Spellbound

She never smiled. In the whole time he had known her, she had never smiled. He was certain that if she did, her midnight black skin would sparkle like a clear night sky. He had never seen anyone like her. She was unique. His family had never employed Dökkálfar, if you could call it employment, the way the Dökkálfar were kept. His mother had never wanted them around and living in Spectaculum, Dökkálfar were a rare sight indeed.

Her snow-white hair danced across her face as she worked, her focus entirely on the book that was laid out on the table before her. He stood in the doorway watching as she ever so gently dabbed at the torn edge of the book cover with a brush. He didn’t think that she had even noticed him enter her little lair.

“Why not use a spell of mending?” he asked suddenly.

She didn’t start at the sound of his voice. Instead she kept gently dabbing at the torn edge she was so focused on. “Can you do a spell of mending?” she asked as the returned the brush to its pot and looked up at him. She eyed the book in his arms.

He looked down at the book he was holding and felt the blush creep up his neck. “Uh… No…” he answered.

“Neither can Ziva,” she said softly, picking up a straight edge bone tool. She turned in her seat and dipped the tool in water and ever so gently, she applied the wet edge of it to a sheet of material beside the book. Gently she started to rip the material against the wet edge of her tool. “Is there something this one can do for you?” she asked without looking up.

He shuffled into the room and placed the book he was holding down on the table where she could see it. “I uh… I need to get this fixed…” He said softly, looking around for something. “I was told that Master Bjorkaas would be able to help me.”

Ziva looked up from her work and glanced at the book he had placed down. She frowned. He was right he thought, he had never seen her smile. Not once. He had seen her around school, attended classes with her and no, he had never in all that time seen her smile.  She put her tool down and rolled her chair over to where he had placed the book. A chair on wheels? He didn’t think he had ever seen anything like it. “Master Bjorkaas cannot fix this with a spell of mending,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked in shock. “I was told Master Bjorkaas can fix anything.”

She shook her head. “This is a book of magic spells. It too is imbued with magic.”

He nodded. “Yeah…”

She shook her head. “You cannot magic better a magic book,” she stated simply, before rolling back along her workspace to continue what she had been doing.

“Can you fix it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “This one has no time for another project. Master Bjorkaas is a hard task master.”

He went to stand before her and looked down at the book she was working on. It looked like a history of the World Tree from what he could read from its pages. “But that’s not a magic book,” he stated.

“It is not,” she agreed.

“It can be magicked better then,” he said with a smirk.

She looked up at him, her expression telling him that she was not impressed with his assumption. “As this one already has told you. Ziva cannot do the spell of mending and you have said that you cannot do the spell of mending. Therefore no, this book cannot be magicked better.”

He also didn’t think that he had ever heard her speak to someone for so long or look them in the eyes as she had with him. He smiled at her, a grin gracing his lips as he picked his book back up. “I’ll be back!” he announced. “I need to get this book fixed.”

“This one will not do as you demand simply because you are Ljósálfar and she is Dökkálfar,” she said looking up at him once more. A fire burned in her eyes, a spirit he had never seen before. “Ziva is a free Dökkálfar. She is allowed to choose what she does and who she does it for.”

“Of course,” he said, backing out of the room with a smile upon his face. He started to walk away, before poking his head around the door and saying to her. “The name’s Sidawi. Sidawi Harmeet.”

“This one knows who you are,” Ziva said, focusing once more upon the book she was repairing and refusing to look back up at him.

Still grinning from one pointed ear to the other, Sidawi Harmeet almost skipped down the hall to the stairs that lead up to the main level of the library. It took him only moments to find the librarian and ask for assistance in finding a very particular spell book.

~ * ~ * ~

Sidwai retuned a week later to the small workroom beneath the library. He once again carried the large spell book that he needed repaired. His need for the repairs was becoming urgent, even more so after he had attempted to do it himself.

“Hi,” he said poking his head around the door to see her once again hunched over a book in need of repairs.

She looked up at him and he could have sworn that aside from the sigh she seemed to visibly give, that he saw her lips twitch ever so slightly. “What can I do for you today, Mr Harmeet?”

“I uh…” He looked at her sheepishly. “I tried to fix it myself…” he said, his pale skin glowing red in embarrassment.

She shook her head, white strands of hair falling across her eyes, then held out her hands to him. He placed the book carefully in her outstretched hands and bit his lip as she inspected it carefully. “What in the nine realms did you do to this?” she asked, her tone incredulous as she gently opened the cover and inspected the rips.

 “I uh…” He coughed. “I uh… Well…” He glanced at her materials. “Tried to… do what you do…”

She shook her head. “No you didn’t… Well, you did, but you used magic on this first didn’t you?”

He glanced at her, wide eyed in surprise. “How…” He could barely formulate the sentence.

She shook her head, then with one delicate dark finger, she pointed towards the singed edges of the rips. “Magic burns differently than fire does,” she said softly. “Ziva warned you. You cannot magic a magic book better.”

“I really needed it fixed. I was desperate!” He begged. “Please!”

“How did you even try a spell of mending?” she asked, still inspecting the damage he had done, not only with glue and excess material, but with his attempts at magic. She shook her head. “This was an easy job before… This one still does not have the time to repair this book. Ziva is sorry,” she said finally looking up at him. Sidawi grinned and picked up a book to the side that she had yet to start working on. “Wait!” she cried, “Be careful with that!”

Instead, Sidawi ran his hands over the fractured cover of the old book and murmured under his breath, “deisiú na briste.” Ziva watched in awe as the fibres of paper and leather seemed to knit themselves back together again.

“But… You said that…” she breathed out.

“I leaned it,” Sidawi said.

Ziva put his book down and turned back to the book she had been working on. “You thought you knew better than Ziva? Ziva is only Dökkálfar, what could she possibly know about the repair of a book? She’s only a stupid slave. Uneducated, unteachable. This one has heard it all before. Take your book and go. Master Bjorkaas will be back next week. You can come back and ask him then.”

“No, no, no!” Sidawi said. “Please, look at me!” he begged. “I didn’t go learn the spell because I thought I knew better. I learned it so that I could help you.”

Ziva scoffed and tried to look away again. Instead, Sidawi rounded her long worktable and crouched down beside her. “Go away!” she whispered.

“Look at me,” he begged. “You said that you had no time… And that stack of books there is very big… I’m guessing someone in our class found out that you repair the books… They’re doing it deliberately, damaging them.”

She refused to look at him, instead fiddling with her materials, “This one does not know what you’re talking about…”

“If I help you with the non-magic books, can you fix my book? Please!” he begged.

She stared at him, distrust clouded her face and Sidawi waited, not sure what he would hear as her response. “You… You want to… help…” she said slowly. “You want to help me?”

He nodded. “Yes…”

She glanced surreptitiously at the book he had originally brought to her. “Why is it so important?”

Sidawi scratched at his neck, the tips of his pointed ears going red. “It’s my family’s spell book… I should not have been using it…”

Ziva nodded, her fingers gently tracing the engravings on the cover. “What did you do to it?”

The blush of embarrassment descended down his neck. “The spell I was practicing went wrong…”

Ziva glanced at the book he had repaired, then at the one he had damaged. She shook her head. “If… If that spell goes wrong… You … you could unbind the entire book and then I would still have to…” She shook her head. “No… No, it’s not… You can’t… It’s too dangerous…”

“Please Ziva!” Sidawi begged. “If my father finds out about…” he motioned awkwardly towards the spell book. “Please!”

Ziva shook her head. “I… Umm…” she bit her lip. She sighed, her fingers still racing the book. “Ok… But only because I can’t stand to see a book this damaged.”

“Thank you!” Sidawi gushed. “Thank you!”

Ziva turned in her seat and rifled through her stack of books to be repaired. She pulled out one that only had a few scrapes and a slight tear. She handed it to him. “Don’t destroy it.” She then got up and brought over a chair for him. She wheeled it over to his delight. He loved the idea of chairs on wheels. “Here,” she said, then sat back down. She gently moved the book she had been working on and placed it to the side. She picked up Sidawi’s book and began to inspect it.

Sidawi sat down and watched her as she carefully handled his book, her fingers gently caressing the singed edges of leather and paper as she began to determine what would need to be done to repair it.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“You owe me repaired books,” she said, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. As a response, Sidawi, ran his hands over the book he had been given and repeated the incantation.

He glanced at her as he did so and smiled when he caught her looking at him. Tentatively he touched the tip of his ears and cursed to himself. They were warm and he guessed red with embarrassment.

As they worked side by side, Sidawi thought that maybe, for the first time all year, he caught her smiling… And she was smiling at him. He felt his blush extend across his cheeks as he selected another book to bind back together with his newly learned spell.