It took a monumental amount of effort for Juniper to keep the scowl off her face, but she succeeded against all odds. After all, Varis had done nothing wrong. It was entirely Juniper’s fault she kept getting caught off guard.

And this isn’t even the first time, she thought. One day. One day, I’ll actually pay attention to what time and day it is.

“Hi, Varis,” Juniper said after taking a moment to compose herself, giving him a polite nod.

“Didn’t expect to find you here,” he said conversationally. Juniper tried to recall how the conversation had gone the last time around. What had they talked about? Some small talk about the trip, Paths, and…

Don’t mention his mom. Right.

“I should say the same,” Juniper said with a laugh. She should have expected it, though. That she didn’t was her failure. Still, since they were both here, needling him for some more information couldn’t hurt. “Studying the Living arts, are you?”

Varis’s lips quirked into a smile. “I am, actually. I picked Healing as my Path.”

“Really?” Juniper asked, feigning surprise. Her surprise turned real as she lightly probed his Soul to find Varis was well into the Path Inscription stage.

Even with a light touch, scanning someone was not subtle, so doing it to someone unprompted was generally considered rather nosy, if not rude. Juniper hadn’t scanned Varis last time for fear of stepping on his toes, but talking about one’s Path was usually seen as an acceptable pretext for a scan.

It was partly for that reason that Juniper’s advancement to Path Inscription had gone largely unnoticed by her peers.

“Wow,” Juniper said, looking at Varis with new eyes. She hadn’t–couldn’t have–probed deeply, but what she’d seen suggested Varis was much farther into the stage than her. “And here I thought I was finally catching up.”

Varis tilted his head quizzically, and a moment later she felt a brush against her Soul. “You advanced?” he asked incredulously, his eyebrows rising high. “You?”

Juniper crossed her arms defensively, hugging the book she was holding to her chest. “What do you mean by that?”

Varis opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He looked away, his cheeks flushing red. “I apologize,” he said, giving her a small bow. “That was unbecoming.”

It was, though it wasn’t an unreasonable reaction–he probably thought Juniper had rushed to Path Inscription, which would have been somewhat foolish without proper backing. Either that, or he thought Juniper couldn’t have reached the peak of Soul Connection already–which was frankly just insulting, and she didn’t think Varis would be so snooty as to believe this. She wasn’t that far off from the top of the class.

“I know what I’m doing,” Juniper said, her words clipped. Then, more softly, “But I accept your apology.” He had bowed, which was shocking enough from the son of a Duke that he had to be sincere.

“So, what brings you to this section?” Varis asked, a tad awkwardly.

Juniper took the change of topic in stride. “I had a problem of a… medical nature, I guess, and I was trying to find a solution.” As she spoke, she grew suddenly aware that she was holding onto an embarrassingly outdated book and felt her cheeks heat up. “I have had little luck, though,” she said as she ducked down to a lower shelf and forced it back into its place before turning back to Varis. Juniper took a step to the side to block the young man from seeing the book’s spine.

Varis perked up, his eyes lighting up in what Juniper thought was genuine interest. “Really? Can you tell me more? I might be able to help.”

“Help?” Juniper asked, brows furrowing in suspicion. “Would you? Why? We barely know each other.” She knew him slightly better than he did her, but from his point of view, this would have been the first time they’d ever talked to each other at the academy.

“For starters, I kind of owe you for that remark,” he said, then sighed. “Actually, it’s not entirely altruistic. It’s difficult to improve as a healer without someone to practice on, you know?” He paused, face turning serious. “Unless it’s something private?”

Juniper shook her head. ‘No, it’s nothing of the sort. But there’s plenty of places down in the city that would do anything for a healer–even a complete novice.” She frowned as she remembered the shelters for the poor and the pitiless. “Have you–”

“I know,” Varis cut her off brusquely. “It’s… complicated, but going to Ebonfell isn’t an option for me right now.”

“I see.” She didn’t, but it seemed like a bad idea to press the issue. “So, you want a study partner?”

“Something like that,” he agreed. “I help you, and it helps me in return. As long as it’s within my capabilities.”

“So, a test subject,” Juniper said, pursing her lips.

He shrugged. “Basically.”

Juniper thought for a moment, then nodded. She motioned for him to follow, and she led him to one of the library’s many nooks. They sat, and Juniper described her motion sickness problem.

“I have a few ideas,” Varis said after pondering for a minute or two. “But I can’t be certain of anything until I examine you while it’s happening.”

“So you’ll try?” Juniper asked, biting her lip. “To fix me, I mean?”

“I said I would, didn’t I?” Varis said with a smile. “In the interest of full disclosure, though, keep in mind that I’m a novice. It could go wrong. I might even make it worse.” He paused. “In fact, you might have better luck going to Professor Danla directly. She can definitely fix you up.”

“Are you trying to convince me to be your test subject or not? It’s like you’re trying to scare me away.” Juniper snorted. “And really, you think Danla has time for every minor thing?” She’d studied Anatomy under Professor Danla, and she knew a caring, nurturing healer the woman was not.

Varis laughed. “True. She’d probably send you away unless you were bleeding from every orifice.”

“Alright, then. I’ll be your lab rat.” Worst case scenario, he messed up and she’d waste the iteration–but that wasn’t really that much of a problem, now, was it? “I don’t have any plans for the next few days, so whenever you’re free…?”

“After lunch, if that’s alright with you?”

Juniper nodded. “You know where the flying gym is, right?”

“I’ve been there before.” He bounced up from the sofa. “I guess I’ll see you then.”

Juniper rose as well. “See you,” she said with a wave. She watched him as he walked away until he disappeared into the stacks.

At least she now had a potential solution to her issue, Juniper thought. Not exactly what she’d been looking for, but a welcome surprise nonetheless. She was lucky Varis proved more helpful than Ghost–

Wait.

Ghost had sent her here after a book–or so Juniper had thought. But she’d leafed through the book, despite her reticence, and there was nothing there of any relevance to her problem. But she had ended up finding a solution, which meant one thing.

Ghost set me up!

Juniper scowled, and not because she was upset at Ghost for pulling a fast one on her–even if it was for her own benefit!

Rather, she was upset because Ghost had been right to do so.

If Ghost had outright told her to talk to Varis, in the privacy of her psyche, she could grudgingly admit she would have hemmed and hawed for at least another iteration unless the problem went away on its own. Trickery was absolutely the right choice on Ghost’s part.

It scared her a little. It told her that Ghost knew her, at least well enough to know what buttons to push.

And she could only wonder–what else did Ghost know?

***

Trust did not come easily to Juniper. As a former ward of a Ravens-run orphanage, she’d walked the fine line between two different worlds, never fully fitting with either of them. Polite society ran on the assumption that people were generally fair and worthy of trust. The criminal underground had taught her the opposite.

Despite herself, Juniper’s gut was of the opinion that she should trust Varis’s intentions, and that he wouldn’t bring her any harm on purpose.

But to trust in his intentions was not the same as to trust in his ability–so when Juniper walked into the gym that afternoon, it was with an empty stomach. There was no point in eating lunch when there was a good chance she would lose it.

True to his word, Varis was punctual, so Juniper did not have to wait long before the young man sauntered in. He waved, which Juniper returned, then sat down on the padded ledge and gestured for Juniper to join him.

“So?” Juniper asked as she sat down on the ledge. “How’s this going to go?”

“I’ll need to touch you if I want to examine you, so you’ll need to fly close to me,” he explained. “Does hovering in place trigger the nausea?”

“If I spin, yeah. Want me to do it now?”

“Do it,” he said, holding out his hand.

Juniper offered her wrist, which he took lightly, canceled gravity on herself and entered a slow rotation. The uncomfortable sensations began almost immediately, and Juniper sought the trance to shield herself from the effects. Varis closed his eyes, his face the picture of concentration.

Several minutes later, when her sickness was close to unbearable, Varis opened his eyes. “That’s enough for now,” he said, shaking his head and blinking a few times.

Juniper was glad to sit back down. She ran her fingers through her hair as she breathed slowly.

“I think I know what the problem is,” Varis said slowly. “But I want you to test out one more thing before I try to heal you.”

“I’m all ears.”

He reached into his pocket and removed a small carving of a wing, about a finger long. Juniper’s breath caught as she realized what she was looking at.

“Is that…?”

“A flight focus, yes.”

Foci were a type of artifact that allowed a practitioner access to disciplines outside of their Path. Creating them involved making an imprint of one’s Path on a magically-charged material. They weren’t exactly rare, but depending on their grade and discipline, they were potentially very expensive.

A low-grade focus might grant the user the senses required to work a particular discipline–Juniper suspected Drae owned a focus like this, as the Soul Connection stage practitioner should not have otherwise been able to use electric attacks as she had. Those were fairly common–enough that Juniper might be able to afford one if she saved for a few weeks.

A flight focus, though, was a high-grade focus at the very minimum. One could use, say, a low-grade force focus to fly, but they would need to learn to do so from scratch–on top of being incredibly energy-intensive. A flight focus, instead, came equipped with a full array of spells which meant the user needed only provide the direction, with no micromanaging required.

Selling the orphanage building ten times over would probably not cover the cost of the focus Varis was holding.

A thousand thoughts flew through Juniper’s mind, and all of them revolved around stealing the wooden wing carving. She pushed them down a moment later–even if she did manage, it wouldn’t survive past the iteration. There was no practical point in stealing it.

“I want you to try flying with this.” A moment later, he raised an eyebrow and added, “Just for a minute or so, of course.”

Juniper flushed as she realized she’d been staring. “Of course,” she echoed, but her heart wasn’t into it.

He held it out, and Juniper had to muster all of her willpower not to snatch the object from his hand like a barbarian.

“Do we need to touch, or…”

Varis shook his head. “No. I only want to see if your motion sickness carries over to a different kind of flying.”

Juniper looked at the focus, channeling the barest hint of Will into it. A wealth of information appeared into her mind–almost like a manual, but one she felt like she already knew by rote. Innately, she knew this flight focus was based on a Dynamics discipline. For a moment, Juniper wondered if it had been made by his mother–she certainly had the requisite power.

Then Juniper remembered her one and only meeting with the Duchess and couldn’t help but flinch.

Varis regarded her with apparent amusement–he likely thought her awed by the focus, which in all fairness, she was. He couldn’t know she was suddenly reliving her death from the one time she’d tried to burgle his family’s vault.

Pushing aside the bad memories, Juniper channeled more of her Will into the focus and took to the air. Unlike her awkward, bumbling attempts at flying, using the focus came naturally. She sailed gracefully through the air, letting the focus do the heavy lifting. Using it was liberating in the extreme, and–

“Alright, that’s enough,” Varis said, grinning. He held his hand out expectantly.

Juniper landed next to him, and with great effort, placed the focus in his hand. For some reason, she barely persuaded her fingers to let go.

It was probably the greed, Juniper reflected.

She watched sadly as Varis pocketed the focus. It was truly a marvel of magical artifice. Perhaps one day she would steal it.

“After that display, I’m going to guess no nausea, right?”

“Right,” Juniper said. She forgot they’d been testing for that. If she’d suffered from motion sickness during that run, she hadn’t noticed.

“Alright. Sit down, and I’ll see what I can do.” She did, and Varis placed his palms over her ears. “Don’t resist it.”

Juniper relaxed, preparing to accept Varis’s spell. Practitioners had a natural resistance to other people’s magic, and doubly so for internal manifestations like healing–which was why a healer couldn’t just defeat their enemy with a single touch.

She felt something–a kind of warmth, radiating inside her head. After a minute, Varis removed his hands, and said, “Okay, let’s see if this worked.”

Juniper climbed to her feet–

And the world spun around her. The next thing she saw was the ceiling, and Varis’s worried face looking at her from above. He was saying something, but Juniper couldn’t hear a thing, and Varis’s two overlapping heads weren’t helping either.

He knelt next to her, and she felt another wave of warmth about her head. The world returned to normal, and she could finally hear Varis’s voice.

“–really thought that was the trick! I’m so sorry,” he said, the concern obvious.

Juniper raised a finger to silence him, then sat up. “I’m good. I’m good.”

“I’m so sorry,” Varis repeated.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” Juniper said. “I said I’d be your lab rat, didn’t I? No one expected you to get it right the first time.”

Well, she had expected him to get it right the first time, but only because she didn’t have the barest understanding of what he was trying to do. In hindsight, the systems he was targeting were complex organs and he probably had as much control over his spells as Juniper had over her gravitic anchors.

In other terms, there was a lot of winging it involved.

“Alright. I’m good now,” Juniper said. “Do your thing.”

“You want to try again?”

“You don’t?” Juniper shot back.

“Well, I do,” Varis admitted. “I didn’t think you would.”

Juniper braced herself, lips pressed into a thing line. “No pain, no gain. Do your thing,” she repeated.

“Alright,” Varis said. “Take two, starting… now.”