Chương 4: Chapter 3: Exposure

Breakfast ended when Alistair was finished with it. Mrs Harrow was waiting outside the dining room with a younger maid and a folded white garment over one arm.

"Master Halvern has been waiting twelve minutes." Elizabeth resisted the urge to check her pulse. She had already done it twice that morning, and Mrs Harrow had known Elizabeth White for years. Master Halvern had known her almost as long. Her father might notice open defiance; these two were more likely to notice something small.

"Father kept us longer than I expected," she said. Mrs Harrow gave a brief nod and set off towards the eastern wing. Elizabeth followed. The estate still refused to feel entirely unfamiliar. At one corner her foot adjusted for a shallow change in the floor before she saw it. A turn later, she found herself angling left while she was still trying to decide which corridor looked familiar. The body's habits were useful, provided she did not mistake them for understanding.

The eastern wing was plainer than the rooms around the dining hall. The carpets ended. Pale stone replaced polished wood, and narrow metal strips ran through the floor in repeated patterns before disappearing into the walls. A servant came the other way carrying a brass-bound case. Green light showed at the seam beneath the lid. He kept it a little away from his coat, but neither Mrs Harrow nor the maid paid it any attention. Elizabeth did.

She had seen expensive laboratory equipment become ordinary through daily use. Apparently magic could suffer the same fate. Mrs Harrow stopped at a reinforced door and pressed her palm to a glass disc set into the wood. The disc lit beneath her hand. Something clicked inside the wall. The room beyond smelled faintly of alcohol and hot stone. A reclining chair occupied the centre, surrounded by six waist-high pillars. Three held colourless crystals. Two contained pale blue ones.

The last looked clear until Elizabeth moved and a faint shimmer crossed its surface. Glass instruments and metal-framed dials covered the tables along one wall. Leather straps had been folded beneath the chair. Elizabeth's fingers tightened before she realised why. The sensation was gone almost as soon as it came, leaving a familiar pressure in her chest. Different chair. Different room. No needle in her arm. She turned her attention to the man beside it.

Master Halvern had close-cropped grey hair and a narrow face. His dark sleeves were buttoned neatly at the wrist, and a chain set with several tiny crystals rested against his chest. He was straightening a sheet of notes against the edge of the table when they entered.

"Twelve minutes late, Lady Elizabeth."

"My apologies, Master Halvern."

"She overslept," Mrs Harrow said. Halvern set the sheet down.

"Wrist." Elizabeth held out her arm. Two fingers settled over her pulse. A cool prickling moved beneath the skin, travelling towards her elbow along a path too narrow to be ordinary touch. She almost pulled away. Halvern noticed the movement.

"Pain?"

"No." The family physician stood nearby with an open leather case.

"Headache this morning?"

"Not now."

"Nausea?"

"No."

"Any pain in the channels?" Elizabeth knew enough not to ask what that meant.

"None." Halvern kept his fingers in place for another few seconds.

"Faster than yesterday."

"I hurried here."

"Mm." He released her.

"Eighty-six." The physician wrote the number down.

"Air at two-forty?" she asked.

"Two-forty. If the pressure rises above yesterday's reading, reduce it before she reports symptoms." Elizabeth said nothing. Yesterday had apparently been lower; the treatment was being adjusted rather than repeated blindly. That was enough to work with for now. The physician took her behind a folding screen to change. The treatment garment was loose and fastened at the back. Elizabeth managed one tie, missed the second twice, and finally let the physician do it.

"You are tense today," the woman said.

"My ceremony is in six days."

"That will do it." The answer came so easily that Elizabeth wondered how many oddities could be hidden inside ordinary nerves. When she returned, Halvern had opened the housings around the air crystals.

"Sit." The chair was built for an adult. Elizabeth settled back and found that her heels hung a little above the floor. The physician fixed a narrow metal band around her wrist, another above her elbow, and a flat glass disc against the centre of her chest. Needles moved on three separate dials. Elizabeth followed the one that rose and fell with her breathing.

"You never cared about those before," Halvern said. Halvern had noticed. Elizabeth kept her face neutral.

"I was not six days from my ceremony before." The physician gave a quiet laugh as she adjusted the wrist band. Halvern only regarded Elizabeth for a moment, then turned back to the pillar.

"Do not force your breathing and do not try to pull at the mana."

"I cannot pull at it yet."

"Not before awakening. That does not stop children from trying." He placed his palm against the housing. The crystal brightened. For a moment nothing changed. Then Elizabeth inhaled and felt something touch her. It was not wind. The room had not become hotter or colder. Yet pressure gathered across her skin, light enough that she might have doubted it if every hair on her forearms had not lifted at once. She took another breath. The sensation was inside as well as outside.

It brushed the palms of her hands, tightened faintly around her throat, then seemed to move through her chest without following the shape of her lungs. The sheer wrongness of it pushed every other thought aside. Her pulse quickened. One of the needles jumped. So did the corner of Halvern's attention. Elizabeth stopped staring at the instrument and concentrated on the sensation instead. Tingling developed along her forearms. A few minutes later, pressure gathered behind her eyes. The physician checked the dials.

"Anything?"

"Tingling in my arms. Pressure behind the eyes."

"Pain?"

"No." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Halvern adjusted the crystal. Its light dimmed slightly. The pressure eased within a minute. Elizabeth wanted to ask what he had changed. She kept the question to herself and watched the physician mark the sheet instead. The session lasted long enough for the novelty to fade without becoming ordinary.

By the end, the tingling in her arms had spread into her fingers and the headache sat just behind the bridge of her nose. Halvern shut the crystal down. The strange pressure receded more slowly than the light. The physician removed the bands and checked her again.

"Pulse is coming down." Halvern tapped one of the readings with a fingernail.

"Channel tension?"

"Within range."

"Water in twenty minutes." Elizabeth stood. Her legs felt too light for a few steps, and she caught the edge of the table before she could stop herself. The physician reached towards her, then stopped when Elizabeth straightened.

"That happens after air," she said. Elizabeth nodded as though she already knew. A technician came in while they waited and began removing the crystals. He wore thick gloves and lowered each one into a padded case. When he lifted the last air crystal, a cloudy sliver broke from the base and clicked against the metal holder. He picked it up between two gloved fingers.

"Discard it," Halvern said without turning. Elizabeth waited until the technician moved towards a small tray beside the wall.

"May I have it?" Halvern turned then. Mrs Harrow, who had been speaking quietly with the physician near the screen, stopped as well.

"For what?" Halvern asked. Elizabeth glanced at the fragment.

"I want to know whether I can feel something that small without the pillars."

"You have managed for years without testing your own crystals."

"I cared less about them before this week." That at least was difficult to argue with. Halvern held out his hand to the technician.

"Meter it." The fragment went into a small brass device. The needle barely moved.

"Under five marks," the technician said. Halvern took the fragment, turning it once between his fingers.

"Low enough for ambient exposure. It will not give you a useful treatment."

"I don't want a treatment." Mrs Harrow's mouth tightened. Halvern passed the fragment back to the technician.

"Wrap it. She may keep it until the ceremony. Ten minutes at a time, no more than once in the evening. Never during another exposure, and not beside the bed while she sleeps." He looked directly at Elizabeth for the last part.

"If your headache worsens, you stop."

"Yes, Master Halvern." The technician wrapped the fragment in cloth and handed it to Mrs Harrow to place with Elizabeth's clothes. The water session began once Halvern was satisfied with her recovery. It felt nothing like air. Cold settled into her muscles without cooling her skin, followed by a heaviness that made every movement feel slightly delayed. Elizabeth did not ask what it meant. She paid attention to which instruments changed and which did not. The rest of the day was less interesting.

Lady Renwick spent two hours reviewing class categories and selection rules. Handwriting exposed how much Elizabeth's old habits and Elliot's conscious control interfered with one another; the instructor corrected her grip twice. Music was worse. Her fingers sometimes found the correct position before she did, then lost it as soon as she tried to think through the movement. The afternoon fire exposure ended early. Heat spread beneath Elizabeth's skin while the air around her stayed cool.

Halfway through the session, her heart began beating hard enough that she could feel it in her throat. The physician leaned towards the nearest dial.

"That's climbing too fast." Halvern shut the crystal down.

"Enough for today." He cut ten minutes from the mixed exposure scheduled for that evening. Nobody behaved as though anything serious had happened, but the dull headache from the morning never fully disappeared. After the shortened mixed session, Mrs Harrow accompanied Elizabeth back to her room. She placed the wrapped fragment on the desk beside the lamp.

"Ten minutes," she said.

"I heard him."

"I know. I am repeating it because you looked pleased when he gave it to you." Elizabeth considered denying that and decided against it. Mrs Harrow pointed at the bed.

"And it stays on the desk when you sleep."

"Yes, Mrs Harrow." The housekeeper left. Elizabeth waited until the door closed before unwrapping the crystal. In ordinary light it was disappointing: cloudy, chipped and barely larger than the last joint of her thumb. The mantel clock had no second hand. Her pulse was still not quite back to normal, and several different mana exposures had already passed through her body that day. Fine. She was not going to learn much tonight. She rested her hands on the desk for a while, then picked up the fragment.

The cool surface touched her palm. Nothing happened immediately. A faint prickling appeared in her fingertips. Elizabeth put the crystal down. The sensation lingered, then faded. She tried again after waiting. This time she expected the tingling and disliked that fact; expectation made the result harder to trust. Still, it returned. She wrapped the fragment in the cloth and held it through the fabric. The prickling came back. That surprised her enough that she repeated the test once more.

She opened an old exercise book and wrote the observation in the back, between notes that already concerned the ceremony. Then she set the wrapped crystal a short distance from her hand. For several seconds she thought she felt something. When she moved it farther away, she felt nothing at all. Not useful yet. She tried paper next. No obvious change. A wooden jewellery box seemed to weaken the sensation, until she realised the box also increased the distance between the crystal and her skin.

She drew a line through that result. The mistake irritated her more than it deserved. One final test: pulse with the fragment beside her wrist, then again after a short rest with it on the far side of the desk. The readings differed by three beats. Elizabeth stared at the numbers, then crossed those out too. The mantel clock showed that her ten minutes were almost gone. She could have continued. The fragment was weak, and the headache had not worsened.

But if Halvern checked her tomorrow and found anything unusual, the experiment would stop being private very quickly. Elizabeth wrapped the crystal and placed it in the jewellery box. The notebook went beneath her class-preparation papers, easy to reach and unremarkable at a glance. Her first attempt had produced very little. The cloth result might be real. The distance effect might be real. Neither was good enough to claim yet. Elizabeth caught herself smiling at the closed jewellery box.

Tomorrow she needed a better way to count seconds.