Dalliance was exhausted. Not all of the classes started at once, and not all of the classes had very much to do in them. It seemed, really, that memorization and repetition were integral to success as a mage. He had simply been told to practice his [Cancel] spell, and like many in class, sat there practicing, feeling like he could have stayed at home. Not that he was in possession of one of those anymore.

  "Thank the gods it's Paxday, so it is," his teacher had suggested. Dalliance didn’t feel strongly either way on the topic, but the aphorism was common enough that he knew what the man was saying.

  Pater's Day was the day for working at home, for providing family time with your children, and that kind of thing. And for many, or even most, that meant that it was the day that you could go home from working in the fields, the young bucks taking shifts on Patersday replacing the family men who got to go home.

  It was certainly something he had heard before. But for him, even the one day ‘off’ had hardly been a day off, and having a day on again, full of makeup work, seemed like it was, in general, an unfair idea. Though perhaps for someone who had just killed his father, the unfairness might be a little relative.

  Still, tomorrow was a day with no classes, and now that his Practicals had begun, his school days would be quite full. Practicals were the first thing in the morning, before he was even awake enough to think, which seemed unfair given how complicated the topic was. This was followed by Divination, Incantation, a break for lunch, and then his Applications of Aeromancy, after which people broke off to their individual course studies. First-years, apparently, were expected to go home and practice—or back to the dorm, as was his case.

  He would have time for maybe a walk with Earnest, after, with lunch with Charity, and then he’d be on his own recognizance for the day’s end, with mana burning its metaphorical hole in his pockets, but really needing to be spent on spellcraft.

  Which brought up dinner, if he could afford it. But probably not. And then tomorrow was truly the earliest he could work Whimsy in, which might be for the best, because he didn’t know what he was going to tell her.

  His continued lack of progress in Incantations had begun to worry him, and in fact, seemed to concern his teacher as well. That he was still only in the bottom half of the class was, he knew, due to a lack of practice. It hadn’t clicked, and since it hadn’t clicked, he had been frustrated, and since he was frustrated, he hadn't practiced.

  He found excuses to cast all of his other spells, whether in class or not, for the first time, despite how many tries it took for the unfamiliar spells to come out. He should, he knew, have also put in the effort with [Cancel], but the very concept of "grasping the mana conduits," while clear enough on paper, didn’t match the feeling of casting intuitively and didn’t map to anything it seemed, visually.

  After some consideration, he'd asked about that in class.

  "An excellent question," said the professor. "It’s quite simple. Imagine a tube from, say, your mouth to a balloon. You blow into the tube, the air goes into the balloon."

  "When you pop the balloon, the air goes into the world. Most beginning mages are still told at some point about the existence of conduits, but depending on the formality of your pedagogy, perhaps this is past due."

  "Self-taught," Dalliance admitted.

  "Interesting," said his teacher, sounding genuinely enthusiastic about it. "I would not have guessed. Do we have any others?" No one raised their hands. "Just you," he said. "And as I expected, you wouldn’t see many hands raised for that one anywhere in the Empire. Good for you."

  The tubes analogy strangely did help. Dalliance was able to cast [Cancel] by the end of the class. The requirement, it seemed, was to have something to cancel to aim at, which seemed likely to be a crutch and, anyway, not part of the instructions earlier. But without it, Dalliance suspected, he never would have succeeded.

  Dalliance had expected something a little different upon his second entry into Professor Rainy's class. The first thing she did was pluck his signed paper from his fingers.

  "You did your work," she confirmed. "But your partner did not do his."

  Dalliance hadn't thought about it, assuming his partner had obtained a signature and gone about his day without ever being sought out himself.

  "I already addressed this," she said. "Yesterday, about two-thirds of you made the same lapse in judgment. For that reason, the rest of the class has already re-done this assignment, which you shall do as well, with a new partner. As there was only one name left in the bucket, I took the liberty of drawing for you."

  She reached her hand into her chest pocket and withdrew a small slip of paper, which she pushed into his grasp.

  Penny-Ante Nonesuch, it read.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "She is not here today, and won’t be tomorrow either," said Rainy. "Funeral, I understand. Lots of those, going around." Her voice sounded a little maudlin for a moment there.

  "You’ll have your work cut out for you tomorrow. She’ll have the task of finding you, likewise, upon her return: feel free to make it as obnoxious as you like. Divination is not meant to be effortless. To wit," she said, "I'll be teaching you all, today, the basic spell of obfuscation: [Obscure]."

  Dalliance's hand was already raised.

  "Really," she asked. His seat had barely touched the chair before he had his first question. It wasn't an unreasonable reaction.

  "I was thinking," he said.

  "Always dangerous for the unprepared," Rainy said.

  "The thing is," Dalliance continued, "I had wondered how it was that during the Hunts, they were able to grade us fairly on our contribution. And I think they were scrying on us. But the spell that you gave us, you said you can feel when you’re being watched."

  "And you’ve never felt that," said Rainy, "because your partner here . . . "—Gus looked embarrassed—" . . . never attempted the spell himself. Let me show you."

  It felt like all the eyes in the room were focused on him, which, to be fair, they were, and had been. But now he was aware of it, a dawning horror at being seen.

  And just as quickly, the spell winked out.

  "This is what we teach students. Teachers have the original spell, [Scry]. It does not have this effect of warning the observed. We can watch you anywhere, at any time. And we do not teach that spell for a reason. It is rife with potential for abuse. Still, if you’re doing something you do not wish to have seen, obscuration has its value, and thus today, I shall teach it. This is a spell which will make it impossible to see you, but not to hear you. Scrying allows for both. If you do not wish to be heard, do not speak, or learn a different charm."

  Silence in the classroom. She rolled her eyes, repeating herself:

  "By the bye, for your delayed hide-and-seek charade, Dalliance, you shall be allowed to cast [Obscure]. I have sent her a letter, telling her as much."

  "For those of you who know the spell [Cancel] . . . ." She looked around the room. Some hands went up, Dalliance himself newly among them. "[Cancel]," said their teacher, "is invaluable when using [Scry]."

  Looking around, he could see that not everyone had as much trouble as he had.

  "For those of you who can," she specified, "canceling your spell the instant someone feels it is a good practice to get into. Because even for the advanced version of scrying, there exist spells to detect scrying, by which the advanced version, for all intents and purposes, is rendered the same as the version I already taught you. Better to cut your spell off immediately than have someone follow it back to you, which you can do via ‘trace scrying’ spells."

  "The wonderful world of magic, it’s so fun," she said, only the faintest hint of irony in her voice. "Curses and counters, and counters to counters. You’ll see that all through each of the disciplines as you go. Sometimes the offense is ahead, sometimes the defense is ahead. But always, for anything you do, magic or otherwise in life, there’s someone who wants you to not do it, or who will profit from you not doing it, or simply doesn’t like that you’re able to do it and just makes themselves an obstacle out of spite."

  "People are poison," she concluded. "Better to get a cabin and live alone and happy, and perhaps read a book or dozen." With a wink, she went back to the blackboard.

  "As for scrying, I’ve taught you the basic idea of scrying for air. But you should know that to punch through the obscuring, one needs a focus. Mists or candle smoke for air. Fire for fire—nice and simple, that one. A bowl of water or ice for water. A crystal for earth, and so on, and so on, and so on."

  "Any questions?"

  Dalliance tried, but his mind, which had been humming right along, trying to manage his enjoyment of the class in tandem with his stressing about mana and getting spell practice in, not to mention what he would say to Whimsy, refused to kick up any questions.

  "There should be questions," said Detective Rainy. "I haven’t explained how to do any of this. But perhaps you were not listening. If I’m going to spend my time teaching, you will learn, one way or another."

  "Therefore," she said, "homework. Come to class capable of casting an obscuring screen. I will put a shock wand on the other end of the room, which will try to divine you upon entering through the door. If it can see you after, I don't know, some amount of time, you’ll get zapped." She smiled pleasantly. "That’ll be all."

  Effluvia met his eyes on the way out of class, having apparently been sitting there in the back. "I don’t have any natural Divination magic," she said miserably. "And there’s almost none of it in the environment. How are you getting on?"

  Dalliance shrugged. "I am Air threaded with Fortune," he said.

  She scowled. "This is how people felt watching me casting lightning," she complained.

  "Isn't it?" He made a wavering motion with his hand but didn’t comment.

  She looked like she was on the cusp of saying more, but didn’t, and walked away through the drizzling rain, which was still falling even if the worst of it had passed.

  Dalliance felt much better knowing how to cast [Obscure], which had worked the first time he'd tried it, standing in the doorway after class, waiting for a break in the rain (which hadn't eventuated).

  Presumably, additional spellcraft was meant to come from prospective masters, not that he'd heard anything back. But it had barely been a day. He hadn’t been here long: it hadn’t even been a week yet. Deciding whether to mentor someone or not took time.

  Certainly, he had already gained some basic tools in his toolbelt, even if he didn’t know how to use all of them yet.

  But now it was time for lunch, and he'd gotten soaked from not having his umbrella on him. A damp tramp back to his apartment, at speed left him newly shod, but staring at yet another letter, this one in shakier handwriting than the last:

  Dalliance, it said, we should talk. I'll be in the house of healing for the next several days. Stop by at your convenience.

  —P.

  It isn't that Dalliance hadn't expected it, but he had managed to forget that he was expecting it, which made it worse.