"Come on."

"No."

"Come on."

"No."

"Come on."

"I said no, Zerbst."

"Come ooooooooon."

"No! I'm not a performing seal!"

"Come on come on come on come on come on-"

"Fine!" Louise threw her pen to the desk and spun round in her chair to face Kirche, currently sprawled on Louise's bed in rather less than full dress. "I'll show you one more time if you put some clothes on and stop slutting up my bed. And then after that you're doing your homework with me."

"Must I? The homework's so boring, and you keep your room so hot all the time…"

"Yes, you must! Now, or I won't show you again!"

Kirche pouted. She had a great pout, damn her, all doe eyes and big sad lips and an innocent hurt expression. Louise's will was steel, though, and she held firm. Eventually, Kirche was the one who gave up, heaving a great put-upon sigh that did very improper things to her bosom before sitting up and pulling on a silk dressing gown.

"Oh, you're no fun, Vallière. Anyone else would be happy to have me in their bed, you know. Why, just yesterday afternoon that cute little Gallian from second year told me-"

"Not! Interested!" snapped Louise, face pink. "Are you doing it, or not?"

"Tristainians, honestly… okay, okay." Kirche produced her wand, though Louise didn't think too hard about from where, and swished it in a languorous motion. "Candle!"

Fire burst from the end, in a bloom of ostentatious orange – less controlled than old Maestro Rossi's had been and wilder.

Much, much easier for Louise to reach in with her magic and seize control of.

She imagined runes in a cage around the flame, sealing it, trapping it – not in the world she saw but the real world where flames danced without being bound to something as base as fuel. The flame on the end of Kirche's wand flickered for an instant, then burned a bright pink, the same shade as Louise's hair.

"Pretty…" breathed Kirche. "More, do more!"

"Alright, alright," Louise said, with less bite than she might have. Using magic – using her magic – always calmed her down.

Using runes was how she'd started off manipulating flame. When she really focused on a spell, she sometimes got glimpses of the weird, ornate glyphs. They didn't have any translation in any language Louise had found in three years of research, but by imagining them while attempting to shape her magic she was able to use them as a kind of framework, a mental shorthand to copy that spell.

Some spells, anyway. All Fire, some Wind, but no Water or Earth spells she'd ever seen. And, of course, all the weird stuff she'd found by experimenting.

The flame lengthened, growing from a simple flame into a stalk of fire three feet tall. Kirche watched, enraptured, as the column split into three and wound around itself as a glowing braid. Despite herself, a smile crept onto Louise's lips. It wasn't every day you impressed a Triangle mage in her chosen element.

The braid flowed into itself, then solidified. An instant later, it unravelled from the top, forming the shape of a tree, complete with shimmering heat-haze leaves. Louise focused, chewing her lip. A little more…

The trunk glowed white-hot, while the leaves deepened to a vibrant sunset orange. Kirche burst out in delighted laughter, and Louise allowed herself a grin as well. Magic was the best. Louise didn't usually feel the need to show off, even to her self-proclaimed 'rival' Kirche, but, well. It was just so fun. With a wink and a mischievous giggle, Louise pocketed her wand and seized control of the fire entirely. Then she gave a magical wrench.

With a whoosh, the flame left Kirche's wand entirely, spiralling through the air to settle as a fist-sized orb above Louise's hand, like a tiny sun. The heat in the room rose, and rose, and rose until both girls were sweating – then rushed inwards, leaving the room cold as a cellar. Around the orb of flame, but entirely separate from it, a shell of heat a foot wide shimmered, visible only through the way it made the air run like water.

Louise looked at Kirche triumphantly.

Kirche opened her mouth, then closed it. Finally she said, "Um, Vallière… that's not possible."

Louise's magic thrummed. She felt it as a deep, dark clawing on the same level she felt her magic – like something was forcing its way in. She risked a look into the real world, and winced. Beneath the flame and heat and light, black cracks spread, infecting and corrupting and burrowing in to the clear bright world. Louise broke off with a gasp, and said in a panic, "Yes, yes it is, look at it, it's all real."

The other girl shook her head slowly. "No… no, that can't be real." Another thrum. "You've not even got your wand, how that possibly be real!" Thrum. "I've seen square Fire mages who couldn't do that with heat – and you're barely dot level! You can't do that!"

And all of a sudden, Louise couldn't do that.

The orb shattered, leaking flame like yolk from a smashed egg. A bonfire's worth of heat and fire oozed out the sides and onto the floor. Where the molten drops of pure heat touched the carpet, it began smouldering, then all of a sudden blazed up in a rush of fire.

Both girls shrieked, leaping back from the out-of-control blaze. The remnants of the orb hung in mid-air where Louise had left it, still pouring out liquid flame in a torrent.

"Stop it!" Kirche yelled, looking desperately at Louise. "Louise, make it stop!"

"I can't!" snapped Louise. "It's my own magic out of control, it won't listen to me any more!"

"That doesn't make sense!"

Louise looked around frantically, then shoved past Kirche and grabbed a pillow off her bed. She set about the orb, beating it as though trying to smother a cooking fire. It didn't do anything but make the pillow begin to smoulder instead, so Louise tried a different approach. Using the pillow to shield her hands, and closing her eyes against the incredible heat, she pushed, aiming for the open window of her room. It was hard, and seemed to be fighting back – like trying to win an arm-wrestle against yourself, except your other arm was on fire.

After a moment, two dark-skinned hands joined Louise's thin pale ones on the pillow, and together the two girls made headway against the orb. Right before the pillow burnt away entirely, the orb finally seemed to lose whatever force was keeping it in place, and it dropped out of the window like a stone.

Kirche frantically waved her wand to snuff out all the little fires the orb had started in Louise's soft furnishings, while Louise herself collapsed against the window frame, panting from the exertion and the heat.

Far below, the orb was merrily burning a hole in one of the lawns. A nearby gardener had noticed, and was running over, cursing. Louise hurriedly shut the window and drew the curtains.

"Phew," she said. "I think we might have got away with that."

Kirche opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, at a loss for words. Then she just started giggling helplessly. Louise flopped down on her bed and joined in, tiredly.

"I think I might need to send off to Father for money to replace the soft furnishings, though," she said. "It's a little embarrassing, but it's a noble's job to fix problems caused by magic, after all."

"Eh, I'm sure he'll understand," Kirche said. "Flaming the bed happens to the best of Fire mages sometimes."

"Did you ever?"

"Pff, as if. Who do you think I am?"

Louise laughed again. "Anyway, sorry you had to see that. That's what I get for showing off."

Kirche tilted her head. "Showing off?"

"Yeah. You know, the thing with the heat shell? I hadn't tried it before, and wanted to see if I could-"

"Louise," Kirche cut her off. "What are you talking about?"

Dammit. Louise really thought she'd have been past this by now.

"Never mind," she said, miserably. "Anyway, homework time. You promised."

"You want me to hold a pen like this? You're inhuman, Vallière…"

With only a minimal amount of protest, Kirche produced her notes from class, and the pair went through them. Louise's job was to correct the Tristainian grammar and spelling more than anything, because for all her flirty airhead act Kirche really did know her stuff when it came to magic. Now, though, Louise's mind wasn't on her work, but on what had just happened.

Her spell had gone out of control. It didn't happen very often, and almost never when she was alone, but for as long as Louise had been studying magic it had been an ever-present threat. Sometimes, almost without rhyme or reason, things would just… go wrong.

Almost without rhyme or reason. There were rules, albeit very woolly and vague ones.

First, flashy spells were way more likely to go wrong. Subtle things, like Louise's heat manipulation or control over sound, she was pretty safe with. Her magical vision spell had never once caused her any problems. Things like playing with light or fire were more… temperamental. However, even her less obvious spells caused problems if she actually drew attention to them, pushing her luck like she had with the heat shell.

If she was using her wand, however, she never experienced any problems at all. This made a sort of intuitive sense – there had to be some reason why everyone used wands, right? – except that other mages simply couldn't do magic without a wand. When she'd raised the issue with Maestro Rossi, she'd gotten some very strange looks indeed.

Which brought her onto the second rule, just as weird as the first.

Spells done in front of other people were more likely to go wrong. Louise had, very rarely, had a spell go out of control when practicing in private – but the vast majority of times things happened, it was when she was showing someone else a trick she'd learned. This had led to a number of embarrassing situations, including almost setting the dining room alight while trying to write her name in fire in mid-air, without moving the candle she was drawing the flame from.

Mother had starved the fire of air before it could even get close, of course, but that wasn't the point.

Louise had tried and tried to find a pattern as to what set her magic off when other people saw it. She'd persevered, stubbornly performing more and more complex spells in front of more and more people – and not just her family, either. A couple of the maids and serving girls had been more than happy to sit down and watch a dazzling demonstration of Louise's master of light. There had been no sense of rising tension, no strange feel to her magic.

When she was done, the girls had politely applauded, apparently not finding anything odd about the whole thing in the slightest. However, when Louise had done the same trick in front of Maestro Rossi, her fountain of sparkles had exploded into blinding white light that refused to die down for hours – and had done so immediately after the old Fire mage had expressed his disbelief at Louise's level of control over light while only a Dot mage.

Louise had no idea why this might be. She'd played with the idea of God punishing her for excess pride in her magic when it should only be used as necessary and not to impress others, and had taken to only casting very subdued and unobtrusive spells, and wearing rather more modest clothing than she was used to besides. Then she'd seen her father making a set of statues dance a gavotte outside Cattleya's window, and had decided it was a ludicrous idea.

The only commonality, it seemed, the only link, was how likely the observer found it that Louise could perform that particular spell. For Louise's family, and Maestro Rossi, who knew her as a Dot mage only just starting to learn how to perform magic, any show of power or control above the norm was dangerous, and only got more dangerous the more of them there were to see. The serving girls, however, didn't really understand all that – and why would they? – and seemed to just have the belief that mages could do anything. Thus, it was easier to perform magic with unnatural levels of control around them – although not entirely safe.

Louise had hoped that moving away entirely and being around a new group of peers who didn't know what she could do would have helped. However, it wasn't that simple. Between her classmates, each of them had a pretty good expectation as to what was and wasn't possible for a girl Louise's age – even one descended from a royal line as the Vallières were. Kirche especially was already an expert at Fire magic – it was hardly surprising she wouldn't accept the stunts Louise pulled off.

Not that it kept her for asking for them, of course.

Worse, she never seemed to remember the result. This was another common point when Louise's magic went wrong – no-one seemed to remember it properly, rationalising it away as chance or some mistake made by a more powerful mage. Sometimes, they just misremembered events entirely, and any attempt by Louise to tell them the truth was seen as her exaggerating. For example, after the incident in the dining room, Mother had just sternly told Louise to better control her little flare-ups in future, as though it had been a little burst of fire and not a pillar of fire that had almost burned the house down. She apparently made no connection between it and the blackened, scorched food, either, instead instructing the wide-eyed head maid to reprimand the new chef when she got a chance.

(Louise had quietly gone and apologised to the chef for that – it was the right thing to do, and besides she'd gotten a cinnamon pastry out of him for her honesty.)

So, Kirche had some idea that Louise was incredibly good at controlling fire, heat, and light. And this was true. But she was also intensely curious about what exactly Louise had done to make her fireballs disappear on the day of their 'duel', and wouldn't quit bugging Louise to show her. And every time Louise actually showed her anything impressive, anything that might explain what she had done to Kirche's fire… the spell went out of control and she forgot again.

And then she would start bugging Louise again.

It was incredibly tiresome, and more than once Louise had considered just snapping and sending the annoying Germanian away. It wasn't like she was an especially important political contact that she had to make nice with – she was a Zerbst, for Brimir's sake, barely half a step above a commoner in the eyes of the Vallières. Actually, even that was pushing it, because at least the commoners generally worked hard and knew their place… or so Louise might have thought a month ago.

Now, she wasn't so sure. Annoying Kirche might be – okay, annoying Kirche absolutely was, gleefully and maliciously annoying, and a slutty big-breasted long-limbed wasp-waisted homewrecker into the bargain too, not that Louise was jealous or anything. But, well, Louise had sort of got used to having her around. Certainly she hadn't really connected with anyone else in the school. Oh, she was perfectly cordial to them, and they were certainly polite and deferential to her, as expected of minor nobility towards a Duke's daughter. But Kirche was the only one she could really call… friend.

Urgh.

Honestly, what was her magic's deal? If a von Zerbst and Vallière could call themselves friends, then clearly impossible was nothing.

The Vallière library took up almost a quarter of the second floor of the house… but the Academy of Magic was larger even than the Vallière's mansion, and the library took up an even larger proportion of its space. It was internationally famous for the breadth and depth of knowledge that could be found there.

So, Louise had reasoned, if she couldn't find any reference to mages who did magic as differently as she did in the Academy of Magic's library, then she could just go ahead and assume there basically weren't any to be found anywhere.

Where the family library was snug, and cosy, and perfect for a small girl to curl up in an armchair and forget about the world for hours on end, the school's was grand and bright, with stiff chairs set up at desks between row after row of stacks. There were private study rooms, in which a student could work all night if needs be in the peace and quiet only afforded by Wind-based silence spells; but these were invariably hogged by the older students, who liked nothing better than telling the younger years how easy they had it. How much work actually went on was debatable – suffice to say Kirche was rather more familiar with these secret cloisters than Louise was.

Everyone else was relegated to the desks – which, to be fair, were a perfectly adequate place to set down a stack of books and get things done. Each desk had its own Fire spell on it, so that the whole area remained well-lit but stayed cool – some would say 'void-damned freezing'. For the concentration of the students, the librarians said. Louise set down her selection of books and frowned.

Yeah, nope. Louise was a de la Vallière, damn it, and wasn't about to freeze her butt off just because some sadistic teacher ages ago had decided to screw over generations of students.

Louise looked at the spell, and began taking it apart. It wasn't as easy as snuffing out a fire – that was quick and instinctive, and Louise had had a lot of practice playing with forces like that. It wasn't quite the same as countering a spell before it was fully cast, either, although it was similar. Louise could quench any spell so long as she saw it being cast, not through any particular control of fire but just through trumping the spell with sheer force of, well, magic. To Louise it made perfect sense. Her will to not have a spell cast was stronger than the other person's will to cast it.

She'd never dared try it on Mother, though. She thought the only thing scarier than trying to counter her mother's spells and fail might be trying to counter her mother's spells and succeed.

This used her own magic as well, just… differently. Where a counterspell was a crushing, smothering force, this was more like unweaving a tangle of wool. (Louise liked this analogy. She'd had to unweave approximately 100 percent of her attempts at knitting, so she was quite good at it by now.)

Like all of her stupid magic, it came with restrictions and rules, none of which had been explained to her beforehand. It didn't work on everything, for instance. Like the spells she could copy by examining the runes, it worked on all Fire, most Wind, and hardly any Earth or Water. Still, this was one of the ones that was safe to perform in front of others as long as she didn't draw attention to it, so despite the quiet bustle of students she was able to make quick headway with pulling the heat-dissipating spell apart. Being able to just delete magic spells was extremely useful.

Case in point. The years-old spell unravelled, and Louise pulled in all the ambient heat to warm up her seat. Every student within a thirty-food radius shivered violently, and Louise smirked. Relaxing into her toasty chair, she opened the first of her books on 'alternative magic' and began reading.

After an hour, though, she was forced to admit defeat. The situation was no better than it had been in her own house – there was just a greater variety of fairy tales, myths and false leads to choose from. To be sure, some of these were fascinating to read.

There had been, for example, a heretical clergyman in East Germania – a minor noble and Earth mage of middling skill, with prowess in transmutation but otherwise unskilled in magic – who had claimed the power to raise the dead. Louise scanned his entry with particular interest, and gasped at the account of soldiers sent to arrest him, who had fought their way past decaying bodies and vengeful ghosts to get to the vile sorcerer himself. The article concluded that the man's necromancy was likely a product of the Ring of Andvari, an ancient relic known to have that power, rather than some innate magic all his own.

The article didn't, however, mention whether the Ring had been recovered or not. It seemed like a pretty important detail to leave out to Louise, but then she wasn't an editor.

Well, Louise had been expecting to have to build her magical skill up from scratch – this changed nothing. She'd come this far on her own, she would make do without a teacher.

A draught rolled across her, and Louise shivered. She'd been so engrossed in her reading she'd completely failed to notice the passage of time, and she hadn't cast her warmth spell to last. She'd need to redo it, probably – but she took a peek at how the spell was holding up, just to be sure. Behind her eyes, the world burst into comforting flame.

As always, the sleepy and silent room was transformed into a celestial hall of vibrant energy. Where the library was silent in the world everyone else saw, to Louise it was almost deafening – spell after spell clamouring for attention. Just as she'd thought, her own spell was fraying, nearing the end of its lifespan – but as she moved to repair it, something caught her eye.

On the table in front of her, clearly left by another student, a book glowed.

Louise was obviously no stranger to things glowing; pretty much everything magical did in the true world, including and especially the people. But this wasn't some dusty grimoire, this was – she checked, letting the magic fade from her eyes so she could read the words on the cover – just an academic text on spirits. She looked again.

Yes, the book was certainly magical, there was no mistaking that glow. But… Louise frowned in sudden confusion. She couldn't decide what element it was.

Usually it was pretty easy to guess at someone or something's element – by colour, by metaphor, by general feel, Louise had gotten pretty good at reading the little signs and she hadn't been wrong yet. Th aura of a jug enchanted to purify any liquid stored in it would ripple like a lake in a breeze and betraying its Water element. The lamps that gave light without heat nevertheless always felt warm to Louise thanks to their inner Fire. But this book didn't fit any of them.

The best way she could describe it was… inhuman. Yes, that was it. Not unnatural, not alien like the cracks felt, but not human all the same. There was the feel of an other intelligence behind this magic – as though the book wasn't entirely of the world Louise knew. She shut her magic vision off, and the feeling vanished; brought it back and it returned. Was this spirit magic?

No, she decided – because as far as she knew, spirits couldn't write.

In a perfect semicircle on the cover, stretching from one corner of the spine to the other, were runes. Unmistakably, they were the same kind she saw when she looked deep into the heart of a spell to decipher how it worked. Those were usually elegant loops and swirls, and for some reason Louise couldn't guess they all featured a single dot. These, though, were more jagged and zig-zaggy, as though scratched into the surface of reality by a clawed finger.

Louise had never found a single reference to the runes, anywhere. No dictionaries, no magic primers, no ancient texts, nothing.

She traced the half-circle with her finger, and turned the book over in her hands excitedly. To her surprise, the runes didn't extend onto the back – even though the pattern was clearly incomplete, some runes cut-off halfway. Curious.

There hadn't been anything like this in her family's library. Louise hadn't seen anything like this ever. Just when she'd hit a dead end, just when she'd resigned herself to a life of self-study and no answers, a mystery fell right into her lap. Louise let her sight fade, and the real world faded, runes vanishing like a dream. The book proclaimed itself to be A Primer on Spirits, these being the Essence of Magic beyond the Veil and past the Gauntlet…

…Volume II.

A tiny growl of frustration definitely didn't force its way through Louise's teeth, that would have been totally unladylike. She placed the book down on the table so gently that everyone in the room looked round and made 'shush'ing noises of appreciation, and studied the cover.

There was no suggestion of the semicircle visible in the real world. Instead, it was covered in illustrations of what Louise could only assume were mages, at least, about half of them had the traditional cloaks and wands. The other half… were those pointed ears?

Whether elf or human, each and every figure on the cover had their attention focused to one side – the spine of the book, where the semi-circle was. Or, putting it together…

She'd need to take a look at Volume I to be sure, but she very strongly suspected that the complete circle formed a spell. One of her spells, the kind that no-one else could cast. Which, if you thought about it, meant that she was meant to find this book. Not letting her have it would basically be rejecting her destiny. She couldn't exactly do her magical experiments in the library – but the library let you sign out books, obviously. With a satisfied smile, she picked the book up and marched off to the checkout desk with it.

"Restricted access?!" Louise said, outraged. The librarian had not shared Louise's opinion on her destiny, only looked at her sternly over horn-rimmed glasses.

"Absolutely not," she said. "Without a valid academic reason, I can't possibly sign out a book of this age and significance."

"Oh, well that's fine, because I actually-"

"That means a signed slip from a professor, Miss Vallière, detailing exactly why you need this particular book – with the Headmaster's seal on it too. I know how easy it is for you kids to forge signatures. Quite frankly, I can't see any reason why a first year would need a book on such," she sniffed, "paganist beliefs, anyway. The curriculum hasn't changed that much since I was a girl."

Louise huffed, but knew when she was beaten.

"Well, how about the first Volume? Can we order-"

"No," the librarian said shortly. "Go on with you, girl."

Louise gave a prim curtsey, turned on her heel and strode from the library.

So, she hadn't left the library with the book. And worse, when she'd gone back the next evening to check for it again, it had been returned to its place in the restricted section. She hadn't dared to challenge the librarian again, so she hadn't been able to examine the book since she'd first seen it. Fortunately, since Louise was a noble, she'd been handling the setback with grace and aplomb.

"Stop sulking," Kirche said, leaning in close to mutter in Louise's ear. "Either do something about it or quit whining about it, but either way stop distracting me in class."

Louise snorted. Kirche was paying rapt attention to the lecture, even going so far as to take a seat in the front row, but not because she'd become a diligent student overnight, or even because she wanted to improve her Tristainian. Oh, no no no.

Resting her chin on her fingers, Kirche batted her eyelashes at Professor Colbert. To his credit, the man seemed unflappable, and responded in pretty much the same way as he had all Kirche's flirting for the last week, which was to say not at all. Instead, he forged on with his lecture on everyday use of magic, gesturing this way and that. It was a boring topic, but he was always so animated that he'd quickly become one of Louise's favourite teachers.

For different reasons to Kirche, of course.

Today, though, she couldn't keep her mind on the lesson. She needed that book. And Volume II, as well. She had a destiny, dammit.

Even better, she had a plan.