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To Dioni, magic had always been serious. When you could speak binding promises into existence, you learned to be careful how you used the power just as much as you learned to be careful with how you phrased things. Magic was serious and difficult and something that required a lot of oversight.
So when Jaq grew her a flower up from nothing, she was caught off guard.
“Did you just…” she stared at the flower blooming through the cold Fozian soil. It didn’t look like it belonged. No—it honestly didn’t belong. It was only there because Jaq had willed it to be, and the fact that he would speak a curse over something so simple was stunning. Did all commoners treat magic with so little care?
“It’s just a flower,” he said, waving a stick at it. She was used to seeing a knife in his hands, not a stick, but he gestured with it with just as much comfort. “I can change the color if you’d like.”
Another wave of the stick and it was blue. Flowers weren’t meant to be blue. He was throwing around magic as if it was worth nothing at all, and he hadn’t even spoken aloud to do it. Dioni had never heard of anyone who could cast curses without the words for them.
“What are you doing?” she finally managed to ask. “Stop that!”
“You don’t like it?” Jaq picked the flower and twirled it between his fingers. “I honestly thought you would. I used to be good at this, but I suppose a flower is pretty paltry to a Princess. Let me think, I can do a couple of other tricks.”
“No!” Dioni exclaimed and Jaq looked up at her. His frow furrowed as a frown took over his face.
“Okay…” he said slowly. He gave an almost imperceptible shake as he came back to his usual self, that usual smile back in control. “I’m sorry I overstepped, Princess. It’s just with a woman as charming as you are, it can be hard not to.”
He wasn’t getting the message at all, and while Dioni was flattered by his obvious attempt to placate her, she hated that he was missing the point. “It’s not about the flower, Jaq. I like flowers, and I’d like a flower from you. I just don’t like either of those things enough for you to play with he strands of fate over it.”
“The strands of fate,” Jaq repeated carefully. It took a moment for understanding to break over his face. “You mean Felix. You’re fated to him, so he should be the one giving you flowers.”
God, she’d known he didn’t have a formal education, but she’d never actually thought Jaq would be this thick. “It’s not about Felix. It’s about the curses you’re casting for something so small. It’s not right.”
“I’m not casting curses,” Jaq said, waving the stick in his hand just a bit. When she didn’t respond to that, he tilted his head at her and waved it again. “You really don’t know about my kind of magic?”
“I didn’t know you had magic,” Dioni admitted, staring at the stick he was waving around for a moment before looking back at his face. “I thought it was a Bonnian thing.”
“Curses are a Bonnian thing. Manipulating fate, that’s all you guys. But we Fozian’s have got a little something up our sleeve too,” Jaq grinned and waved his wand again, this time spurting an entire area of admittedly much smaller wildflowers. “I think your sort generally call them parlor tricks.”
“I don’t…” Dioni started at the lush ground around her. “I mean, how? The soil’s not good enough and the weather’s terrible and plants don’t grow at that speed. You’d have to rewrite probably five or six natural laws to get even one to bloom, let alone a full set like that. You’d be risking all sorts of strange side effects, and that’s not to mention the raw power.”
“I didn’t rewrite anything,” Jaq said, his face quirking into a smile. “I just added a little beauty. It’s really all Fozian stuff is good for—making things just a touch nicer.”
“But…” Dioni just kept staring.
“It’s simple,” Jaq said. “You guys play big. Rewriting rules of the universe and laws of probability and all that sort. We play small. I didn’t change the soil or the weather or the air quality or anything. I just encouraged a handful of flowers to gow up. Added just a tiny touch to a tiny area. Small, focused, simple.”
“How have you never shown me this?” Dioni asked, reaching for a flower and plucking it from the earth. It was cold in her hand. She got the idea that it wouldn’t live much longer on its own. “We’ve been meeting here for years, and I had no idea.”
“Well first, I figured you knew, and I figured you weren’t that impressed. You can change fate. I can… polish your jewelry?” Jaq suggested. He waved his stick at her hands and suddenly her rings seemed to shine just a little bit more than they had in the past. Then he tucked the stick away at his belt and shrugged. “Also haven’t had a wand in a couple years, which would have made showing off a little hard.”
“A wand?”
“Seriously?” Jaq got out his stick again. “They don’t even teach you that much? We Fozians can’t just use words to do magic like you can. Not sure we’re really actually talented when you think about it, we’re just nearby to some trees that seem to be. If you make a wand out of the right kind of wood, it channels the energy or something and let’s a Fozian control the magic. I can’t do my parlor tricks without one.”
He handed it over for Dioni to examine. It was about nine inches long of plain, straight wood. She turned it over in her hands. “You really need this to do magic?”
“I don’t know a single Fozian who has pulled off even a simple spell without one,” Jaq agreed. “Like I said, I don’t think we’re really powerful. I think it’s just the wood.”
“So you think I could do what you’ve been doing?”
“If for some reason you wanted to, sure. Just hold the wand out, wave it around a bit, and focus a bit of intention,” Jaq said. He stepped around her to hold her hand in his and guide her through the motions, though he admitted the details of the gesture were largely trivial. Partway through trying to explain what he meant about intention, he reminded her: “You can do a whole lot bigger things than this with your actual powers you know. Just say the words and you could rewrite this field into a perfect meadow.”
But Dioni kept her mouth shut and tried to learn it his way. He laughed his way through trying to teach her, and she hadn’t actually managed any of his parlor tricks by the time she knew she had to go. When he grew her a final flower on the way out though, she found she didn’t mind her failure. She could handle the big picture stuff and leave it to Jaq to make life just that little bit more beautiful. It was how they had always done things beyond magic anyways, and as Dioni finally returned to the palace she called home, she couldn’t help but think that the situation just seemed right.