My feet were heavy on the stairs. Going down them felt as hard as climbing. I’d washed the swamp scum from my body and clothes, but the leech bites had stayed. My nose still ached sometimes, in the spot where Adrian had broken it. The bruises from my encounter with the runaway sorcerer at the ruined inn had yet to heal, and worst of all, the bite the vulture spirit had given me on that first dangerous morning outside the academy was turning strange. The actual wound had scarred over, and I’d been lucky enough that it hadn’t got infected, but a small black mark had appeared at its center, like an ink blotch. When I ran my hand over it I still felt the tingle of what I now knew to be foreign maja.

The infirmary was my only option for getting it checked, and that meant it wasn’t going to be checked. I wouldn’t willingly go into the building that was run by Master Sectus.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and was immediately confronted with one of Antonyx’s servitor spirits. It was standing at the foot of the stairs, facing me, its dim blue lantern held to the side. I stared at it for a few seconds.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

It hovered there for a long moment, its featureless head staring out at me from the translucent cowl, then it turned and drifted away through the shelves.

Why had I even come here? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have a goal. I just wanted to get out of the cell, to escape my sleepless night. When I’d been out in the swamp I’d been sure I’d have more to research on gentling, if only I was in the library. Now that I was here, I felt like I’d already found everything I was going to find. I’d already scoured the section on gentling several times. I wasn’t going to extract any more information from it, unless there was somehow another even more hidden scroll in there.

I checked my library index and started heading towards the section on structured magic.

Since the reorganization I had more cantograms available to me than I could memorize. Cantograms for light, like the Night’s Welcome that covered my lantern. Cantograms for heat, designs to repel insects, or to clean the air, or to make a blade immune to rust, or to make an arrow fly for miles. All useful, but all limited in their applications.

I was also limited in my ability to apply them. I had a little maja ink, and one scroll of paper a week, but not every cantogram would work on paper. I didn’t have the maja-infused wire I’d need to inscribe my sword. I didn’t have the maja thread that I might use to turn my clothes into something more protective. Keeping cantograms intact on my skin would take a lot of time and maintenance, and seemed hard to justify when I might go days without using any of them. I wasn’t surprised that so many sorcerers favored unstructured magic. It was fast, simple, and cheap in terms of materials. And counter to my expectations, I wasn’t bad at it. I’d picked up the Force aspect on my first exposure to it. I’d learned Wheel when many of the other students hadn’t. I’d even worked out the Thought aspect, which apparently eluded plenty of Masters. I could learn the Fire aspect tonight, provided I was willing to learn what it was like to burn.

I walked through the structured magic section, thinking that maybe I should turn my attention elsewhere.

Beyond the books on cantograms were the ones on rituals, the other form of structure magic. With the right words and props, a sorcerer could invoke greater spirits that dwelt in the Fold. A sorcerer could buy or borrow power that way, though the fireside tales I’d grown up with promised a grisly fate to anyone who thought they’d got the better of a spirit in any deal.

It wasn’t that different in effect to praying to a god. Like the prayer to Ixilthan Adrian had been given to say as his first assignment, or the invocations that the decidedly non-magical priests of the Abbey used to cry to Horis or Levethan or any of the gods revered in Losiris. Except I doubted Ixilthan would give me anything just for asking nicely, or Horis for that matter. They were so powerful and distant that the cries of a single mortal had to be less than the chirping of a cricket to them.

As I stepped out of the shelves I caught sight of a figure crouching a little way off down the isle.

I froze, lowering my lantern and ducking back behind the shelf.

It was the older student I’d seen before, a man with a shaved head and a curve where his spine joined his neck. He was crouching next to a shelf, reaching out to rest his hand on an old wooden cane.

Was he thinking about taking it? Surely someone would have taken it long ago if it was worth anything.

I stepped out and slowly approached him. I checked my sword, finding it loose in its sheath. I moved quietly at first, then more normally when he didn’t react. I got within a couple of feet of him without seeing any sign he’d heard me at all. He was still crouched, with his hand on the cane.

If I was a typical Windshriek student I could easily have robbed him. If his eyes weren’t still half open, I might even have thought he was sleeping down here.

“Hello?” I said.

He didn’t respond immediately. After about a minute he stirred, taking his hand off the cane and stretching his shoulders. He turned his head and visibly jumped when he saw me standing next to him.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He jumped to his feet, backing off and raising his hands, palm out. That wasn’t necessarily a peaceful gesture among sorcerers.

“It’s you,” he said. “The boy with the lantern.”

“Yes. What were you doing?”

He looked at me, then down at the cane he’d been touching. He looked like was trying to think for a few seconds.

“Answers to questions aren’t free, here,” he said.

“I told you about my lantern for free.”

“That was your mistake.”

“What do you want then?” I asked. I was sure he was about to try and extort me for something. I was starting to wonder if the whole thing with the cane was a performance to trick me into paying him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tell me something useful.”

“Just, something useful?”

I thought about my recent discovery on gentling, but that wasn’t useful to anyone but me, and potentially dangerous to know. I knew some cantograms, but that wasn’t knowledge I could speak aloud. He was an older student. What would be useful to him? Did I even have anything? There was the library index, but if they weren’t freely available, I didn’t want him to know I had one.

“Master Antonyx has an index for the library,” I said. “He might give them our as rewards for tasks. That would help you navigate the new layout.”

The other student tilted his head thinking it over. Eventually he seemed to decide this was useful information after all.

He gestured for me to join him on the ground.

“I’m reading the relics,” he said. At my look of confusion he went on. “These items are Fold relics. They are connected to moments, trapped in the Fold. If you reach through them you can witness the memory.”

I looked from him to the cane then back. I hadn’t read anything about this before. At the same time, it sounded too elaborate to be a trick.

“Tell me what to do,” I said.

“Just touch the relic and reach for the Fold, as if you were going to accumulate.”

“And what will happen?”

“You will experience the moment.”

I looked down at the cane.

“Will it put me in a trance, like you were?”

“Yes. Better to do it when no one is around. They are dangerous to use because they leave you vulnerable.”

I looked at the cane, but didn’t touch it.

“Thank you for the information,” I said.

“It is not to receive, but to take…” the other student started, “but that doesn’t say anything about trade. I hope we can deal fairly in future.”

“Me too,” I said.

I meant it, but I didn’t hold out much hope. He was here, he was surviving, maybe even succeeding. No number of fair deals would guard against a betrayal the moment that losing a relationship was worth it to him.

“My name is Olner,” he said.

“Dorian.”

Olner got to his feet and left, glancing back at me as he hobbled away.

I moved away from the spot, hiding my lantern as I walked around the shelves in a long loop, eventually coming back to the cane. I sat down with my back to a shelf and settled down to wait. After twenty minutes with no more sign of Olner, I decided that he wasn’t just going to double back and catch me entranced.

I stepped out from behind the shelf and knelt by the cane. I reached out and touched the cracked wood.

It didn’t feel like they was anything special about it. There was no feel of maja, no smell of a spirit. I did as Olner had told me and reached for the Fold.

The library floor broke apart beneath me.

I fell through shattered stone, my stomach flying up into my chest.

I tried to cry out, but my body was paralyzed. I fell for a half dozen heartbeats, then landed sitting up in a wooden chair.

Hard wood and soft morning light were my first impressions, then the smell of a hearth fire, and the sound of birds somewhere outside a window. My vision was blurry at first, then it cleared.

I was sitting at a table in a cottage. A sheet of paper lay on the table in front of me, and I held a quill pen in my right hand. This was a familiar scenario for me. An old man stood on the other side of the table, the hood of his faded blue robe down around his shoulders. The blue robe made me thing that he probably wasn’t a sorcerer. His hair was light brown, curling down to his shoulders, with a small bald patch developing on the top of his head. He had the bearing of a scribe, though not the haircut.

“Go on, complete the sigil,” the man said. He spoke Irisian with a thick Cortissian accent. This memory had to be from somewhere in Cortiss.

I looked down at the paper. I was shocked to see there was a half drawn cantogram there. So this man wasn’t just a scribe. He had to be a Cortissian mage

That put a darker spin on the scene. I didn’t know how exactly a moment could be placed inside a Fold relic, but Antorx was now at war with Cortiss. They wouldn’t have allowed any Cortissian mage they came across to survive free.

“The sigil, Algernon,” the old man said, pointing at the paper.

I looked down and studied it. I didn’t recognize the design. The sweeping lines already marked out reminded me of the Winter Hearth canto, but there were too many differences for that to be it. I had no idea how to complete it.

Despite my lack of knowledge, I moved my pen to the paper and started drawing out lines. There was a disconnect between my mind and my body. My arm was moving on its own, as if I were a puppet being controlled by somebody else. I felt like an actor, playing someone else’s part.

I completed the outer circle, added the accents, broke it in several places with branching lines, then drew a smaller more complex symbol at the center.

Just as I was finishing it, the old man lashed out, hitting me in the forehead with the side of his walking stick.

A flash of pain ran through my skin and skull, quickly replaced by a sharp, urgent throbbing.

“No! Imbecile!” he shouted.

The stick had caught the thin skin just under my eyebrow and broken it. I could feel warmth trickling down the side of my face, and blood drops had sprayed across the paper.

“This line here should soak into the parchment,” he said, jabbing a finger on the outer line, then the one at the center. “This one should only lightly graze the paper. If it sinks, the energy will escape. Useless. It’s useless!”

He grabbed the piece of paper and threw it into the fire, then picked up a blank sheet and put it down in front of me.

“Again.”

I held the pen tightly.

The scene came apart a moment later, the room breaking up into smoke. When the smoke faded, I was back in the library, crouching with all of my muscles tense.

I reached up and rubbed my forehead. I’d felt the pain of the strike, and some of it had followed me back. There was still a stinging, throbbing pain where the stick had hit me. There was no blood, at least. Looking down at the cracked cane on the shelf, I recognized it as the old man’s walking stick. He was definitely dead, then. I wondered if the student was, as well.

I tried to remember what I could of the cantogram. I could almost certainly recreate it from memory. It hadn’t been the most complex I’d ever seen.

The idea that the depth of the ink mattered to cantogram was new to me. It was a subtle detail that no book I’d read had thought to mention, or at least they’d mentioned it too obliquely for me to understand what it meant. But I supposed that was the point of including the moment here. The relic acted as a bottled lesson.

I stood up shakily. I looked around. I was still alone. No one had crept up on me while I was in the vision, to steal my things or attack me.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Were all of the random items scattered around the library Fold relics? There had to be more than a hundred of them in various places. The cane hadn’t been particularly educational, but it had been a glimpse of the outside world. It had shown me a lesson in a magical tradition beyond the Reeves, and it had given me an insight into cantograms. All it’d cost me was a little time, some vulnerability, and the pain of being hit in the forehead.

Had nobody been going to tell me about these? It seemed like just another aspect of the education here that the Masters had left us to discover on our own. Yet another embodiment of ‘It is not to receive, but to take’. Was I really stronger for having found this on my own, instead of being told at the start?

At least with Antonyx’s reorganization, I didn’t have to grope blindly in the dark, trying them at random. I turned and headed deeper into the structured magic section. I’d seen a handful of the innocuous objects on the shelves there.

One object in this section had always caught my interest. It was a dagger, about the length of my hand, with a round pommel and a cross-guard. The blade itself was rusted to the point of uselessness, and the leather wrapping around its hilt had turned dry and started cracking from the dry air in the library. It obviously wasn’t any kind of useful weapon. I’d thought it had been kept here as a museum piece, representing some significant part of history, but now I suspected it was a Fold relic.

I checked around to make sure no one was nearby. I unwound my lantern and lay the parchment flat on the ground until the light died down, then reached out for the dagger. Like with the cane, I felt for the Fold. Again, I felt the floor fall out beneath me.

This time I landed on my feet. My leather boots plunging into knee-high grass.

The dagger was still in my hand, but everything else from the library was gone.

I was on a gently sloping hillside facing down into a valley, with vivid green grass all around me and small yellow-white flowers stretching up to attract the attention of buzzing flies.

The time of day had changed again. This time the sky was blue, the sun halfway from the horizon to its peak, and from the coolness of the wind it felt like morning.

I didn’t recognize the landscape. A forest of black-leafed trees grew up in the valley ahead of me, and the air was full of the scent of flowers and farm animals.

A sound came from behind. It took me a second to identify it as footsteps in the long grass.

I whirled around. A figure stood above me, silhouetted against the sky. It was a man in gleaming plate armor. His sword was already in motion, swinging straight down at my head.

I ducked, dodging the slash by inches. There was a tugging sensation from my scalp as the blade caught and severed a snatch of hair, then it had passed by.

Before the warrior could even begin to move the weight of his sword up for another strike, I sank into a low stance, took a quick step forward, and thrust my dagger at his armored chest.

It shouldn’t have landed. The blade should have bounced off the steel breastplate. I didn’t know what I was thinking in trying this.

Except it did land. The dagger visibly flashed in front of me, like a light beam had caught it at the exact moment the tip touched steel. It pierced the armor with a crack. Flesh parted for the blade, the man’s ribs offering no more resistance than the steel had.

The armored man froze. His sword dropped to the ground. The dagger in my hand ticked with the final, frantic beating of his heart, then he collapsed into a heap.

I’d killed him.

I was dizzy. I stumbled backward. The smell of dry stone and old parchment filled my nose, and I was back in the library.

I stared down at the dagger in my hand, then tossed it back onto the shelf.

It had just been a dream. The memory of a single thrust of a dagger.

I was wary as I left the dagger behind. I’d known from the cane that I could feel pain in these dreams, or whatever they were, but the strike with the dagger had felt so real. I’d felt the man’s life leave him, and knowing that the blade hadn’t really been in my hand and that the armored man probably died years ago didn’t do anything to make me feel better. What if I sank into one of these moments and found something I couldn’t live with? I’d had terrible nightmares since coming here, but they were always softened and washed away by the following day. I didn’t think anything would wash away the beating of that man’s heart.

I picked something innocuous for my next try. An old comb made of yellow bone rested on a shelf surrounded by books on ritual. Half of its teeth were snapped off, and there were white hairs still tangled around the ones that were left.

I reached down and touched the comb, reaching for the Fold as I did so.

For a second I was falling, then my feet landed on wooden floorboards. I was in a wood-paneled study, with the smells of chalk dust and jasmine incense hanging in the hair. There was a window behind me, and a girl kneeling on a large cushion in front of me. Several more figures stood around, some in robes, others wearing Antorxian military uniforms.

My arms were resting on the hilt and cross-guard of a Reeve’s feather blade. When I caught sight of my hands, I could tell they weren’t mine. They were old and thin-fingered, with long purple-painted nails.

The girl in front of me looked like she was about sixteen, dressed in a burgundy red robe that was armored with dull metal plates across the chest and forearms. Her fingers were stained black from ink, and there was a knife in her lap.

The girl spoke softly, but her body was tense. “Julixa and Gorrotan were the first. I will honor them by surpassing them."

“As you will be honored by those who surpass you,” I said.

Feeling my mouth move on its own startled me. My voice was a cracking buzz in my throat, ancient and dry.

“By hand, by spirit, and by will, I will defend my power, and feed it. I will kill for it,” the girl continued.

“As you will one day be killed for it," I said.

I walked slowly around the girl as she recited her oath. As I moved I got to see more of the room. The furniture reminded me of the pieces in Antonyx’s office, though from the shape of the room and the terrain outside the window, I could tell I wasn’t in the tower, or even on the mountain.

The walls were decorated with banners showing the stars of Antorx and the symbol of the Reeves in alternating bands. A painting at the back of the room depicted three hooded figures, one short and wide, one tall and narrow, and one indistinct, with billowing robes hiding their shape. Behind them in the frame was the tripeak symbol of the Antorxian emperors. That had to be a depiction of Antorx’s leadership, the Triune.

“Indolence, cowardice, and grief. I will scourge weakness from my allies and enemies alike; this is my kindness,” the girl continued.

“As you will be scourged,” I responded.

“Traitors, nations, or gods. I will not flinch before my enemies.”

“And your enemies will break before you.”

I stopped in front of the girl. I got the feeling that whoever’s role I was filling was waiting for something.

“Words are wind, but my oath made in blood is unbreakable,” the girl said.

“This is an oath made in blood,” I finished.

As I finished speaking, the girl raised the knife she was holding and dragged the blade across her palm. Blood welled up in her cupped hand, and she clenched her fist to force it to drain out.

There was a long moment. The other robed figures in the room swayed, as if listening to a music only they could hear. After the motion had passed, I let myself relax.

“Well done,” I said, my breath heavy in my chest. “Rise, Reeve Sandair."

The girl stood. She looked around, letting a restrained smile beam out from her face.

“Now make her serve an oath to Antorx,” one of the Antorxian officers present said.

I turned to him. He was a narrow man, with a short black beard and thick black eyebrows. His eyes looked like they were set a little too deeply into his face, giving him the look of being ill.

“We swear no oaths to Antorx,” I told him.

“To the Triune, then,” he said.

“Nor to them.”

The officer looked around at the group. “Why not? They’re sorcerers like you, aren’t they?”

A couple of the other robed figures in the group laughed. The officer looked around, annoyed.

“You’ve been given free reign long enough,” he said. “I was sent here by General Racxus to oversee your swearing-ins. I’ve seen that you swear an oath, and I believe it to be binding. I will have this girl swear to obey her military commanders, before sending her out into the field with near untold power.”

One of the robed men in the circle reached out to touch the officer on the shoulder. It was a grandfatherly gesture, made as if he was about to impart some important advice.

The officer slumped to the wooden floor, dead.

The robed man stood back up straight and clasped his hands. The other Antorxian soldiers in the room exchanged concerned glances, but none of them spoke up.

“What will you take as your badge of office?” I asked the girl.

“I will take this amulet,” she said.

“Then mark it with your blood.”

The girl looked down at the amulet, and smeared blood from her cut across the metal.

The dream began fading, the painting and banners receding into mist, then the walls and other figures, then the floor. Soon, I was left blinking back in the library.

I lifted my hand from the comb. I was shaking. I looked around. Still alone.

Structured magic covered ritual, and that had been a ritual. I was sure I’d just witnessed the promotion ceremony for a Reeve. It had the look and structure of a knighting ceremony, an oath given and accepted, promises made in return. I didn’t think I could feel maja in the visions from the Fold relics, but I was sure the other people in the scene had been feeling maja at some points.

The Reeve knighting ceremony had shown me something else as well. The Reeves and the military leadership of Antorx weren’t completely aligned. I’d seen evidence of it before, when I’d read Commander Ewart’s three-hundred year old account of the academy sending a creature to attack Fort Msiesetr. The Reeves worked in service of Antorx, fighting Antorx’s wars, but they had their independence as well, and too much power for the Antorxian leadership to force the issue.

I forced myself to put the experience aside. I could think about it later. For now I focused on the shelves of structured magic around me.

I’d glanced at every book at least once. There was some theory here, on spirit contracts, on cantogram materials, the best way to apply cantograms, the limitations of misting as a tool. There were even some speculative texts on cantogram creation, but they were too vague to have any practical use, just the desperate guesses of sorcerers who hadn’t been privy to any real secrets.

I made my way systematically through the ‘decorative’ objects scattered around the structured magic shelves, reaching into them as I went.

I watched a ritual for summoning a lesser named spirit called Ashenti, as seen from the point of view of someone hiding in the trees, trying to keep their breath quiet. It ended when the obsertver accidentally stepped on a branch, alerting the ritualists.

There was a relic that showed me the moment a corporeal spirit broke apart on a large spirit siphon canto, being messily and painfully dismembered while it was still alive.

The last obvious relic I found was a ring that put me in the body of a sorcerer who’d replaced their middle finger with a metal construction that incorporated a steel pen nib. I watched them mist a canto into the air, which then started a small campfire. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make out the design of the cantogram.

Most of the relics were interesting, but not many were directly useful. There were some, like the dagger, where I couldn’t even see the connection to structured magic at all. I wanted to revisit some of them, if only for the experience of being somewhere else, outside of the academy. If I could have left before the caning, I might even have wanted to go back to the moment held in the walking stick.

I slumped down in the isle between the shelves of structured magic, looking along the books.

My eyes fell on one book I’d never been able to read. Not because it was in an obscure language, but because it’d been ruined at some point in the past. Its cover was scorched and its pages were blackened, like it had been left in the fire. I had thought it’d been left down there by mistake, completely unreadable and unrecoverable. But maybe it wasn’t useless.

I felt along the spines until I found the one where the leather was brittle and pitted. I pulled it out and opened the cover. The pages were just as black and scarred as before. In a few places I could make out the loops of letters, but I couldn’t even read enough to confirm it was written in Irisian. I closed the cover, held the book in my lap, and reached for the Fold.

The library floor tore away beneath me. Light shone all around. There was a blue sky above me lit by a bright sun. I fell onto grass and rolled.

The landscape around me was hilly, and I tumbled a little way down a hillside before I reached out and snatched at a passing shrub, stopping my fall at the cost of a little skin on my palm. I rolled onto my side then pushed myself to my feet.

The terrain reminded me a lot of the landscape I’d seen in the dagger. I was halfway down a hill, looking out on a shallow valley that had a river running through it. A mountain chain rose up to my right, and on the left, the valley opened out into flat farmland. The air smelled of damp earth and manure, with the occasional blast of wildflowers on the wind. It’d rained recently. The grass was slick, and I could still smell the rain.

I’d barely got my feet under me when my pursuer appeared. She was a Reeve, of course. A woman with a bare gray scalp in place of hair, one bright yellow eye, and a high-collared black robe that opened around a suit of embossed leather armor. She was carrying a short sword in one hand, holding the other out for balance as she slid gracefully down the slope.

She grinned as she slid into sword range, stopping her slide by planting her foot on a rock and lunging forward with the sword.

I caught the thrust on the flat of my hand. I winced as the blade struck my palm, but instead of penetrating, the dagger blade just slid off. She tried again, feinting with a slash before reversing the movement and stabbing at my ribs, a move straight out of Forescare. The blade cut my shirt, but glanced off my skin, and the Reeve’s grin turned into a snarl.

“You think your pathetic god will protect you from me?” she shouted.

Her foot lashed out, hitting my chin and sending me toppling backwards. I rolled over twice before hitting my shoulder on a rock. The pain was sharp and final. I’d never broken a bone before, but this time I practically heard the crack.

The Reeve was already standing over me, smirking.

“You follow Arilyn the Martyr, don’t you? I’ve seen idols of her. A woman pierced by blades. And I notice that you’re protected from blades.” The Reeve held up her free hand and rubbed her fingers together. “I’ve never seen her depicted on fire.”

Her hand struck out and blue lightning flared from her fingertips. The arcing energy struck my face and chest, playing over my skin like a caress. Where the light touched my skin I burned and blackened. My clothes caught light, and pain raged through my body. My heart was filled with a feeling like stabbing needles. My back arched, my fingers splaying so far back it felt like they’d break from the work of my own muscles.

I woke up panting in the library. My body was soaked with sweat. My joints ached. It felt like my body had been mimicking the motions of the person in the memory, but if that were really true I’d have torn muscles and bruises from thrashing around. It must just have been an echo of the moment, my memory of the memory. I dropped the book and pulled my legs up, wrapping my arms around my knees as I shivered. That had been the kind of experience I’d been afraid of, delving into the relics.

Unfortunately, I was going to have to do it again.

Towards the end of the memory, when the Reeve had been raising her hand to fry me with lighting, I’d caught a glimpse of something on her hand. It’d been a pattern of silver marks, small characters set into the skin of her fingertip, like a metallic tattoo. Looking back, I was sure. It was a cantogram.

I’d only glimpsed it for a fraction of a fraction of a second, through half-focused eyes, but I recognized it for what it was — a weapon. When the Reeve’s maja had turned into lightning, it had been through that canto. Cantos, I could learn. All I had to do to learn this one was suffer its effects, again and again. I was going to end up putting my hand in the fire after all.