Arcometi of the Ordered Death was sitting on its web when I got back to the cells. The spider spirit claimed to be an exalted being, powerful and ancient, but it also hid every time someone it didn’t know came by the cell. I was sure it wasn’t more than six months old.

It had forged itself a corporeal body towards the end of spring, and since then it had got gradually heavier and denser, until it was indistinguishable from a real spider. Its web had become richer in maja as well, easily as dense as my maja-infused ink, and one week during summer it learned how to speak.

“Arcometi,” I said.

The spider twitched on its web then hopped down to sit on the wall next to me. It waved its front legs pleadingly, the sunlight from the window glinting in its four front eyes.

“Servant,” it said. “I have needs.” Its voice had a deep, rumbling quality, but was so quiet that I wouldn’t have been able to hear it more than a foot away.

“I don’t have time for that. I’m leaving for a few days. I won’t be here to feed you.”

“No,” it hissed. From the emotion in the sound, I might as well have told it the world was ending.

“Ask Adrian to feed you while I’m gone,” I told it. “Say it’s a favor for me.”

“He will not,” Arcometi said. “Servant, he tried to kill me.”

“Kill you?”

“He threw his shoe at me.”

I could easily imagine that. Adrian hated spiders in general and Arcometi in particular.

“I’m sure that doesn’t pose a threat to a spirit as powerful as you,” I said.

“It’s true. It did not. But he will not feed me.”

“Then you’ll have to forage on your own,” I said.

I looked up at the web spun across the window. It was larger than anything the spider had spun last season, dotted with small insects.

I’d been taking the webs every time the small spirit renewed them, and Arcometi never seemed to mind. It didn’t eat the insects it caught. The web’s real purpose was to gather maja from the Fold somehow, a corporeal spirit’s version of mortal accumulation. It’d be enough for the spirit to live on for several days, even if it wouldn’t be growing particularly quickly on that diet.

“I refuse,” the spirit said. “You will stay and feed me.”

“Sorry, I can’t,” I said. “I’ll try and find Terese and ask her to keep you fed.”

“No. That one also wants to kill me.”

“Not everyone wants to kill you,” I said.

“All of them do. I am surrounded by enemies.”

“Stay here. Keep spinning webs,” I said, moving away. “I’ll feed you when I get back.”

I went to my bed, digging under my mattress for a small stack of salvaged paper and my charcoal pencil. I didn’t want to leave the mountain without writing equipment, and the pencil was easier to use than pen and ink.

I pulled my journal out of my pack and stared at it. I couldn’t risk it in the swamp. Water would destroy it, washing the ink away and ruining the paper, and even the oilcloth of the scout’s pack wouldn’t save it from being submerged. With the tip of my sword, I made a cut at the top of my mattress and buried the journal inside the padding. It was probably the least imaginative hiding place possible, but I didn’t have much time.

I didn’t have time to paint a Storm’s Gate on my hand, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have stayed intact for long. Between the heat and the humidity, it would start to bleed before dusk and melt into a black smear by morning. In any other environment I might have tried it, but in the swamp I didn’t see the point. I kept my brush in the bag, as well as a small gum-like ball of dried maja ink. I’d be able to apply cantograms out there if I had to.

My personal stash of oat cakes followed the pencil and papers into the pack, and then a filled water-gourd I’d bought from Olner for the price of a single Sky’s Appetite canto. Apparently the canto’s utility in blocking weaker maja aspects wasn’t being widely exploited by the students, it being a narrow application of something in a narrow field, only useful against rare aspects.

I was shocked when Olner claimed that cantograms were confusing and temperamental. It’d only taken me a few weeks after my arrival to learn how to scribe the simpler ones. It had taken a lot of failures and research to get them working, but I didn’t see why anyone couldn’t learn to use them with a similar amount of effort.

I sat on my knees staring at my bed, trying to think of anything else I’d need. I wouldn’t take my robe or my cloak. Just the thought of putting them on in the summer heat was disgusting. If it rained while I was out there, that would only be welcome. Fresh water might be an issue. Finding drinking water in the swamp was always difficult, and had to be worse in summer. After a moment’s hesitation I grabbed my soot-stained cup and threw it into my bag, along with my fire-striker and a pouch of Tom’s tea-substitute. If I was desperate, I could make tea, which had to be safer than drinking the swamp water cold.

I could have spent another hour thinking and planning, but I was on a schedule. Eventually I stood up and left the cell, heading back towards the main entrance.

I spotted Tom coming in as we passed through the common room. He froze for a second, then headed straight for me.

“Dorian-”

“I can’t stop,” I said, cutting him off. “I might be gone for a few days. Will you be alright with your assignment?”

His eyes went wide. “I have to translate a bit out of a book in the library.”

I looked from Tom to the door. Gail would probably be waiting for me by the gate by now. If I was lucky. If I wasn’t, she might have left without me.

This was a particularly cruel assignment for Tom. He hadn’t even been able to read before coming here, and six months of sparse lessons hadn’t done any miracles. He’d definitely need help for this.

“From what language?” I asked.

“Jason says its ‘Old’ something.”

“Old Irisian?”

“That sounds like it.”

Jason shouldn’t have been allowed within ten feet of any Old Irisian text, but he was the only other person in the group who’d have a clue. If it was a particularly simple and literal passage he might be able to manage it.

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“Get Jason’s help with it,” I said. “I’ll be back before deadline day and I’ll double check it. Don’t hand it in without showing me.”

“All right,” Tom said.

I turned and headed for the door.

“If you see Adrian, tell him to feed Arcometi,” I called back.

There was no reply from Tom as I left the barracks and stepped out into the baking heat of the late morning sun.

Gail hadn’t left without me, and she wasn’t at the gate. She was just outside, leaning against the wall of the barracks. She’d positioned the robe over her shoulders so that a fold of fabric covered her head and shaded her face. I pulled up my own scarf and wrapped it loosely around my head. We’d all learned to cover as much skin as we could bear when we had to go out under the midday sun.

“I slept here when I first arrived,” she said. “There were twenty of us. Half of them were gentled in the first two months.”

I hesitated. Thoughts of my assignment sank into the background.

“Are you okay with that?” I asked.

“With gentling?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“No. If it were up to me, I’d just expel them. Let them fend for themselves in the wild. Most would die anyway, or become possessed, but at least it’d be in their hands. That’s cleaner, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I agree.”

Despite everything she’d said so far, and how casually she asked about killing the runaways, her answer helped something in my gut relax. At least I’d be traveling with someone I could view as human.

“Down the south path, then?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Do you have food and water?” I asked. I didn’t want to find out an hour into the journey that she expected me to share.

“I have some. I won’t need much.”

“Why not?”

“Maja can keep you on your feet in place of food,” she said, setting off towards the ramp that led down to the bottom terrace. “And I keep myself cold with Winter aspect.”

I stood in place for a second. The prospect of being cold was suddenly the most important thing in the world.

“How do you use that?” I asked, hurrying to catch up with her.

“I use it internally. Just a little, to keep the temperature down.”

“How did you learn it?” I asked.

I wasn’t expecting an answer. It was the kind of information students traded, threatened, and occasionally killed for.

My expectation seemed to be right. Gail was quiet all the way to the ramp, then down to where the grounds met the gate.

She kept her silence all the way up to the gate. When she finally spoke I realized she must have been thinking all that time.

“Have you ever been so cold that you thought you were already dead?” she asked, pausing just short of the gate. “After you stop shivering, after the point that you start to feel hot. You forget where you are, you stop needing to breathe, and even your heart feels like it’s stopped, but somehow you’re still awake?”

I slowed to a stop next to her. I thought about the night I’d spent down in the swamp, back at the start of spring, soaked by rain and exposed to the night’s chill. I’d known that I was in danger from the cold, but it hadn’t been as deep as the cold she was describing.

“No,” I said.

“That’s what it takes. You have to freeze to death, then come back.” She set off again, walking through the gate.

I followed a few seconds later, wincing as the sharp attention of the gate’s defenses washed over me.

So many maja aspects needed traumatic experiences to unlock. It sounded like Gail had found what she’d needed to use Winter aspect before she ever even came to the academy.

As we walked down the academy road, I experimentally pulled a cord of maja from my core and wound it through my arm. I thought back to the night in the tree, soaked-through with spring rain and near frozen from the cold air. I pushed the memory onto my gathered maja, but it didn’t take. The energy seemed to squirm, but remained as it was, unaspected.

Next to me, Gail gave a laugh.

“Are you trying it?”

I let go of my maja.

“It won’t work,” she said. “You can’t just throw any old idea at maja and have it take. It has to be pure, and you have to understand it on a primitive level. For something like Winter, it takes coming close to death to gain that understanding.”

We walked in silence for a while after that. I’d come across the idea that aspects needed understanding before. From Lectuous’s riddle of Thought, to the relatively simple process of learning Fire aspect, both methods needed understanding. Jason’s description of the method for unlocking Blade aspect suggested that there was a learning process involved. Piercing paper, silk, and tin with a knife, over and over implied an understanding that would come with repetition. It was possible that someone with the right experiences might need less work to reach that understanding. A mage who’d lived their life as a leather worker or a butcher might already understand the meaning of a blade in a way that a scribe’s apprentice would struggle with. The only blade I’d used regularly was the small knife I’d used to put nibs on my pens, and I didn’t see that leading to a useful aspect.

A few hundred feet down the mountain road we reached a place where the wind-ragged shrubs opened up in a narrow gap, a foot wide. Gail stepped off the path and pushed through the gap, disappearing down into a dip.

This had to be the southern path, the other way down the mountain, leading to the South Wilds Wetlands.

I paused at the edge of the road. From here, I was going to be in danger, from the terrain, from mountain spirits, and even from Gail.

I reached down and untied the cord around my wrist. I freed the reed ring and slipped it onto my middle finger. I looking around, trying to pick up any warnings, but the prey spirit scrived into the ring didn’t appear and after a few seconds I set off after her.

The path turned out to be narrow and overgrown, used rarely enough that the shrubs and weeds had taken over, making moving along it more like wading than walking. I found myself walking ahead of Gail, using the tip of my sword to push the thornier plants out of the way and snap through branches.

It was slow going, and we were already far behind. Privately, I’d already resigned myself to failing this assignment. I wasn’t going to drag the runaways back to the academy, and I certainly wasn’t going to hurt them. If I saw evidence that they’d died in the swamp then that would be ideal, but I wasn’t going to hope for it. It felt like a safe conviction to hold, when they were so far ahead.

“I don’t see how we could even catch them after a four day head start,” I said.

“You heard the Reeve,” Gail said behind me. “They’ll have to walk a winding path to avoid the screamers. If we travel across the water, we can catch up.”

“What are the screamers?” I asked.

“A spirit that lives in the water in the South Wilds. It’s only a threat to people who enter the water with it.”

“And how will we go straight through that?”

“We’ll enter the water with it.”

The walk seemed harder after that. Wading through the swamp was enough of a nightmare without hostile spirits making it harder. If I was failing the assignment anyway, couldn’t I just stay at home?