There was some level of awkwardness as we got ready for Magista’s party. Max glanced between Kylie and I, who were avoiding eye contact, but didn’t say anything.

“Now, remember to have a good time,” Max said with a glassy smile as he checked his hair for the twentieth time.

“Mm-hmm,” Kylie mumbled. “Big parties. My favourite thing.”

“I intend to have a fantastic time,” I assured him.

“Why doesn’t that sound reassuring? Okay, let’s go; we don’t want to be late.”

“I thought you were supposed to get to parties late?”

“Well, you can if you want. I can’t. An Acanthos is always exactly on time.” He lead the way down the corridor, and soon, we were at the party venue.

The room the Magistae had chosen was larger than any of the rooms I’d had classes in, and hardwood floors replaced the usual stone. Crystal chandaliers provided white light, every crystal glowing, and the entire back wall was a panel like the faux window in Instruktanto Cooper’s office, except that it shone a much deeper blue and flickered with the illusion of thousands of tiny snowflakes falling just behind the glass. Buffet tables lined one long wall, obscure sculptures, paintings and tapestries the other, and throughout the room little groups of initiates stood, sat, snacked and gossipped.

There were about forty or fifty people there, and more than half had the self-assured, hypervigilant look I’d come to associate with the mage families. There were plenty of others, though, who looked new and unsure. Max had overestimated how much plain grey there would be; more than a quarter of the guests were in black, white, or at least very dark or light greys, which made me feel a lot less out of place.

The Magistae both wore pure white robes of very different cuts that I was sure had some deep political significance. They moved from group to group, doing their duty as hosts, introducing new people and sparking conversations. Simon and Clara sat together in a corner; Clara in layers of grey, and Simon in deep black silk with white flowers embroidered on his sleeves. Most of the other students I recognised from different classes, including a couple of boys I’d been very rude to in General Magic because they’d been whispering about me, and I’d picked up a few names, but on the whole I didn’t really know anyone else.

Wow, I needed to get out more.

The instant we were inside, Max’s nervousness disappeared. He relaxed, his shoulders straightened and he strode straight for the hostess, giving her a warm hug and whispering something in her ear that made her laugh. Kylie and I took a look around the room and headed for a corner where hopefully no one would try to talk to us until we got our bearings.

After a few seconds of awkward silence I said, “You know who I bet has really fucked up home lives? These guys.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kylie said. “We were lucky.”

“I bet the Magistae were drilled for hours on pointless rubbish so they’d know exactly how to place those snack tables and what the perfect robe cut for this party was.”

“Hours, definitely. But somebody probably should’ve told them it’s Magisti.”

“What?”

“Magisti, not Magistae. In Latin, if you have mixed gender suffixes, the male takes precedence for the plural.” She frowned. “I think.”

“Am I the only person in our dorm who doesn’t speak Latin?”

“That’s the one thing I know about Latin. It’s the one thing everyone knows about Latin.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re a terrible benchmark. This is gonna to sound crazy but… is Max really good at this?”

He was. He wandered easily about the room with an easy, interested smile on his face that would look perfectly genuine to anyone who hadn’t seen his nervousness before he’d come in, letting various people lead him to new groups to meet their friends. Any group he joined became relaxed and giggly within a couple of minutes.

“Well. He did tell us he was exceptionally fun at parties.” I supposed, judging from how often and deliberately some people changed groups while others stayed put, that there was some kind of complicated social game happening, but I had no idea what it was. At my old high school, people just hung around with their friends unless forced to mingle. This system was weird.

The whole thing… well, it wasn’t being directed by the Magistae, exactly; plenty of people were drifting between groups or moving others between groups. But there was no mistake that the Magistae were the most influential minglers, presumably as the hosts. Magista was very mobile, changing groups every minute or so to make sure everyone was having a good time; Magistus mostly loitered in one spot and glanced, nodded and raised his coke to various people in the room in a slightly-too-methodical manner.

I wasn’t sure exactly what the rules of the game were, but nobody was remotely subtle about playing it. I supposed that was something to be learned with age; many of these initiates looked excited to be at a real mage party without being under the watchful eye of their parents.

I glanced at Kylie. She didn’t look half as curious as I was about the other guests. She mostly looked like she didn’t want to be there.

But at least she was being civil with me. Had she forgiven me for what I’d said about her family?

“Hey,” I said. “They do have tiny hotdogs!”

“They have their own name.”

“Yeah. But they are just tiny hotdogs. Why be pretentious about it?”

“I think being pretentious is the whole point of this party.”

I nodded. To be honest, part of my mind was running an old habitual question: where would I put the tracker in this room to seriously inconvenience Chelsea? Not the food; that was an amateur’s game. If I could somehow wedge it behind the fake window, that would present a real challenge for her to get it out, but it would be… crude. All alone over there by itself, in full view; there’d be some art, I supposed, in me learning how to remove it from the wall to put the tracker in place and her learning how to remove it from the wall to retrieve it, but all in all a boring location.

No, it’s have to go in one of the art pieces. Inside a vase, perhaps – or concealed in a pedestal close enough to a vase that it would seem to be concealed in the vase. Then she’d spend ages trying to sneakily get it out of the vase and come up with only a decoy stone before realising and having to focus on the pedestal. That’d be a laugh.

God, I missed my friends so much.

My eyes were prickling. Crying at a fancy mage party seemed undiplomatic, though. Instead I concentrated on trying to figure out whether a small limestone statue was supposed to be a woman lounging on a couch or two dolphins fighting to the death. With all my attention on playing flipper-or-ponytail, I didn’t see Magista approaching.

“There you two are!” she said, as if we were supposed to believe she didn’t know exactly where everyone was. “Are you enjoying the party?”

“Having a fantastic time, Magista, thanks for asking. Hey, you might know – is that a dolphin’s nose or a woman’s foot?”

She frowned at the piece. “You know, I’m not really sure? I always thought it looked like a one-winged bird attacking a mouse, and that’s the tip of the mouse’s tail, see? Although the name of that piece is ‘power in layers of pearl’, so you might be right about the dolphin thing.”

“I bet it’s worth thousands of dollars, whatever it is,” Kylie said.

“Possibly. It was loaned by my friend Ellen for the party. It’s been in her family long enough that they probably don’t know what they paid for it. Oh, have you guys met Ellen yet? I really must introduce you to some of the others, I’m so sorry, I’m terrible at this.”

“We’re working our way around the room,” I lied. “Actually, Kylie was just commenting on that guy’s cool belt.” I nodded towards a boy in medium grey robes who was wearing a rainbow-coloured sash, elaborately embroidered in silver thread with designs that seemed to move about as he did.

Magista’s face lit up. “Oh, Marcus? He’s related to Korpo, so that’s probably where he got the belt. Cousins, I think? I’ll introduce you; you can ask him yourself.” She took Kylie’s wrist and pulled her off into the crowd. Ignoring Kylie’s glare of wounded betrayal, I sauntered over to the buffet.

There were some very long skewers over there, and I was pretty sure that if I put them on sideways, I could fit seven or eight tiny hotdogs on a skewer. The shish kebab of the future.

Getting the hotdogs on was easy. There was even room left for my fingers. The tomato sauce was harder, because it came in tiny dipping bowls instead of proper bottles. I could dunk another hotdog in sauce and use it as an applicator, but that didn’t strike me as appropriate fancy party behaviour.

In the end, I just picked up a tiny sauce bowl and drizzled it on. That worked fine.

The next problem was that I’d forgotten something pretty fundamental about cocktail sausages: they might look like you could eat a whole bowl of them, but most people get fed up with them after about two. Three sausages in, I realised this problem. Five sausages in, I began to seriously reconsider the brilliance of my food science. I was trying to work up the appetite to finish off sausage number eight and free myself from this hell of my own making when I heard a girl speaking behind me.

“Eight is too many.”

“Huh?” I turned. The speaker was about my height, with her dark, waist-length hair pulled back in a loose braid. Her robes were in plain, neutral greys, cut in a style that looked kind of like a saree (to someone like me who’s never seen one in person, anyway), but she’d added a splash of colour with a yellow ribbon woven through her plait, and sparkly golden shoes and fingernails. She held her tablet; while I couldn’t recognise the alphabet on it, I recognised the symbol of the intranet’s language translation program well enough, but she wasn’t looking at it. She was watching me.

She grinned, and nodded at my skewer by way of explanation. “Eight cocktail weenies is too many,” she said. “Now you have valuable data for the next party – you know the exact number of weenies to skewer.”

“Valuable information that will get me far in life, I’m sure. Want to help me out?” I proferred the skewer.

“Ah, you’ve seen through my plan.” She took it from me and ate the little sausage daintily, which was something I thought impossible. “I’m Saina,” she said.

“You don’t have a dramatic Latin mage name?”

Saina indicated her distinctly Indian features with one hand. “Do I look like my dramatic mage name would be Latin?” she asked, grinning to indicate that she wasn’t offended. “There are other traditionally magical languages.”

“Oh. Yeah, of course. Obviously.”

“Saina’s my birth name,” she said, taking pity on me.

“It’s a nice name. I’m Kayden.”

Her gaze sharpened. “Hang on, aren’t you – ?”

I braced myself.

“ – in the Basic Magical Theory C class? The class that saw Alania Miratova burn herself by accident in front of everyone?”

“That was an accident? I thought that was part of the demonstration!”

Saina rolled her eyes. “If she burned herself to demonstrate for every class, she wouldn’t have any hand left by now. No; you saw something rare, something fantastical. Something that will pass into legend, something thought to be impossible, and once again thought impossible when the last who witnessed it have passed from this world. You saw…” She tossed the now-empty skewer into a bin and spread both hands dramatically. “You saw the great Alania Miratova screw up!”

“She brought it upon herself, honestly,” said a far less welcome voice. Simon selected a canape (is that what they’re called? Canapes?) with one dainty hand. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a heavy iron ring, with some kind of complicated design worked into its flat head. A signet ring? Good grief. “Alania Miratova is an excellent scientist and has always been very cognisant of the dangers of magical work. She puts all of that effort into making sure her students understand how serious there work is, that there is no room for dilettantes who are just here to mess around – ” he glanced up at me – “and that magic can, and does, kill its careless users. And then she tops that off with a party trick, using her incredibly dangerous gift to impress a handful of students with some impressive-looking heat magic. How does she expect her students to heed her message when she goes against it herself, right there in the classroom? She was going to hurt herself eventually.”

“I suppose you think the Fiore would never make such a mistake, right?” Saina asked. “If he had Instruktanto Miratova’s job.”

“I don’t know what mistakes my uncle would make as a teacher, as I’ve not seen him teach,” Simon said smoothly. “I doubt he would nearly take his own hand off in front of students having their very first magic lesson, but one cannot deny that her mistake is at least a very effective teaching demonstration.”

“And if she doesn’t recover?”

“It’s just a burn. Kuracar Malas lives here. There is no question of whether she will recover.”

“Still, if – ”

“Saina, if you’re trying to find out how I feel about Fiore and Miratova’s rivalry, just ask.”

“Fine. How do you feel about the Fiore and Miratova’s rivalry?”

“I think it’s their business, and none of mine.”

“None of your business? It’s your name.”

“It will be. Not yet.”

“And when it is, it’ll impact your success.”

“Not half as much as concentrating on my studies will.”

“You honestly expect me to believe that you don’t care?”

The initiates spoke in casual, light voices that didn’t match the hard expressions in their eyes, quiet enough not to cause a scene. They seemed to have forgotten I was there. I backed away before I could get pulled into their argument and nearly walked right into Max.

“Kayden!” Max grinned easily, like he was having the time of his life. There was absolutely no hint of panic or discomfort in his eyes. Impressive. “Having a good time?”

“How long have we been here?”

“Twenty mintues.”

“Seriously? It feels like hours!”

“If you hang around another ten minutes, you’ll be able to leave without technically being rude. Have you spoken to the hosts?”

“To Magista, briefly, but – ”

“You’ll probably want to make some small talk with Magistus too, before you go. Not right before you leave either; you’ll need some time to pass, so if you’re trying to get out of here you might want to go over there now. I need to go talk to Kylie because I think she’s about to punch somebody in the face and that’s not considered courteous party behaviour. Oh, and sorry about all this again.”

“It’s no – ” but he was already walking away. I sighed, put on my best polite-dinner-guest face, and made my way towards Magistus. He wasn’t hard to find; he’d barely moved the whole party. He lifted his drink as I approached in a little greeting toast.

“Oh, hey, it’s Kayden.”

“Hi, Magistus. Nice party.”

“It makes my sister happy. It’s been a stressful couple of weeks, finally getting here and starting school and all, so it’s good to see her let her hair down a bit for once.”

I glanced at Magista, working the room with the practiced smile and step of a diplomat, her hair very much up both physically and metaphorically. “Uh, yeah.”

“How about you? Settling in okay?”

I shrugged. “A school’s a school, right? It’s not that different to home.”

“Heh. Sure, man, if you say so.”

“I know this is all really high pressure for you mage types, but it’s different for me. I only need to be here six months and I’m out.”

Magistus, who’d been raising his drink to his lips, paused. “You’re not going through the initiation?”

“Dude, I have a life at home. I’m here to learn how to control my curse. That’s it.”

“Hmm. Does Max know that?”

“Why does everyone care what Max knows?” I forced myself to take a couple of breaths. This was the time for diplomacy. This wasn’t the time to get into a snit about the Magistae’s stupid social games. Something else to talk about… what did rich kids who threw big social parties like to do?

Oh, right. Show off their knowledge and class to the less educated.

“I’ve actually been wondering,” I tried, “why are there two of you?”

“Two of…?”

“You and Magista. This place is expensive, right? So expensive that a lot of these mage families only have one mage. But you and your sister are both here. Is there a rule about not breaking up twins or something?”

Magistus barked a laugh. “Oh, I’m sure the family would love to break us up. No, it’s more complicated than that.” He threw an arm around my shoulders. “Let me tell you about my mum.”