Septimus Heap, Book Six_ Darke - Angie Sage [17]
Chapter 6
Choice
While Gringe was searching for “horse stuff,” Septimus was, as Marcia put it, in conference. He was in Marcia’s sitting room, sitting on a small stool beside the fire, with his blue and gold leather-bound Apprentice Diary on his knees. It was open at the page that read “Darke Week.”
Marcia had been dreading the Darke Week for some time. Even though she knew that the most powerful Magyk—which Septimus would be using in the next stage of his Apprenticeship—needed a personal connection with the Darke, it frightened her. Some ExtraOrdinary Wizards were perfectly at ease with the Darke. They enjoyed playing with the delicate balance between Darke and Magyk, adjusting it as a skilled mechanic would a finely tuned engine and, in the process, getting the last ounce of power from their Magyk. Marcia, however, preferred to use as small an amount of Darke Magyk as possible, relying more on her personal Magykal power—some purists might have called her an unbalanced practitioner of Magyk (although not to her face). It was, however, true that the most powerful Wizards were those in perfect balance—and this was what the Darke Week was all about. It was the time when the ExtraOrdinary Apprentice acquired personal experience of the Darke that would enable him or her to move toward a Magykal skill that was in harmony with everything—even the Darke.
Marcia had an added reason for being uneasy about Septimus’s Darke Week. Recently she had noticed that the Wizard Tower was requiring more Magyk than usual to keep everything running in perfect order. There had been a series of minor breakdowns—the stairs had suddenly stopped one day for no reason, and the floor had begun to display the odd, jumbled message. The previous week the Wizards had had to Fumigate a severe outbreak of Darke spiders, and only the day before Marcia had needed to reset the Password on the doors twice. Each incident on its own would not have worried her—these things happened occasionally—but the cumulative effect had made Marcia jumpy. Which was why she now said to her Apprentice, “I know it’s your choice, Septimus, but I would rather you didn’t begin your Darke Week right now.”
Marcia was perched precariously at one end of her sofa. This was because most of the sofa was already occupied by a willowy man with a pointy beard who was curled up like a cat, fast asleep. The man’s long, elegant fingers rested delicately on the purple velvet of Marcia’s sofa, the color of which contrasted vividly with the yellow of his costume and his tall hat, which looked like a pile of ever-decreasing doughnuts crammed onto his head. This bizarre sleeping figure was Jim Knee—Septimus’s jinnee—who had gone into hibernation. He had been asleep for some four weeks now, ever since the weather had turned wintry. His breathing was slow and regular, except for a loud snore that escaped now and then.
Marcia did not welcome having to share her sofa, but she preferred it to the alternative of Jim Knee being awake. Ignoring a sudden snurrrufff from the jinnee, she opened the Apprentice Almanac—a large, ancient book bound in what had once been bright green leather—which she was balancing on her knee. Slowly she turned the parchment pages until she found what she was looking for. She peered through her new tiny gold spectacles at the closely written text.
“Luckily you became Apprentice at a time that gives you the widest choice of when to do this. You actually have up to seven weeks after the MidWinter Feast in which to undertake your Darke Week. Is that not right, Marcellus?” Marcia looked over her spectacles at a man sitting opposite Septimus in an upright chair, daring him to disagree.
It was only the second time that Marcia had invited Marcellus Pye to her rooms in the Wizard Tower, and she had done so out of a wish to honor an old tradition.