We wandered through corridors long enough to get our bearings before once again turning inward, heading for the centre of the labyrinth. When we crossed the next strong current, thick with spells, Max stopped. “Kylie, it’s safe to stop channelling here, if you want.”

She did so, and immediately slumped against his shoulder. That seemed as good a sign as any that it was time to rest.

“Wouldn’t places like this with more spells be more dangerous?” I asked as Max, who had prepared rather better for this trip than Kylie or I had, passed around water bottles.

“In almost every way, yes,” Max said. “But the spells need… space, I suppose, to manifest as an illusory world. When they are this thick, and moving this fast, they can only hurt us in mundane ways.”

“Like deciding to lodge in our flesh permanently and potentially killing us?”

“… Yes. Although the vast majority of spells in the Pit won’t take somebody who already has a spell, so we are… mostly safe, on that front.”

“Unless we’re unlucky.”

“Yes.”

“So the same as usual, then.” I dug out my healing potion to deal with the various cuts and scrapes we’d acquired on our journey thus far. They would still take an hour or two to heal completely, but I’d given up hope of getting out any faster than that anyway. We’d move faster the less injured we were.

“Hey,” I said, “not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but isn’t it kind of weird that none of us have passed out yet? We’ve been walking around for hours, not drunk nearly enough water, and almost died a few times. You’d think we’d have trouble walking at all at this point.”

“Lucky is one term for it,” Max said. “It’s the effect of being awash in so much undirected magic. Think of it like being drugged.”

“That sounds… not great. What happens when the ‘drug’ wears off, or when we’re too exhausted for it to keep helping?”

“Then we crash, and we hope very much that we’re out of here before that happens, because it won’t be a fun experience if we have to do it without medical attention.”

“Is it dangerous?” Kylie asked.

“Shockingly, the effects of prolonged exposure to a large volume of undirected and unhosted spells is not something that’s been extensively studied. I looked into as many people as I could find who’d been in situations like this when doing my research, and the major effect seems to be exhaustion, but… there really aren’t enough cases to give, you know, statistics. I can tell you that someone did spend more than a day in such a situation once and survived.”

“Oh. Well, good.”

“Speaking of your research,” I said, “when exactly were you going to tell us that the corridors in the initiate’s area of the school make a runic circle designed to keep us at the school?”

“Oh. You found that.”

“So it’s true?” Kylie asked. “They used the architecture of the school to… what, brainwash witches?”

“No! No, it’s… it’s not like that. The circle doesn’t influence your minds. That’s the first thing I checked, but plenty of witches have come here for six months and then refused the Initiation. Your choice to come here was your own free choice; there’s not enough power or influence to leverage in a circle like that for anything else. Anyway, magically forcing you to agree to the contract of the Initiation would result in a less binding contract. They definitely didn’t do that.”

We relaxed marginally.

“What does it do, then?” I asked.

“It’s not designed to affect you. It’s designed to affect your spells.” Max gestured at the maelstrom around him. “Refujeyo’s centre of power, the whole reason it can dominate the magical world, is because it can offer students magic on demand. It has this pit of spells. Do you ever wonder where the spells came from? I did.”

“They’re from us,” I breathed. “When people die, and their spells move on…”

“Refujeyo spells return to the Pit. They’ve been trained to do that. No spell is used in an Initiation unless it’ll be back under Skolala Refujeyo’s control when its mage dies. But how do they increase their stock? They have so many spells, and the student population is growing all the time. They need to be getting all of these from somewhere.”

“So they bring in students who already have spells,” I said, nodding. “Have us walk those runic circles for six month, tracing out the order to stay with the spells in our bodies. And we have to assume there are similar runes in the main school corridors, right? They teleport people around, too.”

“I suspect that the main school corridors are used for a variety of things, most notably generating magic to maintain the teleportation, water and air pumping systems of the school, as well as the lighting and intranet,” Max said. “But, yes. The parts I’ve mapped also contain such things. They’d reinforce the connection to the Pit for the spells in all of the students and staff, including you two.”

“Cheryl likes to say that if you’re getting something for free, it’s because you’re the product, not to customer,” I said. “I always thought that, for our scholarships, that was a PR thing. Not literally taking our spells.”

“It all makes so much sense now,” Kylie said. “This is why they’re so gung-ho about making sure witches go through the school system instead of an apprenticeship, if at all possible. They were so lenient on Talbot’s grades and bent over backwards to get him in. And Malas using your trial to push to lower the age limit for contacting witches… it’s not about proper socialising in mage society, it’s because they’re running a side business of collecting wild spells.”

“Not to go all conspiracy theorist,” Max said, “but I think it might be more than a side business. Refujeyo is powerful because it’s such a large mage society, and it’s a large mage society because almost all the mage children in it train at Skolala Refujeyo. Nobody spends a ton of money to send their children here because they think they’ll get a quality education. They spend a ton of money to send their children here because they’re buying them access to magic. I’d go so far as to say that the primary purpose of this school is quite probably to collect spells from people like you, train them through the rest of us, and pay for the enterprise through school fees and research products from the process. The more we’re taught to do magic in the same sorts of ways, the easier the spells become to handle in those ways and the more valuable a resource they are to sell, or at least rent for life, to new generations of mages. Any actual learning we do, beyond the most basic level needed to function in adult society, is a bonus.”

I nodded. “And you decided to not share any of this with us, because…?”

He shrugged. “Does it change anything? We’re still at school. The spells are still yours until you die. What’s different?”

“Well, it makes di Fiore look like an idiot. He was so hostile about us taking precious school resources last semester; if it turns out that the scholarship is the whole – ”

“You can’t tell him! Neither of you can tell anyone about any of this. Promise me.”

“Why?”

“Just trust me. Promise you won’t tell anyone.”

“… Fine. I don’t usually like making promises without knowing why, but if you think it’s important.”

Max relaxed. “Thank you.”

“Although I don’t see why not. You’re right, it doesn’t actually change anything, and I think everyone would like to know.”

“So it’s weird that we didn’t know, isn’t it?” Max asked. “They didn’t even tell us about the teleporting hallways. Most people don’t even notice them. If I were in a real conspiracy theory mood, I might be suspicious about the inaccuracies in the distances in the school map, maybe wonder if that’s deliberate to throw of mappers, but not even I’m that paranoid.”

“You still should have told us,” Kylie said.

“It was too dangerous.”

“Unlike researching it yourself?” I asked. “Coming down here yourself? That was totally safe.”

“It was only dangerous for me! You didn’t have to be – ”

“It matters to other people if you die, Max! You have a duty to take care of yourself!”

“Rich words coming from you, Kayden!”

“Nothing I have ever done is remotely on the scale of how dangerous this nonsense was! What were you so afraid to tell us for? What could we have done with this information that’s remotely comparable to this?”

“You could’ve gotten all offended and stormed off to yell at the nearest authority figure, threatening to tell their little spell-stealing scheme to the whole world and forcing them to find a surefire way to silence you,” he said acidly. “Which is exactly what you would’ve done, isn’t it?”

Well. Yeah.

“I’m, I’m sure nobody would’ve done anything as drastic as ‘find a surefire way to silence –’ ”

“Wouldn’t they? How many mages do you actually know? Most of the ones here are at least somewhat responsible for your safety and education. That’s not true of mage society in general. How do you think the commonfolk would react if you explained this system to them en masse? Do you think Refujeyo would let their supply of new spells dry up like that because they didn’t want to get rough with one kid?”

Hmm.

Kylie, finished with the healing potion, handed the bottle back to me. There was about half of it left. I busied myself putting the first aid kit away.

“How did you react to the information, then?” Kylie asked.

Max blushed. “I, um. I got all offended on your behalf and stormed off to the nearest authority figure, threatening to tell their little spell-stealing scheme to the whole world.”

“That’s what you and Alania have been fighting about!” I realised. “It has nothing to do with whatever stupid little mage political cabal the Fiore thinks she’s building. You just didn’t want me to realise the actual problem – you lied to me!”

“I never lied to you. I just… didn’t overshare information. You drew your own conclusions.”

“So, what. You’ve been mapping the school and this, this labyrinth of dreams, and she threatened you and told you to step off?”

“No! Alania Miratova wouldn’t threaten me; she’s… legitimately concerned about the dangers. I’ve had to hide my investigations from her, of course, or she’d try to stop me. Anyway, so long as I kept quiet, I wasn’t in any particular danger. As the Nonus Acanthos, I’m… well, not protected, exactly; our family isn’t very powerful in the grand scheme of things, but inconvenient to cause problems for. So long as I was stealthy enough not to attract notice, and people had enough to threaten me with that they knew I wouldn’t talk, I was safe enough.”

“Except for the part where you got trapped in a spell puzzle to eventually starve to death in,” I said drily.

“Yes. Except that part.”

“Something to threaten you with?” Kylie asked.

“It’s complicated.”

“Is it? How long have Kayden and I been hostages for your good behaviour?”

“Wait,” I said, “what?”

“It isn’t like that!” Max protested. “Not… not exactly.”

“No?” Kylie asked. “So you didn’t run off to yell at Instruktanto Miratova, only for her to frantically warn you to be quiet, and you didn’t refuse and ignore her and keep pushing until someone took you aside and mentioned that hey, while punishing the Nonus Acanthos too severely for no clear reason might attract unwanted attention, there were other people without suspicious family members looking out for them who – ”

“No! Not… in as many words. I just…” Max took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I didn’t want you to be in any danger, that’s true. But it’s not… like that.”

“So you kept us distracted while you investigated the Dark Secrets of Refujeyo yourself?” I asked.

“They’re not particularly dark secrets. Moderately embarrassing secrets at most. And I didn’t keep anyone distracted, or lie to you. I just didn’t volunteer information.”

Kylie nodded. “You know what none of this explains? What we’re doing down here. It’s kind of a jump from ‘oh, the school’s sourcing spells from the commonfolk and using its architecture to steal them’ to ‘I’m gonna find out how to get into the spell storage area and mess about down there’. Why are we here?”

“I’m… looking for something. It might be here. It might not. It’s complicated.”

“Oh, complicated. Unlike everything else here. Are you going to tell us what it is?”

“No. It… I can’t explain, okay? If we find it, then that’s different, but… please, trust me on this.”

“I think everything so far has shown that you make terrible choices about keeping secrets,” I said, “but we’re not going to get anything more than that out of you, are we?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Right. Okay, then. It’s not like I ever know what’s going on anyway, so why should today be any different?”