When I woke up, I could still feel the magic inside me, but either I’d gotten more used to it or it had quieted down. Probably both. I could feel it pooling in my joints, curling through my veins, but it wasn’t distracting enough that I didn’t notice the bone-deep ache of me entire body, punctuated with a few points of sharp agony for variety.

Someone was holding my wrist. I yanked my hand away – or tried to. My arm just twitched weakly.

But it worked; the pressure vanished. “Kayden? Kayden!”

Max.

“Mmm.” I forced my eyes open and blinked away the tears that gathered in response to the bright light of the room. “Where – ?” I didn’t bother finishing the question; it was obvious where we were. I was lying in a hospital bed. Next to me was Max, and on the other side of him, Kylie, in another hospital bed. He’d pulled back the curtains between us so he could keep an eye on both of us at once.

“Are you alright?” Max asked. “How are you feeling?”

“Mmn.” My eyes were adjusting to the light, and I watched Max pour a glass of water from a jug next to him, offer it to me and, when it was clear how much difficulty I was having moving, help me sit up to sip it. His arms were trembling, the shadows around his eyes deep. How long had it been since he’d slept?

“How long was I out?” I asked when he took the glass away.

“Well, they tell me that the Magistae’s birthday was six days ago, so…”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Kylie?”

“Just sleeping. She woke up a couple of days ago.”

‘They tell me’ meant that he must have been unconscious at some point, too. “How are you?”

Max gave a short, brittle laugh. “I’m not the person to be worried about here.”

Already, it was getting easier to move. I flexed my hands experimentally, staring down at them. Very little of my skin was visible between the lines and patches of the kuracar’s blue magic, which probably wasn’t a great sign. I was also hooked up to an IV, but that didn’t mean anything; that could just be keeping me hydrated if I’d been unconscious for six days. (Also a really bad sign. Wasn’t that a big risk for brain damage? Or something?)

“How are you feeling?” Max asked again.

“Like there’s magic stuck in my teeth, somehow,” I said. I raised my arms and kicked my legs a bit. Everything seemed to work. That was good. “What happened?”

“A very good question,”came a stern voice as the curtain separating us from the rest of the ward was pushed aside. Alania Miratova fixed me with a look of deep disappointment that I hadn’t seen since the day she’d found Kylie and me at that stupid underground lake. “I would be very interested in hearing just what under the seven points of power you three thought you were doing. And some very good reasons for why we shouldn’t expel you.”

“An explanation for the runes on your arm would also be greatly appreciated,” Malas said, coming in behind her. “Acanthos’ explanation is somewhat lacking in details.”

“Mostly details about why on earth you thought anything like this was a remotely good idea,” Alania added.

“Oh. That.” I tugged up my sleeve to look at the familiarity mark, but it was invisible under Malas’ blue magic. “You can undo that now. Assuming Kylie’s spell is under control.”

The other three mages in the room shuffled awkwardly.

“What? What is it?”

Max cleared his throat. “We, um. We tried. To undo the link. It failed.”

“What… what do you mean it failed? It’s a runic circle. Just break it.”

“We did. The spell won’t let go.”

“You were warned about this sort of thing,” Alania said. “This is why we don’t make human familiars. Spells don’t interact reliably with humans; you know this. It’s got its hooks in you. We can’t break it. We tried everything.”

“Except amputating the arm,” Malas said. “Which I’d rather avoid, unless it becomes necessary to save your life.”

“But it’s not?” I asked warily.

“Apparently not. The spell seems… remarkably stable. For now.” He shrugged helplessly. I took some solace in the fact that I was probably one of very few people to see Malas look helpless about anything. Pity it had to be my health. “Nobody knows anything about this,” he continued. “Human familiars are extremely rare, the vast majority of ‘confirmed’ ones turn out to be clever hoaxes, as the others are so variable in their creation and effects that it’s impossible to learn anything useful or consistent. Unless they’re an extremely well-kept secret, there are no human familiars alive right now except you, meaning we can’t even do any sort of comparison study. We simply do not have data. All I can tell you is that you’re not dying at this moment, and there’s no particular reason to believe that death is imminent. I don’t know why.”

“We want your permission to run a DNA test,” Alania said.

“Uh, sure, if you want. Why?”

“We want to see if you and Kylie are related. More closely than the human average, anyway.”

I glanced at Kylie’s jet black skin, and the patches of my own sour milk complexion visible between patches of blue magic. “I, um, really doubt it.”

“Blood inheritance doesn’t usually work by the rules of genetics,” Alania said. “You can be genetically different enough to look dissimilar while sharing the right ancestor. All most blood inherited spells care about is that lineage. If Kylie’s spell is connected to her lineage – and many prophecies that powerful are – you’re also in that lineage, then that might… possibly… explain why it won’t let you go, but doesn’t seem to be taking you over, either.”

“You don’t look too sure about that.”

“Honestly? It’s the best guess we have.”

“Kayden,” Max said, “before we started, you told me that you’d figured it out and you knew the spell wouldn’t kill you. How?”

‘Because the magic told me, because I could feel in the way it moved through me that if I made room for it, it would make room for me’ was an insane answer, so I gave the logical one instead. “When we were learning about familiars, the Fiore told us the two main things that killed human familiars. He said that if you tried to do it with someone without a spell, the spell would frequently take them over and kill them. If you tried to do it with someone with a spell, the spells tended to react badly in the person and kill them.”

“Okay, so?”

“So, I have a spell, but it’s dormant. Nothing seems to be waking that sucker up. Spells don’t tend to take hosts that already have a spell, unless they’re spells designed to work together, like…” I gestured at Malas, with his two marks. “So it wouldn’t take me if I had a spell. But my spell wouldn’t react with it. I have no idea why you can’t undo the link, but it not killing me seems pretty straightforward.”

The three mages stared at me.

“Kayden,” Max said flatly, “that was unbelievably dangerous.”

“Did you even consider the fact that Kylie’s spell isn’t a Refujeyo spell?” Alania asked. “That you had absolutely no guarantee it would leave you alone just because you had a spell?”

“If I had considered it, it wouldn’t have changed my decision,” I said. “She was dying. I didn’t need certainty to try to save her; a ‘probably’ would have been good enough.”

“Did you think about the fact that we don’t know what could wake your spell up? That they could very well have reacted and killed you?”

“That’s been a risk all my life. It’s not new, and I’m sick of avoiding things that might awaken my spell.”

“Well, I’m pleased to hear that your recklessness and lack of consideration is a conscious and deliberate recklessness and lack of consideration,” Alania snapped. “If you will excuse me, I need to prepare to convene the Circle. We will be discussing the possibility of your expulsion. I suggest you don’t do anything else stupid to kill yourself since you may be called to your own defense.”

She turned on her heel and stalked out. Malas stepped forward and reached out to touch me. “May I – ?”

I nodded. Presumably, he’d been magically monitoring me since I was arrived, did he really think I’d refuse now? He touched his fingers to my arm, and the magic in me swirled and moved uncomfortably as his spell scanned my body. I could never feel Malas’ scans, but Kylie’s magic sure didn’t like it.

“Still stable,” he told me, and followed after Alania.

“I’m guessing Alania’s little field trip went well, then?” I asked Max.

“I have no idea. She hasn’t mentioned it. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Even the kuracar says I’m fine.”

“The kuracar says he doesn’t have enough data.”

“He said I’m not currently dying.”

“That isn’t the same as fine!”

“Well, I am fine. The magic’s just… there. Surprisingly calm, actually.”

“Its mage is asleep.”

“Heh. I guess. What are our chances, you reckon? With expulsion?”

“What? Oh. No, don’t worry about that. Nobody’s getting expelled.”

“Max, I know it’s pretty hard to get expelled from Skolala Refujeyo, but I think everything we’ve done probably qualifies as an expellable offense.”

“Maybe. I haven’t actually checked the school rules. It’s not important. Even if they have me for trespassing in the Labyrinth and both of us over the familiar thing, Kylie’s actions are perfectly defensible. They won’t make a successful case against her, and if they can’t expel her, they can’t get rid of you.”

“They… can’t?”

“Well, they could expel you if they wanted, but there’d be no point.” He tapped his forearm, indicating the spot where, on my arm, the familiarity mark was still healing. “Your sacred right to go wherever Kylie is welcome is older than this school. All expelling you would do is give them less control over you and create more chaos. Also, I’m sure they want to monitor both of your health, and Skolala Refujeyo is the best place to do that.”

“Study us, you mean.”

Max shrugged awkwardly.

“Mm. Do we need to be… worried… about that?”

“In a ‘secret government lab’ kind of way, you mean? No. All three of us are already stuck at this school until graduation, so… this doesn’t really change anything.”

We’d been saying a lot of things didn’t really change anything lately. It sounded less convincing each time. “Hmm. And after graduation?”

“I daresay every mage industry with even a peripheral magical research division will be falling over themselves with job offers for the both of you.”

I’d never considered ‘professional research project’ as a career path. It didn’t sound particularly tempting. But I had years left before I’d graduate to worry about that sort of thing, and I certainly didn’t want to think about it right now.

“They could still expel you,” I pointed out.

Max just laughed at that. “Oh, they won’t.”

“Weren’t you warned not to go poking around in this school rune thing? And then did it in secret?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t matter. Imagine you’re one of the nine people who runs this place. You’ve got two ways of spinning this. You can expel the scion of a middlingly powerful family for either forbidden magic or poking around where he wasn’t wanted, but doing so would really tick off said family, and their best political move is to spin it in their favour and point out that Skolala Refujeyo just expelled a student for successfully doing nigh-impossible magic. Important people are going to have Opinions on this. Kylie and you still being in the school makes the whole thing look a whole lot worse.”

“Kick out the genius, steal his creation?”

“That’s not what I… anyway. It looks incredibly shady even without taking into account that said student has already threatened to embarrass you with knowledge of other shady practices, and when he’s expelled, there’s little you can do to stop him and it’s fully to his advantage to do so. Or… you can go the other way. Point out that a Refujeyo student, one of your own, who’s been working with the prominent researcher Alania Miratova, has done nigh-impossible magic. Keep him where you can control him, where his family will definitely support you to bolster their reputation. Minimum risk, maximum gain, and be certain that neither he nor his friends will speak of the actual conditions that lead to said magic.”

“We won’t?” I asked. “Why not?”

“Because you could have died. The fact that this lead to a stable familiarity link is a stroke of absolutely ridiculous luck.”

“I knew it would work,” I said. “Logic aside, I could feel how the magic… it… it was working with me. Not against me.”

“That’s nice, but you say that to any desperately ambitious student and they’re going to delude themselves into thinking they feel the same thing. If we tell anyone how this happened, they’ll think, ‘oh, that sounds easy, and if they were lucky maybe I will be too’, and a few of them will be stupid enough to try it, and people will die. No; they’re going to twist this into some Dark Secret Project with Important Steps we won’t tell anyone. Alania will insist on it. It’s the only way to save other students’ lives.”

“We’re going to invent a fake secret magic conspiracy?”

“I don’t think ‘conspiracy’ is an accurate term for it.”

“It’s what people will think. Have you met the students here? And the adults! The Fiore’s going to lose his mind! He’s going to think this is Alania’s Master Plan with collecting her Secret Powerful Student Group.”

“Let him. That sounds like a Fiore and Alania problem.”

“I guess.” Great. More politics.

And this time, I couldn’t even claim it wasn’t my fault.