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“I agree with Gamwen,” Duris’s senior conduit designer, Eringale, spoke up in an admonishing tone. “What are you trying to do, Duris? Blow the little lady’s hand off?”

It was Bringham who said, “Let her give it a try. It’ll be alright.”

“Will it?” Gamwen seemed doubtful.

“I believe so. In any case, it looks like she’s already started.”

Bringham knew his apprentice well. Sciona was already at the scratch paper, sketching a flowchart of the spells she would need.

There was no way to map for matter in the Otherrealm because no mage had ever found a way to display the physical reality of God’s Bounty.

All a mage could do was choose his coordinates, siphon, and hope he got what he needed.

And if he did get the matter he needed, it was often mixed in with a sludge of other elements, crushed together in the passage from one realm to the next.

Sometimes, the blind-siphoned sludge was dangerous—explosive, acidic, or poisonous.

More alchemists died in their laboratories than any other type of mage.

Before composing for the siphoning itself, Sciona wrote a separate spell to scan whatever came through from the Otherrealm and give her a chemical breakdown. Chemistry was not one of her specialties, but she hoped she would recognize a dangerous compound in time to leap back from the desk.

In the end, she had to siphon five times, filling all the bowls to the brim with mystery muck, before she came up with enough carbon for her purposes.

Another painstakingly written alchemic spell pulled the carbon from all the dishes to form a ball the size of Sciona’s fist—her incendiary device.

Not that pure carbon was combustible. Sciona couldn’t make a true material explosive because, well, she wasn’t a damn alchemist; she didn’t know the chemical composition of a bomb off the top of her head, and guesswork could kill her where she stood.

What she could do was write around the need for advanced alchemy.

With the soon-to-be bomb resting on the floor before the desk, she was back in her element.

Energy-based magic. Like all sourcing spells for conduits, this one had to siphon from Tiran’s energy Reserve.

It was the only way for a sourcing sub-spell to yield energy automatically without the need for manual mapping and targeting.

She assigned the sourcing spell the name’ POWER. ’

Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called ‘FIRE,’ inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name ‘DEVICE’ and translated the directives scribbled on her notepaper into the runic language of the spellograph:

CONDITION 1: DEVICE is fifteen Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.

ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.

ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than three Vendric fingers.

If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.

The spellwork may not have come easily, but throwing the bomb was by far the most daunting part of the demonstration; true to form as a woman and a scholar, Sciona had a terrible arm.

Stepping back from the desk, she carefully lowered the carbon ball and eyed her intended trajectory—over the desk but not directly over, away from herself, but not too close to the archmages.

Men sniggered on the benches behind her just as the Danworth boys once had when she tried to play ball with them in her skirts.

Back in that schoolyard, she had turned around and hurled the deerskin ball ineffectually at the boys.

If she did that here, it would be so much more satisfying—and possibly murder.

As satisfying as the mental image was, she ignored her spectators and kept her eyes focused upward on the founding mages’ murals above.

On where she was going, not where she had been.

With a deep breath, she drew her arm back and slung the ball toward the ceiling. DEVICE soared farther forward than she’d intended but successfully hit fifteen feet and— whoosh! —burst into flame.

Fire burned ferociously around DEVICE, using the carbon as an anchor in space, until the ball descended below fifteen feet, extinguished, and fell to the floor, trailing smoke. Another success.

The spells only got harder from there.

If the archmages meant this to demoralize her, Sciona supposed even their wisdom had its limits. The deeper she sank into complex magic, the more focused she became, the more her surroundings fell away until nothing mattered. Not even the opinions of the greatest men in the world.

At last, Gamwen leaned over to Orynhel and said, “Archmage Supreme, we’re nearing the maximum prompt count.”

And Sciona was almost disappointed. She was so wrapped in the work at this exhilarating pace that she didn’t want it to end.

More importantly, she realized she had yet to fail a prompt.

Cautious elation welled up inside her. There had been a few stumbles, yes, but no spell that she had failed outright. She was passing .

Nodding, Archmage Orynhel said, “Before we move on to our final deliberation, does anyone have a last prompt for Miss Freynan?”

“I do.” Archmage Duris lifted his gloved hand, and a cauldron appeared before the desk—an industrial cauldron, bigger than the desk itself…

bigger than three desks stacked one on top of the other, the kind of cauldron a factory worker might fall into and not be discovered until his body bloated and bobbed to the surface.

“Miss Freynan, before you, you will find a cauldron. Levitate it.”

Sciona stared blankly at the mass of metal between her and the archmages.

It had to be a hundred times heavier than anything the other applicants had been asked to move.

And Duris wasn’t just asking her to move it; he was asking her to levitate it, a deeply delicate operation.

Sciona had to walk partway around the desk to even see the archmages’ panel past the cauldron.

“May I use any mapping method I choose, Archmage Duris?” she asked and thought she saw Bringham smile.

“Sure.” Duris folded his arms as he leaned back in his seat.

“But no siphoning the Reserve.” Meaning Sciona would have to calculate her energy use on her own.

Perfectly. On the first try. “You’ve demonstrated your aptitude with tame—we might say womanly —amounts of energy.

A highmage must master far more than that. ”

“Yes, sir.”

But this task would require an enormous amount of energy. The prompt was dangerous… unless Duris thought Sciona simply didn’t have the skill to access that much energy. Or maybe, he knew that she had the skill and just wanted to see if she had the nerve.

“Duris, I don’t like this,” Gamwen voiced Sciona’s apprehension. As the leading mapper in all of Tiran, he had picked up on Sciona’s skill; he knew the risks if she attempted the spell, but Archmage Orynhel raised a withered hand, silencing the objection.

“The prompt has been issued, Gamwen. Miss Freynan, please proceed.”

“Yes, Archmage Supreme.”

Sciona approached the cauldron and experimentally pushed on it with both palms. It didn’t budge.

Putting her shoulder to the metal and throwing all her weight against it only got her a sore arm and some unhelpful chuckles from the benches at her back.

Her heartbeat was picking up again—not in excitement, for the first time in the course of the exam, but in fear.

The fact that she couldn’t shift the cauldron an inch meant that she had no read on its weight over a few hundred pounds.

In Bringham’s lab, Sciona had gotten good at estimating the weight of machinery, but always with more information than this.

There, she would have been able to ask, ‘What are the dimensions on this thing?’ ‘How much does it weigh?’ ‘What’s it made of?

Iron? Pewter? Steel? Some newfangled alchemic compound I should read up on?

’ The material looked like steel, but… She rapped her knuckles on the side and frowned at the sound—muted, like there might be a layer of some other material inside, but she was half again too short to look over the rim.

The cauldron could weigh five hundred pounds. It could weigh five thousand.

“Miss Freynan,” Archmage Orynhel said when Sciona had circled the vessel several times. “You are required to begin composing a spell within the next minute.”

“Right.” Sciona let out a shaky breath and returned to the desk. “Sorry, sir.”

The levitation formula was quick work, but she paused, still stumped, when it came to estimating the cauldron’s weight.

Too low and the cauldron wouldn’t move at all.

She would fail at this final hurdle. Too high and…

well, too high and at least her end would be a dramatic one.

She bit her lip. A memorable death had to be better than the obscurity that awaited if she failed.

That thought swallowed all fear. Sciona erred on the side of power and set her values around the estimate of five thousand pounds.

Now, to source the energy to lift that much weight…

She smiled. This was where Duris assumed she had neither courage nor power, but he had misjudged.

This was where her fingers hit the keys and sang .

She had been making borderline heretical adjustments to traditional mapping methods since she was twelve.

At twenty-seven, she had her own fully formed methods so heavily adapted and reworked that, save for the base Leonic lines, one could scarcely recognize them as Kaedor, Leon, or Erafin.

They were something new. They were Freynan , methods she would have the right to publish under her name if she could just get through this last spell between her and the High Magistry.