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“I have been a goddess. I know you will think me silly, but I am a pious lady of good manners, and I tell the truth. I have been a goddess, but I am a pious lady of good manners, and I know that in this house, there is only space for one god.

I am a pious lady of good manners.

I will not stay in someone’s house where I am not wanted.”

S CIONA

SPENT

HER next two weeks at the Magistry interacting almost exclusively with Thomil.

Partly by choice but also because the other mages no longer deigned to speak to her.

It was like the moment she had agreed to work with the janitor, she had relegated herself to his class, invisible, beneath notice.

What the other highmages didn’t understand was that this was the best thing they could have done for her.

Maybe they needed to spend half their time rubbing elbows to secure their importance to Tiran’s future, but Sciona worked best undisturbed, and Thomil was blessedly quiet.

So quiet, in fact, that Sciona would completely forget that he was there as she sank into her work.

Thus far, she had failed to make significant improvements to the hybrid mapping method she had demonstrated for the Council during her exam—which was alright, she kept reminding herself.

She had worked on that mapping method for a year, and she had only been in the High Magistry for two weeks.

She would still have opportunities to make it better.

But in the meantime, she needed to make sure the mapping spell she proposed—whatever its composition—had the support of an impeccable spellweb.

In recent years, no one in the High Magistry had been able to match Cleon Renthorn when it came to energy-sourcing spellwebs.

But Sciona had committed herself to trying with the understanding that her web didn’t have to be quite as good as her rival’s.

Unless Renthorn had some kind of staggering breakthrough, his chosen mapping spell wasn’t going to be as clear as Sciona’s when he presented to the Council—just as her web wasn’t going to be as tight as his.

“Whether the Council chooses Renthorn’s sourcing plan for the barrier expansion or mine will come down to who executes their balancing act better,” Sciona explained to Thomil.

“Either I will win back the ground I lose in web composition with my superior mapping spell or Renthorn will win back the ground he loses in his mapping spell through superior web composition. So, before tackling the parts of this project that will come easily to me, I’m going to reduce my deficit as much as possible by drafting the best spellweb I can.

” Sciona’s next breath came out in a groan just thinking about it.

“Is there anything I can do to help, ma’am?” Thomil asked.

“Yes,” she laughed—the idea of a Kwen touching work as complicated as a spellweb was hilarious—“You can sit on the other side of the lab and read those gradeschool spellbooks I gave you very, very quietly.”

Drafting a sourcing spellweb of this size was a grueling process involving guesswork on guesswork, endless probability calculations, contingencies on contingencies.

The goal was to stack probable energy sources in order to ensure that the barrier expansion action spell got the energy input it required—no more, no less.

Sciona began by sorting 1,500 promising non-Reserve sourcing zones by projected energy yield, separating them into five tiers, with the first tier representing the highest projected yield and the fifth tier representing the lowest.

After that, she had to arrange her 1,500 zones into sets, which would slot into the branches of the final spellweb.

This web had three hundred branches—more than any sourcing spellweb in the nation’s history and the maximum possible considering how many qualified mages Tiran would have on hand to manually assess each branch.

When the expansion spell went into effect, the spellograph designated for a given branch would map to one of Sciona’s first-tier zones—one of the zones most likely to contain sufficient energy to cover one three-hundredth of the expansion’s energy expenditure.

At this point, a research mage with a mapping certification would visually assess their Otherrealm visual to determine whether they were looking at the correct amount of energy.

If the mapping mage didn’t enter focal coordinates and siphon the site within thirty seconds, the second-tier siphoning zones would come into play.

If the mage didn’t find sufficient energy in the second-tier zone, the spellograph would map to the third-tier zone, and so on down to the first tier.

If all five locations failed to yield an appropriate energy source, the branch would automatically fall back on the ever-reliable Reserve.

This was a last, last resort, as the Reserve powered Tiran’s essential systems. Only five of the three-hundred branches could fall back on the Reserve before the city risked structural failures.

More than five and the results could be catastrophic.

More than ten and the spellweb could just as easily destroy Tiran’s barrier as expand it.

With several highmages’ and archmages’ projections of Otherrealm energy distribution for the coming winter spread before her, Sciona spent the next several days on her calculations.

If she had trusted one mage’s work implicitly, her probabilities would have been fixed, her calculations simple.

But projections were just predictions, and Sciona would find herself disagreeing with them in the areas of the Otherrealm she was used to sourcing, which would, in turn, affect her level of trust in a given mage’s predictions, which often had her circling back to previously finished work so she could rerun the calculations with various mages’ predictions weighted differently.

All told, the spellweb draft took a full week longer than Sciona would have preferred, but she was on the final pages when a boom shook the building, dislodging dust from the ceiling and jolting books from the shelves.

“No!” Sciona darted forward with a surge of panic to grab her favorite spellograph, but she needn’t have worried.

The machine’s weight had kept it planted firmly in the center of her composition desk as lighter objects fell from tables and shelves all around her.

The tall laboratory windows, which had cracked in the initial boom, shattered one after the other as the building shuddered with the echoes, the panes spilling broken glass onto the floor.

“Highmage Freynan!” Thomil, who Sciona barely remembered sending away on an errand, burst into the lab. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” she said, breathless. “Fine. Careful of the broken glass,” she added as her darting eyes cataloged which pieces of equipment were still intact, which had broken beyond repair, and which could still be salvaged.

Most of her glass testing dishes were gone, having jumped from their shelf and shattered, mixing with the broken glass from the windows to form a glittering multi-colored carpet. “Feryn, what was that?”

“Well, something exploded.”

“Obviously.” The question was which of Sciona’s careless idiot colleagues had done this. These laboratories were the only ones in the Main Magistry where mages ran experiments, meaning it had to be someone from the mapping department.

“We should see if anyone is hurt in the other labs.”

“Who cares?”

“Ma’am!” Thomil gave Sciona that terrible look—the same one Alba so often gave her: Sciona, for shame! And for some incomprehensible reason, Thomil’s judgment stung just as sharply as Alba’s.

“Fine!” she growled.

“They are your people, are they not?” Thomil said, not seeming to understand her hostility.

“I said fine!” Sciona stomped past the Kwen, glass crunching beneath her heels. “Let’s go check.”

When Sciona came out into the hall, she fully expected Jerrin Mordra’s lab to be the one in crisis. Instead, she found the other newbie highmage at the door of his office with his assistant, Evnan, both of them clean and unhurt.

“That wasn’t you?” she said.

“I thought it was you,” Mordra said.

“Me?” Sciona spat in total indignation, and the two of them turned their eyes down the hall leading to their colleagues’ laboratories, which was gray with smoke and stone dust.

“Feryn, have mercy!” Mordra gasped and ran toward the debris after Thomil, who had already vanished into the dust cloud.

“Miss Freynan, you should wait here where it’s safe,” Evnan said before rushing to join the other two men.

Grumbling in annoyance, Sciona followed—not because she gave a damn what happened to Renthorn, Tanrel, or Halaros after the way they had slighted her but because she resented being left behind like she was a delicate flower who had never seen an industrial accident before.

The placard outside the destroyed chamber had been blown away, along with the door and a bit of the wall, but Sciona knew it to be Halaros’s lab. She was the last into the laboratory, just behind Renthorn, Tanrel, and their teams of assistants.

Halaros was leaning back against the only bookcase in the lab that hadn’t collapsed, coughing, his eyes unfocused behind his cracked spectacles, his white robes blackened where flames had met the fire-resistant fabric.

As the obscuring dust settled into a film on the room, Sciona took in the chaos—men and furniture thrown against the walls, dishes shattered, ruined books smoking.

Thomil and Evnan lifted a table off one of Halaros’s assistants.

Coated in dust, the man looked like a corpse, but as Mordra helped him to his feet, it was obvious that he was very much alive, just shaken.

“Halaros, can you hear me?” Tanrel had rushed to put a hand on Halaros’s shoulder and straighten his robes—as though that would help him look any more presentable with his spectacles cracked and his eyebrows singed off. “Are you alright?”