This . . . this could be enough to actually try a spell. At least if there's anything in here about what the incantations should actually say. She can't actually hold a conversation in French in real time, but individually composed and rehearsed sentences with precise meaning and correct grammar should be doable with a dictionary and patience.

The incantations need to be longish, a sentence or two, not just a word. They should fill in all the gaps about what your spell should do that aren't covered by the fairly simplistic rune meanings. If possible, poetic language seems to help a little where it doesn't sacrifice precision or fluency.

Excellent. Her first actual spell, which is going to be tomorrow at the earliest, is going to be the invisibility diagram from the textbook and an incantation of her own devising. Unless this textbook has exercises in it, or a recommendation for what to do first, anyway.

It does not recommend doing spells just to do spells, since spells are so dangerous.

If this textbook does not understand concepts like "doing simple things for careful practice before attempting the thing you actually want to do" or "doing things for the sake of knowledge", that's, well, it's the sort of mistake you wouldn't expect from a good textbook. But it's what she's got, and she'll probably spend the whole day minus meal breaks taking careful notes on it.

It does recommend drawing out diagrams, leaving them alone for a week, and then checking them over to find out how they would have killed you!

See, that's excellent, that's the sort of exercise a textbook should have in it. There are other things she wants to try before that, like analyses of all the presumably professional-quality diagrams she has access to in this book and the other one, and getting incantations down, but that's definitely a good idea.

She has a total of 7 complete diagrams. They are for:

- invisibility
- water control
- a shield spell
- a space warping spell
- healing
- sleep
- boiling water

and none of them have incantations.

Boiling water is probably the safest of those, if she starts with a small quantity of water in a safe container and is careful to specify that only the water in the container should be affected. Invisibility is potentially safer, except potentially getting stuck invisible with no way to get visible again sounds worse than getting scalded and more likely than boiling her own eyeballs. What does the book have to say about spell sizes--duration, amount of material affected, area of effect, etc--and how to make them larger or more importantly smaller?

The ratios between the runes are the important thing if you want to resize a spell; a straight shrinkage or enlargement works fine as long as everything's the same relative size. For some applications you want the diagram actually on something that you're planning to affect, and then the size has to account for that, but for affecting a thing that is not your inscription's surface a standard two inch maximum rune line size is recommended.

Resizing diagrams introduces some complications relative to simply tracing, but eventually she'll be drawing her own and then she won't be able to trace anyway. She's going to get perfect at copying existing diagrams at various (small) sizes first, though, so she's not learning design and drafting skills at the same time. That said, she should also try photocopying a diagram and using it at some point; if it works, it can turn one perfect diagram into hundreds of equally perfect diagrams at different sizes with no room for error.

If she doesn't incant one she'll never know.

She'll get to everything in her queue eventually. Tomorrow was probably a bit ambitious for her first incantation, though; she wants to do a thorough analysis of the boiling water diagram to find out exactly how much of what meanings are present in the final result. And she may not even have time for that today, depending on how long this textbook is.

It's not very long for a textbook.

It's still rather a lot of intellectual effort; she'll go to dinner when it's done. At home, she does the calculations for the boiling water diagram. What intentional and unintentional meanings remain when all the cancellations are canceled?

There's plenty of "heat" and "water" and little shreds of a dozen other things.

She writes down the numbers she gets and puts them away; tomorrow she'll do it again and compare results. In the meantime, she starts on a French translation for "heat the water in the cup in front of me, until it begins to boil", but doesn't get a first draft done before bed.

The next day she gets the same numbers again, which is heartening, and works a bit more on her incantation. Does the book have any example incantations, even ones for diagrams she doesn't have?

Nope! It does have one of those pullout text boxes that says, "Remember, never, ever incant in your native language! Choose a language you started to learn later in life. It's okay if you're fluent as long as you didn't start speaking it often before you were about school aged. Since this textbook is in English, I assume throughout that your native language is English."

She started French in seventh grade and still isn't fluent; she'll be fine at least on that front. Maybe they don't give examples because if they did most readers wouldn't know any of whatever language they put the examples in and it wouldn't help them.

By the following Saturday, she has a French incantation she's happy with. She has copied the boiling water diagram exactly, waited 48 hours, and checked it over to confirm that she really did copy it exactly.

Instead of going to the Avalon, she puts the diagram and a cooking pot with half an inch of water in it on her desk. She writes a letter to her parents explaining everything and apologizing, and leaves it where they'll see it if she dies. And she says her incantation, straight through without pausing or stumbling.

The water boils abruptly!

Margaret whispers, "Holy cow". Seeing magic is one thing, being herself a magical creature is another thing, but making magic happen with her own work and intellect is yet a third thing. She goes back to her notebook and looks at the list of applications she wants to try someday, an ambitious list with things like "healing" and "de-aging" and "sell artifacts" and "recreate medallions" and "combine with computers???". She hides the letter to her parents where they aren't going to stumble on it. And she promises herself not to do any more magic for the rest of the day, because she's much too excited to do it carefully enough. 

Her next experiment, carried out between homework assignments, is to make another copy of the boiling water diagram, wait 48 hours, check it for perfection, then make photocopies of both the used and unused ones. This takes multiple tries, because the first go had stray marks on the paper from where the photocopier got confused.  Then she sets up the same water-and-death-letter setup as previously and tries the photocopy of the unused diagram with the same incantation as last time.

This does not work.

Bother. And the photocopy of the used-up one, just for completeness?