“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.
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!”