So the story, as I knew it, went like this:

A few months ago, Max, Kylie and I had arrived at Skolala Refujeyo. Max had been immediately fascinated by Kylie’s curse, which wasn’t too weird; people liked to stare and gossip about curses, that was just a fact of life. We’d ended up rooming together at Kylie’s suggestion, because Max didn’t want to room with the Magistae, whom he’d forgotten were coming to the school. He wasn’t interested in playing social political games and wanted as little to do with them as possible, so we acted as a shield.

This turned out not to be terribly effective, because Magista wasn’t half as reluctant as we’d expected about welcoming a couple of scholarship witches to her events, but at least it protected him from having to room with them. The Magistae clique were alright, except for Simon, who was a dick. He hated witches for some reason, and when a skilled and cautious mage began having accidents with her spell, wasted no time in blaming Kylie and me, deciding that it must somehow be the fault of one of our curses. Despite how little sense this made, even I was convinced after Kylie started having casting problems in my presence, and her Eye gave a pretty damning prophecy that seemed to accuse my curse of killing hers.

Max still wasn’t convinced that my curse was doing anything, and I promised him a week to figure out what was going on. He immediately got to work studying curses in general, and mine and Kylie’s in particular – mine to see if there was any way it could be interfering with spells, and Kylie’s to untangle the prophecy and the issues she was having.

The topic was impossbly vast, but in the end that didn’t matter, because before the week was up we discovered something that changed everything. Simon’s enchanted ring had been embedded in the staff I’d given Max to study. Whenever he worked on it, he put himself in uncertain danger, explaining Kylie’s multiple false alarms with her prophecy. The ring’s presence in the staff explained Miratova’s difficulty controlling her spell, and the only logical way it could have gotten there was by destroying her lab experiment. It didn’t explain everything strange going on – I still had no idea what Kylie’s prophecy in the desert had been about or how we’d ended up in the desert in the first place – but it was clear that the problems had nothing to do with my curse.

Of course, now we were looking at a murder plot, or at least an attempt to badly injure somebody. Simon using his uncle’s ring to put Miratova out of action allowed his uncle to wedge his foot in the door for getting her job, which he’d wanted for years. When I’d confronted Simon about the plot, he’d gotten furious with me, throwing threats around and, after he’d had time to calm himself, accusations that I was using my curse to attack Miratova and him. But that was a losing argument from the getgo. We’d turned the evidence over to the relevant authorities, and it was a matter of time before he was caught. My curse was safe, the jerk would be expelled, Kylie’s curse was operating correctly and nobody would be in danger. Happy ending.

Except that didn’t completely make sense, did it?

Right from the start, things were weird. Kylie was pretty shy and I’d only ever seen her hang out with girls; it didn’t entirely make sense for her to offer to room with two boys she didn’t know. I know, I know; it was an impulse decision to help out Max, who’d run into a problem he’d forgotten about, but… Max had fought stiff competition to get into Skolala Refujeyo. Everyone said so. Everyone said he’d beaten older cousins who were supposed to be shoo-ins, that he was so good the family had waited an extra couple of years to be old enough which, given Octavia’s age, was dangerous. That meant two things: it meant that Max had known he was coming to Refujeyo for at least a couple of years. And it meant that Max had really, really wanted to be the Nonus Acanthos, and had taken this very seriously.

Was that the sort of person who’d just forget which politically important peers he was supposed to make friends with? The sort of person who’d decide they didn’t care about family politics after all?

Max never forgot anything. He’d seen my class schedule once, and still knew when my classes were. He wouldn’t just forget about the Magistae. And if he honestly cared that little… why was he here? Why fight so hard to be the face of your family’s politics if you didn’t want to do family politics? He didn’t seem all that interested in being a mage. He loved magical theory, sure, but he was completely disinterested whenever one of our teachers actually cast something, even Miratova. And when people addressed him as a mage, he corrected them. I’d never once heard him speculate about what kind of spell he hoped for, or how he intended to use it – that was the sort of thing someone wanting to be a mage would think about, right? In fact, he’d openly remarked on a few occasions about how useless he thought spells were, especially in mage families. Hadn’t we had a whole conversation about how his grandmother’s spell was only used for party tricks?

So why was he here? What did this school have to offer him? The chance to work with Instruktanto Miratova, sure… but was that worth committing to a life he didn’t want as a political figurehead with a dangerous magical parasite in his body?

No; something was off, here. Max’s opinions and preferences didn’t match up with someone who’d fought tooth and nail to get to Skolala Refujeyo and knew basically the whole history of magic backwards. They matched more with… well, with a persona designed to get along well with two witches who hadn’t really wanted to come here and were probably suspicious and resentful of magic as a whole. The two people he’d met in the van on the way to school.

And Simon. Simon didn’t make sense, either. Or at least, my read of Simon’s actions didn’t make sense. He’d been so, so angry when I’d accused him in his dorm. And, sure, I had just punched him in the face and accused him of attempted murder; if I’d tried to kill someone and a mouthy twit had stormed into my room and punched me to prove I’d done it, I’d be pissed, too. But he’d… what had he said? (Argh, I hated my memory. I needed to just start recording everything that happened to me. Screw trying to remember anything.) I’d accused him of murder, and he’d accused me back, right? He’d threatened to kill me, I remembered that part pretty clearly. And then he’d said I had tried to kill Miratova?

Stolen novel; please report.

But he’d had no way of knowing that we were onto him. He didn’t have time to formulate a plan to blame us for the whole non-working ring thing. And that anger wasn’t defensive, like someone who had been caught out; it was the kind of reaction I’d expect from someone who, for example, had just realised his priceless family heirloom was broken when the person who broke it showed up to brag about it.

Sure, maybe Simon was really that quick off the mark. Maybe he was a great actor, though I’d never seen him show that kind of skill. But I did know that Max was a phenomenal actor. I’d seen him being exceptionally fun at parties.

And of course Simon would be angry, because that ring was, it seemed, unbelievably valuable. Miratova had said it was far too valuable to waste in an assassination attempt. Which meant that either Max was right about there being something far more valuable on school campus that the Fiore wanted to be here for, or he hadn’t dropped that ring into Miratova’s cauldron.

So the story, as I suspected it, went like this:

The scion of the Acanthos family, who’d fought hard for his position and beat out older and better-placed candidates, met two cursed kids on the way to school. He didn’t necessarily want to be part of the Magistae’s little clique, so after a rocky start he set to work using his incredible acting skills to set up a dorm of his own with the two wild cards. Things went pretty well until the Madja scion, with whom he had a bit of a rivalry, started accusing his witches of being responsible for some magical difficulties.

At first this seemed like a weak claim – a couple of accidents could easily be coincidental, and whoever heard of a curse that went around influencing random spells? – but then one of his witches started having difficulties with her spell, and gave a prophecy that pretty soundly condemned the other. There was no denying it; all the evidence pointed to one of his chosen pawns being a walking tornado of spell disruption. After choosing them over the Magistae dorm, this was hugely embarrassing.

But Max could turn this into an opportunity. He convinced everyone to stay quiet for a week, and used the time to plan to clear my name and frame his rival. He wrote home and contacted some family friends for help.

Didn’t Simon say that Max’s grandmother knew a lot of good forgers? That would make sense, given the nature of her spell… so. He contacts some forgers.

And while he’s waiting on them, he studies. He studies Kylie’s Evil Eye in far more depth than one would expect if he were merely trying to untangle her latest prophecy. He charts its casting frequency, grills her every chance he gets on the details. Almost as if he wants to understand, in detail, how it works.

As if he wants to know exactly how to trigger it, and what it might predict.

He studies my spell, too. He notices that Miratova recovers control of her spell; that’s good, he can work with that. Kylie’s recovering, too, and that’s even better, because he needs her back in shape after his ploy.

Then, when everything’s ready, he makes his move. He backdates his research notes, double-checks the timeline, and sets explosives in the staff. He takes a plane to it.

He puts himself in real, genuine danger. And, of course, Kylie’s prophecy saves him.

Then, when he’s cleaning up and nobody’s looking, he ‘finds’ the damaged Guardian Ring, covered in ichor from the explosion. He calls us over. Two witnesses, to testify that the staff exploded and the ring was among the shrapnel. He’d refused to go to Malas over his head wound, insisting on getting on with the cleaning. Why was it so important to do the cleaning then and there? To ensure he’d find the ring with us in the room, right after the explosion. To ensure his story was as convincing as possible.

Thus he’d had me completely convinced that my curse wasn’t causing problems. And both of us convinced that Simon had tried to kill Instruktanto Miratova. The bastard.

There were a couple of holes in that story, of course. Most notably, Miratova and Kylie weren’t having spellcasting problems any more. But if the interference effect of my curse was temporary, then why did Kylie’s curse say mine was going to kill it? And what was Max’s plan for when Simon’s ring recovered, exactly? Come to think of it, how did Max know that my curse was going to break Simon’s ring?

No… no, Max had to have switched the rings. Bought a forgery, swapped it for Simon’s ring, broke the real ring and planted it. That was the only way he could know that Simon’s ring would ‘break’, and be sure that the ring he’d given to Miratova wouldn’t be found to be a forgery – because it was real. So Simon thought he had a real ring which I’d broken; he had no need to seriously defend himself from accusations of murder because he was innocent and didn’t know that he’d been so expertly framed.

Simon thought I was the enemy, deliberately running around breaking spells; Clara seemed to agree with Simon; Magistus didn’t have all the info but knew I wouldn’t hurt anyone deliberately and I was Max’s patsy, that my spell was causing problems but I believed it wasn’t; Magista thought… well, who knew?; Kylie and I were convinced that Simon was the problem and I was completely safe; and Max was about to eliminate his rival and clear my name in one fell swoop, as soon as the identity of the ring was verified.

It was all very well planned, but it meant that at some point, Max had to switch Simon’s ring for a fake. Could he do that? Probably. He couldn’t have snatched it off Simon’s finger, but he might have snatched it from his room. He knew how to get past the force fields on the beds; I’d shown him how. So if somebody let him into the Magistae dorm, and he managed to get a few minutes in there alone… easily accomplished, for the silver-tongued Acanthos. But would he do such a thing? Nervous, academic, non-confrontational Max?

I’d seen the way he looked at Simon when they fought. Yes. Yes, he probably would.

That didn’t explain Kylie’s desert prophecy, but none of my theories about what was happening explained Kylie’s desert prophecy, so that wasn’t really relevant. It also didn’t explain what Max planned to do the next time my spell interfered with someone else’s. But it made at least as much sense as Simon throwing away a valuable family artefact on a really stupid murder plot. Somebody here, either Simon or Max, was playing a very dangerous game.

And they were using me to do it.