The spell I was currently studying and working to memorize was called Lux Sanitatem.
One thing I had picked up on fairly quickly was that the basic runes inside any magic circle were not just decorative. If you had even a working knowledge of Latin you could read them, and reading them told you what the spell was actually doing at each stage of its execution. That was the foundation mages were expected to build before anything else. You could not just memorize the shape and hope for the best. You had to understand what the shape was saying.
I had made that mistake early on with Virgil, trying to hold the circles in my memory by brute force without understanding the language underneath them. He had corrected that quickly, teaching me enough Latin to actually parse what I was looking at, and after that the memorization became significantly faster and more reliable. I did not know everything yet but I was building toward it steadily.
So in practice, when I cast a spell I was not doing something mindless. The runes outside the origin rune in any given circle contained real information. Calculations, parameters, conditions. For a teleportation spell for example, the non-origin runes encoded the distance of the intended jump, the time it would take to complete, and the weight of whoever was traveling. Which meant that every time I teleported I was quietly adjusting those values to match my own body and my intended destination, without always consciously registering that I was doing it.
And yes, that meant physics.
I had said I hated school and I had meant it at the time. But apparently the universe had decided that was not going to be an option here because you could not get very far in magic without understanding the principles sitting underneath it. Force, distance, mass, the behavior of light through matter, the mechanics of tissue repair. All of it showed up eventually in one form or another and you either understood it or your spells misfired in ways that ranged from embarrassing to genuinely dangerous.
Gravity spells required it too. So did most of the others.
And healing was, if anything, the most demanding in that regard.
For a healing spell to work correctly, you needed to understand the depth and nature of the wound you were addressing. Not approximately. Precisely. The spell did not guess. It followed the parameters you gave it, which meant that if your measurements were off, the results were off in exactly the same proportion. Heal a deep cut as if it were shallow and the tissue would close at the surface while something remained wrong underneath. Miscalculate the cellular reconstruction of a severed finger and the person might end up with a finger that was technically attached but the wrong length, the wrong density, or both.
This was why healers were not just appreciated but genuinely rare in the sense that mattered. Anyone could learn the incantation. Not everyone could develop the understanding and precision to use it safely on another person.
Limb regrowth was a category unto itself. Full body reconstruction was something that sat at the top of healing magic and took years of dedicated study to approach responsibly. You were not just closing a wound. You were directing the body to rebuild something that no longer existed, cell by cell, nerve by nerve, in the right order and with the right specifications. The comparison to surgery was not a metaphor. It was essentially surgery conducted through mana.
So yes. I needed a test subject.
Nephis had suggested animals first and I declined before she finished the sentence.
That idea did not sit well with me, and the reason for it went somewhere I did not want to examine too closely in the middle of a lesson. One of the animals she had thrown out of that bag had a coat of white fur and a placid expression that reminded me of something I was trying not to think about.
My dog from my previous life.
He was the only family I had actually had. No one else. Just him, in a small apartment, in a life that had been mostly grey and quiet. He had been the one warm thing in it and I had left without warning and never came back. I did not know if anyone had found him. I did not know if he was still alive. I did not know if he sat by the door sometimes still waiting.
But I hoped that he was okay.
I pushed that thought down firmly and kept my face steady.
"I will do it myself." I said. "I need to get used to managing my own injuries anyway. This is practical experience."
Nephis looked uncomfortable but eventually stopped arguing.
We rearranged. Two chairs, a table between us. I laid my left arm flat on the table and pushed the sleeve of my pajama back. Nephis passed me a small knife without looking entirely happy about it.
She had already suggested twice more that she would volunteer instead. I said no both times.
I infused a thread of mana into the blade first because a standard edge would not cut an awakener's skin cleanly without it, and then I drew it in a short arc across my wrist. Clean, deliberate, not deep enough to be serious.
I saw Nephis flinch.
The pain was sharp and immediate, the kind that made your body want to pull away from itself, but it was manageable. It was painful but it was nothing compared to the pain of a dagger piercing your heart.
Shout out to Arthur for making me stronger against pain.
Blood welled up and ran across the table in a slow line.
Without wasting time, Nephis moved both hands over my wrist and settled her focus.
"Watch carefully, Second Prince."
"Lux Sanitatem."
The white magic circle formed above the wound and threw a soft glow across the table. I kept my attention on everything. The way the circle oriented itself. The sequence in which the runes lit as the mana flowed through them. The way the energy from the spell reached the wound not all at once but in a specific order, addressing one layer of tissue before moving to the next.
The first thing I felt was warmth. Then the bleeding slowed and stopped, the broken vessels responding to the spell's instruction before anything visible happened at the surface. Then the skin itself began to move, drawing closed from the edges inward with the careful precision of something being guided rather than something happening on its own.
Less than a minute after she had cast it, my wrist looked like nothing had happened to it. The cut was simply gone. The blood that had run across the table was still there but the wound that had produced it was not.
Nephis pulled her hands back with a sigh of relief and the circle dissolved.
"You followed everything?" She asked.
"Yes." I turned my wrist over and looked at it. The skin was unbroken and smooth. "That is a good spell."
She smiled and nodded, already reaching for a tissue to clean the table. "For minor injuries it is excellent. Something more severe, a missing finger for instance, requires a second circle spell. A full limb sits somewhere around the fifth circle and demands a level of anatomical knowledge that takes years to develop properly."
I nodded and without wasting time, I was already reaching for the knife again.
Nephis noticed. "Second Prince—"
"My turn." I said.
I drew another cut across the same wrist. Same depth, same length. The pain hit the same way and I let it sit there without reacting to it while I set the knife down and moved my hand into position above the wound.
Now I had to do what I had just watched.
I built the magic circle in my head, holding every element of it in place simultaneously. The origin rune at the center, the arrangement of the calculation runes around it, the specific values I needed to encode for the depth and surface area of the cut in front of me. I took the measurement as carefully as I could manage, translating what I could see and feel into the parameters the spell needed, and then I began casting.
The circle formed above my wrist slowly. More slowly than Nephis's had. The process of holding the formation steady while simultaneously feeding it the correct mana output and keeping the healing parameters accurate required a level of divided attention that I was not yet comfortable with. I felt the strain of it behind my eyes almost immediately.
But the warmth arrived. Faint at first, then more consistent as the spell found its footing. I felt the tissue responding, felt the edge of the wound beginning to close, and I held everything where it was and kept the output steady while it worked.
Five minutes, roughly, from cast to completion.
When I looked down my wrist was clean. No cut. No scarring. The blood that had been there was gone as well, absorbed and processed by the spell along with the damaged tissue.
I let out a slow breath.
"That was harder than it looked." My head was aching again. The concentration required for that one small cut had been genuinely significant.
Nephis clapped her hands together, and the brightness that came into her face was entirely genuine. "You did it! On your very first attempt, no less. You really do learn quickly."
I looked at my wrist for a moment.
"Talented." I said it quietly, almost to myself. "Some people used to call me trash."
I had not meant to say that out loud. It had just come out of wherever it had been sitting.
Nephis asked what I had said.
"Nothing." I shook my head. "Just thinking."
She watched me for a second with an expression I could not quite read and then nodded gently. "Well, Second Prince. All I can tell you is that what you just did is something most beginners take several attempts to achieve. Whatever anyone said before does not seem to have much bearing on what I am seeing right now."
I did not respond to that but I filed it away somewhere.
I was indeed planning to practice the spell on my own. Meaning that I would be cutting myself more often.
Not that I was into masochism or anything.
"Shall we continue?" I said.
"Yes." She brightened again. "The second healing spell is a second circle one. We will go through it and then move into attack and defense applications."
I picked up the knife again.
Nephis looked at it. Looked at my wrist. Looked at the knife again.
"Second Prince, I do want to note for the record that I am technically fine with being the test subject."
"Noted." I said. "I am going to cut myself again."
She sighed, accepted this, and reached for more tissues.
***
Nephis watched Lucas draw the blade across his own wrist for the second time with the same calm, unhurried expression he had worn for the first.
She had expected many things from this appointment. She had not expected this.
When she had first heard she would be assigned to the second prince she had thought of the third princess, because that was the only frame of reference she had for what noble children in this palace were like aside from the crown prince, the first and second princesses. Londres had fired an instructor that morning for being ten minutes late. The stories that came out of those lessons filtered back to the tower in pieces and none of them were pleasant.
But Lucas had greeted her without any of that. He had reassured her, told her she was not late, laughed at her own awkwardness without making her feel small for it. And then when it came to the practical work he had refused to let an animal be harmed on his behalf and had volunteered his own wrist without hesitation or performance.
She watched him now as he held the cut steady on the table. Fifteen years old, blood running across the marble surface, and his face completely still. Not suppressing a reaction. Genuinely, it seemed, unbothered by it. The only thing on his face was focus.
It was quite weird and surprising for such a child but then again, he was stabbed in the heart which was much more painful than a simple wrist cut.
She turned her attention back to her book and smiled quietly to herself.
These lessons were going to be considerably more interesting than the paperwork waiting for her back at the tower.