Four weeks ter, still no answers.

  After so many experiments, I felt like a waiter at a restaurant who could only describe dishes that weren’t on the menu. Nadia threw test after test at me from the depths of her spellbooks, but the dormant magic inside me refused to respond, leaving us hungry for even the tiniest scraps.

  Nadia had studied enchantment theory at Werth Academy before she and her brother moved to the Berin mountains to start their business, so she at least knew where to start. Armed with a half-dozen books on magical detection and cssification, she and Tobias methodically tried every spell, potion, charm, hex, wish, curse, seal, incantation, and sorcery designed to trigger a response to all common sources of magic. We quickly ruled out elemental energies, arcana, all fvors of Terran wellspring energy common to wizardry and witchcraft—the W-form magics all came up negative. At least the spells looked pretty, with swirling motes of blues and pinks nding on me before vanishing into oblivion.

  I didn’t want to just idle on the table, so I tried to coerce my energy out with each attempt the Denholms made, but I felt nothing after each test. Nadia would barrage me with streams of magic, only for her supernatural energies to fizzle and vanish, leaving me frustrated and the shopkeepers perplexed. The tests ground to a halt when the weather cleared and customers arrived, so I’d have to wait on the workbench for them to return and try again.

  After we finished Advanced Arcane Detection, 3rd Edition by Dr. Olivia Promell, Nadia and Tobias changed tactics from magical stimuli to physical ones. That’s where the real misery began.

  They started small with only mildly unpleasant trials, hoping that the threat of damage or destruction might prompt me to react. I feared for the worst when Tobias took a nail file to my silver exterior, but to my relief, my metal didn’t show a single scratch from his efforts, which was good because I didn’t feel anything supernatural bubbling up that I could have used to make him stop. Files became razors, razors became hammers, but every cut, scrape, and strike couldn’t even scuff my mirror finish. That was just the start, as they tried boiling me, burning me, electrocuting me, freezing me—everything short of hurling me into a volcano to see if I’d melt.

  It’s the noise of it all that annoyed me the most, I think. I couldn’t hear my thoughts while a fire crackled and popped around me. None of it broke me, but all of it made me grumpy. Just put me back in the window already, you two! By that point, I started thinking that even if I gained access to my magic, I’d hide it from them, just to spite their efforts.

  “Another dud,” Nadia said, fishing me out of a bowl of bubbling purple acid with tongs. She sighed. “Okay, what if we combine some approaches? You could cast a wellspring disruptor while I electrocute it.”

  Tobias rolled his eyes as he walked away from the workbench. “Or what if we send that letter to Berindal Academy already? It’s clearly some obscure magic they didn’t teach us about at Werth. I’ll admit that maybe you’ve got something valuable here, but all I really care about is that it’s not dangerous to the customers and the girls. At this point I’d say you should give it to Evelyn, she’ll find a way to crack it open in ten minutes.”

  “How about you let your daughter break your own things, hmm?” Nadia prodded at Tobias with her elbow.

  The man grunted as he picked up some vials of elixirs to take to the shelves. “At least it would keep her distracted so she’d stop switching the tags between the predator repellents and the immobilization gel.”

  Nadia wasn’t deterred from continuing to try whatever she could think of, but I could see the weariness in her eyes. As much as she enjoyed the mystery, a month with no progress had her considering Tobias’ suggestion. A letter to Berindal Academy seemed more likely with each failed attempt.

  I tried to look on the positive side of things. Whatever powers y hidden in me, for them to be this much trouble to extract, they must be something remarkable. Still, I feared that maybe the Denholms uncovered nothing because there was nothing to find.