The trip back to town was uneventful.

  Jonnie kept talking about what he was going to spend his part of the rewards on. I blocked most of it out. I was pretty sure that an indoor snow globe didn’t exist, but we were living in a game. Anything could happen.

  We walked into the Mage Guild and Jonnie dropped the bag on the counter. One good thing about character stores was that they were always open.

  Merlin counted the rocks and dropped them behind the counter. Once we were done, he dropped a spell book in the bag.

  “Thank you.” I said as I picked up my bag. I pulled Jonnie’s robe out of the bottom and tossed it to him. "Put some clothes on.”

  He slipped into the robe. "What spells did you get?”

  I flipped open the spell book. There ten pages in the book. The first one had an electric spell, the second one had a light spell, and the third one had a healing spell. All were low level and would have been easy to cast.

  “Not much.” I showed him the spells. "How do you get more pages?”

  “They get added automatically.” He looked over the spells. "You want some better ones?”

  I eyed him. "For what?”

  “Whoa!” He grinned. "Not everything is some master plot to screw you.”

  I glared at him. "What do you want?”

  “I’m curious if you can actually enchant like you say you can.” He pulled out a dagger. "Tell you what. I’ll give you my Ice path spell. You enchant it on this dagger. If the enchantment sticks, then I’ll let you have any five of my spells that you want.”

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  “Five spells just to enchant a dagger?” I asked

  “Six actually,” He handed me the dagger. "You get the Ice Slide either way.”

  I set the dagger down. "Deal.”

  He opened his book to the Ice Slide rune and passed it to me. I took the pen out of the spine of my spell book. I laid the rune under one of my blank pages and started copying. It was really easy. The rune was blue, but it was so dark, it begged me to copy it to the blank page. I finished in less than a minute.

  Jonnie took his spell book back and admired my work. "You’re a natural at this.”

  I let a smile cross my face, but I bit it off quick. I didn’t want his praise to distract me.

  I set the dagger down on the page opposite the rune. I had read up on how to enchant something, but I hadn’t actually done it yet. The pressure of what would happen if I messed up got my hands to shake a little.

  Jonnie took both of my hands in his. He brought them up, so I’d look him in the eyes. "You’ll do fine.” He grinned. "You got this.”

  I let out a long breath and pulled my hands away. I was good at drawing. This would be easy.

  I brushed the tip of the pen over the outside of the rune. After I did, the blue part vanished, leaving only a grey outline where it had been deep blue. I moved over to the dagger and made the same stroke I had just made. The blue edge of the rune started on the base of the blade.

  I kept taking the circle away until I had transferred the circle completely over to the dagger. I set the pen down and stretched my fingers. The strain of being perfect was helping them cramp, though it probably had a lot to do with how tight I was gripping the pen.

  I picked the pen back up and started on the inner rune. The outside was the easy part. It was just the area that the rune rested in. The inside was the part that actually held the power.

  I moved slower with the actual rune, making sure that I got every stroke right. When I was finished I set the pen down. The rune in my spell book was completely gray. The one on the dagger shone a soft blue.

  I handed it to Jonnie. "What do you think?”

  He grinned. "Let’s try it out.”

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