Free The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) by James Fahy Page A

ice, and has as many uses.”
    “This is really, really cold,” Henry’s voice came politely from behind Robin.
    “Can you let him down?” Robin asked. His tutor held out her hands, palm upwards. There was a shimmer, and a long, wickedly sharp spear of ice appeared in them, as tall as Robin himself. “Ice is best for combat,” she confided in him. “You can pierce and slash as hard as any steel could. Once you have your enemy caught,” she glanced, unconcerned, at Henry. “Evisceration is a simple matter.”
    Robin took the ice-spear from his tutor, a little alarmed. She was still smiling sweetly at him.
    The spear was freezing cold and numbed his fingers immediately. He turned it on end and jabbed it into the ground, where it shuddered like a tall flagpole.
    “Let’s not eviscerate Henry though, eh?” he said, a little shakily. “Maybe you should let him down?”
    Calypso blinked at him blankly for a moment, as though she had forgotten she had pinned the boy to the crumbling wall above them. “Oh, yes.” She nodded her head at Henry, stuck and shivering. The ice bands immediately dissolved, falling with splashes. Henry tumbled from the wall and landed with an ungainly ‘oof’ on the grassy earth.
    “Water…” Calypso continued, clearly unconcerned with Henry’s wellbeing, “…can also guide and steer.” With a languorous wave of her slender arm, she summoned a long snake of water from the shore, it rose out of the lake like a thick whip, the questing tendril of some huge underwater beast, and sinuously made its way across to where they stood in the folly.
    As Henry got blearily to his feet, brushing mud off his bare knees and looking very bad tempered, the water snake formed a wide loop around Robin and his tutor, floating in a glittering band as though they stood within a magic circle. “And of course,” she said, bringing her hands together in a clap as the liquid hula-hoop shimmered and shone around them. “It can conceal.”
    The circle of water exploded, billowing into a cloud of cool, thick fog immediately, which rolled over the two of them, covering the island and blotting the bright sun from view.
    Disoriented, Robin stumbled a little, blinded by the fog. He heard his tutor’s soft melodic voice drift out of the mist. “It is as mutable as mana itself, and of all the Towers, once mastered, it can be shaped and moulded, limited only by your own imagination.”
    There was a gust of wind, and the fog cleared. Robin stared, wide-eyed.
    “Wow,” he heard Henry say behind him.
    The fog had cleared, Robin saw, because his tutor had acquired great shimmering wings of ice. They spread out on either side of her back, as clear as crystal, each sharp and carved frozen feather glittering like diamond in the sunlight. She beat them a few times, looking like an angel carved from ice. The fog dispersed completely in the wind, and she lifted from her feet, suspending herself slightly in the air above the staring boys, her bare feet dangling from beneath her rippling silks.
    “This,” she sounded quietly pleased with herself, “…is called Waterwings, and takes a great deal of concentration. It is a two-level cantrip, and very advanced. With Waterwings, one can, for a span, fly, or dive.”
    She lowered herself to the grassy soil softly, her great wings tucking themselves up behind her with a sound like a thousand musical knives folding in against one another.
    “So, Scion of the Arcania.” She peered at him with her deep gaze. “Where would you like to begin?”
    “That one please,” Robin stared, unable to suppress a grin.
    Emboldened by his affinity with the water brought on by his recent kraken-based medicine, and strangely eager to impress and please his rather alarming new tutor, Robin found himself determined to master Waterwings immediately.
    “That is some very advanced casting,” she told him. She seemed to consider for a moment, and then leaned forward and poked Robin rather hard in