Flames flickered, and the smell of pine and scorched wood filled the common room. Seven people sat around the torch, looking at each other nervously, trying to tell friend from foe.

I'd thought that it would be hard to get the others to come together against the threat of gentling. I'd expected to be met with distrust, if not fear. I'd been wrong. I was starting to think I didn’t know that much about people.

I’d gone to each of them with the suggestion that we help each other, and the ones who weren’t completely closed off had been almost desperate to accept.

It didn’t matter that they’d seen me kill a squad of soldiers. It didn’t matter that they might have been afraid of me, or afraid of being associated with me, or afraid of just everyone and everything in this place.

There was a need in them to connect, and the academy hadn’t yet managed to burn it out. I'd offered them a connection, and they'd taken it.

The seven of us were gathering on the sixth day of the week. The eve of deadline day. We’d each had ample time to attempt our assignments, and now we had a day to work together, to accomplish as a group what we might have failed to do alone.

Everyone seemed shocked at what the failure’s fate really was. Master Antonyx had been right. We’d all secretly expected the punishment to be death, and against the bleak backdrop we were numb to the idea. The threat of death had seemed distract and abstract, but gentling was immediate and concrete. We’d had uncertainty, but now we had certainty. Now we had clarity. The reality was much worse than death, and we were all quietly terrified of it. More terrified of it than we were of each other.

I’d wanted the group to check in early and often, but the others had wanted as much time as possible to work on their own assignments. So we’d set the weekly meeting to happen on the sixth day of the week; enough time for us to complete our own tasks, while leaving a day for cooperation.

We met in the barracks common room, the seven of us gathering just after dusk, sitting down in a circle at the center of the room like children on a camping trip.

Now we were here, it seemed like we were all reluctant to speak.

The common room was lit, for once. A woman called Terese had put together some torches out of split sticks and resin-coated pinecones. They were apprently a traditional craft in the hill kingdom of Durrin, where she’d lived before the Reeves came for her. In her village they were common midwinter gifts. Here, they were our light and hearth.

Adrian checked outside the barracks doors, then came back to John us.

He was looking better since he’d moved back to the barracks. He was washing more regularly. He was sleeping better, partly thanks to the heating cantograms I was maintaining in our cell.

At some point over the last week he’d picked up a piece of armor; just a battered steel breastplate with a hole burned over the heart, but he wore it like an Errant’s regalia.

Some of the others showed signs of progress as well. I’d last spoken with Sal Merchamp when I was teaching her the Force aspect. Now she carried one of Adrian’s quarterstaffs, and one of her hands was red and from the scabbing burn on her left hand I guessed she’d tried to learn the Fire aspect. I didn’t know if she’d succeeded.

Olan Draxs had surprised me by joining the group. He was one of our cohort’s native Antorxians, a tall man with short black hair and a muscular frame. He looked like he could have been a soldier before the academy. Natural born Antorxians were only supposed to be here voluntarily, but I got the feeling it wasn’t that way with him. I didn’t know for sure.

Four weeks ago, he hadn’t been any better prepared than the rest of us. Now, he had an improvised weapon made from a short spear made from a stick tipped with the razor-sharp shell of some swamp shellfish.

Jason Isarion was a man a couple of years older than me. He’d kept his hair long despite it looking increasingly ragged over the last few weeks. He wasn’t carrying any new equipment or bearing any new scars, but his bearing was subtly different to how it’d been when we arrived. He’d been as lost as the rest of us at the start, but now he seemed like someone trying to make the best of it.

He’d been the son of a mayor in Cortiss, the contested nation north of Antorx, but when the Antorxian army rolled in he’d been handed over as quickly as any of us. He was the only other Initiate in the group who’d had something like a formal education, though where mine had focused on the scribe’s arts, his had been preparing him for a life in Cortissian society.

The last two members had been the hardest to get on board.

Tom Carrot was a farmer’s son from some minor Antorxian tributary kingdom, and Alexa was wiry nineteen year old woman from a coastal city-state called Kon-Perel.

Out of all of us, Tom seemed most out of his depth. He’d looked like he wanted to run when I’d first approached him. Alexa had been innately distrustful, and even now she was looking around at the rest of us like we were about to pull a knife on her.

“I think this is everyone. Let’s begin,” Jason said. “Unless there are any objections, we’ll pass around the circle reading our assignments in order, starting with myself and moving clockwise. After that we’ll go around a second time, saying how we completed them, or what help we need, if we didn’t.”

I listened carefully as Jason established what sounded like a system he’d thought out in advance.

“Are there any objections?” he asked, looking around at us.

I looked at Jason, then around at the others. I’d sat in on enough farmer’s councils to recognize when someone was trying to take charge.

“We should start with Adrian,” I said. “He helped put the group together and we all know him.”

The study group was my idea, but I had no desire to lead it. I didn’t object to someone taking charge in principle, but I didn’t trust the instincts of someone who’d jump at the opportunity the way Jason had seemed to. Adrian was a little crude but otherwise pretty benign.

There was a momentary change in the expression around Jason’s eyes, but then he gestured at me.

“Of course, starting with Adrian.”

Adrian gave me a sideways glance, then started speaking.

“I had to fight one of the soldiers,” Adrian said.

A few of the others exchanged glances. I met Adrian’s eyes. He’d told me about it already.

“What, the other soldiers just let you beat one of them up?” Sal asked.

Sal had been a town guard before the Reeves got hold of her, so she probably had a unique insight into how they felt about that.

“He was being punished for something,” Adrian said. “They’d already stripped him of his rank and sentenced him to death. They left him with his sword and his shield and set us against each other in a rock garden on the south side of the grounds. I had my staff. We fought.”

“Did you kill him?” Sal asked.

Adrain shook his head. “That wasn’t on the scroll. I just had to punish him. So I knocked him down and gave him a caning. I don’t know what happened after that. They probably killed him.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is breaking with the protocol,” Jason said. “Can we please stick to simply giving our task to begin with?”

Adrian shot me a look, but stopped talking.

Going around clockwise, it was my turn next.

“I had to clear a ruined inn of spirits,” I said.

To my left, Alexa asked, “What kind of spirits?”

I looked at her, then at Jason. “They were the spirits of dead students,” I said to her. “Runaways who’d died in the swamp, and left incorporeal spirits behind.”

“And you killed them?” Sal asked me from across the circle.

“They were already dead. I just distroyed the spirits they left behind.”

“Still, it’s kind of like turning against your own, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’d run if I got the chance, and I wouldn’t want you coming to kill me, even if I was only a ghost.”

“I don’t think they had enough of a mind left to know I was on their side,” I said. “They were just blurry shapes, really. Most of them didn’t even have faces. I tried to talk one of them down, but he didn’t listen.”

“How’d you kill them?” Alexa asked, sitting next to me on my left.

“I coated my sword in blood,” I said, resting my hand on the birchbark scabbard at my side. “The blood of a mage is a maja-infused substance, so it can affect incorporeal spirits.”

“Where’d you get the sword?” she asked.

“In a ruined fort two days from here.”

“Any more of them there?”

“No. There wasn’t anything else useful there, just junk.”

Her eyes stayed on my sword for a few seconds, then she looked away, chewing her lip.

I knew Alexa was from Kon-Perel, a busy port city. She seemed quick on her feet, but I didn’t know anything about her beyond that. I forced myself to take my hand off the sword. I told myself she wasn’t going to try and take it.

“Your turn, Alexa,” Jason said.

“I had to draw blood from an older student,” she said. “Didn’t get into a fight or anything. Just traded for it, in the end. A lad up the hill let me cut him for a weird rock I found, and that was that.”

“What was the rock?” I asked.

“Dunno. Black shiny rock, fell off the back of a wagon when that big metal fella was coming in.”

“The Titan?”

“Yeah, that.”

Tom was leaning forward to Alexa’s left, his hands on his legs. He looked desperate to speak.

“Tom, what was your assignment?” Jason asked.

“I’ve got to get an ‘human fingerbone’ for Master Sectus an’ I’ve got no idea how to go about it,” he said. He sounded tense, like he barely had any breath to speak with.

Jason looked slowly around at the rest of us. “Well, I’m sure we can work that out together,” he said. “Does anyone have any ideas?”

“You’ve got ten at the end of your hands, haven’t you?” Alexa said. “Dorian can lend you his sword.”

I shared a look with Tom. He looked like he thought I was going to jump up and cut his finger off right that second.

Jason went on to describe his own task, sounding pleased with himself. “I had to collect a variety of plants from the cliffs above the academy. The hike was a little difficult, and one of the plants irritated my skin somehwat, but I was able to find all the varieties listed and hand them off to Master Vodkus without issue.”

“Did you have any samples left over?” I asked.

I’d been sent on my own plant collection chore, and I still had some Ginsberry leaves slowly drying out in my cell.

“I did have a few, yes,” Jason said.

Terese was up next. She spoke quietly, twisting a fold of her robe between tanned hands.

“I had to kill an animal,” she said. “I killed a bird.”

There was a few seconds of silence. Sal broke it with an exclamation.

“Saints blood. What’s the point of these?” She looked from me to Adrian, then around the group. “Killing spirits and collecting plants, alright, those are jobs. That’s just us working as mercs. Beating up a soldier and drawing blood, fine, we can call that combat training. What’s the point in killing an animal? I killed ten birds a month back in Dorries. It’s not hard. It doesn’t teach you anything, and it’s not useful to anyone, unless you eat it.”

“Terese seems to have a delicate disposition,” Jason said. “I wonder if they’re trying to toughen her up.”

“You reckon they’re paying that much attention to us? Seriously?” Sal asked.

“None of my tasks have been personalized,” I said.

“Two of mine focused on fighting,” Adrian said, “But another was… something else.”

I looked at him, then away. His first task had been to pray to a dark god called Ixilthan. Knowing that Adrian was raised in the Abbey, that would have been a particularly heretical act. Maybe they were trying to test us. Or break us.

Everyone was quiet for a half a minute, probably looking inwards to see what their tasks might say about them.

Into the silence, Olan Draxs said, “I have to kill one of you.”

Everyone slowly turned to look at him.

“I am not going to do it,” he added.

After a few seconds of silence, Jason cleared his throat.

“No, of course not. I’m sure you wouldn’t have told us if you were planning on doing it…”

“No,” Olan confirmed.

“You completed your last assignment, so you’ll be safe this week,” I said to him.

“Yes.”

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“What if you weren’t safe?” Sal asked, turning to look at the man beside her. “Would you do it? If not doing it would get you the failure’s fate?”

Olan looked around us slowly, probably thinking about which of us he’d be willing to kill.

“I think some of you would do it, if it were you,” he said. “And one day, it might be you.”

“Not me,” Sal said. “I’m leaving. As soon as I get an assignment outside the wall.”

“I don’t think running has a high survival rate,” I said quietly.

“Well half of the people we arrived with are as good as dead, so staying doesn’t seem that safe either.”

“What’s your task, Sal?” Adrian asked.

“Got to show two types of magic to Master Cordaze,” she said. She held out her burned hand and focused on it. After a few seconds, a blue flame appeared, dancing across her fingers without ever really touching them. She held it for a moment, then clenched her fist, snuffing it out. “I’ve got Fire and Force, thanks to Dorian.”

“Watch your hands around Cordaze,” Adrian said, still staring at the hand that had held the flame. “She’s the one who zapped off Ordan’s hand on the first day.”

“And someone else’s, when she was teaching the Wheel aspect last week,” I said.

“Sounds like she’s got an obsession,” Adrian said.

“Say,” Jason said casually. “I wonder if any of poor Ordan’s hand bones are left in the field where she made that speech.”

Tom had the expression of a drowning man who’d just been thrown a rope.

“What? I didn’t think of that!”

He jumped up and immediately started hurrying towards the door.

“Take a torch,” Jason suggested, calling after him.

Tom pivoted and picked up one of the pinecone torches from the edge of the room, before pulling open a door and stepping out into the night.

“Well, the first meeting of this group has been a success,” Jason said.

“For most of you,” Olan said.

“I propose we continue to hold regular meetings on the sixth day of the week, just enough time for emergency interventions,” Jason suggested.

Nobody disagreed and he nodded, satisfied.

“Then perhaps we should name our association along those lines,” he said. “The Sixth Day group?”

Again, nobody objected, but this time it seemed to be because nobody really cared.

As far as I was concerned, this was a desperate act of survival, not any kind of official group. I still wasn’t sure we’d even live long enough for a name to be necessary.

Alexa was the first to leave when the meeting was over, getting up and heading off to the cells. The others left one by one after that, some going to the cells, others sitting around the edge of the room, taking advantage of the light and heat from the torches.

Adrian got up towards the end, heading back to the cells. I followed after him.

After last week, a lot of the cells had been left empty, and some of those left behind had spread out to fill them. Adrian and I had chosen to stay roommates, since while we weren’t exactly fast friends, we knew that we at least wouldn’t try to kill or steal from each other in our sleep, and we could at least rely on each other for protection if anyone else tried something.

After the meeting tonight, I wasn’t so worried about any of them trying to hurt us. I hadn’t felt any real danger from them. Even Alexa, who was I pretty sure had designs on my sword. Even Olan, who’d apparently been explicitly told to murder one of us. Him just telling us that was an almost unbelievable act of trust. He could have and probably should have just lied about it.

There were others in the barracks who hadn’t chosen to join our group.

Marie Hyndeston and Faux Juris, the other two native Antorxian students, had declined to join. Not that they seemed to be having any trouble completing their tasks.

Unlike us, they were here by choice; sent by their familities to attend what was to the Antorxians a prestigious magical academy.

The other initiate not to join us was a scarred man called Crewe from one of the Antorxian tributary nations. He was taller than even Sal, and had an outlaw’s tattoo on his collarbone. Of all the other initiates in the barracks, he was the one I’d heard from least, and the one I was worried about most.

I followed Adrian into the room. He shut the door behind me and immediately wedged a large rock against it.

It was dark in the room, especially after being around the torches in the common room, but it was warm thanks to the Winter Hearth cantogram on the wall. We were as close to comfortable and secure in there as it got at Windshriek.

I’d learned that after initially painting the cantograms, I could refresh them by misting maja over the lines, even if I’d never managed to mist a cantogram directly. I’d had to teach Adrian how to do it, since I was still mostly wiped out.

Adrian went to his bed on one side and I went to mine on the other. There was no other comfortable furniture, here or anywhere in the barracks.

I sat on my mattress, just sackcloth densely packed with dry grass, and crossed my legs.

I had three hours or so before I’d be able to sleep, and I needed every minute of it for accumulation.

I listened to Adrian’s breathing as I tried to shut out the details of my senses. I breathed deeply, feeling for the chaotic roil of the Fold.

The process got infinitely harder when Adrian started talking.

“Why would they tell Olan to kill one of us?” he asked. “I can’t work it out. They go to all this trouble to sniff us out and drag us here from across the nations, only to throw our lives away like they’re nothing.”

I took a deep breath, trying to maintain my meditation.

“Is it some kind of sick game?” he went on. “Do they enjoy pitting us against each other?”

He seemed to expect a response.

“A single Reeve is probably worth about a thousand soldiers,” I said. “If they get a single Reeve from our group, maybe that’s enough to make it worth it to them.”

“But how did they know Olan wouldn’t kill that one person?”

“Because if he were going to do it, he would have targeted the weakest among us,” I said.

Adrian was silent, for a few seconds at least.

“That’s probably Tom or Terese,” he said quietly. “Should we watch them, to make sure he doesn’t?”

“I don’t think Olan is the one we have to worry about. Jason was right. If he was going to do it, he wouldn’t have told us. He’d have just done it. And we’d probably never have known what happened.”

Adrian finally went quiet after that.

I sank back into meditation. Sight, sound, and discomfort faded away. The room smelled of the dry grass of the mattresses and the mountain air coming through the window. I filtered those out as well. Soon I was sensing more with my spiritual senses than my phyiscal ones.

In this state I could feel the maja sources around me.

Adrian’s was the most prominent, a bundle of energy that felt solid and warm, like a sun-baked brick, or a metal pot cooling over the embers of a fire.

A few cells to my right, two more signatures hummed in my senses. One of them gave off the hot prickling feeling of a rope burn or nettle sting. I recognized that as Sal Merchamp. The other was a cold crushing weight that made me feel like I was being buried alive. One of the other students. I let my attention linger on them, looking for signs of trouble, but they were as separate and motionless as Adrian and I were.

I felt the presences of the other students in the building, then let my attention spread out.

Finally I sensed the Fold; a crashing, roiling layer of maja, seemingly infinite. I started to draw it in like clear fresh water from a lake.

My accumulation was interrupted after a couple of hours by a knock on our door.

Adrian jerked awake.

“What’s happening?” he said, disoriented.

Letting out a long breath, I opened my eyes and stretched out my legs. My accumulation had been more efficient than it’d ever been before coming to the academy. I didn’t know if it was because of the environment at the academy, or if an empty core was easier to fill than a full one, but in one session I’d managed to accumulate enough maja to enough to throw whoever had disturbed me down the corridor.

“Someone’s at the door,” I said.

The quiet knock came again.

Adrian got up and went to the door. He lifted the rock blocking it back a few inches and cracked it open.

“Hello, Adrian,” Jason’s voice said from outside. “I wondered if I could speak to Dorian.”

Adrian dragged the rock away from the door as I got up and opened it.

“Hi,” I said, blinking the crust out of my eyes.

“Hello, Dorian,” Jason said. He was standing in the corridor with his hands cupped together, like a shy farm hand about to ask for a pay rise. “I heard that you’ve been looking for a small spirit. You need it for some kind of magical training?”

“I mentioned it to Sal,” I said.

Master Devaus in the tower had rewarded me for my assignment with a spirit siphon, which could apparently drain small spirits of maja to improve my accumulation. I’d mentioned it to Sal, but I hadn’t asked anyone to find one for me.

“And when I mentioned I’d seen a nest of spirits, she passed the information on to me. I happen to have found one.”

He lifted his hands and cracked them open. The corridor was only lit by moonlight from the window behind me, but I still caught a flash of movement inside his clasped hands before he snapped them shut again.

“I’m willing to give it to you,” he went on.

“Thanks,” I said, cautiously. “That’d be useful.”

Jason didn’t immediately hand the spirit over. He looked in through the doorway and his eyes fell on the cantogram sketched on the wall.

“Your room seems warmer than the others,” he said. “Is it some kind of warming magic?”

“Yes. A Winter Hearth canto,” I said.

“Would you be willing to apply it to my room?”

I looked down at Jason’s clasped hands, then back at his face.

“Yes?”

“Wonderful.”

He held out his hands and started slowly opening them. I held out mine, ready to catch whatever was inside.

The spirit flashed out through his fingers and into my waiting hands, which I closed around it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“We have to help each other, from now on,” Jason said.

“I can apply your cantogram tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll need light to do it properly.”

“Of course,” Jason said.

He said farewell, then left. Adrian re-barricaded the door and came to sit next to me on my bed.

He looked down at my hands. “What is it?”

I cracked my hands open to peer inside, and the thing darted out.

It flitted around my head, then through the air around me, before settling on my bed.

It was faint, translucent, but clearly recognizable as a small spider.

“A spider, wonderful,” Adrian said, stepping away. “Just what I wanted to share my cell with.”

I crouched on the floor and dug through my bag. My hand closed around the metal disk and I pulled it out. The cantogram on the surface was hard to make out in the low light, but I could see well enough to orient it upwards.

I turned and crept towards the spirit.

The spider spirit skittered on the spot as I got close, turning to waggle a pair of forelimbs at me.

I placed the disk down on the bed next to it and slowly slid it underneath it.

The effect was instantaneous. The spirit froze, locked in place by a sub-section of the cantogram. It started to shake, emitting a high-pitched whining sound, and I felt maja start to roll off it, thick and scented like burning dust.

“What’s the noise?” Adrian asked.

He came across the room and crouched next to me.

The spider spirit was waggling its many legs at the walls of its invisible cage, shaking and screeching as maja flowed off it.

“The disk is siphoning its maja,” I said. “In theory, I can accumulate directly from it.”

“Aren’t spirits only made of maja?” Adrian asked.

“Yes.”

“So this is kind of like draining its blood, for power.”

“Yeah.”

We watched it shaking and screaming for a few more seconds. I shifted, putting my hand next to it on the bed. Maja was blowing off it like a summer breeze, filling the room.

“It’s only an incorporeal spirit,” I said. “It probably doesn’t even have the intelligence of a real spider.”

“No, probably not,” Adrian said. He didn’t move away.

I watched the thing shaking for a few more seconds, before pulling the disk away and releasing it.

It immediately darted away, scuttling up the wall and disappearing through the window.

I tossed the spirit siphon back into my bag.

“The sound was pretty annoying,” Adrian said, moving back to his bed.

“There’s no way I would have been able to accumulate with that going on,” I agreed quickly.

Adrian lay back down and rolled over, seeming determined to go back to sleep.

I turned crossed my legs again.

Sinking into a meditative state, I drank up the maja that had been loosed from the spirit in just the brief time it’d been on the siphon. When I was finished, my reserves were back to a tenth what they had been when I’d arrived.