In the ruins of Adrian’s old camp, Sal held out her hand.

Her maja flared. A sensation like a bad sunburn radiated out from her, and flames dripped from her fingers like oil to spill over the piled wood. The dry leaves caught first, filling the small clearing with the smell of wood smoke, pushing back the shadows with small flames.

She angled her hand downwards and channeled more maja. A spurt of flame shot from her hand, flying like liquid and coating the tented branches. After the flames landed, they continued to burn, catching the wood faster than the kindling.

I stared at it as the wood crackled. Anyone else on the terrace would know we were here soon. The whole Spring’s End idea had been a bad one, and the fire was the worst of them all.

As the flames grew they lit up more of the small clearing. We were in the small, dry clearing under the boughs of the stunted beech and chestnut trees that colonized the upper terrace. Adrian’s sad lean-to was now just a collapsed raft of leaves and some broken sticks. The bucket he’d used for water was still here, along with a piece of flint he’d chipped into a crude blade.

As the light from the fire spread it revealed evidence of recent fighting. The bark of the trees was chipped in places. Some of them looked like they’d been scorched by Fire aspect. One tree a few dozen feet away was completely uprooted. I’d been right in guessing that a war would break out up here over the spring.

The fighting was done, now. The maja spring had closed at some point, and the rock slide had been cleared away. Someone had mended the wall with mortar and stone fragments, probably the soldiers. The terrace had returned to being a place whose only real value was its isolation from the rest of the academy. It still wasn’t so isolated that I felt safe.

Sal pulled up the sleeve of her robe and shook out the silver bracelet she’d taken from Mira.

“Sacrasmodi,” she said.

The translucent knight spirit stepped out from behind a nearby tree, as if he’d been hiding back there the entire time.

“M’lady?” the knight said.

“Guard the woods around us. Let us know if anyone gets close.”

“As you wish.”

The spirit left the circle of firelight, marching off silently into the trees with a ghostly spear resting over its shoulder.

Sal had taken the bracelet after we’d disarmed Mira and nobody had contested her claim to it. Adrian probably couldn’t use it for religious reasons, and I thought someone with city watch training could probably get the most out of the spirit weapons he could provide. Maybe one of the others had more need of it, someone with less command of aspects, but they hadn’t spoken up.

She sat down at the edge of the fire, and the others picked out their own spots.

I watched them take their seats, before finally giving in to the group and joining them at the fire.

The festival fires in Kirkswill had always been bigger. Bonfires, that the whole village could gather around. Someone always brought a fiddle, and others always danced. Once I’d even been asked to dance, and quickly made myself scarce. In the flames I saw Bevin with a birch wreath on his head, telling me to come out and enjoy myself. I saw the village chief tapping a keg of wine from his cellar, fully expecting it to be drained by morning. For a second I was staring at my mother’s hearth, waiting for a kettle of tea to boil. If there was a Fire aspect, was there also an aspect that could put a fire out?

Adrian sat across from me, a pale face under an increasingly mane-like clump of sandy hair. Tom and Alexa were to my left and right, then Sal, Jason, and Terese. Olan hadn’t joined us. The Antorxians did celebrate Spring’s End, apparently, but Olan’s family never had.

I met Adrian’s eyes over the flames. Our talk about his deal with Horis was still fresh in my mind. I doubted he’d told any of the others.

As we looked at each other his expression became troubled. He’d never actually told me not to tell anyone else.

I cast my gaze around the circle, then back to Adrian. He frowned and shook his head slightly. He didn’t want the conversation to go any further than our cell.

The others around the fire looked relaxed. I couldn’t get comfortable on my patch of grass.

Sitting out here in the open struck me as absurd, a place where not so long ago we were fighting for our lives. Our enemies might still be out there. We’d feel anyone who got close, and we were here in numbers, but we were only initiates. It seemed like an unnecessary risk. And for what? This was fairly pathetic, as celebrations went.

“What do we do now?” I asked them. “Sing songs?”

“Exchange gifts,” Terese said.

She held up her gift for Adrian, a brown canvas hood decorated with green embroidery. The embroidery was too good to have been made with nothing but dandelions and an iron needle over a handful of days. The curling shapes that seemed practiced and thought out. She stood up and walked to Adrian, bending over to hand him the hood.

He took it and held it out, examining the pattern.

“Thanks, Terese.”

“I waxed it to keep the rain out,” she said.

Adrian pulled it on his head. Two long strips of fabric trailed down at the bottom of each corner, which he tied under his chin.

I got up next and handed Jason the small booklet I’d made him. He took it cautiously, then peeled back one of the folds. When he saw the contents he flipped it open, his eyes scanning from one panel to the next. After a few seconds of looking, his hands drooped to his lap and he slowly folded it closed.

“Thank you, Dorian,” he said.

Tom had got Terese a woven grass pouch filled with what he was calling tea, having sourced from plants on the mountainside and dried them in the sun over the last week. Sal had found a hardened leather helmet like the Antorxian scouts wore somewhere, and offered it to Tom. Jason gave Sal a small blade made from a long freshwater mussel shell, strategically broken and ground to form a thin hilt with a small quarter-circle blade, definitely more of a tool than a weapon, and Adrian’s gift to Alexa was a stone that looked a little bit like a dog, with some work to give it more detail in that direction. She accepted it with either genuine or perfectly acted enthusiasm.

When Alexa turned to me I took a deep breath. She held out her fist, turned it palm up, and opened her fingers.

Sitting at the center of her palm was a small steel pen nib.

“You like this stuff, right?” she asked.

I was still holding my breath as I looked at it.

“Er, you do want it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, letting out the breath all at once.

She held it out. I picked it out of her palm.

It was one of the nibs the paper merchant had been selling at the last market.

“How did you afford this?” I asked, staring at it. “The merchant told me they were worth more than three ducs.”

“Yeah, well, I got a discount.”

“Dorian,” Adrian said sternly. “Didn’t your parents tell you it was rude to question a present?”

I looked up at him then at Alexa’s face.

“Thank you,” I said.

“No bother.”

I held the nib in between my fingertips. Some of the others were saying something, but I couldn’t hear them. It was all reduced to background noise. It seemed like all I could focus on was the nib. It was warm from Alexa’s hand. I could feel the heat from the fire on my face as well, and it was all suddenly too much heat. My face was burning, my eyes were stinging.

I stood up and stepped away from the fire. Before I knew what I was doing, I was walking out into the dark woods.

“Dorian, are you okay?” Adrian’s voice called behind me.

I raised a hand without turning around, waving him off. I kept going until I couldn’t feel the fire’s heat on my back or see its light against the trees.

Once I was out in the cold dark of the woods I stopped. What was even the point of doing this? I held the nib between my fingertips, the back resting on my thumb, with the sharp tip pressing into the pad of my finger. I looked up, catching sight of a web of stars between the branches of the trees.

I shut my eyes. The fire was infecting me. All I could see behind my eyelids were images from home. My mother baking in an iron pot over a hearth was joined by the image of Tom baking his mystery leaves over a fire. Bevin giving me a printed almanac with the dates of the seasons became the pamphlet of cantograms I’d given to Jason. The nib from Alexa just made me think of the wax slate my father had given me the Spring’s End after I’d been apprenticed to Bevin, an awkward, tortuous exchange, where he hadn’t been able to hide his disappointment.

There was an ache in my throat like I’d swallowed a stone.

I drew on my maja, looking for calm and clarity, for it to sooth away all my dull aches and sharp pains.

The pain in my throat faded. The heat in my face dispersed. The stinging in my eyes receded. The maja stopped my running nose as easily as it had stopped my bleeding in the past. Within seconds I was cool again, all the heat gone, replaced by the deep subterranean cold of my maja. I could feel the night air again. And something else.

I wasn’t alone.

A little way off, at the limits of my senses, another maja presence was squatting in the woods.

I couldn’t see them, but I could feel their maja. It was muted, like a shuttered lantern, but I could sense a presence that made me think of soft cloth and crisp paper, mixed until the two could be confused, bedsheets made of paper, books made from bandages.

It wasn’t Mira, Duran, or Seil, so probably not someone who would consider me an enemy on sight. I had my weapons painted on my skin, and with the others only a shout away, I felt safe in moving to get a better angle on whoever it was.

I started picking my way through the woods, stepping slowly and carefully, feeling for roots and holes, steadying myself on the trunks of trees. I closed my eyes periodically, feeling for maja to make sure I was heading in the right direction.

After a minute of slow progress, I came to a point where I could see something about fifty feet ahead of me. It looked like a pale oval, illuminated by starlight. It wasn’t until it moved that I recognized it as the top of someone’s head.

They were crouching, looking down at the ground. They didn’t carry a light source, but I knew that the darkness wasn’t an obstacle to the more advanced students.

Suddenly the head looked up. A pale face stared straight at me. My heart clenched for a second, then relaxed. I recognized him. Olner, the bald potentiate I’d found in the library. I’d traded with him to find out how to access the Fold relics. He was indirectly responsible for my learning the Storm’s Gate.

I upgraded the figure from potentially hostile to likely neutral.

In the distance, Olner stood up. I wasn’t ready to return to the fire yet, so I set off walking in his direction.

It took me more than a minute to reach him, and he crouched back down as I made my way through the woods. As I stepped out of the trees closest to him I found myself in a small clearing, with moonlight beaming down through a gap in the trees.

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“Dorian, wasn’t it?” he asked, not looking up. His Antorxian accent was as thick as it had been in the library.

“Yes. And you were Olner.”

He put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. He didn’t look older than me by more than a couple of years, but he moved like moving was a struggle.

There was a reed basket at his feet, half full of small white mushrooms. More of them dotted the grass in the moonlit clearing. On his hands he was wearing a pair of cracked brown leather gloves, the tips of the fingers stained with something that looked black in the moonlight.

“You’re gathering mushrooms?” I asked.

“Moon skull mushrooms,” he confirmed.

“For an assignment?”

If it was, then he was late. Today was deadline day. I’d already turned my jar of corpse water in, and the others had finished their tasks as well.

“No. And they’re not to eat. I will use them to lure a spirit of toxicity in the swamp below.”

“And what will you do with that?”

“Store it for use later. I don’t have a need for it now.”

I wanted to ask how it was possible to store a spirit, but I already knew Olner didn’t give information out for free.

With the lull in the conversation he lowered himself back to his knees, the curve in his spine bringing his head level with his ribs, and continued picking mushrooms.

After a few seconds he looked up, waving a mushroom at the woods behind me.

“I can smell wood smoke on the air,” he said.

“My friends are back there,” I said. “They’re celebrating Spring’s End.”

Olner froze with the mushroom halfway to the basket.

“I hope the Masters don’t hear,” Olner said. “They will wonder why you have time for that.”

“We’ve already handed our assignments in.”

“There is always more to do. More to learn, and more to prepare.”

“I can relate to that,” I said.

“Is that why you are not with them? You’re leaving to work?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just not sure if the academy is the place for a celebration.”

“Springs End,” he said, holding the mushroom in both hands. “You give gifts, is that right?”

“Yes. I thought the Antorxians did as well?”

“Probably. But I grew up on the streets of Marixs. There were no gifts for me. If I was lucky, there was a good meal left over from the feasts of others.”

I watched him toss the mushroom into his basket.

“Did you have any luck getting a library index from Master Antonyx?” I asked.

When I last met him, he was complaining that the reorganization had made it impossible for him to find anything. Antonyx as a source of information on the layout had been my part of the trade for the Fold relics.

“I asked if he needed favors,” Olner answered. “He said he’d think about it. I am note hopeful. He didn’t trust me.”

Before I asked my next question, I reminded myself that I was armed, full of maja, and had my friends within shouting range, and asked,

“What would you trade for a copy of it?” I said.

Olner looked up from the mushroom patch. He sat up, resting his weight on his knees.

“You have one?”

“Yes.”

“And you could make me a copy?”

“I could.”

Olner went to put his hand to his chin, then stopped when he remembered his glove.

“Do you have any requests?” he asked.

“Nothing specific,” I said. “What can you offer?”

This was the opposite of how I handled negotiations with merchants. I had no idea how much the library index was worth, and this time I wasn’t interested in concealing the fact. Last time we’d traded, Olner had let me set my own price for the information he offered. I’d see if he used this opportunity to make me a fair offer.

He thought for a second, the carefully pulled off his gloves. He held up his left hand, showing me a slim wooden ring wedged halfway down his middle finger. It looked like it’d been made from a dry and flattened reed.

“This ring. Just a small thing. It is scrived with a prey spirit, simple, but alert. It can warn you when you are being hunted.”

I stared at the ring.

“Hunted how?”

“If it senses someone has hostile intent. If they are stalking you, or watching you, or is planning harm, then it will appear to warn you. It is not all-knowing. It sees, it watches, it reads maja, and it can see a little way into the Fold. From that it makes its judgements.”

It didn’t sound too useful to an advanced student. Someone conditioned to alertness would already notice if they were being watched or followed, and I’d seen hints that sorcerers could read intent from someone’s maja without the help of a spirit. To Olner it was probably just a trinket, but it would make a dramatic difference to my chances here.

“I’ll make that trade, if it does what you say,” I said.

Olner pulled the ring off and put it in an inside pocket of his robe. He gestured at me to start.

I sat down on the grass and pulled out my journal, inkstone, and reed pen. Since I couldn’t trust anything left alone in the barracks, I was still carrying all my most important possessions with me. I put my new steel nib away until I could cut a holder for it and brushed a clump of ink off my reed pen.

I looked down at my dry ink stone, then back towards where I knew there was a shallow pond nearby.

“Do you have any water?” I asked.

“I have some dirty water for cleaning my hands.”

“That will work.”

Olner lifted a dried gourd off the grass next to him and pulled a cork out of the top. I held out my ink stone and he splashed water into it, reactivating the ink that had dried there earlier.

I unrolled my library index from my bag and laid it out on the grass.

Olner watched my squinting at the star-lit paper for a few seconds, then pulled out a candle and lit it between his fingers.

“Thanks,” I said. I hadn’t even felt his maja stir.

By the light of the candle, I started copying the index onto a clean page of my journal.

“Do you trade this with the intent that I can make my own copies to trade?” he asked.

“If I said no, would you listen?”

He thought about it for a while, frowning. “If you were the creator, and this was your own research, I would listen. But since you are copying something that you did not make, I don’t think I need to respect its uniqueness.”

“Just don’t trade it with Mira or Duran,” I said. “I don’t want to help them find something down there they’ll use against me a month from now.”

“If I ever meet them I will refrain from trading your index with them.”

Olner put his gloves back on and continued plucking mushrooms while I wrote.

It only took a few minutes to copy out the list of subjects and shelf numbers. I drew my sword carefully, reassuring Olner with a glance that I wasn’t going to attack him, then cut the page free.

I checked that the ink was dry, then folded it and handed it over.

Olner had finished picking mushrooms and thrown his dirty gloves into the basket a minute earlier. He accepted the folded page, then offered me the ring.

I held out my hand and he dropped it into my palm.

“Are those cantograms on your skin?” he asked, looking at my palm.

“Yes. Paper isn’t a strong enough surface for some of them. How does the ring work?”

“Just place it on your finger. The spirit will give you minor impressions when it senses a threat. I hear whispers when I’m being watched, but it will likely be different for you. It is not a strongly formed spirit.”

I hesitated for a moment, but I didn’t think Olner was lying, at least not yet. I slid the ring onto my middle finger.

I picked up a faint maja smell like burned hair, but other than that I didn’t sense anything different.

“Remember it isn’t infallible,” Olner said. “It’s just a simple spirit. It can’t read thoughts, and it can be fooled. But it does see the world with the eyes of prey, and it is always watching. That is enough to be helpful. It’s how I sensed you when you were standing in the dark a few minutes ago.”

“Will you be safe without it?”

“Yes. And I will make another. My next will be an improvement.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Olner’s shoulders twitched in what might have been a shrug.

“It was a fair trade.”

In the distance behind me, I heard Adrian’s voice start up in song. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it sounded like something someone would sing at a tavern.

“I better go and put a stop to that,” I said.

“Go. Enjoy your night,” Olner said.

I left him behind, heading back towards the fire. When I reached it, Tom handed me an oat cake with a layer of honey smeared on top. I sat down and threw a twig at Adrian’s head, who stopped singing.

“How long are we going to sit out here, exposed to anyone who comes along?” I asked.

“Until the fire burns out,” Sal said.

I sighed and started to eat the oat cake.

Overhead, the scattered clouds were moving past at enormous speeds. I looked around at my friends, watching as they told stories of home, or strung flowers together, or just listened.

My heart stuttered as I looked at Jason. A sparrow sat on his shoulder, upright but dead, like it had been impaled on a branch. Bloody thorns sprouted from its eyes and body, with one emerging from its beak like a long tongue. Instead of decay, I could only smell the tingling odor of burned hair.

I reached down and pulled the wooden ring off my finger. When I looked back up, the sparrow was gone. I slid the ring back on, and the sparrow corpse returned.

Jason caught me looking and turned a smile on me. I tried to return it, but I didn’t think I was fooling anyone.