I went for a bit of a stroll to give Malas and Miratova time to finish their conversation, then slowly made my way back to the medical ward.

“Injure yourself again already?” Malas asked.

“Not yet. Give me time. Instruktanto Miratova, you said that staff’s useless now, right?”

“Completely.”

“Are you going to analyse it or anything?”

“No point. I have overloads created under laboratory conditions that are more informative.”

“Can I have it, then?”

“Why?”

“If I’m leaving soon, I want a souvenir to remember the school by. Something cool I couldn’t get in the common world. But I don’t think anyone’s going to let me take a tablet or anything, right?”

“Definitely not.”

“Right. But if that’s just a stick now…”

“Strange choice, but I don’t see the harm. It’s yours if you want it.”

“Thanks.” I grabbed the stick, flashed her a smile, and left.

Max’s bedcurtains were closed when I got back to the bedroom. I rapped on the force field. “Max. You in there?”

“Mm?”

“I got you an early birthday present.”

“Do you even know when my birthday is?”

“Is it today?”

“No.”

“Then it’s an early birthday present.”

The curtain was pulled aside. “What did – ” His eyes alighted on the staff, and widened. “Did you steal Alania Miratova’s staff?!”

“Of course not. I asked her for it, and she gave it to me.”

“You can’t just ask Alania Miratova for her staff!”

I glanced at the ruined piece of wood in my hands. “Apparently I can. But if you don’t want it – ”

“No!” Max practically leapt over his bed and snatched the staff out of my hands. “Oh, wow. This really was damaged.”

He wasn’t wrong. The crystal on top that Instruktanto Miratova used as a tablet was completely gone. The wood of the staff was charred in several places, and several metal shards jutted out of one side. Furthermore, the wood itself had warped and swollen, somehow, twisting out of shape and almost engulfing some of the shards. It put me in mind of an exploded hotdog.

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“My guess would be that the magical dump overwhelmed the power tolerance coefficient of – ”

I raised a hand. “Never mind. Sorry. Don’t want to know. Are you able to tell me what you’re going to do with it, without an hour-long lecture I won’t understand?”

Max bit his lip and gave this some serious thought. Eventually, he said, “The staff took too much power and is broken. I am going to look at it to see which parts broke, and which parts didn’t. Then I will know which parts of the staff are weaker than the other parts.”

“How?”

“Oh, I’ll just take it apart with a plane.”

“A plane?”

“You know, a plane? Woodworking tool? Cuts wood into slices? I can look at it layer by layer, although all these metal shards are going to make things complicated. I’ve seen some of Miratova’s early designs in my early learning, but she doesn’t publish prototypes; this is the most up-to-date Miratova design anyone’s seen out of her lab. If I can convince her to take me as a student, having analysed this will really help. I’d better go order a plane right now; who knows how long they’ll take to get one in? I owe you one, Kayden!”

“Don’t mention it!” I called as he practically sprinted out of the room.

Well, at least someone was happy.

I needed to… I dunno. Do homework? No. I wasn’t in the mood to read or write anything at the moment. Besides, if I was going to stay on past Initiation, I was going to have to make some changes to my schedule. I was going to have to start learning Ido. And take classes that… that mages needed. What classes did mages need? Chemistry? The Fiore had made it sound like change mages needed chemistry, but I was an evocation mage, so…

Ugh, I’d ask Instruktanto Cooper about it. That was what a surveyanto was for, wasn’t it? But not for the moment. For the moment, I needed to… not think about any of that.

Twenty minutes later, after taking a path through the school’s caves that I was certain I’d never taken before but nevertheless lead me past several familiar areas, I stood on the balcony next to the climbing cliff and stared down, down to the forest below.

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It was probably a forest down there. It was something green, at any rate.

I could jump right off. Fling myself over the side. And the enchantment would catch me, draw me back up. What if it didn’t?

Would my curse save me?

What if it was going to, but I didn’t know it would and thought I was going to die. Would my curse save me then? Was it based on whether I thought I needed it, or whether I actually did need it?

The first, surely. I had decided to throw it at Matt. I had decided to shield myself and go back in for Instruktanto Miratova. But Magistus had pushed me off this very balcony, and it had done nothing. I’d thought I was going to drown at the tentacles of a lake monster, and it had done nothing. Maybe Kylie was right and, like hers, it was unreliable. Or maybe… maybe I was wrong about the trigger. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily about danger.

Okay, what else? What else was similar, between the two situations? What had I felt? Anger and fear with Matt, presumably. Hardly surprising; I already knew that heart curses and evocations were both prone to being triggered by emotions, so I had a double whammy there. But there’d been nothing to be angry about in the lab. Fear… maybe? There had been an explosion and fire and everything, but I mostly remembered disorientation, followed by determination. There was probably fear, though. I wasn’t great with emotions, but my heart rate had definitely been up.

But if the trigger was fear, that just brought me back to the lake. I’d been terrified, and I’d tried to wield the curse, and nothing had happened. If it was anger, well, my curse would’ve clouted Simon’s smug face by now, protective signet ring or not.

It was more complicated than that. It couldn’t be a matter of ‘feel this emotion and your curse will do something’; that made no sense. I needed more data. That meant I needed to cast it again. And I didn’t know how to cast it until I had more data, from casting it.

Dammit.

I needed to talk to other magic-users. Instruktanto Miratova was in hospital, sure, but the school was full of mages. And even though everyone kept saying ‘every spell is different’, there were obviously a lot of commonalities; enough to categorise them, enough to have standard methods of handling their power, enough to make teaching magic possible. Every spell might be different, but among my teachers, there had to be someone who could teach me to cast one.

I headed back into the gym. As usual, there were people peppered about the room wearing various colours, from a few grey initiates to the violet-clad gym coach. I’d been a bit worried, stepping in, about whether any of the older students might get a bit aggressive over the whole Instruktanto Miratova thing – the rumours about Kylie and me being responsible had started among her older students, right? – but there’d been absolutely no reaction to my entrance whatsoever. Quite probably, I’d decided, the mages knew as well as Max did that the chance that some random curse would interfere with a single scientist’s spell was astronomically small. And even if any of them did believe it, they had no idea who I was or what I looked like. I was just some random initiate, right?

Magistus was lying on a bench, pulling weights. When he saw me looking over, he sat up and waved. “Hey!”

“Do you live in the gym or something?” I asked him, wandering over.

“I could ask you the same thing. Here to climb a silly wall instead of getting a real workout?”

“Being a sore loser isn’t a good look on you, Magistus. Just accept I’m better than you at climbing, and everything else.”

“Ha. Come over here and I’ll show you how to get a real workout.”

“Can’t. Busted up my right arm. I can’t even lift it higher than this; look.”

“So? You’ve got a left arm, haven’t you?” He strode over to a rack of hand weights and came back with a small one, dropping it into my left hand. “Here, lift this.”

I pulled the weight up easily. “How weak to you think I am? This thing weighs as much as a can of beans.”

“It’s not about the weight. Not at your level, anyway. Beginners always think heavier is better and grab the heaviest weight they can lift, but that’s a big mistake. The important think is getting the form right; you want to pull your muscle in one smooth action, at the right angle. Too heavy, and you’ll use the wrong angle for better leverage and hurt yourself. You also won’t get the smooth, consistent action you need; you’ll jerk the weight up, and that’s not what this kind of workout is about. This weight is too light for you, yes, but it’s the right weight for learning the proper form. Come over to the mirrors.”

I didn’t have to put up with this. I also didn’t have anything better to do with my time. I followed him to the mirrors.

“Like this,” Magistus said, taking the weight from my hand and lifting it. He gave it back. “Wrist level, one smooth motion.”

I lifted the weight. Magistus shook his head. “Turn your wrist. And one smooth motion, remember; you’re putting a lot of force in at the bottom of the lift and catching it at the top. It’s not a shakeweight. You should be exerting the same effort for the entire pull.”

“But this is faster.”

“It’s not about speed. Your goal isn’t to lift a weight – your goal is to work the muscle correctly. The weight is just a tool for that, nothing more.

“Why are we doing this?”

“What, you don’t want to be good looking for those lovely commonfolk ladies back home?”

“Who said I’m not gonna pull a mage lady?”

“In just six months? Good luck.”

“Hey, man. You haven’t seen me in action. At home I have two girls-next-door who are in my room all the time.”

“Two girlfriends? Nice.”

“You can’t borrow one. I don’t need weights to be irresistible,” I said, handing the weight back.

“Why, is everyone really impressed by your ability to cheat at rock climbing?”

“Ha! This is about that! You are a sore loser!”

“You’re the one making a fuss over a teeny little weight.” He put the weight back in my hand. “Come on. It’s a new skill.”

“This doesn’t count as a skill.”

“Now who’s a sore loser? You’ll learn to lift eventually. Wrist level, elbow down… no, like this.” Magistus turned me to face the mirror and stood behind me. One hand on my right collarbone, high enough to avoid the bruises, and one around my left wrist, he pulled my arm through the motion. “This is how you do it. Now you take the weight this time. Much better, see? You want a nice consistent pressure here.” He tapped my bicep. “Now, do you reckon you can do ten of those without stopping?”

“Of course I can. It’s barely any weight.”

“Great!” Magistus watched me do a few reps, then retrieved a couple of much heavier-looking weights, stood right next to me, and pumped them both, alternating hands, and very deliberately not smirking at me in the mirror.

Dick.

I tolerated this for about three minutes before making up an excuse to be somewhere else. I was almost out the door, when I heard an unfamiliar voice behind me.

“Excuse me.”

I turned. The speaker was tallish, probably in his late teens, and like most people at the gym wore robes cut like a karate gi in his year colour (yellow). A light breeze, presumably an externalised spell, tossed shiny golden ringlets of hair about his shoulders, while he stared at me from behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

Designer sunglasses.

Inside.

“You are Kayden, the witch?” he asked in a tone that made it not a question.

I didn’t answer. I just tried to be subtle about glancing around him for anyone watching. Was I about to get cornered?

“Is the other witch about?” he asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“I do. My name is Talbot. Mae and Terry said you wanted to talk to me.”