Page 9

Sciona’s custom composition allowed her to map a wide range like the Leonic Method but then pull in close on promising energy sources like the Kaedor Method. On top of that, she had added modified lines from the Erafin Method to sharpen fuzzy patches of energy to bright pools.

The field in her mapping coil seethed with white, but no single source here was big enough to levitate five thousand pounds… In an act of reckless confidence, she entered three different sets of coordinates and siphoned them all at once.

The spellograph rattled with the rush of energy, Sciona seized it to keep it from shaking off the desk and—

BOOM!

The cauldron shot toward the ceiling—and into it, right through Founding Mage Stravos’s handsome copper-haired head. Cracks burst like lightning across Mordra the First’s inventions and Highmage Sabernyn’s trial, and shouts of shock rang through the chamber.

As chunks of the ceiling broke loose, Sciona’s sense of self-preservation finally caught up with her; she let go of the spellograph and dove under the desk.

Limestone thundered onto the desktop, pieces as big as fists tumbling from the wood to the floor on all sides.

In the next moment, the cauldron crashed back to the floor, terrifyingly close, adding a spray of stone tiles to the chaos.

And thank God for Aunt Winny and her fussing; the rain of debris bounced off Sciona’s petticoats, leaving her dress torn but her legs untouched.

The cauldron’s final impact reverberated through the chamber as clouds of stone dust settled in a soft hiss. And, in their wake, silence.

Rolling to her knees, Sciona peered from under the desk. Judging by the damage to the ceiling and the size of the indent in the limestone floor, she had vastly overestimated the cauldron’s weight. It wasn’t five thousand pounds. It had to be right around one thousand.

She was out from under the desk before she realized what she was doing, brushing rubble from between the spellograph keys. Amid a mess of splintered wood and shattered glass bowls, the machine had waited for her fingers, undamaged, like a sign from God.

“Miss Freynan,” one of the archmages was saying in concern. “Are you alright? Shall we call in the medic?”

“No,” she tore the used spellpaper from the platen and replaced it with a fresh sheet.

“Pardon?”

“No!” Her voice grew stronger as she lay into her action spell—the same one she had written before, but this time with the correct values slotted in. “I have it!”

“Miss Freynan, you have not been asked for any further spellwork,” Archmage Duris said warningly. “Step away from the desk and find your seat.”

But at that point, Feryn Himself could not have stopped Sciona’s hands. The math came easily now that she knew the weights involved. Within a few breaths, she had hit the break and started her custom mapping spell anew.

“Miss Freynan!” Archmage Duris’s voice sharpened with outright anger. “Failure to follow instructions will result in disqualification!”

The wrath of an archmage would have shaken anyone with half a brain. It did shake Sciona, setting her stomach churning, but the churning was just another form of energy, one more shot in the engine speeding her to the end of the spell.

The Otherrealm burst open before her, glowing with a wealth of energy. She found her coordinates.

“Step back this inst—” Duris choked on the rest of his words as Sciona hit the final key.

Her spell roared into action, vibrating the spellograph with more energy than the little machine was built to handle. Sciona finally did as she was told then. She backed away from the desk with both hands raised—in surrender? In triumph? It didn’t matter.

All that mattered was the cauldron, hovering motionless in the air before the archmages. Perfectly controlled.

For the second time during Sciona’s exam, silence ruled Leon’s Hall. It was only in that stillness that Sciona registered precisely what she had done. She had openly defied an archmage’s instructions during her exam. She was disqualified.

The world grayed.

She was disqualified.

Archmage Orynhel cleared his throat and said into that hideous emptiness, “Applicants, guests, please leave the hall and await our decision.”

Sciona fled the chamber as fast as speed-walking in heavy skirts would allow.

She didn’t want to look at the other applicants.

She didn’t want to look at Alba, or Bringham, or any of them.

She blazed straight through the chamber where the testers were supposed to wait for the results, down the hall and into the women’s lavatory where no other mages could follow her.

But of course, there was one person who could follow her.

“Sciona!” Alba pushed into the lavatory, out of breath from running after her. “Are you alright?”

Sciona couldn’t have answered if she’d wanted to. Invisible hands were on her lungs, on her heart, squeezing so each heartbeat throbbed right to her eardrums. The world blurred as she leaned into the cool stone of the lavatory wall.

“So…” Alba said slowly. “I take it that wasn’t supposed to happen?”

Obviously not! Sciona wanted to snarl. Obviously, I’ve blown my chance and the chances of all female mages for the next decade! None of that came out when she opened her mouth. What did come out, finally, was her breakfast.

She barely made it to the toilet before everything in her stomach vacated the premises. The hydro-conduits around the bowl flared, banishing the vomit in a whoosh of water—just in time for her to be sick again. Alba stayed with her, rubbing a soothing hand on her back.

“Honestly, from where I was sitting, it didn’t look that bad,” she said in a truly pitiful attempt at comfort.

“Don’t patronize me,” Sciona rasped.

The exam was explicitly about how well a mage could perform within parameters.

Plenty of mages could badly exercise creativity; ill-executed ingenuity was a far bigger liability than by-the-book mediocrity.

If the High Magistry was going to bring a woman into their ranks, it would be someone safe, someone who could follow a brief to the letter.

But Sciona didn’t have the strength to explain any of this to Alba.

The only thing she could do was clutch the sides of the toilet and shake.

“But you were so amazing in there!” Alba said softly. “So powerful!”

“Well, the Widow Eringale was amazing,” Sciona growled through the chemical sting in her throat and nasal passage. “Keracy and Irma Mordra were powerful. Trethellyn was the best damn alchemist the city had ever seen.”

“Who?”

“Exactly.” A tear slid down Sciona’s cheek, and she angrily scrubbed it away. “Exactly.”

Keracy had spent the rest of her career teaching school children after she failed the High Magistry exam.

Trethellyn had married an archmage. All her subsequent research had been published under his name—a fact Sciona only knew because she had read the footnotes of an obscure book by one of their mutual colleagues.

After giving up her name and career to marry a city chair, Irma Mordra had suffered postpartum hysteria so bad that her husband sent her to a mental institution.

Her caretakers had discovered her body hanging by the neck from a light fixture in her room.

“I can’t do it, Alba!” Sciona’s hands pushed into her hair, nails digging into her scalp. “I’m not Trethellyn or Keracy, I’m Irma Mordra. I won’t live! I won’t—”

“Shh-shh.” Alba pulled her close. “Sciona, darling…” She seemed to cast around for something to say and came up empty.

So, instead, she just sat with Sciona and softly rubbed her back.

It was only at length that she said, “I don’t suppose it’s worth asking you to get up and come back to the waiting chamber with me? ”

“No!” Sciona knew she sounded like a child.

But the last thing she wanted was to wait in a room with the other applicants, knowing she had just self-destructed in front of them.

She would prefer never to see any of those men again…

although, now that the exam was over, she supposed she wouldn’t have to.

She was destined for lesser things. Tears seized her throat, and she ruthlessly forced them back.

She might have failed like a woman, but at least no one was going to catch her crying like one. Not even Alba.

“It’s better if we don’t show our faces,” Sciona said past the awful, acid-flavored lump in her throat.

“We didn’t belong there in the first place.

” Except that it was the only place in the world Sciona could belong.

Without warning, a sob made a lunge for freedom.

Sciona turned away from Alba and retched again to cover the sound.

“Sorry,” she muttered when the moment had passed, and her eyelids had beaten back the tears.

“For what?”

“For being such a mess. Not just today… all the time. Since we were little.” Sciona had always selfishly assumed that one day, her obsessive studies would pay off. What a stupid thing to think.

“Oh,” Alba said. I couldn’t have lived with you for twenty years if I couldn’t live with a little mess, she’d said in the past. Today, she just gathered that failed mess of a mage into her arms and rocked her, just as she had when they were children and Sciona would wake crying for her mother.

Sciona didn’t know how long she and patient Alba had sat there, rocking, when the door creaked open.

“Oh, Miss Freynan, there you are!” It was the secretary from the front desk. “Your mentor has been looking everywhere for you!”

Of course. Archmage Bringham would want to talk to Sciona about the exam, to say goodbye and wish her luck with life as a lesser mage.

“Sorry,” Alba said. “Sciona isn’t feeling well.”

“Oh dear, should I call for a nurse?”

“No,” Sciona said in a ragged voice. “Don’t.”