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 named Demes. There has been some cursory attempts to culture me in the ways of a demure female, my mother made a halfhearted attempt to teach me embroidery and cross-stitch but she's terrible at both so she was happy to give up early. Madame Cushnere tried to get me 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 immediately wonderful at it, much to my surprise. Demes the tutor brought round a variety of instruments for me 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 Madame Cushnere, but Mester Demes had enough suspicious glares for me that I knew I was busted, even if they would not call me out directly.

  After assessing that I was good with math up to a collegiate level, Mester Demes 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 Mester Demes 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 arithmetic to be memorized 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 something 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 come 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 Madame Cushnere after Mester Demes 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 me that the control to create well-written text and to create precisely-controlled runes are the same 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 Mester Demes what it would take for me to learn enough about clockwork to start inventing devices of my own, they went to our library and brought back four thick tomes on spring tension, metal tolerances, pendular movement and design principles. That stack of books weighed as much as I did. And, my tutor made it clear, this was to get me started so I could decide whether or not clockworks, tinkering and mechanical invention was something 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 amusement. "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 same 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 time and the cramps in my wrist. All the reasons I could not use a movable-type writing machine, the same 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 mean 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 me at level zero with a ten-year timer to count down so that I can really build the anticipation... well, if she was trying to drive me 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 time.

  I pushed aside the book of history and reached to my right side, for the big dusty tomes that waited for me. Mester Demes 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 Whitemead Trade Accord," I said, handing over the pages. "With a specific emphasis on how those documents interact. Together they form something of a tripod that keeps Meadowtam from forming a parliamentary system, though none of those documents ever intended to do such a thing."

  Mester Demes glared at me. "Yes," they said after a long moment. "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.

  Mester Demes looked sour. "And literature?"

  "I have some questions about the themes of the two lakes in chapter four," I admitted. "Is this meant to represent a duality of the urge to create and destroy, or am I reading too much into this?"

  The thick magic tome 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 presume 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 instrument there, and now Demes was fixing what my old teachers had not. But secretly, I've been writing some sheet music. Isn't everyone going to be surprised when I turn out to be a composer as well as a performer. 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 time, reminding myself how the pieces go. I write what I know, I play it out, and I tinker with it until I remember what comes 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.

  Demes' hand tapped the cover of the mage's tome, and their hard eyes drilled into me. The eyes were dark and intense, the face harshly lined. And the hair! I believe the tutor's method was that when their hair grew too long over their eyes, they gathered all of the front in one hand and cut one time 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 means. Before I took lessons from Demes, 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.

  Demes lifted their hand, and I grabbed for the book. "Very well," my tutor said, relenting. I knew that they did not resent teaching me 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 me through more advanced schooling. To Mester Demes, 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 me to advance in my other subjects?" I tried again. "Perhaps investing more time into this training could pay dividends in my scholastic works?"

  "I have," Mester Demes admitted. "But I also know that if I prioritized that, you would then try to convince me 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," Demes 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 memorizing treaties or reading about natural philosophy. It's a composite measure of mental faculty itself.

  Basically, you could move from two to three by studying lots of geography, but the improvement would come mostly from better study methods, not from the knowledge of geography.

  Let me 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. Mental mathematics, riddles, puzzles, visualization exercises, speed-reading, meditation, pattern-matching, spatial reasoning, mind-mapping, lucid dreaming, loci memory, and more. We used to do some board games like a variant of chess, but it got competitive and I kept getting my feelings hurt. Mester Demes said that maybe I need more practice with sportsmanship if I'm going to be bitter about losing a game, and I proposed that we drop the subject and that maybe not everyone's cut out for those kind of games.

  So my big primer 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 mental muscle. It taught me to memorize 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 outcomes efficiently. The best methods are passed down generation after generation. Sometimes something new and useful is added, but rarely anything that is a significant improvement 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 tomes of magical training that I could be using instead. But for the romance of it, for the image, I preferred working from a creaking tome of ancient origin, dusty and brittle. It felt more magical that way. Mester Demes humored my ways.

  When I realized how intensely these people pushed their exercise of mental 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 game'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 came bursting in.

  His eyes were squinted hard and burning with the effort not to cry openly, and he ran straight for me. I hopped off my stool and met 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 me."

  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. Someday you're going to be so much more than me, 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 me 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 me, 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 me. Also, I had a hard time 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 me 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.

  Mester Demes kept a very neutral and respectful tone as they opened up an old argument at the worst time. "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 me 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 me aside, shown me the letter, told me what it meant. 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 me 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 me.