Work Text:
Wind fluttered the girls’ papers around the heels of their palms. Coco’s attention was pulled once more from the field with its grasses and wide, framing hills to the pages that refused to lay still.
Beside her, Agott sighed sharply.
“Be mindful of the inkwells, too,” Tetia chirped. Coco nodded, glancing towards her left in thanks. Ahead of Tetia sat Richeh who had already placed down a spell—it was slight but sturdy, enough to weigh the ink bottle down and keep it from tipping in the playful gusts.
“Ooh, clever,” Coco murmured, and she eagerly craned to examine the sigil and signs for herself, rising half to her knees. “Agott, you should–”
“Thank you, Coco,” the witch interrupted tightly. Coco bit her lip rather than say anything further. While their relationship had improved leaps and bounds from those first days at the atelier, Agott could still be snappish when frustrated. The combination of the wind and the interruption of their usual studies were undoubtedly the source of Agott’s irritation. But, with a sigh, she managed to add more patiently, “I’ve already got a solution for that, you see. It’s just the pages…” She trailed off. A strong gust sent their sketchbooks rattling in their bindings and the girls groaned.
“Why is this never a problem when we draw in our palm quires,” wondered Tetia.
“I imagine the size has something to do with it.” Richeh paused her stroke impatiently to hold down the edge of the overlarge sketchpad. “Ugh!”
“It’s faster to draw seals, too,” Coco sighed. “I mean, all that’s already just up in our heads, isn’t it? This is-"
“These may help, girls.”
Qifrey had leaned into the bag beside his own spot where he was seated comfortably on a flat boulder at the ridge of their hill. He withdrew wooden clips. One by one, he tossed these to each of his students. “It may do you well to keep a handful in your own supplies,” he added with a patient smile.
“A contraption?” Tetia asked. A quick smile flitted to her lips and, just as quickly, melted as she turned the object over in search of a spell and found none.
Olruggio snorted. He was sprawled out on the slope ahead atop a blanket, fingers knitted behind his head. “Just a clip,” he rumbled. “I think from our laundry room. Not all contraptions need to be magic. Just ‘cause you’re a witch doesn’t mean simple solutions can’t be of use to you.”
Sure enough, as Coco fastened the clip to the bottom right of her pad, she mused that she had used these to hang her clothes to dry many times before. Pages secured, she leaned back and examined her work.
A line drawn precisely straight, pen pulled towards her, was her specialty. A line drawn straight, pulled left to right, was something different. Her strokes wibbled their way horizontally in an attempt to recreate the landscape before her. It was odd; her line looked right. But only when she focused on it alone. When observed alongside the rest of her marks, it looked…
“Lopsided,” Coco sighed. She fell backwards onto the grass.
The clouds scudded across the sky and Coco found her breath slowing. She inhaled, holding it a moment, and exhaled. Around her, the other girls’ mumblings mingled with bird song and the sound of rustling grasses, waving branches and leaves. Slow footfalls, tpp, tpp, tpp, approached and a shadow fell across Coco’s face. “Let’s have a look, then, shall we?”
She sat up again and shifted so that Qifrey could settle beside her. A sense of nervousness came over Coco as she handed over the large sketch pad. “Ah—I’m sorry, I know it needs a lot of work.”
“Why apologize for learning something new?” Qifrey examined the lines. His head lifted once or twice to compare the drawing against the landscape. Eventually, he hummed and pointed to a section. “Let’s see if rearranging a line or two here may help. May I make a few marks of my own, Coco?”
“Yes, please,” she replied quickly. She sat forward more closely to watch.
From a pocket, he withdrew a pencil. “Oh. Master Qifrey, I don’t mind if you borrow my pen and ink.”
He shook his head. “No, it should be your hands that lay the final marks. This is ultimately your work after all.” Deftly, his hand crossed the page and grey strokes joined, then diverged from her bold pen marks. He worked quickly and Coco watched the landscape beneath his fingers shift, the two-dimensional trees and hillocks settling in more comfortably onto her page.
Agott was careful not to interrupt as she paused her own drawing and stood to observe Qifrey’s changes. Before long, Richeh and Tetia joined the audience and an embarrassed flush rose in Coco’s cheeks. The drawing wasn’t very good, she knew; she hadn’t meant for everyone to see it quite yet.
Scritch, skraaaaaa—tch tch, scritch. “There we are,” Qifrey murmured. Around him the girls sighed, or hummed in appreciation. The graphite lines he’d added to Coco’s drawing had remedied the issue and she wondered how she’d ever missed the problem before.
“I really like your clouds,” Tetia complemented, and Coco’s unease lessened. “And Master Qifrey, I had no idea you could draw so well. I mean—more than just spells, you know?”
He laughed. As Coco took the sketch pad back, ran her fingers over the pencil marks, Qifrey shook his head deferentially. “Olly’s far more proficient than I.”
“Don’t pull me into this,” the witch grumbled from the hillside. “I’m taking a break today.”
“Why practice drawing from nature at all?” Agott questioned at last. “Would it not be a better use of our time to return to our studies?”
Despite his assertion only seconds prior, Olruggio was the one to answer. “You can’t just always ram your head into your books.”
Agott’s expression curdled and Coco worked hard to stifle her amusement. Agott seemed prepared to argue, to defend the merit of books always, when Olruggio continued. He went so far as to turn where he lay and lean up on an elbow, the better to see the class more clearly. “There’s plenty to be gained from drawing things other than spells. For one thing, creativity often comes from observin’ the world around us. Maybe this kind of drawing’s a pain. But I wouldn’t have come up with even half my contraptions had I not taken inspiration from the world around me.”
“I’m sure some of the movements felt unfamiliar to you girls as you worked,” joined Qifrey. He indicated a few sections of Coco’s sketch—the clouds that Tetia had complemented—as an example. “The gestures needed to create these strokes are slightly different from your circles, sigils, and signs, are they not?”
He was right. Coco outlined the pen strokes, recognizing the movement and how it differed. She’d started to grow used to penning a circle and some of the sigil forms. Her wrist tended to twist a particular direction. The clouds had required a different motion, something that originated more closely to her arm than her hand, especially to fill the large page. “So, this exercise is meant to make us move our pens differently?”
Qifrey smiled again. “It is certainly one of the reasons, yes.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to use a pencil so that we can erase the marks?”
“We ink our spells,” Agott countered. “If this is meant to teach us pen control, then it makes sense that we’d work with a permanent means rather than with something we can fix.”
“Well,” Qifrey interrupted, tilting his head with a weak chuckle. “Yes. But, that isn’t to say that everything needs to be a lesson in spellcasting. If you wanted to work in pencil, I wouldn’t mind–”
Agott was quick to shake her head. “No, I don’t think that would be as efficient.”
“Ah–”
“I’m surprised you are interested in this, Richeh,” wondered Coco. The young witch had returned to her drawing with focus. “I wouldn’t think you’d like drawing from real life.”
Tetia loomed over her classmate’s shoulder and sighed. “No, Richeh’s doing her own thing, of course.” Despite being turned away, Richeh’s customary pout was visible in the squaring of her shoulders. “What are those trees made out of? They’re full of angles. Are they meant to be rocks?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well–”
There was a loud ripping noise and Qifrey startled. “Agott! What are you doing?”
Coco’s attention shifted between Richeh and Tetia, and Agott and Qifrey. The latter had half stood, staring despairingly at the page ripped from the witch’s sketchbook. Olruggio began to chuckle to himself as he listened.
“I think I ought to begin again. I hadn’t realized the purpose of the exercise and I think it’ll serve me better to work more quickly and accurately next time.”
“There’s a whole big page, Richeh, you hadn’t needed to make your drawing so teeny tiny–”
“I like drawing tiny,” and an edge came with the words.
“I know you do,” Tetia replied patiently, “but there’s just so much outdoors, why not draw it all! Big trees, big clouds–oh, and you can add some animals–”
“Apprentices,” Qifrey said loudly, standing.
Agott’s discarded drawing was swept up in a wind gust, whipped past Coco’s face in its transit. The chatter paused. Before the page could wander even as far as Olruggio, their professor’s palm quire was out and gently rewinding it along its trajectory. He caught it and returned the notepad to an inner pocket of his robe. “I think it’s time for lunch.”
They had smelled Olruggio’s cooking that morning and all thoughts of spellcasting technique and landscape drawing vanished with its memory. In short order, the students, teacher, and watchful eye were seated on the edges of a blanket enjoying tarts made from mountain apples, ham, and a rich cheese, all seasoned with savory chrysanthonions and herbs.
“Well, we’ve seen Coco’s drawing,” Qifrey said at last, wiping his fingers with a napkin. “Might we look at the others? Perhaps we can put them in a pile here in the middle. Richeh, would you care to redraw that weight spell you cast earlier? One for each drawing pad should suffice.”
Richeh obliged, adjusting the signs to account for the added weight of the books. A few minutes later and the witches were sipping chilled cups of juice as they scanned their work. “How interesting that we all were looking at the same hillside,” observed Coco, “and yet all of our renditions came out differently.
Richeh’s leaned into elements of abstraction, the furthest removed of all the interpretations from reality. Angular leaves framed sharp trunks that struck out from the fields. Coco grinned. “They look like guards. Big hulking things whose job it is to keep bad things away from the wildflowers, there, at the center.”
Tetia exclaimed, pointing at the lone page that had been separated from its book and nearly crumpled. “Agott! This looks incredible! How dare you try to throw it away.” Her drawing was precise with careful, flowing lines and an even focus on every element of the composition.
“Yes, I’d say it’s quite a faithful rendition,” Qifrey agreed. “And Richeh, those forms are marvelously imaginative.” He indicated the remaining sketchbook. “Tetia, I appreciate the detail you put into rendering the different things you saw.” Rather than one unified illustration, Tetia had drawn a little of this, a little of that. As her attention had wandered, so too had her pen.
Tetia was delighted by the compliment. Agott bent over her own drawing with a new eye and hummed critically at her work.
“May we see yours, Master Qifrey?” Coco asked.
“Of course.”
Where the apprentices’ works were black and white, their professor’s was a mix of gentle colors. He’d sketched an underlayer with ink and overlayed colored pencils to depict leaves and impossibly intricate flowers in the foreground.
As the girls marveled, Qifrey brought his knees up and crossed his ankles comfortably. “Coco, you mentioned earlier that everyone’s drawings were unique. Do you find that curious?”
“Yes,” she agreed slowly. “But, I suppose it’s not so strange. We all drew what we loved in the end, didn't we?”
By way of an answer, Qifrey pointed at his drawing. “I am fond of the fields around our atelier with its wide open spaces. This time of year, it’s all golds and greens with spots of fire-red from the last blooms. As such, I couldn’t resist adding a bit of color.”
Olruggio had bent over the collected sketchbook with a hand tucked under his chin. “Let me see that,” Olruggio mumbled, and he flipped Qifrey’s artwork over to give himself a fresh page.
“You ought to have brought your own.”
“I’m taking–”
“–a break, yes. So you said. And you’re doing marvelously at it, old friend.”
Olruggio ignored him and settled down to sketch. Agott shuffled to watch him work, and Tetia picked up her own drawing once more. She openly admired her sketches, tilting her head. “I enjoyed this, I think. It’s hard to think of drawing much other than our spells sometimes.”
Richeh nodded firmly. “I would like to add color next time, like Master Qifrey.”
“You are welcome. I believe I have additional supplies at the atelier. If not, I’m sure Kalhn would have what we need. In fact,” and Qifrey adjusted his glasses slightly. “I would like all of you to maintain a sketchbook. Please, draw the things which interest you. Do not think of it as an assignment, precisely; merely another way to observe the world around you.”
“Can we work a while longer? I think I ought to fix the work I started,” Coco asked.
Another hour passed on the hillside before the group packed up their things and returned. Each apprentice hung their drawing in their workspace and, over the following weeks, new pieces joined the first: a loose sketch of a quadryphon that had landed just long enough outside a window for Tetia to capture in a spirited series of gestures; an imaginative depiction of a crystal-laden seaside imagined by Richeh. Increasingly precise drawings began to join Agott’s assemblage of spells until, eventually, Coco would catch her roommate rendering nigh-perfect replicas of their various spellcasting implements at night as a way of winding down before bed.
“These are quite good,” Olruggio murmured one evening after the apprentices were sent to their rooms. He had a handful of Agott’s latest in a small pile on the kitchen table.
Qifrey nodded warmly and wound his hands around the tea he’d poured. “She has an eye for detail.”
“You realize she could do something with these,” he continued. He shook his head slowly. “I know what she’s got her heart set upon. But damned if she wouldn’t make a fine draftsman. I know contraptionists who’d pay good money for fine illustrations of their in-progress works.”
“Herbalists, too,” Qifrey agreed.
“And Coco. I can’t say I’m surprised to see what took her fancy.”
Another drawing rested across from Qifrey and he smiled. She’d drawn her classmates, and her skills had improved considerably since the day on the hill.
“Did you ask if you could keep it? You’re going all misty eyed over there.”
Qifrey cleared his throat. “I am not. But, I did.” He tapped the page with his forefinger. “I think I’d like to keep this by my desk. As a reminder.”
Olruggio glanced up at his old friend, a curious expression on his face, but said nothing. Instead, he took a grateful sip of his own tea (secretly fortified with something aged).
Eventually they, too, made their way to their respective studies. Olruggio exited to his own rooms off the atelier and Qifrey lingered in the front hall. Above the arched hallway hung a sketch of the atelier itself, captured on a gusty day by the hillside. Olruggio’s careful marks, perfectly weighted, a balance of fine accuracy and gestural movement, made it look as if, should one listen hard enough, they might hear the sound of the wind through the grasses and the chatter of young apprentices.