The invitation was more tempting that I wanted to admit. “Another time,”

I said regretfully. “When I’ve got more money. Will you take the carry sack to Amzil?”

“I said I would,” he agreed. “And will you be more careful in how you spend your magic?”

“I would if I knew how. I wish I could undo what I did to the men at the courier station. It was only their sergeant who was so hard-hearted to me.

I’d no wish to curse them all.”

“All the more reason for you to be careful. If that’s what you do when you don’t mean to harm anyone, what would happen if you really intended it?”

It was a sobering thought. “I’d undo it if I could. I don’t know how.”

He was standing by the door, the laden rucksack in his hand. “That’s a feeble excuse, Never, and you know it. You said you did it without knowing how. If I were you, I’d be trying to undo it.” He shook his head at my expression. “Don’t be stubborn. This isn’t something you want connected to you. You’re a dangerous man, Never. The fewer people who know that, the safer you are. Good night.”

And so he left me to what was not a good night at all. I didn’t like that he thought I was “dangerous,” and I liked it even less that, on consideration, I concluded that I was. I was like a foolish boy with a loaded gun. It didn’t matter if I knew how the gun worked; I’d fired it, and someone had suffered the consequences. Was I so different from the two young fools on the riverboat who had felled a wind wizard with iron shot? They’d probably had no real notion of the harm iron could do him. I’d despised them for it. But here I was, spraying magic out just as carelessly.

According to Hitch.

I lay in my bed and stared up at my shadowed ceiling. I wanted so desperately to be able to go back to where magic was the stuff of tales, not something that affected my life every day. I didn’t want it to be a power I had, with no concept of how it worked or was controlled. The light danced with the flames in my hearth and I decided I should try to undo whatever I had done to the courier station. It wasn’t easy. In the moment I’d said those words, I’d wholeheartedly desired that they suffer exactly as I did from their lack of charity. There was still a hard part of me that thought they deserved what had happened. I discovered that I would need to forgive them before I could truly wish to undo what I had done to them.

That forgiveness was an easy thing to say, but a harder thing to feel in my heart.