“She’s playing the long game,” is Edward’s verdict, once I’ve described Electra’s suspiciously nice behaviour to him, under the strongest privacy wards he’s capable of casting. Though he does point out that they are not strong enough to keep out a sufficiently determined Electra. It’s more the principle of the thing.

I still don’t entirely understand why casting privacy wards should be a matter of principle, but I don’t object to his doing it. “What do you mean?” I ask, though I have a reasonable idea.

“Being the supportive teacher. Doing us these little illicit favours. A little at a time, until we’re convinced that she’s on our side and trying to help us. And then before we know it, she’s built up a stock of goodwill and blackmail material, so when she just wants one small favour in return…”

That sounds suspiciously likely. “It doesn’t work if we know that’s what she’s trying to do, though.”

“Exactly,” Edward says. “Which is what’s bothering me. Because she knows you’d tell me, and she knows I’d suspect something like this.”

I ignore the implication that I couldn’t figure it out on my own. I am perfectly happy to let Edward be the one who understands these things. “So why would she even try, if she knows it won’t work?” I think that’s his point, anyway.

“Unless she wants us to think she’s playing the long game…”

This is giving me a headache, but I nevertheless try to work out why Electra would try to trick us into believing she’s trying to manipulate us. “…because it’s actually an immediate trap?” I guess. “You’d automatically be suspicious of anything she gave you, because she’s Electra and you’re you. But if you thought it was part of a larger scheme, you might think that it’s safe to use the form to borrow the books when it’s not.”

Edward nods. “What does she gain by that, though? We could probably get into quite a bit of trouble for forging a teacher’s signature to access restricted books without permission, but nothing serious enough we couldn’t get out of it again. Not unless the people with power over these things are part of this hypothetical plot, and even then I’d just write to my dad.”

“You could just write to him now, if you really think Electra is part of a conspiracy against you.”

Saying it out loud makes it seem ridiculous, but… she’s Electra, and he’s a Blackthorn.

He shrugs. “Maybe. If she’s going for short-term damage, though, the best way is to do what Mildred did to you. Even knowing she was trying to bait me, if she took it far enough…”

I haven’t seen Edward have any sort of episode for a long time, even during the riot, but if he thinks Electra could push him into one then I trust his judgement on that.

“Have you considered the possibility this isn’t actually a plot?” I ask. “That she’s genuinely trying to be nice to us, because we’ve had a rough time recently and we deserve it?”

Edward shoots me a look which reminds me of the looks I give him whenever he says anything particularly incomprehensible to normal people, and we both suddenly burst out laughing.

“Seriously, though,” I say once we’ve recovered. “I bet if she knew we were having this conversation she’d consider it a victory for her regardless.”

“No bet,” Edward says immediately.

“But what are we going to do?”

“The sensible thing is to burn that form and forget it ever happened.”

“But,” I say, recognising the phrasing of that sentence as implying he doesn’t want to do the sensible thing.

“But… I do want that wardwork book. And I know you want your history of… what was it?”

“The Thalian Crisis of the Year 900,” I say. I suppose I should be glad he at least tried to recall it.

“Electra knows us too well,” he mutters. “I’ll think about it. Do you want to talk about the other things that came out of that conversation?”

My mother. Her demands. The prospect of being withdrawn from the Academy.

Say what you like about the headaches the form gave me, it’s a pretty good distraction from other worries. “In a way, it’s a relief,” I find myself saying.

He raises his eyebrows but says nothing, waiting for me to explain.

“I’m worried about the future – of course I am – but – before today, I was wondering if we could reconcile. If we should. If I wanted to. If it would be my fault if we couldn’t. And now… well.” I smile wryly. “I don’t have to wonder about any of those things. Now we know where we stand.”

He nods. “I can see that. My dad says something similar. It’s refreshing when all the secrets are out and you can move openly, when you know for sure who’s with you and who’s against you.”

I sigh. “Edward,” I say, “no offence, but when you’re trying to convince me my feelings are normal, comparing me to your dad is maybe not the best approach.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

To his credit, he does not take offence at that. “Well,” he says. “If you need a place to stay. If you need money – I know you don’t want my charity, but – just ask. Those are problems I can actually solve.”

“Thank you,” I say. I’m still not sure whether I’ll take him up on that, if it comes to it. I hope that it doesn’t come to it.

“Well, while we have the wards up… do you mind if we talk about my family drama rather than yours for a bit?”

The way he phrases that stings a little: why can’t either of us just have normal, healthy relationships with our parents? Why do things have to be so complicated?

“Not at all,” I say. “Go ahead.”

“I got a note from my mother this morning, as well.”

“I thought she couldn’t write to you? Wasn’t your dad intercepting her letters?”

He fidgets uncomfortably.

“Edward, did you search through my mail?”

“…maybe.”

I glare at him.

“Okay, fine, yes, I did. But it was only to see if there was anything from her. I didn’t open anything else or pay any more attention to it than I had to. That doesn’t invade your privacy or anything, right?”

One day, I vow to myself. One day, I will teach Edward what normal people do and don’t consider an invasion of privacy. “It does, kind of. In this instance I don’t have a problem with it, but you really shouldn’t get into the habit of searching through other people’s mail. Also please ask first.”

“Tallulah, may I please have your permission to search through your mail to see if it contains letters to me from my mother?”

Once again I wonder when my life became… this. I sigh. “Yes, you may. Thank you for asking. Anyway. You got a note from your mother this morning…”

“Yes. There’s been a work emergency, and she has to go back to Ridgeton. She can’t meet me next week.”

“Oh,” I say, not knowing what else to say.

“She says she’ll be back in touch as soon as she can, but I… I can’t help wondering if this is just an excuse. If she doesn’t want to see me again.”

“I’m sure she does,” I say reflexively.

But Edward doesn’t want empty reassurances. “Do you believe that? Really?”

“I know she loves you,” I say. But I also know that that visit must have dragged up a lot of painful memories for Sylvia, memories that she’d rather keep buried. And maybe Edward is just too much his father’s son for her, making too many excuses for him, reminding her of the man she hates too much.

Maybe she thinks it’s too late for them.

“I’m being stupid,” Edward says. “If she doesn’t want to see me, it’s not like I’ve lost anything.”

I can’t help wincing at that. “You don’t mean that,” I say. “She’s not nothing to you. That’s why it hurts, and there is nothing stupid about it.”

He sighs. “A chance, then,” he says. “That’s what I’ve lost. Is it my fault?”

“No,” I say immediately. “No, it’s not.” The truth, I think, is more complicated: if Sylvia didn’t have an actual work emergency, then she left because of Edward at our last meeting. Because he’s who he is. And is that his fault?

That is not a question with an easy answer.

The rest of the day is quiet. Unsettlingly quiet, in fact: I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something important I should be working on, even though there isn’t. I start going over old notes from the first few weeks of classes, hoping that’ll mean I’m less underprepared for the tests when they arrive.

It surprises me how easy it all seems. I remember struggling over the spells my notes describe for hours, having difficulty with the most basic of conjurations. And now I can cast even the advanced exercises from back then effortlessly.

At some point in the last few months, I became a magician.

It’s a good feeling, realising that.

Maybe I do belong here after all.

The next morning’s lessons do their best to dent that strange confidence. Because even though I’ve improved so much, it still feels as if I’m barely keeping up. I make no progress on the conjuration of wood, even with Edward’s advice. Organic material is significantly harder to conjure than anything we’ve worked with before, due to the complexity of its structure, but most of the class have still accomplished something by the end of the lesson, unlike me.

“It’s because you’re Malaina,” Edward says as we walk to our next lesson.

I tense at those words, and it takes me a second to realise that he means that Malaina are not well-suited to the precise, delicate visualisation needed for this work. “You cast it with Malaina, didn’t you?”

“It took me fifteen minutes to get it, and that was having cast it with Siaril first.” Apparently it’s far easier to learn a spell in one School when you’ve already cast it with another. Yet another reason to be jealous of his having access to two. “Also I’m a Blackthorn,” he adds with a grin. “I think you were close, though. You had the physical spellwork close to perfect by the end of the lesson.”

Our next lesson is Countering Magical Effects. After my meeting with Electra yesterday I thought she wouldn’t be too harsh on me, but I should have known better. If anything, she’s tougher than ever. It was the same after my isolation. I think she wants to make sure we don’t get the mistaken idea that she’s actually a decent person somewhere under all the theatrical evil and the twisted tests.

Still, I make it through the lesson without crying or having a Malaina episode, which means either my self-control and resilience have improved a lot or Electra knows exactly where my limits are and how far she can push me. Probably the latter, knowing her.

Then it’s Magical Law and Culture: we’re continuing the Malaina debate. I wish I’d found time to do some research for it, to properly prepare my arguments, but it’s too late now.

I resolved at the end of the last lesson to just get it over with, bring up the big problems. I regret that decision a little now, but not enough to back out of it. I’m the first one to raise my hand at the start of the lesson, and I explain the Instability Law and its consequences. How easy it is for any Malaina to find themselves isolated pending trial. How hard it is to deal with that isolation and not come out more unstable than you went in. How in trying to remove threats to public safety, it could do more to create them.

There’s a long silence after I say that. Everyone knows I’m speaking from experience.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Elizabeth says finally. “Someone had to say that. And I’m glad it wasn’t me.”

She has been through something similar to me, I remember, right after Falling. I don’t know the details, and I’m certainly not going to ask, but she understands better than anyone else in this room, even Edward.

There are arguments in favour of the Instability Law, though. They’re made tentatively, cautiously, with apologies to me and acknowledgement that in my case it wasn’t the best choice. But they’re not entirely wrong.

Edward points out the potential for abuse of the law. It’s too easy, he says, for someone to bait a Malaina into an episode, and legally the results are entirely the fault of the Malaina, not the person doing the baiting. I know he’s thinking of what Mildred did to me, even though he doesn’t say it in as many words, and is scared it could happen to one of us again.

I’m a little scared of that myself.

But the debate goes better than I expected. I feel like I’ve made real progress in helping my classmates understand my magic and its consequences, and that maybe they’ll understand me better too.