Runika and the Six-sided Spellbooks

By Shannon Kelly

Runika Jones is a four-foot-five professional thief and amateur rune-caster. But one thing she isn't, is stupid.

So when Runika picks the pockets of the Archmaster Luniorn the Green, headmaster of his own runecasting academy, she figures she's done for. Instead, Luniorn offers her a deal: come study at his academy, learn how to properly ca

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fox Tale Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645510812

Book preview

Prologue

W hat do you think you are doing?

Runika froze with her hand in the pocket of a tall, distinguished gentleman. It wasn’t like she’d never been caught picking pockets before – far from it. As a four-foot-five fourteen-year-old orphan living on the street with just her wits and her cat to survive, she’d been in more than one scrape in the last few years. But as her eyes rose past the tails on his black coat, to the sharp shoulders of his aristocratic jacket, and finally skimmed by the white wings in his hair, they landed on his eyes.

He had no pupils.

Two solid emerald gems stared out at her from where his eyes should have been. And in his hand, he held up a glowing spell matrix, its magical lines of suspended diamond dust hung in the air, sparkling in rainbows beneath his furrowed brows.

He’s a rune-caster, she thought. Oh shoot.

One

The Biggest Break-in of Her Life

The day before

Runika squealed and squirmed as she felt a cold cat’s nose touch her right where her neck met her ear.

Jean, get out of there, she said, giggling, as the orange and white street cat tried to push beneath the thin blanket atop her mattress and curl up somewhere warmer.

Jean just looked at her like she was being stubborn. He knew he would eventually get under the covers. He knew the score and, next to Runika, was the best con artist in the abandoned factory that they called home. Ever since she’d saved him – well, they had saved each other – they hadn’t spent a single night apart. And now that Runika was awake, there was no way she was getting back to sleep. The setting sun’s light streamed in through the large window, empty of glass, and – more importantly – tonight was the night of her big break. Big break-in, that was.

Runika finished the leathery apple of her dinner, eating first around the outside of the core and then biting through it until there was nothing left but the stem. As she ate, she nervously rolled through her fingers a single grain of the rare diamond dust that rune-casters used for their magic. She summoned a tiny earth elemental and dismissed it, again and again making it appear and disappear, while she went over her plans for the day in her head. The little creature looked like a thick-set gorilla, but one inch high, made of sand constantly sifting from its form to disappear back to wherever elementals went when they were unsummoned.

Jean mrowed and pushed his furry head against Runika’s leg as she went through her evening exercises. The set of motions her mother had taught her years ago was about the only thing she had left of her parents, except for memories of their last night together that she tried hard to forget. As she stretched one leg high above and grabbed her ankle with one hand, she reached out the other and scratched Jean behind the ears.

Are you coming with me? she asked the cat.

He sat and watched her – saying nothing but not needing to. They’d been together for eight years now; long enough for silence to be a conversation. Almost long enough to forget the night Jean had found her cold and alone, knees and palms scraped from hard stone, tears on her cheeks. The night Jean had led her back to this little sanctuary, hidden between the walls of two working factories, but convinced this little room was part of the other. Back when the cat, then a tiny kitten, had found food for them both and convinced her to eat it. Jean was like family. The only family Runika had left now.

Runika approached the Baroness’s keep wall as the sun finally set over the city of Galbresia. She stretched out her arms – it never hurt to stretch before rune-casting – and looked both ways in case anybody was following her. Jean would have warned her anyway, but it also never hurt to be safe.

She had been organising this particular break-and-enter for a week now. The Baroness’s guards were taking in a shipment of saffron spice from the southern lords this week, and would be sending it as tax to the Queen in two days’ time. The only people who knew it was coming in were the guards escorting the treasure and a young kitchensweep, who Runika had been bribing with gifts for a year now in hopes something interesting reached the boy’s ear. And it finally had.

Saffron was worth at least double its weight in silver. Better, actually, because Runika already had a buyer set up who was expecting this particular score. Because of this, she hadn’t left anything to chance. Everything about this job was meticulously plotted out and … oh, who was she kidding? She had the basics of a plan and she would vibe the rest of it. She glanced sideways at Jean guiltily, and it was like he could read her mind again. He stared at her unblinking and she could practically hear him saying, Maybe you should think before you act this time?

She grimaced and stuck her tongue out at him. Vibing the plan had always worked for her before. Sort of. She didn’t count the sewers incident. But apart from that … and the time with the birds. And the vines fiasco. Oh, and definitely when she tried to steal ice that one time. Hmmm … maybe Jean had a point.

Runika checked again for guards, but the coast was still clear. The tall wall stretched up before her. There wouldn’t be any guards here. How could anybody climb a wall this tall after all? Nobody could. Except maybe a rune-caster like Runika.

The trick to rune-casting was working out the patterns that made sense. Use a scattering of diamond dust to form a spell matrix in the air. Summon a few elemental spirits and arrange them into a pattern on your matrix. When you felt like the elementals were happy, you set them loose on the world. The pattern caused something to happen – a fire to keep you warm at night, pulling a bucket-full of water out of the earth to clean with, a sudden draught of air to put out the lanterns in a target’s household.

Runika had heard of more complex workings, using maths and geometry and stuff like that. But it had always been good enough for her to just do what felt right at the time. More often than not, she got it right. The times she got it wrong were spectacularly bad – times she shivered to remember – but being flexible and thinking fast were the keys to surviving. Rune-casting had kept her warm at night, full of food, and safe from the predators that roamed Galbresia’s night-time alleys.

Runika focused her will on crafting her spell matrix, sprinkling a glittering half-fingerful of the rare diamond dust into the air, drawing ribbons of sparkling, pure magic through it and weaving the dust through and around the ribbons until they formed into a rough cube, spinning on one corner, split into twenty-seven smaller cubes in a three-by-three-by-three ‘matrix’ that gave it its name.

She double checked her matrix. It was flickering dangerously on one side, the ribbons there were slightly thicker than on the other side, and using more power to come into focus. She also hadn’t used enough dust to keep it functioning for long. But diamond dust was expensive and she couldn’t afford to fix the error.

She looked around in case anybody happened to see her outside of the keep’s walls. Then she reached across the divide to summon her elementals. The earth elementals who answered her this time resembled the two-legged landbirds the Baroness’s Cavalry used as mounts. They chittered and chattered, standing on crackling stone legs, and shaking sand into the air. Runika concentrated, looking past their illusory forms and seeing the physical beings that lay at their hearts. There before her hovered four yellow-orange crystalline cubes, shaped like six-sided spellbooks and glowing softly from within.

Runika directed the elementals into her spell matrix as Jean swiped at a fifth crystal – a blue water elemental that had also answered her summons. She directed it into her spell matrix before it could get loose and cause trouble. Calling elementals was never an exact science, and you often got more than you called for. Usually Runika just let them go wild. It was only the fire elementals she had to be careful with, as they could hurt people if she wasn’t careful to keep them contained. But tonight, she didn’t want to take any chances with rogue elementals of any kind.

When the four earth elementals felt like they were in the right place, Runika shifted her focus, releasing them to form into an earth rune. The diamond dust bound it all together, mixing with the elementals and rippling from the air and into her hand. She pressed her palm against the wall of the keep, already knowing that this rune would work.

Sure enough, beneath her hand, a stone slid out from the wall. Runika rubbed her hands together, spreading the magic across her palms and then placed her other palm against the wall. Another stone drew out just far enough for her to grab it.

Jean jumped onto her shoulders as she started up the wall, pulling herself up one handhold at a time. These would shift back to their proper place by morning, once the elementals had got bored and left. But she would also be long gone by then, as would all evidence of her secret passage.

Two

Playing for Keeps

Once Runika and Jean were inside the Baroness’s keep, she set him down. She had already bribed the location of the keep’s strongroom from the kitchensweep, and that was where the saffron would be kept. The door to the room was well-guarded, her informer had said, but she didn’t intend to go in through the door.

She had never robbed the keep before, and felt anxious now just being on its grounds. But she thought she knew where everything was, in particular how the back wall of the strongroom backed onto an empty passage between buildings – a rubbish dumping ground for the kitchen that was far enough from smell range of the other castle occupants. Dinner was long over too, and the smell of fresh food scraps filled the alley. A couple of rats freaked out when they saw Jean, and made themselves scarce. No human would find her there.

This time, when Runika crafted a rune, she included some fire elementals alongside the yellow earth birds. The red elementals were more dangerous – sometimes they came out funny and all they wanted to do was set fire to the world. It was one of the reasons that unlicensed rune-casting like she was doing was against so many laws that Runika hadn’t bothered learning all of them. But if she were worried about breaking laws, she wouldn’t be a thief. And if she was careful, she could feed the red elementals into her spell matrix just like the others, and use them to do things the other elementals couldn’t. Like, for example, cutting through the back wall of a strongroom to steal a box of spices.

She spent half an hour this time shifting runes exactly so, being so careful not to let any loose. Then she held her breath as the spell took hold, and a gap big enough for a small box of spices – or a cat – burned out of the back wall. This wouldn’t return in the morning – once you destroyed something it was gone for good – but Runika hoped it was small enough, and hidden deep enough in the strongroom, to remain a mystery.

Jean snuck into the hole. Runika was convinced that he was smarter than an average street cat. Not only was he able to read her intuitively, but he had a knack for getting in and out of places he shouldn’t. All of which made him the perfect partner in crime.

Runika counted under her breath as Jean manoeuvred through the dark storeroom. After a full minute, she heard a scraping through the hole, and then a soft mrow. She stretched her hand through the gap in the wall, first scratching her accomplice along his cheek and then reaching down to grab the wooden box he had pushed in her direction. She pulled it out, swallowing hard as its gold-inlaid top sparkled in the faint moonlight above her. The box alone was worth the trip, but inside ... she opened it and smiled. Packed tightly within were strand after beautiful red strand of queenly spice. Good boy, Jean, she said as the cat emerged from the hole.

Getting out of the keep was as easy as getting in. She even had a little bit of diamond dust left over. All up, it was the perfect crime. But then, Runika was a master thief, and this theft was the biggest heist of her career. She kept mindful enough not to whistle as she snuck down back alleys, avoiding one where a drunk was snoring loudly across the entrance. But