Fox and Phoenix (Lóng City 1)

Stop reading my mind! I stomped again.

I don’t blame her, Chen went on, with a wicked grin. Not after you flirted with that teahouse girl.

Shut up!

Chen shrugged his massive shoulders and went back to squinting at my homework. I quashed the temptation to fling my chair at him. Chen would just vanish into the spirit plane, leaving me with a broken chair to explain to Ma mi. This time, she might really feed me to the watch-demons, the way she always threatened.

Still muttering, I picked through the ink-soaked papers on my desk. Ruined, all of them. Which meant no money from the students. And another lecture about responsibility.

Do you want help?

No.

I swept all the sheets into a pile and started mopping up the ink. Stupid papers. Stupid work. Stupid me for thinking I could make a good apprentice. Yún could fiddle formulae and spells better than I ever could, and that was even before she signed up as an apprentice to my mother. No wonder she was always running off to visit that stupid Shou-xin. He was Ma mi’s best paying student—talented, rich, and charming. Even Ma mi said he would end up the king’s chief wizard someday.

Twenty minutes later, I wiped the sweat from my eyes. All that scrubbing and I couldn’t tell a difference in those blasted ink stains. If anything, they looked blacker than before. Suspicious now, I sniffed. A faint metallic smell in the air made me think of magic, not ink and paper.

Oh, crap.

I retrieved the bottle from the counter.

EXTRA-DARK RUB-RESISTANT BLACK INK. Then in smaller characters, ENHANCED WITH MAGIC.

Some of the students cheat, Chen grunted. The ink won’t let them change their answers later and pretend they deserved a better grade.

So I figured. I must have grabbed the bottle without checking the label first. Bad move in a conjuring shop.

By the way, have you looked in the mirror?

Why?

Then I noticed my hands. Ink all over them, of course. Extra-dark ink all over my palms, my sleeves, and underneath my fingernails. I rubbed my cheek with a clean rag. It came away smudged with black. When I blinked, my eyelids felt sticky, and not just from sweat.

Crap, crap, crap.

I hauled the bucket outside and emptied its contents into the courtyard, where Old Man Kang’s chickens scolded me. The rags went into the special laundry tub. By the time I came back to the front office, Chen had discarded the spectacles and my homework. He was reading a paperback with a lurid cover, making absentminded snuffling noises to himself.

I surveyed the remaining mess. Maybe I could pull the rug over a few inches to hide the stains. No good. Ma mi noticed everything. I’d have to bribe one of her advanced students to help me clean up the mess before she came back from shopping. But not Shou-xin. Someone else. Anyone else.

Something poked my elbow. I glanced down.

A thin brown scroll floated in midair. It looked like one of Ma mi’s older scrolls, its edges dark and crinkled. A velvety blue ribbon tied in a complicated knot kept it from unfurling.

I glared at my pig-companion. Chen feigned being absorbed in reading, but I wasn’t fooled. He had probably conjured the thing from my mother’s archives. We’d both be in trouble if she found out.

The scroll darted in to give me a quick poke in the stomach. I made a grab for it, but the cursed thing soared out of reach.

How can I read the scroll if it won’t let me touch it?

Chen grunted and flipped a page over with his tusk.

With a sigh, I held out my hand. The scroll settled delicately onto my palm. When I touched the ribbon, it unwound itself and curled around my wrist. The scroll unfurled, showing a single densely written paragraph in the center.

And if a man or woman should wish to break a spell for unwashing such as the old wizards might put upon an enemy and his entire wardrobe, here are the words you must use . . .

It was a laundry spell, of sorts. Reading the old-style calligraphy, I wondered if some old priest or scribe had brushed those characters, all crisp and dark, like tiny black birds hopping across the rice paper. After thirteen months studying under Ma mi, I could detect glimmerings of power in the spell’s deceptively simple phrases. Whoever created this scroll must have infused the characters with more magic as they brushed them, and the sequence of syllables (long and short, to be spoken with special stresses) hid the mathematical properties required to summon the magical flux. Simple and complex. Yin and yang. Chen had chosen well—a person didn’t need to understand the math or the magic behind the spell to use it.

But it still required concentration.