Read The Lost Prince for Free Online

When she pointed up, the salt shot up in a white line and then dived into a pile in her hand. “If you pull these elements apart, I will buy you a pack of cigarettes,” she promised, resorting to the carrot-and-stick approach.
    It occurred to him he’d never seen sodium or chloride. “What’s the end result supposed look like?” he asked.
    Lelani gazed at the salt and the pile separated into a pale yellow-green gas and some silvery metal dust.
    “That,” she said. “Chloride is an ion form of chlorine.”
    “An ion form of … I didn’t like high school the first time I went,” Seth complained. “Isn’t magic about waving wands and silly phrases?”
    He picked up a stick and waved it at a tree. “Expelliarmus!” he shouted. Nothing. A cold wind continued to blow; a squirrel looked at them and, deciding they were of no importance, skittered up a tree.
    “I am not familiar with that spell,” the centaur said. “What was your intent?”
    “To avoid retaking organic chemistry. Magic looks easy when you do it. You just say some words, wave your hands.”
    “Magic relies on communication,” Lelani admitted, picking up on Seth’s track. “Wait here a moment.”
    She went to the Explorer and pulled a six-foot-long branch from a bundled stack on the roof. Seth wondered why she’d tied them there in the first place. She tossed it to him.
    “Many wizards use staves to focus their spells,” she explained. “Staves, wands, amulets, rings, and so forth are walking aids or decorative accessories for the best of wizards, and a crutch for the rest. You are hopelessly lame and, I believe, in desperate need of one.”
    “Did we stop at Wizards R Us?”
    “These branches are from Rosencrantz. Wizard trees are very rare, and staves made of their wood even rarer. Magic from the lay lines has seeped into the wood over the years. It will not be difficult to draw magic into the finished staff from far-off sources.”
    The branch was hardly straight, still had bark on it, and was pretty thick and heavy in his hands. “Really?”
    “You must whittle your staff from that branch,” said Lelani. “And take care to save the shavings—they can be used for potions and other enchantments.”
    “I don’t know diddly squat about whittling.”
    “I’ll teach you my technique,” Lelani said. “But your bond to the staff is determined by your mind-set as you craft it. Put some thought into what you want to accomplish. I’ll help you with the runes when it’s ready.”
    “Runes? I have to learn a foreign language, too?”
    “Magic is language, Seth—verbal and nonverbal, thought, knowledge, and will merged into a single action. When we cast a spell, we’re communicating with magical energy to produce an effect—rearrange molecules, speed or slow kinetic movement to change temperature, and in more advanced stages, altering the smallest particles of creation—even brain neurons that influence the mind. The more powerful the wizard, the smaller the particle he can manipulate. But you have to have a fundamental understanding of a thing, both in what it is and what you intend to create. And, most importantly, we are asking the energy to undertake this change.”
    “What if the hocus pocus says no?”
    “The things a caster asks are in harmony with the energy’s nature,” Lelani instructed. “Just as a bee wants to make honey, the energy wants to affect things. It is oblivious to the ramifications of those changes at our level of understanding. If a wizard turned you into a mouse, the magical energy he used to rearrange you is not aware that you think being a mouse is inferior to being a man. It does not realize that it is changing you from the version of yourself that you hold superior. The magic was asked, in the proper cipher and form, to rearrange you in a particular way, and its nature is to do that.”
    “Does the energy think?” he asked.
    Lelani smiled. Was this what geeked her out?
    “The sentience of