The next morning, Eliza grew and shrank her breasts a couple of times during her shower. After drying off and starting to get dressed, she found that her bra didn’t fit, so she had to shrink them again slightly. She repeated that for the next few days while showering until she could cast the growing/shrinking spell correctly every time. She also experimented with shrinking and growing her vocal cords until she found the sound of her voice just right.

Cassie invited her on another shopping trip, since she needed to buy new bras and wanted to buy clothes that would flatter her larger breasts, and so they went. They drove to Hickory this time, which was half an hour closer than Asheville and about half as big, but still big enough to have decent selection at its clothing stores. Eliza wasn’t going to buy anything, since she’d spent so much money on the trip to Asheville, but Cassie insisted on buying her something nice as a thank-you for the larger breasts and her general help with her transition, so she picked out a knee-length navy blue dress that Cassie said looked good on her.

She cast the knowledge-absorbing spell on the Finnish textbook and dictionary at the start of the trip, and read the Finnish novel she’d started puzzling her way through a few days earlier on the road and while she was waiting for Cassie to find bras that fit her. She thought she was getting noticeably more fluent; she didn’t have to consciously parse sentences or compound words as often, and when the spell wore off, she could still recognize a lot of common words though not enough to actually keep reading without casting the spell again.

After they returned to the house, she did about half a day of cataloguing and reshelving, planning to make up for the other half on Saturday.

Thursday was July 4, and Cassie decreed she mustn’t do any cataloguing as it was a holiday. They hung around watching movies and reading during the hot part of the day, and drove to Beech Mountain that evening for the fireworks display. They spread out a blanket in a grassy area of one of the parks, and chatted and read until it got dark and the pyrotechnics went off.

Friday morning, Cassie gave her her stipend for the week. Eliza was surprised by the amount, and asked her if she’d written it out correctly.

“Yeah,” Cassie said, looking puzzled. “Remember how I said you deserve more pay because you’re doing two jobs? Helping me with my transition, and with learning Lisp, and maybe helping me learn magic later on if you can figure out how.”

“But this is way more than twice as much as usual!”

“Yeah, but the normal amount takes into account your room and board. I added in the value of that and doubled it. Plus I backdated the extra to the first day you cast the complexion spell on me.”

“Wow… thank you so much. I’m not sure if I –”

“By decree of Princess Cassie, the royal sorceress and librarian shall have her salary doubled,” Cassie said smugly.

Eliza smiled. “Then thanks again.”

She drove in to Boone to deposit the check and have lunch with Sarah, then got back to cataloguing after her return.

---

Saturday started out as a normal workday, since Eliza had taken half a day off to join Cassie for her mid-week shopping trip. She was in the midst of reshelving some books in one of the guest bedrooms when Cassie came in, saying “I just had a great idea. What if you cast the knowledge-absorbing spell on the spellbook itself? Or one of those other spellbooks that you can’t read yet?”

Eliza stared at her. “I have a feeling that will either shortcut finishing my training, or it will backfire horribly. I have no idea how to guess which.”

“Or, you know, it might only work on the chapters you’ve already decrypted, which you already know pretty thoroughly. But I think it’s worth a try.”

“I’ll think about trying it.”

“Another thing I thought of testing… have you tried casting the spell on a book you can’t understand normally? Like in Chinese or whatever?”

“No, I haven’t tried casting it on a book in a language I don’t know. But remember, I tried studying the endocrinology books the normal way, and they were way over my head – I didn’t have the background knowledge and didn’t know the medical jargon. And when I cast the spell on it, I was still able to understand it… so maybe that would work with a book in an unfamiliar language too?”

“Let’s try it!”

“Okay.”

At Cassie’s request, Eliza had been moving all the foreign-language books to a shelf in one of the guest bedrooms, organized by language. They went to the other guest bedroom and Eliza pulled a big book at random off the shelf – she wasn’t sure what language it was in, even. Something Slavic written in the Latin alphabet, apparently, so maybe Polish or Czech? She cast the knowledge-absorbing spell on it, and her mind was flooded with details of the life of King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki – apparently it was a biography, and an in-depth one. She also suddenly had a splitting headache.

“Ow, ow, ow!”

“Sorry!” Cassie exclaimed. “What’s wrong?”

“Headache,” Eliza said, closing her eyes and sitting down on the bed. “Ohhhh…”

“Do you want me to go get the Tylenol?”

“Can’t hurt. Gonna go lay down.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Eliza forced her eyes partway open and made her way across the hall to her bedroom, lying down and pulling the covers over her without taking off any of her clothes. Cassie came in with a glass of water and a bottle of Tylenol a minute later; Eliza thanked her, took the Tylenol, and closed her eyes.

She lay there unable to sleep because of the headache until the spell wore off and the pain went away. She remembered getting a mild headache the first time she tried casting the spell on two books at once, Teach Yourself Finnish and the Finnish-English dictionary, but it hadn’t happened the subsequent times she’d cast the spell on the same two books. And it had never happened when she cast the spell on only one book, until now.

Further, more cautious experimentation over the next few days showed that the harder it was for Eliza to understand something the normal way, the worse the headache she’d get if she crammed it all into her head by magic. Books in French and Spanish, in which she was moderately fluent but not native-like, gave her a mild headache similar to English books with a lot of unfamiliar jargon, but she didn’t try again with books in languages she didn’t know at all.

---

Sunday, she met Sarah at her house as usual and went to church with her. Shortly after they sat down, a family with three small children came in and sat next to them. Eliza was delighted at how adorable the kids were, and during the greeting time the little boy, who was sitting next to Eliza, shyly offered to shake hands with her. Unfortunately, she realized only after that that he had the sniffles. She hastily excused herself and went to the restroom to wash her hands, but it was too late; she woke the next morning with a sore throat that didn’t go away when she drank some water. Soon it developed into congested sinuses and a low-grade fever.

She and Cassie avoided one another to try to avoid Cassie getting sick as well, eating meals at different times. Eliza didn’t feel like doing any reshelving, but sat in her office cataloguing books based on photos she’d taken earlier. When she reviewed the spellbook during lunch on Tuesday, however, she realized that chapter seven had unlocked, and she had her first healing spell. Perfect timing.

Reading the description carefully, she found that it wouldn’t just get rid of the infection instantly, though more advanced spells of the type could potentially do so, but that it would temporarily boost her immune system to get rid of an infection faster than it normally could. “Warning: may cause a temporary fever. Do not use if you already have a fever over 104°F (40°C), as this may increase your temperature to dangerous levels. Be sure to hydrate well before using this spell.”

Eliza thought she probably had a fever, though she didn’t feel anywhere near bad enough to have a 104° fever. And she’d already been drinking a lot. To be on the safe side, however, she went and asked Cassie (from a safe distance) if she had a thermometer she could borrow.

“There should be one in the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom… let me go check.” Cassie returned a minute later with an old-fashioned glass mercury thermometer in a plastic case.

Eliza washed it off and checked her temperature; it was only about 100°. It wasn’t as precise as a modern digital thermometer that would give your temperature to the nearest tenth of a degree, but she was well within the safe zone for using the spell, so after drinking an additional glass of water, she started tracing the spell on her face.

Using magic always tired her out a little, but she hadn’t been prepared for how much more tiring it would be when she was sick. She tried the spell three times, all unsuccessfully, and then had to lie down for a while. When she felt better, she tried again (still in bed), and again, and then felt it work on the fifth try. She didn’t immediately feel better; if anything, over the next half hour or so she started feeling worse. She checked her temperature again a while later and found it was 102°. She dozed off and on, getting up to go to the bathroom a couple of times, and started feeling better by sunset. By the time she would have normally gone to bed, she was feeling perfectly fine, if a little tired. Her sore throat and fever were gone and her sinuses were no longer congested.

Despite their precautions, Cassie woke up with a sore throat and stuffy nose Wednesday morning. Though Eliza was still feeling a little tired, she cast the immune system booster on her as soon as Cassie had checked her temperature and drunk a large cup of water, and she was fine a few hours later.

The other two spells in chapter seven were a meta-magic spell to let her detect magic and do a basic analysis of its purpose, and an information magic spell that was like the scrying spell she’d already learned, but for space rather than time – it would let her watch something happening in real time up to about a hundred and fifty miles away. That made her feel uneasy; she didn’t want to spy on people’s private activities. But then she realized she could just focus on public spaces, not the insides of people’s homes, and get plenty of practice with it to unlock chapter eight.

A hundred and fifty miles was just far enough to see her family’s home on the outskirts of Greensboro, but though watching her own parents seemed less invasive than watching somebody else at home, she decided against it. Who knew what her parents might get up to with her not around? So the first time she cast that spell, she focused instead on the mall in Greensboro. Maybe she would see someone she knew.

She cast the spell repeatedly during her lunch break on Wednesday, focusing on the food court. She figured she’d see the most people concentrated in one place there. On her fourth try, Cassie’s kitchen walls and furniture faded away to translucent phantasms and she saw the food court of the mall spread out around her. It wasn’t super busy at twelve-thirty on a weekday, but there were a fair number of people sitting at tables and eating, chatting silently, others standing in line at the various fast food places or ordering their food, again silently. She stood up and slowly turned around in place to see everything and everyone. Was that Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs from church, over there in line for the Chick-Fil-A? She couldn’t quite tell at this distance, with their backs partly turned to her. She walked slowly in that direction, hands groping for the walls and furniture she could barely see, and stopped when she ran up against the kitchen counter. She probably should have cast this spell outdoors. Then the woman turned around and Eliza recognized her; yeah, that was Mrs. Dobbs. She inanely waved to her before remembering she couldn’t see her.

The vision lasted around twenty minutes, a good bit longer than the visions she’d seen of the church parking lot a week or so earlier. Maybe seeing across space was easier than seeing across time? That would make sense, but it raised the question of why the spellbook had given her the time scrying spell before the space scrying spell. Well, she had needed or at least wanted the time scrying spell to find out who vandalized her car, just like she’d needed the immune system booster when she was sick… and she’d needed all those transition spells, though she hadn’t realized it until she’d already gotten and tried out several of them. This one, on the other hand, seemed to be just for fun, like the make-things-glow spell or the levitation spell.

By the time the vision faded and the kitchen came back into solidity, she’d half-blindly eaten the rest of her lunch, and was ready to get back to cataloguing. She talked with Cassie during supper about the new spells and particularly the spell to detect and analyze magic.

“I figure I’ll cast the glowing spell on something and then have you hide it somewhere,” she said. “And then try the detection spell until I can find it.”

“You don’t think you’ll find any other magic around the house?”

“I think if your uncle had left permanent spells on anything around the house, we’d probably have noticed something weird by now. Unless they’re really subtle. But I guess we’re about to find out.”

“What’s the range on that spell?”

“Only about three miles. I doubt there will be any other magic within that range but outside the house, though.”

“Okay. Let’s test it as soon as we’re done with supper.”

So they did. Eliza cast the glowing spell on a nickel, and then closed her eyes while Cassie took it and… probably left the room? A couple of minutes later, she heard Cassie say, “Okay, I’ve hidden it,” and she opened her eyes.

“All right, let’s give this a try.” She studied the detection spell again and then cast it. Again. Again. On the third try, her awareness lit up with a number of glows of different colors, many of them shining through the walls of the kitchen from other rooms. The closest was on the table in front of her – the beginner’s spellbook, of course. There was a cluster of several rectangular glows in the same bluish-green through the walls where her office should be – probably the other spellbooks she hadn’t unlocked – and there were several small dots of red, orange, and purple scattered around the living room, bedrooms and bathrooms, but the biggest glow, a yellow one, seemed to be coming from the utility room.

“Huh,” she said. “A lot more than I expected.” She got up and walked into the utility room, where she found the yellow glow outlining the hot water heater. Once she was close and focused on it, the spell filled her head with basic information about the spell on the hot water heater – apparently it was designed to help keep the water hot?

“What’s going on?” Cassie asked, following her into the utility room. “You’re getting colder – which is ironic given that you’re staring at the hot water heater…”

“Your uncle enchanted it for some reason,” Eliza said. “My guess is that it got to where it wasn’t keeping the water hot enough, or not heating it fast enough, and instead of getting it repaired or replaced, he helped it along with magic.”

“Huh. Does it look stable?”

“How would I know? All I can see is the basic function of the spell. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to get an electrician in here and look at it. It looks pretty old.”

“Yeah. Seems a shame to replace it if it’s working perfectly, though.”

“You could just have him do a safety check on the wiring and stuff?”

“Good idea.”

After that, Eliza walked through the rest of the house, finding the glowing coin where Cassie had dropped it behind some books on one of the shelves in her office, and seeing the other magic books glowing in Eliza’s own office, and finding several more things with lingering enchantments cast by Cassie’s uncle – or someone else.

Several of them had uses that were obvious as soon as Eliza got close enough to look at them directly. There was a high-quality razor that was enchanted to keep its sharpness, which Cassie had been using to shave until Eliza had cast the hair-removal spell on her, a pair of scissors with the same sort of enchantment in Eliza’s desk drawer, and a magnifying glass that would blow things up a lot more if you tapped its side in just the right place. And then there was…

“This?” Cassie asked.

“Apparently so,” Eliza confirmed.

The last glowing object was a postcard from Maui, postmarked January 15, 1965, from someone named Jeff Blevins, if Eliza was deciphering the scribble correctly. Whether this Jeff Blevins were a mage who had enchanted his postcard, or whether Eugene Taggart had enchanted it after receiving it, she couldn’t tell.

“And what does it do?”

“Nothing, as far as I can tell – it’s just magic. Barely magic, it doesn’t glow as bright as the hot water heater or the razor, but it was noticeable through the wall of the closet and the cardboard of the box these postcards and letters were stored in.”

“You think maybe it needs to be activated in some way? Like he enchanted a video message into it, way back before Skype, and your uncle had to cast a spell to make it play back?”

“That’s as good a guess as any. Or maybe the spell has faded out over time until it doesn’t work anymore, but the traces are still there?”

They examined and talked about the postcard for a while, but couldn’t come to any conclusion.