Magic has enticed humans since their first dreams let them peer beyond the boundaries of the world they lived in. It would have been reasonable when things started peering back at them for that interest to have been lost, but anyone who imagined that would happen has clearly never met a human being.

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

I couldn’t say that the prospect of learning magic was unappealing. Especially since it seemed like there was a lot I needed to catch up on if I was going to survive the Cadet Trials and have a chance to get inside the Academy. There was one problem though; my magic wasn’t really magic at all.

“You came to Middlerun to take part in the Trials, but you’ve had precious little exposure to the Transcendental Arts. I gather your aptitude tests were impressive enough that someone was willing to sponsor you?” Doxle asked.

“They insisted I come,” I said, which had the virtue of being true, while also not being the reason I had wound up where I was.

“Would you mind if I perform an aptitude test of my own?” Doxle asked. “There are fundamentals that you’ll need but I’d like to get a sense of what areas you’re likely to excel at and which ones will be more challenging to start with.”

“They spent most of a day testing me last time,” I said, again the truth, though somewhat misleading since they’d worked out that I had an unusual aptitude on the first test and then spent the rest of the time trying to figure out why I was so weird.

Doxle gave me one of his many patronizing smiles and assured me that, “I work somewhat faster than provincial academics.”

Without another word, or any sort of gesture, the test began. I could tell because one moment I was sitting on the overly padded chair in Doxle’s library and then next I was frozen in bands of green light and floating in a great starry void.

“Here’s your first test, get out of here before you suffocate or go mad.”

From the faint wind that tickled the hairs on my neck and arms, I knew there was air here. Suffocation appeared to be an issue because the green bindings weren’t just wrapped around me. They seemed to run through me from back to front and back again.

Seemed to run through me, but not in a physical sense it turned out. A quick check showed my newly restored internal organs were still in prime shape. 

I sniffed. Was this another illusion?

No.

The air carried the scents of rain and dust and chicken feathers and wine spilled over undercooked meat and…and that wasn’t helping. Wherever we were there were too many different places and people close by. A cacophony would have been less disorienting, but I was familiar with shutting out the world. I’d had to do that for as long as I could remember.

“This is one of the basic capture spells a caster would try to use on you if they knew you to be a form shifter and if they felt they had time to complete it,” Doxle said. “Whatever the origin and nature of your magic is though, it is relatively simple to escape this sort of binding. All you need to is…”

I didn’t let him finish his thought. I knew what to do. It was obvious once I took a moment to get a feel for the green bindings.

What passes for magic in me isn’t something I have to twist my mind out of shape to work with. It’s always in me, always a part of me. If anything, it’s the world around me I need to twist my mind around to make sense of. 

My magic flows through me not like blood but like the tide. A tide in which I’m no more than a single rain drop. Rebuilding my organs wasn’t hard because it took energy out of me. It was hard because shaping the everflowing stream of ‘me’ into any solid embodiment goes against what the oldest part of me wants to be.

Down in the darkest depths, where hunger and desire and rage rule over everything lives a version of me without form or identity. In those waters, I am nothing and everything and all that lies between. I am something alien to this world. Something that probably shouldn’t exist.

But I do.

And I plan to keep on existing.

That ever-shifting, fluid thing at the heart of what I really am couldn’t have survived here. 

So I made something else of myself.

I made who I am now.

Cell by cell, bone by bone, thought and dream by hope and fear. Most of that wasn’t planned and very little of it was by conscious choice. I simply wanted to survive and so I became someone who could.

Doxle’s magic wasn’t like that. When I quieted the panic that rose up and drew it in, I felt an unfamiliar current flowing through me. It was warm and simple, a stream of possibility wrapped in threads of intention.

I took a moment to appreciate the spiraling curls of reason that gave the green stream of power its purpose and definition. Each unspoken, unwritten word was a reflection of Doxle. How he’d managed to weave such a clear and distinct tapestry of rules for what the magic should do in so little time, I had no idea. What I did know was what I could do about.

That was when I interrupted him.

One moment I was bound at the edge of the veil between worlds and then next I was sitting back in the library, free once again.

“Oh, well you seem to have done it,” Doxle said, the surprise on his face genuine from what I could tell. “I think. What is it, exactly, that you did to regain your freedom, and where, if I may ask, is my spell now?”

“I ate it,” I said. Again, arguably the truth, but not the most accurate representation of what I’d done.

Doxle’s magic was a stream given shape and purpose by the words of the spell he bound it with. Flowing alongside it and making it my own? Why would that be hard when my nature was to change and shift as I needed. The words of the spell weren’t mine and would have been more complicate to become one with, but it was a simple spell, there were no words protecting the words of the spell itself, so all I needed to do was drown out one of the threads and the rest broke and unraveled into silence too.

The original aptitude test hadn’t been like this. The proctors for that test had started by trying to see how much magic I could hold. They’d placed cuffs on me similar to the ones the guards had used. Those spells I couldn’t break because there were words wrapped around words and intentions wrapped around intentions, the whole of them so deeply that breaking one only caused the others to multiply making the spell even stronger.

The proctors had tried lightly draining me first, only to find that the light draining wasn’t reaching an end in anything like a safe time frame. They debated trying a heavier drain, but that risked injuring me if they set it too high and couldn’t stop it before I ran out. Thankfully I was more valuable intact than damage, so they ruled out really testing what I could do (which, to be fair, might have actually killed me). Instead, they tried filling me up but that didn’t produce the results they were looking for either.

The one approach that did work for them was binding my magic directly. My nature is to flow, but I’ve spent my life building structure and form around my magic. It was all too easy for magics designed to lock my magic in place to follow the pathways I’d created and freeze me as I was. To fight against that, I would have had to fight against everything I’d built up as myself.

Doxle was looking at me strangely.

Not like I was strange.

I was used to people looking at me like that.

He seemed more pleased than disturbed at the oddity in front of him. Not pleased in a happy sense though. There was something burning in the fire of his eyes, something with knife edges and claw tips.

“An interesting technique,” he said before relaxing back into his seat and into his normal lecturing voice. “Keep that one under wraps for as long as you can tomorrow. Not many, or possibly any, of the Cadets you’ll face can manage a binding spell like the one I just used, but most of them will have similar techniques.”

“Will they be able to cast as fast as you just did?” I asked. Training produced speed, among other traits and, as Idrina had demonstrated, without the time to react to what was happening I tended to fare poorly.

“No.” 

Not “probably not”. Not “it would be unlikely”. Just “no”. He wasn’t bragging that he outclassed all of the casters I would be put up against because he didn’t have to. 

“They will have other strategies in place to compensate for that however. Ironbriar for example could hurl a spear at you and then start casting the moment it makes impact. Even if the full incantation takes her several seconds, the distraction of being impaled could prevent you from reacting in time.”

“And how should I deal with that?” I asked.

“Don’t get impaled. It’s solid life advice. Truly.”

My reply was silence and a glare.

“You wish to know the one big secret to winning your battles,” Doxle said. “The secret is that there is no ‘one secret’. Each conflict is different even when the combatants are the same. Ironbriar knows more about you now, and you know more about her. Neither of you will approach the next battle in the manner you approached the last one. Accept that you will be faced with uncertainty, and be ready to act without perfect understanding.”

“So no thinking, just wing it all the time then?”

“Quite the contrary, you want to think and plan as much as possible. Just not in the battle itself. Imagine how you want your battles to go. Imagine what will go wrong. Imagine adapting to those set backs. Try to find the common strategies which present themselves. Identify the signs that suggest when each strategy is needed. Just never make the mistake of thinking that you know what will happen, or that you have responses in place for everything your opponents will do. Expect to be surprised and know what surprises you can spring in return and when you’d want to spend those capabilities.”

“All that tonight?” I asked, wondering if I was ever going to get to sleep at all.

“Oh, of course not,” Doxle said. “That’s what you’ll be doing tomorrow night after you’ve won a place in the Academy and need to prepare for the next set of tests they’ll throw at you.”

“You think I’ll get in?” I asked and then added the more pressing question, “You think I’ll survive?”

“I think you want something inside the Academy very badly. I don’t believe you will allow yourself to die before gaining that.”

He wasn’t wrong, but we’d just established that I did have limits and people were likely to be able to work around them, so I didn’t feel terribly comforted.

“Now that your head is full to the brim, it’s time to give it some rest I believe,” Doxle said, gesturing for me to rise.

That wasn’t how my head worked, and for once I don’t think I was being weird. 

Doxle was already leading me out the library though so I followed him into a whole new wing of the house.

This one smelled of pine and, outside the windows, I saw a night darkened forest with a full moon hanging just over the treetops.

Except the moon wasn’t supposed to be full. It had been a waning half moon two days prior when they put me in jail. And the faint pattern on it was wrong too.

“You may use this one if you like,” Doxle said, gesturing towards a bed room the size of Grammy Duella’s entire cottage. 

There was no dust and no cobwebs, but I could smell the hint of them lingering in the air, hidden under a layer of fresh soap and water.

I stepped in the room and could smell that someone had been there just a moment or two before the door opened. 

“I’ll wake you in the morning,” Doxle said and before I could protest that I would probably still be up, I felt myself topple over into a deep and dreamless sleep.

“It always makes people uncomfortable to reflect on how someone else might kill them and, to be fair, that’s not the most important thing many nobles need to consider. The question of why someone might be interested in killing them is far more critical in most cases. For some reason though preventing the ‘how’ always seems to be given a lot more attention than exploring options to resolve the ‘why’ which triggers homicidal impulses in the first place.”

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame, speaking to an audience of three fresh corpses

As turns in the conversation went, talking about my weak points wasn’t my favorite.

“Simple methods of executing you are demonstrably ineffective,” Doxle said, conjuring a glowing green image of me in silhouette. He poked his left pinkie finger through the center of the image’s torso and removed it, leaving a hole behind that was much bigger, proportionally, than the one Idrina had left in me.

He hadn’t asked a question I needed to answer yet, so I responded with a frown and waited to see where he was going with the lecture.

“Even those with exceptional durability however,” he poked more holes in the image, each of which began shrinking quickly on their own, “will still be vulnerable to one form of attack or another.” He traced a finger around the edge of the silhouette, peeling away the thin border around it. It took a second or two, but that was the end of the figure. The green light within it bulged outwards before spurting into a green puddle as the figure’s structure completely collapsed.

I shrugged. I had no illusions that I was indestructible. My earliest memories are of people like me dying to violence. I don’t dwell on that much, but his demonstration brought back the echo of those old ghosts.

“Form shifters often try to cheat a path to victory in battle with little tricks like placing their heart somewhere people don’t think to stab,” Doxle said, allowing the illusion to fade. “My counsel is to use such approaches sparingly. I’ve only seen it happen once but it was truly tragic to witness someone inflict what should have been a merely disabling wound only to strike their opponent quite dead because the form shifter had decided to relocate their brain from their head.”

I grimaced at the lack of aesthetic propriety. Bodies were structured as they were for a variety of reasons, the largest being that they worked when things were in the right spots. Sure, you could put eyes in the back of your head but routing the extra optic nerves was a mess, not to mention splitting the brain’s visual processing center to handle the additional sensory input.

Also that meant having no hair there, and hair is wonderful. It carries so many scents or you can wash it and be surrounded in something lovely all day. Who wouldn’t want hair if it was their choice whether to grow it or not? 

For their crimes against aesthetics, I was tempted to say that the form shifter got what they deserved, but that was unkind and silence seemed like a better response again.

I also had no interest in pointing out that I hadn’t moved my heart or my lungs, though I did grumble at the memory of how much of my nice work on them had been wrecked. I was going to be doing touch up work on my…my everything for the next week or more.

“Repositioning major organs also carries with it the cost of continual magic expenditure,” Doxle said. “Unless you happen to be a sufficiently talented at designing biological systems that you can morph into a configuration which is viable without metaphysical support.”

I waited to see if he was going to draw another example image in light but for this point I was apparently supposed to use my imagination. Or maybe he didn’t want to give me any help coming up with what was sure to be a bad idea.

“It’s fascinating to me that you seem to possess that level of skill and yet that is not what you did,” he said. I didn’t like how he was staring at me. There was too much understanding lurking behind those burning eyes. 

“Why do you say that?” I asked. I wasn’t denying it. He was right and he obviously knew it. I just wanted to know what I’d done to give myself away.

“You fell forty feet onto hard stone. No matter where in your body you’d hidden your vital organs stored, that should have damaged at least some of them severely.”

Which, in hindsight, was sort of obvious.

I nodded, conceding the point.

“We don’t need to dwell on that however. You knew you would survive and you did.” He took a breath to say more but I cut him off before he could begin.

“Did you?” It was a simple question, but his answer was going to color quite a lot about how I dealt with him going forward.

“I confess I’m still unclear on the exact mechanism you employed, but the damage from a fall of that magnitude was clearly well within your tolerances.”

That wasn’t exactly comforting but it wasn’t the worst answer he could have given. Not that I could trust him. He could say anything he wanted at this point. 

“How did you know that?” I asked. He could lie about that too, but I still wanted to see what he said. Even lies can be enlightening sometimes.

“I spoke with the guards who apprehended you.”

“And they said they beat me up worse than a forty foot fall?”

“Not in so many words, but yes. Also I know them, or rather men like them. Beyond a certain point of resistance they lose interest in apprehending anyone. From the description of the bystanders and their own accounts I expected to find you in the Free Fields outside the city, not locked in that charming little cell.”

That was a believable story, but I had to bite back a growl anyways. Not for myself. Doxle’s description of the men made me regret all the damage I held back on inflicting on them. If he was right, there were people buried in the public cemetery outside Middlerun who deserved the sort of justice only a few dead guardsmen could bring.

I forced myself to draw in a breath like Grammy had taught me. She would say that there was a lot in the world to rage about and only so much skin that I had to lose. I could almost hear her voice asking me if this was one of the fights where it was worth pitting myself against the grindstone of the world, or if maybe I had better battles to try to win.

I don’t think I caught a whiff of Trina’s scent then, it was probably just a memory, but it was enough. I did have more important battles to fight.

“Could you have caught me?” I asked. I’d relied on him as a safety net in that fight. It occurred to me that I should have verified whether he was capable of being one before hand.

“Not without cost, but had you been in actual danger, yes.” Again, he seemed sincere, but faking sincerity was a lot easier than faking your scent. 

“Did Enika know I could survive?” She should have been able to stop Idrina. Maybe not before she stabbed me through the chest but at least before she kicked me off the top of the pillar.

“She may have suspected, but I doubt she had certain knowledge of that,” Doxle said. “Even if she had fully believed that you would perish in the fall however I do not believe she would have acted to save you. Not when forcing me to act would have been more efficient.”

That I believed all too easily. Enika seemed to be many things but ‘sentimental’ and ‘merciful’ did not appear to be on that list.

“For what its worth, I’m reasonably sure that Ironbriar had no idea you could survive either her attack or the fall.”

That I could believe too, but for a different reason.

“She was just making sure,” I said. I wasn’t defending her. I just wanted to have a clear understanding of what had happened.

“Yes. You fought back more than she expected you to be able to,” Doxle said. “From what I saw she intended to disable you and force you to yield, at least at first.”

That tracked with the fact that she’d taken out my arm with her initial attack.

I think I’d hit her with a headbutt after that but the fight had been a blur even before my head went splat on the stone floor.

“Wasn’t a good strategy for her,” I said. I like to imagine I’m a reasonable person, but I had to admit that I probably wouldn’t have backed down, even if she’d taken out more of my limbs.

“Yes and I believe she saw that, hence moving to a more aggressive posture.”

Meaning she’d switched from winning the fight to trying to kill me mostly out of a sense of self preservation. I nodded in agreement with Doxle’s appraisal. I wasn’t happy she’d tried to kill me, but it wasn’t entirely unreasonable under the circumstances. 

The scary bit was that she seemed to be damn good at it.

“I would dock her points however for choosing the wrong aggressive tactics,” Doxle said. “True, she played to her strengths and did manage to eliminate you as an immediate threat but those strengths are not the ones you are vulnerable too.”

“She knows that now,” I said, worrying anew at what that would mean the next time we fought.

“Indeed she does, and while I am certain she will not spread word of that – there’s little profit for her and significant advantage to be gained if you come into opposition with those she opposes – it is entirely possible that the foes you face tomorrow in the Cadet Trials will not make the same mistake.”

“They’ll know how to kill me?” I asked, wondering more what they might try than whether they would be as vicious as Idrina had been.

“The senior cadets who take part in the trials have been trained to deal with all sorts of foes,” Doxle said. “Almost anything can come from a Reaving Storm, and the Imperial elite troops only get called in when its something sufficiently unpleasant that the local forces are overwhelmed.”

“And they’ll be trying to kill me? For an entrance exam?” I wasn’t actually surprised. Just annoyed. It had sounded ridiculous to me when I’d heard about it the first time and it sounded just as ridiculous with the trials being less than a dozen hours away.

“Technically they are only trying to test you,” Doxle said. “In practice however there are almost always fatalities during the Cadet Trials, particularly early on since that tends to reduce the candidate pool and convince the more sensible applicants to try for the common track instead.”

“It’s mostly nobles who are applying though, isn’t it? Why do the Great Houses allow their children to be thrown into a meat grinder?”

“Every Great House supports many children from many different familial lines within the house. The death toll for the Cadet Trials tends to strike the unwanted ones harder than others, even though the rules are clear that upon the battlefield all are in mortal peril.”

“What does that mean for the commoners who apply?” I asked, trying to imagine how bloody the next day would be.

“They fare slightly better, if only by virtue of there being fewer people with pre-established vendettas against them,” Doxle said. “They can still be knocked out or slain of course, but their primary concern is that they must do more than simply survive the Trials. Unless they are selected for sponsorship by one of the Great Houses, they won’t be admitted to the Academy, regardless of their performance.”

“This system sucks,” I said.

“You will find that applies to a great deal within the Empire,” Doxle said. “Which is why we need to give you every advantage you can get. So how would you like to learn magic?”

Forgetting our history does not doom us to repeat it. I assure you, I am quite capable of remembering every terrible mistake I have ever made and that has done precious little to prevent me from making them over and over again.

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

I knew who had saved the empire from its greatest calamity. Everyone did. Hundreds of years later they still sang praises to the name of the Empress Eternal. 

“How did she do it?” I asked. I’d always been curious how one person had born the the weight of a thousand worlds, even if it was only long enough to spare all of the life on this one.

“Foolishly,” Doxle said. He’d conjured something stronger than tea to his hand when I wasn’t looking and took quite a bit more than a sip before continuing. “I won’t bore you with the details, the important element is that instead of the High Planes crashing through the world, they all crashed into her.”

“That doesn’t sound particularly survivable,” I said. I’d always assumed the ‘Eternal’ part of the Empress’s title was metaphorical. She hadn’t been seen in centuries and while the Great Houses ruled in her name, I don’t think anyone believed they answered to anyone except each other.

“It wasn’t,” Doxle said. “Not even the self-proclaimed ‘Greatest Dweomer Crafter of the Age’ could have managed to do what she did. At least not without cheating, which she also did, but then he was far too self absorbed to for her strategy to ever have occurred to him.”

“You were there?” It didn’t seem impossible. I had no idea how long demons lived, and it seemed like an ‘Imperial Advisor’ might be have been called on when Empresses Court were trying the most difficult spell ever attempted.

“Unfortunately yes,” Doxle said. “Had I been elsewhere – where I should have been – the whole affair might have been avoided entirely. Or we’d all be quite dead. Or never born at all in your case I suppose.”

Or I would have been something else entirely. Something I would probably mourn the loss of if I had any connection to it anymore. 

“We’ve covered this general topic before though,” Doxle said. “Let’s get to the useful bits. You do have any early day tomorrow after all.”

I bit back any show of disappointment from crossing my face. I couldn’t lie through scent like he could though, so maybe he could tell anyways? It didn’t matter. 

“Following all the dramatics the calamity inspired, people discovered that the magic they had access too was greatly expanded. For some people.” He looked weary at the thought of that and took another pull from the seemingly bottomless glass in his hand before continuing. 

“There’s been a popular belief, widely encouraged by the Great Houses, that High Magic, and the Transcendent Arts in general, are the purview of the nobility alone. Any commoners who exhibit talent with advanced magecraft, or esoteric potion distillation, or any other ‘noble’ pursuit are said to be the descendents of a noble bastard whose breeding threw true a generation or two down the line.”

He gave me a questioning glance, not so subtly inquiring if that description applied to me. It didn’t, though not for the reasons he would discover if he searched my family tree.

“Each caster with a talent for the Transcendent Arts is connected to one or more of the fractured High Planes and draws their magic from there,” he said. With a wave of his hand he tossed the glass he was drinking from onto the table where it shattered into a shower of crystalline razors and then hung frozen in the air, forming of a model of the High Planes and their interaction with our world.

“Our friend from Ironbriar showed us techniques from at least two world fragments. Possibly three. Can you guess what they were?” He touched two of the shards and they lit up with a deep green light. A third flickered on and off with as well as though it was uncertain which state it should be in.

I ignored the model. I could visualize the idea well enough, I didn’t need it spelled out for me like that. I also knew an that we’d reached the portion of the lecture where interaction was useful so I considered the question he posed.

“She has a connection to somewhere the let’s her conjure spears, or maybe weapons in general?” I said, working out the answer as I spoke. “And somewhere that made her fast.”

Her speed had been one of the big problems in the fight. I’m not slow but she was so quick that I hadn’t had many options available for how to handle her.

“Excellent observations,” Doxle said. “The one you missed was the ability which lost her the match.”

“She didn’t really lose,” I said.

“You didn’t beat her. She most certainly lost though. Understand that the difference between those two is the fulcrum a great many things in the world turn on. To Ironbriar’s credit, she acknowledged the difference and accepted the reality of the situation. A great many people in positions of power have profound difficulty doing that and it tends to lead to the most unpleasant sorts of drama.”

I nodded in acknowledgement. I still didn’t feel right about claiming a victory over her. If we had held an immediate rematch, the outcome would have been in her favor. Life doesn’t always allow for do overs though. Sometimes we only have one chance to do our best.

And sometimes our best isn’t good enough. And then we have to live with that.

“Her trick of bouncing off the wall might have been a spell from the same High Plane as the one that enhanced her speed, but I believe it wasn’t,” Doxle said, moving on with the lecture.

“Because of the flash of light from her feet?” I asked.

“You noticed that? Oh very good. Yes, spells from the same source tend to be accompanied by the same sort of visible and auditory flourishes. Ironbriar’s hastening spell was almost purely internal. Very well executed with no visible bleed over. The jumping spell however looked to be divided between internal and external effects, with the flash of power an unavoidable side effect.”

“So she can draw on three High Planes. How many more could she have?” I asked. Magic weapons, speed, and enhanced leaping weren’t wonderful to fight against, but I hadn’t pressed her all that hard so it seemed entirely possible that she had even worse tricks she could pull out if she had to get serious.

“Most casters your age can only pull from one High Plane,” Doxle said. “Its possible that she could have access to dozens or hundreds of other sources of magic but her performance suggests that we will not be that lucky.”

“She’ll have more than hundreds of spells to cast?” I asked.

“No, just the opposite,” Doxle said. “A caster with hundreds of planar connections to draw on is almost useless in a battle.”

“But you would never know what spell they might throw at you?”

“And neither would they,” Doxle said. “Remember to cast a High Magic spell requires bending your thoughts until they merge with the reality of the High Plane you’re trying to cast through. With hundreds of connections to pick from, the caster will be hard pressed to quickly align their thoughts with just one of them. Yes, they have more versatility, but their spellcasting tends to be exceedingly slow and the chance that they lose their grip on this reality is significant.”

“She wasn’t slow.”

“Which suggests those may be the only three High Planes she can draw on. Whether or not that is the case, those are most certainly the ones she has focused on training. To be able to cast as cleanly as she did, she had to have developed her magecraft skills to levels only prodigy’s tend to reach.”

“There’s a way this helps me thought. Isn’t there?” 

“Of course. Think about what it means that Ironbriar has three spells from three different sources. Think about what that means for her.” He was testing me again, but this was the sort of test I was used to during a lecture. It meant I had the pieces I needed to answer his question. I just needed to put them together.

I glanced away from Doxle and turned my thoughts inwards. The kind of casting he described sounded alien to me. The magics I worked didn’t require bending my mind out of synch with reality, but rather focusing in on myself and touching on who and what I was.

But I was weird.

Which meant the Doxle was probably right about what Idrina had to go through to cast her spells. A brief moment of madness to cast each one? No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t madness, if madness was even a real thing. She was twisting her mind so that for an incredibly brief instant, the world that was real to her was one where she could create a spear with a thought.

In doing that though, the world we shared wouldn’t have seemed real to her anymore.

Nor would the other High Planes she could cast spells from.

“Spells can only be cast from one plane at a time?” I said, testing out whether the idea worked or not.

“There are exceptions, but yes, in general that is true,” Doxle said. His eyes were glowing with the bright orange of anticipation, as though I almost had the answer.

Which I guess I did.

“Whenever she has to cast a spell, she’s locked out from the other realms she can cast from? Oh! No, wait. Casting a spell locks the caster out from all the other planes their connected to, including this one!”

A smile broke out across Doxle’s face than reached up to crinkle his eyes in mirth too.

“Exactly. Battlefield casting like Ironbriar performed is fiendishly hard and perilous even for those who are excellent at it. Note how she cast the spell to summon a spear well before you were in melee range. She used the spear’s appearance as a distraction to cover casting the hastening spell and then simply maintained the flow of magic to that spell while you fought.”

“Shouldn’t the spear she summoned have gone away when she cast a spell from a different plane?” I asked.

“That’s a more complicated question,” Doxle said. “It depends largely on what the spear actually was. If it was a purely mundane implement, then the act of summoning it was the only magic required for its existence. Once it was in her hand it was the same as any other spear. More or less.”

“How much more and how little less?” I asked.

“Mundane objects conjured by magic have subdivisions too, based largely on the laws of the High Plane where the spell came from. In most cases, the objects vanish after a period of time as the High Plane calls them back. Other summoned items will age at an ever accelerating rate, or will simply disappear at some regular interval, sunset and dawn being typical examples.”

“And if it’s not a mundane item?” I asked.

“Mystically instantiated weapons tend to need the caster’s magics to remain strong and viable for their task. As soon as the caster stops supplying magic, the weapons vanish. Normally weapons do not require much magic for preserve their existence, well below the draw of a typical caster. True magic weapons are a different story though. Those are things like swords of fire or blades of light and they require substantial amounts of magic to summon and maintain. They can be quite showy but are usually a tremendously bad idea given how much they weaken the caster.”

“Can I have one?” I asked. Tremendously bad idea or not, wielding a weapon of pure magic seemed like it would at the very least give me a brutally effective offensive option.

“Certainly!” Doxle said. “All you have to do is learn to cast it on your own.”

“Not going to teach me how to create one are you?”

“I might, if the mood takes me, but alas, it is absent at the moment,” Doxle said. “At present however you have little need for such a thing.”

“It wouldn’t help when I have to fight her again?” 

“It would be a distraction at best. You already have the tools you need.”

“Hit her when she’s casting?”

“She thinks she can cast quickly enough to safely execute spells in battle, and she’s largely correct. No matter how good she is though, casting spells in combat is dangerous. It’s a narrow window of opportunity to take advantage of that, but she no longer has the element of surprise she enjoyed in your first battle, and you know what to watch for.”

“I guess that will have to be enough.”

“Let us hope,” Doxle said, dismissing the model of shattered glass with another wave. “You should turn in early tonight. You have not had the easiest of days recently.”

I could agree with all of that and was ready to fall asleep in the chair almost immediately but was brought back to alertness by Doxle’s next comment.

“Before you turn in though, there is one more thing we should discuss.” He paused for either for effect or to ensure I was following him. “We’ve spoke of how you might kill Ironbriar. We should address the question of how we might kill you.”

People says there is an Art to Killing, as though it takes any special quality to stab someone in the neck. The only Art to found in combat is in the grace and speed and tactics around not killing someone. That is where true accomplishment lies. Not everyone appreciates Art of course. Those people we stab in the neck.

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

I expected Doxle to take me back up onto the platform and demonstrate the techniques I needed to learn in whatever painful fashion amused him. I don’t know what in our time together so far had given me the idea that he would bother with any sort of physical effort when a few thousand words would suffice instead.

Instead of the platform, he lead me out of the sparring room, past a pantry with the scents of at least six dozen different teas wafting out of it, and to a sumptuous library with roughly three times as many books as the shelves could hold. He turned as we passed through the archway into the room and gestured for me to take my choice of seating around a low central table which was surprising free of book piles.

I picked out a chair that was large enough I could have curled up into a ball and gone to sleep in it. It was stuffed with enough padding that the temptation to sink into both the chair and a dreamless slumber was challenging to resist, but my curiosity was enough to keep me awake.

Doxle ran his hand over the archway and it shrunk down until it was the size of a keyhole in the wall. The move trapped me in the library with him, which I wasn’t overly fond of, but I refrained from shredding the covering on the chair. There was always time for that later, and I could see the benefit privacy might hold assuming he really was going to tell me how to kill Idrina Ironbriar.

“We have much to talk about, shall I send for some refreshments?” Doxle asked, taking a spot on the couch on the opposite side of the table from me.

“We just ate,” I said. He nodded in understanding and I had the distinct suspicion the question had been a test.

He’d called me a Form Shifter, which was superficially true. Did Form Shifters need to eat after each transformation though? It occurred to me that while I understood what I could do fairly well, most of what I knew about the magic of the Empire was related to the common, everyday magics people used. Given that  my first encounter with High Magic had included some extremely painful surprises, my ignorance was looking to be more of a liability than I’d thought it would be.

“I suppose that’s true,” Doxle said. “Let us begin your instruction then.”

“How do I kill her?” I asked, hoping to skip past the long winded explanations of overly obvious or unimportant details.

“Poison in her wine,” Doxle said. “That’s an old favorite, though not among the Ironbriars, which is why it’s reasonably likely to work.”

“How do I kill her in a fight?” Because apparently I had to extremely specific if I wanted useful answers from him.

“Stabbing generally works. Barring that I would suggest falling back on slashing, or, if no better option presents itself, bludgeoning her.”

I was wrong. More specific questions still yielded useless answers.

“I tried that,” I said. “Didn’t work.”

“Perhaps you need to practice stabbing more?” He made a feeble little stabbing motion with his hand. “It’s what the Ironbriars swears by. Practice until your arms drop off and then glue them back on and practice some more.”

“I have until tomorrow morning.” I knew he had useful ideas, and I knew I couldn’t reach across the table and choke them out of him, but it was growing more and more tempting to try.

“Shame, I don’t think you can get your arms to fall off even once in that time.”

“So what can I do?” I wanted there to be a single secret for undoing a High Magic caster’s powers but I knew things couldn’t possibly be that simple.

“Not fight?” Doxle asked.

“And when she doesn’t give me that option?”

“Ask for forgiveness?”

“And when she doesn’t grant it?”

“You are in quite the negative mood, aren’t you?” he asked, conjuring a cup of tea for himself from thin air.

I didn’t answer that. I’d been stabbed through the heart. He knew I’d been stabbed through the heart. He was smart enough to draw a line from there to my current mood.

“There is a lesson here, I promise you,” he said after a long moment’s silence.

I waited. There were many lessons I could take from his lack of useful answers. Some of them he may even have intended.

 “You’re asking the wrong question,” he finally said. “It’s not a matter of how you can kill a caster of Ironbriar’s caliber. Killing is easy. People are extremely fragile things. Present company excluded. You don’t want to kill her. That’s too simple. What you want, what you’re really asking, is how you can overcome her magic.”

I nodded. Killing Idrina Ironbriar seemed like a terrible waste. Being killed by her seemed quite a bit worse though. If there was a path between those two, then it would be nice to know about it.

“Good. That seems to have gotten your attention,” Doxle said and set his cup down. “If I’m going to explain how to deal with other casters however we will need a common base of understanding to draw on.”

I nodded. I didn’t mind learning about history and theory. Grammy Duella had taught me about a lot of things and hired tutors for some of the things she wasn’t familiar with herself.

It struck me as odd, in hindsight, that Grammy hadn’t provided more education in the magical arts. Maybe she was hoping that without training any talent I had would fade and people would basically ignore me? If so the strategy had worked for years, right up until the point where it hadn’t.

“Where does magic come from?” Doxle asked.

“The world,” I said. He wanted me to be engaged for this, so I treated it like a class with Grammy.

“That is true for Common Magic,” he said. “High Magic however comes to us from other worlds.”

“The Transcendent Planes?” I asked. I’d heard the term but I didn’t really know what it meant, it just seemed like it fit.

“That is one name for them,” Doxle said. “It suggests several false things though. First that the worlds High Magic is drawn from are uniform, or even vaguely similar to one another. Second that they represent a more advanced stage of being, rather than a lateral one.”

“Lateral?” I asked.

“Some history is in order.” It was a warning, but not one that I needed. I was perfectly capable of following a lecture provided the speaker knew what they were talking about and provided enough information for the audience to follow along too.

“Common Magic has always been a part of our world. It is a natural aspect of the structure of our reality. That limits it but also makes it widely available and far safer to use than the alternative.”

“No casting madness?” 

“You remembered! Yes, Common magic does not require the caster to twist their minds out of phase with our world. Common casters are as capable of losing touch with reality as anyone else is mind you, but it’s not their magic which drives the wedge between them and our world.”

I nodded so that he would go on.

“Originally, High Magic was less perilous too,” Doxle said. “When the Empire was first founded, High Magic rarely snapped any casters’ minds, and on the occasions when that did occur, there were widely applicable treatments which could bring them back into alignment.”

“But that’s not true anymore?” That seemed odd, but there wasn’t a shortage of stories of old casters being more than a little mad.

“No. It’s not.” The scent of ashes escaped his tight control before he clamped down again it. “For centuries the High Plane, the only one that we had at the time, was the subject of intense research, and because of its stability we discovered many elements of how magic worked. Too many as it turned out.”

“What happened?” I asked, guessing this had something to do with the calamity that nearly ended the Empire of the Three Peaks a few centuries back.

“The Empire conquered many lands and peoples, but eventually it reached the end of what the High Plane could support. That was when research on the High Plane became a serious business. Without the ability to extract more power from it, the Empire woul be forced to accept its borders and cease expanding its sphere of control. Have you ever tried to tell a noble family that they can’t buy a second new city this month because all the cities have been sold already and there are no new ones to bid on?”

“The wanted to mine more from the High Plane and they broke it,” I guessed, mostly to show I was following along.

“The ambitions of the Empress and her Celestial Weavers went far beyond the High Plane,” Doxle said. “Developing more efficient refining techniques wasn’t going to yield the quantity of power that we needed. We need more than a better approach. We needed new High Planes.”

“What did you do?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“The Celestials Weavers crafted their greatest spell, one which drew in the strength of all Common magic in an area and used it to make contact with a new High Plane.”

“And it worked, didn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes it did.”

“Right up until it didn’t?”

“For efficiency sake, the spell the Celestial Weavers cast drew the other High Plane in to overlap our world, just as the original High Plane does.”

“Overlap? How didn’t they crash into each other?” I asked.

“The first High Planes were conceptual realms. They had no axis of physical existence, and so they presented no danger to our world.”

“You said the ‘first’. There were others?”

“With the casting by the Celestial Weavers? Many others. Far more than the crafting should have captured.”

“What happened?” I asked, images of an apocalypse dancing in my head.

“They crashed into each other and shattered,” Doxle said. “From one High Plane we vaulted up to hundreds or perhaps thousands. None of them complete but all of them brim with power waiting to be taken.”

“But that was still okay for us?”

“No,” Doxle said. “The first few High Planes to crash together had no physical element but that wasn’t true with all of them. As High Plane after High Plane slammed into each other and our world, the cataclysm began to draw into farther realms, and some of them were quite physical.”

“That sounds like the end of the world.”

“We’re getting there.”

I could smell just the faintest trace of grief underlying the poorly controlled scents of ash and lightning. I wasn’t sure if I should read anything into it though. Doxle had proven that he could lie via his scent. In fact it was probably something he did subconsciously. So was he unintentionally revealing something true or intentionally being misleading? I didn’t know him well enough yet to tell for sure, but my gut said he was being honest so far.

“The problem with High Planes which have a physical dimension is that they cannot overlap with our world. Not without one of the two world’s physical laws being destroyed, which then tends to destroy the rest of the world too.”

“So were all the broken High Planes destroyed by our world when they crashed into us then?” I asked, not seeing how we would be here to be having this discussion otherwise.

“They were not,” Doxle said. “We should not have survived that catastrophe.”

“But we did?” It wasn’t a question that we had but rather how.

“Yes, and all it took was the sacrifice of the best woman I ever had the pleasure to know.”

As a mentor figure, one of the prime things to keep in mind at all times is your charge’s welfare. 

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

My first thought after slamming into the polished stone floor of the sparring chamber was that I’d been correct.

The fall had broken me a lot more than the spear thrusts had.

Since there didn’t seem to be any more spear thrusts coming, I laid there for a while doing a reasonable impression of a puddle of shattered human being, and reviewed exactly where I had gone wrong.

Getting into the ring in the first place seemed was probably one of the many mistakes I’d made. There really hadn’t been any need for that. I’d just wanted to show off.

I could feel Grammy Duella shaking her head at me from a few hundred miles away.

That hurt worse than the fall had.

Underestimating Idrina? Yeah, that hadn’t been bright either. If I was going to pass the Cadet Trials, I needed to be more on guard, and demand a more even playing field when possible.

I kicked myself for missing the bit where she called for ‘no weapons except conjured ones’. That should have been a dead giveaway that she could conjure weapons and planned to do so immediately.

To be fair, I don’t think I could have been expected to guess that she would be so good at it that she could pull off the spell in the first instant of the fight without words or gestures. Part of why I hadn’t been too worried about whatever magic she possessed was that I’d assumed all casters needed time and freedom of movement to cast their spells and I’d planned to give her neither.

I heard voices from the top of the platform but my ears were as busted up as the rest of me so making out what they were saying was a bit beyond my capabilities. I gave a wordless, and mostly soundless grunt, and got to work on fixing that.

The damage to my torso needed work, but the broken bits in my head took higher priority. Grammy Duella would have laughed about the idea that I could fix the broken bits in my head and assured me they were fine as is, but people generally seemed to expect skulls to be solid.

My thoughts strayed onto partially formed jokes about being a blockhead, which got me working on fixing the various bits of brain trauma I’d suffered as my first step in the restoration process. I could have managed the repairs in an instant, but brains are tricky things and mine was one of my most artistic pieces so I wanted it to be just right.

“So will you be starting your year of service immediately, or do you need some time to put your affairs in order?” Enika asked as the voice floated closer.

“My dear former beloved, I am always in service and of service,” Doxle said. “In this particular instance however, I am gladdened to have earned the forgiveness for my offense against House Ironbriar.”

“A curious thing to be glad of as your champion failed to survive even the paltry sixty seconds required by the terms of battle,” Enika said. 

If my face had been functional, I would have been wearing an expression of either disgust or disbelief. 

She thought I’d died there? And she’d done nothing to prevent it? 

I wasn’t sure smacking an Imperial Advisor was a good idea.

No. Scratch that. I was absolutely certain it was a terrible idea. Fortunately I was too busted up to try it regardless.

I suppose it was a little unreasonable to think she or Doxle could have stopped things in time too. Idrina had gone from bouncing off the wall, to stabbing me through the chest, to kicking me off the pillar in around a second or so. I could tell that the Advisors had a lot of power at their disposal but that didn’t say anything about their reaction times.

That Enika wasn’t particularly regretful about Idrina apparently killing me seemed remarkably callous, but it wasn’t like I’d been raised to believe the Great Houses were the good and kind shepherds of the Empire that the official stories made them out to be.

“Yes, well, there are two small, yet relevant points you may be overlooking,” Doxle said as the floating disks drew himself and the others down to ground level.

“And those would be?” Enika asked, her boots clicking on the polished stone about fifteen feet away from me.

“Primarily, that the Ironbriar champion lost the duel,” Doxle said. I had my eyes closed still, mostly because I didn’t really want to see the state the fall had left me in, but I could still tell he was looking directly at Idrina.

I brought my nose back online as the final touch of fixing my skull and then got to work on the gaping hole in my chest.

“Lost?” Idrina asked, a trill of well suppressed anger rolling through the word.

“Oh, you’re performance was magnificent,” Doxle said. “A credit to your house, and doubtless enough to pass the Cadet Trials tomorrow.”

He waited a moment but she didn’t rise to take the bait he was dangling.

“There is only the small matter that you broke the terms of the battle before it was over,” Doxle said.

“How?” the brother asked. He was angry too, though a different shade of it than Idrina was. More protective of her honor I thought.

Breathing in slightly, I caught a whiff of musky protectiveness coming from him. 

That was interesting. A lot of siblings in the Great Houses are taught to view each other as rivals at best and eventual enemies in all other cases, with the only familial affection resting on the fact that they were enemies united by the rest of the world being the Great House’s enemies too.

“Do you recall the terms laid out for the battle?” Doxle asked.

“It was five minutes ago, so, yes, I do,” the brother said.

“What was my one condition then?” Doxle asked.

Idrina groaned, but the brother didn’t follow. “No weapons, spells only,” he said.

“That was her condition,” Doxle said.

“No spell casting outside the circle,” Idrina said.

A pungent spike of self recrimination flowed off her enough that I almost felt bad for the poor girl.

That wasn’t a hard emotion to overcome. All I had to do was focus on the work of knitting my heart back together.

It wasn’t a difficult task to be honest. Hearts are pretty simple organs. Blood goes in, blood goes out. Getting it to react when the rest of the body needs it to takes a bit of doing, but a lot of that is in the brain and spinal cord, which I’d already put back together.

The lungs on the other hand? Those are a pain to reconstruct even when they’re far less damaged than mine were. 

They are, again, a pretty simple organ but there are so many little alveoli, and if you want to do it right, you have to make each and every one, rather than just faking it with a single air bladder under the rib cage.

“You didn’t cast anything outside the circle though?” the brother said, the scent from him turning green with uncertainty.

“Didn’t she though?” Doxle asked and even I felt like slapping the smug, gloating smile off his face.

“Oh, pfff, that hardly counts,” Enika said.

“The terms of the battle don’t count? Is that truly a tack you wish to take?” Doxle asked, losing none of his delight.

“What? What did you cast?” the brother asked.

“A jumping spell,” Idrina said. “When I hit the wall. It was stupid. I didn’t need to, it was just reflex.”

I thought back to the flash of light when she’d bounded off the wall and back into the ring. It had proceeded my torso getting punctured by about a tenth of a second, so I hadn’t paid much attention to it, but Doxle was right. She’d cheated. Sort of.

It was still hard to count the fight as a win in my favor though.

“As I said, it was impressive. There will be few if any candidates at the Trials who can match that level of casting prowess,” Doxle said. “Casting prowess alone however does not assure a victory.”

“Yeah, but she still vanquished your champion in less than a minute,” the brother said.

I still didn’t think he held any particular animosity towards me, but defending his sister’s honor clearly outweighed any concerns about a random stranger’s demise. I could have been mad about that, but I didn’t feel like I had a reason to expect anything from him and, if I had a brother, I think I would want him to have the same priorities.

“That would be the other minor point which is worth consideration,” Doxle said.

He was gesturing towards me.

I still had my eyes closed.

And I couldn’t smell all that much from him, beyond ash and lightning, because he could lie through scent too.

So I had no actual method of knowing that he was directing their attention towards me.

But I knew.

I kind of hated that I understood his sense of the dramatic, and kind of hated even more that a part of me agreed with it, but despite that I couldn’t let a setup like that go unfulfilled so I opened my eyes, fast knit the bones in my legs together and rose to my feet.

My new dress had the small issue of a ghastly tear in the center of my chest and a matching one in the center of my back, but Idrina’s spear hadn’t done enough damage to compromise the modesty it provided. 

Otherwise I was in acceptable shape.

I rolled my shoulders to test that theory and found I’d missed a few spots in my Trapezius muscles. I fixed those as the Ironbriars froze into silence.

Seeing that, and smelling the sharp kick of wariness that gripped the twins, I offered them a blank stare and a small shrug is return. That brought them from scared to confused, which at least smelled slightly better.

Enika’s posture and scent hadn’t changed at all through any of this. Because she could lie the same as Doxle. I probably should have guessed that before, and should probably assume all the Advisors could too. It was annoying, but that was probably going to be a good summation for all of the Advisors if the two in the room were anything to judge them by.

As lessons went, ‘the Advisors are annoying lying jerks’ wasn’t much, but I suspected I would have to take what I could get. Doxle seemed to be many things, but the jury was still out on whether he was a decent teacher or not.

“How?” the brother asked, managing to avoid stammering the word too badly.

“Ah, a form shifter?” Enika said, surprise and delight tickling her words. “How clever of you.”

Clever of Doxle? I felt even more annoyed by that. I let it show on my face. Enika didn’t care.

“Do you think so?” Doxle asked. “I’ve always found it to be a challenging art, and, let us be boorishly honest here, why should I ever wish a form other than this one? Am I not the pinnacle of magnificence already?”

“Ugh. Children, come along, it is clearly time that we took our leave,” Enika said, and began leading the twins out.

“I don’t hear you disagreeing!” Doxle sang out as they departed.

Enika did not choose to dignify that with any sort of response at all, but Idrina did look back before they passed out the room.

It wasn’t much more than a glance where our gazes met, but that short window of connection held a promise. 

We were going to have another match.

I hadn’t won this one, and she’d lost it.

Next time, one of us would walk away the winner, and the other? Well I wasn’t sure the other would walk away at all.

She knew what I could do now.

And I knew I wasn’t unkillable.

My oldest, dimmest memories, the ones that surfaced only in hazy nightmares, held the proof of that.

I waited three breaths after they’d left the room before I turned to Doxle.

He was waiting patiently for me, the delighted smarm gone from his expression.

“You need to teach me how to kill her,” I said.

“By all means,” was his reply. “Let’s get started.”

In the heat of battle a person’s true soul is revealed…is exactly the sort of nonsense people espouse when they want other people to go and die for them. The only thing battle tends to reveal is the internal organs of the combatants.

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

I should have been more concerned about a fight to the death. By definition they’re a big deal for at least one of the combatants. I wasn’t going to be the one who was bleeding out at the end of the fight though, so it didn’t seem like the most important thing I needed to worry about.

Also there was the small fact that Doxle and Enika were clearly conspiring to make the fight happen and I don’t think either one of them intended to lose one of their pacted casters. I expected I’d fight one or both Enika’s Ironbriar charges and the moment I was about to strike a killing blow, Doxle would freeze me and they’d invent some reason to declare the fight resolved.

That had the downside that some of my competitors at the Cadet Trials would know what I was capable of, but Doxle had said he wanted to see me spar so he could offer suggestions on how I could pass the Trials. I had to hope the benefit of his wisdom would outweigh giving up the element of surprise.

Of course that all assumed I was going to win.

That, as it turned out, was not a good assumption.

“As the offended party, your charges may set the terms of battle,” Doxle said. “And my charge may choose to accept them or not.”

The sister twin stepped forward, not looking me in the eyes, or even acknowledging my existence at all.

“As the younger of the aggrieved party, I claim Right of Proving.”

I glanced at Doxle. If this was something I was supposed to know about, it was on him to explain it.

“Agreed,” he said, instead of being useful. “And your terms are?”

“Conclusion on submission or death. Fleeing the arena taken as forfeiture.” She was still staring directly forward, but I couldn’t smell any fear wafting from her.

That was the first sign that I hadn’t evaluated the situation properly, but I missed it because I am occasionally stupid.

“The prize should we win?” Doxle asked.

“Your insult is forgiven.”

“And if you win?”

“A year of service.”

Doxle’s laugh held no mirth. He was about to wax poetic and spend an hour haggling for better terms. 

“Fine,” I said, cutting him off. I wasn’t going to lose, so their terms didn’t matter. 

The slight smile that graced my opponent’s face was the second sign that I was making a mistake, and that one I did catch. Rather than convincing me to backtrack a bit on agreeing to the fight though it only left me puzzled. 

I knew the sister had stepped forward because she was a better fighter than her brother. She smelled of sweat and the oil of chainmail. Her shoulders were loose and charged with excitement instead of fear. Her brother on the other hand smelled of lavender, worked leather and underneath it all the suppressed whisps of dread I expected from someone facing a potentially deadly struggle.

“Weapons?” Doxle asked.

“Conjured only.”

“Spells?”

“Any thing she can cast is fine.”

“As the host, I will add the stipulation of no magic use outside the ring,” Doxle said. “This room was a frightful expense, I would hate for sloppy casting to ruin it.”

“You are the accused in this,” Enika said. “I don’t believe you have the right to claim the host’s privileges.”

“The term is acceptable,” the sister said.

She didn’t exactly sound as eager as I was to get this over with, but she seemed to agree with omitting as much of the needless babble as possible.

“Excellent,” Doxle said and paused. “Am I forgetting anything? I feel like I’m forgetting something?”

“They need to set a time limit,” Enika said.

“One minute,” the sister said. “If she can endure for one minute, I will forfeit.”

“Does that mean I’d fight him afterwards?” I asked. 

I was sure there were official rules, they were all speaking with too much formality for this to be entirely spontaneous.

“You’re safe from that unless you have cause to claim counter-offense,” the brother said.

His tone was milder than his sisters. Whatever anger Doxle had provoked in the twin had rolled off his back I guessed. Or he thought his sister was about to kill me and didn’t see a reason to make the tiny remainder of my life any more miserable.

I nodded at him. He would probably be an enemy later, but for the moment there wasn’t any real animosity between us.

“Are these terms acceptable?” the sister asked.

She hadn’t been so quick to forgive or forget, but her anger was wrapped up in bands of steel. She wasn’t going to kill me out of malice. It would be an act of duty and honor with no personal investment. I would still be dead of course, so the difference was largely irrelevant to me, but I supposed it helped her sleep at night.

“Yeah,” I said, which seemed to annoy her. I didn’t get that at first. I’d said yes to what she wanted. People were usually happy about that. 

Then I considered how I’d said yes. 

I hadn’t made any effort to hide the fact that I wasn’t concerned about the fight.

Or from her point of view, that I wasn’t taking the fight seriously.

Oh! Or that I wasn’t taking her seriously.

On reflection I could see where that might annoy her.

“We can begin whenever you wish to,” I said, not knowing any of the proper words but taking a stab at the right tone anyways.

“No magic outside the ring,” Doxle reminded us.

I wasn’t sure how people were normally supposed to get to a sparring ring that was forty feet off the floor. Climb the pillar? I shook my head. Doxle definitely had a more dignified option. I’d known him for less than half a day and I was already perfectly certain about that.

“If you would all follow me,” he said, confirming my suspicion by leading us to a series of disks in the floor. 

Machinery began to twist and whir somewhere beneath us and one-by-one, Doxle’s first and mine last, the disks lifted gracefully into the air. Doxle, Enika, and the brother were flown to an opera viewing box which detached from the wall and hovered at what seemed like a safe distance from the top of the highest platform.

The sister and I were deposited on opposite sides of the ring, just outside a richly decorated band of silver which described a slightly smaller circle inside the platform’s edge. I recognized a few of the etchings in the silver from the ones on my jail cell’s door. These weren’t invisible but I guessed they served a similar function of limiting stray magic from splashing out of bounds.

“Wait,” I said, before stepping into the ring.

The sister’s eyes flashed with irritation as her jawline went hard.

“What?” she asked, probably assuming I was finally coming to my senses and intent on begging for some reprieve.

“What’s your name?” I asked. I didn’t have any specific need for it, but telling people I ‘fought some girl from Ironbriar’ later on seemed like it would a bit disrespectful.

“Idrina,” she said and waited.

I nodded to indicate I’d heard her reply, and she understood.

We didn’t need to talk further.

There was nothing else to say. 

As though we’d rehearsed it, we both stepped over the line into the arena and settled into a fighting stance.

She wasn’t going to drag this out. Not when she’d only demanded I survive for a minute. I wasn’t sure if her initial delay was because we were supposed to wait for Doxle or Enika to signal an official start to the fight, but the next instant she launched herself at me and the battle was begun.

I don’t really know what happened next. I can piece some of it together from the scattered memories I do have, but I know I missed at least a few steps in the dance we waltzed through.

The important thing though is that I did not win.

What I recall is that Idrina crossed the space between us in a single leap. The pillar wasn’t exactly a spacious field, but at a bit under twenty feet wide there was plenty of time to see her coming. What I didn’t see coming was the spear that materialized in her hand.

I’d seen casters work their magic before. There were any number of common uses for spellcasting, but most of those casters were not working with ‘High Magic’. The ‘Low Magic’ of the commoners comes from the world around us. It takes time to gather and shape and tends to produce fairly subtle effects if that’s all that’s required.

There was nothing subtle about the spear that appeared in Idrina’s hand though, and she’d managed to cast the spell to summon it without speaking any words or performing any gestures.

I’m sure that took me by surprise largely because it ruined my plans. I’d thought to grapple her the moment she came within arms reach and bend her limbs in directions that would encourage her not to move anywhere I didn’t want her too. It was difficult to execute that plan however when my left arm was fine one moment and a shattered noodle the next.

The headbutt I hit her with was nothing more than a wild reflex and I was unfairly lucky that it connected as well as I could have ever hoped. 

The impact sent her reeling back all of a half step, which was far less of a reaction than I should have gotten from such a clean hit, but still enough that I was able to fall backwards to dodge her next spear thrust and then nail her cleanly in the chest with a solid kick.

I held back a little on the force of the kick. I wanted her away from me to buy myself some recovery time. I didn’t want to put my foot through her torso.

In terms of distance, the kick worked wonderfully. I hit her at enough of a rising angle to knock her completely off her feet and into the air.

We’d gotten turned around at some point – I might have missed an exchange, which would explain the stomach wound I also had to deal with. The net result though was that when I kicked her backwards by fifteen feet or so I launched her completely out of the ring rather than simply over to the far side of it.

That should have been the end of the fight. I wasn’t happy at the idea of what a forty foot drop would do to her, but she had stabbed me at least twice.

I really should have known better than that though.

Twisting in mid-air, Idrina landed feet first on the wall and burst off it in a flash of golden light. She threw her spear ahead of herself and I was too surprised to dodge which gained me a length of metal protruding out of both sides of the center of my chest.

The obviously fatal wound didn’t stop me from swinging at her as she landed, but I was a bit too damaged at that point to make anything effective of the attack.

Bodies are difficult things. Broken bodies even more so.

I almost thought things were getting better when Idrina ripped the spear out of me but then it was my turn to be kicked from the platform and all I could think as I fell was that the forty foot drop was going to leave me a whole lot more broken than the spear had.

Relationships come to us through the accident of our birth, and, sometimes, the accidents of our judgment. 

– Glenmorda Tinbellus Enika of the Reaper’s Mercy

Part of me wanted to leap at the intruders in Doxle’s house and take them down before they had a chance to blink. That part was very stupid.

Enika moved with the graceful, self-assurance of a predator pacing around an unfortunate prey which had lost every means of escape. The two people behind her didn’t move at all. 

Both of those facts bothered me. 

Doxle, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care. That seemed odd given the effort he’d made apparently to avoid this meeting, but the slump of his shoulders suggested that he wasn’t so much unconcerned as resigned to his fate.

“Ex-wife? As though that’s a mark of any distinction.” Enika’s laugh was filled with the honey that surrounded her. “I share that status with how many now? Have you lost track yet?”

“I will have you know I remember those seven years with remarkable fondness,” Doxle said, looking to me as though I had some stake in choosing which of them was correct.

“We were only married for three.” Enika didn’t seem either concerned or surprised at the mistake.

“I am of course adding in the years I dreamed of winning your heart and the ones I spent pining away after I lost it,” Doxle said without missing a beat.

“Oh my dear sweet one, you never had my heart.”

“I suppose if I had, we would not be parted as we are now.”

Enika laughed with what sounded like genuine amusement.

“And yet we are,” Enika said, with a complete absence of regret.

“And yet you are here,” Doxle said.

“Are you going to pretend you don’t know why?” she asked, and the urge to attack first leapt down my spine.

It was still a stupid urge.

“I can venture only guesses and you know how ill founded my imagination can be,” Doxle said. 

“My presence does not elicit specific remembrances?”

“Seven years worth of remembrances,” Doxle said. “And more beyond that of course.”

“Allow me to assist your recall then,” Enika said, taking a step closer to Doxle.

It was the best chance I was going to have to strike, and that was still the worst idea I could have had. 

“Winter Faire, there was a crystal chain, the corpse of a raven, and a child, who was how old?” 

“It was a crow,” Doxle said before brightening his tone. “And of course I remember that evening. You cut a stunning figure in that blue and gold dress with the high neckline.”

“See, your memory isn’t so fallible as you believe. Which means I’m sure you recall our arrangement.”

“You desire a soiree? Now?” Doxle asked.

“Of course not my dear one,” Enika said. “I desire a soiree in three days time. One that you will host and make the talk of the season.”

Doxle drew in a long slow breath and I could feel the tension in him rising, as though he was poised to flee at any second. He released his breath though and mastered the impulse, which I wasn’t certain I was grateful for.

“Three days is precious little time,” Doxle said.

“You’ve done with less,” Enika said. “Our wedding if I recall, but then you are well versed in those.”

“You must admit, they are delightful affairs.”

“Indeed, and you will make the soiree three days hence their equal or superior. As was agreed.” 

“Am I allowed to review the guest list?” Doxle asked.

Enika thought for a moment and shook her head.

“No. I don’t think you will require that.”

“With but three scant days?”

“Consider it a kindness. I had intended to give you only two but some of the guests will not have arrived by then.”

Doxle frowned, but there wasn’t any anger flickering behind his eyes. If anything, he looked like he was already plotting the logistics of the event.

“Theme then? Or the occasion which warrants the gathering?” he asked, his gaze going distant as he mulled the idea over. “Not a funerary observance?”

Enika blew out a puff of breath.

“As though I would waste you on a funeral?” She shook her head and looked appalled at the idea. “No, this is to be a celebration.”

“In that case will there be one guest of honor or two?” Doxle asked casting a glance at the two people standing behind Enika.

They weren’t frozen like statues. They were both breathing and their eyes were tracking the back and forth of the conversation, but each of them stood at what I imagined was perfect attention and kept stock still.

It occurred to me that if they were pacted casters, Enika might have paralyzed them both, but their eyes were relaxed where their bodies weren’t. 

“Two,” Enika said with a smile. “Which suggests you already know two of the entries on the guest list and it’s been less than a minute since you started preparing.”

“You do know that you’re asking a lot,” Doxle said.

“As did you,” Enika said.

There was clearly a story there. History between them. So far though none of it included me though so I let me attention wander over to the two people Enika had in her wake while they bantered back and forth.

“And this is Lady Kati?” Enika said, turning her gaze on me, though she continued speaking to Doxle. “However did she have the misfortune to make your acquaintance?”

I wasn’t sure ‘I found her in a stinking jail cell’ was going to be an answer that would do me any favors, but it was what it was. 

“Oh, this is more than an acquaintance,” Doxle said. “She is my latest charge.”

“You’ve formed another pact bond?” Enika asked. “Wait, that was you earlier? I thought Xarxes had run one of his quarries to ground?”

“He did stumble on us shortly after the bond was forged, though I don’t believe he had been searching for Lady Kati prior to our meeting.”

“Tell me, was he mad? Did he rage and froth?”

“Oh of course not. Xarxes can be civil. At times.”

“With you? You were going easy on him, weren’t you?”

“I did feel some sympathy for the poor fool. He landed in Ironbriar of all places.”

I knew the two people following Enika weren’t statues because of how they stiffened at that particular remark. Neither of them managed to rise to presenting the level of threat Enika did but it wasn’t hard to smell that neither of them were happy.

“You have always had the most unwise of tongues,” Enika said, marveling at Doxle as she did so. “And so unkind, to torment my charges like that. Now I shall have to find some suitable target for the aggressions you’ve raised in them.”

“I of course offer myself,” Doxle said. “Though I have only one body to give, I shall gladly sacrifice it to make amends for disparaging the Great and Noble House of Ironbriar, stewards of the Empire’s might and protectors of us all.”

“As though that body is your first or will be your last,” Enika chided him. “You would need someone like your charge to stand in your place for the offering to matter.”

“While I would never shelter one of my own unduly, calling her to the battlefield even for a simple sparring sessions is a touch premature as this is only the first day of our engagement,” Doxle said.

“I’ll do it,” I said, taking a half step forward. It was still a bad idea, but a sparring session sounded a lot more controlled than chancing a surprise attack and hoping to escape in the ensuing chaos.

Apparently that hadn’t been the response anyone in the room was expecting though.

For a solid five seconds I had four people staring at me and not saying a word.

“I’ll do it. I’ll fight. What shouldn’t we break in here?” I repeated, in case they were unclear on what I was signing up for.

That didn’t seem to help them, though Doxle rallied quickly.

“You truly do not need to do this,” he said.

“I know.” I nodded, hoping body language might get the idea through the everyone if my words continued failing.

The room that we were in was something like a family room. Hallways led off into darkened corners of the house and the stairs suggested there was an upstairs as well.

The furniture that decorated the room looked more than nice, it looked expensive. Ornate carving were visible on all of the woodwork and the fabric on the couches was stitched with the kind of needlework that only someone with a fantastic eye for detail and a tremendous amount of time could create.

I breathed in and confirmed that, unlike the alley outside the now closed door, everything in the room smelled clean and fresh. 

In short, it was not the sort of place where blood should probably be spilled.

Unless Doxle employed a magical cleaning staff, in which case I supposed blood and viscera removal might be a standard part of their job.

“An unexpected delight then! How wonderful,” Enika said and turned to Doxle. “You still have the dueling ring setup do you not?”

I had no idea where a dueling ring might fit in the the house given the size of the buildings we’d walked past but Doxle surprised me.

“I had two more installed in fact,” he said and offered Enika his arm.

He led her down one of the hallways that I was pretty sure should have dropped us back out into the alley, except of course it didn’t.

With no better idea of what to do, I tried to fall in beside him, but the hallway was too narrow for three and the other two people had the same idea.

I could have insisted on sticking close to Doxle but the idea putting of two hostile people behind me, even if they did seem to be roughly the same age as me, was one I instinctively shied away from.

They were confused by that choice too and took a moment to stare at me. I guess they expected me to try to push past them but when I held my position they got the point and marched forward together, taking a position behind Enika and Doxle.

With them between me and Enika, I was able to pick up more details from their scents, starting with the fact that they were siblings. Twins I was pretty sure. The girl was taller than me, and her brother was taller than her. Both moved with a precision that came from more than their familial connection though. They’d trained. A lot.

A glimpse of the callouses on their hands confirmed that. There were scars there too which said either they’d been thrown into real combat or whoever trained them had stopped holding back at some point.

I knew House Ironbriar by reputation. Grammy said they’d been the source of the Empire’s elite troops for centuries. Once upon a time that had been because the scions of House Ironbriar had been trained from birth for their roles. People seemed to think that was a good thing, but the real Ironbriar families had figured out that it worked out a lot better for them if they simply bought or ‘adopted’ people who were promising fighters in order to fill their ranks.

With these two though, I could believe the old ‘trained since birth’ regime might have held true.

Doxle led us down three flights of stairs, which should have put us well underground, and then out through a rooftop garden, and up another two flights of stairs to an open air courtyard with perfectly manicured grass and two columns of stone, each twenty feet in diameter.

I did not understand Doxle’s house at all.

“So you see we have our choice of venues,” Doxle said. “From safest,” he gestured at a stone circle at ground level, “to dangerous”, he gestured at the nearer column which rose ten feet in the air, “to deadly”, which was of course the last column at twenty feet tall. 

“Which would you choose?” Enika asked the brother and sister pair.

“Deadly,” the sister said.

“Deadly,” the brother said.

That was a shame. I didn’t want to kill either one of them.

The blood scent that rose from the two said they didn’t feel the same though.

A part of every Advisor’s duties to their pacted casters is to instruct them in the fine details required to survive in a world devoid of any interest in their well being. Running away therefor is an educational act of great value and should be viewed by all as a selfless teaching exercise rather than any blight on one’s own courage or valor.

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

Leaving the Golden at a full sprint was apparently too undignified for Doxle to consider, despite the urgency that was hammering behind his eyes so hard his glowing irises were visibly flickering.

“Was your stay agreeable, Sir Advisor?” Bemond, the waiter who’d seated us asked as Doxle led us over to the reception desk.

“Delightful,” Doxle said. “Will there be any issue placing the charge for our meal on the Ironbriar’s account?”

The smelled like mischief – Xarxes hadn’t said anything about picking up the tab for our meal – but I wasn’t about to complain. For all I knew Xarxes and Doxle had a standing agreement relating to meetings over lunch, and Xarxes had been the one to interrupt us.

“Not at all sir. I directed the Ironbriar’s Advisor to your table because he explained that he was meeting with you in response to an Imperial summons.” Bemond had the quizzical look that said he was curious if Xarxes story had been even vaguely true. He clearly wasn’t interested in opposing an Imperial Advisor regardless of the veracity of their claims, but curiosity is a difficult beast to tame.

“Yes. If any other Imperial Advisors should check in, can you pass along the message that my event here is over and done. I’ll likely see them next at a soiree I plan to host on Sunfall Eve at my villa in White Ridges.” Despite the anxiety he’d shown me early, Doxle’s voice was all relaxation and ease.

It wasn’t until we were outside and marching south, away from the Academy, that I saw the tension was still plainly written on his face.

“Why are we running away?” I asked, concerned that we were moving in more or less the exact opposite direction from where I might find more information on Trina.

“We’re not running,” Doxle said. “We’re walking briskly.”

“We’re running,” I said, walking briskly beside him. “Who is Enika?”

Doxle and Xarxes hadn’t talked for long and it was at the mention that Enika was in the city that Doxle had started to panic.

“Another Imperial Advisor,” Doxle carefully understated, scanning the street and the rooftops as we fled as fast as we could without drawing attention to ourselves.

It was a sunny late summer afternoon. The sun warmed stones had chased away the morning mists and the southeasterly breeze carried the scent of fresh water in from Sirens Lake. It was as delightful a time for a stroll as a city like Middlerun generally saw, so plenty of people were out, with pedestrians and construct drawn carriages crowding the roads. 

Ahead of us a huge crowd had gathered, cheering on some street performers. Doxle maneuvered us across the street to the less trafficked side of the road where only a few dozen people were walking. From Doxle’s nerves, it seemed like any, or possibly all of them, might be threats though.

They weren’t threats. I knew that. If I hadn’t known that, I wouldn’t have let Doxle lead me down a cobblestone sidewalk away from where I wanted to be. I wasn’t sure why he was unable to tell that though.

I sniffed, trying to pick out scents of aggression or malice. I found plenty of them, but they were distant and mixed into the overall melange of the city from many different sources. If I tried I could trace a few of them back, but in a city it wasn’t exactly challenging to find someone who was angry or violent. The trick, which I had to admit I hadn’t figured out, was finding the people who were angry with you before they found you.

“Do they have wings?” I asked. Doxle was scanning the rooftops and sky as though whoever he was looking for did, but I didn’t think an attack by winged demons was likely. Grammy would have warned me if that sort of thing was common in Middlerun.

“Not as such,” Doxle said.

“Then you should watch the crowds more closely. Three people have moved past you within stabbing range since we turned onto this street.” It was a what I was watching for, but that was mostly because I considered stabbing my primary response if someone tried to attack either of us.

Doxle shook his head and sighed at that though.

“Physical violence is not my concern on this occasion,” he said.

“Lead with that next time you make us run away,” I said, unsure how I felt about his reassurance. 

“We’re not…we are returning to one of my secondary residences. You are in need a bath and new clothes, and I am in need of finer spirits than the Golden has to offer.”

Both of those were true, but neither was the reason we were running away. My nose was stuffed with a variety of noxious scents and at least a few pleasing ones and I could still smell the bit of lightning that were leaking through Doxle’s self-control. I couldn’t tell where he wanted to be except that it was ‘not here’.

“When’re the Cadet Trials?” I asked. If violence wasn’t what my demon was concerned about then I couldn’t help him, and if I couldn’t help him then I had my own things I wanted to worry about.

“Tomorrow,” Doxle said and turned us down an alley that was painted in pale shadows. The lovely warm stone aroma faded before the eternal dampness and its attendant mold the alley seemed to be cultivating.

Despite the less pleasant environment, with our course winding along side roads and alleys that paralleled one of the main roads running towards the river, Doxle relaxed a hair or two.

“I want to enter the Trials,” I said, in case it wasn’t clear from the conversation we’d had when we formed the pact. There were a ton of other questions I wanted to ask too but getting into the Academy had to take priority.

“So I gathered,” Doxle said. “My advice would be to pick a different life path, but I am aware that for whatever reason that does not seem to be an option for you.”

“It’s not,” I agreed.

“In that case, I suppose I should ask what you intend to do should you fail to be admitted?” He was walking at a calmer pace. We were still running away, but our run was more of a stroll. Good for blending in. Good enough that I wasn’t sure why we didn’t continue on the main road again. Using the alleys was adding a lot of extra time to our trip. Time when I could have been in a bath. Or practicing.

“I’m not going to fail,” I said.

“Which means you have no plan for when you do.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head. “You are aware that failure can mean death are you not?”

“I’m not going to die,” I said. If I died and Trina was being held in the Academy there wouldn’t be anyone to rescue her. 

Trina wasn’t being held in the Academy.

I knew exactly where she was.

I knew how deep under the earth she was.

The only possibilities that lead to her being held in the Academy were horrible ones and I didn’t want any of them to be true.

But I had to know.

“I agree,” Doxle said. “You’re quite forbidden from dying. As your pacted Advisor, you may consider than an official order and requirement. No dying. It’s simply not allowed.”

As far as I knew, the Cadet Trials for the Imperial Academy were serious affairs. Doxle’s comment about applicants dying during the trials wasn’t an exaggeration or even unusual. I wasn’t sure why he thought a simple admonishment would be enough to determine my performance, but as long as he wasn’t planning to prevent me from taking part it didn’t really matter.

“Once you’ve bathed and eaten again, I would see you spar for a few rounds,” Doxle said, turning us down onto an alley that even in the afternoon’s daylight looked questionable, “There’s too little time for proper training but I may be able to identify some improvements that will raise your chances of success.”

I wasn’t sure who he had in mind that I would fight. Possibly him? Was that an option? It seemed like a bad idea to allow pacted casters to assault their demons, but given that he could drain away my magic and paralyze me I suppose the opportunities for real mayhem were limited.

“You have a house here?” I asked as a strong and not particularly agreeable odor engulfed us.

We’d wandered into a dead end alley that we could only walk down by stepping on planks that rested atop a waist deep pile of trash.

“A secondary residence. Or perhaps tertiary,” he said, tracing his finger over the solid wood wall which flanked us to the left.

The first glyph he traced did nothing. No glowing light trail. No secret door creaking open. No rising scent of ash and lighting.

I was the most disappointed by the last bit. The lack of ash and lightning meant that we were able to enjoy the full bouquet of the alley and, as alleyways full of trash went, this one was not one of the more appealing ones.

“Is it broken?” I asked and for a change it was his turn to remain silent.

The second glyph also failed to glow, but the third started behaving more like I’d expected. The glowing trail of light Doxle left behind as he scribed it was the orange-red of a dry twig a moment after being tossed on the fire. The scent of ash and lightning was so mild that it could have been no more than a half forgotten memory. The important thing though was the door that opened up on the second floor of the building.

Doxle turned to offer his hand as assistance in climbing up into the room beyond the door. I stared at it for a second before understanding what I was meant to do with it. When the idea finally clicked, I had to suppress a laugh.

He thought I needed help climbing? Should I be insulted? Or was it funny? Both maybe?

To his credit, he did have a great deal of height on me, so it was a polite offer to make. To demonstrate how unnecessary it was though, I waved his hand away and in one motion did a standing jump that let me grasp the bottom edge of the doorway and lift myself cleanly inside.

I took a step and turned to see if he would join me. I don’t know if I triggered a competitive reflex in him or he refused to do anything as undignified as jumping. Instead he merely flexed his feet slightly and floated up in gentle arc to land inside the door.

Behind me, someone descended stairs across the room I had only barely noticed. I whirled to see who it was, but not before catching a glimpse of Doxle’s face twist into an expression of despair and resignation.

“And here he is, right on time,” a woman with a voice like honey and razors said. From around, her the scent of chipped obsidian and grave dust reached out and threatened to knock me to my knees. I coughed and Doxle drew me an inch closer to himself.

The grave dust woman lead two other people downstairs. Their scents were hidden before hers and for a moment I couldn’t make out anything about them beyond the fact that they were additional threats. 

The woman was a far greater one though.

“Who?” I asked, fighting for a clear breath to get the word out without it being a growl.

Doxle threw a resigned smile in my direction.

“Lady Kati, may I present my ex-wife Glenmorda Tinbellus Enika of the Reaper’s Mercy.”

I wasn’t afraid of losing my mind. I done that before. I knew how to get it back.

I also wasn’t afraid of the Great Houses. That was stupid. I definitely should have been afraid of them. Unfortunately Grammy Duella had made keeping them at bay look a lot easier than it really is.

Most of all though, I wasn’t afraid of Doxle.

Entering into a pact with him was a terrible idea. I wasn’t even sure if it was possible for me. If it turned out that it was, being bound by someone else’s will would be anathema to the entire essence of my being. If he pushed me, or tried to paralyze me when I was sufficiently interested in not being held back, he would learn just how deep my Hollowing was and exactly how much control I had over my magic and that wasn’t going to be good for anyone at all.

In short, I had every reason to, politely, decline his offer, thank him for the meal and head out before the Great House’s hunters picked up my trail.

“You said if I try for the Cadet Trial, I’ll have to use enough magic to pass it that I’ll give myself away.” I watched his eyes narrow. This wasn’t where he’d expected the conversation to go. “Will that matter if I’m pact bonded to you?”

Doxle drew in a slow, considering breath and his gaze went distant for a moment before he answered on the exhale.

“Yes, it will,” he said at last. “If you show off the sort of magical prowess you did with the guards, you will capture a great deal of attention. I cannot promise to shield you from all of it, as I said, but with a pact bond in place between us they cannot force you to take another one.”

“Could they force me to break the one I have with you? Or force you to break it?” I suspected the Great Houses either wouldn’t, or maybe even couldn’t, outright kill Doxle. He struck me as the sort of person who wouldn’t still be here if dying in response to be murdered was an available outcome.

I marked his chuckle at my question as a tally in the column confirming that.

“That is not a concern,” he said. “As an Imperial Advisor, I enjoy certain privileges including the right to choose what pacts I form. The only voice I must answer to is the Empress Eternal’s.”

Which meant he had no actual oversight since the Empress Eternal had gained her ‘eternalness’ by being frozen in similarly eternal ice. 

That should have been terrifying. The idea of something like Doxle operating with no constraints on what he was allowed to do was a recipe for death and armageddon. In place of terror though, I felt a small surge of joy.

“Pact me then,” I said and held out my hand.

I had no idea if we needed to hold hands, or if he was going to slap a tattoo or a brand on me and I didn’t care.

Trina’s scent was gone, but it had left before too, only to waft back in as I was losing hope of ever being able to follow it. I’d walked around the land bound sides the city twice tracking it. I knew it had to be coming from the Academy. 

So I needed to get in there. 

Doxle was the key to that lock.

Which meant I needed him. 

It was as simple as that. If there were repercussions to deal with later, then later is when I’d deal with them.

“Are you sure?” There was a gravity in Doxle’s voice it had lacked up till now.

“Let’s do this,” I said. I wasn’t feeling especially patient, which I think sent the wrong message to him.

“Why?” He kept his hands folded, and made no move towards me, but his eyes were burning darker than they had been at any time up till now.

“I need to get into the Academy.” I left it for him to decide if that meant into the building or accepted as a student.

“And for that you’d accept a lifetime of shackles on your powers?” He looked like he was about to wax poetic on how terrible a burden being pacted to him truly was. 

I cut him off.

“Yes.” My magic didn’t matter. Bearing up under a thousand tons of shackles and finding my sister was better than being free in a world without her. It was as simple as that.

“Are you sure? I can promise you this will not make your life easier.” There had been a distant anger in him. Not directed at me I didn’t think. Maybe at himself? Or maybe at our whole world? It had ebbed away though, and I smelled the ashes of sorrow rising from him.

“Yeah,” I said, allowing some of the weight in his voice to be reflected in mine.

“You may come to hate me, most people do, but that won’t free you from this bond. You may struggle and perfect your casting till you are certain there is nothing more you can learn, and that won’t win your releases from the pact we make. You may shatter and crumble and be reduced to nothing by the strains this life, a life with me, will place on you and still I will be there, still joined to you, still feeding on your magic.”

His eyes grew brighter with every word he spoke while the shadows in the room darkened into a pitch of blackest night that should have been impossible with sunlight still streaming in through the windows.

Except there was no sunlight.

Or windows.

We sat alone. Nothing beyond the wood table between us remaining of where we’d been.

Doxle’s sharp features were gone too. To my eyes he still looked the same, but I was seeing him with something more than just my eyes. He was shadows and fire and power and something more.

Around us the scent of lightning crackled and built. We stood in the moment before the thunderstorm, when the sky has coiled itself up and drunk in the power of the land.

“Are you sure?” Doxle said and his voice held only the echo of otherworldly power. The great inhuman thing he had become, the nightmare made of shadows, that otherness, it was present at a remove, standing behind and around us as a witness. The Doxle who asked the final time asked as a timeless man grown weary from the years which could not touch him or wear him down.

“I am sure,” I said, and meant it. 

“Then we are bound,” he said, relaxing as he exhaled.

His breath seemed to drive the shadows awa,y leaving us in the same booth and the same room in the Golden we’d been so far away from a moment earlier.

I stared around.

The world didn’t look any different?

I didn’t feel any different either?

I turned to ask Doxle what was up but shut my mouth when I saw another demon with features that could have marked him as Doxle’s brother cross the small room and pull a chair up to our booth.

“Well wasn’t that exciting!” the newcomer said. “And so much louder than you normally bother with you old fox.”

“Xarxes, always a pleasure,” Doxle said. “You got free of the well?”

“Oh, pff,” Xarxes said, waving his hand to swat Doxle’s words away. “That’s old news.”

“I am sadly out of the loop, it is true,” Doxle said. “I’m going to guess Lightstone?”

Xarxes sighed. “Ironbriar.”

Doxle winced. “Oh, my condolences. Don’t tell me they have you here as an evaluator?”

“What else?” Xarxes rolled his eyes.

“How many do they have you bound to so far?” Doxle asked, with what I thought was a trace of genuine concern in his voice.

“Only three,” Xarxes said. “Which of course is why I’m here. I am to find at least three more to bring into the fold on pain of disappointing Himself the Head of House.”

I could have asked what they were talking about, but I could smell the subtle traces of animosity between them and whatever feud they carried wasn’t anything I needed to be a part of. 

I did recognize the names Lightstone and Ironbriar though. They were two of the Great Houses, with Lightstone being arguably the most powerful house and Ironbriar one of their chief supporters.

“Having any luck with the early scouting,” Doxle asked with the sort of guileless smile that I was certain had gotten punched in the face more than once.

Xarxes fixed me with his gaze.

“It appears not,” he said.

His tone was the sort of mild that hides frustration and malice, an impression which the rising scents of blood and steel seemed to confirm. 

“Would you introduce us?” he asked, turning back to Xarxes.

“Hmm, no, I don’t think I will,” Doxle said, which from the spike of steel from Xarxes was definitely a violence worthy response.

But they didn’t come to blows.

It was puzzling.

Maybe they didn’t want to wreck the Golden?

“Really? How mysterious!” Xarxes said. He didn’t smell as pleased as he sounded but that didn’t seem to bother Doxle.

“Not especially so,” Doxle assured him. “And this is good news no? You won’t need to be concerned I will make off with any of your other hopefuls. So, see, you’ve garnered a win already!”

Xarxes let a short laugh escape his lips.

“Yes, that is your habit isn’t it?” Xarxes paused to regard Doxle critically. “I’ve always wondered why that is? Never more than one pact at a time, and often none at all? It boggles the mind.”

“In what possible manner does laziness strike you as something other than an essential aspect of my being?” Doxle asked.

“Laziness yes, but consistency?” Xarxes objected.

“I am a creature of perfect consistency,” Doxle proclaimed. “When have I ever done anything save what is easiest and the most in my own self interest? My track record is sterling, at least in that regard.”

“And no other,” Xarxes said. “But I will grant you that your vices are quite dependable. But still, only one? You must be miserable with so little power to draw on?”

“Misery is my lot in life,” Doxle said. “It’s why I am a creature of ease and comfort. What else could balance the scales?”

“Come now, you know Ironbriar would – well, no, I suppose they wouldn’t,” Xarxes said, deflating a bit.

“Nor would any of the rest,” Doxle said. “You’ve proven your worth well enough for any of them to take you on, but I? Alas I have also proven my worth, but that accounting falls solidly against my favor.”

“I suppose congratulations are in order then,” Xarxes said. “I imagine you’ll be vanishing off to some remote estate or rustic little cabin for the next few decades?”

“There are many open roads,” Doxle said. “Choosing is work though, and you know how I abhor that.”

“Only since your beloved was frozen,” Xarxes said which lead to surprising burst of ash from Doxle.

Whatever surge of emotion had shot through him was clamped down instantly though as the scent vanished as quickly as it appeared.

“Alas for my broken heart,” Doxle said. “I pray you never suffer such a loss.”

“As though I would be foolish enough to dally with a heart?” Xarxes said.

“Clearly, you are the wisest of us,” Doxle said.

“Perhaps I should heed that wisdom then,” Xarxes said. “It is telling me that the hunt for fresh talent will grow only more ernest as time passes and that with a quota to meet, I should be off.”

“It was a delight to see you once more,” Doxle said. “Give my regards to Enika when next you see her. I believe she is still working for Ironbriar, is she not?”

“Oh she is,” Xarxes said. “And I needn’t pass along your words. She’s in town as well. You can deliver your wishes personally!”

With that he rose, gave us an overly dramatic bow and glided out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Doxle maintained a calm and pleasant expression for precisely three second after the door close.

Then he reached across the table and took my hand.

“We need to leave. Right now.”

I disliked the idea of being hunted. I also had no doubt that Doxel’s appraisal of the Great Houses’ interest in me was anything but accurate. Grammy Duella had painted a very clear picture of how the Great Houses of the Empire tended to operate both through the stories she told and the fact that she lived in “some little cottage in the woods” as Doxle had put it.

He’d arranged for us to have a semi-private booth in one of the Golden’s smaller dining rooms. It was all velvet cushions and dark wood luxury but I’d already been wondering if he’d asked for it because he didn’t want to be seen with me or because he didn’t want me to be seen. Either or both might be true, but with the reminder that there were people who would prey on me as naturally as they drew breath I was feeling glad to be isolated. Glad and also worried that we were still too exposed.

Those emotions had an unhappy companion in the question of how much I should be concerned about Doxle himself. The obvious answers were ‘a lot’ and ‘flee while you still can’, but the counterargument that kept me in my seat was that he could have simply left me in the jail if he wanted me to suffer, or kept the manacles on and dragged me out if he wanted to steal my power, or drink my blood, or whatever horrible thing it was demons did to captive humans.

The kindness he’d shown me so far didn’t mean he wasn’t  going to take advantage of me somehow, but so far he’d been reasonably honest and, under my current circumstances, gambling that I could sniff out his secret agendas seemed to carry better odds than striking out on my own.

Of course, he still hadn’t made his offer yet.

“So you’ll protect me from the Great Houses?” I asked.

“Not precisely,” Doxle said. “Think of me more as a buckler in that context. I can deflect some problems, but associating with me is not a perfect Aegis from the attentions of the powerful and influential.” He continued after I stared at him for a moment and then raised an eyebrow. “More explanations are in order I see.”

I nodded once, not taking my eyes off him.

“You have a great deal of power, and a remarkable degree of control.” He swished his hand, banishing the light show he’d conjured. “The former makes you desirable to a number of the Great Houses, with only a bare handful of those possessing interests which are compatible with your long term health and viability. As for the control you’ve shown though? The only sort of control the Houses tend to recognize is their own. Any casters possessing significant power who are not under the yoke of someone are automatically viewed as a threat to everyone. The Empire tolerates many things, but wild cards are not typically one of them.”

Which told me what role Doxle would play in any arrangement we came to.

“You’ll be my yoke then.” It didn’t feel like I had to guess at that.

“A very special kind of yoke, yes,” Doxle said. “Imperial Advisors have many roles. The ‘guidance’ of talented casters is one of our primary ones though.”

“So instead of one of the Houses telling me what to do, you would, but that’s better for me because you’re not them?”

“I wish it were that simple,” Doxle said. “If I merely had to make my case against the greed and cruelty of the Great Houses, I could convince you in three words. What I am offering is more involved than that though.”

He paused waiting to see if I would ask any questions. I did not.

“Casters with access to large amount of magical energy are among the most likely to be overwhelmed and lose control of their spells. This can have obvious and immediate ramifications – the caster exploding being one people enjoy citing, though I’ve always found the ‘summoning a pillar of fire the size of a city block’ to be the more concerning possibility. It’s on the basis of those easily imagine concerns that the duties of an Imperial Advisor are often argued for but the reality is that much worse problems often afflict powerful and untrained casters. Recall what I said about how casting a spell involve transforming your mind? When a caster’s power exceeds their ability to manage it, their psyches can and often do develop deep fissures leading to such entertaining pastimes as berserk rages and possession by malevolent entities from the transcendent planes they are attuned to.”

“You can shield my mind from that?” I didn’t like the idea of someone being able to monitor my thoughts, but it turned out my worries were running in the wrong direction.

“Only indirectly,” Doxle said. “Your thoughts are sacrosanct from me and all other Imperial Advisors. What I can do is prevent you from being overwhelmed by your magic by siphoning it away. In fact if we enter a pact, I will always, on some level, be siphoning power from you. When they are summoned, Imperial Advisors are cut off from their home plane and fully instantiated in this one, one effect of which is that their Draw – the ability they possess to recharge their magic – is eliminated. By entering a pact with you I will be able to replenish the magic I expend with what I take from you.”

“Who controls how much you take?”

“I do,” Doxle said. “Part of the role is to take as much magic from you as is required to keep both you and those around us safe. That includes taking all of it should the need arise.”

“You can take away my magic completely?” The idea was more than horrifying. I wasn’t certain I could survive without my magic, and it wasn’t something I was eager to put to the test.

“Not completely, or forever,” Doxle said. “Through the pact bond, I can take the magic you have accumulated in your Hollowing. I cannot prevent you from drawing more in however.”

“But you could take that away too.”

“Yes, though likely not before you could attempt to use it for a spell.”

“Attempt?”

“Spells can be interrupted. Most spells. That tends to send the magic in them splattering everywhere, but a skilled Advisor can salvage a fair portion of it.”

“And I know you won’t do this because why?”

“Oh, you don’t,” Doxle said. “Not at all. Once the pact is formed, I could, completely at my own discretion, drain you of magic and apply the drain continuously. Some Advisors would lack the skill to do anything with that much magic, but I am not one of them.”

“That doesn’t inspire confidence.”

“Nor should it. This is not a pact you should enter into blindly. In fact if you had the choice, I would advise against entering into any arrangement even vaguely like this. Especially since draining magic is not all the pact allows for.”

“You could do more to me?”

“If we form a pact? Yes. As your Advisor, I am not allowed to inflict real injury on you, but I can force you to halt any action which I deem to be dangerous to yourself or other. Or which I simply find distasteful.”

“Force me to halt?”

“I can paralyze you, and yes, that is every bit as horrible as it sounds. I would be using our combined power to do so as well, so to break it you would need to break both of us.”

“That sounds worse than the Great Houses hunting me.” Far worse in fact. If I was hunted, I could flee to places and in ways they wouldn’t expect and might never be able to follow. Forming a pact with an Imperial Advisor sounded like a fate worse than death.

“It is,” Doxle said. “Or it’s not. For those who need an Advisor’s aid, the draining of their magic can be a life saving relief, and the ability to paralyze them can prevent them from taking actions they dearly wish not to take. With the control you have shown, I do not believe you are one of those people though. Which is why I would advise you not to form a pact with any Advisor.”

“Except you’re offering me one. Why?” I knew he wasn’t stupid, and he seemed to understand that I was following everything he was saying.

“I am – and it amuses to no end that this is true – the lesser of many evils in this circumstance.” He folded his hands on the table. “Word has gotten out about your performance at the gate. The Houses have their evaluators in the city at the moment for the Open Enrollment tomorrow at the Academy. When they don’t see you there, when they see no one there who can fight a squad of guards without permanently injuring any of them, they will set their hounds loose looking for you, and when they find you, they will bring you in and force a pact on you.”

“What if I go to the Open Enrollment Trials?” I asked. It was why I’d been sent to Middlerun, though not why I’d fought to get into the city.

“You’re not studied enough to pass the Common Trials, and if you take part in the Cadet Trials, either your power will be obvious to them or you’ll die hiding it.” He wasn’t saying that as a threat. If anything I thought he sounded sorrowful about it.

“So they would pact me to another Imperial Advisor. What makes you better than the rest?”

“Oh, I am much worse than many of them. I am a liar, a betrayer, and a failure. I serve so many masters I have lost count, and the one I love the most I am the least faithful to. My enemies are legion and my allies lost to time. In truth, making a pact with me will enmesh you in a web of problems that stretch back before the Cataclysm of Peaks.”

He offered me a tired smile and I responded by waiting silently for him to continue.

“I can offer you one thing though, something I don’t believe a forced pact would ever omit.” He sighed and looked at me so I could see his eyes clearly. “There is one other tool a pact can provide to an Imperial Advisor – we can punish behavior we wish to discourage.”

“Punish how? I thought you couldn’t hurt me?”

“Advisors cannot injure the ones they’re bonded to. Inflicting pain without physical injury though? There is no real limit to that. The manifestation differs from Advisor to Advisor. For most it’s a variation of simple searing agony, from something as mild as a minor stab wound up to the sensation that every cell in your body is burning in eternal flame, as the Advisor desires. Some choose stabbing cold, others needles, and so on.”

“What’s yours?”

“I don’t know. That is something I specifically exclude from the pacts I make. I can promise you very little, but I can forge into the magic that binds us together that I will never, can never hurt you with that binding. That you will know as a certainty.”

“But you’ll still be able to paralyze me?”

“That aspect of the pact cannot be omitted without the binding failing to count as a pact, and if we have no pact, then another one will be forced onto you.”

“Or I could run, and see if they can catch me.”

“Or you could run. I won’t tell you that escape is impossible. You are a creature of wonder and delight to me. I haven’t seen someone quite like you in centuries. Or perhaps ever. Who know what depths you hold? You might be able to do the impossible and escape from hunters who have decades of experience finding the cleverest of prey. You might even be able to retain your mind without any formal training. There are dangers before you, but not all dangers come to pass.”

He paused to allow me to interject even though he wasn’t done speaking.

I remained silent. 

“It is your choice. I cannot offer you unbiased advice in this. Only you can choose the life you wish to pursue.”