That’s actually a simplification of how the spell in question operates. The underlying principle is that you have to get a group of people to willingly put aside their selves and offer their time and energy to help perform a working for someone else’s benefit that doesn’t help any of them directly. And the trick is, once you ask a particular group, if anybody in the group refuses or can’t make themselves do it, the spell fails. It’s one of Mum’s, if you couldn’t tell already.
Nobody said anything for a moment. It’s not even remotely how things work in here. You don’t do anything for anyone without some kind of return, and the return’s always got to be something solid, unless there’s some more substantial connection in place: an alliance, dating, something. But that’s why I knew the spell would work if everyone did agree. It means a lot more in here than outside to do something for nothing. Even Cora herself was just staring at me confused. We weren’t even friends; she was willing to sit at a table with me now, when Chloe Rasmussen from New York was my ally and Orion Lake himself would be here as soon as he came off the line with his tray, but she’d barely tolerated my company all those years when Nkoyo used to let me tag along behind them on the way to language lab in the mornings. She was standoffish in general, and had always been a bit jealous of Nkoyo’s company, but it was more than that: she was aces at spirit magic, her family had a really long tradition of it, and she had clearly thought—and probably still did—that I was carrying some kind of unpleasant baggage on mine.
Nkoyo didn’t say anything. She was staring at her own tray without looking up, her lips curled in between her teeth, her hands curled on either side, waiting, waiting for someone else to speak. I really wished Orion had made it to the table already, and then Chloe said, “Okay,” and held a hand out to Aadhya, who was sitting between us.
Aadhya was definitely in the sidelong-eye camp, less at the request than at me: I could all but hear her saying okay, El, are you trying to develop a martyr thing of your own now or what, but after one good hard look, she just sighed and said, “Yeah, sure,” and took Chloe’s hand and held her other out to me. I took it, and as soon as I did I felt the living line of the circle building. I turned and offered my other one to Nadia, Ibrahim’s friend. She glanced over at Ibrahim but then after a moment took it, and he took hers and reached out to Yaakov across the table.
I’d been in circles with Mum a handful of times. She hadn’t asked me very often, almost always only when it was magical harm, usually someone suffering from a spell a maleficer had put on them or a complication from some spell they’d cast themselves, or the attack of some maleficaria. Healing something like that is a lot easier if you have another wizard helping, even a kid, instead of just you and a bunch of enthusiastic mundanes who can’t actually hold mana. But she didn’t ask me a lot, because most wizards who came to her for help couldn’t keep from getting uneasy round me. They were already vulnerable, so when they looked at me they were rabbits looking at a wolf—a half-starved wolf who sometimes snapped even at the hand that fed her because it also kept her on a leash. I never really wanted to help them. They were sick and weak and cursed and poisoned and desperate, but they were still part of the pack that hated me, that left me alone and scared and desperate myself. So Mum only asked me when she badly needed the power that came from me agreeing to help anyway, because otherwise she knew I’d say no sometimes. And I’d done it, grudgingly, partly to make Mum happy, partly to try and prove to myself I wasn’t what they saw when they looked at me.
But I’d never cast a circle by myself before. The idea’s straightforward enough: the mana everyone puts in flows through all of us in the circle, and because everyone shares the same purpose, it gets intensified. So you just let the mana keep circling around until it builds up high enough. But just because the idea is easy to describe doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.
In fact, I realized too late it was going to be even harder because everyone else around the table was a wizard. With Mum’s spell, you can heal internal injuries with a circle of ordinary people because you don’t need any more mana than you produce just by making the effort to stay in the circle, and you just need one wizard in the mix to “catch” the mana and hold it for long enough to pour it into the spell. With a bunch of almost adult wizards, we were building up a lot of mana really fast, and I could already feel everybody else sort of tugging on it. It wasn’t even on purpose; if anyone had deliberately tried to grab the mana for themselves, the circle would’ve fallen apart. But all of us are actively thinking about some kind of magical work every minute of the day and most of the night; we’ve all got spells half worked out and artifice projects in progress and potions brewing in the lab and graduation graduation graduation in our heads, and here was all this mana to work with, and I was asking them to think about using it to save Cora’s arm instead of their own necks.