The Hedge Witch Princess

The archivist had pinched the bridge of his nose three times in as many minutes — a tic Adelina had learned to read as the price going up.

"You understand what I'm risking," Master Dunstan murmured, one ink-stained finger resting on the folded parchment between them. "A copied cantrip from a palace grimoire. If the Stone Tower learned I'd let their text walk out of this archive — "

"You'd lose your post, and I'd lose my last ally inside these walls." Adelina laid two silver coins on the scarred reading table. "Which is why I brought more."

Dunstan's hand did not move. Neither did the parchment.

"This is the third one this season," he said. "Your Highness has not a single drop of mana in her blood, or I'd have smelled it by now. What do you do with these?"

Adelina set a third coin beside the first two. The silver caught the thin light filtering down from the archive's high slit-windows — the only illumination in this neglected corner of the palace, where the dust lay thick as felt on shelves nobody else remembered existed. "I read them. I copy them again into my own hand. I learn the grammar."