“— excellent… excellent… excellent… well would you look at that,” Seliana raised her head to gaze at Tercius. “Another excellent. Twelve out of twelve for the first year. I feel that if I say ‘excellent’, it might be one time too many, Tercius,”

Tercius snorted gently, appreciating her attempt. Seliana's praise had almost made his chest swell, but once he remembered what was truly going on, his chest popped and deflated like a balloon that decided to play with a needle. The brain was truly a strange organ, he reflected. He had felt pride in a situation that was the equivalent of an old Master competing with a Neophyte in casting speed. Still, it was the only time in his life that all of his grades had been so synchronized around the top, and for that to happen, he only had to cheat life itself. Just a bit of reincarnation, he thought with a tiny smile. No big deal.

“How about you Pen?” Seliana asked, her hand extended to her daughter.

“A little warning first, Mother. I’m not as good as Tercius," the blonde-haired girl waved her paper and gave it over for inspection.

"A few excellent and the rest satisfactory," Seliana murmured, as she cast a questioning glance at her daughter.

"As I said, I'm not as good as Tercius," Penelope defended herself, casting a narrow gaze Tercius's way.

Tercius observed his schoolmate with a blank expression. Despite his best efforts to convince her that she shouldn’t compare herself to others, she clung too strongly still. Penelope proved that she was not a young Tercius and he proved that he most certainly was not a Mr. Sullivan.

He observed the conversation Seliana had with Penelope and noted all of the words that only emphasized the value of grades and not the knowledge itself. By the minute, the heat of their faces and the strength of their words and voices rose. Still, he kept his mouth shut. It would do neither good if he undermined them against each other.

All words had a time, a place, and a listener, Tercius knew. The difficulty always lies in aligning the three. For most people, he wouldn’t even bother, but for Penelope and Seliana he would make an effort.

It didn’t take long for a red-faced Penelope to storm up to her room, her feet slamming the wooden staircase. Seliana sighed, gently placing a hand over her eyes.

"You know, Aunt, I actually thought that you would see past these grades," Tercius said while taking his seat around the dinner table. The flames in the fireplace hissed and popped every so often, keeping the house warm and cozy. Unlike the private houses of commoners he saw in Lissea, homes in Chameos had decent insulation.

“Tercius…” the woman shook her head. “Not now…”

“No… I think that now is probably the best time. Come sit with me, Aunt,” he indicated to the chair across the table, where a steaming cup of tea, just like his, awaited. “We need to talk,”

With a sigh, the woman plopped down to the chair and grabbed the cup with both of her hands. For a while both sat in silence, slowly sipping the tea.

“I thought you wanted to talk,” Seliana said after a while.

Tercius nodded. “I do,” he said out loud and lapsed into another silence. I’m just waiting for your head to cool down and your stomach to get warm.

“Tell me Tercius, is she cut out for this mage business?” Seliana asked suddenly, her face clouded. “I’m mean, compared to you…”

One eyebrow raised, Tercius asked, “Because of the grades?”

Seliana nodded.

Tercius’s eyes narrowed. “And if she were not cut out? What would you do?”

“Take her back under me and teach her how to brew more potions, of course. She is almost completely trained, you see, she only needs more practical experience,” Seliana said. “I just… I just wanted her to have a chance at becoming an Alchemist,”

"Grades…" Tercius murmured the word with some distaste in his mouth. Truly a source of trouble and anxiety. "I don't know how familiar with the concept you are…" Tercius said and saw the woman look at him with a questioning gaze, so he proceeded to explain.

Unsatisfactory, the lowest grade of grades, were quite rare. Only those who truly had no idea what the question asked, got the grade. From what Tercius saw, the mages formulated the questions on the exams in such a way that even tangential knowledge of the topic in questions could get points. Those with unsatisfactory grades in any exam had to undergo private lessons with teachers and another mandatory go at the exam. Tercius heard from Penelope that out of almost two hundred students in their Academy year, only a handful had gotten the grade.

Passable, the second grade from the bottom, was the threshold where students were encouraged to study more and try again, but the grade could stay if a student wanted it to stay.

Satisfactory, the next grade, was where most students’ grades congregated, simply because it was a broad grade.

And finally, excellent. Only those who answered the questions with a clear mastery over the topic got this grade.

If Tercius made a scale with these grades, he would say that ‘unsatisfactory’ was everything below the first thirty percent of the scale, followed by ‘passable’ that made up the next twenty, ‘satisfactory’ with forty percent, and finally at the end came ‘excellent’ with the last ten.

“So, as you can see, the system is flawed,” Tercius explained. “But in that flawed system, your daughter is near the top. Take that as you will. Err… have you ever had a bag of supplies— plants, let’s say— delivered to you, and the first thing on the top of the bag was dried out or maybe rotten?”

“Oh… I don’t think I can count how many times that happened…” Seliana admitted.

“And did you ever throw the bag away before you had a better look inside?”

“Of course not,” The woman scoffed. “I paid for it. I find all the usable ones and throw away the garbage. Usually, I also stop buying from that seller,”

Tercius nodded. Once bought, you’re stuck with whatever it is you bought. There was no turning back— this was how the Empire merchants operated. He imagined that the same principle applied to most parents and children.

His mother's store, on Tercius recommendation, had allowed a small time frame for returns, especially on perishables. While it led to an occasional money loss, overall the policy had led to a long-term gain. His mother's store was able to get more regular and new customers from the competition and maintain a small but steady plus each month.

But of course, time and time again there had been people who tried to exploit the policy. Too many times people had returned plants they supposedly bought from their store, and Tercius had known for a fact that they didn’t. After all, he had been the one weeding and tending the garden where those plants grew.

“All I’m saying is that you can’t trust a single sample. And that’s what a grade really is… a single sample from the top of the bag. It might show what’s inside, there’s no denying that, but it can also mislead, and this goes both ways.”

Seliana's eyes stared unblinking at him.

***

Tercius would have preferred to stay in his new room on the second floor at the Academy but once he had refused to go with Penelope, the girl had only returned with reinforcements. Even apart, Seliana and Penelope were nothing if not persistent. Together, the two of them could move mountains better than any mage alone could. So, for a week now, he had stayed at their home, with no word from Mistress Kalina. Worse, even after a week of deliberation, he still didn’t know how to tell Seliana about Mistress Kalina…

Tercius knew that Mistress Kalina knew of Seliana and Penelope. He had visited on numerous occasions and Seliana came from time to time to the dorms. The energy-wielding mage had even been present in Seliana's house, that night when she took the ball of Energy from Tercius. Tercius's sense of privacy screamed at the invasion of his space and had been for quite a while now. Then he remembered that he had done the same thing in Spheros— to an attempted rapist and his family of hitmen hiring halfwits, but nonetheless the fact that he did it stood.

A voyeur, a privacy violator, a killer, and apparently a hypocrite, and who knows how many other faces he had donned. With each passing day, week and month, he was slowly turning away from a point where he could judge himself and his actions with ease.

The monotony of the days when things had been simple was something he recalled fondly. Days when not one of those names could be pinned on him. Days where he didn’t have to plan and plot for eventualities that might or might not happen.

Days when a simple knock on the front door didn’t startle him.

“I’ll get that,” he yelled as he heard Penelope's feet run from her room, on the floor above his head. Taking a deep calming breath and a pinch of Meditation, he released his hold over his mana and stopped with the expansion of his Well. The pressure of the expansion eased in moments, the pain so small it might as well not be there.

He stretched his numb legs, as he stood up, his eyes never leaving the door. Somehow, he knew who was on the other side.

Each step he took towards the door was a long one, where time stood still and a dozen thoughts tweeted past his mind, and yet when he stood before the stout wooden door, he felt as if those steps should have been smaller and took more time to complete. His hand held the door handle but couldn’t pull.

Another set of two knocks, a rich sound of finger bone finding a thick wooden panel, made his spine freeze, then melt, and finally solidify, all in one instant.

With a shudder, he unlatched the lock above the handle, pulled down the handle, and pulled in the door.

Expectations and scenarios ran through his mind with a speed at which he only got glimpses, the pictures overlapping into each other and finally fading away until only reality remained.

Covered from head to below knees in a thick gray winter cloak, Mistress Kalina’s green eyes greeted him. The still falling snow piled on her head and shoulders, but it quickly turned to water and slid down the sides, only to plop on the doorstep of Seliana’s home.

“Who is it?” A yell came from the staircase, as Penelope rushed down in a cascade of flying earth and blonde hair. One of these days he feared that the girl would tumble down the stairs.

Tercius cleared his throat. He realized that he had been staring for a while, as the middle-aged Mistress waited with a wry smile on her face. "Err… Mistress, please come in," he waved and let the woman pass.

The woman made her way past him, and Tercius hurried to close the door against the snow and wind that tried to follow. By the time he turned around the big winter coat that hid Mistress Kalina's orange hair had been removed from vision, probably to the amulet that hung around her neck, leaving her springy hair free to spread in every direction like rays of the sun.

Tercius observed Penelope gape at the hair, and he had to say that there was an impressive factor there. Mistress Kalina looked like a giant sunflower. He suppressed a smile, even as he realized that the time for him to explain some things had come.

“Pen, this is…” Tercius indicated to Mistress Kalina and abruptly stopped. He had no idea how the woman wanted to present herself so he made a pause. Now the woman had a chance to say whatever name or title she wanted.

“You can call me Mistress Kalina, child,” The woman bobbed her head in a greeting, even as Penelope hastily gave a formal salute reserved for first meetings and formal events.

“My name is Penelope, Mistress,” Pen said and gave him a look.

“Pen, can you get Aunt Ana?”

While Penelope skipped to separate Seliana from her experiments in the basement, Tercius led Mistress Kalina towards the fireplace, where Amber and Draco, the two reptiles, warmed their bodies.

Draco’s dark head snapped at Mistress Kalina briefly, his black forked tongue darting out in question, but promptly lowered his head and went back to napping. Amber slept near the salamander, blissfully oblivious. The two rarely ventured far from the fireplace, mostly doing their business in the small open terrarium he built for them in the corner. Vrasta, Penelope’s green sparrow pet, rested on his perch above the fireplace. While Penelope’s pets still had some feral episodes, they had mostly settled down and Amber was responsible for that. She was the boss, and the two animals knew that. When they didn’t, she was prone to remind them.

“Tea, Mistress?” he asked.

“Thank you,” Mistress Kalina bobbed her head, and the hair followed.

He made his way to the kitchen area and placed a kettle to boil, just as he heard Seliana’s annoyed voice rising. Interruptions during brewing made her waste ingredients and time. With a sigh, Tercius grabbed the tea leaves and four cups from the top cupboard—

There was a sharp murmur behind him and something crashed. His head turned to the sound, as his eyes widened and his mouth fell open. Seliana was barely holding herself to the wall, slowly sinking to the floor before his eyes.

“Seliana!” Tercius sprang, the ceramic cups crashing to the floor and smashing into a thousand pieces. Running took him to the pale woman in an instant, and his shoulder crashed into the wall, the radiating pain ignored as he took in the situation. There was no blood, he saw immediately. Seliana was a pale ghost, barely breathing, her shaking hand pointed to Mistress Kalina.

“Mother!” Penelope screamed and ran to Seliana. “What’s wrong?”

Oh no! With wide eyes of realization, Tercius' stomach dropped and he turned to Mistress Kalina. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“I’m not doing anything,” the woman raised her hands, with a strange expression.

Mana Sight [35] truly didn’t see anything in the way of mana, but with someone like Mistress Kalina he simply couldn’t be sure… but why would she… and if it wasn’t a spell… Tercius’s eyes turned to Seliana’s heart.

“Ruul." The ethereal words sent a wave of mana over him and Penelope, only for them to sink into Seliana. Visibly, her fast breaths slowed. Penelope fussed and mumbled half-words over Seliana, tears, and snot streaming down her face.

“Calm,” Tercius murmured, recognizing the word of Magik. “Calm,” Calm was good for the heart. Calm was fine. A healer was better. The fastest ways to get to a healer from Seliana’s home were— The snow! No, there has to be a— Potions! Where—

“Teacher,” Seliana whispered, her eyes darting up and down, just over Tercius’s shoulder.

Tercius latched onto the word. Teacher… teacher… what? What is she talking about? Is she raving?

“Is that you? But… you…” Seliana said, her eyebrows furrowed and mouth slightly open, surprise and disbelief painted all over her cheeks.

"I thought it was you, Seliana, but I wasn't quite sure. It has been a few decades, hasn't it?" Mistress Kalina's voice came from behind Tercius. "I am that glad to see you again, child."

“Teacher…” Seliana whispered with tears in her eyes.