Calico woke me. I set her gently back into her clock for the day, pulled on the only clothes not ink-stained, took a look at myself in the restroom mirror – hissed at it – washed my face, dried it on a clean corner of my kit bag, and wondered how I was going to get the rest of it clean again in this place. I hadn’t seen any signs for a laundry I could use and I didn’t fancy going down to the Stridden with the hand soap from the sink, wading into the shallows and batting at my cloak with a paddle like a caterwauling old maiden. Partly because I was sure Holly thought all the Foresters did that anyway.

  The same Holly pointed me in the direction of the firstie classrooms. Pretty sure she would’ve taken me to the door if she hadn’t needed to go pick things up from the city. I found an aggregation of people in about the right place, ‘And it’s down a short corridor’, she’d said. Most of them were. Only one of them hung about at the edge of the hall still. Tall, slim, resplendent in an open, dark robe with opalescent hems and a blood-red shirt beneath.

  “First year conjury?” I asked. I couldn’t stand out here and simply ignore him.

  His face turned to me. Sharp, dark brown eyes washed over me, an umber complexion under his thick dreads, swept exactingly to one side. “Of course,” he said with a mote of hesitation.

  “Thanks.”

  He turned back, rested his back against the tan stone wall. “You’re new.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re one of those Foresters.”

  “...Yeah.”

  “Why were you not here at the start?” He spoke carefully, pronouncing his words like a prince.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “...Indeed.”

  I couldn’t figure him out. His ears were sharp like mine and he didn’t have the typical accent, not in the slightest, but other than that, he could be any Clearlander. All stuck up noses and the same reproachful glares – though his was so crafted, so deft, it felt the rest must have all learned theirs from his. I didn’t wanna stare too much in case he noticed. But he had my attention and I couldn’t help –

  “Were you not the one whom I saw two days hither?” he asked, “Who’d run up the Hill Road with a military pack on his back?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I think so.”

  He hummed gruffly, and I took my attention to a bit of crumbling wall masonry and scratched it with a claw.

  *

  Two long desks ran the length of the room, a stone aisle between them. The left one filled up pretty quickly. The right side still had space. Right next to the guy I’d just talked to. Of course. He took the very end stool and I kept clear of him, but also clear of a huddle of girls further up. A tricky balancing act. A single square of paper laid before me, totally blank. I knew how it felt.

  “Fellows! Students! Wrevondalers! Commencements, commencements… Where did we get to last week? Ah: all things are made of energy. Yes, all of us! Everything! Right down to the last little bitty bit of it.” The professor strode down the aisle, arms aloft, head high. She looked like she’d been zapped by lightning, and she whirled on the spot. “I’ve repeated myself enough on that fact by now, but by the dark spirits I’ll do it again until you’ve all got it. All is energy! It’s just a matter of convincing the energy to do what you want. Be the active force in your life.” She marched back the other way so fast the breeze from her robe took a couple of papers from the desk, and she swept them back into place in a moment. Magic.“You’ve all got your sheets in front of you? Good. We saw some veritable progress last week: a few singed corners. Let’s see some more. If any of you actually set it alight, you’ll earn a Plaudit. Spirits be with you.”

  I glanced at the guy near to me, who was carefully folding his paper along an exacting triangular crease. Did he know something? “Oakley!” boomed a voice from right behind me and I jolted.

  “Professor…?” I said as I turned.

  “Field,” she said. “And no need the for ‘professor’ if you’re not in the mood. Fashionably late, were we?”

  “No, miss, I was on time to your class. I made sure of it.”

  “I mean to the semester. The course. The Institute. The wondrous and wonderful life of magical study.” Professor Field hammered through her words like a woodpecker on a tree. “Not many things pass a good arcanist by. Mark that, student, and mark this: lateness can be vital as long as you used the time for something important.” Something flickered in her eye, and she came close so quickly I drew instinctively back. “Me, I came to the arcane in my latter thirties. Everyone told me I was far too late. But I believe everything happens at the right time.” I blinked, trying to keep up. “The first week anyhow was for introductions and outset theory. Easy to catch up on. Dreadful dull to sit through. Even worse to teach, quite frankly. You’re fortunate. For your first lesson, we’re setting stuff on fire. Exhilarating!”

  Her eyes were huge and wild, or maybe it just looked that way through her circular glasses. I swore they must be glued to her nose, because with every sentence, she flicked her head like she was trying to fling them entirely off her face. “Don’t worry about getting it right now or even this week,” she continued. “You’ve plenty of time. For you, for now, focus only on feeling the magic. Darkmagic. I’ll catch you up.” I tensed as she stood square at me, rooting herself to the floor. Not the first time I’d had a ‘teacher’ take that exact position before me. “You want to draw it up from the good, hale, hearty and dependable earth beneath your boots. From the darkness we came, and to the darkness we shall all return so very, very soon. Access that. Power is energy in action, and you are a conduit of power: feel your connection. It’ll feel like a buzzing at first. If you can get that on the first lesson, you’re doing good.” She drew back, shoulders wide, acting out a deliberate slow and deep breath. “You can tell you're using dark magic when your body feels warm from using it. And you'll probably feel really tired really quickly until you get used to it. Nauseous too.”

  No one else seemed to be paying much attention to her. Maybe she was always like this. “How long does that take?”

  “Few years or so. But it's better than the lightmagic. That makes you wildly dizzy if you start tapping into it, so you know to back out again. Much like glancing up at the Brightness on a clear blue day – eh, you’ll probably be fine if you do it accidentally once or twice and pull yourself right away from it quick as a snap, but doing it on purpose is asking for trouble you might not recover from. Would you keep staring up, even though it stung and seared your eyes?” My head shook vehemently. “There was one student I heard of a few years back who went totally mad from just one dip into light, so it’s claimed, but if you’re not dizzy and your head feels clear, you’ll be okay. Probably.”

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  “That doesn’t feel too safe.”

  “Not many things do. You’ll want to focus on finding the buzz in your legs at first. Focus your mind into connecting with the earth below you, spiritually, emotionally, metaphysically, synergistically, whatever works for you. Make it real for you. The rest can follow. Call me over if you have any questions. And remember that the really dumb questions are usually far more vital to your progress than the smart ones. And far more fun for me to answer.”

  She headed away and I tried to calm the whirlwind in my head. She’d pelted words at me like a hailstorm and I swore I’d –

  “Rudd!” resounded her voice again. “What are you doing there?”

  I looked over. That guy had folded his paper into a sort of figure of a crane. Impressively intricate. “I understood folding it up would make the material more volatile,” he said, wavering just a fraction, “and I’ve heard more volatile materials are more susceptible to arcane… affectation.”

  “You’re absolutely and entirely correct, but I know for a fact firsties don’t get taught that yet. Where did you learn it from?”

  He offered a non-committal wave of the hand. “Here and there…”

  “Mysterious. Enigmatic. Fancy yourself important, do you, Rudd?”

  “I’d really rather not…”

  “Wrong. I’ve walked this land for half a century and I’m yet to see anyone who isn’t important. Clever thinking with the volatility. Chin up. Never be afraid to stand out from the crowd.”

  The Professor whisked away up the aisle to the top of the class again and I finally got my chance to breathe. I leaned back on my stool, remembered it didn’t have a backrest at the very last moment, and scrambled to avoid an ignominious fall to the tiles. And he noticed. Of course he noticed. “So, uh, does she always talk like that?”

  “Only when she’s designing to sound impressive.” He rotated the paper crane slowly on his desk space.

  “So I guess she’s done it every class so far?”

  “Quite so. Every last one.”

  I checked up the room. Professor Field was animatedly busy with someone else. “Cos every last lesson is important! Vital!” I effused, the same way she had. “All of them! Absolutely all!”

  He snorted a small laugh to himself. “So now we’ve got two Fields in the room.”

  “Nonsense. I’m Oakley. But I’m also important. All of us are. Everyone! Important!”

  “Okay, now you’re taking the piss,” he said, a smile finally cracking onto his face. He looked so cool, so handsome, so effortless. Back to his work, focused on his paper crane, but less like he was trying to set it alight and more like he was expecting to do it entirely on its own. Like he believed it would do it simply because he wanted it to.

  I had to ask him. “What’s your name?”

  He didn’t answer straight away. “Rudd.”

  “The rest of your name. I can’t call you that.”

  “As if to tell me you don’t know…”

  “Huh? Of course I don’t. I barely got here.”

  “...Indeed. If you want to play it like that.” His eyes set on me. Searching me. Digging through me. “For the sake of humouring you, it’s… Just call me Kaspar.”

  “Alright, thanks, Just-Call-Me-Kaspar. Mine’s… Morrigan.”

  “Do you want me to try setting your cloak on fire instead of this paper?”

  “Sorry.”

  He toyed a little more with the paper. “...Morrigan like the death spirit?”

  I bundled my cloak around me a little more, and I guess I let out more of a breath than I meant to. “If you don’t like it,” he followed, “just change it.” He said it like it was so easy. “...Morrigan, hm? You know, there was this master sage a few centuries back called Gan Aldolpho? Preeminent transmuter. Sense of humour to his work. He was the first to turn grass to glass, flax to wax, silverbarks to silver bars… You can comprehend. Indeed he spent the last decades of his life working on magic to turn something cold into something gold. Never managed it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s unfortunate.” And then: “Guess he turned into something cold before he, uh…” I caught a look from him. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Stop saying sorry for being funny. Keep that up and you might rival Gan one day.”

  I didn’t really want to think about spending an entire lifetime doing this. Three years would be more than plenty. Now my head was back at a normal speed again, I tried to bring back some of the professor’s words, despite how absurd it all felt. Despite the fact she could have at least tried to explain it in a way that made it feel anywhere near normal. And despite how I did, against it all, sense the slightest, vaguest hint of a buzz around my legs. Hadn’t felt anything like this since the evening of Omen’s eighteenth…

  Eyes shut, hands over my face, I tried to focus into it. Make it feel real. Like Field had said. Grew a little, sharper, deeper, unsteadily so but the sensation strengthened. Fizzing in my muscles like a medicinal tonic. At this rate with how long I’d been sitting on the stool, it could have been merely pins and needles. I found I needed it to be more.

  Someone’s loud expulsion of breath broke my focus. The delicate little paper crane atop Kaspar’s part of the desk still had one pristine wing, but the other was singed all along the edges like it had divebombed through someone’s campfire. “Hey! You did it!” I said softly, but I don’t think he noticed over the whirlwind approaching.

  “Splendid! Charming! Superlative! Exemplary work, Rudd.” The professor’s tornado of energy brought everyone’s eyes to this corner of the room. She poked experimentally at the blackened, crumpled edges. Charred flakes drifted to the table. “Perhaps some certain others in this room could learn from you rather than distancing from you. A dozen plaudits. You’ve got the rest of the class to see if you can symmetrify your achievement.”

  She bustled off elsewhere and I slid minutely closer to him. Clicked my claws on the desk. Gritted my teeth. “Hey, may I ask what’s up about everyone distancing from you?”

  “This game again? If you’re saying to me that you don’t know, then I’m saying to you I’d prefer it stay that way.”

  So I backed off. Glanced at him. Glanced down at my own paper. I grumbled and tried to fold it like he’d done to his – not the full crane, of course, however and wherever he’d learned such a delicate craft as that, but if he’d managed to do what was asked, following the general direction felt like a good step. Folding corners over. Focusing and folding. Focusing and folding and feeling the ephemeral buzz deep in my legs again, telling myself it was the energy from the earth below me, the earth we as Foresters were said to know like kin, and trying to draw it up into my body. But it felt dumb. It felt silly. I’d always known that arcanists had their weird ways and it was so easy to spot them while you were in the city, swaddled in their idiosyncratic dress sense and babbling about something strange. And now here I was amongst it all, trying to do the same. It all felt so cobbish. Like some grand practical joke being played on me. Wouldn’t be the first time everyone around me was in on the same joke, and they’d all laugh at it later once I wasn’t around. All watching me. Whispering comments. Muffling snickers. Like they did through the years of training camps in Dreadfall. They never even –

  “Five minutes left!” boomed the professor’s voice and I jumped from my stool. Not from the noise. From the fire.

  “Fire!” I yelled dumbly and immediately wished I hadn’t as the entire [spirited] world turned to stare at me.

  “Fire? Fire!” echoed Field. By my desk in a flash. “My students, oh my, we have fire!” She picked up my sheet, a candle’s worth of flame dancing on a corner, and beheld it as if I were the caveman to first discover fire, and she were about ten seconds off becoming the first to discover the burnt finger.

  She wafted it out and handed it back to me. “Fire indeed! Mightily commendable! I suggest you keep this somewhere important, Oakley. And a dozen Plaudits to your name. No: two dozen!”

  I sat down, bewildered, all too aware of how many faces still gawked at me, and realised my hands were shaking. I buried them in the hems of my sleeves. My whole body ached and reeled like I’d rolled backwards all the way down a hill, and I took a slow and deliberate breath through my teeth. Over at his place, Kaspar’s crane now sat tightly crumpled and discarded on the edge of the desk. “Hey, uh, what does a Plaudit do?” I asked.

  “It’s so the staff know who the favourites are,” he tersely replied.