“My mother did everything right,” Sciona said before she realized she had opened her mouth.
“Ma’am?” Thomil asked.
“She did everything a good, middle-class Tiranish girl should. She was poised, and quiet, and accommodating. And when an upper-class gentleman took an interest in her, she did what she was supposed to. She indulged him, married him, loved him, served him, and sacrificed her health to give him a child…”
Sciona might not remember much of her time in Perramis’s house, but she knew that, at the end, when her mother had been a skeleton, too weak to even hold her daughter’s hand, he had not been there. She knew he hadn’t bothered to send for his sister-in-law until it was too late.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye,” Aunt Winny had said, and that was Sciona’s first memory of her sweet aunt—crying over her sister’s body, “I didn’t get to say goodbye!”
“Women are always told to be kind, be forgiving, be nurturing,” Sciona said, glaring down the walk ahead. “As far as I know, it’s never gotten them anywhere. The men of Tiran, who have the real power, won’t return the favor when it matters.”
“This is why you believe the highmages of your department would take advantage of your cooperation if they got the chance?” Thomil said.
She nodded. “If returning their indifference makes me a bad woman, so be it.”
“A bad woman?”
“Arrogant,” Sciona clarified bitterly, “egotistical, impure of heart.”
“I think it’s only bad if your ego is unwarranted.”
“What?”
“If you fail to exceed their results on your own,” Thomil said. “If you are capable of everything they are as a group, then who can say you’ve been arrogant or unvirtuous?”
Sciona smiled at Thomil. “I like the way you think, Kwen.”
By this time, class had let out, students in brown robes were trickling out of buildings onto the walkways, and Sciona’s destination was in sight: Trethellyn Hall.
Arhcmage Bringham’s building stood proud at the juncture between the ancient white stonework of the original campus and the newer cement erections of the expanded campus. Until Archmage Bringham’s tenure, the building had just been called Northeast Hall 4. When he set up operations there, Bringham had decided that, as the city’s leading employer of women, he wanted to honor a largely forgotten female mage from the generation before his, even going so far as to use her maiden name.
“Oh,” Thomil murmured when the gold-lettered sign on the front of the building came into view. “That’s where we’re going, ma’am?”
Sciona nodded. “If there’s one person on this campus who will make sure we have the facilities we actually need, it’s Archmage Bringham—possibly the one exception to everything I’ve just said about men in Tiran.”
Thomil’s eyes turned to the textile building with an unreadable expression. For a moment, it seemed like a flicker of pain—or wrath?
Sciona opened her mouth to ask what the matter was when Thomil spoke. “Should I go back to the Main Magistry and try to retrieve your papers?”
“Hmm?”
“You were in the middle of composing a spellweb, weren’t you, ma’am? I assumed you’d want to continue.”
“Oh, no, I was all but finished with that. And, for the next week, I have something more important to do.”
“Ma’am?”
“If I’m going to outdo Renthorn and Tanrel, I’m going to have to do what my colleagues do and pass some responsibilities off to my assistant. You’ve been studying magical theory for a while, but if I’m going to use you properly, we need some practice in the mix.”
“You mean…？” Thomil seemed hesitant to even say it, but there was no time for hesitation.
“We need to get you doing some magic.”
“I will not fear evil, for where I go, God’s Light goes also. In the presence of God, I will not turn my gaze, though Light burn me. For Light will show the Truth of the world, and all the world’s Truth is of Feryn the Father.”
- The Leonid, Meditations, Verse 5 （2 of Tiran）
AS SUMMER RACED toward winter at train speeds, Thomil advanced just as fast. The days were still long when they moved from Trethellyn Hall back into the Main Magistry, and Sciona told him to leave the introductory children’s books behind. A month into their time together, the days had noticeably shortened, and Sciona had brought him to a grade school level of competence. Two months in, snowfall turned to vapor as it hit the warming barrier, shrouding the university in mist that fogged the new windows of Sciona’s lab, and Thomil had moved on from copying elementary spells to copying Sciona’s. At three months, the sun lasted only a few hours each day, and, in the red haze of an early afternoon sunset, there was a bang that made them both jump.
“I did it!” Thomil exclaimed, eyes wide in a rare display of unmasked emotion. “I made a conduit!”
“Well, don’t look so surprised,” Sciona said, though she was unable to hold back a grin. “You’ve been studying the formulas long enough.”
Drifting over to examine his work, she found that he had executed one of her harmless smoke cylinders to perfection. This was the first step to magic: memorizing the spells of greater mages and replicating them.
“Well done,” she said earnestly. “Next, you can try training it on a unique voice command. I’m glad one of us has made a breakthrough.”
“Still stuck on the same problem, ma’am?”
At this point, Thomil knew Sciona well enough to take her sullen grumble as a ‘yes.’ Three months of research, and she hadn’t come up with a mapping spell better than the hybrid composition she’d used back in the exam. This shouldn’t have surprised her. Even with the extra resources of the High Magistry available to her, this kind of research took time. Trial and error. But she was starting to get nervous about the utter lack of forward movement. She should have had something to show for her work by now.
“Anything for me to test?” Thomil offered, looking over the smoking aftermath of the fire spells Sciona had been using to test her mapping composition.
Whenever she made an adjustment, she would try siphoning through the new composition twenty times herself, documenting the results, then have Thomil siphon through it twenty more. This gave her data from an experienced siphoner as well as an inexperienced one. So far, none of her tweaks had measurably improved siphoning accuracy for either of them. Sciona’s precision hovered stubbornly around ninety-four percent, and Thomil’s hovered around seventy-three. Today’s modifications, she could already tell, would be no different.
“There’s nothing to test,” she said crossly. “We’re exactly where we were yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.”
“Alright.” Thomil glanced at the tomes and testing bowls of burnt twigs covering every surface in the vast laboratory. “I can tidy up some of these books and dishes unless you’re still—”
“I’m still using them,” she snapped.
“I’ll put on some tea, then.”