Illusory

Chapter 12

"Like this?" I asked, and with a cry of "Referio!" knocked back the many steak knives that were repeatedly jabbing in the direction of my face like the spastic pecking of a dozen starved chickens. They spun through the air as if caught in a hurricane-strength wind and tumbled to the ground with a cacophony of metallic clangs.

"Yes," Van said with a broad grin. "Perfect."

"What next?" I asked as I turned to him, breathless but beaming. We'd been at this for a while now. He'd made me repeatedly practice the shield spell from the forest — "The most useful and the most complicated of all the defensive spells," he'd said, nodding wisely — then we'd switched gears to this spell, the reflecting spell, without any break at all, and I needed a break. You wouldn't think that magic would leave you gasping for air, but it did. I felt like I'd just run a marathon.

"You practice some more," he answered, his smile growing. It was filled with a mixture of pride and mocking. He knew I was doing well, but he wouldn't let me move on to the fun stuff so easily. "Do you know how to make the shield from the shield spell larger, perhaps large enough to defend more than one or two people?"

"Would I just...think about it as larger?" I asked hesitantly, brow furrowed in an unsure frown. I didn't know any of this, not like he did. Of course, that was why we were here, now, in his study. He was teaching me all the things I didn't know.

"For the most part, yes," he said, and I grinned at my own minor accomplishment. "You also have to will out more of your energy, though. Be prepared for the drain." I nodded once, sharply, and Van's silky-smooth murmur of "Subrigo" had the knives rising into the air once again.

They flew toward me, toward us, and I imagined a larger yellow wall than before, squeezing my eyes shut to help sharpen the image — yards instead of mere feet, miles of shimmering yellow like spun gold. "Contego!" I cried, pushing more power from my mind with a feeling of flowing mud. I felt a whoosh of cool air and heard several loud pings, and when I opened my eyes, the wall before me stretched from one end of the room to the other, the yellow swirling slowly in the dim light. It was thinner, so much thinner that a couple of knives had managed to get their still-wriggling tips through a couple of inches, but for the most part, it appeared to be a sturdy barrier.

"Did I...Did I do it?" I asked, once again hesitant to hear the answer. I turned my face to Van's, and he smiled down at me.

"For the most part, yes," he said again, and the hovering knives dropped to the floor. The two that had poked their points through fell when I allowed the wall to disappear with a second rush of air, breaking the flow of energy from my mind to leave a heavy stillness in my head. "Just a little bit more power, and it would have been perfect. It was certainly impressive for your first try, though. Certainly."

"Thank you," I said with a happy bounce, a grin taking over my entire face.

"Now," he began, and my smile vanished at the sly gleam to his eye, "I want you to levitate those knives."

"I thought we were supposed to be using defensive spells, not offensive spells," I said, confused and just a tad bit worried. That expression was just not comforting. At all.

"This one's going to be a little mixture of both," he answered. When I opened my mouth to question his thinking further, he stopped me with a simple, "You'll see. Just levitate the knives."

"How?" I asked after staring at the cutlery for a moment. I remembered the word for the spell, but Van usually told me the rest of what I had to do. With the shield spell, I had to imagine a wall and will my aura and energy into the air; with the reflecting spell, I had to imagine the general direction that I wanted the object to go in; with all of the appearance spells he'd taught me during the first month of our partnership, I had to vividly picture the outcome that I was aiming for. This spell had to entail something of that sort, but what was it?