When the scrying spell finally worked, Dalliance understood what the professor had meant about it being possible to misuse. His target, Gus, coalesced first as a face with a long nose and an unfortunate complexion, and then a body, tall and scraggly. He was probably taller than Dalliance, which didn’t really make him very special. And then the courtyard tiles around him appeared.

  Dalliance watched in envy as Gus shaped a ball of yellow mana and threw it to stick on a suddenly shrieking crowd of girls leaving the main hall. So, he had never left the Commencement. That was convenient.

  Dalliance jogged on his way, not necessarily excited to have to talk to a stranger, but happy to have all of his assigned work done for the day. It had been hard to focus. The other kids in the classroom were clanging on about one thing or another. "Is this professor cool? I have this spell, do you have this spell? No? Well, maybe your dad’s not as rich as mine."

  And the contests. He hadn’t realized how important they would be.

  "I’m gonna beat you, you know. I could take both of you and an arcane knight with both hands and my foot tied behind my back."

  Worse, and this had really soured Dalliance's mood, he’d seen Sterling walking on the campus. He wasn’t even a mage.

  And then there’d been lunch. Their ‘house mother’ was no Miss Thicket Wimple, who had been able to mix up a healthy and tasty lunch from almost any combination of donated goods from the farm kids' families. No, these were clearly street food. Not that he had any particular aversion to street food; he’d been eating almost nothing else since he got the scholarship. It was more the lack of effort. And he knew that wasn’t fair. Not having to cook, or even not having the time to cook . . . Thicket Wimple hadn’t also been teaching a class full of wizards how to whiz. But acknowledging that didn’t help in any way whatsoever.

  He knew he should be more grateful.

  Reality was just so much more boring than the fantasy had been.

  When Dalliance reached him, the tall boy was surrounded by other students who, like Dalliance, thought the spell was pretty cool. Once he knew the details, he thought even more so. It was an Air spell with an Illusion sub-class that stuck to a living target and helped archers hit it at night. Importantly, it couldn’t stick to something that wasn’t living, so no false positives. Gus bragged about this facet repeatedly, earning himself a share of Dalliance's displeasure, even if he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Gus Vibert. Another peasant name. Common. Not peasant names, Dalliance realized. He really needed to stop thinking of them that way. He wasn’t his father. He could do better.

  Doing better. The thought sparked the notion of Charity, who would probably be available shortly. Dalliance went to the temple courtyard and waited. By the time she emerged, he had very nearly finished the incantation for the spell [Detect Audible], though its working principles completely eluded him.

  She looked happy.

  He smiled at her as she sat down and arranged her things, moving his own small stack of books to the side courteously.

  "You seem to be in good spirits," he half-accused her.

  "I am. But you aren't." She gave him the full benefit of her undivided attention. "Why aren't you?"

  "I guess I thought I’d be having more fun," Dalliance muttered, after thinking about how to convert his vague dissatisfaction into something she'd understand. "I hoped that once I wasn't competing for a scholarship I could just get taught things, and conflict would go down, not up. But because we’re meant to be battle mages, and sometimes have to go up against creatures that can cast magic, we have to contest with one another. Non-lethally, so there's that: I can't even complain that they're being unreasonable about it. I just hoped I'd get to read in peace, you know?"

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  "I'm sorry, Dalliance," she said.

  "You don’t even get experience for it; you just get your skill better. It makes sense, but I can’t help but think that I’m going to end up resenting people who do better than me."

  "If you think about it, sparring isn't really—"

  "—that’s just the thing," he said. "I could do sparring. I wouldn’t be unhappy about hearing that I was going to have to spar with people, even if I’m not very good right now. It's that contests have outcomes. The masters with the best reputations or the more unusual classes are usually more picky about which students they take as protégés. And so, the contests are opportunities to show ourselves as exceptional, to get the eye of someone who can train us with, you know, the secret knowledge or whatever. That’s what's going to get us to the next tier, where we want to be set up for success on the tier after that."

  "So it's not just sparring. You're still competing for reputation."

  "It’s a system that perpetuates hoarding. Nobody can just share knowledge. Isn’t that what the college was supposed to be about? Teaching us?"

  "That does sound frustrating," she agreed, sympathy in her blue eyes now. "I suppose where I am, it’s the opposite problem. Because in theology, it isn’t that there’s one true, testable theory about the gods."

  Dalliance made the mental effort to shift gears: she'd listened politely, and now he was going to pay attention to what she was saying. Because that mattered too.

  And what she was saying didn't make any sense.

  "But you can test it," Dalliance said. "You can pray and see if your theory does anything."

  "We're not talking about the same thing," she said. "That's Orthopraxy. Orthopraxy is 'right action.' It’s doing the thing that the gods want you to do and getting the results that correspond with the thing that you did. It’s like saying the password to a guard at the door, and he lets you in. But why does the guard ask for a password? Why this password? And how do I predict the other passwords? I want to know the mind behind the password, what it wants. And for that, in theology, you don’t have the incentive to hide and hoard, but instead everybody does the opposite: they grab the best pieces of everything they’ve ever heard and try to stack them up into new and exciting combinations so their names can be on them. You've got scarcity. I have junk to sift through. I have to read a dozen nonsense papers to find something with value in it."

  "Better you than me," he told her.

  "It isn't all bad. It’s also really helped me figure out how to phrase things so that people will understand them, because there’s so much ambiguity."

  She quirked a small grin.

  "You’re looking at me," she said, "like I just grew horns and started bleating."

  "No, not at all," he said. "Just . . . happy for you. You seem to be having a good time."

  "I am," she said. "And this is just the introduction, they want to know which of us have the mindset to become, well, one of the liturgy, the book people—the ones to do the reading and come up with the ideas about what it means, or better yet, understand what’s there on the page and explain it in terms people can understand."

  "I would’ve thought it was just the second one that had any value," Dalliance admitted.

  "Take Pater. The holy book of Pater never made it through the gate when the world was new. All the copies were lost. And the will of Pater, therefore, is the collected recollections, understandings, and commentaries of his high priesthood and their successors."

  "To be frank," she added, "I get the feeling a lot of them didn’t really like women."

  Dalliance's mother had had a lot to say on the topic. "Like women having to stay home until married off, and their dad getting the proceeds."

  She scowled. "That has to do with nobility passing along lineages, and not anything to do with the inherent qualities of men and women. Yes, that is exactly what I’m talking about."

  "Well, I’m glad you’re having fun," he said mildly.

  "I’m sorry that you’re not," she said. "Do you think you’d feel better if there weren't any challenge?"

  "That's not the problem. I think anytime that I'm competing for something, it cheapens my gratitude for it. I don’t want to have to perform to get the thing I was promised."

  She patted his arm to comfort him, and he gave her a brief smile.

  "Oh, speaking of performance," she said. "Effluvia wants us to meet, tonight. The whole council, before our first time up on the Wall. To strategize, make sure we all know what to expect, as much as she or Morality can offer. They'll be riding into town this evening. We can get Earnest's read on things."

  Sounded like it was happening whether or not he took part.

  "If the worst should happen," she said, "I wouldn't have wanted to pass up an opportunity to see everybody together anyway."

  Oh yeah. He could still die tomorrow. That was like the cheerful cherry on top.

  "I guess I'll see you at dinner, then."