The needle was iron, an inch long, thinner than a thorn and sharp enough to draw blood if mishandled. It slid easily through the weave of my practice cloth, pulling the coarse thread behind it. All the cantograms I had were surface-level designs, which meant if I was ever going to be able to stitch them, the thread needed to stay on the surface of the fabric.

I plucked the tip of the needle and pulled, tugging the thread the rest of the way through. The grayish thread slid through easily at first, but then it caught. I pulled with a little more force, trying to clear the snag, but as soon as I put pressure on it the thread immediately tore, breaking where it passed through the fabric.

“I broke another thread,” I whispered to Terese.

Terese was holding more of the thread in her hands, one end wound around a homemade spindle, the other end coming together from a tuft of dandelion seeds. More of the seeds were piled in front of her, a mountain of white fluff that represented hours of work gathering them across the mountainside.

She dropped the spindle and twisted on the floor to look. Reaching out, she took my needle, cupping the broken thread in her other hand. From her expression I would have guessed I’d broken my arm rather than a thread.

She turned back around, pulling the thread free and placing the needle on the floor in front of her. I obviously wasn’t getting it back.

“It’s not linen,” she said. “The fibers are so short. You’ve got to handle it more carefully.”

Like all the children of Kirkswill, I’d spent time spinning thread from wool before I was apprenticed off to Bevin. But that had always come to me cleaned and carded, easy to twist and cord. Terese had had a similar experience, but in her village wool was rare, so they mixed it with dandelion seed, cattail, and thistledown to stretch it. Here she was spinning dandelion seed on its own, which apparently took a lot of skill and produced very flimsy thread.

Terese finished working the snapped piece of thread into her ball, then grabbed another bundle of white fluff from the ground and continued twisting that into thread.

I watched her for a minute, then asked, “Can I borrow your needle again?”

She wound a few more twists onto the spindle then reached down and grabbed it. She held it out to me so sharply she might have jabbed me with it if my hand had been out.

I took it back and threaded it with my remaining thread, going back to my practice.

My first few stitches went well, slowly tracing the outer curve of a circle. I managed seven good stitches before the needle went through the wrong gap in the weave and I ended up with a line going off in a subtly wrong direction.

It was going to take months for me to learn to do this right, but now that I could foresee the possibility of having access to maja-infused spider silk, I was willing to put the work in.

The webs spun by the spider spirit living in my cell were weakly but noticeably alive with the tingle of maja, and just like the maja-infused ink I’d made from Wild Century’s leaves, that meant thread spun from them could be used for cantograms. I’d already tried making thread from it, hand-twisting one of the spider’s discarded webs into lumpy but serviceable yarn.

After that my imagination had started getting away from me. I imagined robes with permanent Winter Hearth cantos, and sleeves stitched with Spirit Siphons that I didn’t need to repaint every day. I saw hoods with the Sky’s Appetite drawn across them in needlework, passively blocking attempts to trap me with external thoughts and illusions. Moreover, I imagined selling them. What rich merchant wouldn’t want a cloak that kept them warm in winter, provided I could find a way to keep the canto supplied with maja. And there were ways to do that.

But to reach that point I needed to learn the art of embroidery, and that wasn’t easy. Even with the best tools and materials, I knew it would take months to become adequate. The seamsters of Kirkswill took a year before their work was good enough to sell to the passing merchants, and the old masters had taken years to hone their craft. I was getting a late start.

Terese had never practiced embroidery either, though like apparently everyone in her village she was an accomplished maker of clothes. She certainly knew more than me.

I watched her as she finished spinning the thread in her hand, twisting the spindle on the ground to gather it up into the ball.

She reached out to take the needle back from me, then threaded the end of her cord through the eye. Picking up an oddly-shaped cutting of canvas from the floor, she started sewing parts of it together according to a design that only she could see.

The fabric we were using was salvaged from the sacks that the soldiers brought the food in. Ever since I’d taken that first one almost three months ago to use as a makeshift bag, anything the soldiers left in the barracks had been fair game. I doubted that they liked us tearing up the sacks for our own use, even sackcloth had its price, but nobody had objected yet.

“What are you making?” I asked her.

She held up her work in progress. It was already taking shape, looking like a half-formed bag.

“A rain hood for Adrian,” she said. “I wanted to make a bag, but the thread won’t hold the weight.”

“Why are you making him a hood?” I asked.

I was suddenly worried I’d missed something. I shared a room with Adrian and we talked often, but we didn’t talk about everything.

Would I have noticed if something was developing between him and Terese?

It wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary, I guessed. Adrian was a boy and Terese was a girl, and from what I understood that’s how it often worked. We had been here three months, which I supposed was long enough for feelings to develop, if I ignored the crushing weight of the situation. And it was spring, and the shock of being brought here might have started wearing off, for some.

“It’s my Spring’s End gift for him,” she said.

“Spring’s End,” I said.

I looked at her, double checking that she wasn’t being sarcastic. She gave me a stern look in return. She was serious.

Spring’s End was one of the biggest festivals of the year in Kirkswill. The stockpiled food we hadn’t used over the winter was baked into sweet treats, there were ribbons, and dancing, and gifts were exchanged.

It was coming up. But the thought of celebrating it here was clearly ridiculous. What were we going to do? Dress the Masters in garlands and put daisies in their hair? Have a bonfire in the mustering ground? Maybe our assignments would come tied with ribbon next week. The image of Master Cordaze in a flower crown was warmly horrifying.

At least Terese was only insane. Adrian wasn’t about to disappear into some new confusing situation. I hadn’t missed anything significant.

“Are we doing that, here?” I asked.

“We’re just doing it among ourselves,” she said, putting another stitch through canvas to shape the hood. “Tom’s found some wild honey we’re going to put on the oat cakes. Adrian’s set up a gift circle. Tom says he can sing, but none of us want him to.”

They were all in on it? They were actually doing it?

The idea of a Spring’s End at Windshriek was so absurd it made me feel sick. I took a deep breath, then another. I didn’t know what had possessed them. Just thinking about it was enough to drag my thoughts back home. The day of Spring’s End was almost always sunny in Kirkswill, and everyone was glad for a chance at fun after the work of the planting season. Memories of sugared apple and flower wreaths hit me like a curse.

I reached down and touched the stone floor. The cold of it grounded me. How could anyone celebrate anything after what we’d seen? Why were they doing this?

“We included you in the gift circle,” Terese added.

“What?”

“Your name went on the slate with everyone else,” she said.

“Someone’s getting me a gift?” I asked. My stomach was suddenly tight.

“Yes. But you don’t get to know who!”

I jumped to my feet. I looked around, as if I was going to spot someone preparing a gift for me in the empty room.

“What if I don’t want a gift?” I said.

“Then give it to me. I’ll have it,” she said.

“I didn’t even see the slate,” I said.

She pointed to a reed basket sitting across the room, next to the water barrel.

I dropped my canvas and headed for the basket. My feet felt heavy as I walked across the room. There was a black stone tablet sitting at the bottom of it, just a piece of the slate scree that could be found all over the mountainside. At one point there’d been a list of names on it written in chalk, but the potential gift recipients that had been wiped off as each of the others picked their targets. Now most were smeared. Only one name was left readable.

Jason Isarion.

If I’d seen the slate at the start I’d have wiped my own name off. Too late, now. Someone had already taken my name, which meant I was going to get something whether I liked it or not. And with only one name left, if I didn’t get something for Jason, nobody would.

I let out an annoyed snort. I didn’t even know anything about the man, except that he’d grown up wealthy and was curious about cantograms. Maybe he’d like a reed pen?

There was something like a flame fluttering somewhere in my body. A warm light, full of images of home, and it was trying to get out of control.

I looked to the right, staring at the common room’s front wall. There were still stains on the stone from the soldiers I’d killed. If I looked closely, I’d probably find buried bone.

I still had my assignment to do this week. It was just a chore. I had to gather a jar of swamp water from a place where a body was rotting. They’d at least provided the jar. The wetlands were full of dead animals, so I didn’t think it would take me more than a day or two, and I still had most of the week.

I picked up the slate and stared at it, wondering whether I should go down into the swamp now.

“When are we swapping gifts?” I asked Terese.

“On deadline day,” she said. “We’re going to have a fire up somewhere, out of the way.”

I had as long to find a gift as I had to find the corpse water, then.

It was too late in the day to be worth walking down the mountain, I decided. I left the room and headed for my cell. I had an idea for a gift, something simple and unimpeachable that I could make in an afternoon.

I hesitated at the door to the cell. I could hear Adrian’s voice on the other side, but I couldn’t hear who he was talking to.

I turned to my spiritual senses for a second, checking that I wasn’t about to interrupt something, but when I felt for maja I could only feel one presence, and it wasn’t Adrian.

Relentless drumming. Rain, or hail, or sling stones. It was the sensation I’d felt in the swamp, and in the fight with Mira.

I flipped the latch and pushed the door. It hit Adrian’s doorstop, but I kept pushing, scraping the rock across the ground.

Adrian was standing facing the window, his hands raised like he was trying to collect rain in them.

He twisted to look at me as I stepped in. He seemed shocked for a second, then he relaxed.

“Dorian! Hello,” he said, turning to face me.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Me? I was just accumulating.”

I looked from him to the bed, then back to him.

“Do you always accumulate standing up?”

“Yes. It’s good for my back.”

I took a long blink and felt for maja again. The strange drumming was gone, replaced by Adrian’s normal hot-stone presence.

I’d seen people standing like he had been before. The cleric in Kirkswill used to do it every sixth day, standing in front of the dozen or so people who cared.

“Adrian, were you praying?”

“Praying! No.”

“Isn’t a sin to deny your faith?” I asked.

He walked past me and shut the door, wedging the stone against it. He spun around and faced me.

“I’ll take a sin over being dead,” he said quietly.

“So you were praying.”

“It’s not prayer,” he said quickly. “The god’s don’t really care about praying. It doesn’t do anything for them. But I was in contact. Call it communing.”

I shook my head. I rubbed the skin between my eyebrows.

“What god?”

“Horis.”

I tried to remember what I knew about the greater spirits. The Abbey worshipped a fairly cludged-together pantheon, made up of the kind of gods that would appeal to farmers and merchants, spirits that usually had nothing to do with each other, outside the arbitrary selection of the Losirisian clerics.

“Which one’s that?” I asked.

“You know, Horis the Righteous War?”

“I don’t know it.”

“The Antorxians banned worship of him. Probably because they’d be on the wrong side of any kind of righteous war.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “The greater spirits can be flexible about who they consider righteous.”

“He favors revolutionaries and the oppressed,” Adrian added. “That would be reason enough for them. The Abbey I grew up at had one cleric who followed him in secret. He taught me the few prayers he knew. I never thought much about it, while I was there. I called to him a few times as a child, but it was just like calling to any other god.”

“He wasn’t listening.”

“No.”

“Because they don’t really care about us,” I said.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“Until I tried calling with maja,” Adrian said.

I stared at him for a long moment. I connected what he was saying to the strange maja I’d been feeling from him.

“He listened,” I guessed.

“Listened. Answered. Helped.”

I took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. This was worse than if he’d been getting involved with Terese. Now I had to worry about the whims and desires of a god influencing him. Weren’t one set of tyrannical masters enough for him?

I moved across the room to sit on Adrian’s bed. He came to sit next to me, and I shuffled over to make room.

“How did he help?” I asked, first of all.

Adrian held out his hands. He looked down at them, stretching his fingers.

“He gives me strength. He protects me. He teaches me.”

“And what’s the cost?” I asked.

I didn’t believe in a benevolent god any more than I believed in a benevolent Reeve.

“He has precepts,” Adrian said. “I had to swear to them, as a condition of accepting his aid.”

“And what are the precepts? Is he forcing you to wage some kind of never-ending war of justice against Antorx, or something like that?”

“No. The first is that I’m only allowed to fight righteous battles. The second is that I’m not allowed to use the cowardly arts. I had to swear not to use them. There was a whole ritual I had to do while I was asleep.”

“You were doing religious rituals while I was asleep next to you?”

“Only once.”

“What are the cowardly arts?”

“Basically, anything a sorcerer would normally do. I can’t use maja outside my body. I can’t make deals with other spirits. I can’t get any of that gray-skin healing that the Reeves all have.”

“It’s fleshcrafting.”

“Yeah. It’s forbidden. If I lose a hand, then that’s it. No hand.”

“You’ve hobbled yourself,” I said. “You’ve given up your ability to use entire fields of magic, in exchange for power you can only use for purposes that this spirit likes. You’re going to die.”

“I feel like that’s an overreaction.”

“You have to break your oath,” I said. “What if you get an assignment to demonstrate an aspect?”

“I can use aspects. As long as I use them inside my body.”

“What if your assignment’s to use one externally?” I asked. “Like Force, or Fire? Sal had almost that specific assignment right after we arrived.”

“Maybe they’d give me a religious exemption?”

I stared at him. He was making joke, but the smile was fragile. Behind it, he looked scared.

“You have to break your oath.”

“It’s not the kind you can break. It’s the kind that changes you, forever.”

“Horis changed you?” I asked. “Like the failure’s fate?”

“It’s not fleshcrafting. The oath just became part of me. It’s part of my maja, I guess.”

I pulled my feet up off the ground, folding them under me. What had he done to himself? Locked himself out of magic, essentially.

He’d hated the idea of becoming a sorcerer right from the start. Now he’d guaranteed that he never would be, even if it meant he’d be dead or worse instead.

“Was it worth it?” I asked.

He seemed to think about it for a while.

“When we were fighting that girl, and she used her pain magic on us—”

“Its proper name was Agony aspect.”

“Yeah, that. When she was using it on us, I asked for help, and Horis helped. He reached down and covered me in his power.”

“We might have died back then, if not for that,” I suggested. It was the only nice thing I could think to say.

“Yeah, I thought so too,” Adrian said. “I don’t think I could fight a Reeve, yet, but if a battle is righteous I can call on his power, and any fight against a sorcerer is righteous. I don’t think I can lose a fight to another student.”

He shifted on the bed, pulling his feet up to sit on the bed with his legs out, so that we were facing each other.

“What does he teach you?” I asked after a while.

“He taught me to use Force aspect inside my body. He had to guide my hand at first, but since then I’ve learned to use it on my own.” He gestured, pointing at me. "And I passed that lesson on. So this is helping all of us. "

“Has he told you anything useful about our situation?” I asked. “Does he know where the closest town is? Or what our next assignments are going to be?”

“He’s not a big giver of information. He mostly only says one word at a time. Like Learn, or Resist.”

“How did he tell you about the ritual you needed to do?” I asked.

“It was kind of an instructional dream.”

I stood up from Adrian’s bed and went to mine. I pulled my pack out from underneath it and pulled out my journal. I needed to document some of this.

“Can you describe the ritual?” I asked.

Adrian’s gaze fell to the right.

“Can I?” he said. “I don’t know if I’m allowed.”

“Why don’t you try, and your god doesn’t reach down and smite you, then you’re probably allowed.”

“Alright.”

Haltingly at first, then with more confidence, he started describing the ritual he’d used to swear his oath of forbearance to Horis. First, he’d needed a weapon, and it had to be either a mace, hammer, or staff. The weapon needed to be marked with his own blood, and given the name of his enemy. He’d named it sorcery, which I thought was a little unimaginative. Then the weapon had to be touched to a flame in a place of complete darkness. He’d used one of Terese’s candles, and our cells were dark enough. Finally he’d had to move his maja to the weapon. All of it. When his maja came back, it came back changed. It returned to him carrying Horis’s oath.

“Did you know what you’d be giving up when you did this?” I asked him.

“I knew, more or less. From Cleric Dawman at the Abbey.”

I reached up and pinched my upper lip between my fingers, thinking.

“Someone’s going to notice,” I said. “The Masters probably already have. If I can feel when you’re using Horis’s maja, they definitely can, from further away. I’d be shocked if they didn’t recognize it as a greater spirit’s power. Some of them might even be able to identify the spirit.”

“If that were true, I’d already be dead,” Adrian said.

“Not necessarily,” I said.

I was thinking about the difference between the Antorxian Empire and the Windshriek sorcerers. They weren’t perfectly aligned. The prohibition against free magic was a rule set by the Empire, I was fairly sure.

The philosophy of the sorcerers was all about increasing their own personal power in absolute terms, not by suppressing magical study. The Sovereign’s Path didn’t start, It is not to learn but to stop anyone else learning. If it was the Reeves suppressing native magical study, then there’d only ever be one of them, hoarding their secrets and killing anyone else who aspired to it.

I was sure the academy benefited from the steady stream of mage-talented conscripts the Antorxian prohibition sent them, but the law against wild mages seemed more like the action of an empire trying to keep control than a magical sect which was more devoted to their philosophy than to empire management.

I knew there was conflict between the Antorxian military and Windshriek, and that there had been since before the Empire was founded. I didn’t know how old the memory of the Reeve knighting ceremony I’d found in the Fold relic was, but the uniforms the military officers had been wearing were modern, and that had ended with a Master killing the military officer who overstepped.

I thought it was more likely that the prohibition against worshiping certain greater spirits would be something that came from the imperial government. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t see the academy Masters denying any path that led to power, and Adrian’s weird religion had led him to power, even if it had imposed restrictions.

I’d sooner believe the Masters were aware of Adrian’s worship and completely disinterested than that they’d somehow missed it.

Maybe it went even further. Adrian’s first assignment had been to pray to a subterranean Antorxian god, Ixilthan, and they had to have known he was found in the Abbey. Had they known back then that this was the path he’d take? It seemed like a strange coincidence, otherwise.

My first assignment had been to collect leaves from Wild Century, which I’d used to make maja-infused ink, which I’d used to study cantograms. Had someone guessed that this was the path I’d take? Or had I only taken that path because of the opportunity the task offered me? Would Adrian have prayed to Horis, even if the task with Ixilthan hadn’t put the idea in his mind?

How much was knowing, and how much was guiding? Or maybe I was giving the Masters too much credit. They were more powerful than any of us, unknowably powerful, and it was hard to guess what their limits were. Was it possible to see the future? Was it possible to manipulate people with that much precision?

In the end, I decided they probably couldn’t see the future. I knew Antorx was currently fighting several wars, and if the Reeves had that power then there’d be no standing against them. And if they really had known us well enough to plot out our paths like game pieces, then it had to be limited. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when I arrived, and nobody really knew the person I was now. Not Adrian, not myself, and certainly not the Masters.

A small pine cone hit me in the center of my forehead. I looked up to see Adrian staring at me.

“You were getting in your head again,” he said.

“I was thinking.”

“Think less.”

“Is that your personal motto?”

Instead of answering, he glanced down at the slate sitting next to me on the bed.

“What’s that?”

I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. “My name for the gift circle.”

“Oh yeah,” Adrian said. He seemed relieved by the change of subject. He lifted his hand to cup his chin. “Who did you get?”

“Jason.”

“Blergh.”

“I heard this was your idea,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

It took him a second to understand what I was asking, then he just shrugged one shoulder.

“I thought we could all just use cheering up. It’s been three months since we arrived, you know? I think we’re all missing home.”

“You think reminding people of home will make them miss it less?” I asked.

Adrian seemed to lose interest in the conversation at that. For the next minute, he stared at his hands.

“I’m going to make Jason a book of cantograms,” I said.

Adrian looked up.

I opened my journal to its last page, then pulled my sword from its scabbard. Holding the hilt in one hand and steadying the blade with the other, I carefully pulled the point of the sword down the spine of the page, severing the sheet from the rest of the book. It wasn’t the most violent thing I’d ever done with the blade, but I still flinched at the sound.

“Oh no, Dorian! Your book.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s only one page.”

I took the severed sheet and folded it into three, then pressed a crease halfway across it, creating a pamphlet with six sections on the inside. I grabbed my pen and ink stone and started copying cantograms from my journal. Winter Hearth, Night’s Welcome, and Sky’s Appetite went into the spaces along the top, and Stone’s Quickness and the Spirit Siphon canto along the bottom.

I hesitated at the last square. Jason had wanted a copy of Storm’s Gate, but of all the knowledge I could give him, the Storm’s Gate was the thing other students would be most likely to attack him to get. I couldn’t ignore the possibility that some of the other students might even kill him to get it. An item that someone might kill for didn’t seem like the best Spring’s End gift. Instead, I wrote my recipe for maja-infused ink in the final square. Maja-ash as a pigment, oat starch as the binder, with the method and proportions I’d worked out over several batches. It didn’t make good ink, but the ingredients were at least within our reach.

While I worked, Adrian sat on his bed and actually accumulated. It felt strange from the outside. His presence was dimmed, as if some of his maja was elsewhere. I could almost feel it moving back and forth, waxing and waning with his concentration.

He came out of his meditation just as I was blowing on the ink to dry it. Writing on my new paper was as rewarding as I’d expected. The ink flowed smoothly. My reed pen hadn’t clogged once, and the ink left behind on it washed off easily with a little water. The ink sat on the surface of the paper without bleeding, and it was mostly dry a minute or so after laying it down.

Adrian slipped off his bed and came to look down at the sheet.

“Very tidy,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“You should sell these at the market,” he said.

I froze part way through folding it up.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’ve seen other students selling scrolls there. It’s all their notes and research. I bet people would pay for something like this.”

I finished folding the sheet, ending up with a small square of folded paper that was blank on the outside. On the front I wrote, For Jason. On the back, I wrote my guide for scribing cantograms; pen for paper, brush for skin.

“Maybe when I can produce something more useful,” I said. “This would take too much work for someone to use.”

I didn’t tell him my actual plan, that one day I might be able to sell items inscribed with cantograms directly. It felt too silly to admit to, when I was still only scratching out cantos in ink made from burned leaves.

Adrian turned. Something caught his eye by the window.

“Your friend’s back,” he said.

I looked up and spotted the spider spirit sitting on the wall. It was almost indistinguishable from any of the jumping spiders that lived on the mountainside, now, except that it only had six legs.

“Do you think it was listening to us?” Adrian asked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Some spirits could understand language and even speak. But the spider spirit was so young.

“It could have heard everything,” Adrian said. “We should kill it.”

The spider flitted away, back through the window.

“That answers that,” Adrian said. “Now we should definitely kill it.”

“I don’t think you’re in as much danger as you think,” I said. “The Masters would kill, maim, or gentle us for almost no reason at all, but I don’t think religion comes into it.”

“The clerics told it differently, so I’m sorry if I don’t take your guess over what they taught me.”

“Spider,” I said to the window. “We’re not going to kill you. Come back. Do you want some maja?”

The spirit didn’t reappear. It could have been a coincidence that it ran away at that moment. But if it wasn’t, then it wasn’t just capable of understanding us, it was smart enough to be suspicious.