so grand that you forget the people who love you best.”
    “As if I would!” I said, but already I was anxious for him to go so that I could begin my new life.
    I was to share a room with two other girls. Lissa was quiet and tearful, and after a ten-sun she took her belongings and left without a word. Hestanora was friendly for the brief time it took her to discover my name.
    “Oh, a village girl! Well! They let anyone in, I suppose.”
    After that she didn’t talk to me at all if she could help it, which suited me just fine.
    ~~~~~
    All through the autumn rains and the frosts of early winter, I diligently practised my scribing. We learned contract script first, the basic style used for personal and business messages. It was not unlike the usual style of writing non-scribes used, although more formalised and precise. We were told that this was the way everyone had written once, but in general use, the letter shapes had become sloppy and deformed, so now contract script was almost unintelligible for those not trained in it. Then we learned dot script, a quick way of writing used for taking dictation.
    Every morning was spent copying and repeating endlessly, until each letter was identical to every other instance. Our script had to be perfect. We sat in orderly rows at our desks in the teaching room, heads bent, while a master walked up and down with a pointer, inspecting our efforts, tapping the paper to emphasise every mistake. “Longer. A wider down-stroke. No flourish there. You have blotted it – start again.” I hated that pointer, and worked hard to avoid it. Before long, my efforts earned me an occasional grunt of approval.
    In the afternoons, I worked in the laundry to earn my keep, boiling great cauldrons of water to soak sheets and gowns and shirts, then rotating them to drain away the water, refilling, rinsing, rotating. Then every item had to be squeezed through rollers and hung to dry. Another group folded and pressed the dried garments, among them Hestanora. For all she considered herself too grand to associate with me, she was just as poor as I was.
    When the first shoots of spring appeared through the snow in the little garden, we were allowed into the scribes’ tower, to begin learning spell script. The spellarium was a circular room high up in the tower, with desks around the outside in five groups, one for each year, and a large hearth in the middle which burned constantly.
    The excitement in the room was tangible, but the master was unsmiling. “All your efforts, whether good or bad, must be destroyed in the fire here. No spellpage leaves this room, ever. Once you begin practising with magically imbued paper, quill and ink, burning will release the magic to the air, without harm.”
    Hestanora coughed, her way of attracting attention. “If you please, master, surely burning activates the magic?”
    Some of the others tittered at her ignorance. I wondered why she hadn’t read even the very basic books we’d been set, which explained the principles of magic quite clearly.
    The master smiled benignly at her. “Ah, yes! That confuses many people, Hestanora. Just remember that you need three things to activate a spellpage: the proper scribing materials, a crucible to focus the magic and an invocation to the Gods. Without all three the spellpage cannot possibly be effective. And