“I still don’t believe you.”

  Flicking his eye away from his work upon the rune-covered parchment floating before him, Gregor looked down to Mildred, who was walking while he rode.

  Their new mare was quite old and not very sturdy, and thus couldn’t be expected to carry two people at a trot for very long, so occasionally they’d slow and she would hop down to walk.

  Mildred was giving him The Look, which was an expression that fascinated him greatly, owing to the fact that he had no precise idea what he should call it.

  It was a very particular and striking look. So particular, in fact, that it was definitely the kind of thing that should have a name, and should occupy a rather major place among the storied ranks of all of the famous expressions, like smiles and frowns and grimaces, rather than being merely a look.

  Certainly, it ought to count as a unique expression – It was a discrete and consistently (and frequently) replicated collection of facial contortions, like a smile or a frown or a grimace, but it had no proper name that he knew. It was possible, Gregor realised, that he had found an entirely new species of expression, one that had hidden from civilisation for epochs untold and was as yet undescribed by any scholar and generally unknown to science. Thus, it seemed that the academic duty fell to him.

  Mildred’s Look would be the type specimen, and he would need to begin a study of its habits and behaviours – what provoked it, what sustained it, at what time of day was it most active, and where and why it might retreat from sight. These questions must be answered for the sake of knowledge and for his own benefit, and also the (entirely incidental) benefit of society at large.

  There was also the name.

  Gregor would need to name the look that Mildred gave him when he said mad things.

  “You’re staring.” She stated, maintaining The Look. “And you still can’t know all the languages.”

  He kept staring. “I can.”

  “You cannot.”

  Looking back to the runes, he telekinetically got to drawing again with a brush, speaking as he made slow strokes.

  “The more languages you know,” he began, “the easier polyglotism becomes, because all languages are at least distantly related to most others, so words’ meanings and correct semantimorphic transformations can usually be derived and deduced from their associations with known others, and at some point it turns into an inductive exercise, rather than being one of memorisation. You begin to be able to construct and transduce words from roots according to conventions specific to the language in question, pulling related semantic fragments and cognate transformations from your pool of known words. Grammar and cases follow along quite easily. Of course, this process lends greatest benefit to the interpretation of a given language, rather than the synthesis and the speaking. To be actually fluent in that regard, and in the eyes and ears of native speakers, the memorisation of specifics is required, but is also made rather simple. It also helps to be good with accents.”

  Mildred was rendered mute by this assault upon reason. The Look grew strong, but the more she thought about it, the more it almost began to make sense. Almost. The longer she allowed herself to think, the less absurd it seemed, which was scary because it was definitely impossible to develop an inductive understanding of all of the languages. Probably. For a normal person, certainly… but what if you had seventy years?

  The Look became squinty and suspiciously contemplative, until- No! Mildred forced herself to stop thinking. She couldn’t let Gregor convince her that this was even slightly reasonable.

  It had to be impossible. Or magic. That was it.

  It was either magic or a joke. Neither were to be discounted.

  “But… why?” She asked, hoping to avoid further contemplation of ‘how’.

  “Secrets and spells, and secret spells.”

  “I mean, I assumed that, but is being an, uh… omniglot… really such a great aide to wizardry for it to be worth however much insane effort it probably requires?”

  Without turning from his work, Gregor replied.

  “Yes. In short, it is quite common for tomes of forbidden knowledge to be written in dead and obscure languages, sometimes purely for the fashion of secrecy, and sometimes due to genuine antiquity, or because nobody survived the secrets long enough for them to be recorded in more than one tongue. Secrets in dead words die with their speakers, or writers and readers, as the case may be, and so we must prepare for every linguistic eventuality if we wish to learn forgotten things. Also, most magic does not lend itself well to translation, and only really makes sense in its original linguistic context. As you can imagine, attention to intention and definitional detail is very important when it comes to spells, and there is no standard language for sorcery.”

  “That was not short.”

  “It was relatively short.”

  She shrugged, conceding that Gregor could have very conceivably been even more long-winded. “But all of them? Surely they aren’t all useful. I’m certain that you could spare yourself some difficulty.”

  “Well-”

  “In short, please.”

  “If you think back to the train, you will recall my delirious communication of the danger inherent in giving deference to difficulty.”

  “I do recall that phrase, yes.”

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  “If you respect something as being definitely beyond your means, then your means will forever have a ceiling, and you will forever judge your own abilities in relation to this absolute limit that you presume yourself to possess. Acknowledgement of impossibility therefore serves to limit what actually is possible. Further, if one wishes to be remarkable, then it is an absolute requirement to do difficult deeds without qualm or care. The unremarkable do not have that ability, and lack significantly the gumption to acquire it.”

  At this, Mildred had a big, deep think.

  She imagined herself in front of a box, deciding whether or not to pick it up. It was large, and presumably filled with heavy things, and she found herself comparing its probable weight against the weights of things she had previously picked up. Was it too heavy? Was it too difficult? Yeah. There was no way she was going to pick that thing up, and so she didn’t.

  The next time she was deciding whether or not to pick up a heavy thing, she’d think back to the box, remember that it was too heavy, and use that as a base for her judgements about the new heavy thing. Whether or not she could actually lift the thing would be by that point several degrees removed from her decision.

  In other words, if you retreat from difficulty for fear of fruitless exertion, you might end up lowering the practical threshold for impossibility, such that your actual abilities are no longer the limiting factor, but rather, you become limited by what you think you can do. Gregor’s outlook sought to eliminate the overlap between ‘things that you can’t do’ and ‘things that you choose not to do’.

  In this way, she could see what Gregor meant, though perhaps his philosophy had developed in a bit more of a self-cruel direction.

  “That is what you were trying to communicate?”

  He nodded, still without looking, and still telekinetically drawing very slowly and deliberately on the parchment before him.

  “…Gregor, are you secretly very wise?”

  “Secretly?”

  “It is sometimes hard to tell.”

  He began rubbing his chin like an evil sorcerer might stroke a long beard. “Secret wisdom? How very wizardly. Does it make me seem mysterious?”

  Mildred thought for a moment. “I suppose,” she shrugged. “And now that you’ve explained one of your mad-sounding statements, I’ll be forced to wonder if the rest of them are actually very profound.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “By the way, what is that?” She asked, waving a finger in the direction of Gregor’s parchment.

  “A stopgap. It should let me see for a few years.”

  “Oh! You figured out a solution.”

  “No.” Gregor remarked with very genuine displeasure. “I was working at a solved problem this whole time.”

  “Something in the grimoire?”

  “That would have been slightly remarkable, but no. In reality, I did not need to complete the incredibly complex and interesting task of translating light stimuli from a magical rock into simulated electro-chemical impulses in exactly the way that a real eye would – which actually is possible, by the way. Illusions already exist, and they are rather simple. The eye is already mostly functional, I just needed to a way to connect it to my head.”

  Mildred could see what he was getting at. Maybe. Not with the light-chemical-rock stuff, but with the illusions, because even she knew that it was entirely magically possible to make people see things that they aren’t actually seeing.

  She hmmed lightly. Something had occurred to her. “You’re very talkative today.”

  She knew that she was particularly vocal when she was in a good mood. Might that be the case with Gregor? Was Gregor in a good mood? Perhaps looking forward to the restoration of his organ? It would be shockingly normal. A positive development, she thought, and rarity for the wizard.

  Ignoring her, Gregor continued. “Illusions distort the mind and confuse perceptions. I am simply going to distort my own perceptions very particularly, such that my brain will think that my right eye is still there, and that it is seeing exactly what the ruby actually is seeing, which it almost will be, but not really.”

  “So you’re going to cast an illusion on yourself.”

  “No. You are.”

  “I are?”

  “You am.”

  Gregor watched Mildred, his eye on the freckle, intending to determine its exact role in the formation of The Look.

  She was silent for a moment, and phantom hints of The Look began to emerge. The world’s newest expression threatened to reassert itself, but Mildred very quickly completed whatever internal process had been underway, and it faded to nothing with a nod.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  ***

  “Tattoos are imperfect. The ink fades and migrates, and flesh is changeable. It grows and shrinks and inflates and deflates with muscle and fat, and any part of the body somehow safe from these changes can still be ruined by wrinkles and scars. For properly putting enchantment into people, runes must be etched into bone, and re-touched several times thereafter so that they properly take hold, but this will work for now. I will have time for a permanent solution later.”

  “Gregor, I’ve never even seen a tattoo before.”

  They had settled into camp while the sun was still high in the sky, hoping to have as much light as possible for the tasks ahead.

  “Then I shall be your first.”

  The Look resurfaced in full, but Gregor wasn’t watching close enough to catch it. He was busy removing little vials from his hat, shaking them, opening them, sniffing them, looking for something in particular.

  “What if I make a mistake?”

  “That would be very difficult.”

  “What about your hair?”

  Keeping two of the vials he found, the rest were returned.

  “It is only hair.”

  First, they changed his bandages. They unwrapped him, cleaned his wounds, checked for the angry redness of infection, then re-bound him tight. Oddly, all the shot-holes in his robe had disappeared.

  Next, he sat shaving the back of his head while Mildred watched, cringing. It was not a good look, and something about the wanton hair-disfigurement irked her deeply.

  He then dabbed this new bald spot with a cloth soaked in something that smelled like raw meat, to ‘dissuade the blood,’ whatever that meant.

  As he did this, he explained Mildred’s task.

  Apparently, by ‘tattoo’, Gregor intended for her cut the runes on his parchment into the back of his head, then rub some magical grit into the wounds in place of pigment.

  Soon, he lay face-down in her lap so that she could work on him comfortably, with the parchment telekinetically plastered to the contours of the back of his head so that the runes could be traced. She had a curious little knife in hand, and a small bottle of stardust nearby.

  Mildred had obvious reservations about her part in this endeavour, but this was the first time Gregor had ever asked her for help, and knowing him, perhaps even the first time he’d ever asked anyone for help.

  She would not shirk, and she would not disappoint.