“I’m surprised there isn’t some kind of magic potion for this,” I remarked to David, my new gender transition specialist, as he watched me carefully draw a testosterone shot into the needle.

“Oh, there have been several in the past, but we’re fortunate enough to live in an age where hormones can be safely mass produced,” he shrugged. “And if you’re choosing between a magical solution and a mundane one and the magic doesn’t have any major advantages…”

“The mundane is usually safer,” I finished, nodding. “But I’m surprised there’s not a magic answer with advantages. A shapeshifting potion or something.”

“If you’d prefer an oral dose, we can still – ”

“No, needles are fine. I just poke it in and push?”

“Yes. Into the muscle; you don’t need to go looking for veins.”

I gave myself the shot and dropped the needle into the sharps disposal. David nodded. “Perfect. Exactly like that.”

“I just do that once a month?”

“Yes. We might have to fiddle with doses later down the line; see how you’re feeling, see how it affects your individual body, see if we want to speed up or slow down.”

“Magical shapeshifting potion would be faster.”

“If you’re that much of a fan of kidney transplants and permanent liver damage, sure.”

“Uh. That’s very… specific.”

“Let’s just say that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and having a blood-based change spell doesn’t qualify a teenager to ‘assist’ his trans friends without getting some extensive medical training first. Closest I’ve seen to a student facing expulsion here. When you have access to professional medical care, use it.”

“Definitely,” I agreed in the tone of someone who hadn’t spent the morning practicing healing potions specifically to avoid seeing the kuracar as much as possible. “So I’ll see you in a month, then?”

“Sooner if you have any questions or worries,” David said. “Or if you just want to talk.”

I nodded, but it wouldn’t be sooner. The last head doctor I’d spoken to had been my childhood one, whose job had been to try to figure out why I’d been cursed. I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience discussing my gender if I could avoid it.

Anyway, I had better things to do than wallow in the past. Kylie’s witch meeting was today.

I approached the room we were meeting in with some trepidation, although I wasn’t sure why. There was nothing to be nervous about. Of the five of us, I already knew Kylie, Talbot and myself, and it wasn’t like we had any kind of complicated plan for the gathering; just getting to know people who’d gone through similar things to each other. It wasn’t a big deal. It shouldn’t be a big deal. So I tried not to look nervous as I entered the room.

I wasn’t the first person to arrive. Talbot was in a corner, having an intense discussion with a blonde woman who looked up as I came in, and I realised with a shock that in fact I knew her as well.

“Cheryl?” I asked, disbelievingly.

“Kayden!” She gave me a little wave. Her arms, I noticed, were free of the dozens of anti-curse charms she’d worn when I met her in New Zealand. “How are you?”

“Y’know. Alive. How are you and Holly? Also, what are you doing here?”

“Tristan – my master – is dealing with some business in Politikala Refujeyo right now and thought I should check out the school. So I’m hanging about for a couple of months. We’re doing fine; Holly’s at daycare right now. How about you? I, uh, I saw what happened with your trial. Is everything…?”

“It’s still not doing anything,” I said, indicating my heart. “Yours?”

“Not a damn peep.”

“And yet you chose an apprenticeship anyway,” Talbot remarked drily. “You realise that if it never awakens, you’re trapped under him forever?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I insisted on an escape clause in the contract. If it’s still dormant when I’m twenty one, our contract dissolves.”

“Hmm. Be careful, Cheryl.”

“Talbot. Out of the two of us, who has a history of not being careful?”

Just then, Kylie came in, followed by a short girl in wizard green with a penetrating stare. She swept her gaze over everyone in the room before follow Kylie in and sitting down.

“So this is everyone?” Cheryl asked.

“Yes,” Kylie said. “Um. Does everyone know each other?”

“We do not,” I said. I gave the new girl a smile. “I’m Kayden.”

“Yuan Hua,” she replied. “Pleased to meet you.”

The others went around and gave their names while I tried to gauge the energy in the group. Hua seemed pretty familiar with Talbot, so nobody was a complete outsider, although Cheryl was close; I was pretty sure I was the only one of us she’d met before today, and that had only been once. She didn’t look nervous or shy though.

“So why are we here, exactly?” she asked.

Kylie shrugged, blushing a little. “We were all kind of… thrust into this, this mage thing, but nobody here really has the same experiences as us. I thought it might be a good idea to, you know, talk to each other. I’ve been thinking of setting up… I don’t know, something for new witch initiates? But I wanted to talk to other people first, just…” she trailed off and looked away.

“Fair enough,” Cheryl said. “So how were you guys cursed?”

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An awkward silence, predictably, greeted this. Talbot broke it. “Well, if no one else wants to break the Tragic Backstory ice…”

He launched into his story, which I’d heard before. This version didn’t contain anything new. Then Kylie told her story, about how she’d used her curse to act as a guide and guardian for her family, until the fateful day it had made a false prediction and gotten three family members killed. Cheryl clicked her tongue sympathetically.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said.

Kylie shrugged. “Yes. Well.” She smiled ruefully. “I used to think it was my fault, you know? Because my curse killed them.”

“You didn’t do anything. They chose to listen to your curse, right? Because your curse had saved other people in the past, right? If the policy was to not listen to it, it would’ve been other people who were dead instead. Everyone takes the worst possible reading of us in any situation, and it’s bullshit. Taking the worst possible reading of ourselves is just doing the arseholes’ job for them.”

Kylie nodded. “Yeah. It wasn’t until I stopped blaming myself that I could grieve them properly, and they deserved to be grieved. Sitting around calling ourselves monsters just for existing never helped anyone.”

“My curse broke my family,” Hua said quietly. “I picked it up in a temple, of all places. I thought, how evil must I be to be cursed in a temple? And my father agreed. My mother left him to protect me, and she had to work so hard to keep both of us alive. When the men came for me, and told me about the school, I mostly agreed to come here so that I wouldn’t be holding her down any more. And now I’m going to use this curse to excel, so I can give her everything she deserves.”

“Evil has nothing to do with it,” I said, with more force in my voice than I intended. “Society lied to us. That’s not how it works.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of the modern theories now,” Hua said, indicating her green robes. “And perhaps we can work at getting others like us up to date a bit sooner. What about you? What’s your story?”

“Really boring, actually,” I admitted. “They found the curse in my heart when I was six months old; no dramatic acquisition story. Then it proceeded to do absolutely nothing to this day. I still have no idea what it does.”

“Me neither!” Cheryl grinned. “But you’re skipping over the part where you were on trial for assaulting someone with a curse.”

“It really wasn’t that big a deal.”

“There was a huge amount of speculation about whether it was going to turn into a murder charge.”

“You killed someone?” Talbot asked, surprised.

“He didn’t kill anyone!” Kylie snapped. “The dirtbag is still alive, and even if Kayden’s curse killed him, it would have been his own fault, not Kayden’s. And it turned out that Kayden’s curse didn’t do anything at all. He was a dimwit who fell off a roof and tried to blame Kayden.”

“I don’t think that he specifically blamed me on purpose,” I pointed out, although I had no idea why I was defending Matt Parker of all people. “Circumstances did most of the work.”

“He deserved it,” Cheryl said. “Just saying. Guy seems like a dick.”

“And we all know that anyone who’s a dick deserves to fight for their life for months in hospital.”

“Mmm. Did you follow up on anything after the trial?”

“Uh, no. I’ve been here. Why?”

“I kept watch, just out of curiosity, you know? He had a really fast recovery after the trial. Suspicious timing. Anyway, if I were in your position, and it turned out the curse had done it, I wouldn’t have felt a shred of guilt. Wasn’t he trying to knock you off the roof?”

“No, he was just… generally harassing me. With some very targeted language. And throwing stuff at me.”

“Yeah, he definitely deserved it.”

“What about yours? I know it hasn’t done anything, but it’s definitely affected your life.”

“Oh, yeah.” Cheryl rubbed the witch mark on her arm. She wasn’t a student of the school, so she wouldn’t get a mage mark until her master pronounced her competent and released her. “I was two years old when I got this. I’d wandered out of sight and gotten tangled in a blackberry bush, got myself all cut up. I came out f it with a few scars, including this one, which wasn’t surprising; we didn’t think much of it. When I was six, I accidentally cut it open again and this weird black stuff oozed out; my parents freaked out, because what kind of infection makes black pus? They rushed me to hospital, and suddenly the hospital was sending for specialists and explaining the bad news. I used every method I could find to try to keep it quiet and protect the people around me until Kayden finally convinced me to hear the mages out, and… here we are. I’m just glad it didn’t do anything in those first four years, because we would’ve had no idea what was going on.”

“Is your apprenticeship helping?” I asked.

“Well, it’s safer. If it does anything now, at least there’s an expert on hand. And I’ve been learning a lot about magical culture and stuff, so that’s nice.”

“Be careful,” Talbot said.

“You’ve said that already. I’m not an idiot.” She scowled at her arm. “I just want to know what this damn thing does.”

“Me too,” I said. “I’ve lugged this thing around my whole life and I know nothing about it. What does yours do?” I asked Hua. “I mean, if you don’t mind talking about it. It’s cool if – ”

“It sings,” she said, “in my mind.” She touched her throat, where I could just see the top of a mage mark poking out above her high collar. “And when the sound is intolerable, it sings through my throat and… well, you don’t want to hear it. Things were very difficult before I was taught to manage it properly.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

She just shrugged. “Perhaps, if we arranged some way to find and contact cursed people earlier than Refujeyo – ”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “I mean, the school wouldn’t let us do it.”

“Sounds about right,” Cheryl scoffed. “If they want to control the training of witches, they’d hardly want us taking it into our own hands.”

I shook my head. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, all of us except Cheryl are part of Refujeyo. We’re legally prevented from approaching anyone until they reach certain ages, usually around sixteen but they’re campaigning for it to be lower in Australia right now, unless something goes wrong with their curse. The school already approaches people as early as it possibly can; we can’t go earlier without breaking a bunch of treaties and stuff. We could probably volunteer to go along; Taine took me to see Cheryl because he thought I might be able to convince her to give the mage world a try. But I don’t know how… useful… that would be.”

“Volunteering to be a shill for Refujeyo,” Talbot said drily. “Exactly how I want to spend my time.”

“If there’d been another witch to talk to you, to slip you their contact details, when you first took your vow, don’t you think that would have helped you?” Kylie asked. Talbot inclined his head slightly, conceding the point.

“Cheryl can approach them early,” Hua pointed out. “If she had a way to find them. And could convince her master to let her travel to them. Couldn’t she? Cheryl, are you part of the whole… system, or are you not beholden to it until you get your mark?”

“I… honestly don’t know? It’s probably in my contract somewhere; I’ll have to have a look. But even if I’m not, my master is, so that doesn’t help us overmuch.”

“For now,” Talbot said. “But you’re free of him in two years, if your curse is still dormant by then, yes? Worth thinking about.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

“If her curse stays dormant,” I said. “And if we were able to find cursed people. We tend to be pretty good at hiding our curses.”

“Refujeyo found all of us,” Kylie pointed out.

“Great. We’ll just get some talented magic hacker or something, and, and hack into their database, or whatever they have.”

“We don’t need a serious action plan right now,” Hua said. “But it’s something worth thinking about, if it becomes viable in the future. I’m sure all of us could’ve done with someone who actually knew what we were going through.”

I nodded. Practicalities aside, it was hard to argue with that sentiment.