“I’d be liable to be offended, if I were real,” the spellthing told me, sipping its tea. “I left you such useful gifts, and you’re just ignoring them. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to exist coherently enough to give them to you in the first place? We don’t have the advantage of individuality that you do.”

“Yeah, well, I’m real. And you’re just a dream.” I glanced down at my own cup of tea on the table in front of me, hot and smelling delicious, but didn’t touch it. “Have I had this dream before?”

“Why ask me? I don’t know anything you don’t know.” It smiled, baring its unnerving identical teeth. “Although I suppose logically, if you have and you’ve forgotten, you’ll forget this time as well. So none of this really matter, does it?”

“Great. I can go then.” I stood up, cracked my head on a ceiling I’d had no idea was so low, and sat heavily down again.

“Yes, that is your pattern, isn’t it? Running away from anything even a little bit complicated. Oooh, this is messy, I’d better find a distraction! Let’s do pit competitions! Let’s make potions! Let’s play silly hide-and-seek games with tracking devices so we can think about that instead of what’s actually going on around us!”

“If you’re a piece of my dream and don’t know anything I don’t know, I don’t see how you berating me is going to – ”

“You know quite a lot. You just refuse to pay attention to any of it. And once upon a time, when you had to make sure you never got too angry or too happy or too afraid, that made sense, but you’re well past that now, Kayden. This scattered nonsense is cute in a toddler. But you’re an adult now.”

“I’m fourteen!”

“Oh, don’t pretend you still care about Australian rules. You chose to walk into the Pit. You chose this place, and by doing so you agreed to its rules. Rules that you should be paying more attention to.”

“I’m doing fine. I’m too busy for delusional nonsense and stupid conversations designed to trick and trap me in some magical Pit; I have real things to worry about. I’m so far behind in even the basics of schoolwork; my grades – ”

“Don’t try to lie to me. I’m you. You have never, ever cared about grades.”

“Yeah, well, what with training to be a mage now, they’re more important, okay? Certainly more important than whatever dumb nonsense is – ”

“How? How are they important? You’re not on a time limit to graduate! Your scholarship provides free food and board until you eventually dawdle through your exams, and then you’ll be a mage! Even if your grades don’t impress mage society, you can walk into a dozen commonfolk industries, and if you don’t want to do that, almost your entire social circle are rich kids who could nudge you into any industry you want! Grades don’t matter. Sports don’t matter. Your nonsense with Magistus doesn’t matter. Birthday parties and conspiracies about awakening curses don’t matter. You need to focus on what matters.”

“You don’t matter,” I snapped. “You’re a bad memory of a magical illusion designed to confuse and trap me. I refuse to keep thinking about you. You don’t get to keep scaring me.”

“Neither you nor I have any control over that. And if you did, you’d use it badly.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Problems don’t go away just because you refuse to put the pieces together and acknowledge that they exist.” Its hand shot out and closed around my wrist. I pulled back, but couldn’t break its grip. “You want this to be a safe place for you, but hiding from a monster doesn’t make it go away. Do you remember what I told you?”

Of course I remembered. I remembered the feel of that hand around my wrist, the fingers tracing across my palm. “You told me a lot of nonsense about being the Chosen One, except not really because I hadn’t chosen to be the Chosen One. But stupid little distraction games to try to get me to drink your tea weren’t – ”

“Not that!” it snapped. “That doesn’t matter! The important – ”

And then there was a loud crash, and I woke up.

“Ggn?” I muttered, staring up into the darkness. I pushed my bedcurtains aside to see light spilling out from a crack in Max’s. He swore quietly.

“Everything alright?” I asked.

“Yeah. Knocked something over. Did I wake you?”

“It’s like two in the morning on our schedule. What are you doing?”

“Just some homework. Doesn’t matter. Knocked over some paper and pens and stuff.” He paused. “Might have broken my chair.”

“Hey, breaking school property is my job,” I mumbled into my pillow. I should probably offer to help him clean up, but going back to sleep seemed a hell of a lot more inviting than crawling under a force field to pick up paper. I let myself drop off again.

If I dreamed more of the spellthing, I didn’t remember it. I was too busy to worry about dreams, anyway; we had a birthday party to plan.

“So we’re keeping it small, then?” di Fiore asked while the four of us sat in the library. “I suppose the limit’s already set by the previous party.”

“And we don’t want to wear them out,” Max added. “You just know they’re going to have proper celebrations planned with all the regulars, and Magista’s going to have the Amazons…”

“‘They’? You’re skipping out on the main celebrations?”

“I have plans for the rest of that day. Unavoidable plans.”

Di Fiore narrowed his eyes. “These two can get away with that nonsense, but if Nonus Acanthos spurns the celebrations, people are going to talk.”

“That’s my problem.”

“No, Max. It’s your family’s problem. You affect their reputation when you affect your – ”

“Somehow I really don’t think my grandmother actually cares which teenage birthday parties I attend. I’m pretty sure that when we all graduate and take on our responsibilities, nobody’s going to be tutting about some party I didn’t go to three years ago, and if I’m wrong, they can write their angry letters to me. It’s none of your business, and frankly I have more important things to concentrate on right now.”

“If you don’t care about your reputation, how about the Magistae? You know how important this sort of thing is to Magista. Are you really going to embarrass her like that? By publically spurning her at her own birthday?”

Max’s cheeks coloured. “There are going to be more important and better networked people there than me. I’m hardly important to the Magistae reputation.”

“No, but you are someone who is very visibly among their closest friends. People will talk, and Magista and Magistus will have to deal with it.”

“No petty party nonsense here is going to hurt their futures,” Max mumbled.

“So that makes it okay to hurt their feelings?”

“Don’t presume to know about my relationships with my friends, di Fiore.”

“I mean, it’s hardly presumption to note the very obvious consequences of – ”

“You’re accusing me of leaving my friends out in the cold based on a surface reading of a situation you have absolutely no – ”

“Guys,” Kylie cut in. “We can’t plan a party if you two devolve into a screaming match and get us kicked out of the library.”

“… Right.” Di Fiore cleared his throat. “Well, with a date and time, we can get started. We can probably just use one of the bedrooms again as a venue, to be completely clear about the desired tone, but I’m a bit concerned about catering.”

“We can probably just bulk things out with what the janitors cook if we have a couple of statement pieces,” Max said, rubbing absently at his arm. “For the cake, I can ask – ”

“What happened to your arm?!” I asked.

“What?” Max glanced down at the arm, where he’d inadvertently pushed the sleeve of his robe back. A large wound dressing ran from almost his wrist down to his elbow. “Oh. It’s not nearly as bad as this looks. I just knocked a bit of skin off it last night, when I knocked everything over.” He shrugged.

“A bit? A bit?”

“I know the dressing looks big, but I swear it’s just skin.” He peeled it back to show me. “See?”

“You’re aware,” di Fiore said, “that even a superficial skin wound is a significant infection risk with potential healing complications when it encompasses half of the surface area of your forearm?”

“You’re exaggerating. This is barely a quarter of my forearm.”

I pursed my lips. This was someone who’d resisted going to Malas over shards of metal in his head, and it wasn’t like I was in a position to chide anyone else for avoiding Malas, anyway. Instead, I reached into my bag and pulled out my healing potion. “Well, we can at least speed things up. Pull that off for a sec and give me your arm.”

Max hesitated, but did so. Di Fiore cleared his throat. “Ah, you are sure that that’s safe?”

“Yes, di Fiore, I’m not an idiot. I did get Instruktanto Costa to check it.” I double-checked that the wound really was only skin deep all the way across – the potion only healed skin, and applying it to anything deeper could cause odd scarring – before dousing it and handing Max a new dressing from my first aid kit.

“You just carry a first aid kit around with you?” di Fiore asked.

“Have you met Kayden?” Kylie asked. “Have you seen how often he – ”

“For your information, Magista and now Max have officially hurt themselves more than I have this semester,” I pointed out. “Kylie’s insinuations are baseless slander.”

“I don’t think it counts as slander if it’s just insinuations,” Kylie said.

Di Fiore cleared his throat and turned the conversation back to party planning. I focused long enough to confirm that I had absolutely nothing to contribute, before letting my gaze drift over the library shelves around us. I’d made a half-hearted attempt, a few days ago, to find books on unbinding or awakening curses, to see if what we suspected had happened to Cheryl was an actual possible thing, but unsurprisingly I hadn’t been able to find anything on curses. Oh, I’d found plenty of books on spells in general, and some probably had sections on wild ones as well as the tame ones of Refujeyo’s Pit, but almost all of them were full of technical language I wouldn’t understand. The few basic books I’d found didn’t mention anything relating specifically to witches, except in occasional asides like ‘the exact proportion of spells belonging to each category isn’t known because many exist wild and unrecorded’, like we were some trifling outside annoyance. The intranet, unsurprisingly, was equally unhelpful.

There were people all around me I could ask, of course, but I’d already run into that problem. There was a small sliver of people who might conceivably know the answer, and a small sliver of people whom I trusted enough to openly discuss my suspicions, and they didn’t overlap at all. The school had magical researchers. It probably had experts in this exact thing. But there was no non-suspicious way to –

Wait. Yes there was.

“What is it?” Max asked as I pulled my tablet out and started furiously typing a message for Alania.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Just something I forgot I had to do. Not related to the party.”

“Did you miss a homework deadline or something?” Kylie asked.

“Something like that.”

We were able to set up a meeting pretty quickly. I loved having a surveyanto who took her job seriously, even if she was playing stupid political games with us. I tuned back in to the conversation long enough to pick up that Max and di Fiore were debating specifically what kinds of red flowers to have at the party, then tuned back out again. Kylie was as silent as me, her eyes glassy; I nudged her to make sure she wasn’t casting her prophecy. Nope, just bored. I could sympathise.

But if we could get this party out of the way, I could get to planning exactly what I was going to say to Alania. And then I wanted to make more healing potion, since I’d used a fair bit on Max, and could use the practice anyway. Oh, and I had to go to the doctor for another T shot.

My life had gotten really busy lately. I certainly had no time to waste thinking about stupid dreams.