Nathan Free, Natalie Bound Chapter 6: Practice

Five and a half now. More than halfway to unlocking Level 1. For two years now I've been attending classes, tutored by a sharp-witted polymath nad Des. There has been so cursory attempts to culture in the ways of a demure female, my mother made a halfhearted attempt to teach embroidery and cross-stitch but she's terrible at both so she was happy to give up early. Mada Cushnere tried to get accomplished in painting but accepted when I set my brush down and stated that I was not interested in these arts. I took up dance and was imdiately wonderful at it, much to my surprise. Des the tutor brought round a variety of instrunts for to practice at- I pretended to be bad at the flute and clarinet for a while before slowly letting myself play better and better. I fooled Mother and Mada Cushnere, but ster Des had enough suspicious glares for that I knew I was busted, even if they would not call out directly. After assessing that I was good with math up to a collegiate level, ster Des dropped that topic entirely to concentrate on skills I did still need to build. Geography, history, literature. And penmanship. My handwriting had always been marked by haste, I wanted to get my ideas written down so I could go back to having more ideas, but ster Des shut that shit right down. "Your script is not a subject you capture once and call off," they hissed, shaking a disapproving finger. "It is not arithtic to be morized once, it is not a paint-set to bring out for special occasions. Your scripting is an art you practice through your life. It is how you take your thoughts from idle fancy into sothing that can be conveyed and understood outside of the room you stand in! And if your pencraft is sloppy and idle and unpracticed, that is the image you convey! Your father does not attend state affairs in his pajamas, because he understands the image he wishes others to have. The difference is that your father in his pajamas could scandalize at most one or two hundred people. Your writing is not your person, it represents you but may travel far! A misspelling or a juvenile kerning could travel the world, and never co within your grasp to stop it. Any note that leaves your desk may end up in a museum, so your every note must be written for a museum!" Their eyes blazed with nearly fanatical light, and I was actually a little freaked out by how intense they got about this. I brought it up to my mother and Mada Cushnere after ster Des had left for the evening. "Unfortunately, your tutor is correct," my mother sighed. "I have never had a lesson in calligraphy that went to waste. I still do a page of warm-ups every day, and I practice my letter-forms like scales of the lyre." My governess took it a step further. "I could not speak over Her Grace for the needs of statecraft and correspondence," she said, "but my ill-dressed cousin Kosar is a wizard and he has the most lovely penmanship. I asked him why, and he told that the control to create well-written text and to create precisely-controlled runes are the sa skills entirely. If the young lady does intend to pursue magic as a craft, advancing the skill of the quill is a wonderful head start." I was quite outnumbered. I still longed for a word processor. I'd settle for a typewriter. I could invent a typewriter, couldn't I? It couldn't be that hard, right? It absolutely was that hard. Guys, I was not an engineer when I died. And when I casually asked ster Des what it would take for to learn enough about clockwork to start inventing devices of my own, they went to our library and brought back four thick tos on spring tension, tal tolerances, pendular movent and design principles. That stack of books weighed as much as I did. And, my tutor made it clear, this was to get started so I could decide whether or not clockworks, tinkering and chanical invention was sothing I wanted to get involved with. There's a reason people make this their life's work. And I just have too much else on my plate. So, no typewriters. Also, when I brought my secret plans to my father, to invent a table-top movable type device so that I would not need to letter by hand, he mournfully shattered my hopes. "Princess, I wish that it were as easy as that," he sighed, with remorse that was exaggerated a little bit for my amusent. "Genuinely, I would sing praises for a device like that on my own desk. But to have that would not release the need to practice lettering and loops. Your poor old father, who would rather wrestle bears than hold a quill, still is beholden to these sa tedious exercises." "Father, you would rather wrestle a bear than eat a hot breakfast," I pointed out. "You'd love the chance to wrestle a bear." "All right, so my analogy is flawed," he said with a regretful sigh. "But when I am sending orders to my banners, I want them to look at the page and know that it is truly myself sending them these instructions, without trusting to a wax seal. When I send correspondence to my cousins and cadets, I want them to feel that they are worth my ti and the cramps in my wrist. All the reasons I could not use a movable-type writing machine, the sa reasons I do not simply hire a scribe and just dictate all my work for them to write down." I patted him on the shoulder. "If you hired one scribe when you were my age and kept them on, nobody would ever know that their handwriting was not yours." His mouth dropped open. "You devious little devil." I giggled at the admiration in his voice. Besides, if having good handwriting really was so important to magic... I'd have to learn, I guess. Because that is definitely the path I'm going to take. I an c'mon, I'm raised in a world with no magic and I'm handed an opportunity to start learning magic? I'd be crazy not to! And that bitch goddess, starting at level zero with a ten-year tir to count down so that I can really build the anticipation... well, if she was trying to drive a little nuts obsessing over that it was absolutely working. I don't think anyone looks forward to birthdays as much as I do. And yes, I've been doing everything I can to get ready ahead of ti. I pushed aside the book of history and reached to my right side, for the big dusty tos that waited for . ster Des clapped a hand down on the cover before I could move it an inch. "Have you already completed your history essay?" "The three treaties I picked were the Stormhalt Ceasefire, the Riverdun Talks, and the Whitead Trade Accord," I said, handing over the pages. "With a specific emphasis on how those docunts interact. Together they form sothing of a tripod that keeps adowtam from forming a parliantary system, though none of those docunts ever intended to do such a thing." ster Des glared at . "Yes," they said after a long mont. "There's no chance you've looked at my notes, is there?" I blinked in surprise. "Your notes?" The tutor sighed. "I did not suppose so. I've had pupils before that would dissemble for less, but that is not your character. Very well: I will need to prepare new lessons for next week, since you appear to have outpaced my lesson plans. And your geography?" "All my worksheets for the week," I assured them, patting the folder at my side. ster Des looked sour. "And literature?" "I have so questions about the thes of the two lakes in chapter four," I admitted. "Is this ant to represent a duality of the urge to create and destroy, or am I reading too much into this?" The thick magic to was shoved over my way. "That's a question that you can use to start a lively debate among a handful of professors," my tutor said. "As usual, your understanding of the more sophisticated material is well beyond your years. If I cannot teach you mathematics or natural philosophy, all that is left is to make you as worldly and cultured as possible. I presu you've put in your hours on the clarinet?" "I'm working on my lip tension problem," I admitted. It's a flaw that I brought over from my old life. I was never more than passable in the instrunt there, and now Des was fixing what my old teachers had not. But secretly, I've been writing so sheet music. Isn't everyone going to be surprised when I turn out to be a composer as well as a perforr. They've never heard Debussy but I have, and if my options are to copy the work of geniuses to pass off as my own, or let the great works go unheard by an entire world full of people, I'll be selfish enough to share the work of real geniuses so that others can enjoy and adore it. I've been secretly practicing Gershwin, Debussy, Stravinsky and Miller on my own ti, reminding myself how the pieces go. I write what I know, I play it out, and I tinker with it until I rember what cos next, and bit by bit I'm reconstructing these pieces I haven't played in a few years. I think one of my most useful skills right now, is that I can read and write musical notation. Des' hand tapped the cover of the mage's to, and their hard eyes drilled into . The eyes were dark and intense, the face harshly lined. And the hair! I believe the tutor's thod was that when their hair grew too long over their eyes, they gathered all of the front in one hand and cut one ti with a pair of scissors. And when it grew too long in the back, a second handful, a second cut from the scissors. I'm not vain or self-obsessed, by any ans. Before I took lessons from Des, I would only put about five minutes a day into my grooming and presentation, not counting hygiene and bathing. Unless I was going out, of course. But nowadays even if I was not leaving the palace or seeing any visitors I would put at least fifteen minutes into my hair, five minutes into my clothes. Des lifted their hand, and I grabbed for the book. "Very well," my tutor said, relenting. I knew that they did not resent teaching about magic, they just considered it to be less valuable than the sort of skills that impacted my ability to manage or govern a fiefdom, or to get through more advanced schooling. To ster Des, spells and sorcery were an interesting hobby, an elective. And at this level, that is not far from being correct. "Have you considered that pursuing my magical training might make it easier for to advance in my other subjects?" I tried again. "Perhaps investing more ti into this training could pay dividends in my scholastic works?" "I have," ster Des admitted. "But I also know that if I prioritized that, you would then try to convince to teach it to the exclusion of all else. You enjoy magic too much to not treat is as a reward for diligence. If you enjoyed sweets as much, I'd bribe you with gumdrops." "That would be bad for my teeth. This is good for my mind," I pointed out. "You'll get more teeth," Des said dismissively. "Now then, we were back to rotations." If you look at my Status screen: [ Natalie Harigold ] [ Level 0 Sorceress ] [ Rival ][ Strength 1 ][ Stamina 2 ][ Intellect 7 ][ Charisma 3 ][ HP: 1/1 ][ MP: NA ][ Essence Gathered: Air, Nathan, Oak, Void, Water ][ Condition: Untethered Essence (can fully bind Essence 100%, can bind Essence more easily) ] You will see that my Strength and Stamina have both increased by one since I was an infant. I'm pretty fit for my age and size. But also my Intellect has gone up by one, and that's the much more impressive feat. The further you get up that hill, the steeper the climb gets. Diminishing returns. It's a ton easier to train a stat from two to three, than from three to four. And Intellect does not train up by morizing treaties or reading about natural philosophy. It's a composite asure of ntal faculty itself. Basically, you could move from two to three by studying lots of geography, but the improvent would co mostly from better study thods, not from the knowledge of geography. Let explain with an analogy: the first step in learning how to sword-fight is how to do a push-up. The first lesson in wrestling is how to take a fall or to get your stance correct. Knitting starts with needles, not yarn, and apprentice painters learn to stretch canvas before they learn to mix colors. So to learn magic, we build the mind like a muscle. ntal mathematics, riddles, puzzles, visualization exercises, speed-reading, ditation, pattern-matching, spatial reasoning, mind-mapping, lucid dreaming, loci mory, and more. We used to do so board gas like a variant of chess, but it got competitive and I kept getting my feelings hurt. ster Des said that maybe I need more practice with sportsmanship if I'm going to be bitter about losing a ga, and I proposed that we drop the subject and that maybe not everyone's cut out for those kind of gas. So my big prir of magical training does not have a single spell in it, not a single incantation or formula that would produce a mana-based effect. Instead, it was a giant collection of puzzles, riddles, diagrams, exercises and instructions to build all that ntal muscle. It taught to morize faster, to retain better, to process faster, to multitask better. To look at a complex situation and discard the useless distractions first and to extrapolate the outcos efficiently. The best thods are passed down generation after generation. Sotis sothing new and useful is added, but rarely anything that is a significant improvent over the old. This world has been practicing magic, and actively building reasoning skills, for hundreds of years. After a certain point, it's hard to invent a better push-up. There absolutely were more recent tos of magical training that I could be using instead. But for the romance of it, for the image, I preferred working from a creaking to of ancient origin, dusty and brittle. It felt more magical that way. ster Des humored my ways. When I realized how intensely these people pushed their exercise of ntal abilities, I was kind of shocked at how little their technology was progressing. Maybe that's a sign of a stagnant society. Maybe that's the effect of magic. Maybe it's just because the ga's original designers wanted it to be this way. I am not in a position to say exactly, I just report the facts. I was working my way through a spatial puzzle (if this ring of blocks is moving one step every three seconds, and this ring of blocks is moving three steps every seven seconds, how many seconds until this third ring will be able to advance one step and then backwards in the next second?) when Nathan ca bursting in. His eyes were squinted hard and burning with the effort not to cry openly, and he ran straight for . I hopped off my stool and t him halfway, crashing into each other in a hug. I held him, and he shook for a while, but he did not weep. He just trembled, and I held him, and I stroked his hair. He started to relax, and I held him closely until the tension was done draining out. Releasing a hug too early is almost worse than refusing it in the first place. When he was ready I held his shoulders and brought him out to my arm's length. He was an inch taller than I, even at this age. "Was it the math?" I asked him. He nodded. "It's hard!" he blurted out. I patted his shoulder, held his eyes. "You already know the easy parts. Learning just turns the hard stuff into the easy stuff, right? It's a process, and you're going to be proud when you master this." He nodded, and hiccupped. I brought him back in close, I could tell that another round of trouble was close by, and I held it off by being the first to start the embrace. "I've got you, Nathan," I said to him. "And you always have ." The pressure around my ribs was tight and desperate. "I wish I was smart like you," he said. "We could do all this stuff together." "Instead, you are smart like you," I reassured him, and put one hand behind his head, patting gently. "We are not just great for what we have in common, but also for our differences. The things that make us separate are just as important as the things we share alike. Soday you're going to be so much more than , and everything we're doing now is all part of that. I just take my turn first, that's all." "Don't wanna be more. Just wanna be us," he pouted. I rocked him a little, just to help him settle. I can't believe I'm about to reference this, I said to myself. Then, "If you won't believe in yourself, then believe in and my belief in you." He held still for a few long seconds, and then he nodded against my shoulder. "All right," he said, and the energy went out of his arms. He was ready. I held him a little longer, I lingered, and then I walked him back to the door. His own tutor was waiting in the hall, fretting. She hated upsetting the young lord, but it really was not his fault. Spending four hours away from each other was hard for us. If he didn't break down and run for , I'd break down and run for him. I'm only about an hour more patient than he is. I walked back in, somber again. We had tried having him and I taking our lessons together. But our material was too far different, my advanced subjects would distract and confuse him, and his age-appropriate lessons would distract and amuse . Also, I had a hard ti resisting my urges to help him out whenever he had a small inkling of trouble, and while the urge to help another is a noble thing it can also lead to academic fraud, and relying on to do his thinking for him did not help either of us. Nathan deserved better than to be the brawn of my brain. So now we took our lessons in adjoining chambers, and saw each other in mornings, at lunch, and in the evening. ster Des kept a very neutral and respectful tone as they opened up an old argunt at the worst ti. "It's going to be even harder for him when you leave for the Academy," they said, overly casual. "No it will not, because he will go with and we will see each other every day," I said, and I let a little bit of a warning slip into my tone. "He isn't ready! He won't be ready for years!" "Neither will I," I said, pulling back up onto the stool. "I enter the Academy when I am fifteen, just like him." "But you are more than ready right now! Your parents have already received a letter requesting you!" I chuckled. My parents had taken aside, shown the letter, told what it ant. I told them to tear it up, I was not leaving Nathan. They both looked grateful to shred that paper. They knew that going to the capitol to attend my education was not going to make stop loving them, or to make their family any smaller. But it felt like it would. It felt like losing each other. So when I told them ten more years, they smiled with .