Blood Over Bright Haven — Chapter 7: Web Weaver

“I have been a goddess. I know you will think me silly, but I am a pious lady of good manners, and I tell the truth. I have been a goddess, but I am a pious lady of good manners, and I know that in this house, there is only space for one god.

I am a pious lady of good manners.

I will not stay in someone’s house where I am not wanted.”

— Irma Mordra to Walsen Mordra (319 of Tiran)

SCIONA SPENT HER next two weeks at the Magistry interacting almost exclusively with Thomil. Partly by choice but also because the other mages no longer deigned to speak to her. It was like the moment she had agreed to work with the janitor, she had relegated herself to his class, invisible, beneath notice. What the other highmages didn’t understand was that this was the best thing they could have done for her. Maybe they needed to spend half their time rubbing elbows to secure their importance to Tiran’s future, but Sciona worked best undisturbed, and Thomil was blessedly quiet. So quiet, in fact, that Sciona would completely forget that he was there as she sank into her work.

Thus far, she had failed to make significant improvements to the hybrid mapping method she had demonstrated for the Council during her exam— which was alright, she kept reminding herself. She had worked on that mapping method for a year, and she had only been in the High Magistry for

two weeks. She would still have opportunities to make it better. But in the meantime, she needed to make sure the mapping spell she proposed— whatever its composition—had the support of an impeccable spellweb.

In recent years, no one in the High Magistry had been able to match Cleon Renthorn when it came to energy-sourcing spellwebs. But Sciona had committed herself to trying with the understanding that her web didn’t have to be quite as good as her rival’s. Unless Renthorn had some kind of staggering breakthrough, his chosen mapping spell wasn’t going to be as clear as Sciona’s when he presented to the Council—just as her web wasn’t going to be as tight as his.

“Whether the Council chooses Renthorn’s sourcing plan for the barrier expansion or mine will come down to who executes their balancing act better,” Sciona explained to Thomil. “Either I will win back the ground I lose in web composition with my superior mapping spell or Renthorn will win back the ground he loses in his mapping spell through superior web composition. So, before tackling the parts of this project that will come easily to me, I’m going to reduce my deficit as much as possible by drafting the best spellweb I can.” Sciona’s next breath came out in a groan just thinking about it.

“Is there anything I can do to help, ma’am?” Thomil asked.

“Yes,” she laughed—the idea of a Kwen touching work as complicated as a spellweb was hilarious—“You can sit on the other side of the lab and read those gradeschool spellbooks I gave you very, very quietly.”

Drafting a sourcing spellweb of this size was a grueling process involving guesswork on guesswork, endless probability calculations, contingencies on contingencies. The goal was to stack probable energy sources in order to ensure that the barrier expansion action spell got the energy input it required —no more, no less.

Sciona began by sorting 1,500 promising non-Reserve sourcing zones by projected energy yield, separating them into five tiers, with the first tier representing the highest projected yield and the fifth tier representing the lowest.

After that, she had to arrange her 1,500 zones into sets, which would slot into the branches of the final spellweb. This web had three hundred branches—more than any sourcing spellweb in the nation’s history and the maximum possible considering how many qualified mages Tiran would have on hand to manually assess each branch.

When the expansion spell went into effect, the spellograph designated for a given branch would map to one of Sciona’s first-tier zones—one of the zones most likely to contain sufficient energy to cover one three-hundredth of the expansion’s energy expenditure. At this point, a research mage with a mapping certification would visually assess their Otherrealm visual to determine whether they were looking at the correct amount of energy.

If the mapping mage didn’t enter focal coordinates and siphon the site within thirty seconds, the second-tier siphoning zones would come into play. If the mage didn’t find sufficient energy in the second-tier zone, the spellograph would map to the third-tier zone, and so on down to the first tier. If all five locations failed to yield an appropriate energy source, the branch would automatically fall back on the ever-reliable Reserve. This was a last, last resort, as the Reserve powered Tiran’s essential systems. Only five of the three-hundred branches could fall back on the Reserve before the city risked structural failures. More than five and the results could be catastrophic. More than ten and the spellweb could just as easily destroy Tiran’s barrier as expand it.

With several highmages’ and archmages’ projections of Otherrealm energy distribution for the coming winter spread before her, Sciona spent the next several days on her calculations. If she had trusted one mage’s work implicitly, her probabilities would have been fixed, her calculations simple. But projections were just predictions, and Sciona would find herself disagreeing with them in the areas of the Otherrealm she was used to sourcing, which would, in turn, affect her level of trust in a given mage’s predictions, which often had her circling back to previously finished work so she could rerun the calculations with various mages’ predictions weighted differently.

All told, the spellweb draft took a full week longer than Sciona would have preferred, but she was on the final pages when a boom shook the building, dislodging dust from the ceiling and jolting books from the shelves.

“No!” Sciona darted forward with a surge of panic to grab her favorite spellograph, but she needn’t have worried. The machine’s weight had kept it planted firmly in the center of her composition desk as lighter objects fell from tables and shelves all around her. The tall laboratory windows, which had cracked in the initial boom, shattered one after the other as the building shuddered with the echoes, the panes spilling broken glass onto the floor.

“Highmage Freynan!” Thomil, who Sciona barely remembered sending away on an errand, burst into the lab. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” she said, breathless. “Fine. Careful of the broken glass,” she added as her darting eyes cataloged which pieces of equipment were still intact, which had broken beyond repair, and which could still be salvaged. Most of her glass testing dishes were gone, having jumped from their shelf and shattered, mixing with the broken glass from the windows to form a glittering multi-colored carpet. “Feryn, what was that?”

“Well, something exploded.”

“Obviously.” The question was which of Sciona’s careless idiot colleagues had done this. These laboratories were the only ones in the Main Magistry where mages ran experiments, meaning it had to be someone from the mapping department.

“We should see if anyone is hurt in the other labs.”

“Who cares?”

“Ma’am!” Thomil gave Sciona that terrible look—the same one Alba so often gave her: Sciona, for shame! And for some incomprehensible reason, Thomil’s judgment stung just as sharply as Alba’s.

“Fine!” she growled.

“They are your people, are they not?” Thomil said, not seeming to understand her hostility.

“I said fine!” Sciona stomped past the Kwen, glass crunching beneath her heels. “Let’s go check.”

When Sciona came out into the hall, she fully expected Jerrin Mordra’s lab to be the one in crisis. Instead, she found the other newbie highmage at the door of his office with his assistant, Evnan, both of them clean and

unhurt.

“That wasn’t you?” she said.

“I thought it was you,” Mordra said.

“Me?” Sciona spat in total indignation, and the two of them turned their eyes down the hall leading to their colleagues’ laboratories, which was gray with smoke and stone dust.

“Feryn, have mercy!” Mordra gasped and ran toward the debris after Thomil, who had already vanished into the dust cloud.

“Miss Freynan, you should wait here where it’s safe,” Evnan said before rushing to join the other two men.

Grumbling in annoyance, Sciona followed—not because she gave a damn what happened to Renthorn, Tanrel, or Halaros after the way they had slighted her but because she resented being left behind like she was a delicate flower who had never seen an industrial accident before.

The placard outside the destroyed chamber had been blown away, along with the door and a bit of the wall, but Sciona knew it to be Halaros’s lab.

She was the last into the laboratory, just behind Renthorn, Tanrel, and their teams of assistants.

Halaros was leaning back against the only bookcase in the lab that hadn’t collapsed, coughing, his eyes unfocused behind his cracked spectacles, his white robes blackened where flames had met the fire-resistant fabric. As the obscuring dust settled into a film on the room, Sciona took in the chaos— men and furniture thrown against the walls, dishes shattered, ruined books smoking. Thomil and Evnan lifted a table off one of Halaros’s assistants.

Coated in dust, the man looked like a corpse, but as Mordra helped him to his feet, it was obvious that he was very much alive, just shaken.

“Halaros, can you hear me?” Tanrel had rushed to put a hand on Halaros’s shoulder and straighten his robes—as though that would help him look any more presentable with his spectacles cracked and his eyebrows singed off.

“Are you alright?”

Meanwhile, Sciona’s attention swept disinterestedly over the effects of the explosion until she found the cause. Only one of the spellographs in the room was smoking from recent overuse. Lifting her skirts, she picked her way through the ruins to the spellograph, leaned close over the paper on the platen, and softly blew the dust away to reveal the spell itself.

As she uttered a surprised “Huh,” a shadow fell across the page, and she looked up to find Renthorn at her shoulder. The smarmy spellweb specialist was the only person in the chamber who had done exactly as Sciona had, making a beeline through the chaos to the spellograph.

“An energy use cap?” he asked as his eyes met Sciona’s.

“No,” she said and stood back for Renthorn to see. “Just a standard Kaedor mapping spell.”

“How did you mess that up, Halaros?” Renthorn asked the question on Sciona’s tongue.

“Um…” Halaros blinked and squinted blearily. “W-well, I… I don’t quite remember.”

“I think he might have a concussion,” Tanrel said.

“Seriously though,” Sciona pressed, not understanding. “No highmage is that bad at finding his coordinates, even with the Kaedor method!”

As embarrassing as it would be for an experienced mage to cause an explosion with an energy usage cap, it was nearly as embarrassing to misjudge one’s coordinates this badly with a method as common as Kaedor.

However, when Sciona leaned over the spellwork to search out the coordinates in question, her attention caught on something else—the embossed make and model of the spellograph itself: Maclan Splendor 55.

“Hold on…” She looked back at the lines of the spell itself, then at Renthorn’s weaselly, too-interested face. “Highmage Halaros, where did you get this machine?”

“I dunno…” Halaros shook his head, his speech still uncharacteristically slow. “The supply room?”

“The common supply room?” Sciona’s eyes narrowed. Not by special request? “How many Maclan spellographs are usually in there?”

“What in God’s Bright Haven is wrong with you two!” Tanrel turned on Sciona and Renthorn. “Who cares what spellwork he was doing or what kind of machine he was using? He needs a doctor!”

“Before that, we should evacuate the building, Highmage,” Thomil said to Tanrel. “It may be unstable.”

“Oh, so working in Freynan’s lab for a few weeks has made the Blighter an expert on architecture?” Renthorn said with a snide look at Thomil.

“Let him alone, Renthorn,” Tanrel said in exasperation. “He’s right. No one said the building was going to come down, but we won’t be able to resume work anyway until the space is assessed for risk. Come on, everyone.” He took Halaros’s arm to guide the dazed mage to the exit.

“Out, out!”

It was temperate outside—as good a day as any for the evacuation of a massive university building. The highmages’ assistants shooed the crowds of students and staff away from the front steps where their bosses had gathered, then closed ranks around Halaros so that no one would see the state of his robes and infer that the explosion had been his doing. The assistant who had been the victim of the flying table was quickly whisked away to see a doctor while another assistant ran to get Halaros a fresh robe.

From a cursory look over the gaggle of brown, green, and purple robes, it seemed like no one from the lower floors of the building had been hurt.

Some had just received a bad scare and a sprinkling of stone dust. The real tragedy, Sciona thought, was that Renthorn’s lab had suffered no damage in the blast.

“You are cleared to return to work whenever you like, Highmage,” the building manager informed Renthorn after an assessment of the fourth floor.

“Now, Highmage Tanrel, Highmage Mordra, Freynan, I’m afraid the work on the windows means it will be a few days before your labs are of use again.”

“Fine by me.” Tanrel shrugged. “Young Mordra and I have been checking our work against Renthorn’s anyway. This is as good an excuse as any to move to his lab on a more permanent basis. We might as well roll our work on the barrier expansion into his sooner rather than later, right Tenth?”

Jerrin Mordra, whose work was only being ‘considered’ for the expansion as a formality, of course, nodded in agreement.

“Highmage Halaros, I’m afraid it will be at least a week—possibly up to three before your lab is in working condition,” the building manager told Halaros, who was seated on the steps with a pair of nurses fussing over him.

“I’ve already put in a request to find all of you temporary office space in a different building, should you require it.”

“No need,” Renthorn said. “There’s plenty of space in my laboratory for Halaros to join us as well for as long as he likes. Highmage Halaros, what do you say?”

“Hmm?” Halaros looked up and said wearily, “Sure, why not?”

A moment later, four sets of green eyes turned to Sciona, who folded her

arms and frowned.

“Freynan?”

“What?” she said stubbornly, though she knew perfectly well what they were expecting.

“You’re always welcome to join the winning team as well,” Renthorn said.

“That’s very kind of you, Highmage,” she lied, “but no, thank you.”

“Let’s be reasonable—” Tanrel said.

“Is there something unreasonable about my wanting to do my own work correctly?” she snapped before she could stop herself.

“Um…” The building manager looked uncomfortably between Sciona and the four men. “In that case, there should be spare laboratory space you can use in Faene’s Hall, Miss Freynan.”

“Mm,” Sciona grunted, her lips pushed into a pout. “I’m going for a walk.”

“A walk?” Tanrel said as she turned from her colleagues “Highmage Halaros broke my energy gauge and testing dishes,” she said coolly. “I need to replace them.”

“So, send the Kwen,” Tanrel said. “A highmage doesn’t run errands, and a lady shouldn’t go walking alone.”

“So, I won’t,” she said shortly. “Thomil, come.”

She headed down the steps without a look back at the other highmages, feeling Thomil fall silently into step at her shoulder. The staff and students who had vacated the Main Magistry building parted for her white robe, though her status didn’t keep them from staring with their usual abandon.

Apparently, a month was not enough for them to get used to the sight of a woman in highmage’s garb.

“You can always send me for whatever you need, ma’am,” Thomil said once they were out of earshot of the crowd on the steps.

“I don’t care about the energy gauge,” she said. “I wasn’t using it, and testing dishes are never hard to come by.”

“Oh.” Thomil didn’t ask the obvious ‘then, where are we going?’ instead quietly keeping pace a respectful step behind her as she circled the block.

Once they had passed out of sight of the Main Magistry, Sciona turned onto a path that took them deeper into the campus rather than outward to the shops beyond. Class was in session, so the other pedestrians were sparse between the great lichen-touched columns of the Old Campus. Barely anyone was about to gawk at the female highmage in her white robes or her Kwen assistant in his lab coat… barely anyone to overhear a delicate conversation between the two.

“This is bad news,” she said at length. She had been self-conscious about over-sharing with Thomil after that night of embarrassment at the Dancing Wolf. But she felt like she had to give this train of thought voice so it didn’t sit inside her, twisting into something dark and demoralizing.

“What is bad news?” Thomil asked.

“Renthorn was always planning to absorb Tanrel and Mordra the Tenth into his team—basically just use them as two more over-qualified assistants in his plan for the barrier expansion. Now, not only is he getting them onboard early, but he also gets Halaros.”

“But Halaros still has his own work to focus on, doesn’t he?” Thomil said, clearly not seeing the bigger picture. “He mentioned special assignments from Archmage Gamwen?”

“It’s the potential effect of Halaros and Tanrel sharing a workspace that concerns me.”

“Have you seen them work together, ma’am?”

“No, but I’ve read their research. Tanrel is a strong theoretician, but like Mordra the Tenth, he lacks the tactile experience to put much of his theory into practice—although, that’s an unfair comparison,” Sciona amended.

“Tanrel is still far out of the Tenth’s league in talent and common sense.

Then you have Halaros, who specializes in manual mapping spell composition like Tanrel but came up through hands-on industrial sourcing like Renthorn and I did. In general, I’m not intimidated by Tanrel’s mapping spells, but with Halaros in the room to hold his hand—even if Halaros does have a concussion, and it’s just for a few weeks, I worry…”

Sciona frowned, not quite willing to say Tanrel was capable of mapping composition on par with hers. It was the balance that worried her—a mapping spell nearly as good as hers paired with a spellweb superior to hers. “Together, Renthorn and a Halaros-supported Tanrel could formulate a formidable sourcing plan for the barrier expansion.”

“Would that be so bad?” Thomil said, and Sciona looked at him in total

incredulity.

“Excuse me?”

“I mean—this barrier expansion is important to Tiran’s overall well- being. You’ve made that clear many times. Why would you want them to do poorly? For that matter, why not pool your skill with theirs if the end goal is to help your people?”

“I’m sorry,” Sciona said, floored that he would even ask that. “Have you met me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Something in his tone got under her skin, like he thought she was doing something wrong. Not that the opinion of a Kwen should matter, but— “I’m not any more selfish than my colleagues,” she added. “I’m just playing a more difficult game than they are.”

“A more difficult game?”

“Brilliant men—even moderately intelligent men—in this city get showered with opportunities to succeed. Brilliant women have to fight for

those opportunities, and, when we get them, we have to defend them tooth and nail, or they’ll be snatched away. I’m never going to work with Renthorn and the others because this barrier expansion is my project, my chance to make a mark on history, and I’m going to make sure the spellwork has my name on it if it’s the last thing I do.”

Thomil nodded, though he still looked puzzled in a very irritating way.

“What?” Sciona demanded.

“Forgive me, ma’am. It’s the spellwork that is important to you, yes? That it be done well and that it have a positive effect on people’s lives comparable to the spellwork of your male peers?”

“Yes.” Obviously.

“If this is the goal, then does it truly matter whose name goes on the work?”

“Of course it matters!” Sciona rounded on Thomil, but of course, her frustration was unfair. Of course, a Kwen man wouldn’t understand the workings of Tiranish academia. Maybe she was just in a foul mood from days of mind-numbing spellweb calculations, and she shouldn’t be taking it out on her poor, uneducated assistant, who was just doing his best to understand.

She took a breath and tried to explain. “Husbands have been putting their names on their wives’ work in this city for three hundred years. And if it’s not a woman’s husband, it’s her boss, because women are limited to being apprentices and assistants in almost every profession worth doing. No woman ever gets credit for the work she puts in—especially in academia.

She never gets the glory. Well, I’m not married, I’m no one’s apprentice, and I’ll be damned if I let a man find some other way to take my glory from me.”

It was by far the most selfish, unwomanly thing Sciona had said aloud all day—so selfish that she never would have said it to Alba or Aunt Winny for fear of that disapproving look. Perhaps she should have stuck to saying ‘credit’ instead of ‘glory.’ Credit was a thing a woman could want out of a sense of justice, which was arguably virtuous. But a woman who wanted glory… that was a woman who had something really wrong with her.

Surprisingly, Thomil didn’t respond with an air of disapproval. He just asked, “And you think that’s what Renthorn is aiming to do? Steal your glory?”

“Beyond a doubt,” Sciona said. “In fact, as I get to know him better, I’m wondering if he won’t finesse some way to take credit for all his peers’ accomplishments—or at least harness all their energy for his own purposes.”

“As you get to know him better?” Thomil asked, looking troubled. He wasn’t so bold as to ask: what has he done?

“I can’t prove anything, but…” Sciona chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment, thinking back to Halaros’s Splendor 55 spellograph and the spell sitting on the paper rest. “But I think I may have been wrong to laugh at Halaros back there. I mean, not totally.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “The spell was composed fine. The odds of siphoning inaccurately enough to create an explosion would be next to nothing, especially for Halaros. I mean, the man has worked in the High Magistry for almost a decade without any mishaps of note in his laboratory.”

“So, what do you think happened?” Thomil asked, and only a moment later, remembered himself and added, “If you feel like sharing, ma’am.”

“There’s only one way a properly-written spell can malfunction like that,”

Sciona said. “If the machinery through which the spell operates is either

broken or cursed.”

“Cursed, ma’am?”

“That’s when a mechanism—in this case, a spellograph—has malicious spellwork concealed inside it and set to activate upon a particular key combination or other trigger. You can engrave a curse into the metal itself or type it on a paper, which you then conceal inside the machine—and set to combust on activation if you want to cover your tracks. Of course, all curses are forbidden by Leon, but they’re easy enough for the unscrupulous actor.”

“That doesn’t sound easy,” Thomil said.

“Right,” Sciona said, remembering who she was talking to. “When I say it’s ‘easy,’ I do mean for a highmage of a certain skill level.”

“Ma’am, are you implying that another highmage…?” Thomil stopped himself, clearly realizing what serious trouble he could be in for voicing the thought if he was wrong.

Sciona shared his caution and worded her response carefully. “I’m not saying anything outright about what any highmage did or didn’t do. I’m just noting a few facts. Fact number one:”—she held up a thumb—“the spellograph that caused the explosion is a very specific model I’ve only ever seen used in Archmage Bringham’s testing labs.” The Splendor 55’s

big mapping coil, among other quirks, made it fantastic for experimental mapping for industrial siphoning spells but little else.

“Fact number two:”—her index finger went up—“because of the unusual key size, that model of spellograph would only be appealing to a person who’s used one for years.

“Fact number three:”—her middle finger—“except Halaros and myself, there’s only one other highmage in the building with reason to be familiar with that model of spellograph—possibly to the point of knowing how to

disassemble and reassemble it.”

“Highmage Renthorn,” Thomil realized.

“Not naming anyone in particular,” Sciona reiterated, but Thomil obviously followed.

“And if it’s a model favored by Archmage Bringham’s proteges,” he said slowly, “Then Highmage Ren—someone—would have known that Highmage Halaros was likely to select that spellograph over the others in the supply room.” A pause as the gears turned in Thomil’s head.

“Highmage Halaros or you.”

“The trade of a spellweb specialist is to think many steps into the future,”

Sciona said instead of directly affirming the question in his eyes.

Thomil murmured a Kwen oath. “It wouldn’t matter which of you picked up the spellograph,” he went on as more of the pieces came together.

“Highmage Tanrel’s laboratory is between yours and Highmage Halaros’s.

So, no matter where the explosion originated, it would do enough damage to justify Highmage Renthorn offering Highmage Tanrel—who he really wanted—and at least one other mage a place in his lab.”

“You see what I’m up against, then?” Sciona couldn’t help asking. “You see why I’m not going to go work for that man?”

“So, if we’re not taking Highmage Renthorn up on his offer of laboratory space…” Thomil looked around and seemed to realize that they were headed out of the Old Campus toward the larger, more utilitarian research buildings of the New Campus. “Are we not moving into Faene’s Hall?”

“We are not,” Sciona said a little too sharply.

Thomil opened his mouth, seemingly to ask for an explanation, then closed it again. Sciona should have appreciated his unwillingness to pry— did appreciate it—but she had a problem leaving a ‘why’ hanging in the air.

It felt like an itch.

“The city chairs use Faene’s Hall for meetings with the archmages,” she said before properly considering where this line of questions and answers would lead.

Thomil clearly didn’t follow. How could he? “Do you have a problem

with the city chairs, ma’am?”

“No. Not on principle.”

And Thomil seemed to read the throttled pain in Sciona’s voice—or perhaps just noted the tension in her posture. Somehow, he saw the open wound and walked on with her in silence instead of pressing.

Sciona did not have any proper memories of her father. She had only a faint outline, a man in a pressed suit, a door closing behind him. She had been only four when her mother died, and that man sent her from his house to live with Aunt Winny. She remembered learning the word ‘bastard’ from a schoolbook passage on Stravos and bluntly asking Aunt Winny if that was what she was—since it seemed like the only explanation for that man in the fine suit to close that door on her.

“Bite your tongue, Sciona!” Aunt Winny had exclaimed. “Your father is an upstanding man who loved your sweet mother dearly! They only ever had eyes for each other.”

“Then why…” Sciona had never quite found the voice to ask: why didn’t he want me?

“You look so much like her,” Aunt Winny said. “He just couldn’t bear it.”

Like most of Aunt Winny’s explanations, it assumed the best of all parties, and it did not satisfy.

Perramis was a prominent enough figure for Sciona to know, even at six years old, that he had married another woman and now had two sons. At six, she was old enough to know that a man didn’t deny his child his surname without malice. By the time she was twelve, Sciona hoped that she had been born a bastard. Because if that wasn’t the reason, the only other explanation was that she was a girl. It wasn’t until she approached university age and her potential became clear that she began to change her mind.

As an adult, Sciona hoped Perramis had cast her out on the basis of her sex—because she was going to surpass every city chair and highmage’s son in God’s Bright Haven. And because Perramis had denied her his name, she could deny him her glory. This would be her vengeance—for herself and the mother she remembered only as a weak and loving smile.

“My mother did everything right,” Sciona said before she realized she had

opened her mouth.

“Ma’am?” Thomil asked.

“She did everything a good, middle-class Tiranish girl should. She was poised, and quiet, and accommodating. And when an upper-class gentleman took an interest in her, she did what she was supposed to. She indulged him, married him, loved him, served him, and sacrificed her health to give him a child…”

Sciona might not remember much of her time in Perramis’s house, but she knew that, at the end, when her mother had been a skeleton, too weak to even hold her daughter’s hand, he had not been there. She knew he hadn’t bothered to send for his sister-in-law until it was too late.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye,” Aunt Winny had said, and that was Sciona’s first memory of her sweet aunt—crying over her sister’s body, “I didn’t get to say goodbye!”

“Women are always told to be kind, be forgiving, be nurturing,” Sciona said, glaring down the walk ahead. “As far as I know, it’s never gotten them anywhere. The men of Tiran, who have the real power, won’t return the favor when it matters.”

“This is why you believe the highmages of your department would take advantage of your cooperation if they got the chance?” Thomil said.

She nodded. “If returning their indifference makes me a bad woman, so

be it.”

“A bad woman?”

“Arrogant,” Sciona clarified bitterly, “egotistical, impure of heart.”

“I think it’s only bad if your ego is unwarranted.”

“What?”

“If you fail to exceed their results on your own,” Thomil said. “If you are capable of everything they are as a group, then who can say you’ve been arrogant or unvirtuous?”

Sciona smiled at Thomil. “I like the way you think, Kwen.”

By this time, class had let out, students in brown robes were trickling out of buildings onto the walkways, and Sciona’s destination was in sight: Trethellyn Hall.

Arhcmage Bringham’s building stood proud at the juncture between the ancient white stonework of the original campus and the newer cement erections of the expanded campus. Until Archmage Bringham’s tenure, the

building had just been called Northeast Hall 4. When he set up operations there, Bringham had decided that, as the city’s leading employer of women, he wanted to honor a largely forgotten female mage from the generation before his, even going so far as to use her maiden name.

“Oh,” Thomil murmured when the gold-lettered sign on the front of the building came into view. “That’s where we’re going, ma’am?”

Sciona nodded. “If there’s one person on this campus who will make sure we have the facilities we actually need, it’s Archmage Bringham—possibly the one exception to everything I’ve just said about men in Tiran.”

Thomil’s eyes turned to the textile building with an unreadable expression. For a moment, it seemed like a flicker of pain—or wrath?

Sciona opened her mouth to ask what the matter was when Thomil spoke.

“Should I go back to the Main Magistry and try to retrieve your papers?”

“Hmm?”

“You were in the middle of composing a spellweb, weren’t you, ma’am? I assumed you’d want to continue.”

“Oh, no, I was all but finished with that. And, for the next week, I have

something more important to do.”

“Ma’am?”

“If I’m going to outdo Renthorn and Tanrel, I’m going to have to do what my colleagues do and pass some responsibilities off to my assistant. You’ve been studying magical theory for a while, but if I’m going to use you properly, we need some practice in the mix.”

“You mean…?” Thomil seemed hesitant to even say it, but there was no

time for hesitation.

“We need to get you doing some magic.”

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