Dalliance was roughly carried, not ungently by design, just hurriedly, by soldiers who were too busy to coddle his weak stomach, to a bench just within the Citadel doors, out of the elements, and lined with faded felt.

  They planted him in there and left him until he thought he had been forgotten, returning eventually carrying a steaming mash of potato, generously buttered and sprinkled with chopped greens, on a tin plate.

  "It's a half mile of stairs, and unless I miss my guess you're in no shape to fly your way down," said the soldier who had brought the plate, not unkindly. "Archmage said to give you this—told me to tell you, don't lose it, too."

  It was a leather bandolier with three pouches, such as buckle around his chest and arch over one shoulder, with the pouches in front. In each of them questing fingers could feel a rounded protrusion of some hard substance or object within. Upon opening one of the pouches, he saw a faintly luminescent purple liquid in a glass phial.

  The soldier pulled back his own weatherproof coat, revealing the interior lining of fluffy white sheepskin, and his own bandolier, much like Dalliance's, except holding more equipment—dagger, waterskin, flask.

  "Featherfall," said the soldier. "You can break any of the three to do it if you need to, if flight fails you or you run out of mana. It wouldn't help the cart, of course."

  "I guess not."

  "Yeah. Well, eat up, you earned it. Chefs were beside themselves. Remember to pace yourself on the way down. Take a seat and recharge if you need it, it's better than tripping and rolling your way down."

  "I'll do my best."

  A nod. "Surely you will. That trick with the cart -- I can think of lots of good places for a talent like that. Before the wall, during a calm, would do it -- most mages haven't got the stomach for the smell, or the spine either, to recover lost weapons and artifacts. Not that one or two at a time is worth much anyway. A wagon, though?"

  He looked hungrily at the wagon, now mostly emptied, sitting lonely out on the Citadel roof, the only wooden thing within a span of grey.

  "With a load of that size, now, we'd change the war."

  Dalliance gave him a little noncommittal quirk of his mouth that showed he was trying to bravely smile at the idea of going into the corpse pile to recover precious artifacts, but it was half-hearted. When the wind was wrong in the city, you could smell the charnel stench of the wall wafting over the middle tiers. To be down there in it . . . well.

  Dalliance had had to rebury his fair share of squirrels and other varmints around the farm, and the memory of the sickly-sweet corpse smell, and the bursting, ripe flesh gushing with nameless liquids . . . didn't help his appetite any.

  "It's a thought," he said.

  That'd be IN FRONT of the front lines, he didn't say. I have no interest at all, he didn't add.

  The soldier lingered for a moment, but left when Dalliance dedicated himself to the potato, without further comment.

  It was to an awkward dearth of acknowledgment that he descended—his notoriety, his novelty, having apparently worn off. He was simply nodded through to the top of the stairs and left alone for his descent.

  The stairs curved so slowly that they were more akin to a straight stairway than a spiral, a great sweep of stone steps falling quickly around the corner and out of sight. As Dalliance followed the vaulted ceiling passage down and down from the cloud-top, in no time at all his knees hurt.

  There was no banister—there was no need of one, because the walls were on either side—except he wasn't quite tall enough to brace himself on both walls at once. He sat down, taking the soldier's advice. He actually could fall and just keep falling, and his corpse would show up at the bottom.

  The steps were hard underfoot. The road was always hard, of course, being cobblestone—but in a different way. You got the impression that cobblestone, and the grout or mortar holding the stones together, all sort of remembered being earth. But the Tower rock was different. It was almost glassy, and the steps weren't worn in the center the way he was used to seeing—each one described a crisp angle, and shone with a dull finish that made it look waxy.

  They had no give at all. With every step, every bit of give was his foot. And if he caught the edge of the stair with the sole of his foot instead of the flat, he could feel the sharpness of the edge right through his boots. No wonder his feet hurt.

  About halfway down he saw his first rat, slinking in the corner of the steps, trying not to be noticed. There were no holes in the wall, of course—nowhere for it to skitter through but the passageways and steps designed for bigger beings.

  "Not my potatoes, you don't," he said, momentarily irate at the idea of his hard-carried produce being thieved upon.

  It was quick work to with prediction to dispatch the thing with his knife, one stroke mercifully quick. Of course he couldn't leave it on the steps, because it would start to stink soon, but . . . wait.

  Abruptly grinning to himself, miles away in his thoughts, Dalliance wrapped the carcass up and tucked it into his pocket, where it made an odd bulge and rubbed at his skin.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  He'd have to find a jar, somewhere, and some sealing wax.

  With new life in his steps, Dalliance continued down the tower.

  Scry versus Scry, proclaimed the blackboard in Detective Rainy's class.

  Dalliance seated himself gingerly, legs still deeply sore from the tower-top exertion the previous day.

  "Today," said Detective Rainy, "I have a special announcement. I've been spying on you all—and it's not, I'll note, an ambush if I announce what I'm doing. To play fair, I used the [Observe] spell rather than [Scry], giving each of you plenty of opportunity to prevent me from seeing anything you didn't want seen. And what I saw is a grave disappointment."

  Dalliance's thoughts hitched, flushing immediately to Topaz as the worst possible thing she could have seen. She didn't let him wallow for long.

  "Only four of you," she said, "attempted to subvert my spells or obscure yourselves. Effluvia, using the reactive wards of her manor, sent her own counter-scry in the person of their ward-mage. Presley—excellent fellow—took me for drinks afterward to discuss why I was spying on little girls. I think he might have brought a knife with him."

  She looked pleased about it.

  "The goal of this exercise," she continued, "was to see if any of you would use the fancy new spell I taught you and obscure yourselves. Ideally, unless you like being watched, one ought to remain obscured. The spell lasts quite a long time unless you are being looked at, and when you are being looked at, one must become used to feeling when the spell is about to fail. So I explained, and so I did not get stabbed."

  She looked sternly around the classroom.

  "Most of you failed."

  She wrote Effluvia's name on the board, and marked a star beside it in yellow chalk. Penny-Ante, Dalliance, and Laken also went up on the board.

  "Dalliance—you remained obscured the entire time you were home last night, the longest of anyone in the class. Well done indeed."

  Dalliance felt the eyes of the class on him. What was he doing at home, he imagined them wondering, that he was so reluctant to have someone see him doing?

  "Sometimes I don't like to wear a shirt," he said, causing a few cheeky smiles across the room. Instructor Rainy was not among them.

  "An admirable," she said instead, "devotion to decorum. One wouldn't want someone peeking in on you to be shocked at your state of undress."

  She rolled her eyes as she scribed his gold star.

  "An entirely understandable motivation."

  "From what little I did see," she told him after class, "you're quite the studious young mage. But I do worry—it isn't that the rate of practice is inappropriate for your studies," she said. "It is that your mana is a limited resource. So is your time. When you tier up, you can improve your spells, but knowing more spells without mastering any will not result—" she hesitated. "You will waste the opportunity of a lifetime if you tier up without mastering any spells, and with all of the best will in the world, you will not master any spells if you practice every spell you can get your hands on as you have been doing."

  "Furthermore—" professor's voice, lecture mode: "it took you quite a bit longer than expected to master Cancel, which is a fundamental and not a complicated spell. Instructors talk. It's a concern because when you graduate to the truly advanced, to counter-spells and the like, you will find yourself with far too complicated a workload to just . . . do. Serial focus is more effective than multitasking for mastery."

  Dalliance scowled, though not in her direction. He hadn't asked for help.

  "If I teach a spell, you are expected to go back to your dorm and practice just that spell until you can cast it. You do this in sequence for each of your classes."

  And that was just unreasonable.

  "But I won't have any mana left," Dalliance protested.

  "Out of mana is no way to live, but you don't have a choice. That's why students stay broke—you spend all of your mana on spellcraft, then conserve what you can during service days and spend that for food and necessities."

  "And if I have to use it on the wall?" he asked.

  "Then you will fall behind," she said.

  "I'm already behind," he complained. "I can't use a mana engine yet."

  "I know. And what would that take to remedy?" she asked.

  "Focused practice," he guessed.

  "Try it, and find out."

  That night, Dalliance sat on the balcony, legs through the railing, staring down at the drop off the edge of Penitence Hall, then over the edge toward Water Street, where the mist from the Imperial waterfall floated on the wind, visible even in the evening in the fitful glow of the gas lamps.

  Topaz had told him: he had to choose: upkeep what he had, prepare for where he wanted to be, or react defensively to what's going on around him. And, he'd come to decide, planning beats reacting, every time.

  He needed a plan.

  Someone screamed in an alley, and Dalliance wondered idly if someone would help them. Everything was going wrong. He felt he had plenty of mana—he was going to practice—but which spell? What was important? What could he get away with not learning? They all sounded so tempting.

  Prediction was best, and nearly there—97% mastery. Werewind might have been second-best; he was starting to realize he thought more clearly as the wind than as a boy. But then again, Redirection was super-powerful—he was just not agile enough to use it properly yet. There was never enough time to figure out what the options were before the skill engaged. But if he never mastered it, he'd remain vulnerable to a lot of things. He sort of regretted levelling it up. He had understood the earlier version. He worried the same would be true for Prediction's upgrade.

  If you perfected a skill, you could upgrade it and keep it fully mastered. Otherwise you had to start from scratch after upgrading it.

  He had a bunch of perfectly nice spells which, apparently, fully mastered, enabled you to cast their follow-ups—such as Blur, which led to Invisibility. But Blur seemed so useless! And he wasn't even sure why the others mattered to learn. Or which to pick, in the case of Chill, which might become Heat Manipulation, or Chill of the Grave, which was a curse—and who knew what it would become. Plus, they both needed water aspected mana to cast, and he didn't have any water mana, so that was really inconvenient—he'd need to purchase a water engine, or practice under the cataract, or something.

  And then it would be next week, and he would be spending all of his mana on hauling potatoes, and the day after saving nothing up. And if you got paid what he had, it was a drop in the bucket compared to his normal reserves. He'd always wondered before why mages resented the service—now it made sense.

  At least there was no rush or anything. He hadn't exactly been rolling in experience points.

  Until today.

  That worried him, but he shook it off—probably that would be because he was going to be hunting with Earnest. It would be fine. Just a couple of experience points here and there. It would be slow enough to control. He felt happy about that, in a way—it gave him time to master his spells, grind his skills. He'd have a foundation. So maybe nothing bad was going to happen.

  Maybe it was all going to be okay.

  He wondered what perfecting [Werewind] would do. How could you get better than the best spell ever?

  He had three really nice skills, too. He really wanted to perfect all three.

  He wondered how he could even start making that sort of choice.

  Another scream drifted up—wordless and terrified—and Dalliance realized no one was coming to help.

  He closed his eyes and sighed through his nostrils.

  He'd practice spells another day.