“Full moon starts in fifteen hours,” Saina remarked as we clambered our way down a rocky slope.

“Yep.” I took her elbow to steady myself down a particularly steep part, then helped her down after me. For some reason, Peter insisted on having our training sessions in nearly inaccessible places, and just getting to the meetings was an exercise regimen in itself. I wasn’t sure where we were exactly, but if I’d had to guess, I’d say it was probably an abandoned quarry destroyed by multiple floods. Get out of the tunnels into the sunlight and immediately climb into a big pit – great thinking. “Are you ready?” I asked.

“Of course. You?”

“Absolutely.” Not that we had to do very much. Kylie was keeping an eye on Duniyasar in case the assassin showed up there, with the coven for backup, and Max had worked with the Magistae to arrange events that should keep most of the people in their shared social circle busy enough to keep an eye on. (It was lucky, I supposed, that Saina had decided to hang out with people like the Magistae at school; if she’d come under her own name and hung out with her own social class, Max would have no leverage and no idea what to do.) It had been tricky to arrange things without telling anyone who Saina was or that she was in danger, but doable, and they had the hard jobs. My job was to skip a few classes and go into lockdown with her. Easy.

(For three days. So… maybe not super easy. We were going to get pretty sick of each other. When I’d agreed to this, I’d thought a full moon was probably about twleve hours long; turns out that depending on how exactly you define ‘full moon’, it was anywhere from a single moment to three whole days. Hopefully, we’d find this assassin quick and wouldn’t have to repeat the experience.)

“Glad everyone’s made it,” Peter said as we got to the bottom. “We won’t know the layout of our mountain until the relay, but I’ve had a look at some of the old courses, and slopes of loose stones feature heavily. So, that’s what we’re training for today.”

“Sounds like a fantastic way to get injured,” I pointed out.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hammond said, shrugging his massive shoulders. “If I have to, I can carry any of you out of here, no trouble.”

“What if you get injured?”

He grinned. “I won’t.”

“You will now that you’ve said that. The irony gods won’t permit anything else.”

“The irony gods are going to have to mind their business for a day or two,” Peter said. “Magista’s been double-checking that Hammond will be coming to her event tomorrow for days. If he gets too injured to go, we’ll all feel her wrath.”

“You’ll feel her wrath,” I corrected. “Training here was your idea.”

“And you’ll throw me under the bus just like that?” Peter affected a hurt look. “You would turn on your great leader so easily?”

“I didn’t vote for you,” Hammond shrugged.

“Captain goes down with the ship,” I added.

Peter crossed his arms. “This is mutiny. If you think any of you are immune to Magista’s glare, you are mistaken.”

“Actually,” Saina said, “Kayden and I can’t go. We have other plans.”

Peter turned his full attention to her. “You’re not going?”

Saina shook her head.

“I’m sure you can reschedule your other thing, though. It’s going to be great.”

“Sorry.”

“Hmm. Well, I’ll save you some cupcakes. Anyway, for this drill… ”

I watched Peter carefully. Peter, who was Saina’s friend. Who was disappointed that she wasn’t going to attend an event he was going to on the full moon. Who had offered to bing her food from the event, an easy way to poison someone.

That was a lot more ticked prophecy boxes than I was comfortable with.

“ – So we should pair up, outside our usual pairs,” Peter finished. “I’ll go with Saina, and Kayden can go with Hammond.”

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Had he decided his assassination wasn’t going to work without Saina at the event, and elected to have her suffer an accident right now? I stepped forward. “Actually, I should probably go with you,” I said. “I’m a climber, and Hammond’s really strong; I don’t think we’d learn as much as a pair.”

“Hmm,” Peter said. Was that disappointment, flickering across his face?

He shrugged. “That works.”

I could barely concentrate on the various two-person drills we went through, and came out of the experience with an embarrassing number of scrapes. I was too busy watching Peter. When training ended, Saina floolwed me back up the slope to the portal, scowling. “What was that?”

“What?”

“You were giving Peter the third degree with your eyes the entire time. Did he insult you?”

“No. I just… how long have you known Peter?”

“I don’t know. A bit more than a year? We met as initiates.”

“So he’s a friend, but a pretty recent one. Does he know who you are?”

“No. Why – wait, what? No.”

“He was pretty disappointed that he wouldn’t see you on the full moon.”

“Peter’s not trying to kill me. He’s – ”

“A friend? Like the prophecy warned us about? Saina, somebody here is pretending to be your friend while trying to kill you. And it’s not like he’s a childhood friend whom you’ve known for – ”

“You met Max and Kylie as an initiate, right? Do you think for a second that either of them would try to kill you?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. “That’s different.”

“How? Because you magically know how to make good friends and I don’t?”

I didn’t have a response for that. Which was probably a good thing; starting a fight with someone I was about to spend three days straight with didn’t sound like a great idea. “You’re right,” I lied. “Sorry. I’m just worried.”

“Me too. I’m sorry. I, I know I should be suspicious, I just… this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to avoid.”

“Well, when we catch this assassin, you can go back to avoiding it.”

I could see where Saina was coming from. I’d been in this situation before, back when I’d suspected Max of playing politics with our friendship and trying to kill Alania and all sorts of horrible stuff I still felt ashamed to remember. I’d promised myself, back then, that I’d stop doing the very thing I was now doing; refusing to trust people, getting suspicious of their every action, spinning up what-ifs that made it impossible to confirm their innocence and trust them. But we had a prophecy, an actual prophecy, that said that one of her friends couldn’t be trusted. And if we screwed this up, she could die. What was I supposed to do, not look out for trouble?

I tried not to sulk like a little child as I went to get some healing potion for my wounds. I should probably sleep, soon; I wasn’t tired, but I wanted to be well rested before our three-day vigil. I was going to have to sleep while on guard duty – it was three days – but the less I did so, the better. We still couldn’t be certain that Saina’s assassin wouldn’t find some other way to get her, if she wasn’t ‘on timeless sands’ under the full moon. They might come looking for her.

And if it was Peter, he was now forewarned that she couldn’t be at the party.

I got back to my room to find Max lingering outside, talking to a man I didn’t know. He was short, with a wide grin and a shaved head, revealing the mage mark tattooed above his right temple. I read it automatically; force evocation, grass element, and a bunch of achievements and accolades that I’d never bothered to learn to decipher. Elaborate enough that he’d clearly put effort into achieving things, but not as impressive-looking as most of the Refujeyo staff. He looked up and saw me.

“Ah! This must be Kayden.”

Max turned to me with a weary, uncomfortable smile. “Yes, this is Kayden. Kayden, this is my uncle Ed.”

“Uncle?” I asked, glancing at the mage mark again. I was petty sure that legacy families could usually afford one mage and their heir at a time, and the Acanthos mage was Max’s grandmother, so…?”

“He’s a family friend,” Max explained.

“I’ve known young Nonus here since he was a baby,” ‘Uncle Ed’ said exuberantly, ruffling Max’s hair. Max’s lips twisted, but he didn’t pull away or correct the name. “Tutored him in basic magical theory when he was little. It’s amazing how far he’s come, huh? And I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr James.”

“Likewise,” I lied, shaking the hand he offered me. I wasn’t great at this kind of thing, but I tried to read the situation as best I could. Neither Max nor Ed had given me Ed’s family name, which legacy mages tended to do first thing; it was an important part of their identity. They were both leaning into his friendship to the Acanthos family. So… not a legacy mage, someone from the commonfolk, who worked for the Acanthos family, if he’d tutored Max. That made sense. “So you’ve come to see how he’s doing at school?” I asked.

“Ed is our family physician,” Max said. Now that Ed’s attention was on me, the look that Max shot me was blatantly apologetic.

“When I heard that Nonus here had a situation on his hands, of course I came to help out,” Ed added. “I’m given to understand that he’s put you in a physiologically precarious situation, yes? I know you have the world’s best doctor here, but his speciality is, quite naturally, normal human physiology. I thought I should offer my expertise.”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about, until I noticed that he was still holding my hand, and his eyes had become fixed on my right arm. Oh.

I glanced at Max. He was no longer looking at me at all, just shuffling his feet and looking extremely uncomfortable. If I shrugged Ed off and walked away now, Max would have to deal with him.

“Alright,” I said, pulling my hand back. “Your expertise would be appreciated. Let’s walk and talk, though.”

I didn’t wait for a reply. I just started walking off down the corridor, away from Max. The last thing I wanted to deal with right now was bullshit mage family politics, but I certainly wasn’t leaving Max to deal with this alone.