Riordan’s skin crawled. Just being in this clearing with the agents made his badger pace inside him, agitated and closer to the surface than normal. Mark watched Riordan with too much damned understanding in his eyes. Fucking kid. He was a porcupine. What did he know about a badger’s temper?

He couldn’t even pretend it was the clearing itself that set him on edge. To Riordan, the atmosphere was peaceful. An endless sleep lay over the magic here and filled Riordan’s ragged soul with restful feelings. He hated it, of course, but it wasn’t something that riled up his badger.

No, it was Agent Heeren’s damned eyes and Agent Ahlgren’s damned ears. Heeren looked like she could see right inside his head. And Ahlgren was a habitual eavesdropper, bending space to magically lurk near distant conversations. De la Fuente was the least upsetting of the three agent mages, not including Quinn who wasn’t born into the mage bullshit, though in truth, De la Fuente’s essence magic might be the thing most capable of spotting the major changes to Riordan’s magical system despite the tree spirit’s shroud.

The tree spirit hadn’t just cloaked its own presence, here and in the spirit realm. It had cloaked Riordan as well, filling him with shadows that only grew deeper the more one tried to pierce them. Frankie had been able to make out some details by relaxing her magical examination and taking a holistic impression of Riordan, but any more focused approach yielded increasingly vague results.

Like it wasn’t suspicious that Riordan was hard to scan. It implied he had things to hide, which wasn’t a great combination with trying to convince everyone that he was corruption-free and not a threat.

The spirit didn’t think about any of that though. It was done being bothered and considered Riordan one of its people, so it hid him just as it hid itself. That was all. It wasn’t like the spirit answered to anyone or had to convince anyone that its choices were correct.

Riordan was not jealous of a tree. Totally not jea- Fine, he was jealous. Stupid spirits just doing what they wanted and fuck the rules.

“Are we done here?” Riordan growled at Mark, since he didn’t think it wise to actually engage with the agents at the moment.

Mark, being the saint that he was, just rolled his eyes at Riordan and said, “I’ll check.”

Riordan and Maudy watched Mark walk over to the cluster of agents near the base of the tree. De la Fuente and Quinn were managing operations over there, cleaning up stray bits of harmful magic by draining the component magic types into different objects. Quinn handled the death magic and De la Fuente handled everything else.

Essence mages might not be able to use the other magic types, but moving around the raw mana was one of their specialties. Honestly, given what Quinn said about not always staying for the clean-up, Riordan suspected that essence mages of De la Fuente’s skill level could likely clean up death magic as long as they were careful not to try and use it in any way. That didn’t mean it wasn’t far safer to have Quinn do it since he was here.

Ahlgren and Heeren were taking photos, making notes, tagging the items, and then a lot of them went into a little spatial fold Ahlgren made. Riordan didn’t think it was a pocket space as much as a quick way to send the items back to their base for later examination, but he wasn’t really sure. There was so much about the different magical affinities that he’d never bothered to learn about. He’d known roughly how each type of affinity mage fought and what defenses they might have, but utility spells? It hadn’t come up much.

“Why do you hate them so much?” Maudy asked Riordan suddenly, “I mean, they are mages, but they are here to help.”

Riordan bit back his first rude response to that and gave it some thought. Maudy, young and idealistic as she was, deserved a real answer. It was interesting that it was the youngest and oldest shifters who got along with Riordan the best. The majority of the shifters found him unsettling.

“I… don’t hate them,” Riordan said slowly. “I don’t know them as individuals enough to hate them. However, they represent multiple organizations, some of whose interests do not align with my own, and I am wary of them.”

“Aren’t the Department of Magic the good guys? As much as there is a thing? And allowing for bureaucratic idiocy...” Maudy said, her voice trailing off as she realized how many conditionals she was placing on her own question.

“They serve an important purpose,” Riordan allowed, “They are too new to know if they serve it well. And in being new, those divided loyalties and old habits of the traditional ways are still heavily in play.”

“Is this about them being mages?”

“Yes and no. Most members of the magical community are technically mages, since that really just means a human with one or more magical affinities. But the department was founded by capital M Mages. The great house mages. They have such a convoluted web of interhouse politics, between the different great houses and all their branches and the minor houses, supported by old rivalries and alliances and marriages and grudges. You pretty much have to be born into it to understand it. And because those are the sort of mages that originally founded the Department, then those same great house politics carry over.”

Maudy blinked at that, trying to study the mages as if she could tell which of them was plotting what just by looking. “That doesn’t sound efficient.”

Riordan barked out a laugh. “I’m sure it’s all highly organized and choreographed. They seem to be getting along despite obviously being tied to different great house loyalties, which probably means that they want this to succeed enough to pretend it is neutral ground on the surface.”

“How do you know they have different loyalties?” Maudy wrinkled her nose at this whole mess.

“Their affinities. The great houses of a region each specialize in one of the different specialties. Branch houses either follow the same specialty or they are a branch that specializes in another affinity on behalf of the main branch. Composite affinities are mostly the minor houses, though they sometimes are a branch house. Or there isn’t always enough of some of the affinities to have a full house at all.”

“Really?” Maudy raised a brow, “I thought that was an exaggeration. A good pack flourishes from a diversity of skills. The more affinities, the better, in my opinion.”

Riordan snorted a laugh. “Shifters aren’t really any different once you remember that our equivalent ‘house affinity’ is the shifter affinity. We like people to have second and third affinities to support the pack, but anyone without the shifter affinity is always a bit outside the pack, aren’t they?”

Maudy opened her mouth to object, likely because there were a few non-shifter members of the Sleeping Bear pack, but then closed it, thinking. Riordan got it. Someone could be welcome and loved in a pack, even if they weren’t born shifter or married in despite being shifter, but they didn’t take shifter roles unless they were something truly exceptional. Riordan had heard a few unverified stories of mages being a leader or shaman for some historical pack and one about a human who led wisely alongside her shifter spouse, but it was rare. Shifters lived too long and too differently and people in the pack without the shifter affinity were always just a bit out of sync.

And even more than that, people with two affinities were uncommon. People with three were rare. People with four or more usually weren’t born that way and were the stuff for legends. Which, Riordan realized, was a truly uncomfortable thought in light of his current status of having four affinities, two primary and two composite. Spirit and shifter, which was spirit and life. Death and blood, which was death and life.

Riordan felt a sudden hysterical urge to try and acquire the life affinity just for symmetry, but swallowed it down.

Fortunately, Mark returned to their side of the clearing, removing the need for Riordan to continue his current conversation. Unfortunately, that meant Riordan had to deal with the current situation again. His grumpiness deepened.

“So,” Riordan grumbled, “what’s the word?”

“They are almost done with the initial cleanup,” Mark explained. “They are going to study the things left behind here and will want to check back in a bit to make sure that they didn’t miss anything once the energies here have settled down more, but they are talented at this. I certainly couldn’t clean up magical traces like that.”

“It’s their job. I imagine they have had far more practice handling lingering magic from other casters than most, since they literally go around and deal with rogue mages. Most people just need to master their own magic,” Riordan mused, begrudgingly respectful of the agents’ skill.

Because Mark was correct. Cleaning up magic like this wasn’t something Riordan had seen much. Most shaman blocked or countered spells when they fought other casters. Or just tried to nuke the other caster first. When someone did get cursed, it required pulling out the weird spells. That was why Quinn was able to easily fix Mark when he’d gotten hit with a blood magic spell and why Quinn was the one doing the same for Billy now, even going as far as trying to remove any lingering side effects.

The best that a typical shaman could have done would have been to rip the foreign magic out of them and then boost their healing or, if they were lucky, possibly contracted with a spirit specialized in eating that kind of spell. It lacked precision.

Man, how long would it take Riordan to learn the kind of precision and efficiency used by Quinn? The death mage had lived and breathed magic as his only concern ever since it claimed his life and the only way to extend his existence and his sanity was to master it.

Someone like Riordan could throw power around and brute force issues. He’d never needed to be concerned about wasting power unless he was dealing with a rare extended issue. Most of his magic had been used for shifting and for boosting his physical state and healing, which weren’t major burst spells. Riordan’s original well was deep.

His current wells were smaller, having been split off from the single well. Wells grew in depth with use. Even with Riordan’s issues accessing his magic, he was constantly using his shifter magic to reinforce his body, slowly growing that well. What would happen if he let the wells become significantly different in size?

Gods, another potential worry that Riordan really didn’t need. He wasn’t even able to access his wells properly yet. One step at a time.

Riordan just hoped he really had time to set up his foundations before disaster dogged his steps.