Kylie froze, but I’d already shut the door behind her. Magista swept her more fully into the room, saying, “You’re fifteen! We thought we’d celebrate.”

“I never told any of you when my birthday was…”

“Of course you did! You mentioned it a few months ago. Magistus, the candles?”

The cake that Magista had made was understated, but beautiful, with pink icing covered in elaborate red scrollwork. The fifteen candles were quickly lit and we sang the birthday song, feeling like idiots while Kylie waited patiently for her chance to roll her eyes and blow them out.

When Magista cut into the cake, I realised I’d vastly underestimated her baking skills. I wasn’t the only one.

“That,” Max declared, “is straight-up impossible. I do not believe you’ve done that, on a fundamental physical level.”

“It’s a bit of a fiddly technique,” Magista said humbly, “but very possible.”

“No. I guarantee it isn’t.”

What Magista had done was write inside the cake. That is, she’d made a vanilla cake, and marbled a little bit of chocolate through it, but not in the random marble pattern normal in such cakes; somehow, she’d gotten the swirls to spell ‘Happy Birthday Kylie’.

“Seriously,” Max pressed, “how did you do that?”

“Baker’s secret.”

“Okay but how – ?”

“Everyone wants a big piece, I assume?” Magista asked, loading plates. The question was obviously rhetorical.

I pondered my piece of cake and wondered how any of us were going to fit in the various other snacks that had been prepared and displayed among the scattered red and white flowers. “So, I guess you’re the oldest of us then, Kylie?”

“Di Fiore’s the oldest,” Magistus said. “His birthday was a few months ago.”

“You didn’t invite me.”

“You’d stormed into my room and punched me in the face the week before,” Di Fiore said. “Also, I didn’t want you there.”

“Don’t feel bad, Kayden,” Max said. “They didn’t invite me either.”

“And you both missed out on some great cake,” Kylie said, eating a forkful of her current cake. “That’s what you guys get for fighting.”

“You were invited?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“You never said anything.”

Kylie looked puzzled. “Should I have?”

We finished our cake, then turned Kylie’s attention to the pile of presents in the corner. She blushed. “You guys didn’t really have to get me anything,” she mumbled.

“That’s half the fun!” Max exclaimed, pressing an immaculately wrapped package into her hands. “Anyway, this will be useful.”

Kylie looked like she wanted to give it back, but reluctantly opened the gift. When she read the title of the thick, leather bound book inside, her eyes widened.

Looking Forward and Back: How Prophecies Shape our World.

“You have a rare and powerful spell,” Max explained. “I know your history with it has been… mixed… but I thought you should have some context on mages like yourself.”

Kylie nodded. “Thanks,” she said quietly.

“Mine might be similarly useful,” di Fiore said, handing her a thinner, irregularly shaped package.

Inside was a hand mirror, about the size of Kylie’s spread palm. The handle and frame looked silver to me, although I couldn’t be sure without holding it myself. The reflection wasn’t clean and sharp like a modern mirror, but had that hazy, foggy look of antiques; I’d read somewhere once upon a time that old mirrors reflected like that because the craftsmen would literally brush silver onto the back of the glass with a brush.

The back of the frame was covered in writing in all sorts of languages and alphabets. A couple of the sentences looked to be in English, but they were too tiny for me to read from where I was standing.

“The Fiore before the current Fiore was a prophet,” di Fiore explained, “and always found it useful to have something on hand to help her cast. I thought something similar might help you, and mirrors are one of the more portable foci for prophets.”

“It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

“My turn,” Magistus announced, lobbing a small gift over di Fiore’s head so that it landed perfectly in Kylie’s arms. She jumped and tore her gaze away from the mirror to glare at him; he just grinned.

He’d bought her a stationary kit. A fancy one, with paper that had shiny threads through it, and little pressed flowers and perfumes for decoration. “Since we all miss home a bit,” was the only explanation he gave.

“And we all deserve to have fun here!” Magista exclaimed, presenting her gift. It was easily the largest, and squishy. Kylie unwrapped the neat package and pulled out a long scarlet robe.

“We’re going to need new formal clothing this year,” Magista shrugged. “I had them do something I thought you’d like.”

Even I could tell that the robes were fancy. Like Kylie’s formal robes last year, they were cut in a style resembling a dress, except this one was made from many layers of extremely fine fabric, each patterned in what looked like leaves of various shades of red with a few shocks of orange or yellow. Kylie ran the fabric through her hands, and I realised I’d been wrong; the patterns weren’t leaves. They were flames. When the fabric moved, they rolled and danced over each other to give the impression of a living, moving fire.

Next to all these fancy presents, I was feeling kind of stupid about mine. I handed over a small box. “Careful; it’s breakable.”

Truth was, I’d used most of my guilt-induced goodwill with Instruktanto Cooper to encourage him to drive me to a town to buy this. I wouldn’t have been able to get it through the school shop. I hadn’t even told him why I’d wanted to go to the very specific town I’d tracked down that still sold them.

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It was an instant camera, the kind that prints out a little photo right after you take it. Kylie looked down at it, then up at me, confusion and understanding colliding chaotically on her face.

“You can take as many pictures as you like on your tablet,” I said quietly, “but there’s nowhere here to print them out. No way to share them except on the school intranet. I know you write to your family a lot. I thought maybe you’d want to show them your home here.”

Kylie looked away quickly, and for a moment I was worried I’d screwed up; was I about to make her cry in front of all of her friends? But she busied herself putting her presents away behind her bedcurtains, giving her a chance to get it together while we chatted about what classes we were looking forward to and soforth. I didn’t have much to add to the discussion, of course; without knowing what my spell was, or being able to cast it, the range of magical classes I could take was pretty limited, and I didn’t have any great enthusiasm for maths or science. Potioncrafting and runecrafting had the potential to be interesting, I supposed.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Max shrugged when I mentioned this. “I don’t know how to use mine, either. It’ll probably take yeas to figure out.”

“Yeah, because it’s complicated and awesome and powerful,” I said. “At least you know what it is.”

“Broadly. But given the variation within the category of contract spells, I know a lot less than you might think.”

“You all have some idea of what you’re working with,” I said.

“I don’t,” Magistus said. “Still no idea what mine does. But if it doesn’t show anything by next week I’m going to Malas for an assessment.”

“An assessment?”

“Yeah. Let him magically poke it a bit rile it up, give it a scan. You could come with me if you want. I know it’s kind of a long shot for you, since your spell isn’t a Haven spell like mine, but he might find someth – ”

“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t think that’d help with mine. Best of luck to you, though.” The last thing I needed was to give Malas another chance to manipulate me by lying about my magic.

An alarm went off on my tablet – ten minutes until my first potioncrafting lesson. I had to hustle. Grabbing a second serve of birthday cake for the road, I bid Kylie another happy birthday and left. Working with potions shouldn’t be too bad – it might even be fun!

As soon as I got to the classroom, I regretted my decision. The fifteen two-person tables were mostly filled with students, dressed in a sea of orange and yellow. I’d known that this was a mixed class, but I’d expected a lot more acolytes to be taking it. I was surprised Magista, at least, hadn’t picked the topic – it was basically cooking, right? – but maybe such a trade skill was looked down on by legacy mages or something. Whatever.

Just as I tried to pick out the least intimidating person to sit with, another red-clad student brushed past me. She looked familiar, with medium brown skin and long, straight dark hair, but I couldn’t recall her name. Maybe we’d had some classes together last semester? Probably.

Her quick eyes skimmed the room, seemed to reach a similar conclusion that I had, and rested on me. She flashed me a bright smile. “Oh, hey. It’s been awhile.”

“Uh, yeah. How are you?” Oh no, did she know me? Was I supposed to know her?!

“It’s Kayden, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” Dammit; if she knew my name, I couldn’t really ask about hers, could I? Of course she’d know my name, I’d been the witch. Everyone had known about my curse. It wasn’t fair.

“You ate seven cocktail weenies off a stick that one time.”

“What?” But the memory was coming back to me. Magista’s first party… that’s where I’d met this girl. That was my reputation? After everything? I was the cocktail weenie guy? Oh, god. Quick, say something witty… I shrugged. “Everything’s better on a stick.”

Ugh, that wasn’t witty at all. But she was nodding like I’d said something clever. It’d have to do. “Have you got someone to work with in this class, or…?”

“No,” I said, too quickly. “I mean, I don’t. You?”

“Let’s grab a table while some are still empty, shall we?”

We did, sitting at one of the empty wooden tables and pulling out our tablets just as the oldest mage I’d ever seen ambled through the classroom to the teacher’s desk up front. She didn’t have the prematurely ageing look of Ahuja or Miratova; she looked to be at least eighty, probably older, and walked with the help of a frame. I half-expected the walking frame to look fancy or mystical in some way, but no; it was just aluminium and rubber. Her wrinkled face was largely concealed by a cloud of thin but puffy white hair and a pair of large, thick glasses. They were clearly for seeing, not sunglasses, but I… couldn’t really make out her eyes behind them, for some reason.

I didn’t know this woman, but the quiet respect of the older students around me suggested that she was somebody important. At the front of the class, she sat, gave us a look over, and started to speak in clipped Ido.

“ – that potions are a lesser craft,” she was saying by the time I got my translation software running. (It was difficult to ignore the unfamiliar syllables and focus on the translation scrolling across my screen; I should try to learn some Ido as soon as possible.) “But if any of you are here for an easy grade, you have come to the wrong class. The construction of a potion is a complicated affair. Potions are versatile, so you will be learning many different techniques to create many different effects, and some of those techniques will seem, on the surface, contradictory. To truly excel at this class, you will need hard work, intelligence, and instinct. To pass, you will need at least two out of the three. So. Let us begin.”

She reached under her desk and, with some effort, placed a large glass jar of what looked like water on it.

“This is empowered water. It is the basis of all potions, excepting of course those based in empowered oil. In this class, you will be provided with empowered water; you will be neither taught nor expected to make your own. That is a Wizard level potioncraft skill, and very few Wizards or Masters actually working in the industry use it; they buy their water from Refujeyo, just like everybody else. What we will be learning is how to take the power in this water and shape it to our needs.” She produced a smaller bottle of something yellowish. “This is empowered oil. It works the same as empowered water; a base for a potion that provides its power. Those of you who have studied chemistry will already know why we empower both water and oil: the base that you use will depend on what you are trying to dissolve in it. Oil cannot be empowered using the same industrial process that Refujeyo uses to empower water, so it is more expensive and difficult to produce. We will be using it on occasion, but we will rely mostly on water in this class. Any questions?”

We were lucky there were no questions, because she only paused for about two seconds before continuing, “Today, you will be familiarising yourselves with the equipment and basic procedures that we will be using in this class. I have sent all of you a recipe for Illuminus, a very simple potion appropriate for a beginner class. You will not be graded on this potion; I hope you all take the opportunity to experiment and familiarise yourselves with the process of potionmaking. Tools and ingredients are under your desks. You may begin whenever you like.”

While we all pulled up the recipe, I took a moment to check the school map. Yes! Both my lab partner and the instruktanto had left their locations on. My partner’s name was Saina. Like Kylie, she hadn’t included a surname. The instruktanto was Andrea Costa.

The recipe looked simple enough. As I’d expected, making a potion was pretty much like cooking. We’d been provided with little labelled basins of powers, some bunches of plant roots and stems, and a bottle containing about a cup of precious empowered water. Saina carefully shredded moon-picked dandelion roots and white lillies fed on springwater with a sharp knife, while I carefully measured and crushed ochre with a heavy pestle.

It was repetitive work, so I got a chance to glance around at how the other pairs were doing. Fortunately, we weren’t lagging behind; while a few tables had people bouncing knives like experts, their fingers curled up on their roots like chefs on TV, and barely needing to measure their ingredients, most of them were like us, slowly plodding through steps. Saina dropped pieces of root into my mortar a few at a time, waiting for me to grind them thoroughly into the ochre powder and release their juices before adding more.

“I don’t get how this is supposed to work,” I admitted as the powder became a thick paste under my hands. “I mean, we’re not casting anything. And none of these are magic, right? Except the water?”

“They, ah… tell the magic in the water what to do, as I understand it,” Saina said.

“Dandelion roots and crushed rock? How?”

She shrugged. “It’s my first lesson, too.” She sprinkled the chopped lily petals into the bottle of water, careful to scrape in as much of the juice on the cutting board as she could, then stepped back while I scooped the mortar’s contents in. I capped the bottle and turned it upside down, shaking vigorously to dissolve the paste. Come on, come on…

Light! The water glowed bright and white. I set it on the table and grinned at Saina, delighted. “We did it!”

She smiled, looking a little baffled at my excitement. Everybody else’s bottles were lighting up, too; the project hadn’t been hard. But this was… wow, was this the first magic I’d ever actually done? It was! It was the first magic I’d done!

I picked up the glowing bottle. It wasn’t warm to the touch, like I thought it would be. It just glowed, brightly, in my hands. My first actual magic.

And I’d aced it.