I closed up the window behind us and smiled at Ken. "Thanks for putting up with that. The fresh air helped clear my head."

He nodded. "Are you ready to start again?"

My turn to nod, firmly. "I'm ready."

"Do you want to shower first, or…?" He gestured to the open bathroom door. On the bed, I saw he'd laid out an outfit not unlike what I'd worn to town yesterday…a dark red short-sleeved shirt, a forest green pleated knee-length skirt, and dark tights. Underwear laid beside it (cream colored), and a pair of flats that matched the skirt sat on the floor at the foot of the bed.

Very nice, but maybe not very practical for learning to cast spells. Anyway, I hadn't really worked up much of a sweat, so… "I think I'll wait until after we're done with my practical lesson."

"In that case," Ken said, "let's go down to the lab -"

I cut him off by holding up one finger and waggling it.

He sighed. "Fine. The workshop. You're taking the fun out of it!" His protest was a teasing one.

I laughed softly. "As long as I don't end up feeling like a mad scientist, I'm okay with that, and you're just going to have to live with it." I paused in the doorway. "Um…pardon the pun."

He waved it off. "It's unavoidable when speaking to a spirit like me. I don't mind."

"Thank goodness," I said, and headed out to find the workshop.

The House appeared to have decided that I was in the mood for a bit of a walk that morning - and it wasn't wrong - because it took us about ten minutes to get there. During which time, I said to Ken, "So, I take it we're not going to be throwing lightning around again for a while."

"No," he agreed, "we're not. Your rather spectacular success showed me that we really need to start by working on your ability to gather and control the amount of energy you're working with before we move back into really throwing energy around." He glanced at me. "Your reaction to it showed me that I should've eased you into the idea a bit more gradually." He grimaced. "Sorry about that."

I sighed a little. "It's all right, I guess. Dara explained more of what the House is to me yesterday, and I think I understand a bit better why it's so important for me to learn to defend myself."

"That's good," he sounded more than a little relieved. "But I think we'll still go at it a bit more gradually, at least for now. There are many other things I can teach you about magic that I think will serve you well in the long run. Perhaps even better than being able to throw lightning."

I smiled a bit. "I did find myself wishing I could conjure a light while I was walking home last night."

"I helped!" Sparkle said happily.

"Yes you did," I agreed. "I probably would've tripped over a rock if you hadn't lit up the road for me."

Sparkle swirled around my head twice and landed on my shoulder again. It was astonishing how much energy she had when she was happy about something. Or was excited about something. Or was just awake.

"That," Ken said, "was actually what I planned to teach you today. To conjure light."

I let us into the workshop, and sat down on one of the tall stools by the workbench I'd occupied previously.

"So," Ken began, "you would think that conjuring light is simple."

"Actually," I said, thinking about it, "I wouldn't. I think it will be fairly complicated, and said complexity will depend strongly on what kind of light I'm trying to conjure."

Ken stared at me, his mouth hanging open a little.

I felt my cheeks warming. "I mean…I would think it'll be harder and more complicated to conjure true daylight, as opposed to just producing the magical equivalent of a forty watt light bulb."

Ken blinked twice, then started laughing.

I felt my blush deepen. "What?"

He shook his head. "I'm being a fool. I've gone from overestimating your ability to handle my lessons, to underestimating it. I apologize. You are quite correct, the type and intensity of the light you're conjuring will have a large impact on how difficult it is to accomplish, and how much energy it takes."

"It only stands to reason," I said, gesturing idly with one hand. "I mean…it takes more electricity to power a flood lamp than it does to power a lamp bulb. And I can only imagine how complicated producing light that has the actual wavelength and makeup of sunlight must be."

"It's complicated," Ken agreed, "but valuable to know. Vampires - among other night-dwelling creatures - can be weakened or even hurt, at the extreme, by true sunlight."

"Why?" I asked, my brain briefly being dragged off topic by curiosity. "Does it have something to do with ultraviolet light?"

Ken smiled and shook his head. "Your father actually ran a few experiments along those lines with the help of a friendly vampire."

"There is such a thing?" I asked.

"Oh yes," Ken said seriously, "vampires are quite real."

I gave him a small smile. “I rather assumed that you weren’t pulling my leg about that. I mean…I’m being taught magic by a ghost, my new best friends are a fairy and a hamadryad, and my law firm is apparently made up of Sidhe lords. I’m prepared to take the existence of pretty much any mythological creature on faith at this point. I meant friendly vampires.”

Ken chuckled. “Fair enough. And yes, there are friendly vampires. We’ll get into supernatural creatures later, though. For now, I want you to start with creating a ball of light above your palm. It doesn’t need to be bright, or any color in particular, but it must be luminous. So, walk me through your initial steps for constructing such a spell.”

I nodded and thought about it for a minute, keeping firmly in mind what I’d done earlier to fill the bird bath. “First, I will visualize the result I want out of the spell. How large the ball of light will be, how bright it will be.”

“What about how long it lasts?” Ken interjected.

I blinked. “What?”

“How long do you want it to last?” he asked with a smile. “This isn’t like the water you summoned earlier…it’s not something pre-existing that you’re pulling together. The energy for your little ball of light exists, but unless you’re going to draw in light - and I wouldn’t advise trying that just yet - you’re going to be converting energy into radiance. In order for that to work for more than an instant or two, you need to consider the ongoing cost in energy of keeping it extant.”

I nodded. That made perfect sense, though now I was wondering what would happen if I tried drawing in light. Something not very good, from the sound of it. I let it go for now and concentrated on the task at hand.

“Okay,” I said, “so I need to account for an ongoing flow of energy from myself to the ball of light. Not too much, not too little.” I imagined it, rather whimsically, as tiny beads of invisible energy emerging from my skin and zipping into the ball of light to keep it lit. Maybe not the perfect visualization, but…

“Once I have the visualization firmly in mind, I need a verbal component to focus it. I think a simple ‘lux’ should work nicely in this case,” I said.

Ken nodded. “Agreed. Short and sweet.”

I held out my right hand palm up. “Then I envision the energy flowing down my arm to my hand, out into the air above it to form my light.” I did just that, feeling the tingling sensation in my palm. “Finally, lux!”

A ball of light, about as bright as a sixty watt bulb and as big around as a baseball, appeared in the air above my right palm. Then it vanished with a little pop.

I frowned at the place where it had been. “Okay, what did I do wrong?”

Sparkle giggled in my right ear. “You didn’t maintain the flow of energy. I felt it stop.”

I sighed. “Damn.”

“Hey,” Ken said reassuringly, “that was an excellent start anyway. Nice and bright, but not blinding. You could probably make it a bit smaller, but for our purposes right now that doesn’t matter much.”

“All right,” I said, still frowning a little. Perhaps my visualization of little beads of energy going into the light wasn’t quite what I needed. Instead, I imagined the light tethered to my hand by an invisible string of energy, and tried again.

“Lux.”

Again, the ball of light appeared above my right palm…and this time (with a slight flicker) it remained there, hovering, shedding light, and…I blinked. “There’s no heat. How is there no heat coming from it?” Curiously, I prodded it with my left index finger, which sank into the ball of light and emerged unscathed. All I felt was a weird sensation like something feather-light brushing against my skin.

Ken laughed softly. “It’s magic. All you’re doing is creating light. If you want it to throw off heat, you’ll need to add more energy to it and add that as a component of the spell.”

I looked at him. “You can’t have light without some kind of heat. Even LED bulbs throw off some heat.”

He smiled at me, gently, affectionately. “It’s magic.”

“But…physics!” I protested, my brain scrambling.

“You’re bending it,” he said, still smiling.

I stared at the ball of glowing, heatless light that floated unmoving above my right palm. “Holy crap.” Well, this was quite a revelation. Intellectually I’d understood that by casting spells I would frequently be bending the laws of physics, but I thought that this was probably breaking at least one outright. “How?”

Ken spread his hands. “Magic. Mind you, eventually - unless you’re drawing in ambient energy, which I haven’t taught you to do yet - you’ll run out of power for it and the light will go out. But understand that you’re working with a fraction of the amount of energy it usually takes to run a light bulb of roughly that size and luminance. That’s probably at least partly why magical light casts no heat unless specifically designed to.”

Okay, so this wasn’t actually breaking the laws of physics, it was just bending them. LED bulbs, I remembered reading somewhere, did generate heat…but were much more efficient about releasing what little they generated. Since this was using very little energy, Ken was right…that probably had some bearing on it.

“I’m not using much energy,” I murmured. Then, with an effort of will, I shrank the light to the size of a pea without it losing any of its brilliance. In fact, I was able to make it brighter without any problem at all. Then I expanded it to the size of a softball, then tried to grow it further…

…And it blinked out of existence with a soft pop.

I nodded. “That makes sense,” I said. “I can decrease the size with the same amount of energy input, but to increase it past a certain point will require more energy.”

Ken beamed at me. “Precisely. Now, do it again.”

For the next two hours, Ken had me create balls of light in various sizes, shapes, amounts of luminance, and even had me make several at one time. I learned to make them go where I wanted to and stay there, how to change their color and even how to focus them to create a beam of light rather than an omni-directional one.

Finally, I held up a hand and doubled over, putting my hands on my knees. “Whew. I need a break,” I said. “I feel like I just jogged into town.”

Ken chuckled. “But look at how long you were able to keep doing that! Remember your first wind spell leaving you so drained that you almost passed out? You’ve been casting light spells for two hours and you’re just a bit winded.”

My stomach rumbled noisily.

“And getting hungry,” I added.

“That’s only to be expected,” Ken agreed. “But you’ve come very far in a very short time.”

I sat back down on the stool as Sparkle fluttered over with a bottle of water for me. It was bigger than she was, but somehow she managed it without too much difficulty, holding it by the neck.

“Thank you, Sparkle,” I said as I took it from her, opened it, and slowly drank from it. “So, this would be easier if I were drawing energy from the environment?”

Ken waggled one translucent hand back and forth. “Sort of yes, sort of no. One of the things I’m going to teach you is that magic is everywhere. If you know how, there’s a bottomless well of energy available for you to draw from the environment to cast spells with.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” I said, smiling a little.

“More than one, actually,” Ken chuckled. “The biggest is that - as I told you previously - when you draw in energy from outside yourself to cast a spell, your body still needs to…to metabolize it, for lack of a better term. You’ll have a lot more energy to use, but it’s going to be just as taxing to use.”

He let me chew on that for a couple of minutes as I slowly sipped water. “So,” I said finally, “I could gather energy from outside myself to cast a larger or more energy-intensive spell, but it would wear me out at the same rate? Or faster?”

“The same rate, usually,” Ken said. “It depends on the source of the energy, really. Drawing energy from a source you have affinity for to cast a spell you have affinity for won’t be as draining as drawing energy from a source you don’t have affinity for to cast a spell you don’t have affinity for.”

I chewed on that for a moment, translating it into terms that I had a frame of reference for. “If I drew energy from the air…I guess?…to cast a wind spell, it wouldn’t be as tiring for me as if I drew energy from fire to cast a fire spell?”

“Sort of,” Ken said, then shrugged. “It’s very complicated. But you’ll find that once you know how to do it, it’s pretty intuitive. You’ll be able to feel it when you’re doing something that’s going to be particularly draining. It’ll be…harder, in a manner of speaking. And you often won’t know specifically what the source of magic you’re drawing on is, if you’re pulling in ambient energy. It’s entirely different again if you’re tapping into a Ley Line, and so on.”

“I don’t like the ‘sort of’s and ‘it’s complicated’s,” I said dryly. “I thought magic was a bit more quantifiable than that.”

Ken spread his hands helplessly. “Magic is what it is. Sometimes it’s as clear as crystal. Other times, often for no discernible reason, it’s murky and indistinct.”

“You're making it sound like magic is alive again,” I huffed.

“It kinda is,” Sparkle said from where she was now perched atop what I assumed was a distilling machine for potion making, to judge by the framework of tubes, beakers, vials, flasks, and other more arcane-looking implements. “Magic is both immutable, and ever changing.” She spread her arms. “Magic is like the ocean. It’s huge, and deep, and both understandable and forever mysterious.”

“She watched a lot of nature programs with your mother,” Ken explained, seeing the bemused look on my face.

“Ah. Well, thank you, Sparkle. That actually made sense. Bottom line: at the end of the day, I need to be prepared for magic to make sense, and to leave me boggled,” I said.

“Sometimes both at once,” Ken agreed.

I took a deep breath and let it out. “I can handle this.”

Sparkle beamed at me. “Of course you can.”

Her absolute, bedrock-solid certainty was soothing. I just hoped she was right.

“So, am I learning to draw in magic today?” I asked.

Ken shook his head. “Not today. You’re doing very well at regulating the amount of energy going into a spell, and shaping the spell beyond its basic components, but I’d like to get just a bit more theory under your belt before trying anything more complicated again. And maybe a few more days of practice.”

I liked the sound of that. “Good. What’s next, then?”

“After lunch, I thought we could start brushing up on your fencing,” Ken suggested. “Many members of the supernatural world still consider the art of swordplay to be not only viable, but an honorable way to settle disagreements.”

“Charming,” I said dryly. “Well, I’m already dressed for exercise. I studied saber fencing, by the way, so I learned to use both the point and the edge of the foil for scoring points.”

“Which will serve you in good stead with a real sword,” Ken nodded. “You might do well with a smallsword, or a short rapier…we’ll look into that after you’ve eaten something. And later this afternoon, we should really start going over your properties and finances…”

Before he could say more, a soft bell rang in the room, seeming to come from thin air.

I looked around in confusion...the sound seemed to come from both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It sounded exactly like an old-fashioned pull-chain doorbell.

“I don’t remember seeing a doorbell out front,” I said to Ken.

Ken was blinking in obvious astonishment. “That’s...not the front door. It’s one of the doors inside the House.”

“One of the ones that goes somewhere else in the world?” I asked.

He nodded, then looked at me. “If you concentrate, you should be able to sense where in the House the door is.”

As soon as he said it, my mind veered in that direction, and I suddenly could sense – not far away – a door that was trying to get my attention. “Yes, I can, but is it wise to answer it?” I was terribly unsettled by the idea of someone knocking on one of the mystery doors that I had very little knowledge of yet.

Ken nodded, already heading for the hallway. “It should be perfectly safe. By the time your father died, there were only three or four people in the outside world who knew how to find any of the House’s doors other than the front door, and all of them were perfectly trustworthy.”

I hurried after him, Sparkle flitting from where she’d been perched to settle on my right shoulder. “Oh. You know, I feel like there’s still an awful lot that I should know, that I haven’t been told yet...”

Ken sighed. “I know. And I’m sorry. I thought we’d have a lot more time to cover the basics before something like this happened.”

“Throwing lightning is the basics?” I asked dryly.

Ken hesitated. “I’ve already admitted that we started in the wrong place...”

I held up a hand. “I know, I know. It just seems like every time I feel that I’m getting my feet under me, something quickly disabuses me of the notion.”

“Which way do we need to go?” Ken asked as we reached an intersection of hallways.

I frowned at him. “Ken...”

He pivoted to look at me, looking a bit uncertain. “It’ll get better,” he said, “it really will.”

“Okay. I believe you. More immediately, you haven’t really told me why this is safe, or why it’s so important to answer immediately.” I said. I was starting to feel a bit annoyed with him. “I get that there should only be a few people who know how to find doors to the House out in the world, but...”

He blinked a couple of times. “Oh. Well, any of those people who’re left at this point would probably be looking for aid in some way. One of your responsibilities as Guardian is to provide aid when -”

I held up a hand. “Stop. You and I are going to have a long talk about what it really means to be the Guardian, because you keep expanding on its definition - ”

I was cut off as the bell rang again from everywhere and nowhere. It was soft, but pervasive and impossible to ignore.

“ - After we see who’s at the door,” I finished, then headed off down the hallway. I could indeed tell - roughly - where the door in question was. It was like a pulsing, intangible pressure on my mind, giving me a sense of where the alert was coming from and that there was a certain urgency to it. I found my body reacting to that urgency, breaking into a jog as we headed down the hallway.