This, my Eleventh Decree as Lord Prophet Leon’s sole surviving disciple, pertains to the lines numbering 234, 235, and 301 in Leon’s primary spell journal.
My decree is that, henceforth, no mapping sequence of Leon’s invention shall be altered in its replication nor duplicated except in application for its intended purpose, which is the survey of God’s Bounty. For the Prophet wrote no spell except according to Feryn’s Will.
Therefore, while Leon’s writings, which are the Will of God, endure, Tiran shall endure. He who would alter the mirror of Godhood invites calamity, for he does the work of devils.
—The Tirasid, Law, Verse 13 (64 of Tiran)
Freynan the First
tanding in the center of Leon’s Hall, Sciona felt paradoxically smallerS than she ever had and big enough to eat the world. Instead of looking directly at any of the greatest men in Tiran, she let the white of their robes blur together into a general brightness.
“Archmages of Tiran, I stand before you to test for the rank of highmage.” Her voice shook faintly, and she only steadied it by reminding herself that as soon as she got her introduction over with, they would let her at the spellograph. Everything would be all right when she just got her hands on those steel keys. “My name is Sciona Freynan. I studied at Danworth Academy and then here at the University of Magics and Industry.”
Where applicants had studied before the University really shouldn’t have been a consideration. It was just a quick way for the testers to determine the applicant’s social status. There was a stark economic divide between common students who attended public schools and those with the connections to secure a spot at Danworth.
“Excuse me, Miss Freynan.” Archmage Eringale stopped her. “Your paperwork says that you studied at a public school—East Havendel Public School of Magics—and Danworth Academy?”
“Right. Yes, Archmage.” Sciona held her chin up as Bringham had told her, even as nerves writhed through her gut. “I transferred to Danworth through their scholarship program in my second year.”
Papers shuffled among the archmages as a few of them made notes and others seemed to sit up a little straighter. Danworth accepted only five public school transfers per year, and back when Sciona had applied, the number had been three. She hoped this made her someone to take seriously.
Not just the requisite female applicant for this decade.
“Thank you, Miss Freynan,” said Archmage Eringale. “Please, continue.”
“I’ve spent the last seven years working in Archmage Bringham’s laboratories in Trethellyn Hall. For four of those, I’ve served as his lead manual sourcer.” Bringham wrote beautiful, demanding action spells that streamlined Tiran’s textile production. Someone had to find the energy to test those spells before they went into factory conduits. “My areas of specialization are industrial siphoning application and experimental mapping spell composition. Thank you again for your consideration today.
With the Mage Council’s permission, I will now approach the desk.”
Orynhel nodded his silver head, and Sciona stepped forward.
This time, Archmage Scywin claimed the first prompt, using a click of his timepiece conduit to reset the desk.
“Miss Freynan, before you, you will find twelve pine twigs in a bowl,” said Tiran’s master siphoner. “Using the Kaedor mapping method, ignite the twigs so that they burn slowly.”
Sciona’s hands were on the spellograph before he finished the sentence.
She was awake now. She was home. The mechanical give of the keys beneath her fingers settled the sea of her nerves, leaving only the mirror clarity of the task before her.
Action sub-spells for fire were easy to write; as Jerrin Mordra had demonstrated, it was the sourcing sub-spell where things usually went wrong. A smidge too much energy and Sciona would reduce the twigs to ash in seconds. Much too much and she risked self-immolation, which would be an embarrassing way to flub the exam. Fire spell done, Sciona hit
the break key, stamping a horizontal line into the sheaf and marking the beginning of the sourcing sub-spell.
Kaedor mapping spells adhered to a rigid structure that made their composition easy but their use in siphoning difficult. When Sciona activated the mapping spell, the Otherrealm filled the coil before her in glowing white and gray, but inevitably, the simplicity of the Kaedor Method produced a subpar view of God’s Bounty. White shapes crawled and shifted in the gray, indicating potential energy sources, but all were ill-defined. In Sciona’s preferred mapping methods, those energy sources came up crisp, bright, and easy to pinpoint. This was like looking at lantern lights through a thick fog.
Sciona suspected that the blur of the Kaedor Method was precisely why Archmage Scywin had wanted her to apply it to such a fiddly precision action sub-spell. Other mages called Scywin “the Sniper” for his ability to hit the perfect energy source in any mapping coil through any mapping method. He wanted to see if this upstart sourcer could do the same.
The appraising gaze of the Sniper should have terrified Sciona. On some level, it did, but Sciona’s determination converted the fear directly into focus. After years of applied mapping for Bringham, she knew how to pinpoint the right shape and brightness in the swirling gray. This was where desk mages like Mordra the Tenth fell short and where Sciona shone.
She saw her mark and struck its coordinates into the spellograph before the light could move or fade: 40.5 by 23.1. Her finger stabbed the siphoning key, and the magic whooshed into effect. Like the end of a straw placed to her coordinates, the sourcing spell sucked the targeted energy from the Otherrealm through to Sciona’s action sub-spell.
The mapping visual vanished as a finger-sized flame sprang to life in the bowl of twigs. A tidy success.
Sciona breathed easier as the little flame consumed the twigs before her and the archmages made their notes, but it was a small catharsis. Give her something difficult. Now, the insatiable thing in her screamed. Now, now, so
she could hurry up and overcome it.
Archmage Bringham went next.
“Before you, you will find a slab of obsidian.” He waved his wand to produce the black rock along with a pair of scales. “Bisect it.”
Sciona glanced up at her mentor in surprise. This was the same spell Jerrin Mordra had just bungled—and she noted Mordra the Ninth shooting Bringham a look of irritation. A few other archmages muttered their disapproval, but Bringham had told Sciona to let him worry about them. So, she ignored the ripples of discontent among their ranks and focused on the magic at hand.
Jerrin Mordra’s mistake had been siphoning too much energy into a narrowly confined cut. Under the sudden excess of pressure, his granite slab had exploded. Given the density of obsidian, Sciona’s task would require a lot of pressure focused to the width of a knife-edge…or a modest amount of pressure focused to an edge no wider than a molecule. The latter ran the risk of slicing straight through the desk and into the floor, but Sciona banked on her targeting precision and defined the edge as one molecule in width.
Watch this one, Scywin, she thought as she finished her mapping sub- spell and locked in her coordinates.
There was no explosion when she siphoned, not even a crack as the rock resisted the spell. The obsidian simply fell into two pieces, mirror-smooth where her cut had passed through. It may not have been professional, but she couldn’t resist a smile as she placed the two halves on the scales before her and watched the needles bob to a stop at the same number. Perfect halves. Even on his second try, Mordra the Tenth hadn’t managed that.
A few of the archmages whispered to one another as they took in the results. Mordra the Ninth looked like he could kill someone—though it was unclear whether his ire was for Sciona, Bringham, or his shame of a son.
“Clearly, she just copied the first applicant,” Archmage Duris said.
“She didn’t, though,” Archmage Gamwen pointed out. “Her composition was entirely different—and superior on multiple levels.
Weighing the halves evenly, for one, instead of trying to gauge halves by a measure of length.”
“Still,” Duris said in irritation. “It’s not fair that she saw the spell performed before it was asked of her. I won’t be counting it toward her
score. Miss Freynan.” He turned sharp green eyes on her. “Let’s see if you’re up to more than simple cutting and ignition spells.”
At forty-two, Duris was the youngest archmage in a century, and Sciona supposed she couldn’t blame him for scorning her—or any mage who performed in his presence. The master conduit designer had either invented or improved half the devices in modern Tiran. Who were these youngsters to encroach on his hard-won territory?
When he waved his gloved hand, the obsidian and scales vanished, replaced by a row of empty glass bowls.
“Using matter from the Otherrealm, create an incendiary device that activates when thrown over fifteen feet in the air.”
Matter from the Otherrealm? Not just energy?
“I’m sorry?” Gamwen looked incredulously at Duris. “How is this prompt relevant to the skills of a mapping specialist?”
It wasn’t. Alchemy was a highly specialized field that required entirely different training from all other spellwork. Siphoning matter from the Otherrealm was, after all, a fundamentally different practice from siphoning energy. Of the mages who had tested before Sciona, only one had been asked to siphon matter, and industrial alchemy had been his second major.
“I agree with Gamwen.” Duris’s senior conduit designer, Eringale, spoke up in an admonishing tone. “What are you trying to do, Duris? Blow the little lady’s hand off?”
It was Bringham who said, “Let her give it a try. It’ll be all right.”
“Will it?” Gamwen seemed doubtful.
“I believe so. In any case, it looks like she’s already gotten started.”
Bringham knew his apprentice well. Sciona was already at the scratch paper, sketching a flowchart of the spells she would need.
There was no way to map for matter in the Otherrealm because no mage had ever found a way to display the physical reality of God’s Bounty. All a mage could do was choose his coordinates, siphon, and hope he got what he needed. And if he did get the matter he needed, it was often mixed in with a sludge of other elements, crushed together in the passage from one realm to the next. Sometimes, the blind-siphoned sludge was dangerous—explosive,
acidic, or poisonous. More alchemists died in their laboratories than any other type of mage.
Before composing for the siphoning itself, Sciona wrote an accompanying spell to scan whatever came through from the Otherrealm and give her a chemical breakdown. Chemistry was not one of her specialties, but she hoped she would recognize a dangerous compound in time to jump back from the desk.
In the end, she had to siphon five times, filling all the available bowls to the brim with mystery muck, before she came up with enough carbon for her purposes. Another painstakingly written alchemic spell pulled the carbon from all the dishes to form a ball the size of Sciona’s fist—her incendiary device. Not that pure carbon was combustible. Sciona couldn’t make a true material explosive because, well, she wasn’t a damn alchemist; she didn’t know the chemical composition of a bomb off the top of her head, and guesswork could kill her where she stood. What she could do was write around the need for advanced alchemy.
With the soon-to-be bomb resting on the floor before the desk, she was back in her element: energy-based magic. Like all sourcing spells for conduits, this one had to make use of Tiran’s energy Reserve. Tapping the Reserve was the only way for a sourcing sub-spell to yield energy without the need for manual mapping and targeting.
She assigned the sourcing spell the name POWER. Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called FIRE, inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name DEVICE and translated the directives scribbled on her notepaper into the runic language of the spellograph:
CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.
ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.
ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.
If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.
The matter siphoning may not have come easily, but throwing the bomb was by far the most daunting part of the demonstration; true to form as a woman and a scholar, Sciona had a terrible arm. Stepping back from the desk, she carefully lowered the carbon ball and eyed her intended trajectory —over the desk but not directly over, away from herself, but not too close to the archmages.
Men sniggered on the benches behind her just as the Danworth boys once had the few times she had tried to play ball with them in her skirts.
Back in that schoolyard, she had turned around and hurled the deerskin ball ineffectually at the boys. If she did that here, it would be so much more satisfying—and possibly murder. As tantalizing as the mental image was, she ignored her spectators and kept her eyes focused upward on the murals of the Founding Mages above. On where she was going, not where she had been.
With a deep breath, she drew her arm back and slung the ball toward the ceiling.
DEVICE soared farther forward than she’d intended but successfully hit fifteen feet and—whoosh!—burst into flame.
Fire burned ferociously around DEVICE, using the carbon as an anchor in space, until the ball descended below fifteen feet, extinguished, and fell to the floor, trailing smoke. Another success.
The spells only got harder from there.
If the archmages meant this to demoralize her, Sciona supposed even their wisdom had its limits. The deeper she sank into complex magic, the more focused she became, the more her surroundings fell away until nothing mattered. Not even the opinions of the greatest men in Tiran.
At last, Gamwen leaned over to Orynhel and said, “Archmage Supreme, we’re nearing the maximum prompt count.”
And Sciona was almost disappointed. She was so wrapped up in the work at this exhilarating pace that she didn’t want it to end. More important, she realized she had yet to fail a prompt. Cautious elation welled
up inside her. There had been a few stumbles, yes, but no spell that she had failed outright. She was passing.
Nodding, Archmage Orynhel said, “Before we move on to our final deliberation, does anyone have a last prompt for Miss Freynan?”
“I do.” Archmage Duris lifted his white-gloved hand, and a cauldron appeared before the desk—an industrial cauldron, bigger than the desk itself…bigger than three desks stacked one on top of the other, the kind of cauldron a factory worker might fall into and not be discovered until his body bloated and bobbed to the surface.
“Miss Freynan, before you, you will find a cauldron,” Duris’s voice said from behind the wall of metal. “Levitate it.”
Sciona stared blankly at the monstrous vessel between her and the archmages. It had to be a hundred times heavier than anything the other applicants had been asked to move. And Duris wasn’t just asking her to move it; he was asking her to levitate it, a deeply delicate operation. Sciona had to walk partway around the desk to even see the archmages’ panel past the cauldron.
“May I use any mapping method I choose, Archmage Duris?” she asked and thought she saw Bringham smile.
“Sure.” Duris folded his arms as he leaned back in his seat. “But no siphoning the Reserve.” Meaning Sciona couldn’t direct the siphoning to stop when a condition of her action spell was met. She would have to calculate and source the energy on her own. Perfectly. On the first try.
“You’ve demonstrated your aptitude with tame—we might say womanly— amounts of energy. A highmage must master far more than that.”
“Yes, sir…”
But this task would require an enormous amount of energy. The prompt was dangerous—unless Duris thought Sciona didn’t have the skill to access that much energy. Or maybe he knew that she had the skill and just wanted to see if she had the nerve.
“Duris, I don’t like this.” Gamwen voiced Sciona’s apprehension. As the leading mapper in all of Tiran, he knew the risks if she attempted the spell.
But Archmage Orynhel raised a withered hand, silencing the objection.
“The prompt has been issued, Gamwen. Miss Freynan, please proceed.”
“Yes, Archmage Supreme.”
Sciona approached the cauldron and experimentally pushed on it with both palms. It didn’t budge. Putting her shoulder to the metal and throwing all her weight against it only got her a sore arm and some unhelpful chuckles from the benches at her back. Her heartbeat was picking up again —not in excitement, this time, but in fear. The fact that she couldn’t shift the cauldron an inch meant that she had no read on its weight over a few hundred pounds.
In Bringham’s labs, Sciona had gotten good at estimating the weight of machinery, but always with more information than this. There, she would have been able to ask, What are the dimensions on this thing? What’s it made of? Iron? Pewter? Steel? Some newfangled alchemic compound I should read up on? The material looked like steel, but…She rapped her knuckles on the side and frowned at the sound—muted, like there might be a layer of some other material inside, but she was half again too short to look over the rim.
The cauldron could weigh five hundred pounds. It could weigh five thousand.
“Miss Freynan,” Archmage Orynhel said when Sciona had circled the vessel several times. “You are required to begin composing a spell within the next minute.”
“Right.” Sciona let out a shaky breath and returned to the desk. “Sorry, sir.”
The levitation formula was quick work, but she paused, still stumped, when it came to estimating the cauldron’s weight. Too low and the cauldron wouldn’t move at all. She would fail at this final hurdle. Too high and… well, too high and at least her end would be a dramatic one. She bit her lip.
A memorable death had to be better than the obscurity that awaited if she failed. That thought swallowed all fear. Sciona erred on the side of power and set her values around the estimate of five thousand pounds. Now, to source the energy to lift that much weight…She smiled. This was where
Duris assumed she had neither courage nor power, but he had misjudged.
This was where her fingers hit the keys and sang.
She had been making borderline heretical adjustments to traditional mapping methods since she was twelve. At twenty-seven, she had her own fully formed methods so heavily adapted and reworked that, save for the base lines, one could scarcely recognize them as Kaedor, Leonic, or Erafin.
They were something new. They were Freynan, methods she would have the right to publish under her name if she could just get through this last spell between her and the High Magistry.
Sciona’s custom composition allowed her to map a wide range, like the Leonic Method, but then pull in close on promising energy sources, like the Kaedor Method. On top of that, she had added modified lines from the Erafin Method to sharpen fuzzy patches of energy to bright pools.
The field in her mapping coil seethed with white, but no single source here was big enough to levitate five thousand pounds…In an act of reckless confidence, she entered three different sets of coordinates and siphoned them all at once.
The spellograph rattled with the rush of energy, Sciona seized it to keep
it from shaking off the desk, and— BOOM!
The cauldron shot toward the ceiling—and into it, right through Founding Mage Stravos’s handsome copper-haired head. Cracks burst like lightning across Mordra the First’s inventions and Highmage Sabernyn’s trial, and shouts of shock rang through the chamber.
As chunks of the ceiling broke loose, Sciona’s sense of self-preservation finally caught up with her; she let go of the spellograph and dove under the desk. Limestone thundered onto the desktop, tumbling from the wood to the floor on all sides. In the next moment, the cauldron crashed back to the floor, terrifyingly close, adding a spray of stone tiles to the chaos. And thank God for Aunt Winny and her fussing; the rain of debris bounced off Sciona’s petticoats, leaving her dress torn but her legs untouched.
The cauldron’s final impact reverberated through the chamber as clouds of stone dust settled in a soft hiss. Then, silence.
Rolling to her knees, Sciona peered from under the desk. Judging by the damage to the ceiling and the size of the indent in the floor, she had vastly overestimated the cauldron’s weight. It wasn’t five thousand pounds. It had to be right around one thousand.
She was out from under the desk before she realized what she was doing, brushing rubble from between the spellograph keys. Amid a mess of splintered wood and shattered glass bowls, the machine had waited for her fingers, undamaged, like a sign from God.
“Miss Freynan,” one of the archmages was saying in concern. “Are you all right? Shall we call in the medic?”
“No.” She tore the used spellpaper from the platen and replaced it with a
fresh sheet.
“Pardon?”
“No!” Her voice grew stronger as she lay into her action spell—the same one she had written before, but this time with the correct values slotted in. “I have it!”
“Miss Freynan, you have not been asked for any further spellwork,”
Archmage Duris said warningly. “Step away from the desk and find your seat.”
But at that point, Feryn Himself could not have stopped Sciona’s hands.
The arithmetic came easily now that she knew the weights involved. Within a few breaths, she had hit the break and started her custom mapping spell anew.
“Miss Freynan!” Archmage Duris’s voice sharpened in outright anger.
“Failure to follow instructions will result in your disqualification!”
The wrath of an archmage would have shaken anyone with half a brain.
It did shake Sciona, setting her stomach churning, but the churning was just another form of energy, one more shot of fuel in the engine speeding her to the end of the spell.
The Otherrealm burst open before her, glowing with a wealth of energy.
She found her coordinates.
“Step back this inst—” Duris choked on the rest of his words as Sciona hit the final key.
Her spell roared into action, vibrating the spellograph with more energy than the little machine was built to handle. Sciona finally did as she was told then. She backed away from the desk with both hands raised—in surrender? In triumph? It didn’t matter.
All that mattered was the cauldron, hovering motionless in the air before the archmages. Perfectly controlled.
For the second time during Sciona’s exam, silence ruled Leon’s Hall. It was only in that stillness that Sciona registered precisely what she had done.
She had openly defied an archmage’s instructions during her exam. She was
disqualified.
The world grayed.
She was disqualified.
Archmage Orynhel cleared his throat and said into that hideous emptiness, “Applicants, guests, please leave the hall and await our decision.”
Sciona fled the chamber as fast as her skirts would allow. She didn’t want to look at the other applicants. She didn’t want to look at Alba, or Bringham, or any of them. She blazed straight through the chamber where the testers were supposed to wait for the results, down the hall, and into the women’s lavatory where no other mages could follow her. But of course, there was one person who could follow her.
“Sciona!” Alba pushed into the lavatory, out of breath from running after her. “Are you all right?”
Sciona couldn’t have answered if she’d wanted to. Invisible hands were on her lungs, on her heart, squeezing so each heartbeat throbbed right to her eardrums. The world blurred as she leaned into the cool stone of the lavatory wall.
“So…” Alba said slowly. “I take it that wasn’t supposed to happen?”
Obviously not! Sciona wanted to snarl. Obviously, I’ve blown my chance and the chances of all female mages for the next decade! None of that came out when she opened her mouth. What did come out, finally, was her breakfast.
She barely made it to the toilet before the little she had eaten that morning vacated the premises. The hydro-conduits around the bowl flared, banishing the vomit in a whoosh of water—just in time for her to be sick again. Alba stayed with her, rubbing a soothing hand on her back.
“Honestly, from where I was sitting, it didn’t look that bad,” she said in
a truly pitiful attempt at comfort.
“Don’t patronize me,” Sciona rasped.
The exam was explicitly about how well a mage could perform within parameters. Plenty of mages could badly exercise creativity; ill-executed ingenuity was a far bigger liability than by-the-book mediocrity. If the High Magistry was going to bring a woman into their ranks, it would be someone safe, someone who could follow a brief to the letter. But Sciona didn’t have the strength to explain any of this to Alba. The only thing she could do was clutch the sides of the toilet and shake.
“But you were so amazing in there!” Alba said softly. “So powerful!”
“Well, the Widow Eringale was amazing,” Sciona growled through the chemical sting in her throat and nasal passage. “Keracy and Irma Mordra were powerful. Trethellyn was the best damn alchemist the city had ever
seen.”
“Who?”
“Exactly.” A tear slid down Sciona’s cheek, and she angrily scrubbed it away. “Exactly.”
Keracy had spent the rest of her career teaching schoolchildren after she failed the High Magistry exam. Trethellyn had married an archmage. All her subsequent research had been published under his name—a fact Sciona only knew because she had read the footnotes of an obscure book by one of their mutual colleagues. After giving up her name and career to marry a city chair, Irma Mordra had suffered postpartum hysteria so bad that her husband sent her to a mental institution. Her caretakers had discovered her body hanging by the neck from a light fixture in her room.
“I can’t do it, Alba!” Sciona’s hands pushed into her hair, nails digging into her scalp. “I’m not Trethellyn or Keracy, I’m Irma Mordra. I won’t live! I won’t—”
“Shh-shh.” Alba pulled her close. “Sciona, darling…” She seemed to cast around for something to say and came up empty. So, instead, she just sat with Sciona and softly rubbed her back. It was only at length that she said, “I don’t suppose it’s worth asking you to get up and come back to the waiting chamber with me?”
“No!” Sciona knew she sounded like a child. But the last thing she wanted was to wait in a room with the other applicants, knowing she had just self-destructed in front of them. She would prefer never to see any of those men again…although, now that the exam was over, she supposed she wouldn’t have to. She was destined for lesser things. Tears seized her throat, and she ruthlessly forced them back. She might have failed like a woman, but at least no one was going to catch her crying like one. Not even Alba.
“It’s better if we don’t show our faces,” Sciona said past the awful, acid- flavored lump in her throat. “We didn’t belong there in the first place.”
Except that it was the only place in the world Sciona could belong. Without warning, a sob made a lunge for freedom. Sciona turned away from Alba and retched again to cover the sound. “Sorry,” she muttered when the moment had passed and her eyelids had beaten back the tears.
“For what?”
“For being such a mess. Not just today…all the time. Since we were little.” Sciona had always selfishly assumed that one day, her obsessive studies would pay off. What a stupid thing to think.
“Oh,” Alba said. I couldn’t have lived with you for twenty years if I couldn’t live with a little mess, she’d said in the past. Today, she simply gathered that failed mess of a mage into her arms and rocked her, just as she had when they were children and Sciona would wake crying for her mother.
Sciona didn’t know how long she and patient Alba had sat there, rocking, when the door creaked open.
“Oh, Miss Freynan, there you are!” It was the secretary from the front desk. “Your mentor has been looking everywhere for you!”
Of course. Archmage Bringham would want to talk to Sciona about the exam, to say goodbye and wish her luck with life as a lesser mage.
“Sorry,” Alba said. “Sciona isn’t feeling well.”
“Oh dear, should I call for a nurse?”
“No,” Sciona said in a ragged voice. “Don’t.”
The rest of the men, she didn’t care about; they just wanted her gone anyway. But Bringham had done so much for her. She had to say thank you.
She had to apologize for letting him down.
“If you could just give us a few moments,” Alba said.
“No.” Straightening up, Sciona tugged her robes into order and ran her fingers through her short hair. If she allowed herself another moment with her emotions, she wouldn’t be able to face Bringham. And she had to. He deserved an apology. “I’m ready now.” Holding her head high, she pushed past the secretary and out of the restroom.
She hadn’t quite prepared for Archmage Bringham to ambush her right outside the door.
“Freynan, there you are!” he exclaimed, and before Sciona got a chance to wonder why he was grinning, he did something even stranger.
He hugged her.
Archmages did not hug, in Sciona’s experience. The shock was so profound that, crushed in his arms, she barely registered his next words.
“We did it!”
“Wh-what?”
“Or I should say, you did it.” Bringham drew back to hold her shoulders in a grip vibrating with excitement. “You did it, you brilliant girl!” His voice cracked like a boy’s—like he could cry. “You’re in!”
“She’s in?” Alba screamed.
“I’m in?” Sciona said blankly.
“Archmage Orynhel announced it in the waiting chamber, but you
weren’t there.”
“But…how?” Sciona said weakly.
“Walk with me, Miss Freynan. Miss Livian, if you’d give us a moment?”
“Yes, Archmage,” Alba said, glowing with joy. “Of course! Oh! Oh!”
Seemingly at a loss for what else to do with herself, Alba turned and hugged the secretary, who looked as stunned as Sciona herself. “She did it!”
Putting an arm around Sciona’s shoulders, Bringham steered her down a deserted hallway away from the restrooms and the waiting chamber.
“I don’t understand,” Sciona confessed as soon as they were out of
earshot of Alba and the secretary.
“What’s not to understand, my child?”
“I didn’t…I should be disqualified. I broke the ceiling!”
“Did you ever!” Bringham laughed. “Don’t worry. The maids have almost got the mess cleaned up as we speak. And those crusty murals needed touching up anyway.”
“But I didn’t follow Archmage Duris’s instructions.”
“Oh, stuff Duris.”
“I—what?”
“Excuse my language, but Duris doesn’t actually have the authority to end an applicant’s examination. He likes to throw tantrums, yes, but only the Archmage Supreme can call the end of an examination. You were right to hold your ground and ignore him. Never forget how to do that, Sciona.”
“Do what, sir?”
“Know your rights, know your spells, and press on past the detractors— or through them, if you must. It’s a skill you’ll need over and over again in the High Magistry.”
“Right.” As an idealistic child, Sciona had assumed that highmages and archmages all supported one another, despite their differences; how else could they work the miracles that kept Tiran running? After years of working for Bringham, she knew that powerful mages could be as uncooperative as anyone and that miracles were hard-won.
“Can I tell you a secret, Miss Freynan?” Bringham lowered his voice with a conspiratorial smile. “I was the one who put the industrial cauldron
in Duris’s head.”
“You what?”
“I let him think it was his idea, of course, but I needed the Council to see the sheer power of your siphoning. After that, there wasn’t much to discuss. They had to accept you.”
“Had to?” Sciona still didn’t follow. Was there anything the Mage Council really had to do?
“Well, with the expansion project coming up, we need solid sourcers— genuinely exceptional innovators in the field of mapping and siphoning, not
just passable legacies.”
“I haven’t heard about any expansion.”
“Oh, right! Of course!” Bringham batted himself in the forehead. “It hasn’t been publicized yet, but our much-needed barrier expansion has finally, finally gotten approval from the city.”
“Oh my God!” Sciona felt her eyes go wide. “That expansion? The expansion? It’s really happening?”
“It’s really happening.” Bringham looked as giddy as Sciona. “This year, if everything goes to plan. But shh.” He winked. “There’s going to be an announcement with all the appropriate fanfare after the new city chairs are sworn in. You’ll be briefed on your role before you start at your new lab.”
Her new lab…her own lab. A chance to work on the most ambitious magic since Tiran’s founding… “I was supposed to wait until the Council finalized the decision before telling you, but I think the research you’ll be assigned is obvious.”
She shook her head, not following.
“Mapping innovation,” Bringham said. “You’ll be looking into ways to source enough energy for the barrier expansion.”
“What?” That had to be a joke.
“You’ll be among a few highmages putting forth sourcing proposals— including your predecessors in my labs—so it isn’t as though the sourcing will all fall to you, but I have every confidence that your contribution will be significant.”
Sciona’s body didn’t feel real, but her mind was already racing, latching on to this prompt of all prompts: how to source enough power to expand Tiran’s barrier. Already, she ached for a pen to start making notes, start sketching spellwebs.
“But…” Sobering doubt caught up to her, insisting that all of it was too good to be true. “They would never give this project to a novice highmage —or anyone less than an archmage—would they? It’s too important.”
“Normally, you’d be correct,” Bringham said, “but the Council’s key mapper was Archmage Ardona, God keep his soul. That’s not to diminish Archmage Gamwen’s skill; he’s a genius in his own right, but he and Archmage Scywin have had their hands full making up for Ardona’s absence. They simply don’t have the time to devote to a massive new project on top of the day-to-day responsibilities they inherited from their late superior. And Archmage Thelanra, bless his heart, hasn’t been sharp enough for manual sourcing in years. The highest priority of this examination was to find a new mage who could source—really source—at the level of a Gamwen or an Ardona.”
“I see…” It made sense. With the exception of Jerrin Mordra, Sciona’s fellow applicants had all been strong mappers and manual siphoners. This was probably how Bringham had gotten Sciona’s sourcing-heavy résumé considered in the first place. “Wait, so, what is the timeline, exactly?”
Sciona asked. The year was halfway gone already. “If the barrier expansion is planned for this winter—”
“Sourcing proposals will be presented at the next meeting of the High Magistry.”
“So, Feryn’s Eve.” The yearly convening of the High Magistry usually fell just before the final day of Feryn’s Feast—the final day before the Deep Night, when the sun would set and not return for fifty days. “That’s less than three months away,” she said, flipping through the calendar in her head. Twelve weeks, to be exact. Eighty-three days. “Who can tackle a sourcing project of that size in less than three months?” Sciona said in awe and a simmering undercurrent of something more. Hunger.
“Who indeed?” Bringham smiled.
I can, Sciona thought, feeling her pupils dilate with the conviction: I can do that.
“What did I tell you, Freynan?” Bringham read the excitement on her face without her saying a word. “This is your time.”
Sciona’s heart filled to bursting. “I…Archmage Bringham…” Damn it.
Now, after everything, she was going to cry. “I—I don’t know what to say.
Thank you for this. For everyth—”
“No, my dear.” Bringham held up a finger. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” Cry?
“Credit me or anyone else for your success. As it is, other people will try to credit me in order to tear you down. Be cold, be hard, and don’t give them an inch, you understand? No matter what they say of you.”
“What will they say?” Sciona asked. Or rather—“What are they saying?”
“Oh, the sort of nonsense you’d expect,” Bringham said on a sigh. “That you manipulated your way here, that I pulled strings for you to serve my own ambitions, that the Mage Council only entertained your application to appease City Chair Nerys.”
“Nerys?” Sciona said in surprise. “I didn’t even think she’d be reelected.”
“She will be,” Bringham said with the confidence of someone who knew this beyond a doubt. “I know it’s not what the press has said, but she’s done a great deal to placate some of the more radical special interest groups while playing nice on the issues that are most important to the Magistry.
The Council won’t let her lose her seat anytime soon.”
Sciona didn’t ask how the Mage Council could ensure the results of a public election. She knew the full answer was probably more complex than she had time to contemplate, and the gist of it was clear enough: the body that controlled the clergy spoke for God Himself, which went a long way when it came to informing the will of the people.
“Overall, there won’t be much change to the city council this election cycle,” Bringham continued, “except Amfre losing his seat to Perramis.”
“Oh.”
“What is it?” Bringham asked, clearly noticing the shadow that crossed Sciona’s face.
Sciona shook her head, remembering the second reason she had so persistently ignored news of this particular election. “Never mind.”
She hadn’t spared a thought for her father in the last twenty-some years.
Feryn damn her if she was going to start now. Pushing Perramis out of her mind, where he belonged, she changed the subject.
“So—why would the archmages worry about Nerys?” Sure, Nerys was a vocal advocate for women’s rights, but her power didn’t extend to the University. “She isn’t involved in decisions that affect the Magistry. Why would the Council worry about her opinion?”
“They wouldn’t. But it’s the story Archmages Renthorn and Duris are going with, and they have the best relationship with the press, so…”
Bringham shrugged. “Apologies, my dear. If I’d spent more of my career schmoozing, I might be able to counter them in that arena, make this easier for you. But alas!”
“If you’d spent more of your career schmoozing, you probably wouldn’t have written as many of my favorite books, and I wouldn’t have applied for a position in your lab.” Sciona smiled. “I think it all worked out, sir.”
“Indeed.” Bringham clasped her shoulder. “I’ll see you at work, then, Highmage Freynan.”
On the train home, Alba chattered excitedly, but all Sciona could hear was Archmage Bringham’s voice earnestly saying, Highmage Freynan. She clutched tight to the sound and echoed it to herself all the way home.
Highmage Freynan
Highmage Freynan Highmage Freynan
She saw the letters on the spine of a book and beside them, in gold, all the things she was going to be to this city:
First Woman of the High Magistry
Pioneer of the Freynan Method The Woman Who Expanded the Barrier
