“Oh shit!” the parrot squawked, perching on the footboard of my bed. It cocked its head at me, then swiveled around to regard me with one glowing eye. Damn, but it looked incredibly real—I could see each individual feather cover its glowing body, and man did the claws curling around my footboard look sharp! “Oh shit!”

I groaned, flopping back against my pillows. “No!” I whined at the parrot, flicking my hand in a shooing motion. “This is wrong. You’re not supposed to be a parrot! Just be gone already.”

The parrot cocked its head to the opposite side, then vanished in a flash of light. I let out a sigh of relief that I hadn’t had to resort to using magic to get rid of it. Clearly, I’d been a little too optimistic about my memory of the incantation. I was lucky my pigeon had turned into a parrot and not, say, a hippopotamus. Those things were mean as hell, from what I’d heard, not to mention downright huge.

Oh well, I thought, curling up on my mattress. I might as well take a nap until my lesson with Iannis. With any luck, he’d never find out about this little incident.

* * *

After our usual warm-up exercises, Iannis took pity on me and offered to do some combat training. We suited up with magical armor, and with Fenris acting as referee, we launched into three-minute rounds of magical combat. As in our previous mock fights, we stuck to fire and ice, but this time, we added shielding to our arsenal, which enabled me to deflect Iannis’s ice blasts.

Of course, I quickly found out that since he could also do the same, our fights devolved into something more like a match of tennis, with the two of us bouncing balls of fire and ice back at each other.

“This is so frustrating!” I shouted as I shielded against another ball of ice. “What is the point of doing this if we’re never actually going to hit each other? Why do mages even duel in the first place?”

“Good question!” Iannis shouted as he lobbed the ice ball back at me. I shot a fireball at it to melt it, then another one directly at his head, hoping to catch him off guard. No such luck; he simply bounced it back at me again. “Mage duels are difficult and frustrating, and should never be undertaken without good purpose.”

Growling, I changed tactics. Instead of shielding against the ball, I ducked and allowed it to hit the force field protecting the wall. I shot out two more fireballs, hoping that three missiles would be more than Iannis could comfortably deal with, or at least enough of a distraction that I could figure something else out.

“Oh shit!” a familiar voice squawked, and my mouth dropped open as I saw the ether parrot materialize right next to Iannis’s head.