Kyra Blackrein's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Kyra climbed the tower steps and pushed the door. Her tutor sat hunched over a cluttered desk, muttering to a page. Papers spilled to the floor. A cold cup of tea sat forgotten at her elbow. Mistress Calliope did not look up. She was the scholar who taught Kyra to anchor memory to objects, though her lessons wandered and her appointments slipped her mind. Kyra set her lesson book on a clear corner of the desk. "You forgot I was coming," Kyra said. Calliope glanced at the book, then at Kyra. "I did. I know you come Wednesday. I know today is Wednesday. I did not remember they were one and the same. Sit. We work on the mouse today." No apology. She swept an arm across the desk and knocked three quills to the floor. On Calliope's cluttered desk rested a wide bronze basin. Dark liquid filled it. A small skeleton lay curled at the bottom, delicate as a leaf. Calliope opened her own ancient, battered tome, its leather worn and dark, seams stitched tight, and turned to a diagram of moons and circles. She traced a line with her finger and began the words. Kyra followed. She matched the cadence, shaped each syllable, laid her palm above the liquid. The bones stirred. A faint violet light woke in the mouse's empty sockets. Its ribs shifted. Its tail curled and uncurled. It rose on thin legs and stood in the basin, twitching, held together by crackling energy. The memory of a living thing, moving again. Kyra watched it, hungry. "It moves. But nothing of it is here. No fear. No will. It's only a shape repeating itself." "That is reanimation," Calliope said. "Memory in bone. This ends where I stop teaching." "I want the other thing." Kyra kept her voice level. "Not memory. The spirit itself. Bound and held." Calliope closed her tome. The mouse froze mid-step and folded back into a heap of bone. "No." She locked the book and placed it back on a shelf in the corner. "Why?" "Because you have no reason to need it." She said it flatly, not unkind. "Binding memory is craft. Binding a spirit is capture. It takes a wrong done, a grief with an edge. You have neither. I will not put that in your hands for curiosity." Kyra held her stare. "And if I had the reason?" Calliope studied her a long moment. "Then you would not need me to teach it. You would find it yourself, and you would not sleep after." She pushed the lesson book back across the desk. "That is the whole answer. We are done for today." Kyra picked up her book. The refusal sat in her like a stone. She understood now that the deeper craft was real, that it waited one door past where she stood, and that only one thing would open it. A wrong done. A grief with an edge. She rode home through the forest with the words turning in her, not knowing how soon she would earn them.