It’s actually a quiet week, compared to other weeks I’ve been having recently. I’m finally up to date with my work by halfway through it, so I accept Edward’s offer to teach me some more advanced magic.

“Triggered enchantments,” he says, leaning back in his chair. We’ve taken over a study room for the evening, complete with textbooks we’ll pretend to be working through if anyone joins us. “We’re meant to cover them after Holy Days anyway, so it’ll be useful for you. It’s ridiculous that we’ve had a whole month of lessons and haven’t reached them yet – any remotely useful enchantment is going to be triggered.”

I can’t help laughing. That, I suppose, is the problem with knowing much of the material before it’s dealt with in class. And also with being a Blackthorn. “Okay,” I say once I’ve calmed down. “Start from the beginning. What is a triggered enchantment?”

“An enchantment that will only activate when certain conditions are met. The work we’ve been doing in class is all permanent enchantment, changing the properties of objects: colour, weight and so on. That’s useful, because it avoids spending a spell, but what you really want is to be able to activate something like that in an instant, or even for a non-magician to be able to use an enchantment. You might be interested in the movement to make magic accessible for all, incidentally. Quite the historical drama. There’s a book about it in the family library.”

I nod eagerly. “Just get me into your library. Please. I’ll do anything.”

It’s his turn to laugh. “I will hold you to that.”

I hope he’s joking, but it would be just like him to take that far more literally than it was intended and rope me into some hare-brained scheme. Though judging by our acquaintance so far, I’d likely join in the scheme without needing to be bribed with a library.

“Can I clarify that statement? Nothing illegal, nothing that even comes close to being illegal, nothing unethical, nothing that I’m not actually capable of, nothing that’ll cause a Malaina episode…”

“That rules out all my ideas so far,” Edward says. He has such a straight face I think for a second that he’s serious. “Anyway, back on topic. The most simple form of triggered enchantment is what’s known as delayed-action permanent enchantment. That takes enchantments such as you’ve already studied, but instead of acting immediately the effect will now occur when you channel magic into it. And I do mean specifically you – triggers that can be activated by any magician are a little harder.”

“You can do them, though?”

He looks at me as if I’ve just gravely insulted his entire family. Actually, considering who he is, questioning his ability to do something so “basic” probably does count as a grave insult to every Blackthorn past and present. “Yes. I can. So… favourite permanent enchantment?”

If this is the most simple form of triggered enchantment, I do not want to know what the more complicated forms are like. Edward makes it look and sound easy, but it really isn’t. After the fifteenth failed attempt at enchanting my textbook to later turn blue, I throw my hands up in despair.

“I can’t do this.”

“I wouldn’t have offered to teach you if I didn’t think you were capable.”

I sigh. “Maybe you were wrong.”

“It is a major conceptual leap from what you’ve done before. You shouldn’t be surprised it’s taking you a while.”

“Did it take you this long?”

“Well – no, but – “

“Exactly – “

“I have a much better understanding of the theory behind this than you do.” If it were anyone else saying that, I’d immediately hate them for saying: yeah, I’m smarter than you, I know more than you, of course I’m going to be better. But it’s Edward, and he doesn’t mean it in that way at all. He’s just stating facts.

“That helps?”

“Of course. For me, immeasurably. I did an experiment a few weeks ago to prove it, as much as you can prove anything about magic learning by experimenting on yourself.”

That’s not much, if what I’ve picked up from Magical Theory is accurate. Magic isn’t only based on the complicated, abstract mathematical structures Edward is always reading about; it’s based on belief. So it’s impossible for Edward to prevent the effect of his beliefs about whether learning theory first helps him from influencing his experiment.

“Really,” he adds at my sceptical look. “Knowing what an enchantment means and why you have to cast it in a particular way makes it so much easier to remember and believe it. That’s my other advantage: self-belief.”

I stare blankly at him.

“I’m a Blackthorn. I can do magic. It’s easier for me than for other people. I can do things they think are impossible with my experience. One day I’ll be one of the best magicians in the world.” He pauses for effect. “That probably sounds like I’m just boasting, but I’m not. I really believe all of that. And when it’s magic you’re dealing with? That’s enough to make it true.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I suppose he’s right. It’s more than self-belief: it’s the complete confidence that if you want to change the world, you can. That established laws of magic are more like guidelines, and you have no need to care about them.

It’s not much of a mental leap to imagine what that attitude would look like applied to politics and social conventions instead of magic. Very much, I realise, like Lord Blackthorn’s. I understand him a little better now.

That sort of confidence and arrogance might make someone a better magician, but applied to the rest of life it could be extremely dangerous.

It also makes something else abundantly clear: I do not have that attitude. Not one bit. I still haven’t adjusted to the fact I can do any form of magic, never mind make these conceptual leaps. Never mind do something extraordinary.

I’m not an extraordinary magician. I’m not even a magician, really. I’m a lawyer-in-training who just happened to gain magic by some quirk of fate and her own weakness.

If Edward is right, maybe that’s what’s holding me back.

“You can still get there. It’ll just take you a little longer, a little more practice. You’re making good progress, though. Try again?”

I shake my head. “I think I know why this isn’t taught until after Holy Days.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s hard. Really hard. Hard enough they don’t expect us to be able to manage it until we’ve spent a couple more months learning magic.” That’s an educated guess, based on how I’ve found this compared to the usual difficulty of our classwork and my knowledge of Edward.

He shrugs. “Probably, yes.”

“And you think I can manage this now.”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

“I could give you a nice long rant on education practices and how teachers aim their lessons to the weakest students and are afraid to let any of them truly struggle, which means few of them will ever reach their full potential. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”

I shake my head. “I’m not special. I’m about average in all our practical classes. Maybe even a bit below average.”

Edward looks at me for a long moment, then reaches across the table to take my hand. There’s that strange intensity in his gaze as our eyes meet. Just like his father, threatening me with unspeakable fates if I ever hurt him.

“Tallulah. You had no prior knowledge of magic before starting here.”

“Nor did – “

He looks at me, and I shut up and let him continue. “You started lessons three days late, when you were still recovering from major trauma.”

Major trauma. I still haven’t told him the truth about why I Fell. I don’t know if I can.

“And you have just spent two weeks in isolation, with no proper teaching and only being able to practice casting stupidly early in the morning and under the supervision of Electra. Under those circumstances, I’d say that being about average is really a remarkable achievement.”

I blink a few times. I’ve never thought about it that way, but… he’s not entirely wrong.

“Besides. I’ve been sitting next to you and watching you cast. Your knowledge of theory is dreadfully lacking, of course, but you show a good instinctive understanding of the principles of casting and can adapt your casting to new situations easily.”

I stare back at him. “It’s – very kind of you to tell me that, but you don’t have to – “

“Tallulah. You seem to be suggesting that I’m telling you you’re better than you are to spare your feelings.”

I wouldn’t have admitted it out loud, but that was the first thought I had on hearing him.

“Have you met me?”

I laugh involuntarily. It’s true: Edward isn’t the sort to give praise lightly or to care about sparing feelings. Which means he genuinely believes I’m a talented magician. And I don’t think he’s the sort to be wrong about that either.

He believes in me. More than I do.

“Try again?” Edward asks.

“All right.”

I don’t get it that time, or the time after, or even the time after that. But Edward says my technique is improving, and I tell myself before each attempt that he believes in me, that he thinks I can do this, and that maybe he’s right.

And another six tries later, it turns out he is. This time when I channel a sliver of magic into the book, its cover turns the deep blue of a summer sky.

“Would it be really annoying if I said I told you so?” Edward asks, smiling.

I grin back. “Go ahead.”

“I told you so. Here – I’ll purge that so you can try again – “ he mutters an incantation and the blue colour drains away from the book, leaving it the original boring dusty-brown. “Keep going until you can get it three times in a row. That’s when it’s generally accepted that you can actually cast a spell rather than it just being a fluke.”

It’s not as hard as I thought it would be after how long it took me to succeed the first time; I only fail once before casting three perfect enchantments in a row. Edward is probably right about this belief thing: now I believe I can cast this, it’s a hundred times easier.

“Shall we move onto something more advanced?” he asks.

I laugh. “Slow down a bit?”

Edward sighs exaggeratedly. “Fine. How about trying the same exercise with a different permanent enchantment?”

It takes me three tries to get the simple levitation enchantment to work with the delayed effect, but when I actually activate it the book hovers above the table for only a few seconds. When I cast the enchantment normally it held there for a full minute. “All right, I know you’ve been dying to give me a lecture about theory.”

Edward laughs. “This enchantment, unlike a colour-changing enchantment, needs magical energy to maintain. It’s also too simple to draw from the ambience or from nearby sources, so it works only until the initial energy input in the casting is used up. But there’s certainly no possibility of storing magical energy in an enchantment this basic – finding a reasonably efficient way to store magical energy artificially is one of the great unsolved problems in magical theory – so the modification to delayed-action means that the energy is input when you activate rather than cast the enchantment.”

“And I wasn’t channelling much magic into it at all,” I finish. “Nowhere near as much as I would as part of casting directly.”

“Precisely.”

“So if I channel more magic, it’ll last longer?”

“Up to a point. If you channel too much magic into an enchantment, it’ll overload and fail. That’s one of the reasons Malaina don’t often specialise in enchantments.”

I nod grimly: it’s much harder for Malaina to have the precise control over the amount of magic they channel that comes naturally to Siaril. Never mind simultaneous casting: the best thing about being multi-School is being able to choose which School to cast with for each task.

By the end of the week I can cast all the permanent enchantments we’ve learnt in class as delayed-action permanent enchantments, and Edward is trying to persuade me to make the next conceptual leap and adjust my enchantments to be activated by any magician. I will soon.

Classwork goes well. Robin joins Elsie, Elizabeth and I at mealtimes now; our unlikely trio has become an even more unlikely foursome. If she’s trying to get closer to Edward by befriending me, she’s disappointed: he never joins the four of us, and only spends time with me alone. I wonder if I can make a deal with Edward: I learn more advanced magic, and he learns how to socialise. Unlike me, though, I’m not sure he even wants to learn.

The silence from Mildred is almost more ominous than any threats or bitter accusations could be. And inevitably, sooner than I’d have liked, the day of the execution dawns.