I stared at the market stall like a starving person looking through a bakery window. There were rolls of paper an inch thick, cream-colored and fine-grained, with a faint dappled texture where the pulp had been pressed, drained, and dried. The raw edge of the rolls were perfectly straight, with the faintest evidence of almost invisibly thin fibers, and even from six feet away I could see the paper was no thicker than the width of a hair, and uniform all the way along the edge.

I approached slowly, ignoring the stall owner’s dark eyes glaring at me from beneath bushy eyebrows. He didn’t have any maja as far as I could sense, just a mundane merchant who’d been allowed to sell at the academy’s market.

I stopped by the stall, reaching down to run my thumb across the loose end of a roll.

It had been raining recently, but the paper was ash-dry, despite the late spring humidity. The surface was slightly rough, with a texture that made my fingertips tingle as I brushed it. It felt like cotton, woven rather than laid, with a slight smoothness that suggested it would hold ink without blotting. The air was full of the odors of damp earth and the travel-weary bodies of the merchants, but the paper didn’t have any strong smell. This roll had been made by a master of the craft, in a well-equipped mill, with materials chosen for quality.

“What paper is this?” I asked the stall owner.

“Cotton rag,” he answered.

“Is it sized?” I asked. Sizing was a glue added to paper to make it stronger and stop ink from bleeding, but the cheaper makers would skip it.

His expression changed slightly. His frown smoothed away as suspicion gave way to guarded interest

“Slack sized,” he said.

“What with?”

“Starch.”

I looked back down at it. Starch sized paper would get moldy quickly if it got damp, but it wouldn’t degrade the ink. Cotton was strong and would hold up well over time. With care, any documents I created with it would last my entire life, even if my life wasn’t violently cut short. The paper was perfect, but I couldn’t bear the thought of writing on yet another scroll.

“Is this the same?” I asked, moving my hand to a wood-bound notebook next to it.

The book’s cover was a pair of large, thin shavings of wood connected by a thin strip of the same. All the pieces were joined by a strip of black leather, glued across the spine. The wood was unstained and unsealed, but it had been sanded smooth, and the maker had decorated the front by scorching it with a pattern of falling leaves.

“The same,” the stall owner said.

I lifted the cover. The paper inside was similar to the roll, with the same grain and smoothness, but a slightly different texture. A maker’s mark was burned onto the inside of the cover, a circle with a plant-like coat of arms at the center.

“Who’s the maker?” I asked.

“Ixaris the Younger.”

The name didn’t mean anything to me, and the stall owner probably knew it, but the maker had obviously been proud of their work, and it was always good to know the names of reputable producers.

There was no price listed on the journal, or anything on the stall. I had six silver ducs from the corpse of the Behr spirit, and no frame of reference.

I picked the book up, weighing it in my hand. It felt like about ten ounces, though some of that was the cover. Back in Kirkswill I wouldn’t have paid more than a silver shilling for it, though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a merchant trying to charge two, with a suitable sales routine about how rare and fine a specimen it was. This stall owner didn’t seem like much of a salesman. I wondered how much that had to do with who he was selling to.

I steeled myself and asked the question I’d been dreading.

“How much?”

“Ten silver ducs,” he said.

“Ten ducs! For this?”

My objection, typically rote, was driven by genuine outrage this time.

The stall owner flinched, lowering his gaze. His hands gripped the table, and I thought he looked about to run. After a few seconds I noticed that he was shaking.

I tried to imagine what it had to be like as someone without maja, bringing his cart full of goods to a market in the sorcerer’s academy.

If a random student had been walking around with six silver coins, then money couldn’t exactly be scarce here. That might tempt a mundane merchant up the mountain. But at the same time, most of the students here were killers, or future killers.

The owner had to be worried that any student might just kill him for what they wanted, and I wasn’t sure the worry was unfounded.

“What I meant to say is, I don’t think ten ducs is fair,” I said more levelly. “I wouldn’t pay more than a single duc for it.”

“It’s got to be two,” the merchant said. He looked up, releasing his grip on the table. “Two ducs.”

Two ducs. A third of my money. But it would open up so many options for me.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

I fished two of the silver coins out of my pouch and handed them to him. He took them, dropping them into the slot of a lockbox next to him on the counter.

I picked up the book and held it to my chest.

I’d only properly inspected the first couple of feet of the stall. Beyond the paper, there were clay ink pots; little round jars with telltale black stains around the edge of the lid, like small fat animals that had eaten too much. There were ink sticks and ink stones. There were pens; expertly cut feather quills, reed pens like the ones I made, and even sharp steel nibs in wooden holders. There was a blackwood case sitting open near the back, proudly displaying a set of iron geometry tools, and a straw basket at the end with a collection of pencils in both charcoal and graphite.

Along the back of the stall were the premium supplies. Fine paper the owner was selling by the sheaf, glass bottles of ink in black, red, sepia, and green. Sealing wax and a premade signets, and right at the center, a steel-bodied mechanical pen that I only recognized because I’d seen a picture in a merchant’s catalog.

I picked up one of the ink stones, a rectangular block the length and thickness of my thumb with a depression in the center. It was made to be used with either a brush or a dip pen, so that an ink stick could be ground against it then mixed with water to make liquid ink.

“How much for this?” I asked.

“Two silver bits.”

I hummed, thinking.

I didn’t know how many silver bits were in a duc and I wasn’t going to ask. That would show him just how ignorant I was and ruin my position, even assuming he would even answer truthfully. I just nodded instead.

“And for the ink sticks?”

“The ink sticks are a silver duc each.”

That seemed a lot, but I didn’t want to scare the merchant again. I’d just do him the favor of assuming they were high quality ink. They could have been. I was used to the more expensive sticks having designs molded onto them, flowers or leaves, or just a geometric pattern, but for all I knew that was a Losirisian gimmick.

“And the steel nibs?”

The merchant’s flat expression suddenly became interested. “Four ducs, for those.”

“Would you take two ducs?”

“Two? I can’t take two. Three and six bits is all I can do.”

I stared for a few seconds at the nibs. The advantage over reeds or quills was that they wouldn’t need to be constantly recut. The steel could bend without ever becoming slack, and they would stand up to the soaking and scrubbing needed to get gummed-up ink off them. It would save me some time and a lot of hassle. Unfortunately I couldn’t afford one.

“I’ll take this stone and the ink stick.”

The merchant charged me one duc and two bits. When I handed him two ducs he slipped them into his lockbox then handed me six much smaller silver coins back. Those must be the bits. Back home, I would have called them silver pennies. I suddenly realized I’d been dramatically overcharged for the ink stone. It wouldn’t have cost me more than an iron groat back in Kirkswill.

Despite my relative poverty, it was hard to care.

I pushed my new purchases into my bag, carefully wrapping the journal in sack cloth. The ink stick came in waxed paper, which I rested on top, shoving the heavy ink stone down to the bottom of the pack. I picked the bag up and continued through the market.

There was a mundane smith selling small steel tools and weapons; knives, forks, daggers, shears, and even a small saw. I didn’t stop to ask for prices. My sword wasn’t in good condition, but I’d got it sharp enough to cut the things I needed to cut. I ignored the stalls selling clothing, and even a cart where a woman was selling traditional Spring’s End sweets. They were the same here as in Losiris, dried apple rings fried in sweet batter, hazelnut brittle, and spiced biscuits shaped like flowers. It was jarring to see something so familiar here among the mud and the stones of the mountainside. At least the woman selling them looked quietly terrified, or I’d have thought I was caught in someone’s Dream aspect illusion.

This was the first time I’d seen mundane merchants from outside the academy running stalls at the market, and I hoped it would continue. It wasn’t just the chance at getting goods from the outside. I enjoyed seeing people who weren’t soldiers or sorcerers. These were just normal people, who lived lives free from magic, down in the cities and villages of Antorx. They weren’t my people, but they might as well be. The currency was different but the patterns were the same, and the familiarity was a comfort.

I stopped at one more stall before leaving. A folding table was set out with general goods, and I used my last two ducs to buy a glass-shrouded oil lamp and a jar of oil. It would be useful for the light, but more importantly, I could use the soot from the burning oil to make some decent ink of my own.

I left the market with a bag full of prizes and a few silver bits rattling in my pouch.

I moved away from the market at a fast walk, skipping down the dirt ramp without worrying about falling, then on onto the next terrace.

As I turned to head to the tier down, I caught someone watching me. It was a narrow figure with pale skin and a robe slightly darker than mine, staring at me from behind one of the potentiate huts.

I took a second to make sure it wasn’t Mira or Duran. I hadn’t seen them since our fight the previous week, but this person’s outline didn’t match either of theirs.

I continued along the terrace, checking behind me every few seconds. When I was halfway to the next ramp I realized that they were following me. They’d left their hut, and were walking after me down the path. There were other students around, but nobody else was paying me any attention.

I started walking faster. When I reached the ramp, there were another two students standing at the bottom, talking in low voices. My mind went back to the night I’d found the spirit spring, when Mira and her friends had cornered me.

I was suddenly sure I was about to be robbed. I thought about running, or making the first move and taking them by surprise.

I reached for my core and pulled deeply on my maja. It came quickly, filling my body, massaging away the aches and pains and itches that living on a mountainside and sleeping on straw generated.

I’d managed to drink my fill of the maja spring, before a group of eight older students turned up to chase us off. They hadn’t been willing to accept any trade, and even Adrian didn’t think we should try fighting them, so we had to retreat. Until that point I’d had seven hours of uninterrupted accumulation in the maja-rich air of the fissure. My reserves were in better shape than even when I’d arrived. After filling my core, I’d continued to accumulate, and through an uncomfortable stretching feeling, expanded what I was capable of storing. I wasn’t the best judge of maja capacity, but I felt that I didn’t compare badly to any other initiate, or even some of the potentiates.

While I was drawing on my maja, I tried the reactions-enhancing technique I’d found written in Aderyn’s notes. I pulled maja through my spine and into the back of my skull, as if I was threading a needle.

The technique had never really worked for me. As the energy filled the spaces described in Aderyn’s notes, time seemed to stutter, moving in quick bursts between moments of painful slowness.

I turned back and saw that the boy following me had stopped. He didn’t look older than sixteen, a native Antorxian with short-cropped hair. There was no weapon in his hand, but I didn’t think that meant much.

I didn’t have a weapon in my hand either, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t armed. I was inked with what I was starting to wear as my standard armament. On my left palm I’d painted the Storm’s Gate, only good for one full use, but damaging and alarming enough that it might be enough. On the back of my right hand was the Sky’s Appetite, the maja-absorbing cantogram I could use to block less energetic magical attacks. And on my right palm was the Spirit Siphon canto, an easily-accessible way of attacking incorporeal spirits. On top of Force and Wheel aspects, I was fully capable of defending myself.

The two students at the bottom of the ramp looked up sharply, reacting to my stirring maja. They exchanged a glance, then made themselves scarce, hurrying away down the terrace.

I spun and stared at the student following me. We locked eyes for several seconds, until eventually he turned away, heading across to a nearby hut. When I sure he’d stopped following, I continued on to the barracks.

I rushed to the cell I shared with Adrian. He wasn’t there, away chasing butterflies or something, so I had the space to myself. I collected a cup of water from the common room, then sat down on my bed, spreading my new purchases in front of me.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

I picked up the ink stick first, rubbing it onto the well of the ink stone. The coarse stone ground away at the stick, leaving chunks of slightly waxy powder behind. I tipped some water into the stone, then used my brush to mix it into a deep black glossy ink. It released smells of oil and smoke as I mixed it, the liquid lapping at the edges of the well but never quite spilling. The result was perfectly smooth, with none of the lumps I’d had to live with over the last few weeks. It wasn’t maja-infused, and wouldn’t ever be, but that wasn’t why I wanted it.

I picked up a reed pen and dipped the nib into the well of the stone. Ink flooded into the belly of the reed, coating the nib in a thin layer that stuck to it when I lifted the pen up.

Opening the journal to its first page, I brought my pen close to the paper.

I felt the tension I always felt when starting a new page. A terror, really, that I would spoil the paper and Bevin would shout at me, or that I’d make a mistake that would keep me awake at night.

Ignoring the fears I brought the pen to paper and started writing.

The journal of Dorian Tisk, Day 1, Spring 63.

I started writing out everything I knew about magic.

Force, Wheel, and Thought. How I learned them, the ways I’d learned to use them, their dangers and limits. The words were protection against my own fallible memory, and an exercise in refreshing what I knew. They were evidence that I’d been here at all. If I did die in the future, to a swamp spirit, or to another student, or to gentling, then at least there’d be a record.

I wrote my entries in Old Irisian, but using the Varian alphabet. For sensitive entries or magical terms, I transliterated the text phonetically into the Hoghan script, the smooth curls of Varian turning jarringly into the runic language for a word or two, before transitioning back.

It was the best defense I could think of against someone else reading it. It would take someone who knew all three languages, written and spoken, to comprehend it. As I learned more and committed more to paper, the book might become something worth taking from me, and I wanted to discourage that by making it useless to as many people as possible.

After I’d written what I knew about aspects and spirits, I moved onto cantograms. I carefully sketched out the cantograms I knew. The journal would be a single place where I could reference all of them, when the details started to fade from my memory. I added Sky’s Appetite first, then Winter Hearth, Night’s Welcome, then Storm’s Gate, hiding it among the less important designs. I added a stray line to the Storm’s Gate diagram. It would be enough to spoil the canto for anyone blindly copying it, but as long as I remembered I’d done it, I could still use it as a reference. I’d suffered to learn the Storm’s Gate, and as far as I could tell it was the only cantogram I knew that couldn’t be found written down in the library. The rarer the knowledge, the more intensely it needed to be protected; this was also a lesson I’d learned in the library. I finished with the Spirit Siphon and Stone’s Quickness cantos, labeled in my phonetic Hoghan.

Now that I had a good set of writing equipment, I’d be able to make notes directly from library books. I wouldn’t be limited in what I could remember from one visit to the next. This book could become my personal library of cantograms. I could have a canto on hand no matter what I needed, wherever I went.

As I wrote, I started to notice an unpleasant odor in the cell. It reminded me of sour milk. Had Adrian left some cheese moldering somewhere? I continued writing until the smell hit me again, stronger. This time there was a faint tingling sensation with it. It was a maja odor. Somehow, there was a unfamiliar spirit in the cell with me.

I looked up at the window. The sunlight was still strong. The high window faced west, and it was brightest just before dusk than at any other time of day. I looked to Adrian’s bed. It was untidy. That was an accomplishment when our only bedding was the thin mattress. There didn’t seem to be anything under his bed. We didn’t have a lot of possessions, and wouldn’t trust them to be left in the cell anyway.

Nothing strange caught my attention. I took a deep breath. I could still smell it.

High on the wall, the small spider spirit appeared at the edge of the window. It was looking darker than usual, almost solid, but the spider wasn’t the source of the smell. The little spirit barely had any smell at all, and what I had picked up was different.

“Can you sense something?” I asked it. “Can you understand me?”

It scuttled away, back out of the window.

I twisted on the bed and fluffed up my mattress. There was nothing under it.

Finally I leaned over the edge of the bed and looked underneath.

I had chance to see a flash of luminous scales and a yellow eye before something was flying at my face.

I snatched at the air in front of me and my hand closed around something. When I pulled my arm out, I was holding a writhing serpent spirit.

It was green, scaled, about a foot long and not much thicker than my thumb. It had six yellow eyes lining the sides of its head, and a tail that forked into two long spines. It was translucent, but not completely insubstantial. The blood in my body was full enough of maja to be a barrier to it, but I could feel something in my hand as well. It was like holding very light cloth, or threads of hair wound into something the shape of a snake.

“Where did you come from?” I asked it. I hadn’t found a way to tell whether a spirit was intelligent enough to speak or not, but I knew that some could.

The snake didn’t seem to be able to. It thrashed in my hand, bending its head to try and sink translucent fangs into my skin.

I didn’t want to know what the insubstantial spirit version of snake venom would do to me, so I moved my grip up to just below its head.

As I immobilized its head, it started flicking its spined tail at me. I caught the other end of it with my other hand, and it started to hiss like water on a skillet as it came into contact with the Spirit Siphon canto on my other palm.

I didn’t want to release it. For all I knew it was something Mira had sent to spy on me, or even kill me.

“If I let you go, will you leave me alone?” I asked.

A knock at the door made me jump. The latch went a second later, and the door started to open.

The snake took that moment to try and escape. It writhed out of my grip while I was looking at the door, then glided up the smooth stone wall to the window. It vanished through the opening.

The door stopped moving. Jason poked his head in. His hair hung around his face, long straight strands draping across the sides of his head. He still wore his hair in the style of the rich city merchants, but it seemed to be suffering from lack of access to soap and hot water.

“Hello, Dorian. Do you have time to talk?”

I looked down at my empty hands, then spent a second checking my arms for bites. I couldn’t see any damage, but if the spirit was immaterial enough, it wouldn’t have left any marks on the skin.

“I suppose,” I said, looking from my hands up to the window. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“A snake spirit.”

“No,” he said, staring up at the window as if he’d be able tonsee it. “It was probably just a wild spirit. They pass through the academy occasionally, and come into the barracks when they sense our maja.”

“Strange,” I said. “I haven’t noticed that.”

Jason came in and sat down on Adrian’s bed. Adrian wouldn’t have liked that. He was protective of what little personal space he had. I twisted and shut the cover of my journal, desperately hoping that the ink had time to dry.

“What did you want?” I asked him.

“Straight to the point then,” he said, folding his hands together. “I’ve been paying attention to you. To your studies, and your progress. I was impressed by how you handled yourself at the spring.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Thanks.”

Jason looked uncomfortable in the silence that followed. He shuffled forward on the bed and hunched over and bringing his shoulders together.

“I think that you’re a person of note in our little group, Dorian. You’re someone who I can be proud to stand with.”

“Yes. Well, we’re all standing together.” I said. "You, me, Adrian, Sal, Tom—

“But what about the future? Have you thought about what you’ll do when Adrian leaves?”

“He’s leaving?”

“They all are, eventually, I think. But not you and I.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “We’re not?”

“I want us to be allies, Dorian,” he said, brushing the question off.

“I thought we already were.”

“We’re all friends. And we help each other. It’s a casual arrangement. I want an alliance between you and I, as sorcerers.”

I shut my eyes briefly. I leaned into my spiritual senses, feeling for other maja. Jason was there, a presence without texture, like cold wax. I couldn’t feel anyone else. I suddenly felt cornered in the small room.

When I opened my eyes Jason wore a friendly smile and an open expression. We were all friends, here. Jason seemed, at worst, a little awkward.

“I don’t really know what all that means,” I said.

“It’s a formal arrangement. A tradition among sorcerers. Two people whose goals align will form an alliance. They watch each other’s backs, cover each other’s weaknesses. They trust each other not to take advantage of momentary weakness to take what belongs to the other.”

“Doesn’t sound very much like the sorcerers,” I said. “I’m surprised their Sovereign’s Path allows it.”

“It’s not prohibited by the Path, as I understand it.”

“I don’t really see how it would be different to what we have now,” I said.

“It’s different because it’s a decision,” he said. His voice was getting a little tighter than it had been before. “Because it’s an oath. And I know we’re both people who take our oaths seriously.”

“Do you want something specific?” I asked, lost. We were all already working together. If he wanted something more, something specific, I didn’t know why he wouldn’t just ask.

“An alliance with a promising peer,” he answered.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I’m already helping as much as I can. If you want something beyond that, then no. We should all be helping each other. That’s the whole point of the group.”

Jason rose to his feet. He straightened, then put his hands at his side.

“I see. Well, thank you for hearing me out.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

His eyes strayed to my journal.

“While I’m here, what was the magic you used to cast lightning, the other night?”

I peered at his face, trying to stop my confusion from showing. I’d already mentioned the Storm’s Gate to everyone, hadn’t I? Or had that just been to Adrian?

“It was a cantogram I learned in the library,” I said.

“Like the one that makes heat?”

He was talking about the Winter Hearth. I’d drawn it on a few of the cell walls earlier in the season, when the spring night has still been cold.

“Yes, kind of.”

“Would you teach me it?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “It’s not something I can teach, really. It’s a complex design that has to be recreated exactly. Learning cartograms just involves a lot of staring and memorizing and drawing.”

I opened my journal to the page where I’d drawn Winter Hearth to use as an example. I held it out, showing it to him.

“This is the Winter Hearth canto, for example,” I said. “It has to be copied exactly for it to work. You’d need to be able to draw a perfect circle to begin, freehand unless you have tools, then ink these lines at the right angles, with the right curves.”

“I see,” he said, peering at it. “Could you make me a copy of the one you used for lightning so I can study it?”

“It’s more than just the design,” I said. “You also need the right materials. You’d have to find a source of maja-infused pigment and make your own maja-infused ink, then it has to be drawn with the right tool.”

“Still. If I had a copy, I could practice.”

I stared at him for a few seconds.

“It’s probably the most complicated cantogram I have,” I said. “Let me copy one of the simpler ones for you. When you can recreate it, I’ll draw you the Storm’s Gate.”

He stared down at me. There was something other than friendliness in his eyes, now.

It vanished a second later when he smiled.

“No, that’s all right. Save your paper. I don’t think it’s the area of study for me.” He raised an imaginary cap. “I’ll be on my way. Thank you for hearing me out.”

“No problem,” I said, watching him head for the door.

He left without looking back. I got up a second later and moved Adrian’s rock over to wedge under the door, before returning to my bed.

What was that?

While I was contemplating the weirdness of the conversation, I heard a low hissing coming from the window. It was quiet, almost inaudible, with a cadence that sounded like laughter.

I got up and tried to peer up to see what was making it. The window was too high, so I dragged my bed frame a foot across the floor and stood on the corner, hoisting myself up to look directly out.

The snake spirit was there, caught in a web that stretched across from one edge of the open window frame to the other. The spider spirit was crawling over it, slowly bundling it up in webbing even while it twitched and thrashed.

The hissing wasn’t coming from the snake, but from the spider. It was making gleeful little sounds as it entombed its prey.

With a jolt I realized that the spider spirit was now completely opaque. It was solid. Corporeal. And so was the web.