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Watching Orion finish brewing the latest of his alchemy assignments to have fallen by the wayside wasn’t anyone’s idea of a fun time – well, it wasn’t mine, anyway, though someone from his fan club might have disagreed – but neither was saving him yet again from toxic fumes or an animated cloud of infused silver sharp enough to shred skin or the red-hot cauldron that had sprouted legs and scuttled after us like an overgrown spider just last week, and so I’d resentfully chosen the first option and marched him down to the labs to finish the poison neutralizer he’d been putting off.
“But Chloe's already got plenty of antidote,” he'd tried to complain, as I shoved him along. “And Magnus said that Ilya said that he'd heard a piercer going off on the third floor – ”
“Are you kidding me?” I demanded. “Someone said that someone else said that there might be a mal somewhere on the third floor? And that’s worth skipping out on your homework for? Lake, if the school doesn’t kill you for flunking lab, I’m going to do it.”
“Okay, okay, fine,” he’d said, resentfully, and we’d gone into the alchemy lab together where he resentfully headed to the cupboards to gather the ingredients he needed. I kept a watchful eye on him while he did that, in case there were mimics in the equipment chest or something – force of habit, I suppose, because nothing ever seemed to jump out at Orion – but I had an essay to finish, and when he finally came back with his arms full of diamond dust and glassware I sat down and went straight to work. So it took me twenty minutes to notice that he’d finished the setup but hadn’t actually turned on the burners or anything: he was standing there squinting down at the worksheet he’d written out earlier with his brow furrowed.
“Now what?” I demanded, poking his elbow with my pen. “Is there a mal hidden in the desk that you’re trying to find? Is your worksheet about to come to life and devour us?”
“Oh, er,” Orion said, jumping a little. The tips of his ears had turned pink. “No, I’m just – doing some conversions."
“...what?” I said.
“It's just, um.” His cheeks were going pink, too, and he was studiously not looking at them. “All the calculations for mana were done in motes, so I’ve got to convert them. It’ll just be a minute.”
There’s a significant split in the magical community about how mana is measured. Even saying magical community is misleading, because mundanes are the ones who came up with, say, the internal combustion engine, and high-speed rail, and jet engines – any artificer can slap a speed enhancement on a car, but they’d have to go out and buy a car first, and before there were things like cars and trains and airplanes, we had just as much trouble getting around as anyone. So magical communities have sprung up more or less independently in different areas since the beginning of human civilization, and each one of them had their own magical traditions. Besides language – the major barrier in spell translation– there was also the significant issue of how mana was measured. Every enclave came up with their own units: the Zhou enclaves used wu, the ancient Babylonians had a complicated constellation system, the druids of 11th-century Wales – thanks, Myrddin Tradition – went with cups, and so on.
And units are important . Maybe if you were a hedgewitch five hundred years ago swapping cough remedies with the other hedgewitch down the road it was fine to say, oh, this one takes a bit more mana than the other one, or this one needs three times the mana if you replace the comfrey with willow root, but that’s not exactly what anyone would call precise . You can’t build an enclave with that sort of eyeballing; you can’t even build a piece of minor artifice, not if you want it to have more than three working parts that you can delegate to your apprentices. And so back in the nineteenth century when they started building the Scholomance – the first truly international major working in history – Sir Alfred Cooper Browning had taken a look at the mess of units coming in from all the enclaves around the world as they submitted their spell proposals, and sent them all back with strict orders to be redone in something he could understand, which was how everyone wound up using the local British units as a sort of international standard.
The problem with the nineteenth-century British units is that they’re entirely subjective. The candle is, in theory, the amount of mana it takes to light a candle. But this will obviously vary quite a bit from person to person: a twelve-year old with poor mana control is going to need significantly more mana than an adult wizard who’s been practicing her whole life, for example; or if you’ve got an affinity for fire magic, it’ll take you just a drop of mana, whereas someone with, I don’t know, an affinity for putting out fires instead will need twice the average, and so on. It helps to have everything in candles if you’re the only one who’s going to be casting the spells, but it makes sharing difficult.
So, early in the twentieth century, a bunch of wizards from enclaves all over the world took a look at the mess of conversions and decided to throw it all out and start over. They made a little gadget – the precursor to the mana sharers the enclaves have, actually – that fills up when you pour mana into the little chip of diamond in the middle, and when it was full, that was a mote. It's not a subjective measure: the amount of mana that it stores doesn't change depending on who's charging it. Everyone agreed that this was very useful and that they would all start using motes to measure mana as an international standard. The original prototype is in a museum somewhere in Paris, and every enclave has their own, and there's a group of wizards who travel around checking each of them once a year to make sure they're all up to standard.
The one drawback to this brilliant system was that the Americans flatly refused to get onboard. They're still using candles. They'll do a conversion – grudgingly – if they want to swap spells with anyone else, but there was no way a boy from the New York enclave would've written up his alchemy assignment in anything but candles when he was going to be the one doing the brewing.
“And just why is your worksheet written in motes?” I asked, in completely level tones.
“...because Ibrahim helped me with it?” he tried. And then added, indignantly, “I promised him a quarter of the batch!” when I snorted in disbelief: helped him, yeah right – Ibrahim had probably just done the whole thing himself; easier than trying to get Orion to pay attention to anything that wasn't a mal for more than three seconds.
“How were you planning to pay him back?” I demanded. “You weren't even going to brew it if I hadn't cornered you!”
“I knew you would make me do it,” Orion said, resentfully scribbling down numbers with the stub of a pencil. “Anyway, even if I didn't, I would’ve given him something else – I’ve got extras of mana recovery potions, that’s always useful.”
“Did he know that?”
“Yes!” Orion said.
I couldn’t argue with that – not when Ibrahim would’ve been happy to do it for free for his beloved hero – although I rather wanted to, just on principle. “Why is it taking you so long, anyway?” I asked instead. “There can’t be that many to do.”
“Usually Chloe helps me with them,” Orion muttered.
“You’ve got to be joking,” I said, thoroughly disgusted. “Lake, have you ever done your own homework at any time in these past four years?”
Orion had the nerve to throw me an affronted look. “I couldn’t have passed any of my classes if I hadn’t!”
“Oh, for – ” I heaved an enormous sigh. “Let me have a look.”
“Oh, I, um,” said Orion, who made no attempt to actually stop me from snagging his worksheet. I looked it over with a critical eye: Orion didn’t have any affinities that would make the calculations difficult, and the potion wasn’t inherently complicated, but he did have the bad habit of rounding to the nearest decimal point when he needed three, and after a few rounds of multiplication, his final numbers were off by nearly twenty motes. Which doesn't sound like a lot, and it usually isn’t – I couldn’t light more than a dozen candles with that kind of mana, and that only because setting fires does come in neatly under destruction – but small amounts matter in alchemy, which requires quite a bit of precision. Incidentally that was also the reason why I’d never gone in for alchemy – it’s incredibly fiddly, loads more than incantations or even artifice. I don’t know how Chloe has the patience for it.
“Don’t take so many shortcuts,” I informed him severely, handing it back. “Your numbers were off, you’ve got to be more careful.”
“Thanks, Mum,” Orion said, rolling his eyes.
“I don’t know why you don’t just do them in motes, anyway – it’s what the rest of the school uses,” I went on, ignoring him. “And the rest of the world, in case you didn’t know. The world doesn’t actually revolve around New York.”
“You Brits are the reason we use candles in the first place!” Orion had the nerve to say.
“First of all, excuse me, I’m Welsh, and second of all, we had the good sense to stop using candles the moment something sensible came along!”
“Yeah, sure,” said Orion, rolling his eyes again. “Something sensible, which is why you use litres, except when you use pints, and metres except all the roads are in miles, and I don’t even know what a stone is – ”
“Lake, stop wasting time arguing with me and brew your damn potion,” I said, because I couldn’t come up with a good retort to that one.
“Ha!” said Orion, but he did actually get to work after throwing me a triumphant look. I watched him narrowly for a few moments to make sure that he wasn’t going to get distracted – it was really amazing how many completely normal noises “might be a mal” if you were trying to avoid your homework – but it seemed like Orion had finally decided to finish brewing his potion, so I went back to work on my essay.
I was so focused on the rise and fall of Camelot and its impacts on the Welsh enclaves of the eleventh century that I jumped when Orion came to sit down on the bench next to me. “Fifteen minutes for the mixture to settle,” he said. “Then it’ll be ready to bottle up.”
“Was that so bad, then?” I asked him, putting down my pen. He had bits of dried comfrey and powdered shell in his hair, somehow, but he ducked away and grabbed my hand instead when I went to brush them off.
“I guess not,” he admitted. And, a little sheepishly: “Thanks.”
“Don’t make me do it again,” I said severely, instead of the you’re welcome that was trying to come out.
Orion just grinned at me. “I’ll give you three bottles?”
“Yes, fine,” I said. That was a fair trade by any measure in return for my time; I couldn’t complain that I’d been doing him a favor. Except I wanted to complain anyway, because it didn’t feel like a trade at all. It felt like – it felt like I’d helped Orion with his homework, and I hadn’t expected him to pay me back. And he’d offered me some potions, and hadn’t expected me to pay him back. And I didn’t mind, and I tried not to think about why I didn’t mind.
“So what is a stone, anyway?” Orion asked, after a moment. We were still holding hands, but he was pretending we weren’t.
“A kind of rock,” I said dryly, pretending along with him.