Captive Magics

42 - The experiments

Anyone who saw their neat little house from outside would likely have been surprised within, for lack of funds meant it was furnished only with two beds and the kitchen table and chairs, which, by providence, the previous tenants had not taken with them. More recently it had taken on an even stranger aspect, the whole house being littered with folded paper boxes.

The boxes clustered in corners and spread across windowsills, massing silently on the shelf above the toilet. They littered and loitered, a silent army in varying states of decay. With little else to do and a lot of ideas to try, Lissy made hundreds, replacing every box after a few days. Each one was covered in symbols with a slice of potato or carrot inside, or perhaps a peapod with the peas extracted, or whatever they could afford to spare. The rejects were taken in a pail to the kitchen, and Lissy would carefully peel the paper away from rotting vegetable and make notes on which experiments had failed this time. Somehow she remained optimistic while Leander, who brought new ideas and symbols home to try every day, felt his hope for success slipping away when all of them failed.

There was one box which Lissy moved to a place of prominence on the sitting room mantlepiece, and Leander thought little of this until it was still there, two and a half weeks after she had first had her idea. He had found more symbols in the library for her to try, for easing the transition from cant to rune, and some of these had made their way into this the pattern on this box. Lissy came up behind him as he slipped the lid open and peered inside.

"How long has this one been going?"

"Nine days," she said without hesitating to sift through her memory for an answer. "I'll get excited at ten." Inside was a third of a carrot, unappetisingly dusty but perfectly edible.

"Hmm," he replied noncommittally as his optimism suddenly burst into life again. "Explain what you've done with this one?" She talked him through it, and they spent most of their evening watching the box from the corner of their eye, as if it were about to do something interesting.

The following evening, he opened the larder to find she had painted the same design over the walls.

"I wonder what the landlord will make of it," he said, pausing with his hand still on the door as his eye traced the runes. Lissy made a dismissive noise and he turned to see her impish grin.

"I don't give a fig. Do you?"

"He's not my biggest concern," he replied. "But you've succeeded, you've actually succeeded. The whole College has been trying to do this for months and you've worked it out in three weeks."

"We succeeded, they need a team as good as us," she asserted cheerfully, wrapping her arms around his waist all too briefly.