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“Have some sense, child. The middle of working, with no warning, is no time for an assistant to experiment. Do you have no idea what happens when a spell is wrong?”

“Of course I do. But it wasn’t.”

“Ah, Meda,” Eudoria sighed.

“Here.” I grabbed my journal flipped through scribbles of sigils, hunting for a page on scrying. This was a safer journal to have out. No Tarelay or other forbidden enchantments. Finding a scrying base, I showed the page to Eudoria.

She studied it with a frown. I wriggled in place, biting my tongue against explaining it before she’d have a chance to take the meaning in.

“What book did you find this in?” she asked at last.

“I made it. From your spell.”

“But why did you take out…?” her fingers traced along the spell, marking the areas I’d shortened.

“This, here?” I sketched a broken sign in the air, careful to feed it no power. “It does the same thing.” I drew the eighth of Eldrezar. “I had the thought that by asking for the vision twice, you don’t make it any clearer. And there’s no way taking it out could make the spell dangerous. It wasn’t adding to the meaning, it just repeated it. Not that they’re entirely interchangeable, of course, but of the two…”

Eudoria looked up from the page and studied me with a disbelieving frown. She turned back a page in the journal, then another. I resisted the urge to ask her to stop leafing through my work. Instead, I watched as her frown deepened. Her eyes widened at one point. She rifled further back and drew a deep breath. She’d never looked at my notes before. Eudoria set the journal carefully aside and stood slowly.

“How did you know they do the same thing?” she asked as she walked over to the oven. She lifted the lid on the pot to peer at the tea.

“Well…” I frowned down at my journal and licked my lips, trying to get my thoughts in order. “It’s like music, isn’t it? You can hear when someone plays a note wrong, or when it sounds good. You can hear when it repeats itself. Nobody has to tell you. You just have to listen.”

“I have never heard someone talk about magic that way.”

“It feels obvious.”

“It isn’t.” She settled the teapot’s lid back in place.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I shrugged. With a sigh, Eudoria continued.

“You should have shown me your journal sooner, Meda. You may not be much of a witch, but perhaps you have something to offer in academics. Maybe you belong at the Temple after all.”

My breath caught. I’d certainly tried to show her my spellwork before, but I didn’t even mind if she blamed me for the delay—not when she’d finally offered a path to my life-long dream. Eudoria had trained at the temple; she knew the head of the Order. A letter from her, even if only about scholar’s pursuits, could change everything.

I saw her fingers start forming the runes for burning and heat, to speed along the process I had started. A simple casting; one of the simplest there was. Predictable. Ordinary. Tried and true. Almost identical to the one I’d done minutes before.

Unfortunately, that was the moment our world came apart at the seams.

Chapter 8

In his book Casting the Barrier, located on the bottom left of Eudoria’s shelves, Azterin, former head of the Temple Order, described the Ward like a great sieve that filtered out magic. I was inclined to agree with him. Three hundred and twenty- seven years of air and rain and wind and dust had passed from one side to the other, while magic caught and clung and built a sediment along the huge, arcing shell.

Three hundred and twenty-seven years of magic thickening like pond scum, a choking, heavy layer of power that blurred the heavens above. Three hundred and twenty-seven years of the Ward of Tarelay, the world’s greatest enchantment, the one that never failed, never wavered, never broke.

Until it did.

A tidal wave of raw power dropped from the sky and crashed through every sigil in the Protectorate. To my right Kalcedon’s bean sprouts, braided into the sigil for growth, shot up ten feet higher. Heat unlike anything I’d ever felt crushed me from all sides.

And in front of the outdoor oven, Eudoria’s simple fire sigil exploded. The blaze was immense and catastrophic.

It swallowed her in an instant.

There was no time to react, except to jump up, drop my journal, and fall over the bench. I scrambled back to my feet, so startled I couldn’t wrap my mind around what happened. First Eudoria had been standing next to the stone oven and the stack of firewood. Then it was gone, all of it—Eudoria, the basket of kindling. The olive tree beside us was in flames. The inferno gnawed at the corner of the bench where I had sat a half-second before. My journal crumbled into ash.

“Eudoria!” I shrieked. For an idiotic, confused moment I thought she’d chosen to do it, and couldn’t understand why. My throat burned with the smoke and my eyes smarted from the intensity of the light. I screamed again and choked on the sound. Stumbling back, I threw my hand up to cover my face.

A shield. A rune for protection. Something. Anything. Eudoria was in the fire, and I had to save her.