Part 1

One


Teraania regarded the massive, sprawling ruins of her new house with extreme contentment. Spread behind it, peeping out at either side, she could see The Lake. She called it The Lake privately, as she thought its real name, Lake Slerikas, did not suit it in the least. It was glittering, majestic, mysterious – not Slerikish. She liked the lake a lot. She knew it was a long lake and wound through a number of hills, because she’d looked it up on a map, and she shared its shore with a dozen other property-owners – neighbours. She liked the idea of having neighbours close by too.

The house was huge. It was three stories high and it rambled across the overgrown and be-treed ground between the drive and the shore. It must have been wonderful before it fell apart, even with that ugly puce cladding around the windows. Without the cladding, it would be even better. The house didn’t have a name, which was another thing she liked – it meant she could write one on the deeds when she’d chosen it, instead of having to stick to whatever fallacy its builder had dreamed up.

She sighed tranquilly. This place was perfect.



The day she’d met the house – and the lake – had been overcast, and the ground underfoot frosty. It had been a little over a year ago, in fact, and she hadn’t intended to look for a house at the time. The rain clouds that roiled off the coastline about 400 miles to the west had mizzled over the hills she could see from Degna at a point when she was sick of dry grasslands. After casting the spell she’d been employed to do, she’d set off for the hills, found a village and started asking around.

Home, that was what she was looking for. She’d never had one in south-east Linviocheta, where she’d grown up. She wanted to be near water – there wasn’t enough of it on this world. She wanted, above all, to be away from what she knew; to use some of the fortune she’d accrued through spellwriting and casting for the nobility to be alone in her own place. Not that she didn’t like the huge estate she’d grown up on. It just wasn’t home.

She and the village selling-agent had gone out to the house in a little covered buggy. The driveway had been (and still was) potholed and overgrown. The bare branches and evergreens stacked up the gentle slopes and loomed across the track, and the smell of rain was inescapable. She’d taken one look at the stinking ruin and fallen in love with it. It came with a hundred and thirty acres, only forty of which were cleared. There was a creek about fifty paces from the house with a gorgeous mini-waterfall built into it. She now owned most of the hill south of the house (the lake was north-west to the house, the drive east); and in that winter, she’d had an excited glow imagining the look of the place with the trees budding, the sky rosy.

Now it was hers, hers, hers!



The huge wagon crunched up behind her, still travelling as slow as ever; she’d climbed off it and run up the 300-pace drive several minutes ago. At least two, anyway.

Teraania – what a lovely name; oh, how she hated it – smiled as she surveyed the flat, unassembled expanses stacked in the wagon, ready to be put together into an abode. Two more wagons were trailing behind it; she was expecting several more over the next few days to add to her fix-uping materials dump. Bags upon bags of spells and spell-makings were heaped in one cart; the other was full of beams for use as supports. Her own belongings were jumbled in with the spells.

She was pleasant enough to the wagon crews, but she wasn’t chatty. Between their muscles and her shoulder-bag of spells, they had everything out of the cart and laid and stacked neatly in about half an hour. She bid them a firm good-bye and sent them off down her drive. Her drive. She loved the sound of that.

She’d had apartments and family estates and townhouses, but nothing permanent; she travelled so much with this or that lord or court, to this or that village. The only things that had ever been her own were her offices, because no-one had ever known how to put together a spellwriter’s office. Her assistants had been fleeting, her friends few.Her work had been her joy.

She’d been stunned when she’d checked her account after coming back from Degna. She’d had to pawn her grandmother’s silver-and-emerald bracelet to get the money for the deposit on the house, though she’d been hoping to buy it back – which, it turned out, she’d been able to do. And she hadn’t had to beg her family to underwrite a loan at all. The Emperor had sent her a bonus far larger than she’d expected for the contract writing, constructing and empowering that she had done two years ago with his magicians. She had money coming out of her ears. Even with the reconstruction of the house, she wouldn’t need to take on another project for a couple of years.

She shook herself out of reminiscence. It was midday and she had work to do, especially if she wanted to sleep under a roof. Considering how much it rained around here, a roof might be nice. Especially to hear the rain on.



Levelling spell to flatten the earth. She’d chosen a spot just inside the wooded area south of the house, between the house and the creek. She had to improvise with a small enchantment to get one of the trees to move so she’d have enough space, but she could walk ten paces from her seclusion and see the house and the lake.

After the levelling spell, she laid the foundation spell. This was her own take on the classic foundation spell most house-builders used; she’d made the cool-room under the kitchen-area bigger and the foundation shallower so she wouldn’t have to step up to leave the hut. When she had that in place, she ran a no-interference spell around it so no animals or branches would get trapped in it and went to collect her sections of floor.

She laid those carefully, holding her hands steady as she manipulated the levitation spell. The spell shushked the sections into place, its locking sub-spells fusing the boards together. Leaves rustled overhead as an afternoon breeze sprang up.

Next came the walls. After she’d collected the lower-wall sections, she ripped the tabs on the floor sections that would set off the slot spell. Then came some very careful manoeuvring of the levitation spells. A few large, grey clouds drifted across the patchy sky, making the sunlight fade and intensify surreally. The lack of noise was peaceful but also unnerving, so she hummed to herself as she worked. A leaf fluttered into a slot-spell as she lowered the wall onto it. When she was sure the spell had coalesced, she ripped the bit of stem sticking out of the join.

After she’d done the lower walls, she paused for a while and ate bread absently, scribbling a few notes on a spell she could write that wouldn’t require such precision handling on the part of the user. She realised soon enough that the spell was too complex to be feasible for cheap production, but she kept the notes anyway.

Back to work. The upper section was easier to do; the walls slotted together nicely, and all she had to do was make sure they were straight with a liquid-level and rip the tabs. The timber construction was looking very professional.

The roof, now. The sun was sliding inexorably towards the hills to the west. She slotted the frames into the walls, checked their levelness and straightness and ripped the tabs. One tab got twisted and stuck and she had to sort out a few tangled threads with some tweezers. Two sections stuck together to make one side of the roof; that side of the roof up. Her fingers were tingling from so much levitation-spell use. The other side together and up.

Now the details. A weatherproof spell she dissolved in a bucket of lake water was carefully daubed on every inch of the outside of the structure. A plaster spell was applied to the inside. Then she put up a divider in the middle of the hut – Presto! A two-roomed hut. She’d make do with a bit of curtain as a door between the rooms.

Windows. Frames. Glass and shutters. The sky was a spectacular pink-orange. A bit of dirt-pack spell outside – it made the ground look almost paved. Rip the tabs on the self-assembling furniture – bed, table, chairs and bench. It was well and truly twilight now. A door on the hut was easy to install – there was only the outhouse to do. She was careful choosing that spot – she didn’t want to foul up the water table for the creek.

Once that was up, she gratefully used this new facility and headed back to the house to install the glowspells inside and out.

She was bone-weary after all this work, but she lugged in the rest of her belongings, sorted them into a basic order, made herself a sandwich and strolled once around the house while she ate it before collapsing into bed. Outside, frogs croaked, bugs chorused and stars twinkled magically.