I regained strength quickly, and probably could have left the ward after a few days. But both Kylie and I stayed, and Malas didn’t bring it up. He, I was pretty sure, liked having us where he could quickly and easily monitor the familiarity link. Kylie and I had had six months to adapt to not being stared at and talked about for being witches, and weren’t looking forward to it all starting up again over being a new type of oddity.

“How does it feel?” Kylie asked me one quiet morning in the ward. “The spell?”

I shrugged. “It was weird at first. But it’s just kind of there? It’s like having a body temperature or a centre of gravity or making sure I’m not hungry or thirsty. Another thing to be aware of.” I stared down at my arms. “It’s less distracting than the physical wounds, actually.”

My wounds had mostly healed with, thanks to Malas’ magic, remarkably little scarring. There were a few permanent marks, most notably the familiarity link on the outside of my right forearm, marred with several slashes that were clearly the result of the attempt to destroy the link. They’d healed without any scars, but Kylie’s ichor sat under the skin’s surface, like a tattoo. The only other obvious effect of our little adventure was some deep scarring on my left forearm, just under the thumb, which was all lumpy like it had been made with teeth. I remembered my slide down the tooth slope and winced every time I saw it. By coincidence, the scars sat in two broad semicircles, as if someone had indeed chomped down on my arm until they hit bone, which was a cool illusion until you noticed that the shape was wrong for a bite – far wider than a jaw, with too many teeth. I supposed I was lucky that the teeth that had gouged that deeply into me hadn’t been embedded in the flesh. That would’ve been incredibly disconcerting to deal with.

Other than those, and a few random scuffs, I was fine. Physically.

“I’m sorry,” Kylie said quietly.

I blinked at her. “What? What for?”

“For burdening you with this.”

“What are you talking about? It was my decision.”

“No, it was mine. It wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t agreed to it. I… I was dying, I was afraid, and I put your life in danger.”

“Yeah. Good. Why would you be sorry about that?”

“Because I’m putting you in danger,” she repeated.

“Yes! Good! All three of us contributed to this; we were all in agreement that it should happen! Do you think I’d rather you dead? Don’t be stupid. I’m not saying you… I mean, I don’t want to… look. We’re going to be stuck with this link and its consequences for the foreseeable future. If anything, I should apologise for tying you to me like this, but I’m not going to, because it’s better than the alternative. I stand by my decision and I’m very glad that you made yours. Thank you for trusting me to do this.”

“I was supposed to protect you, not put you in danger.”

“What? No you weren’t. Where the fuck did you get an idea like that?”

“It’s my prophecy! It’s what I – ”

“Fuck the prophecy! That thing in your face is a gift and a risk, a tool and a danger; it is not an obligation. You don’t owe me or anyone else your protection. Nobody’s entitled to expect you to be responsible for their safety.”

“I mean, you did protect me, so – ”

“If you want to get all transactional about it,” I cut in, “you risked your life to save mine a year ago. I risked mine to save yours with this. But you know that isn’t what I meant. I refuse to be sorry about what we did, and I won’t accept any apology from you about it for the same reason. You will not convince me that you have anything to apologise for.”

“… You’re really stubborn, do you know that?”

“I’m told it’s my best and most irritating asset.” I drummed my fingers on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry about this. I know you were planning on making a fetish and I kind of railroaded you into… this. I expected it to be reversible.”

“So did I, but here we are. Anyway, didn’t you just do a whole speech on how I shouldn’t be sorry and you don’t regret what we did? That goes both ways. We made this choice and there are unexpected consequences.” She wrinkled her nose. “Mostly, the reactions of absolutely everyone. Every single person is going to be insufferable about this.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “At least they’ll be insufferable in a variety of different ways!”

“Ugh.”

At least the people who were close enough to us for Malas to allow to see us in the ward weren’t particularly insufferable. Magistus was openly concerned for our health, Magista kept her politics to herself, and even di Fiore stiffly asked us to offer his congratulations to Max for his feat and his clumsy probing for the secret to a stable familiarity link seemed more out of reluctant obligation than any real desire for the information. Talbot, Hua and Cheryl showed up one day as a group, Cheryl explaining how the instant her master learned that she knew the prophet and her familiar he’d suddenly found very urgent but completely unrelated business that he had to attend to at Skolala Refujeyo.

“How surprising,” I noted drily, while Hua inspected the runes on my arm, frowning.

“Hmm,” she said. “The link’s still there?”

“Yup.”

“These marks should have cancelled it.”

“I know. What, did you think maybe everything was normal but Max had screwed up destroying the runes, somehow?”

She shrugged.

“You’ll want to be really careful with that,” Talbot noted, nodding in the general direction of my arm.

“Yes, yes, it could kill me at any moment; I’m very much used to carry around magic that could – ”

“I don’t mean the spell. I mean what it’s going to do to your life. How do you plan on graduating?”

“Huh? The normal way? It doesn’t stop me from taking classes.”

Talbot just shook his head. “Kayden, come on. Skolala Refujeyo have you trapped until you graduate. Do you really think they’re going to let you go easily?”

“They can’t forbid me from taking classes or stop me from taking exams unless they want to expel me, and then they lose me anyway.”

“No, but they can cheat. And they will, for both of you.”

I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it again. I could have told him that just because his master had tried to hold onto him, didn’t mean that a large, prestigious school could get away with that kind of cheating, or that they would do such a thing. But… they had, hadn’t they? Talbot had been perfectly open about being sure that he hadn’t qualified, academically, to get into the school, and they’d graded him leniently enough to take him from his master anyway. To put him in these halls, where his spell would move through the same sigils as everyone else’s and be persuaded to maybe, after he died, return here.

I wasn’t naive enough to think that they wouldn’t try something similar to hold onto us.

That was yet another thing I couldn’t really deal with right now, though. Another problem for Future Kayden. Man, I was racking up some serious debts to that guy. We hadn’t even talked about the incredibly creepy child sacrifice prophecy yet; it wasn’t something I’d wanted to mention where Malas, or indeed anyone else, might possibly hear us. Nor had I asked Max how he’d managed to drag two unconscious people out of the labyrinth. He’d left our stuff behind, which, fair enough, but still. Future Kayden had a lot to figure out.

But Present Kayden had some space to just relax and try to cope with everything, and that was what I intended to do.

I wasn’t expecting a visit from Terry and Mae. Mae, forbidden to smoke in the medical ward, chewed on a pen while she looked the pair of us up and down and said, “Fuck.”

“I agree,” I said. “Fuck, indeed.”

“I don’t know whether to offer congratulations or commiserations,” Terry said.

“Well, neither of us are dying at this exact second,” I said.

Mae nodded. “That’s the most anyone can hope for. So this is your prophet, then, Koala?”

“Uh, yeah. Kylie.”

“Pleased to meet you, prophet. Look, Koala – ”

“Why do you call him Koala?” Kylie asked.

I opened my mouth, ready to change the subject before Mae felt pressured to talk about the psychological reasons she almost never addressed anyone by their real name, but Mae just shot her an amused look. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Um, no?”

“Well, look at him. He’s Australian. His name starts with a K. And he definitely isn’t a bear.”

“What’s a bear?” I asked, and both Mae and Terry failed to suppress their laughter. I frowned. If I was going to be made fun of, I at least wanted to know why.

“Never mind that,” Terry said. “More importantly, what the fuck? Why would you agree to an experiment like this? Are you insane?”

“Tell us your secrets,” Mae said in a stage whisper.

“You can’t successfully grow a tomato. Why the hell would you want to try something like this?”

“Have you ever grown a tomato?”

“No, but I reckon I could.”

“Gardening is harder than it looks.”

“My grandmother can do it!”

“And is your grandmother not a skilled and talented lady?”

It was difficult to argue with that.

As the end of the semester approached, Kylie and I did as much of our schoolwork as we could on new tablets and ignored the rest. What were they gonna do, give us bad grades? How terrible.

Max was working rather harder, but still found plenty of time to come see us in the hospital ward we were reluctant to leave. One afternoon, we headed out into the snowy fields outside the hospital, just to hang out.

And then realised we’d vastly underestimated how cold snow was, got much thicker coats, and went out again.

We made sure we were out of range of the intranet network and that nobody was around before we said anything. Not for any reason. Just caution.

“So,” I said, “Familiars. How do they work?”

Max shrugged. “The theory is the same as for fetishes, living things are just far better at channelling the excess magic. A familiar – wait. Kayden, are you telling me you’ve been holed up in hospital with that thing on your arm and you haven’t done any research whatsoever into your condition?”

“I just figured I’d ask you.”

“Of course you did. You should be fine so long as Kylie doesn’t channel enough magic to kill you. It might make you tired if she does a lot of channelling, but with the nature of her spell I don’t expect that to be much of an issue. Kylie, you should be able to channel more magic so long as Kayden is within range, but if you move too far apart then using your spell is going to be harder until you’re close again.”

“How big is the range?” Kylie asked.

“No idea. It’s variable. You’ll have to experiment. You can channel your spell and Kayden can’t, so you need to be careful not to put the both of you in danger.” He grimaced. “More danger than the whole situation puts you in automatically, I mean.”

I glanced at Kylie. She shrugged. I felt a bit sorry for Max; he hadn’t grown up with his life in constant magical danger like we had. He seemed to think it was new.

“The prophecy I gave,” Kylie said. “Did you record it?”

“I did, but my tablet’s somewhere in the labyrinth of tunnels, so…”

“I remember it,” I said. “Anyone got a pen and paper?”

Max did. “You remember it?” he asked while I wrote it down. “How? You were kind of… I’m surprised you could even hear it.”

“I couldn’t, really. It, uh, it ran through my mind while she spoke it. I still remember every word; I don’t know if it’s possible to forget them.” I handed him the prophecy. The other two were staring at me. “What? Is that… not something that should happen to a familiar?”

“I don’t know!” Max said, throwing up his hands. “Nobody knows! There hasn’t been one around who can be asked about their experience before! Maybe it’s normal?”

“I don’t remember the prophecies when I give them, though,” Kylie said.

“He’s not casting the spell. You are. He’s just channelling the extra magic. I guess that lets him… witness it…? I don’t know.” He handed the prophecy to Kylie. “It’s, um, a little concerning.”

“A little concerning?” I asked. “There’s child sacrifice in it!”

“We’re not sure it’s a child sacrifice. The Child could just be a symbolic name. Like how the Eye calls me the Staffbreaker because its first prophecy about me was about me breaking a staff.”

“Oh, good; a human sacrifice who may or may not be a child. I feel so much better about that.”

“Or, we’re supposed to find this Child and save them from the… jailers,” Max said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “We really don’t have enough information to interpret any of this.”

“Or we do, and we’re just not putting the pieces together,” I mumbled. To Kylie, I said, “This is solveable, right? The Eye wouldn’t tell us unless it was solveable?”

“Theoretically, sure,” she said. “But I’ve failed to find the right information to prevent something horrible before. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to do it.”

“I hate the Eye. I hate how damn obscure it is.”

“Join the club.”

“Well, we know one thing about it,” Max said. “We know that the normal time limit it works in for you, Kylie, doesn’t apply here. This first verse is identical to the prophecy given at Duniyasar, and that was over six months ago.”

“We, uh, could take this to Alania,” I suggested, because it needed to be suggested. But obviously we weren’t going to do that. The spell had spoken about jailers and child sacrifices and while I didn’t think the school would do something like that, I’d seen a lot of new things about Skolala Refujeyo very recently that were rather more sinister than I’d expected. Best not to trust anyone we didn’t have to.

“Alania’s got enough on her plate,” Max said, which was a polite enough excuse for our secrecy that we all silently agreed to use it. “I’m sorry about all this. If I hadn’t gone down there in the first place…”

“Yeah, I’m still confused as to why you did that alone,” Kylie said.

“It’s… complicated. I just can’t believe that after all that, we found basically nothing useful in exchange for nearly dying.”

I tapped the familiarity mark on my arm. “I mean…”

“Okay, yes, but that could’ve happened anywhere with so much magic about.”

“Is there anywhere else with that much magic about?”

“Not the point. We made it there and… I feel like we’re missing something, you know? Ugh, this is going to bother me forever.”

“You’re not going back down,” Kylie said firmly.

“No, no. I won’t. I don’t think we’d survive long enough to be dragged out by janitors a second time.”

That was how he’d gotten us out? The janitors? “How had they known we were down there?”

He shrugged. “They were investigating some damage, apparently.”

“Damage? The tooth castle?”

“Probably?”

“Did they explain why they have a creepy as fuck tooth castle down there?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Kayden, but the school janitors are not particularly enthusiastic conversationalists. Anyway, I didn’t get to speak to them. All three of us were unconscious at the time. I would’ve thought that the teeth were self-explanatory, though.”

I stared. “How?”

“Well, you know how spells are created, right? This place is designed to trap, contain and sell magic. They take yours through the scholarships, but wouldn’t it be better to be able to ensnare them as they’re being born, lure them to be created already inside your trap?”

“Max, if you’re telling me that we went through a trip through the tooth fairy’s castle I am going to fucking lose it.”

“I won’t tell you that, then. I’ll merely point out that the belief of hundreds of millions of children is a powerful thing, and the belief in a ritual that allows the trade of one’s own body parts with a supernatural being as a signifier of growing up and passing development milestones… there are a lot of different kinds of spells that a myth like that can make.”

“And the giant graveyard I found?”

“Death consumes a lot of the human imagination. A massive part of every culture is the thought on death, its meaning, what happens after it and what rituals it entails, as well as the process of grieving and fear of mortality. I’d have to assume that there are several such spaces down there, for different cultures. I mean, I didn’t expect to run into anything like that down there, but it appears that I made several incorrect assumptions, so.”

“Are there real people buried down there?”

“I don’t know. Probably?”

“Fucking hell.”

Max shrugged. “Well, you know what they say. Don’t go poking around the sinister underhalls of your magic school unless you’re prepared to find secret spell trapping graveyards.”

“Do they say that?”

“Probably not. But they should.”

I rolled my eyes and stared out over the crisp snow. Apart from the valley we’d first arrived at the school in, this had been the first outdoor space I’d seen at Skolala Refujeyo, and this, almost a year later, was the first time I’d bothered to actually go out in it. There were so many strange places and even stranger things here, and I simply didn’t have the context to know what we were going to run into next, or even how to deal with the consequences of the things we’d already found.

But if we stuck together, we could probably figure it out.