Eva glanced at the blond as they walked back to the dorms. Her face had the usual impassive look to it and her tone lacked the accusatory edge Eva had been expecting. “Not really,” Eva said, “put the night shift to sleep, walk in, my mentor grabbed the phylactery, walk out.”
Juliana seemed not to hear. “You never told me you had tutelage under a mage-knight. What other bounties did you go after?”
“I don’t think he and your mother are quite the same thing. His bounties come from a more… seedier sort.”
“Still, you didn’t even have a focus until a few days ago. Yet you used two chaos spells, though they were admittedly low-level.”
Eva didn’t have a proper response to that. “Chaos spells?” she deflected.
Juliana glanced at Eva. “You don’t know?” At Eva’s shaking head, Juliana said, “Order and chaos magic are taught during the fifth and sixth year, after four years of elemental magic.”
“So it is very advanced magic then?”
“Not really. I imagine we’ll learn plenty during our general magic classes. It just doesn’t have a dedicated class until later. They’re used a lot more in creating magical artifacts than elemental magic and have less use in daily life.”
Eva frowned at that. “You’re telling me,” she stepped forward about ten feet, “that is a chaos magic spell?”
Juliana nodded. “My mother can blink.”
Eva hummed at that. “Zoe Baxter called it a ‘rudimentary teleport’ and seemed fairly dismissive of it when I first met her.”
“Maybe it fails at some aspect a standard blink can do?” she said with a shrug.
“Still, it is one of the few spells I actually know, yet I used it nearly every day before coming here. It seems a lot more useful in daily life than a lightning bolt.”
“That particular spell, perhaps. Take air magic. Mrs. Baxter was using telekinesis to move her attacks. An air mage might be able to slow their falls or just keep a storm out of their face while high level air magi can fly unaided or perhaps drastically increase their speed and senses. And those are just examples on a more extreme end.”
None of those sounded all that amazing to Eva. Except flying. That might be fun. In truth, she was far more interested in things like lightning bolts and fireballs than how to keep a storm out of your face.
Still, she nodded along with the blond’s words as the conversation drifted to safer topics. They made it back to the dorm and Juliana headed straight for the shower.
The earlier conversation reminded Eva that she slept on two potentially dangerous objects. If Arachne didn’t return soon, she might have to find a temporary holding place herself. Or just do a thorough examination of the golden dagger and the blackened skull herself. Eva procrastinated enough with all the traveling and settling.
Rather than reach behind the drawer under her bed, Eva sat at her desk and took out a pen and paper.
Juliana emerged from the shower a full hour later. She walked to Eva’s desk and peeked over her shoulder, bringing with her the faint smell of her flowery shampoo.
“Very pretty,” Juliana said. “What are they?”
Eva replaced her wand in her pocket as she finished charging the last rune. It was a bit annoying to use, but she decided to get used to it before school started. The runes should last a good few months even with the low quality ink and paper. She would loved to have reset her blood wards, but the idea of exploding roommates wasn’t very appealing.
“They are runes,” Eva said.
“I gathered that. What for?”
“Mostly to stop scrying, but they might be good for keeping away a handful of other minor nuisances.”
“What made you make them?”
“A book on scrying I noticed in the library earlier,” Eva lied. There had been books, but they were not the reason for the paranoia. “If you were a thirteen year old boy suddenly living in the same building as a bunch of girls with easy access to tons of magical texts, what would you do? And try to remember Max’s comments the night we got here.”
Juliana’s face flushed red and she simply nodded. She stopped as a thought seemingly occurred to her. “I didn’t think you cared about such things.”
“We’re both girls,” was Eva’s excuse. “Besides, you don’t want to show off for them, do you?”
She shook her head. “So how do they work?”
“Each one will cover a five by five foot square centered on the paper. We hang them up on the ceiling, overlapping slightly, and anyone who tries to peek gets hit on the head with a hammer. Not literally, there should be no long-term damage. If they persist the worst that might happen would be passing out, but they’d have to endure a good ten seconds of constant hammering in the skull to get that far.
“They should last about two months, maybe a bit less. I need to acquire some better ink and a fountain pen. These ballpoint pens are nice for notes but little else. The one in the bathroom will probably need to be replaced weekly. The humidity will damage it.”
Juliana nodded. “You know, runes are cons–”
