“No!” Sciona said, even as she tried to shuffle on away from the bakery. “No bother. They were good.”
“Well, these are muffins. Better than the scones, in my humble opinion. Fluffier. But nutritious,” he added hastily. “Good study food—or so my mum tells me,” he laughed. “I was never one for the books myself. Not like you, Highmage.”
“Right. Well, I—”
“You have to get to your train. I’ll let you go.”
The moment Sciona was free of the baker’s son, a little girl accosted her.
“Miss Freynan!” she called as though Sciona was supposed to recognize her. Was she the cobbler’s daughter? Did the cobbler have a daughter? Or was Sciona thinking of the butcher who had owned the shop the next door before he died of fever? What had his name been? Idin?
“Will you sign my spellbooks?”
“What—sign them?” Sciona laughed, caught off guard.
“Yes, please?” The little girl looked up at her, all bright green eyes and goofy loose teeth. When she slung her bag to the ground and began unloading its contents, Sciona picked up one of the books and cheated by cracking the front cover. ‘This book is the property of:’ was printed on the front endpaper with ‘Nora Idin’ in careful juvenile cursive on the line beneath. Not the cobbler’s daughter, then. This child had no father. The hard steel engine at Sciona’s core softened slightly.
“Tell you what, Nora: if you let me borrow one of these, I’ll get an actual archmage to sign it.”
Big green eyes got impossibly bigger. “Really?”
“Really. Let’s see what you have here…” Sciona leaned in to survey the stack in the girl’s arms. “Danworth’s Pocket Guide to Magical Terminology? Great. Nice easy starting place, if a little condescending. A Beginner’s Guide to Leonic Sourcing, and—ugh!” Sciona grimaced down at Kelwitt’s Foundational Mapping. “Alright, what you want to do with this one is throw it away and get a real book on mapping. One by Halaros or—no, I guess Halaros is a touch dense for a kid, and his coordinates system is mmm”—Sciona pursed her lips on what she realized would be an inappropriate word to use around a child and settled on an arguably more devastating: “mediocre. Get yourself a nice Paeden. Then give Kelwitt to your mother for kindling.”
“But it’s on the school syllabus.”
“Be that as it may, if you really want to learn magic, you’ll have to supplement aggressively.” Sciona scrawled what later occurred to her was a probably illegible collection of titles on a notepaper and tore it free for the girl. “Here’s a list.”
By the time Sciona had shaken off the last well-wisher, she was almost late for the train and didn’t get a seat. Holding the handrail in the crook of her left elbow, she braced the pastry basket on her hip, arranged her notebook on top of the cloth cover, and spent the ride scribbling notes for the day. When the train pulled to a stop at the university, she was still hunched over the basket, squeezing items into the margins as she thought of one more thing… and one more… and one more.
The stares in the train car and out on the platform were more furtive this time, accompanied by whispers behind hands. Over the past two weeks, news had spread through Tiran that a woman had been admitted to the High Magistry. Sciona suspected that everyone and their mother had an opinion on the matter, but trying to wrap her head around that much attention sent her into a dizzying mental malfunction. So, instead of meeting any of the stares, she fixed her eyes mechanically ahead and hurried on to the refuge of the Main Magistry building.
The gazes of the Founding Mages felt heavier now than they ever had. Don’t let us down, they seemed to say as she passed beneath them. You’ve got your one-in-a-million chance, little girl. Don’t squander it.
With classes back in session, the Main Magistry building adjoining Leon’s Hall swirled with purple, green, and brown robes. A few research and teaching mages stopped to congratulate Sciona, but there were fewer well-wishers here than in Aunt Winny’s domain; most just gawked rather rudely as she made her way up the stairs to the second floor, where the teaching mages had their offices, to the third floor, where the mid-level research mages worked, up to the fourth floor, where only highmages and their staff were allowed.
A security gate barred the final stairway—a beautiful work of classic conduit design—and Sciona’s breath fluttered as the lock flared with Reserve energy. The robust physical locking mechanism anchored a pre-written scanning spell like the one Sciona had used to scan the chemical composition of the sludge she had siphoned during her exam, only this spell disregarded flesh, blood, and fabric in search of very specific input: steel in the distinct and complex shape of a highmage’s crest. As the scanning spell registered the material and shape of the clasp on Sciona’s robes, the conduit’s action spell came to life, releasing the lock and opening the gates for her.
Not all highmages worked on the fourth floor of the Main Magistry building. Most of the university’s elite alchemists and conduit designers had offices in the science building with its vast storerooms of raw material. But the large and sparse laboratories on the upper floors of the Main Magistry worked best for sourcing and action spell experimentation. So, this was where Sciona had been assigned, along with the High Magistry’s few other mapping specialists.
The fourth-floor lobby was a grand hall unto itself. Spacious, lavish—and utterly quiet. The polished crescent of a secretary’s desk stood empty, and Sciona paused before it, unsure which way to go.
A janitor was on his knees behind the great desk, scrubbing what looked to Sciona like a pristine floor. Normally, she didn’t notice the cleaning staff—they so thoroughly blended into the walls in their gray jumpsuits—but the squeak of this one’s rag on the tile was the only sound in the wide chamber.
She peered around for a real person, but the chair behind the secretary’s desk was vacant, as was the rest of the lobby.
“Hello?” she called tentatively.
No one responded, but the cleaning man looked up at Sciona from beneath his workman’s cap—gray eyes like stone. So, like most workmen, he was a Kwen from out in the Blightlands. Chances were, he wouldn’t even speak proficient Tiranish, although maybe it was still worth asking.
“I don’t suppose you can understand me?”
“Well enough, ma’am,” the Kwen said with only a faint accent.
Oh, thank Feryn. “I’m looking for the secretary.”
“He’s usually not in until later.”
“Then, I guess I’m looking for my laboratory. I’m not sure if you’d know where it is?”
“You’re one of the new highmages, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“Then, your laboratory is that way.” The janitor nodded down the hallway to Sciona’s left. “You’ll want to take a right, then another right, then a left.”
“Alright, thanks.”
Sciona took a few steps into the hallway he had indicated but immediately paused in confusion. The corridor appeared to branch multiple times ahead, providing three opportunities to turn right. There wasn’t any signage save the ornate plaques on each laboratory door, indicating which highmage the space belonged to. Sciona supposed this wasn’t like the lower floors, where students often came to meet with their professors. The only people ever allowed on this floor knew exactly where they were going. She could wander the halls until she found her name, but that was assuming a plaque had already been installed for her.