We were intercepted by a few classmates on the way to our room, all wanting to make small talk about the holidays and segue into questions about the familiar thing, but not many. Max and I had paced the tunnels around our room many times for his research, and knew how to avoid the most populated ones. We were, however, unable to avoid the strange woman lurking right outside our door, next to an unhappy looking Alania Miratova.

The woman was tall, with pale weathered skin, kindly eyes and her long grey hair in a loose plait down her back. Her shapeless pale dress looked out of place in a school filled with brightly coloured mage robes. She looked like someone’s aunt who collected healing crystals and grew her own marijuana.

As soon as she saw us, her face broke into a wide smile. “You must be Kylie! I’m Lydia Na Fionn. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

“Um,” Kylie said, wrong-footed. “Same?”

“We need to talk about your future,” Lydia said.

“Perhaps,” Alania cut in, “we should let the girl get settled first? I’m certain we can arrange a meeting for after she’s recovered from her journey.”

“She deserves to know her options as soon as possible, don’t you think?”

We’d been back at Skolala Refujeyo for fifteen minutes, and already the vultures were swooping in. Max had warned us that a lot of people would be interested in us over the familiar thing, but as we were coming in? Really? I shared a slightly exasperated glance with Kylie, then looked to Max – but he didn’t notice. He glanced, shocked, between Kylie and Lydia, and then questioningly at Alania. Alania gave the tiniest nod. Max frowned and shook his head. Alania shrugged.

Max noticed my confusion and mouthed ‘Na Fionn!’ at me, as if that was supposed to clear anything up. It didn’t.

“I’m sure,” I said, “whatever sales pitch you’ve got for Kylie can wait ten minutes. Come on, Kylie.”

Lydia looked at me like she’d only just noticed I was there. “It won’t take long,” she reassured me. “I’ll have your friend back quite soon, but I’m on a bit of a tight schedule here and this is quite important. We need to speak alone.”

“I’ll come,” Alania said.

“It really isn’t your concern,” Lydia said.

“I’m her surveyanto.”

“This isn’t a Refujeyo matter.”

“She agreed to our contract. She underwent the Trial. So yes, it’s a Refujeyo matter.”

“We’ll come, too,” Max said, to my great relief. If this woman was going to try to pull Kylie into some kind of agreement over this familiar thing, we’d definitely need Max’s advice.

“I’m afraid I really can’t have that,” Lydia said. “This issue is between me and Kylie. It’s a somewhat private matter.”

Max purse his lips, but didn’t argue further. Apparently being Kylie’s surveyanto granted Alania some right to intrude, but Max and I didn’t have any such right. I suppose we’d just have to rely on Alania to –

Wait! I did! I had the right to go anywhere Kylie did!

“We’ll catch up with you later about it, Max,” I said. “I’ll go with Kylie.” When Lydia opened her mouth to protest, I shook back my sleeve and flashed her the familiarity mark on my arm.

It was at that point that I realised I had massively misread the situation. Lydia clearly wasn’t here about the familiarity thing, because she’d had no idea about it. She stared at the mark on my arm in pure shock, looked at Kylie, then back at me, and then rounded on Alania.

“This,” she said in a decidedly less friendly tone, “is something I should have been informed of, Miss Miratova.”

“My apologies,” said Alania, barely bothering to hide her amusement. “I didn’t realise I’d need to bring you up to speed on common knowledge. I thought everyone had heard of young Maximillian Acanthos’ achievement in familiarity linking?”

“Of course I’d heard about this place’s little familiar experiment,” she snapped. “But you didn’t inform me that Kylie was the subject. Do you realise how complicated this makes things?”

“Do you really want to have this discussion in the hall?”

“No, no; you’re right. I forgot myself. Kylie, if we may? And um…” she glanced at me.

“Kayden,” I said.

“Kayden. I suppose you should come along too, then. Since this involves you too, it seems.”

Kylie and I exchanged a glance, then went to follow her down the hall. Something was pressed into my hands; my tablet. Max had slipped into our room and grabbed them. I saw Kylie already setting hers to record.

We were lead into a small meeting room. Alania stood by the door, eyes not leaving Lydia as she sat opposite us across a small table and flashed Kylie another kind smile.

“Now then,” Lydia said. “Kylie. How much do you know about the Faith of Fionnrath?”

“Fionnrath’s Destiny? Um. Just the basics? One of the most powerful prophecies in the world, confined to a specific bloodline. It’s so powerful it needs to operate inside its locus, in Fionnrath, in Scotland. Prophesies specifically about the fortunes of the people of Fionnrath, granting the town great fortune and making them a political powerhouse in mage society based solely on the power of their prophecy. It. Um.” She glanced questioningly at Alania, who nodded encouragingly. “It, uh. Went missing, a little while ago.”

“Mostly correct,” Lydia agreed. “Except that it went missing fifteen and a half years ago.”

“That can’t be right,” I said. “Fifteen and a half years? Somebody would have noticed.”

“Nobody expected that it could ever leave Fionnrath,” Lydia shrugged. “It was easy to falsify a prophet and have him pretend to carry Destiny, until Miss Miratova’s little spy came specifically looking for it.”

“I had suspected,” Alania said, “that Fionnrath’s Destiny had disappeared shortly before Kylie was born. And I was correct.”

“Why shortly before I was bor – ?” Kylie’s eyes widened. Her hand flew to the mage mark on her face.

Alania and Lydia both nodded.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “I’ve never even been to Fionnrath. I’d never been out of Australia before coming here. My mother has never left Australia. I… I don’t…”

“You may not have been born in our town,” Lydia said, “but you carry our blood.”

“You remember,” cut in gently, “that the both of you consented to a DNA test at the end of last semester? We were attempting to determine if you were blood related. Well, we found no relation; but you, Kylie, are of the prophet Fionn’s bloodline. Would you happen to know anything about any non-Australian ancestors you might have?”

“My, my great-grandfather. He’s the only whitefulluh. I never met him.”

“That would be Sean,” Lydia sighed. “We thought he had died leaving town. Apparently not.”

“But I don’t… my spell doesn’t act at all like Fionnrath’s Destiny! All it does is tell me if someone close is about to die! It doesn’t give advice or good fortunes or anything like that!”

“What do you expect?” Lydia shrugged. “It’s so far away from its locus. When we get you home, you’ll have full access to its power.”

Kylie went rigid. I spoke up for her. “What do you mean, when you get her home?”

“Kylie is our cousin and our prophet. She has a place waiting for her, back home in Fionnrath. A good career, where she will be safe and prosperous and respected. And you too, Kayden. We can set off at your convenience.”

“Kylie is a student of Skolala Refujeyo,” Alania said sternly. “She has obligations here, until she graduates.”

“Fionnrath is a hundred times older than your little school, Miss Miratova. Our spell – ”

“Kylie’s spell. A spell belongs to its mage, as you well know. Kylie has entered into no contract with you and made no accord. She has no obligation to go anywhere with you, and until she graduates, her place is here.”

“This is attempted theft,” Lydia snapped. “A theft of one of the most powerful spells in the world. It will not be tolerated.”

“Theft? What theft? A free mage with a spell naturally acquired freely entered into a contract with our school. Nobody involved had any idea what spell she was even carrying. That the spell has previously been used in your town, and presumably will return to it in the future, has no bearing on – ”

“Like hell nobody knew! You expect me to believe that? Really? That our spell just happened to end up outside our town and your fucking parasite of a school just happened to pick it up in a mage who wouldn’t know any better but to agree to your contracts and she ended up as your student, specifically, and you sent a spy to us and came to collect her right as she just happened to be the centre of a familiarity experiment that would complicate movign her away; that’s all coincidence, is it?”

“Yes,” Alania said mildly. “Inexperienced witches with very powerful spells and no support tend to end up here. What did you think would happen to your Destiny if you lost control of it? Of course there would be a disaster, and it would fall on us to swoop in.”

“And the familiar?”

“I genuinely had nothing to do with that. My students are just very stupid sometimes.”

“We’re right here,” I pointed out.

“This really isn’t the disaster that you’re making it out to be,” Alania said reasonably. “The Destiny is outside of Fionnrath for a single generation. I’m sure it will return. It’s never left before, has it?”

“That’s largely what concerns me. Why now? This shouldn’t be possible. Refujeyo has organised this, somehow.”

“If Refujeyo had any control whatsoever over Fionnrath’s Destiny, even if we were full of power-hungry sociopaths, we wouldn’t steal it and risk a war. What’s the point in that? If Kylie’s experience is anything to go by, it loses most of its usefulness outside its locus. Do you really think that would be worth it?”

“You expect me to believe you’d just leave us alone?”

“I expect you to believe that if we were power-hungry sociopaths and had influence over it, we’d let it stay in Fionnrath and use it to influence you from there. You might think we’re evil, Lydia, but you have to agree that we’re not idiots.”

“… Fine. But I don’t believe this is all coincidence.”

“It’s certainly… very strange.”

“Then I suppose we have to work with what we have. She has obligations to you until she graduates, and after that, she comes home. We need to hold out until then.”

“She’s with us until she graduates, and then she certainly has the freedom to go to Fionnrath, if she wants. You can’t force her to go anywhere.”

“That spell is ours.”

“A spell belongs to its mage.”

“We never signed that treaty. By our laws, the Destiny belongs to Fionnrath, as does Fionn’s bloodline.”

“You never signed it, but most of the world did. Do you think they’d let this go?”

“Do you think we would let this go?”

I cleared my throat. “So, uh, can Kylie and I go?”

The two women looked at us. I think they’d forgotten we were there.

“Right,” Alania said. “It’s going to be difficult to find agreement on this matter, but fortunately our immediate goals line up fairly well. My job is to make sure that Kylie is properly trained. I assume that you also have interest in making sure your prophet is appropriately trained. If Kylie is willing, I’d like to arrange for one of yours to tutor her in the proper use of the Destiny.”

Lydia noded. “That is my duty. I expected it to do it in Fionnrath, but – ”

“I’m not leaving the school,” Kylie said.

“It really would be much easier to use your spell in its locus,” Lydia said.

“I don’t care. I have other classes here. And friends here. And Kayden has other classes here, and I need to be near him, right?”

“None of your other classes are half as important as learning to interpret our Destiny.”

“They are to me. If you want to teach me, I want to learn, but it has to be here.”

“… Very well. We will make do. But it’s going to be a lot slower and harder this way.”

“I’ll arrange appropriate transport and accommodations,” Alania said, rubbing her hands together. “I’m sure we can fit something into Kylie’s schedule later. Now, can my students finally go and unpack?”

Kylie and I headed back towards our room in numb silence. We were almost at our door when Kylie said, “well, I guess there’s one good thing in all of this.”

“Which is?”

“Fionnrath’s Destiny is a way cooler name for a spell than the Evil Eye of Prophecy.”