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“Vile brutes of the Kwen are ever given unto their basest ills. Woe unto them! God has reserved for these the darkness, in which they will dwell in eternal savagery.”

F OR

A

LONG time, Sciona didn’t hear the pounding on the door through her own screams.

“Miss Freynan!” voices called from outside.

“Freynan, open up! Speak to us! Are you alright?”

One of the voices belonged to Archmage Bringham.

Someone must have gone to get him when she wouldn’t open the door for anyone else.

But Sciona couldn’t move from where she knelt on the floor.

At some point, the mapping spell had run its course, and the image had faded to nothing.

But Sciona was still staring into the coil, the lifeless girl seared into her eyes, when the door broke down.

A rush of bodies overwhelmed the room, voices rambling in concern and anger.

Meaningless hands took Sciona’s arms, pulled her up, bore her to an empty classroom on the third floor, wrapped a blanket around her shaking shoulders, and pressed a mug of tea into her hands.

She couldn’t drink it. All she could do was watch the leaves bleed color into the water and think of red in the shallows.

What life had paid for this tea? To bring the leaves here from their native range, to push the water through the pipes, to make it hot enough to sting her burned hands?

“Sciona,” Archmage Bringham’s voice finally pierced her stupor, and she looked up. They were alone in the deserted lecture hall, dim light from the barrier filtering through the film on the great windows. “Speak to me. Please.” There was so much concern in his voice.

Did he know? Did all the archmages know the real cost of magic?

“Sciona,” he repeated even more softly.

No, she decided as she finally met his eyes. No one who looked at another person with that kind of compassion could know such evil and keep living.

“Are you alright?” he said again.

“Did you see?” she whispered.

“See what, my dear?”

He hadn’t seen the girl in the water, then. Of course. Sciona’s mapping coil had deactivated before the other mages burst into the room. The blood was just there every time she blinked, filling the dark insides of her eyelids, seeping across the gray of the barrier light through the windows.

“Highmage Freynan, what happened back there?”

“I was… Th-there was a girl…” Just saying the words brought tears back into Sciona’s eyes. “A young girl. Fifteen or sixteen. She had hair the color of ink. I… Feryn, forgive me, I killed her!”

“You killed someone?” Bringham said in alarm. “When? Where?”

“B-back in my lab. Sh-she…” Sciona shook her head, trying to clear it of the swirling viscera. Focus . She had to tell Bringham, make him understand. “Listen, Archmage Bringham. The Otherrealm isn’t what we thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not a separate realm. It’s the Kwen and the lands beyond it. I saw it!”

“What?” He shook his head uncomprehending. “Don’t you see the Otherrealm every day, Miss Freynan?”

“No, sir. Not like this. I mean I actually saw it—like I’m seeing you now. The girl in my mapping coil. When I siphoned, sh-she…” Emotion and nausea seized Sciona’s throat. She just managed to set the teacup down before pitching forward and vomiting all over the floor at Bringham’s feet.

When she came back to herself, she had been moved to a different seat while a Kwen janitor cleaned up the vomit.

This one was younger than Thomil—just a boy, really, judging by the narrow set of his shoulders.

Sciona couldn’t see his face. Like Thomil, he kept his copper-haired head down, his eyes obscured beneath his cap.

As Bringham spoke kindly to Sciona, offering her water, she couldn’t hear him.

All she could hear was the scrape of the boy’s cleaning brush on the floor.

All she could see was his wiry little form coming apart in spirals of light again— scrape —and again, with each circle of the brush on the tile.

It was only when the boy had finished and faded away that Bringham’s voice pulled her back.

“Listen to me, Sciona.” He had a hand on her shoulder. “Are you with me?”

She nodded weakly.

“From what you describe, I think you’ve run afoul of a curse.”

“What?”

“Not the common sort of coursework with which you would be familiar,” Archmage Bringham said.

“There are darker magics that even the whole of the High Magistry hasn’t purged or come to understand.

It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve delved deep enough to trigger one of these antique curses so early in your career, you clever little devil. ”

“So…” Hope flickered back on in the depths. “You think I’ve been tricked? This has happened to other highmages?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Archmage Orynhel has some truly chilling tales from his early days in the High Magistry. Of course, his was the generation of mages directly following the traitor mage, Sabernyn.”

Sciona tilted her head, not understanding what Highmage Sabernyn had to do with any of this.

“The public knows Sabernyn as the mage who murdered his colleagues,” Bringham said. “That’s how you know him.”

“Right.” Sciona’s brow furrowed as she recalled the details of those murders: mages and their families eviscerated behind the locked doors of their own homes. “Right.”

“Among highmages, he’s just as infamous for the curses he left around the university.

When he suspected others of conspiring against him, he—well, for starters, he killed many of them with forbidden magic, but that’s the part of the story everyone knows.

He also attached curses to texts, spellographs, and any powerful conduit he could get his hands on.

Not many outside the High Magistry know this, but the library fire of 252 was a Sabernyn original. ”

“Really?”

Bringham nodded. “A curse he wrote to activate if anyone ever tried to remove his life’s work from circulation.

But that’s a highmage for you. His work comes before anything else.

” Bringham paused to chuckle as though hoping Sciona might join him—the way she normally would have.

When she was quiet, he cleared his throat and continued.

“Sabernyn’s curses were never well known outside the High Magistry because he didn’t design them to affect the public—or lesser mages, for that matter.

He set them for future generations of highmages to blunder into.

Not that I’m accusing you of blundering—just of being young, ambitious, and in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is my fault, Freynan. I should have warned you that this was a possibility. ”

“What was a possibility?” Sciona demanded, straining toward that glimmer of hope in Bringham’s hands. Maybe this had all been a misunderstanding. Maybe none of it had to be real. “What do you think happened?”

“Sabernyn and malicious mages who came before him could be skilled in trickery, illusory magics.”

“Illusory magics?” Sciona repeated. “So, you’re saying… there could have been a curse that showed me images in a mapping coil that weren’t really there?”

“Well, since a mapping spell has never produced a lifelike image—violent or otherwise—in the Magistry’s history, I would say yes. What you saw was not really there.”

“Oh…” Sciona breathed out, trying to feel relief. But found that she couldn’t. A barricade of questions blocked her way. If the black-haired woman wasn’t real, where had the image come from? Why had Thomil recognized the field in her first spell?

“Sabernyn, especially, set curses to scare mages out of pursuing deeper magic.”

“But…” Sabernyn had never set foot outside Tiran.

He wouldn’t know what Kwen plains looked like in the snow, let alone how to conjure one from nothing.

He had never seen the ocean. “How? And why?” she asked, even as another part of her screamed not to question, just accept the lifeline Bringham had thrown her.

He was the mentor. Let him tell her that she hadn’t seen what she thought, that everything was fine, that she was the victim in this madness, not the murderer.

“I mean—I thought Sabernyn’s primary motivation was jealousy,” she said. “His crimes were against his rivals and anyone else who impeded his work, right? I haven’t touched his work in my research. Why would he care about future mages delving into spells that had nothing to do with him?”

Bringham shrugged. “Who can fathom the mind of a madman?”

“I can,” Sciona said under her breath. While she couldn’t imagine physically stabbing someone to death, she had thought at times that she would kill for the opportunity to succeed in the Magistry. According to Thomil, she already had killed for that opportunity. Many, many times.

“What did you say?” Bringham leaned in with that softest of concern in his green eyes.

“Nothing,” Sciona murmured. “I just don’t see how this could have been a Sabernyn curse.

” He had been a mapping specialist, yes, but also a deeply Tirasian one.

Sciona had read his work, and it had been some of the most religiously restricted mapping she had ever seen—no Stravos influences, no fancy modifications at all.

“You may be right,” Bringham said. “It’s hard to know the culprit. Curses can sit dormant for centuries. Your attacker may well have been a mage who lived long before our time or Sabernyn’s.”

“Right…” Except that, as far as Sciona could tell, Andrethen Stravos had been the only mage in history who could produce lifelike images in a mapping coil. How could anyone else have used such imaging in a curse?