Heading to runecrafting class so early was a bit unfortunate because it meant that when the Fiore ‘happened to bump into me’ in the corridors I didn’t have a convenient excuse to rush off. I could have lied, I supposed, but if he had something to say he’d only find me again later to say it.

Also, he had Socks in his arms, running slender fingers idly through his thick white fur and looking full supervillain. I lingered to give her head a nice scratch.

“Kayden,” the Fiore said with a bright smile. “It’s been a while.”

“It sure has. How have you been?”

“Oh, well enough. I’ve been asked to take on teaching some classes here next semester, so I’ll be around more then. And if I’m not mistaken, congratulations are owed to you, or at least to your friend Kylie, yes?”

Oh. This was about the familiarity link. Of course it was about the familiarity link, the only thing anyone cared about was the familiarity lin –

“I’m given to understand that she’s training with one of the Nic Fionn. In Duniyasar, too. One could hardly hope for better circumstances to practice with a prophecy.”

I realised I’d frozen when Socks squeaked insistently and shoved her head into my hand. I got back to the all-important task of petting her and considered my response. He knew that Kylie had Fionnrath’s Destiny. Or maybe he didn’t know and was offering idle congratulations on finding a good teacher. Or maybe he suspected, and was waiting for my reaction to confirm things, in which case, sorry Kylie.

I nodded. “Lydia must have owed Alania a favour or something. She is very knowledgable about prophecies.”

“Knowledgable, I would suppose, about one prophecy in particular.”

I shrugged. “I myself am not knowledgable about prophecies. You’d have to ask her.”

“What’s your relationship with Kylie like?”

“She’s my mage. You know that.”

“I meant on a personal level. How well do you get along?”

Huh? Why did that matter? If he wanted to drive a wedge between me and Kylie for some reason, he was barking up the wrong tree. “What is this, twenty questions?”

“Do you consider her your sister?”

“I… guess?” I wasn’t sure. I’d never had any sisters to compare to. Most of the people I knew with siblings weren’t nearly as close to them as I was to my best friends, so while the comparison had been made by several people about my closest friends, I’d never really understood it. “What do you want, Fiore?”

The Fiore looked disappointed, like I’d failed some sort of test. Maybe I wasn’t being subtle enough for his political sensibilities. Carefully, he said, “Just an innocent question, Kayden. Some people take family very seriously. My family owes you a sizeable debt, after all that nonsense with Alania’s apprentice and the Guardian Ring, and the people of Fionnrath are known to take their family responsibilities extremely seriously.”

Oh! He was offering help. The Fiore must have drawn the same conclusions that Max did about what Kylie’s spell meant for her and was looking for a straightforward way to repay a debt by… offering protection, I supposed? Somehow? I was pretty sure that his family, like Max’s, was politically irrelevant in comparison to the Fionn bloodline. If Kylie really needed political help, it’d be almost as useful to ask my family.

But there might be something he could do.

“Kylie’s peprfectly fine,” I shrugged. “She tends not to make enemies, and a lot of people out there want the best for her.”

“Oh. Well, then – ”

“She does worry about her family a lot, though. They’re commonfolk, as I’m sure you know, and she’d rather they stay as far away from the mage world as possible. But, as you say, the people of Fionnrath don’t really have a concept of that kind of division, and can be very much into family, so I guess our big worry is that they might… get them involved. Which wouldn’t end well for anybody.”

“I see. It’s always a pity when one can’t protect one’s family.”

“Yes, being trapped in a secret school most of the time will do that. It really would be better if someone out there was looking out and protecting them from interference – or, if they found something they couldn’t protect them from, at least forewarning Kylie of it. She’d be able to concentrate a lot better on her studies with something like that. But,” I shrugged, “I guess that’s one of the problems with coming here from the commonfolk, right? Not having that kind of support system.”

“Indeed. Well, I’m sure she’s got nothing to worry about. When you give Kylie my congratulations, please let her know that she has more friends than she thinks.”

“I will. Thank you for the reassurance.” Reluctantly, I pulled my hand away from Socks, who meeped in betrayal. “Sorry to be rude, but I really need to get to class.”

“Of course, don’t let me keep you. Have a good day, Kayden.”

“You, too. Uh, Fiore?”

“Yes?”

“Does Socks ever take potions?”

“Occasionally, for health complaints. Why?”

“Are they alright for her? They don’t cause any problems?”

The Fiore looked confused for a moment, then his eyes locked on the familiarity mark on my arm. I really was going to have to start wearing long sleeves again. “They’ve always been fine,” he said, sounding a little puzzled. “She doesn’t like taking medication, but that’s just because she’s a cat.”

“Right. Thanks.”

I headed off to class.

Instruktanto Animus was in one of his hopped-up-on-caffeine moods, and must have been feeling particularly energetic because he’d forgone his usual dangly amathyst earrings for tiny silver bells that jingled constantly as he darted his head around. It was easily the most distracting thing I’d ever seen on a teacher, and that included Instruktanto Cooper’s purple Hulk shorts and Instruktanto Miratova’s invisible dragon. He strode across the front of the classroom, gestured widely with both arms and announced, “Today, you will be constructing your own rune circle from scratch!”

Oh. Good. I was looking forward to that. Presumably we wouldn’t be doing the kind of complicated nonsense that Max’s advanced class was doing, but starting on simple constructions sounded sensible.

“Your job is to use runes to create fire.”

That sounded less sensible.

Creating fire with the runes I knew shouldn’t be hard. I was pretty sure everyone in the room could do it. The problem would be to create not very much fire with the runes I knew. I could just about see myself setting the paper alight in a huge fireball and singing my eyebrows off.

When making runic circles, there were a few different ways to go about things. The most common thing to do was to create an “empty” circle; that is, one where the threshhold of power needed to activate it was higher than the power in the ichor used, and activate it by channelling magic through it. This had several advantages; you could make more powerful circles this way, because people could generally channel a lot more power than they could get out of the raw ichor in their bodies, or was convenient to store. It was theoretically possible to make massive circles that would need a lot of ichor, but the further the power had to travel, the more power it lost, so it wasn’t really a practical way of increasing a spell’s power. Empty circles could also, if you were careful about how you made them, be reusable, although this was a bit too advanced for our class and somewhat unreliable at the best of times – it meant constructing a circle that wouldn’t use the power in the ochor that made it once you’d activated it, and channelling enough magic through it to activate it without burning it out. And, of course, you could control the timing of activation; they only worked when power was channelled through them, so you could make your circle in advance, carry it around, and channel power through it when you wanted to use it.

Empty circles did have one massive downside, at least to me, specifically. And that was that they could only be used by people who could channel magic. Which I couldn’t.

So I got to work constructing an auto-activated circle; one that would use the power in the ichor I was writing with as soon as I put down the last stroke. Since we were making fire, something that could only use a little bit of magical power was probably best anyway. I sketched it out with pen, first, so that I’d have a record of what I’d done for Instruktanto Animus, then slid the tip of my pen into my witch mark and got to work.

As I sketched out the broad, sweeping strokes of the runes, I couldn’t help but think about the skeleton we’d found below the lake. The lines etched into its bones had undoubtedly been runes; it didn’t make sense for them to be anything else. But they’d been nothing like the shapes I was sketching; they’d been all sterile lines and sharp shapes and the way they flowed and connected was less like a series of sweeping circles and more like a, a spiderweb, or, like Kylie had noted, a circuit diagram. The circular shapes that we drew were all about directing power down a singular path, like a river; there were little branching streams and eddies of power branching off and reconnecting and for some really complicated systems there might be two or three ‘rivers’ running ar once, but everything was designed to flow together, in concert, towards a goal. My memories of that skeleton… well, I didn’t have the memory for shapes that Max did, and having abandoned our tablets down there meant that none of us had photos. But that had looked a lot more like a network, to me. Why would anyone make runes like that? The rivers of power would interfere with each other and create a chaotic mess. You’d have to be extremely knowledgable and precise about exactly where the power was going to flow at any moment or you wouldn’t get any coherent result at all.

“How’s it going, Kayden?” Instruktanto Animus asked, pausing behind my desk in his usual slow circle of the classroom.

“Fine,” I said, moving my arm so he could see the plan for my circle. “Hey, Animus… how do runes work?”

“You know how runes work. The power flows – ”

“Yeah, I get the concept, but it’s not just physics, is it? Any more than potions are just chemistry. The force of magic is from the force of mass human perception, so there’s a, a sociological element to it, right?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“Well, are there other, uh, ‘runic languages’ out there? Other ways of diagramming power?”

“Of course. Before communication became so universally simple, there were thousands of little runic languages. Some artists and historians still like to work in the more beautiful ones. We don’t teach them outside of history and sociology classes because they don’t tend to be very good; the reason this language dominates is because it’s so much more effective. It was developed from the roots of hundreds of others, taking what’s most effective and discarding the rest, refining it into something far stronger than any ancient scribe could have achieved.”

I nodded. That made sense. And if it was the language that everyone used, the sheer weight of that belief alone would give it an extra advantage over any other. “So everyone uses this one? Except occasional artists?”

“Generally, yes. You will find a few enchanters – you know, people who embed spells into objects instead of people – who will work in niche languages, because of the materials they work with. The alphabet of any culture is primarily defined by the implements they used for writing, and the materials they wrote it into.”

Maybe that was it. Would writing the swooping circles I was used to be really hard to do in bone? Maybe the jerky, straight-line diagrams were the best someone could do, given the medium at hand… no, that didn’t make sense. I’d watched Max etch runes, our kind of runes, into silver, and plenty of people made art carving detailed curvy shapes into bone. Maybe the skeleton was really, really old? Before the development of our runes? No. We’d found it in the middle of a maze built out of our runes, decently intact, in a damp cave. There was no way it could have been that old.

I supposed the most important thing was

With body still but mind afar

The Heiress of Duniyasar

Strays far from the Heartbound’s sight

To die under the full moon’s light.

The Faithless, seeking Faith restored

Uses runes and poison as a sword

With smile and a friendly hand

To kill her over timeless sands.

Huh. Fine, Destiny; I was in the middle of something, but fine.

I guess I was thinking about that, now.