“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Talbot said, pacing the small classroom we’d gathered in. “Fionnrath? Really? And nobody noticed their spell was missing for fifteen years?”

Hua tapped her fingers thoughtfully on the desk in front of her. “We shouldn’t tell Chery about this. You shouldn’t have told us about this.”

“Yeah, well, I’m tired of being told to keep things about myself secret for other people’s benefit,” Kylie said.

“Do you have any idea what the consequences would be if this got out?”

“No. Do you?”

“… No. But they successfully kept the disappearance of an extremely famous spell secret for fifteen years. That takes a lot of coordinated effort. This is important, and if your legacy friend thinks they’ll go to extreme lengths to keep control of it, I have no doubt they’d also be invested in keeping this quiet.”

“Hua’s right,” Talbot said. “This kind of knowledge is a bargaining chip. Don’t spread it around.” He swept his hair out of his face with his spell. “I can’t believe you, of all people, are a legacy mage.”

“I’m not a legacy mage!”

“Kylie, you’re a legacy mage from one of the most famous and important mage families outside of Refujeyo, by definition.”

“They’re not my family!” Kylie snapped. “Just because they couldn’t manage to kill some guy and he came to Australia and had kids and died years before I was even born doesn’t make us family! My family are – ”

“Easier to protect if you accet things as they are,” Hua said calmly. “You might not think of yourself as a Na Fionn, but there is no way you will convince the others of the bloodline otherwise. If you can’t meet them on their level, you will not be able to engage dimplomatically with them.”

“I still think we should get Cheryl involved,” Talbot said. “I’m sure she’s trustworthy. She can keep a secret.”

“Probably,” Hua said, “but in general, the less people who know a secret, the better. Anybody, no matter how trustworthy, is some level of risk. For example, I’d say that you’re trustworthy with this sort of thing, and you’re already discussing telling Cheryl.”

Talbot glared at her, which I didn’t know he could actually do, being blind. “I wasn’t going to go behind Kylie’s back or anything. I just – ”

“I’m just saying,” Hua said calmly, “that if you tell Cheryl, she might find herself in a similar position to you, with somebody she believes to be completely trustworthy. And they might find themselves in a similar situation. The more people know, the less a secret can be controlled.” She looked to Kylie and me. “Do you trust your surveyanto to have your best interests at heart?”

“Yes,” I said, while Kylie said, “I think we have to.”

“Then us telling other people gets in her way. If you trust her to have your best interests at heart, you need to let her hold onto the leverage she needs to protect you.”

“This is so complicated,” I groaned, burying my head in my hands. “Why does the politics always land on us?”

“Well, let’s see,” Talbot said, counting off on his fingers. “You were two witches joining the school in the same year and decided to hang out together, immediately becoming the centre of attention. You decided to make friends with the Acanthos and run about with a bunch of professional diplomats-in-training with too much time and money. You, for some reason neither of you have explained, decided to volunteer for a massively dangerous familiarity experiment, that somehow actually worked. You’ve somehow managed to piss off multiple teachers, every time Mae or Terry mention you you’re doing some new weird experiment, and now you two are the fucking Destiny of Fionnrath and her human familiar. Aside from the Fionnrath thing, I’d say it’s mostly your fault.”

“That’s fair,” Kylie said.

“No it isn’t,” I said. “I firmly maintain that none of this is our fault. Anyway, what about you, Talbot? Your life is pretty dramatic, too, and it’s not your fault.”

“Perhaps this is the true curse of witches,” he said drily. “Drama.”

“My life isn’t dramatic,” Hua shrugged.

“Nothing catches fire in yours,” Talbot said, “but it’s very dramatic in a family drama kind of way.”

“Also,” Kylie put in, “it isn’t over. Plenty of time for something to catch fire.”

“Oh. Thanks. Truly a lovely thought.”

Kylie glanced at her tablet and scowled. “Sorry to dump a lot of personal drama on you guys and run,” she said, “but Kayden and I have to go. Kayden, check your messages. Malas knows we’re back and wants to see us.”

“Already? I saw a doctor a few days ago! Is the whole year going to be like this?”

“We did kind of hide out in his ward a lot at the end of last semester,” she shrugged. “Maybe we gave the impression we were really sick?”

“You’re sick?” Hua asked.

“No,” I said. “Everyone’s just convinced that Kylie’s spell is going to kill one or both of us at any minute.”

“Oh, wait,” Kylie said, “does he know about the Fionnrath’s destiny thing? He’s going to freak out if he does. Everyone says I have a powerful spell, but I doubt he expected it to be that powerful.”

“Ugh. I hope not. He won’t let either of us out of his sight ever again.”

The kuracar wanted to see each of us separately, and when it was my turn, it became clear why – a lot of his questions were invasive and personal, even for a doctor. I was used to this kind of thing from years of having my curse monitored by Dr Marley, and it seemed kind of a waste of time to be cagey with someone who could examine all of my individual organs with his mind anyway, so I answered them as best I could. He spent a good fifteen minutes asking incredibly detailed questions about the physical symptoms of being away from Kylie, being close to Kylie, when Kylie was casting, et cetera, before finally reaching out to scan me with his spell. I braced myself for the unpleasant tingle of his magic displacing Kylie’s as it washed through me.

It lasted longer this time. He stared at me for several seconds, scanning, before finally pulling back.

“I’m fine,” I told him, shaking the feeling off. “You don’t have to be such a mother hen. The spell isn’t hurting me.”

“I am concerned about the impact of more than one spell,” he told me.

“… What?”

“Your spell has been dormant for, quite probably, your whole life. We’ve never been certain why. The most likely reason is that one of the techniques you have used to bind it has worked, but such techniques are not infallible. You’ve been in a very high energy magic environment since then for quite some time, been through the Trial twice, and now you’ve had Kylie’s magic in your body for three weeks. That amount of magical interference would be expected to shred any binding and wake your spell up, and I’d like to be completely certain that that hasn’t happened, because if your spell is still dormant then that is very good news.”

“It is?”

“You want to avoid waking it, yes? You should certainly want to do so now. Having it awaken while you’re a familiar is absolutely very dangerous.”

“Y-yeah. But I don’t see how…?”

“If the things you’ve been through haven’t awoken it, then it’s very probable that it can’t be awakened, at least not easily. Perhaps it’s defective in some way. Perhaps it needs specific conditions to awaken. Or there is the obvious incompatibility possibility, of course.”

“… the obvious?” I asked.

“You know, I assume, that spells can be picky about their hosts. Some will bind to and work for only people with specific characteristics.”

“Like members of certain bloodlines,” I said, nodding.

“That’s a popular one, yes, but not unique. Some will bind only to people with hair a certain colour, or born in a certain month. Some will bind to people with a characteristic that can be lost, such as virgins, or people who have never eaten meat, and they will stop working if that characteristic is lost.”

“You think it bonded to me for some characteristic I lost?” I asked.

“Unlikely. Those spells tend to have a… sense, for picking hosts likely to maintain the relevant characteristic. Spells pick compatible hosts. Anything reliant on behaviour is impossible to determine in a six month old baby. But spells do make mistakes. You were six months old, yes? Far too young to have formed key parts of your identity. But old enough for people, and spells, to make fairly reliable estimates about them.”

“I… guess? What do you mean?”

“Kayden, have you ever considered that perhaps your spell was meant for a woman?”

Huh. I hadn’t, actually. “Is that likely?”

“No possibility is ‘likely’, simply because there are so many possibilities. But it is possible. And it would be good news.”

“… how?”

“Because it’s a criterion you don’t fit, and that’s not going to change. So if it’s the case, then that spell isn’t going to awaken, fight with the spell you’ve engraved in your arm, and burn you to death at random.”

Fair point. From a practical standpoint, a situation where the spell in my heart would remain dormant forever was a good thing. But the idea that the spell wouldn’t work because of my gender made me viscerally uncomfortable. A lot of my problems before Refujeyo had been because I’d been cursed, and a lot after finding the school had been because the spell wouldn’t work. The idea that so many problems in my life might be specifically because I was trans was just… it was so fucking cliché.

So as good as such a simple answer would be from a practical standpoint, I was pretty relieved that Malas was clearly wrong.

“You’re wrong,” I said, shaking my head. “I can buy that the spell might make a mistake and pick me as a baby, and then be stuck with me, but when I first met you and asked you to remove it, you said it was probably impossible. You said that even if you gave me a heart transplant it was a toss-up on whether it would actually leave. Why would it be that clingy with an incompatible host?”

“Hmm. That is a good point. But then, we can’t remove Kylie’s spell, either. There may be something else in your nature that makes magic bind to you easily.”

“I’m just walking flypaper for spells? In general?”

“Possibly. We don’t have an exceptionally large sample size. Not very many people seek spell removal, so while I can tell you that your spell is exceptionally clingly, I don’t have statistics on just how exceptional it is. And we have almost no human familiarity data at all, of course.”

“Of course. Why would anything ever be simple. Hey, remember how you guys wanted to check to see if Kylie and I were related?”

“Oh, that. No relation. Almost certainly.”

“Almost certainly?”

“Certainly enough that the possibility can be disregarded, probably. But nuclear DNA testing for relationships becomes inherently less reliable over each generation of separation. DNA is… well. You have half of your mother’s nuclear DNA and half of your father’s, right? So if I wanted to DNA test for your relationship to either of them, the mathematics is easy. I can find some relatively rare genes in one and see if you have them. There’s a 50% chance for each gene.”

I nodded. “People DNA test paternity all the time.”

“That particular test doesn’t rely on the full genetic code, it counts repeated sequences of… well, it doesn’t matter. The point is, the genetic relationship between you and one of your parents, assuming you are their biological offspring, is 50%. Now, let’s imagine that you have a full sibling. They’re also getting half of each parent’s genes, and if you chart it out or crunch the numbers you find that the overlap in the genes you get and the genes they get is 50% – that is, you would share an average of 50% of your genes with a sibling. Okay?”

“Right,” I said.

“Okay. But that is an average. It is possible for you and your sibling to just happen to get most of the same genes from each parent, and share more than 50%. It’s possible that you just happen to get a lot of different genes from each parent, and share less. You could, in theory, be almost genetically identical, or almost completely genetically different, from a sibling. A lot of genes are shared by every human on the planet and useless for testing, but there are still plenty of varied ones, and the chance of you and your sibling happening to get none of the same unusual genes is so absurdly low that it can be discounted – we’re talking, one in several times the number of atoms in the universe level of low. But let’s imagine that your sibling has a child. Your neice or nephew has fifty per cent of your sibling’s genes, halving the amount that you and they, on average, have in common. So on average, you would share 25% of your rare or unusual genes with your neice or nephew. The chances of you sharing a lot of genes go down, and the chances of you sharing not very many genes increase significantly. Now let’s say you have a child. Your child and your sibling’s child are cousins, and should share an average of about one eighth of their unusual genes, but the chances – ”

“I get it,” I cut in. “More distance means more chance of no actual shared unusual DNA, so a DNA test wouldn’t pick up the relationship.”

“Essentially, yes. It’s not generally considered a concern because the number of genes humans have… well, it depends on how you define ‘gene’, but with so many genes the chances of accidentally erasing any evidence of a relationship is very low even for distant relationships. But it’s possible to be related by blood, and not genetics.”

“And spells tend to care about the bloodline, not the DNA,” I said. “So it’s possible to both qualify for a bloodline-restricted spell but not have any relationship that a DNA test would pick up.”

“Some spells might go by DNA, but… yes. That is possible. If incredibly unlikely.”

Hmm. The chances that I was related to Kylie through her great-grandfather were probably low enough to discount, then. But what if another member of the Fionnrath bloodline had left the town, far earlier? Early enough that there was a good chance we didn’t share any DNA, but the Destiny would know, so that was why it wouldn’t let me go? How many generations would it have to be? Probably way too many. Those online DNA test sites said they could track your ancestry for thousands of years, so either they were lying or we had enough genes that we could be reasonably expected to carry traces of all of our ancestors from that long ago. And if Fionn had had descendants running around the rest of the world for hundreds or thousands of years, then the spell would’ve gone missing long before now. No; we probably weren’t related. Which meant that the simplest answer might be that I really was ‘walking flypaper’ for spells, for some unknown reason. But that seemed unlikely. I’d been wandering around in tunnels full of them for hours and none of them had taken hold. Why only mine and Kylie’s?

And did Malas know about Fionnrath’s Destiny? “Hey,” I asked, “did the DNA test come up with anything else? You were looking for a relationship between us specifically because of the spell thing, did it – ?”

“That’s something you two should discuss with your surveyanto,” Malas said evasively. He did know, then. That made sense. Alania must have suspected the identity of Kylie’s spell months before that test was done, because she’d sent Clara to investigate. And she’d told us to tell Malas about Fionnrath’s Destiny if she never came back. It was probably important for him to know about Kylie’s spell for healthcare reasons.

“I want to see you again next week,” Malas said. “Just to make sure there are no changes.”

“Of course you do,’ I grumbled. But there was no point in making a fuss. I was getting thorough healthcare, whether I wanted to or not.