Even the chairs were grand. Sitting on one at a great round table made me feel like a king about to proclaim the feast commenceth, and for his courtiers to dig heartily into the banquet. Holly had taken her own throne with no bother at all, heaving a whacking great tome onto the table. It didn’t open like a book, more like the wheezing doors to an ancient crypt. She pored through the pages just like so many others did in here, gathered around a dozen tables under a sky of burnished ebony timbers each the size of pine trunks, chandeliers hovering unchained in the rafters like frigatebirds on sea air. In the study hall, you were quiet and you got on with your studying – Dreadfall could never. So that’s exactly what I did.

  I kept my cowl up as I moved between shelves, picking at book spines, none of their titles familiar. At least if I could find something in the Wrevon dialect, I could make a start. Do something useful with myself. Books were a familiar friend to me, but none of Lyric’s Legible Legendarium, Mottley’s Derivations of the Synergetic Lunar Phases, A Brief Introduction to Practical Arcanovolumetrics, or The Comprehensive Biography of the Sky-Mad Monks of Alacrity looked remotely like an entry level read. It was several hells of a jump from what I’d scrounged from the dusty back rooms of our town hall. I chose one: a weighty book clad in at least half a cow’s worth of leather, and set it down next to Holly. Did my best to make a dent in it, but even the opening tripped me up.

  “Who the hell arranges their contents page in a spiral?” I whispered.

  "The closer to the centre it is there, the closer to the centre of the book you’ll find it.” Holly turned a page. “That’s where the most important information is.”

  “...Dare I ask why?”

  “Wouldn’t want it falling out of the book, now, would you?”

  “ … ”

  So it was either this or the war. At least this kind of nonsense made sense. Or I hoped it would, given time. I flipped to the first page proper and set a finger to the paper: crisp and crinkled like an amberfall leaf. But the words were hard and dense, spidery lines dancing, and I could read the letters, but it felt like the words themselves didn’t want to be understood. Fighting me over their mystery. I sounded the spellings out in my head the way I’d been taught so many years ago, under care of my neighbour while my parents were away again prancing across some distant battlefield, but the sounds didn’t bring any real meaning. Sounded like the plays those travelling thespian bards put on. Gibberish, mostly.

  Holly turned another page. “You’ve really never read any arcane text before?” she whispered.

  “They weren’t a thing where I lived.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Just the forest.” Visions of my decrepit town flashed through my mind. Wanted to keep them as separate from here as possible.

  “Oh. Um. So why did you come here then?”

  “You told me you already figured it out.” I certainly wasn’t gonna repeat it here, not in such a quiet hall filled with so many wandering ears.

  "But why *here* of all places?”

  “I needed any other choice. This was my last option.”

  "By the gallows… No way. Tough to have as a last option.” She flicked at the corner of a page. “It’s gonna be real hard for you if you’re starting totally from the ground. Oh and add in the cost of it too. It’ll chew you up like a mountain bear if you’re not totally sure it’s what you want – even then, just a few months back, I’ve seen really promising people lose their heads and end up dropping out. Falling out, really. Not to be like that, but… how do you even plan on paying for it? Cos, like, I heard the Foresters use leaves and twigs for currency.” She said it like she was passing along a playground secret

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  "Well, we don’t,” I huffed. “I’ll find something. Some work in the city. Anything that’s not about the war.”

  “Not about the war… Gracious! There’s an apothecary by the foot of the Hill Road. My sister looked into working there last verdance and they said they’ll pay good coin for certain herbs and forest things but she got creeped out on her first day. Told me she saw a witch or something out in the woods.”

  "Is that kind of work safe?”

  "You’re a Forester, so don’t you guys gather herbs and plants and stuff for your potions in your cauldrons? And the witch’ll probably be long gone by now. Heard they head north before the longfrost. Like birds do.”

  “...Yeah. Yeah. I’ll go down and find it at the weekend. Thank you,” I said, and I did mean it. Didn’t know how to feel about her and she sure spoke like a Clearlander, but despite that, it was still a little warming. Like she really was trying to be nice to me, underneath it all. I let my head drop back over my book and the words stubbornly persisted in refusing to make any sense to me whatsoever and I really hoped something, somewhere would click and work out. Maybe things weren’t meant to click and work out. Maybe they just kind of fell into some incidental arrangement and that’s what we called our life path. Or a spiral of contents. Maybe you kept trying to pick the best option out of what you’re given, when you’re given them, and that’s all you’ve got.

  Holly turned another page. “You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “I’ll be fine. I have to be.”

  *

  At least it had pictures. And the pictures were of organs that seemed to be made of glass, arrows pointing to their various vertices, and in the next chapter, painstakingly intricate schematic diagrams of the vertical cross-sections of trees, and in the chapter after that, some kind of manifest amalgamation of the two: a bark-skinned face stared back at me from the page, eyes bright and lidless, brain visible through a cut-out, its expression almost lucid. With one sharp claw, I slid the book a handwidth further away from me, and I surreptitiously peered across at Holly’s instead.

  “Third year case study,” she said. So I wasn’t as sneaky as I thought. “A sage from a couple hundred years ago. Hawthorn ad Argentis. They were one of the great invokers.” The page flipped over. “Nowhere teaches invocation anymore and there’s some very good reasons for that.”

  “What’s invocation?”

  "Oh wist, you really are starting fresh to this. Imagine going down a dark cave alone and asking a question, and a voice answers you.”

  "Don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Exactly. We know that delving into lightmagic will kinda make you go really mad over time, but it’s also been found to happen with invokers who even said they stuck totally to the safety of darkmagic. No one really knows why. So there’s the reason my class is studying invokers for the next few months. But never learning how to do it.”

  “Oh, I see. So what type of magic will I be doing?”

  She turned on her seat. “It’ll all be on your schedule when you get it, so don’t worry. You firsties have classes in elemancy, diviny, conjury, and transmutation. Conjury is the fun one. Diviny is the weird one. No one gives a rat about transmutation. There’s some other fields of arcany, like invocation and like thaumaturgy, but you don’t need to know about that yet. You won’t study them.”

  “Right. So what I’m gonna be doing is… safe?”

  “Is anything safe? Bodies can break down whenever for no reason at all. Or you could be struck down by goat flu tomorrow and be covered in blisters for a year.”

  "But that makes me worry this isn't safe.”

  She raised an eyebrow. I felt her gaze paring through me like I was some kind of puzzle box she’d got from a wandering merchant, promising riches inside provided you could figure the trick to opening it. “What is it with you and safety? Listen. Trust your professors. Trust them with absolutely everything. Cos if you don’t then you won’t have a good time here at all. Got it? Good. Now pretend to read your book again while I get this chapter finished.”

  “Hey, how did you know I was pretending to read it?” I hissed.

  "See the spine?” She lifted the massive thing up and tilted it to the light. “It’s by Varrastenius.” She left it in my hands. “It must be like five hundred years old. Maybe more.” My mind blanked at the age of it and I dropped it to the table with a thunderous WHUMP! and a chorus of enthusiastic shushes speared me from every other table in the hall.