"Oh, Val, honey… are you sure Oestel did it right?" Ginn asked.

"I think she'd have known," Val said.

This was after Val had returned home and eaten supper, recounting her fight with the Penitent Brothers to a fairly worried Ginn, a fairly impressed Ette, and Galvan, who had all sorts of questions about what it felt like to kill somebody. Which, if he really wanted to know, he could just ask their dad, who'd killed way more than Val in his time.

"It feels terrible," Val had said. "It's like the dirtiest feeling ever… like you've just done something really wrong, even though you had to do it to stay alive. Don't ever do it if you can help it."

"Amen," Ette said.

After supper, she'd bathed, since she felt dirty from two days on the road, even if she had dipped into the deep pool for about five minutes for her part in the tattooing ritual. Ginn had asked to see Val's tattoos, and Val readily agreed, standing there in her undies as the bathwater equilibrated to temperature and letting Ginn see. She could extrapolate what was still covered up. And Ginn was concerned that Val was now fully marked everywhere below the lower slopes of her neck. Even the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet were marked.

"What do your tattoos look like?" Val asked.

So Ginn showed hers to Val, too. "Good thing mine aren't so big," she said, "because I can only cover mine up for a few minutes at a time."

Her tattoos for magecraft and natural magic each took up about the space of a playing card. The alchemy tattoo across her back was a bit larger than Levin's, a fairly symmetrical pattern of jagged, radiating panes, each with a subtle color, that took up about half of her upper back. Clearly, that was where most of her magical talent lay.

"When can I get my tattoo for alchemy?"

"There's a holy woman in the village of Gratha's Pass who gives them… it'll be a while before we can make it out that way," Ginn said, still a bit shocked by Val's new tattoos. So Val made them go away - unless she wanted them to, they wouldn't come back until she fell asleep.

"I guess I'm pretty good at natural magic even though I've only done it twice. Too bad I can't do much with it inside the city." Val shrugged. "I'm going to take my bath before I have to warm it up again."

"Okay, Val. Just… make sure nobody sees how much you're tattooed. Not even other Gifted. It could be dangerous."

Val rolled her eyes. "Yes, mom." Then she froze. Had she really said that? It was a mistake. Even if she thought that way, it was a secret! Ginn wasn't supposed to know - at least not yet! Would she be mad? Would she correct Val? Tell her to keep calling her auntie? Would she tell Ette?

Ginn had turned away - she didn't even want Val to see her face. She'd really messed up this time. "We'll see about going to Gratha's Pass for holiday on the summer solstice… if you practice your alchemy."

"Okay, mom," Val said, deciding she might as well just double down. Still in her undies, she dipped under the bathwater and held her breath before Ginn could make her take it back.

+++++

"Ow! Hale Jerob, that hurt!" Levin yelped. He dropped the buckler and sucked on his reddened fingertips. He was lucky they weren't all rushing to get him a healing potion.

"Don't get hit and you won't need a shield," Tobbin Zollen said, and he readied the practice cudgel for another swing. "Magical or otherwise. Again."

Tobbin could have been Levin's brother, with his dark complexion, considerable height, and pleasant features, but he was much, much broader. In fact, they'd needed to use women's mail for Levin's slim frame until they got a suit custom-made. It fit him pretty well but had a bit of extra give in the chest.

"Look… we're all here because we're mages, right? Why do we even need to know how to defend against blows when we can just use magic?" Levin said.

"Was the 'battle' part in 'battle-mage' not self-evident enough for you? I thought you people were supposed to be smart. Now… I'm going to swing this whether or not you try to avoid it," Tobbin said. "I suggest you do."

It hadn't taken Mrs. Eatherfine long at all to deduce that there was something different about Val. Namely, that she was now hiding her new tattoos all the time. At her first inkling of duplicity, she'd whisked Val right out of her finishing lessons and brought her before Salvala, who was some sort of spymaster for the duke (and duke's mom). When Val had been reduced to tears over even mild insinuations that she was a traitor plotting on the duke's life, the spymaster had to admit that Val appeared to be genuine in her denial of any wrongdoing.

Eventually, an annoyed Mrs. Eatherfine had strolled out from the adjacent room. Val had known she was there from the clack and tinkle of all her jewelry.

"Child, I can tell you're hiding something through magical obfuscation…"

"I don't even know what obfuscation is," Val sniffed.

"You're hiding something with your Gift… what is it?" While Mrs. Eatherfine had never explicitly stated that she was Gifted, too, Val was pretty sure she was - either that, or she was even smarter than Gus. Possibly both.

So Val had shown Mrs. Eatherfine her tattoos - but only the ones for regular magic, since Val could make either set come and go independently if she liked and nobody had reacted all that well to her full set. Whatever skill the dowager duchess had, it wasn't such that she could tell that Val was still hiding something, which she was. A whole body covered in vines and flowers. Even that one set of tattoos, though, had given the duke's mother the notion of establishing a core of battle-mages to protect her son, should he and his standard ride into battle.

So the call had gone out for volunteers to train as battle-mages. The duchy had never developed a battle magic corps due to the insistence of the Pale Order that any magics not explicitly-approved by the church were disallowed. But, since the duke (and his mother) no longer cared what the church thought, the Pale Order was welcome to suck a big egg through a small tube. Since Tobbin and Ette were both already training Val, it was decided that they would be the ones to bring the battle-mages up to snuff.

They practiced two days a week under Ette learning actual combat and then two days a week with Tobbin, learning how to work in formation with the duke's units. The knight-companion assured them that it would all make sense when they were in actual combat, but Val didn't see how making yourself less effective could make your unit more effective. Wouldn't it be better just to have everybody trained to the gills and running at the enemy at their own pace? It made sense to her. But Tobbin seemed to know what he was doing and had been in three actual battles, so she followed his instructions with the rest of them.

"If you expose that leg one more time, I’m making a go at your toes," Tobbin said.

Levin snorted. "Then give me a bigger shield."

"Light combat units have to be mobile - you can't have a big shield," Tobbin replied.

"Then let me use my magic."

"Look… I don't go into your little wizardling classes and tell you how to run things, you don't tell me how to run things on my practice field. Until you understand how regular battle works, you'll only foul things up trying to use magic in them. Like if you cast your magical net when we're about to charge, you'll hamper us instead of the enemy."

"That… makes sense," Levin grumbled. "So I stand like this?"

"More bend… there. Exactly right. Again," Tobbin said.

The notion that Val would be in a unit with fellow mages also relieved Ginn's anxieties quite a bit. None of them were students in Val's class, obviously, because the students in the sept's magic classes were all too young. Apparently, they only let twelve- (going on thirteen) year-olds join the duke's regiment if they were also the great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters of ancient queens. Val sometimes wished she wasn't.

+++++

By the middle of spring, there had been actual skirmishes along the border, though nobody had actually thought to declare war. The Bolearic forces had started conducting drills that went over contested parts of the border, to which the Aurilic border patrol sometimes objected. When they actually fired on the 'invading' troops, the Bolearic troops would fight back, though the emissaries from the Regency Council still insisted that they were only acting in self-defense. Still, it meant that on any given week there might be fifteen or twenty casualties on either side. Nothing major. Yet.

There was no war yet, but the duke went to increasingly many military and public events where he had to be announced by his standard - which meant Val got called away for those duties to the tune of ten hours a week on top of all the other things she had to juggle. She stated to Mrs. Eatherfine that, if she was going to have to dress in her mail (for military events) or leather jerkin (for public events) and wave the duke's flag around and shout his name that often, she was going to stop with the finishing lessons. She was finished enough.

The duke's mom took it in stride. "That's fine, my dear. Actually, it's best if you're a bit common."

"What do you mean?" Val asked… though she knew that common was a term that posh people used for when you didn't have any manners. Her manners were fine, though. Better than fine.

"You have enough bearing and civility to be a queen's descendent, but we can't have you acting like a noble or people might think you are a noble. We wouldn't want that, would we?"

Val didn't want that, obviously. But she wasn't sure why Mrs. Eatherfine didn't want it. From everything she'd gathered, the dowager duchess didn't want Val making a mockery of the duchy in public. But she also didn't want Val acting too proper for some reason. That was fine. The finishing lessons hadn't changed a whit about her overall demeanor… though she did now get a hankering for tea in the afternoon. And, if you were going to do tea, you might as well do it properly.

"You want a tea set for your solstice present?" Ginn chuckled. "Since when? I thought you wanted new boots."

Her old boots were getting tight. "Boots are good, too," she concluded.

Instead, she went out for tea once a week with her friends and some of their friends. Eight of them in all, five girls and three boys dressed in their best and going to the Riverway Tea Exchange, which didn't exchange tea at all, so much as served it in a barely-acceptable (by palace standards) manner. Val dressed in her dress with the floral pattern vest, Iselde dressed in the lilac dress, which was the only one she owned, and Niko wore the one that she'd eventually chosen in lieu of the one that reminded Val too much of Jasil. It was almost the polar opposite - black and violet and simple, but with an understated elegance. When she let the hem down, you couldn't tell that Niko wore metal-tipped leather boots beneath the dress - those were her only good shoes. Gus had about five favorite dresses that she cycled between and Beni rented a different jacket nearly every week.

It always amused Val that Gus thought she was the only one who knew what a proper tea was like, but Val had actually hosted duchess-approved tea parties. The Tea Exchange was fine, but it wasn't posh proper. But at least Gus was nice about being snooty, which meant that Iselde and Niko were getting something close to finishing lessons whenever they had tea, and after a couple of outings it would have taken a practiced eye to tell who was an orphan, a shopkeeper's daughter, or the descendant of an ancient queen. Depending on how you defined 'shopkeeper', 'orphan', 'daughter', and 'descendant', Val was all four.

"I need to powder my nose," Niko told the group. That was the polite way of telling people you needed to use the loo.

"My nose requires powdering, as well," Iselde said, and she scampered off after Niko.

"Lots of nose powder going around," Beni said - but he knew well what it meant. Gentlemen were supposed to excuse themselves by telling the people at the table that they needed to 'consider a matter of business'. Val wasn't sure why gentlemen couldn't powder their noses, ladies couldn't consider business matters, or why everybody couldn't just say they were going to relieve themselves. But that was politesse for you.

"Psst… Niko needs help," Iselde said three minutes later.

"Help… powdering her nose?" Val asked. Iselde replied with a terse nod. So something was happening in the ladies' loo.

Val made her way into the back, vaguely wondering whether Iselde and Niko were playing some sort of trick on her. Iselde had largely abandoned her 'orphan schemes' when in more polite company (since posh people frowned upon pickpocketing), but Val wouldn't put her above a minor practical joke. And, in fact, the two of them sometimes engaged in such shenanigans between streetball, jaunting down crowded city blocks with Iselde's little brother shouting from far behind that they had better wait for him to catch up. They never did.

Val made her way back to the area, a smallish room with three stalls featuring proper plumbing, a fountain-style sink, and a seldom-used powder table for actual nose-powdering (or other cosmetics) if you actually needed to apply them. Val had never known anybody to actually nicen themselves up in the middle of afternoon tea.

"Did you get Val?" Niko whispered from behind the stall door.

"Yeah," Iselde said. She wrung her hands… she bounced on the balls of her feet… she seemed nervous.

"What? What is it?" Val whispered back. "Are you sick?"

"Not exactly," Niko said. "Um… I got the Gift?"

It took a moment for Val to process what her friend had just said. At first, she thought Niko was implying that she'd got Val a gift… which would be very welcome, though completely unexpected at afternoon tea. And completely completely unexpected in the loo. Not a gift. The Gift.

"But you're older than me…"

"Yeah, and Cousin Crimson decided to postpone her first visit until right in the middle of afternoon tea," Niko said. "Can you help?"

"You got the Gift!" Val screamed. She was so excited that she jumped up and down - and Iselde jumped up and down, too, because it seemed like the thing to do in the moment. In retrospect, her volume had been much too loud for anything happening in the ladies' washroom. Everybody in the Tea Exchange had probably heard her. "Um… give me a sec." She scrounged through the drawer at the bottom of the powder table until she found the proper amenities, which Iselde then tossed over the stall door.

Gus burst into the restroom about three seconds later, almost as excited as Iselde and Val. "Did Niko just get the Gift?"

"You heard that?"

"Everybody heard that."

Niko groaned. "Great. If you guys don't mind, I'm just going to stay in here forever and die."

+++++

It was great that Niko got the gift, because that made two more activities that she could partake in with Val - magic classes at the temple, obviously, and training with the battle-mages. Nobody's parents would let a thirteen-year-old train to fight with the duke's regiment, but Niko didn't have parents and Gotkosen Mellia (who oversaw the Orphanage at Hale Wulde) did not object. And it actually helped that Niko didn't really know any magic yet because it meant she listened to Tobbin and didn't second-guess which magic would be more useful than a shield.

Val also taught Niko how to do magic, obviously. It was a frustrating process, though, because Niko couldn't yet read Old Sudren and, even though she could feel the Gift, she couldn't do much with it yet. That was how the Gift worked…

Girls got the Gift all of a sudden (well… over the course of a few minutes), and boys got theirs more gradually, but everybody had all of it within a few months of feeling the first stirrings of their magical sense. But that was only the start - it was like suddenly being a big strong person. Some folks were bigger and stronger than others, but none of them were trained. Training in each type of magic was like training in a new combat style. A wiry scrapper could beat a musclebound goliath if they trained hard enough. So Val picked up every bit of magical knowledge she could get and practiced it as much as she could. She even dreamed about practicing magic.

Val wasn't clear on how many sorts there were, but it was at least four or five: magecraft, natural magic, alchemy, divination, and sorcery were the ones that Val had heard about, though she was unclear about the difference between the last two. In any case, Val knew a bit about the first three and was, apparently, more talented in natural magic than anybody that Priestess Oestel had ever heard of. There was a witch who lived way out in the wild that everybody called the Green Priestess - she was over a hundred years old and had vine tattoos stretching out past her shoulder… but they didn't cover her whole body. Nobody knew what that even meant. But, in retrospect, it was probably why Val now had a cat friend.

She'd shown up one day to watch Val and Beni get trounced by Iselde and Niko in streetball. Obviously, it was five on five, but nobody else scored any goals. The final score had been seven-three, and it hadn't even felt that close. When Val sat down to catch her breath and feel sorry for herself, the cat that had been watching the whole match was right there. She gave Val a head bonk and Val scritched behind her ears. She purred - the cat did, not Val. Then she followed Val home despite repeated attempts to shoo her away.

"You can't just let a strange cat into the house!" Ginn had said.

"He's not strange. We're practically old chums - been hanging out for hours."

"Well… somebody will be missing him, no doubt, assuming he's a good mouser…"

To that the cat meowed and made clear that she was a girl cat, she belonged to nobody but herself, and she was most definitely an expert mouser but preferred rats. She didn't say it in words, per se. But, somehow, Val understood the gist of what the cat was trying to get across. She relayed this to Ginn, who crouched and scritched the cat and ran her hand along its flank, which the cat seemed just fine with.

"Well… she seems friendly. But if you're taking it in, you're responsible for it, understand?"

"Yes, mom," Val sighed. And she made a show of rolling her eyes, but deep inside, part of her burst with joy at getting to call Ginn mom, and at watching Ginn smile a bit each time. Ginn had always wanted a daughter, and now Val was her. She had a room, a bed, friends, a pet cat, an apprenticeship, the Gift, a very nice tea dress, and a job working for the duke (which she could have done without, but Mrs. Eatherfine thought it was important). And a family! If you'd told Val that a year ago, she'd have kicked mud on your shoes and told you not to tease her. If it wasn't for the fanatical zealots who occasionally tried to kill her, it would have been her perfect dream life.

She thought about her astounding fortune as she flipped through the book on offensive magic she'd managed to find at the rare book shop. It was in Old Sudren, obviously, and the shopkeeper barely knew enough of the language to know that it was a magic book, so Val got it for three low marks, which was a damn good deal for a book like that. Still, that was about a month's worth of her earnings if you didn't include her wardrobe allowance from the duke (which she didn't). Val took notes as she read, her cat curled up beside her, purring as Val absently stroked her fur with her free hand. Her cat was a sleek feline, a bit above average size, with beautiful calico fur and intensely violet eyes, just like Val's.

"I don't suppose you have a name?" Val asked.

The cat meowed in a way that meant, No, but you can name me if you like.

"Okay. You're Violet, just like our eyes." The cat purred at that. It was a good name.

Violet liked to follow Val around, whether it was to fighting practice, streetball, or magic lessons. The guards wouldn't let Violet into the palace, but she somehow found her way inside to the practice yard regardless. And sometimes Val awoke in the middle of the night to find Violet gone and the window cracked open about two inches. When Val asked what she'd been doing, her cat replied with a meow and then another meow, which meant: Hunting rats. I didn't think you'd want any. Which was absolutely correct. To everybody else, Violet sounded like every other cat, but Val could always get the gist of her meaning. She tried with other animals, but no dice. A bark and a neigh were still just a bark and a neigh.

The next thing she noticed about Violet was that she could sense where she was, just as she could sense out sources of the various magics. In the middle of the night, if she awoke and her cat was gone, Val could sense her prowling through alleyways in pursuit of rodents. When she went into the palace, she could sense Violet forty feet underfoot, crawling through some hidden tunnelway to gain access to the palace. And, as Violet grew near, she could feel the connection between them spark and sparkle with energy, as if an invisible tether had connected them. The tether sparkled with natural magic - not nearly as much as there was out in the wilderness, but well more than there ought to be in the city.

"Are… are you my familiar?" Val whispered.

Violet's meow meant, Of course.

There were tales of witches who lived way out in the woods who had animals as pets. Usually, it was a bird, but sometimes it was a cat. There was a legend of one who had a giant spider, but Val wasn't sure she believed that. Some things were just too strange to believe. Actually, pet wasn't the right word… they were called familiars. So Val guessed she now had a familiar named Violet. Though Violet didn't appear to do much aside from follow Val around, sleep, and chase rats at night. Well… and provide that little spark of natural magic, even amid the bustle of the city. Maybe that was the whole point of a familiar?

Violet's meow suggested that it absolutely wasn't, but that she'd have to discover more on her own, since it was different for every pairing. Val wasn't sure how Violet knew these things, exactly, because she was just a cat. Maybe familiars went to familiar school? She should ask Priestess Oestel.

Meow. Meow. No, there was no such thing as familiar school, and she shouldn't tell the priestess unless she was absolutely sure nobody else was around. Not even her classmates. Not even Niko.

"You have a familiar?" Niko said. "That's so cool!"

Violet wasn't at all happy about being outed and stalked off. But Val still felt the little tingling bond between them, so she was just angry. She wasn't leaving for good.

"I think they're animals possessed by nature spirits - they're drawn to mages with strong natural magic since we can feed off one another," Val said. She'd found a whole stack of books on witches and witchcraft, about five paragraphs of which was actually useful.

"You feed off one another? That sounds dangerous…"

"Not like that," Val said. "It's like… I've got my spirit energy, just like you or Gus have, and she's got natural energy like the plants and animals of the wild have. And we can kind of convert the energy back and forth, and the stronger my natural magic is the less gets lost in the transfer. That means Violet can live in places without a lot of nature and I can do natural magic in places without a lot of nature… it's still pretty weak, though."

"Really? Like what kind of magic?"

Val pointed over toward a dandelion growing through a crack in the cobblestones. She'd already tried the magic in Ginn's rooftop herb garden to coax some of the plants into growing, so she knew it would work. She just had to sense the Earth's magic, which was there high above in the clouds and deep within the earth, even if there wasn't much in the city proper. She had to sense it and draw it, using Violet as a lifeline, into herself and then push it out toward the plants. A great, slow river of magic welling up at her request and managing poke a tiny thread through and into the city. It passed through her, pulsing energy through her limbs - though, if she tried too much, it would start to tire her out instead of invigorating. So she just sent a modest stream at the dandelion.

Before their eyes, it grew and bloomed… and grew up and up… and grew bark and little branches and spring-green leaves. The nearby cobblestones groaned under the strain of a displaced trunk and growing roots, pushing up a foot or more as the dandelion sprouted into a twelve-foot sapling in the space of about fifteen seconds. That had been a lot more dramatic than Val had intended.

"That was a lot more dramatic than I intended," she said.

"Yeah, I got that," Niko said. "Can you teach me to do that?"

"If you get a familiar," Val said. That was the best she could do.