Lessons were the worst.

Not the material. I was mostly on top of that. I wasn’t a great student or anything, but I was mysteriously more motivated to learn about runes after all the rune nonsense with the Labyrinth of Dreams, the magic history class I’d forced myself to take in a fit of motivation to actually have context for what was ever going on was less boring than I’d expected, and my Ido was almost good enough that I could take some classes without translation, provided the teachers spoke slowly and used a lot of visual aids. The people, though… that was another matter.

The instruktanti were fine. They were professionals, they had jobs to do. Most of them had been teaching since before I was born and had probably had weirder people than me in their classrooms. The students, though, wouldn’t stop looking at my arms, like they’d be able to see the familiarity link straight through my sleeves. Talking about me when they thought I could hear. Asking me questions, if they felt bold enough. It was like being the new witch student in my initiation semester all over again.

In the end I did what I couldn’t have done with my witch mark, and started wearing short sleeved robes so everyone could get their fill of staring and get bored. I made a game of seeing what ludicrous things I could get people to believe, when they asked about it. Convincing them that Kylie and I had a mystic telepathic bond was pretty easy, and one or two even believed that the link let us cast each others’ spells (although I had to explain that since my spell was dormant that only really worked one way). By the time I was explaining that we’d achieved the familiarity link by giving Kylie a wolf familiar and then having me devour it’s soul in a secret ritual, everyone had figured out that I was bullshitting. Which was a pity, because that whole thing was the setup to a werewolf bit that I was actually pretty proud of.

At least my friends knew better than to bother me about the whole thing. Slipping back into doing weights with Magistus, or holing up in the library to work on a history report about the Purity Revolution with Saina, was relaxing by comparison.

“Why do you even take history?” I asked Saina one day, procrastinating on doing that very thing. “Aren’t you from one of those legacy families? I would’ve thought you’d know all of this.”

“My family cares about my grades,” she said, screwing up her nose.

“From here? This school is obviously a front for a spell gaining factory.”

“It matters to some people. Politicians should be educated. Anyway, it would be dangerous to only learn about history from my family, wouldn’t it? What if they lied, or were wrong? Even if they weren’t, history looks very different from different perspectives.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, glancing down at my own report. “It does.”

I knew about the Purity Revolution, of course. Historically, curses infected every society, settling in witches and breeding trouble, disease and poverty in the surrounding area, depending on the curse. While just about every culture had developed some method of purifying themselves, or at least mitigating the risks of curses, there was no broad, worldwide social movement to deal with such things. Different nations dealt with curses in different ways, and had different attitudes to witches; in some, the discovery of a witch mark was a death sentence, and in others, witches could live openly and even ply their magic in trade, so long as times were good and nothing bad happened that might be blamed on their curse. Then, in the mid eighteenth century, mages started banding together to take responsibility for the effect of magic on the world as a whole, and started dealing with the witch problems. Such infestations no longer had to be tolerated in any community, and communities that had relied on cursed people found that they didn’t need to, any more. They carried along just fine when such people were removed; better, in fact. The idea that a dangerous witch was a problem for mages to deal with became the norm, and witches could no longer spread their infection throughout many parts of the world.

When I’d been a child, knowledge of this history terrified me, but made sense. The mages had harnessed magic much like doctors had harnessed medicine, and the image of all the doctors of the world banding together to rid the world of as much disease as they could was noble, beautiful, as much as it was a warning about what would happen to me if I couldn’t control my ‘infection’. But now, knowing the difference between a mage and a witch was merely linguistic… thinking of those people, turning on their own like that, knowing, because they had to know what they were doing…

“Kayden?” Saina asked gently.

“Mm?” I rubbed furiously at my eyes, which were dry, because I definitely wasn’t crying in the middle of the library or anything.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just tired. Probably because of this totally boring subject.”

“Hey, you chose to study history. Anyway, this is basic stuff – surely they taught this much in your commonfolk school.”

“Ha. Yeah. But like you said, different perspectives and all that. I have to, um.” I turned away, so she wouldn’t see my itchy eyes and mistakenly think there were tears in them or something. “I’m going to get some, some water, or something.”

I rushed off to get a drink and stop being upset over things that had happened literally hundreds of years ago like an idiot, and returned when I was a little calmer. History report. Boring, boring history. That had nothing to do with me, because it had happened hundreds of years ago. I had plenty of actual, right-now problems to freak out about, if I wanted.

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“You okay?” Saina asked when I returned.

“Of course,” I said brusquely. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Do you want to join a pit comp team?”

This was sufficiently out of left field to make me forget about world history entirely. “Uh. What?”

“Peter and Hammond want to set up a four person pit comp team with you and me. You’ve said before you were interested in the competitions, so…?”

It took me a moment to remember who Peter and Hammond were. A couple of Saina’s friends I’d met a couple of times in the past. We weren’t close. “They never asked me before,” I said suspiciously.

“Yeah.”

“It’s because of this, isn’t it?” I gestured at the familiarity mark on my arm.

“They don’t mean anything by it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t care if they – ”

“No, you’re right; I shouldn’t apoligise for them. It just is what it is. I’ll tell them you’re not interested.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested.”

“Oh. So you…?”

“I can be angry and interested at the same time. If they’re hoping to make some kind of political connection by befriending the Mysterious Human Familiar then they’re only wasting their own time.”

“If it helps, they’re not any good at politics.”

“The longer I’m here, the more I’m convinced that none of these mages are any good at politics. I think everyone’s just making it all up as they go along.”

“As a legacy mage, you wound me,” Saina said, sounding entirely un-wounded. “Maybe I’m only inviting you to make political connections. Did you think about that?”

“Nah. You know me too well. You know that no political connection could be worth having to put up with me.”

“Hmm, yeah. That’s true.”

“Do your friends know I don’t fight? Because that’s going to limit the kinds of competitions that any team I’m on can do.”

“Oh. Is that a, a religious thing, or…?”

“It’s a lifelong habit thing. It’s… complicated.”

“Right. Well, they’ll have to deal with it, I guess. You can’t get hurt from fighting in most kinds of pit comps, if that’s – ”

“Yeah, I know. I get hurt plenty without fighting, trust me.” I rubbed at the scars just below my left wrist. Saina frowned at them.

“How did you even do that, by the way? It’s such a weird scar. Like a…”

“A kiss,” I said, nodding. “I know.”

She frowned deeper. “I was going to say a bite.”

“Right, that’s what I meant. It’s not, though.” I put the arm in my mouth to demonstrate how much wider the scar was than my jaw. “I fell down a rocky slope and the cut was too messy for even Malas’ magic to heal neatly.”

“That must’ve been one messy wound.”

“It was a pretty bad day all round. Most people stare at my other arm, though.”

She snorted. “I know what a familiarity mark looks like.

“Unlike every other student here, apparently.”

“Hey, you were the one who volunteered for an experimental procedure and turned yourself into a celebrity. I have no sympathy.”

“Do you have sympathy for how my poor nemagisto upbringing has left me at a significant disadvantage for this history homework? Because I – ”

“Nemaganto.”

“What?”

“A nemagisto would be someone who makes a career out of not being a mage. Which would be a pretty interesting economy, I have to say, but probably not what you’re going for. You mean nemaganto.”

“I… well… some of us are still learning Ido. My poor nemaganto upbringing left me with no education in such vital matters as the clumsy international lego language this school has adopted for some reason.”

Saina laughed at that. “Honestly, it’s a miracle they picked anything. Have you seen the transcripts of the Grand Circle meetings about picking a language? So much quibbling over the tiniest details. There’s all this fluff about how Ido was chosen for its accessibility and ease of learning and because the ironclad rules of word construction are a good practical basis for retraining vocal components of spells and stuff, but I think it won because it didn’t offend anyone enough to cause argument. Nobody wanted some other country’s national language to become the language of magic and give other people an advantage… the whole thing is ridiculous.”

“Hey, at least they landed on the easy one. If I was expected to learn Latin or something to study here I would literally die.”

“Mandarin Chinese was a serious contender.”

“What? No!”

Saina shrugged. “A really large portion of the student body is Chinese.”

“But that’s supposed to be like the hardest language in the world to learn!”

“Guess we’re lucky we got the clumsy international lego language, then.”

An alarm on my tablet went off. I checked it and groaned. It was nearly time for Kylie’s first lesson with Lydia, and while my presence wasn’t actually required – the casting of Fionnrath’s Destiny was all Kylie, I just absorbed some of the magical backlash, and no one could teach me how to do that any better – I didn’t want to leave her alone with someone who Max suspected was hellbent on forcibly relocating her family.

I was playing moral support for people a lot lately – maybe the others had been right when they labelled me the comic relief sidekick. Ugh, and now I was her familiar too, which basically made me the sassy companion animal in a Disney movie. Fuck.

“You have to be somewhere?” Saina asked.

“Yeah.” I started packing my stuff up. “Kylie’s got a thing I should be at.”

She almost managed to hide the way her eyes flicked to the familiarity mark on my arm. “Best of luck with that.”

“I’m sure it won’t be nearly as fun as this absolutely riveting history essay,” I said sombrely, “but at least I will have finishing the essay to look forward to.”

“I’ll try not to do too much of the really interesting research without you,” she replied.

“Oh, no; I’m not greedy. By all means, press on without me. I will simply have to look forward to next time to pull my weight.”

“And deprive you of the opportunity to look up a whole lot of dates about when different agreements were signed? I couldn’t possibly.”

I didn’t have time to wax lyrical about history homework all day, so I cut things short and rushed off to meet up with Kylie. The lesson probably wasn’t going to be interesting, but at least it would be more interesting than history homework.