“The map is wrong,” Max declared, apropos of nothing, as we headed to breakfast that morning.

“Um,” I said, “what?”

“The school map! I’ve been cross-referencing the actual data from people walking around with the distances and directions on the map. The distances the map gives on the corridors are almost always a little bit wrong, up to ten per cent too short or long. And if there’s a pattern, it’s one that’s too complicated for me to find with any amount of data I could physically gather.” He scowled at his tablet. “Do you know what this means?”

So that’s why he’d been asking me to manually pace corridors again. “That the school is actively lying to us about its layout? That can’t be good.”

“It means that eighty per cent of my map data is completely useless! Do you know how long it’s going to take to map anything if I have to rely on physically walking places and taking measurements? It also means I might as well write off mapping the Initiate area of the school; I took hardly any physical data from you there.”

“Okay,” I said, “but more importantly, why is the map lying to us?”

“Oh, probably unintentionally,” Max said, waving a hand dismissively. “The measurements aren’t off my enough to actually cause problems. I guess whatever they’re using to predict the changing corridors has some level of error, which is not good news for me, because if a computer program whose whole job it is to track this map can’t do it then my chances are not particularly great.”

“Unintentionally? I’m sorry, you’re saying that we’re wandering around teleporting underground corridors and this system has margins of error?”

“If it helps, we seem to be jumping around a lot less here than in the initiate area. This part of the school seems to mostly make sense, except for when it occasionally doesn’t. Which is good news for mappability.”

“Oh, so it’s mostly the initiates who are in danger,” I said sarcastically. “That’s so much better.”

“I’m sure there’s no actual danger, or there would have been problems by now.”

“What, like students ending up in a weird magic lake with a tentacle monster trying to drown them?”

“Yes, but that’s you. That doesn’t count. You always seem to find the most dangerous and complicated way to get anywhere.”

I rolled my eyes at the grin he was trying to hide. “Well, luckily, you’ve got more people pacing out corridors for you now, and your precious maps won’t be quite as badly corrupted by my terrible luck.”

“Koala?” A familiar voice called from behind us. “You survived! Awesome!”

I turned to greet Mae with a quick hug. “You don’t have to sound so surprised about it.”

“And who’s this?” she asked, looking Max up and down. “This the rich legacy boyfriend?”

“Ah, no. No, Magistus and I aren’t… it didn’t work out. This is Max.”

“Hi,” Max said.

“Nice to meet you. You broke up, Koala?” Mae looked devastated. “No! I was so invested in your relationship.”

“You have literally never met my ex-boyfriend. How could you be invested?”

“I may not have met him, but I did spend significant personal resources setting up the best date ever for you. Investment! Eh, I’m sure you can do better anyway. Find a richer and softer sugar mage.”

“Yes, that’s what I should do,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Start working my way through the legacy kids in search of money and power.”

“Hey, that’s what the legacy kids do to each other.”

“Hang on,” Max cut in. “That date. Mae, were you the one who provided those faux flowers? They were absolutely amazing!”

“Oh, I didn’t make them. I traded a friend for the favour. They are great, though, aren’t they?”

“It’s not often you see such a good simulation of a living thing using a creation spell! It would have to be highly specialised, I imagine.”

“He does seem to lean pretty heavily into flowers, so… probably? I could introduce you if you like.”

I tuned out while the two discussed magical fake flowers for awhile. By the time I tuned back in, apparently we had agreed to grab something easy for breakfast and ll go eat it at Mae and Terry’s cabin, so… okay.

The last time I had seen the cabin, it hadn’t been the cabin. It had been the Pit version, reconstructed from my memories and my impression of what cabins should look like. I’d forgotten just how rundown the real one was, even with Mae and Terry’s occasional slapdash repairs.

Mae grabbed Max’s hand and pulled him inside for a ‘tour’, which I didn’t think was really possible in a building with a single room. I hovered outside the door, wishing we’d brought Terry so I’d have someone to exchange sarcastic remarks with while Mae put the kettle on and Mas laid out our food.

“Come eat something,” Mae called to me, but I honestly wasn’t feeling that hungry.

“I’m just gonna go for a walk, I think,” I said. “I haven’t been getting enough sunlight recently.”

Mae just shrugged and went back to whatever she was talking to Max about.

I’d spent a decent amount of time at the shore of Agreabla Insulo, but I’d never really explored the forest. I quickly found Mae and Terry’s permaculture garden, which was… not good. Even I, who couldn’t successfully raise a succulent, could tell that a lot of the plants were struggling; leafy plants didn’t have enough sunlight, some looked like they weren’t getting enough water, and the bugs had gotten to them. Maybe gardening was really hard? There were non-food plants there, too, just scattered about, including a surprisingly healthy-looking white rose bush. I thought it looked healthy, anyway. I don’t know anything about roses.

About twenty minutes later, Max found me. “Saved you a pastry,” he said, handing me said pastry. “Are you okay?”

“Huh? Yeah, of course. Why?”

“Just wondering. Mae’s kind of a lot, isn’t she?”

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“Oh, yeah. If she’s anything. She’s a lot.”

“Are you two friends?”

I shot him a look. “Max, if you’re going to try to mage-politick up all of my friendships I swear – ”

“No! No, that’s not what I meant. I just meant, she’s kind of a lot, and you were kind of quiet, and I don’t know what history you guys have so I was wondering…”

“You think she’s bullying me?”

“It’s a reasonable concern.”

“She’s not any kind of bully that I’m aware of, Max. She’s just enthusiastic.”

“Okay, but you’re usually more, y’know. Present? But this morning – ”

“I woke up very early. I’ve had a long morning. It’s nothing to do with Mae.” I glanced through the trees, where I could just make out the roof of the cabin, and up at the sky. Clear. Sunny. No sign of rain. “Mae’s a good person, so far as I can tell. I don’t know her that well, but she’s always been good to me. Helped me out whenever I needed it.”

“Oh. Good.” Max seemed to relax a bit.

I glanced back at the permaculture garden. At the white roses. “Hey, Max. Random magic question.”

“Yes?”

“I was looking through my potion book today and there’s a recipe for a sleeping potion that needs the petals of white roses fed on deer blood.”

“Right.”

“Okay, so my question is – what the fuck?”

He blinked at me. “Which particular fuck confuses you?”

“Deer blood? Really? I mean, does that have some kind of obscure effect on the chemistry of flower petals or something?”

“Oh! No. It just tells the water what to be. Assuming your spellbook is up to date. Cultural perceptions do change, so…” he caught my baffled expression. “Right, so. A large amount of using magic comes down to telling the magic what you want it to do. If you’re taking it out of its spell to do that, then telling it what to do becomes… complicated. Uh… do you understand how spells are born?”

I nodded. Everyone knew where curses came from, especially cursed people. “They’re made from the souls of true sinners.”

“Um. What?”

“You know, when they die?” I hesitated. Max’s expression did not suggest that this was the answer he was expecting. “Sorry,” I said, “am I explaining badly? I don’t know all the sciencey words you magic researchers use, so excuse me if my explanations a bit on the ‘germs are invisible bad-smelling vapours’ side or whatever.”

“No, no, that’s not… uh. Could you explain what you mean? Pretend I’ve never heard of spells before.”

I rolled my eyes. “When people have evil thoughts or deeds, they corrupt themselves. This is pretty normal, nobody’s perfect, but when people are really, really evil, like they’re baby murderers or whatever, hen this wrongness can grow and fester, and if they’re not given the proper purifications and buried properly when they die, then when their spirit returns to the earth, they can leave that piece of themselves behind. That piece is a curse. Then it seeks out other sinful souls, looking for a crack to bury itself in and cause harm to the world.”

Apparently this explanation wasn’t up to Max’s standards, because he looked more and more disbelieving as it went on. “Who… who told you that?” he asked.

I shrugged. “It’s just… common knowledge? I’m sure you have a bunch of long Latin words to explain it, but from a practical standpoint – ”

“That’s what the commonfolk think these days? That curses – Kayden, you were six months old when you got your curse. How could a baby be evil enough to deserve something like that?”

“How could a baby be good enough to avoid it?” I shrugged. “Innocence isn’t safety.”

Max was staring at me with a strange mix of pity and sudden comprehension. It wasn’t a look I liked very much, I decided. “I can’t believe anybody would let you think that about yourself,” he said. “I just… hang on. I’m trying to parse what this whole school, with the Initiation and everything, must look like to you. Do you think all mages are evil by definition?”

“No, no, it’s not… it’s not about good and evil and what people deserve or anything like that. Nobody’s completely pure, right? So everyone’s a little bit vulnerable. But it’s like… okay, some people have better immune systems than others. And some of that’s just down to luck, their genetics and their age and whatever. And some of it’s based on whether they sleep and eat and exercise properly. Right? Anyone can get sick, but some are a lot more likely to get sick than others. And some people are weaker to some infections than others; you might pick up the flu really easily and your friend might be more vulnerable to chicken pox. If you pick up an infection that your friends didn’t, it’s more likely that your immune system is weaker, right? Or at least weak in the way that that particular infection can take advantage of. But not certain. It could just be bad luck. Either way, once you have an infection, if it’s something that could be really dangerous to the people around you, it’s your responsibility to manage it. You have to treat yourself as contaminated, and it doesn’t really matter how well you took care of your immune system before you got it. As for mages, well, if a bunch of people jump into a pit full of different diseases specifically trying to catch one, and they all come out with diseases, that doesn’t mean they had weak immune systems when they went in, does it? And so long as they’re making sure they aren’t a danger to anyone else, which is what this whole school is for, then the question of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ doesn’t really come up.”

“I suppose that makes sense. I’m sorry that happened to you, Kayden.”

I frowned. “You’re sorry I got cursed?”

“No, I’m sorry you were raised by a culture willing to believe that utter bullshit about magic,” he said angrily. “That’s not where spells come from.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um. Then, where…?”

“The first thing that needs to be understood in order to understand magic is that the world we live in isn’t real, in any concrete sense. Or it is… it is real, but that reality is arbitrary. Thought builds our world in three ways. First, it defines what does and does not exist. This is a rose because our pattern-matching brains had seen that it’s similar to other things they’ve seen and we decided to call that sort of pattern ‘rose’ and pretend it is an individual thing. Second, thought creates things to exist, but only in thought. By pretending something exists and behaving as if it does, societies make those categories meaningful and create intersubjective realities.”

“Money and countries and corporations and stuff,” I said, nodding. I knew this much already.

“Yes. Third, enough belief and dreams and desire can create physical influences on the world, little pockets of unusual behaviour that we call spells. When large groups of people all believe and want the same thing, these little fluctuations in the normal laws of physics are how that desire manifests. Which is why every spell is different; it’s determined by the minds that made it, and it’s impossible to get consistency out of a breeding ground like that.”

“Okay,” I said. “So, potions…”

“The magic in ichor or in empowered water or oil is raw and undirected. It no longer ‘knows’ what it’s supposed to be doing. When you make a potion or craft a rune, you build a new dream around it, using the rules that humanity as a whole has somehow decided ‘count’. Some of the ingredients used to communicate with spells make sense and have a through line – things created in full moonlight are for purification and change, the addition of various types of blood for increasing power, that wort of thing. And then sometimes you have to grow a white rose in deer blood and we all just accept that by the time we untangle whatever cultural nonsense led to that, it’ll be three hundred years in the future and the culture will have shifted and it’ll no longer work anyway.”

“So… the right way to make potions changes, as our cultures do.”

“Yes, but very slowly. Some symbols, like the moonlight one, have endured for thousands of years and only gotten stronger with globalisation unifying their meaning across cultures. Others flicker in and out every half-century or so. So it’s important to check the publication date on any recipes you use. There’s a potion museum in Odense that you might be interested in seeing; they collect potions made with mutable recipes and preserve them. So there are samples of potions there over the past few centuries since the Purification that can’t be made any more, many of them the only existing samples of those potions.”

I nodded, as if voluntarily going to a museum was something I would ever consider doing. “So all the work in creating new potions is just trying to figure out the secret code magic is using before it changes?”

“That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. It’s an intense field. A lot of state-employed potioncrafters are verifiers; their whole career is making various potions with ingredients that are thought to be mutable, to see if they still work.”

“Huh.” Well, there was a career option. “Sounds about as stimulating as factory work.”

“Probably. I don’t know anybody who does it. A paycheck is a paycheck though, I suppose.”

“That’s true.” I glanced back up at the sky. A couple of clouds had appeared. Chance of rain, maybe? “I’m going back to the school,” I said. “I’ve got classes soon.”

“Have fun.”

“Unlikely.” I gave him a little wave and headed back toward the tunnels.

My parents had always taught me that curses were made from sins. Max was convinced that curses were made from dreams.

It shouldn’t make a difference. But still, I hoped that he was right.