Trying not to look nervous, I sat on the rapidly cleared chair in Instruktanto Miratova’s papery chaos of an office while she switched on her incongruous little electric kettle.

“Tea?” she asked. “Hot chocolate?”

“Didn’t Clara poison you using hot chocolate and nearly kill you?”

“If I let a near death experience put me off things, I’d have few pleasures left in life,” Alania said, setting out cups. “But I’m sure you didn’t come to talk to me about being poisoned.”

I had, actually. But she didn’t need to know that. I cleared my throat. “If I wanted to wake up my spell,” I said, “how would I go about it?”

“You understand how dangerous that would be?”

“Yeah. Of course.” I’d spent my whole life hearing about how dangerous it would be. “But Malas is right; it could happen eventually anyway. And isn’t this the safest place for it to happen? Anyway, if I’m going to learn magic, I might as well learn how to, you know, actually do magic properly.”

“It’s your choice, but at-will casting isn’t doing magic any more ‘properly’ than drawing ichor. If that’s your motivation – ”

“It isn’t. I’m not even saying I want to do anything yet, I just… want to know what the options are. How you’d wake a curse.”

Alania handed me a cup of tea and sat down with her own cocoa, sipping thoughtfully. When had she started to look so old? No, that wasn’t right; she’d been mostly grey when we’d met and spent a lot of last semester being ill and tired, but now she just looked… I don’t know. She probably had a lot going on.

“Well,” she said, “our mistake last semester was assuming, based on the nature of your arrival here, that your spell was awakened, and we simply had to cast it. Now that we know otherwise, we would first need to find out if it is bound by one of the techniques you tried as a child, or merely dormant. Unbinding a bound curse should be easy enough if we know, specifically, how it was bound. We can try a few things under Malas’ observation, if you like, or I can bring in a specialist friend of mine if you’d prefer not to work with him, but I must warn you that being able to determine the binding that way is pretty unlikely. I’m sure that if it was easy, Malas would’ve already seen it and brought it up in his testimony at your trial.”

“And if it’s just dormant? How would you wake up a dormant curse?”

“That depends. Some have very specific triggers – being in special locations on special days, or performing specific rituals, that kind of thing. But most can be awakened by various types of duress, as you already know. I’m sure we can strike off general emotional duress as a trigger for yours, for obvious reasons, and given your propensity for injury, general physical duress is probably off the table, too. But specific emotions or physical trials might – ”

“You could simulate that kind of duress medically, right? With drugs or something?”

“I’m not going to poison you, Kayden.”

I distinctly recalled her mentioning using psychoactive drugs to train prophets last semester, but that had been before Clara had poisoned her. Maybe that had changed her stance. “But it’s physically possible, right? That method would work?”

“No. And I am not just saying that because I’m worried you’d try on your own.”

“I wouldn’t do that! I’ve taken the occasional fall but I’m not that reckless! I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, though. Physically speaking, the right drugs could simulate extreme physical duress, right? Or illness. Or all kinds of things. I mean, last semester, when your – ”

“Yes, Kayden, I remember last semester very well. But just because something can make it seem like a spell is acting up, to our limited diagnostic capabilities, doesn’t mean it can fool the spell itself. In theory, one could use drugs to actually put someone under extreme duress, but that would just make the drugs themselves a threat to the person’s life as well as the awakening spell. While a few extremely rare spells out there are known to have the ingestion of certain drugs as part of their specialised awakening ritual, for the vast majority of spells it simply isn’t a useful method. I certainly wouldn’t try it with a complete unknown like yours.”

Had Cheryl’s curse been identified? No… no, probably not. The whole ‘make her sick to awaken the curse’ theory wasn’t one of the specialised cases that Alania was talking about; they would’ve known exactly what would happen and what to expect when, for a spell like that. The theory only worked if it was a shot in the dark attempt, so if shot in the dark attempts weren’t viable, then that meant our theory was wrong. Which was… good, right? It was good if Cheryl had just had bad luck, and there wasn’t some conspiracy against her. (Or good luck. She’d had her awakening in the best possible place, after all.) But…

“Can you be sure?” I asked. “I mean, science advances all the time, right? Maybe there’s been advances in, well, spell awakening, that you don’t know about.”

“Yes, Kayden, I’m sure. I’m sure because when students come to this school with curses, they come to me for help. And when people come out of the Pit and can’t awaken their spell within a few days, they get Malas to poke at it, and if that doesn’t work they come to me for help. I have to keep abreast of this sort of information, and I’m most certainly abreast of it right now because as soon as I learned that your curse was inactive I made sure I was up to date in case we had this conversation. There is no ‘awaken my spell’ drug. I’m sorry.”

I nodded. “Right. Of course. Thanks.” I got up to leave, and Alania’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.

“What’s this really about, Kayden?” she asked as I pulled my arm quickly out of her grip.

“Nothing!” I said quickly. “I mean, I just want to, you know, keep my options open and all that.”

“Mmm. Don’t become a politician.”

“What?”

“You’re a shockingly bad liar.”

“I’m not lying!” I lied, like a liar.

“You came in here to ask about methods of awakening spells, very specifically pushed for information on one possible method, pushed harder when I told you it wasn’t possible, and when you’re finally convinced that that one method won’t work you have no follow up questions on any other possibilities. If you’re off to poison yourself – ”

“I swear I’m not.”

“Then what…?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” I backed towards the door, but Alania shot me a severe gaze that made me suddenly forget how to move my legs.

“You are my responsibility,” she said in a severely unimpressed tone I hadn’t heard since she first met Kylie and me across that weird lake of empowered water. “I’m here to help you, but I cannot do that if you don’t talk to me.”

I hesitated. Max was fighting with Alania, resented the things that she was making him do… but still believed that she was trustworthy. And she’d never shown herself to have anything but our best interests at heart. She’d even saved Clara. I could probably trust her.

It didn’t matter now, anyway. If Cheryl hadn’t been poisoned, there was no need for secrecy.

So I told her. I told her about our little meetings, and how Cheryl almost missed the last one because she was sick but snuck out to see us, and caught fire – this much Alania probably knew, and she didn’t seem surprised by any of it. Then, leaving Talbot’s name out of things and phrasing it to sound like I was the only suspicious person, I explained the theory about Malas, or maybe Cheryl’s master, poisoning her to awaken her curse. She listened thoughtfully, sipping her cocoa, and when I was done, put it down and leaned forward to look directly into my eyes.

“Kayden,” she said, “that is the absolute dumbest thing I have heard all semester.”

“It could happen!” I insisted. “I mean, probably not, if you’re right about poisoning not working. But Malas is the expert on this stuff, right? And he kept the truth of my spell from absolutely everyone for six months! If he thought it was for Cheryl’s own good – ”

“Then she would have been hooked up to half a dozen monitors and under constant supervision while she was sick. Even if he would do something like that, and even if a poison or potion existed hat would be worth trying on an unknown curse, if he was going out of his way to awaken said curse then there is absolutely no way that your friend would have been able to sneak out of that ward. He would have been waiting for a dramatic result. He would have been prepared to deal with it. The fact that she simply left the ward while sick confirms that he had no idea that she was in that kind of danger.”

“Okay, but… what if her master did it, then? And didn’t tell Malas? We know he can be fooled by potions.”

“Possible, but absurdly risky. And, again, the chance that he could get his hand on some new potion for that purpose that I was somehow unaware existed… no.”

“Kind of a coincidence that she just happened to be here when it awakened, then isn’t it?”

“Unless a master taking on his first apprentice, who happened to have a bound curse, noticed that she was sick and decided to schedule a trip to be withing easy reach of the world’s best magical doctor just in case?”

Oh. I hadn’t considered that.

“I… guess that’s possible.”

“It happens all the time. Well, not all the time, since people with unawakened spells are pretty rare in mage society, but in general they will find an excuse to be near Skolala Refujeyo if they feel feverish. Even mages outside our system, raised in other schools or traditions, will sometimes suddenly realise they have urgent diplomatic business here and just happen to bring their out-of-sorts apprentice who isn’t casting yet. Unawakened spells make people very nervous, but it’s always just an infection or something.”

“Except when it isn’t.”

She nodded. “Except when it isn’t.”

Well then. I supposed I should pass this on to Talbot. He’d just conclude that Alania with In On It and making stuff up about poisoning people not being viable, which was a fair conclusion to draw, but I didn’t think so. She wouldn’t lie to me about something like this. She wouldn’t.

Besides, he other points had been good. If Malas has been trying to wake Cheryl’s spell, rather than believing he was dealing with yet another feverish student of an overcautious new master, there was no way he would’ve let her out of his sight. And if Cheryl’s master was so possessive of her that he managed to find some spell awakening method that Miratova didn’t know about, and didn’t tell either Cheryl or Malas about it, and put Cheryl under Malas’ care and decided not to keep an eye on her himself and let her sneak away… well, that was getting a bit too just-so conspiracy even for me. If that wasn’t enough for Talbot, well, that was his problem.

“Thanks,” I said, finally taking a sip of my lukewarm tea. “It does all sound a little farfetched, I guess.”

“Your last farfetched conspiracy theory turned out to be true,” Alania shrugged, “after a few false starts. People here can get a bit… well. I swear it’s a lot calmer outside the school, when you’re not dealing with teenagers.” She sipped her cocoa. “Frankly, I think the age of Initiation should be twenty. Perhaps then we’d have time to teach a lot more actual mathematics and science and history and soforth before giving exciteable young people the ability to fly and burn each other and get surprised when something goes wrong. But nobody listens to me.”

“Hey, I’m learning maths!”

“And I’m sure it’s an illuminating class that your instruktanti are putting a lot of focus on, rather than desperately trying to make sure everyone meets a minimum baseline before they run off to their classes about drawing magic pictures or seeing the future. Ka vu komprenis Ido?”

Did I understand Ido? “Yeah, a bit. I’m not confident speaking it, really, but I’m getting tired of relying on translation software in lessons, you know?”

“Ka vu lernos?”

“Yeah, I’ll learn. I mean, it’s kind of necessary, isn’t it?”

“It’s certainly very beneficial to speak the language if you intend to stay in mage society after graduation. Do you?”

“I don’t know! That’s years away. I don’t… I barely know what I’m doing next week. I know I should know what I’m doing by now but – ”

“No, you shouldn’t. You’re fourteen. Despite what adults have probably told you your whole life, almost nobody who’s fourteen knows what they want their future to be. And most of those who do, are wrong. I wasn’t remotely interested in science at fourteen.”

“You weren’t? What were you interested in, then?”

“A tall graceful boy in my dance class, mostly.”

I stared, realised this was rude, and looked away. “Oh. I always kind of assumed you were like Max. With his whole… intensity.”

“How is Max?”

“Fine. I mean, you probably see him more than I do. He’s always working in your lab.”

“Ah.” she tapped her nails thoughtfully on her mug. “I think he’s a little upset with me at the moment.”

“That’s certainly one way of putting it.”

“What exactly has he said about – ?”

“Nothing,” I said, perhaps a bit too quickly. If I wanted to stay out of Alania’s political nonsense, then gossiping about Max’s opinions on it was the opposite of helpful. “He just hates politics.”

“Hmm. That feeling is mutual. I must say, I’m really proud of how well all three of you are doing. We should check in more often. I hear you’re quite successfully making potions?”

“Simple ones. And I have help.”

“Good. Teamwork is an underutilised skill. Whatever you do in life, you’re absolutely going to need allies.”

“Ugh, politics.”

“Friends, then.”

I nodded. Friends, I could handle.