I consider just not asking where he was yesterday, but in the end curiosity gets the better of me. The question spills out suddenly.

Am I imagining it, or does he tense a little as I ask it? He shrugs. “I was around. You must have just not looked in the right places.”

“I looked everywhere I could think of,” I point out. “And I spoke to Rosie.”

“Ah,” he says.

“You weren’t just around, were you?”

He doesn’t answer, which is as good as a confession.

“I know you can’t tell me everything,” I say. “If you don’t want me to know where you were, then that’s fine. Just tell me that. But… please don’t lie to me. How would you have felt, if I’d done that?”

“That’s different,” he protests, and then sighs. “Okay, no. You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just… when you’ve been keeping secrets so long, it becomes a habit. I’m still not used to having someone I can trust.”

I made the right choice, I realise, not digging any further after speaking to Rosie. Doing that, trying to find out something he didn’t want me to know, would have been a betrayal of that trust. “Don’t do it again,” I say, trying to stay firm and make it clear that this is important.

“I won’t. It wasn’t anything secret. Well, it was, sort of, but… personal secrets, not state secrets.”

“Or both?” I add, half-joking.

“Not both. I… I should have just told you before. I didn’t want you to think… meeting room, after this?”

I nod.

“This would be so much better,” Edward says, chalking out a ward-circle on the floor, “if I had that book. There’s not much more progress I can make on my own, I don’t think. Not without taking months longer than it would otherwise.”

“Just ask your dad for it,” I say. No matter how much I want the True History, I don’t know if it’s worth the risk of taking Electra’s bait. And Lord Blackthorn would give the ward book to his son without hesitation if asked in the right way.

Edward hesitates, though. “I don’t – “ he begins haltingly.

I think I know how that sentence ends. I don’t want to just ask him for everything.

I don’t think the Edward I first met would have hesitated like that. But everything that’s happened since – his mother’s brief return, the way Lord Blackthorn handled my isolation – has damaged Edward’s trust of his father.

It’s probably a good thing, overall, not to have blind faith in the Black Raven. It doesn’t feel good to see him hesitate like that, though.

I don’t make him spell it out; I just let the silence linger until he presses one hand to the circle that completes the ward and then looks up, smiling a little.

“That’s done, then,” he says. “I visited my grandmother yesterday.”

“Oh. To talk about – “

“My mother, yes. It’s not as relevant as it was, but I arranged to meet her before knowing Mother wasn’t coming back, so…” He shrugs again.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me that, though.”

Edward sighs. “You remember I told her she would have very vocal opinions about the type of Blackthorn she wants me to be?”

I nod. I think I know what’s coming.

“Well. That type of Blackthorn is not the type who has you for a friend.”

Yup. Thought so. “Why doesn’t she approve of me, then?”

“Oh, she has nothing against you personally. It’s just that no-one who isn’t minor aristocracy or at the very least extremely rich has any business associating with me, as far as she’s concerned.”

I laugh bitterly. “A proper Genford girl, then.”

The irony is that if I’d been that proper Genford girl with parents rich enough to afford the full fees, if I’d belonged at Genford, I would never have been the sort of person who could have a close friendship with Edward Blackthorn.

“I suppose so, yes. But anyway – given that, I wouldn’t be able to get the information I wanted if I took you with me. And if I didn’t – “ He pauses, looking for the right words. “I didn’t want you to think I was hiding you. That I was ashamed of you. Because I’m not, but – you haven’t hidden me, not in the same way.”

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I frown, considering his words. In some ways it’s enough that he had a reason, that he wasn’t just hiding things from me for concealment’s sake, that he does trust me. But in other ways… “I would have understood,” I say. “That that wasn’t what you were doing, not inviting me. That it was only for practical reasons.”

Maybe it would have stung a little, but I’ve dealt with far worse. And it definitely wouldn’t have stung as much as his lying to me, whatever his intentions. “You should have told me.”

“I know,” he says. “I will, next time. I’m sorry.”

And when he says that so openly, so easily, I can’t help but forgive him. Whatever his questionable decisions, he’s trying. That’s what matters.

“Thank you,” I say. “Anyway, did you at least get what you wanted in between listening to her criticise your life choices?” It’s strange, realising how pragmatically he thought of this conversation with his grandmother. Then again, I can’t really talk, given how my last conversation with my mother went.

“She was very helpful, actually. She thinks she can influence me now, and she’s prepared to give me quite a lot in exchange.”

I hope the Dowager Lady Annabelle didn’t think of it in terms quite that direct, but he probably has a point. I wait for him to go on.

“He never loved her,” he says simply. “Marriage – producing an heir – it was part of the arrangement between my father and grandfather, after my uncle – Arthur, who was supposed to inherit – died. They’d barely been on speaking terms until then, but both of them cared enough about keeping the family alive to negotiate.” His face twists into something bitter as he forces out the next sentence: “She didn’t say it explicitly, but I’m pretty sure my mother being a sensitive was a part of what sealed the bargain.”

That doesn’t altogether surprise me. It’s hurt Edward, though, I can tell: no-one wants to hear things like that about their parents. Even if he’s too used to seeing the world in those transactional terms, knowing that your own birth was just another transaction can’t be easy.

“My mother was a romantic,” he continues. “She thought that even if he didn’t love her at first, that would change as they learnt to live together. A lot of people thought that – it’s what happens with many arranged marriages.”

“But not this one.”

“No,” Edward agrees sadly. “Not this one. My grandmother was surprised it lasted as long as it did. It was because of me, she thinks. Both of them were devoted to me.”

I’m not surprised. It must be good for Edward to have heard that, at least. I’m glad he got that much from the meeting.

I have to agree with Edward’s grandmother about the marriage, though. The story has an air of inevitable tragedy to it. But is tragedy ever truly inevitable? In the old tragic myths, it’s always the hero’s own fatal flaw that’s their downfall: the most tragic part is that if they’d just been able to change, to understand their mistakes and resolve to do better, it all could have been avoided.

In the myths, change is impossible: a character’s nature is set, the ending is fixed before the story begins. Real life isn’t like that, though.

Then again, I’m not sure Lord Blackthorn really changing is any more realistic than a mythical tragic hero changing.

The story of Edward’s parents is not over, though.

“Of course they were,” I say, bringing myself back to reality. “They still are.”

“It wasn’t enough,” says Edward.

He’s right; it wasn’t. But I don’t think anything could have been enough.

Lessons go better that day. Felicity is her usual self, but without Mildred in her class the tension is perfectly bearable. And Edward turns out to have been right about the conjuration of wood: I manage it within ten minutes of the new lesson starting. He doesn’t even say he told me so, which is a minor miracle on its own.

I spend most of my time working on the latest Magical Law and Culture essay. It’s certainly an interesting one: Discuss a change you would make to Malaina law. Explain why you believe this change is needed and why your new law would be an improvement.

The point he’s trying to make with it, I realise after only a few minutes spent planning, is that it’s very easy to look at the existing law and say it has flaws. A lot of the time you’d be right to say that.

But making something better? That is not so easy.

I know I want to talk about the big problems, too. The Instability Law and its consequences. I’m taking the hard way through the assignment, but that’s not the point. The point is to prove to myself that there is a better way to do things. That what I went through in isolation is not justified.

It isn’t easy. I start by writing down a list of what I want the new law to achieve: it has to distinguish between stable and unstable Malaina, and avoid unnecessary suffering inflicted on the former while making sure the latter don’t cause harm.

And that needs research, a lot more than I’ve carried out thus far, because I don’t know where that dividing line should be drawn. I don’t know if there even is a line that can be drawn, rather than a murky grey area in the middle – and dealing with murky grey areas in law is infamously dangerous ground.

Maybe I should have accepted the invitation to that conference. People there will have actually carried out this research, will know the answers to the questions I’m asking.

The Academy library isn’t much help, for once. It holds the most up-to-date books and journals in all areas of magical research – it would have to, since it serves a centre of magical research itself – but Malaina isn’t studied in the same way as most magic.

I think because it’s so much more complicated, in a way. Because it’s so dependent on the individual and their circumstances, on things that can’t be objectively measured and controlled like tweaking the way a spell is cast can.

Either way, though, the only relevant thing I can find that isn’t at least a century out of date is a journal article discussing the correlation between changes in the magical signatures of Malaina and their stability. Like the measurements Doctor Wandsworth tried to take for me.

That reminds me suddenly that I’ve missed my chance to get answers from Edward’s mother, if she’s really not coming back. I don’t know when I’ll get another opportunity like that; I should have just asked her when we met.

Well, not much I can do about that now. I settle for asking Rosie where else I can look for research on Malaina. She recommends the City Library: it’s required to stock copies of every book and scientific journal published in the Kingdom. There’s quite a bit of bureaucracy involved in getting permission to access its collection, but mentioning I’m acquainted with Lord Blackthorn should speed the process along.

I don’t particularly want to do that unless I have to. It seems as if getting access will be my next project, then. I am probably not going to have this essay done before the deadline if I want to do a proper job of it. Maybe I could ask Sam to give me longer. I think he would, for something like this.

I ask him in that afternoon’s lesson, and it turns out I was right. “I know this is important to you,” he says, “and I’m fine with giving you time to produce your best work. But don’t let it take priority over work for your other classes or revision, okay?”

I thank him and promise I won’t.