“A little,” Nemienne admitted.
“That will pass,” said the mage. “You may read, hmm, Kelle Iasodde, I think. The fifth section, where he discusses the eternal darkness and contrasts it with the simple darkness of the ephemeral world. Write me, shall we say, a five-hundred-word essay? About the symbolism of glass and iron and their use in allowing a mage to shift between the worlds of the ephemeral and the eternal.”
Nemienne nodded, brightening. Iasodde was hard to understand in places, but that sounded interesting.
The mage smiled a little more widely, missing nothing. He said, “Good. You may try this again tomorrow, then. Or the next day, perhaps. Tonight, the essay. And you may practice calling fire to light candles even in the dark, eh? The ordinary darkness of your room, for now. And practice putting them out again. You’re clever enough with fire. Fire is sympathetic to light. Work with the one and the other should come to you more easily.”
Nemienne nodded again. “You mean, light and fire are in sympathy with one another because they are similar things? Fire is ephemeral, isn’t that what Iasodde says? And light is eternal. Fire brings light, but it isn’t really the same thing at all.” She had been reading about the principles of sympathetic magic, and finding the theory not quite impenetrably dense.
“Precisely so,” said the mage. “Very good. Read the fourth passage of the second chapter of Iasodde—yes, I know you have read it. Read it again. Write a second essay for me comparing fire and light, heat and fire, and sympathy and similarity. You will enjoy that, I think, and you may find that understanding the underlying theory will lead to smoother application in practice. You will learn to hold both light and fire in your mind, a defense against any dark, though it stretches out infinitely far.”
Nemienne tried to imagine this. She would far rather write difficult essays than try to summon light into impenetrable darkness, but she didn’t say so. But she thought she understood why it was important to learn how. She asked, “Why did you build your house in the shadow of the mountain, stretching back into the mountain, if darkness is an enemy of magic?”
Ankennes smiled. “A good question. Your answer?”
“So you would remain familiar with the dark, through continually dealing with it? So you would be constantly reminded of light, through having to keep it in mind against the dark?”
“Both good answers,” said the mage approvingly.
As Nemienne had already learned was his habit, he did not give any suggestion whether either guess was actually correct. But he seemed happy with her, so she was tentatively pleased with herself despite her inability to summon light into darkness. Anyway, she would learn that. She would learn everything. She already knew—she had known from the first moment in the mage’s house—that she belonged here in this house of magic, in the shadow of the mountain and the shadow of magic. She wasn’t sure Mage Ankennes was perfectly confident of it; she never knew what the mage was thinking. But she meant to prove it to him by midwinter.
“I am going out this evening,” the mage told her. “You will be well enough here alone?”
Nemienne blinked, recalled to the moment. This was a question that should have seemed condescending or insulting, the sort of question you would ask a much younger child, not a girl Nemienne’s age. But this house was a little confusing, sometimes. Parts of it were even a little frightening—sometimes. Nemienne said firmly, “Yes, of course. I’ll be perfectly fine.”
“Of course. Besides, Enkea will be here,” Ankennes assured her, stroking the cat, who half closed her green eyes and sat up straight on his knee. He picked her up and handed her to Nemienne.
“Of course,” said Nemienne, taking the cat and stroking her throat. She was pleased. The cat could always lead Nemienne wherever she wanted to go in the house, although sometimes she wouldn’t leave a comfortable chair for any coaxing. Mage Ankennes had commented, shortly after Nemienne had become his apprentice, that Enkea had already been in this house when he’d purchased it. This had startled Nemienne, who in the back of her mind had assumed the mage had lived in this house forever. But no. Less than fifteen years, he’d told her when she asked. So Enkea was an old cat—older than she looked—but not as old as Nemienne’s first startled assumption. Though surely it had been a mage who had built this house, mages who had always lived here—she was sure Enkea had always been a mage’s cat.
She wandered through the house after the mage had gone, Enkea on her shoulder. The house itself seemed in some ways a test of aptitude for magecraft, like lighting a candle with the memory of fire. Navigating it took practice and a certain amount of luck. Nemienne liked the challenge of it. She thought she could feel herself stretching to meet this challenge, as she had somehow never seemed to meet the ordinary challenges of day-to-day life in her father’s house.