When her bell sounded at midnight, Firion the wizard grasped her stoutest staff (crowned, for non-magical reasons, with a razor-sharp chunk of amethyst) and put her lips to the doorjamb. “Who goes there?”

Nothing but the slap of rain against stone, like thrown gravel. But was that a voice she could discern between the droplets? Perhaps a mumbled Apprentice? She opened the stone door and retreated smartly to let the boy collapse on the rug.

He had not, she felt, made a good first impression. Covered in mud, arriving without warning at this unreasonable hour, and now failing to present his new instructor with name and credentials, only retrieving a sodden envelope from an inner pocket of his cloak and handing it up to her.

Firion snapped the purple wax, creating a signature whiff of scent as familiar as her own, elderberries and birch buds. To the esteemed senior wizard Firion … no reply, unfortunately, to our earlier communications … your exemplary performance last year … present you with this student …

She groaned. For months she had been neglecting her mail, even though the villagers collected it from the county station and always sent a kid to put it in her mailbox so she didn’t have to go down and get it. The box was steps from her cave, she passed it twenty times a day, but for some reason the thought of opening it up to remove the backlog of letters and packages made her sick to her stomach. So she had simply avoided it.

Worse yet, she had been given three apprentices last year and passed them all, which was unheard of; so of course the university had assumed she would have no objections to their sending just one, even though she hadn’t responded to their letters.

She didn’t want another apprentice. She wanted peace and quiet. Seemed cruel to turf him back out into the storm though. “Get up. What’s your name?”

The boy murmured something, ducking his head and covering his mouth with a baggy sleeve.

“Rule five of apprenticeship,” she snapped. “Respond promptly and politely to your instructor when you are asked a question.”

“C … Cane, sir.”

“Very well. Apprentice Cane. And what is your major at St. Al …” She trailed off, studying the visible portion of his face as it traversed all the realms of pallor and entered that of translucence. Then she yanked his arm down, revealing crimson-stained lips and a frilly cravat of blood forming on his shirt.

“It’s all right,” he managed, blood bubbling out with each word. “I’m fine, sir. I fell on the climb up … it’s fine.”

It was not. She ignored his protests and pulled him over to the fire, sparking a fresh oil lamp for better light and peering into his mouth. His lip was split, which was fine, but he had also managed to fracture a tooth and there was clearly dirt inside it, a vertical black scratch against the red and the white. “That’ll have to come out,” she said. “Can’t get filth in a cut; it goes bad more often than not. Like mouldy meat.”

“No, I … it’s fine …”

“Rule seventeen. Don’t contradict your instructor. And rule twenty-eight: don’t dare hide anything from me. I must say, if I were to fill out your final report right now, it would be a long string of goose eggs.”

She got her box of medicinal equipment and sat him down in a chair by the fire, then handed him a short length of stout, tarred rope and instructed him to hold either end behind the chairback. He was a tall lad with big hands, and his trembling thumbs almost met in the middle of the rope, but it would have to do.

“What’s …”

“Operational theatre management,” she explained, picking through her leather case of forceps to find the right size. “People’s instinct when they’re in pain is to move, try to get away, reach up, make it stop. So what I need you to do instead is hold that rope. Squeeze and pull as hard as you can, don’t let go. And that way you stay still and it’s over sooner.”

“I … isn’t there … a spell for the pain?”

“No.” The lie was easier with her back turned. “But you’ll get something after. To help you sleep. Not until you clean up, mind. I don’t want all that mess in my nice clean guest bed.”

Afterwards, Firion mopped the floor, wiped down the chair, cleaned her instruments with fire and salt, and packed everything away. Only then did she check on her guest room, in which she had had to hastily clear a spot in the assorted boxes and baskets—she’d not been expecting to host again for some time. The boy was asleep sitting up, head braced on the bedstead with his folded cloak; the empty cup of sleeping draught sat on the windowsill. Sandwrack and ashleaf to make him drowsy, plus some of her dwindling stock of weeping woundwort to keep the rot at bay. But he’d feel every bit of it when he woke up.

There was plenty of night left; she knew she too could go back to bed. Instead, she wrapped up in her biggest cloak and stomped outside to empty her mailbox. It was almost—almost funny the way it kept coming, like a magic cauldron in a fairytale following a poorly worded command to make porridge, swamping the town. Finally she hauled the bag back inside and spread it out in front of the fire. Outside, the storm grumbled, receded, returned, filled the entire cottage inside the cave with the echoing sound of rain.

Last year, she certainly could have cast a spell against pain before she pulled the boy’s tooth. She would also have had a clear, strong white light from a magical lamp, instead of the wavering oil lamp. A single braided spell of her own design would have cleaned the floor and chair later, straightened the guest room, found real pillows for the bed (well, maybe not—apprentices had to earn feather pillows, surely). But now …

Even in her youth—she stopped herself before thinking “heyday,” as she had never had one—she had not been the kind of woman men fought over. Now, she found herself pleased and flattered by being wanted in a different way, because it felt similar to how she imagined that desire: constant, fervent, passionate, accompanied by lavish gifts and fawning letters. Like this pile steaming on the hearth: begging her to teach, speak, demonstrate, judge contests, grade students completing their Tribulations, write books, correct spells.

She had allowed herself to be seduced and, she thought regretfully, this was the inevitable result. Somehow. Of being too wanted, of allowing pride to overtake common sense. This was the unexpected consequence: she had not been able to read the words of the Old Tongue for months. She simply could not summon it up any more. Every time she tried she exhausted herself, and it was worse the next time. Very nearly, at this point, she had given up trying; but she could not force herself to give up completely. All the books in her house were as blank as they would appear to a student on their first day at St. Algomir’s. Something inside every wizard needed to call up the magic to make it useful, and whatever it was inside her, whatever that thing was, had been extinguished.

At first from disbelief, then from humiliation, she had told no one. Not last year’s apprentices, who anyway had returned to school before her symptoms began to show; not the villagers she protected; certainly not university administration, even her oldest friend, who happened to head the apprenticeship program and was responsible for matching students and instructors every year. He had sent her … she glanced listlessly at the pile of mail. Eight or ten letters? Maybe more? She hadn’t read them. That too seemed to be beyond her powers, even though, of course, there was nothing magical about opening an envelope.

It would return, she told herself every day. Must return. Whatever it was. However it might do it. It must, must return. She suspected her impatience and experimentation were making its return more difficult, but she also didn’t know what else to do. How could she train this apprentice without her magic? Should she just send him back? But even as she thought this she knew she could not, because she would need him this fall, would need whatever magic skills he had managed to acquire—whether hers had reignited or not.

It was a Bouldus year. She was sure of it.

What a blessing if she were wrong! She had been wrong before with no harm done. Merely the village of Weystone on high alert, and the added hassle of frantically moving the herds and the flocks as far inland as possible. One year they had been attacked by bandits during this process, admittedly, but that was only once. No village mob with torches and pitchforks had climbed the cliff to besiege her cave. They forgave her. They would always forgive her, because when she predicted its appearance correctly, they managed to save most of their possessions and lives.

But all the signs were appearing. It had been an unusually cold winter; they had even had snow, and all the tidepools froze despite the salt, and fishing was poor even with spring’s return. Crops of false clamberries were springing up along the beach, responding to a subtle increase in the amount of magic in the local seawater. The birds had begun to act strangely already—the red-throated shearwaters and the cinderfell shearwaters, which normally got along peacefully as they ate such different fish, were attacking one another in huge nervous battles, and neither had started to nest yet. They should have picked out spots three weeks ago.

All of nature was wary, braced for the invasion. Firion felt it no less than they did. But she could do something about it, and they couldn’t. And so she must.

She reached for an envelope, wrinkled her nose with disgust, sighed, and then shoveled everything back into the damp canvas bag. Later. Later. She couldn’t deal with this tonight.

Their first five days passed in silence, except for Cane grovelling and flinching and slurring his thanks every time she made him a fresh bowl of broth or checked on the brittlewrack putty she had packed into the empty tooth socket. The lacuna also bought her time to develop a plan, since she could not use her usual curriculum, painstakingly refined over forty years of teaching. To start from scratch seemed a horrifying idea, but how could she get around it? It would get back to the university. Unthinkable.

On the sixth morning, she had the boy cook breakfast—fried herring and potatoes in her second-best iron pan, accompanied by thick slices of sweet pickled onion and carrot—and checked his mouth again before announcing that he could graduate from soup today. “Since you’ll be starting your training, after all.”

She waited until he had finished choking on his tea before continuing. “Apprentice Cane. Attend. What is the name of the village at the base of this cliff?”

“Weystone, sir.”

“And what is Weystone known for?”

Cane was one of those very blond people whose eyebrows were invisible until he blushed, as he did now, the red working its way up from his neck. “It’s … the home of the great wizard Firion?”

She laughed, not expecting it, then grew serious at once. The laughter had been a mistake; the boy was smiling uncertainly, making her think of a kicked dog: he had done something that pleased his master! Now he must do it constantly! She shuddered to think of the ingratiating behaviours this might result in. Must correct him later. She said, “Fetch me that big book. Green cover, gold bookmark.”

Spread out on the table, a layman would have seen only half a book—some pages scribed in the common tongue, others apparently blank. Cane paged through it carefully, keeping it well away from his breakfast. Firion continued to eat, diligently sawing through the pickled onion and sending brine squirting across the table.

“The Book of the Bouldus,” Cane read, returning to the frontispiece. “What’s that, sir?”

“Turn to the back.”

He studied the drawing in silence. “It’s … a sea dragon?” he ventured. “We, er, we haven’t learned much about them in class, actually. Beasts, I mean.”

“There’s not much to teach,” Firion said. “If you think wolves or porpentines are shy, you should see a magical creature. Which you won’t, because they’ve all got a great natural horror of us. However, Weystone is unusual in that it’s on the shore of a sea dragon lek.”

“A what?”

“Mating display area, boy. Read a book sometime. Or go to a tavern. Same idea. Look, sea dragons have a predictable life cycle, and it’s long.” She drew a circle in the air with her fork. “Like cicadas. You do know cicadas.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, his face blank.

“The females stay out in the deep water and wait for the males to fight for the floor nearer the coast, do their dance, and then bring them gifts. Generally, of course, that’s fish—the bigger the better. You know, a tunny-fish or whathaveyou, or a nice halibut, a shark. A seal or a porpoise might be a rare treat. They mate, lay their eggs, then swim out to their hibernation grounds and go back to sleep. It’s about, oh, an eight-ish, twelve-ish year cycle. Varies depending on weather. But the Bouldus, see, he’s a different bastard.” She glared at the book as if hoping that the dragon itself might rear out of the pages so she could bash it with her ceramic beer stein, currently holding most of the pot of tea. “He’s the biggest and oldest, so all the young males want to challenge him; he’s a fighter almost by instinct. But that isn’t the real problem.”

“No?”

“No. He’s so strong, and his armour is so thick, that out of all of them he’s the only one can come up on land—so that’s exactly what he started to do. He raids the livestock, might go for humans if he spots them, and takes back all the stolen horses and sheep and cattle as gifts. The ladies,” Firion added gloomily, “go wild for it.”

“Oh dear.”

“So he’s got no reason to stop, every reason to continue, and there’s nothing a villager can do about it,” Firion said. “Rocks, sticks, spears, arrows, fire, poison, he doesn’t even notice. Which is where you come in.”

Cane blinked, his face blanching with fear and so returning to its normal complexion.

“The only way to drive it off is by hazing it with magic,” she said. “I’ve experimented with a variety of spells over the years; nothing works twice, though, which is magical creatures for you. This book contains the materials and speech that I used for each spell, its efficacy, distance, and duration, and of course, how the Bouldus responded, if it did.”

Cane stared at the book reverently, then turned pages till he reached a half-blank page—the top half empty, written in Old Tongue, the bottom in Common. There was a tiny but detailed drawing of a sea snake in the bottom corner, the legend reading “Bit Father R. on 17 Jun.”

“Don’t mind that,” Firion said. “Note to myself.”

“Oh.”

Firion pulled herself together, silently but adamantly arraying herself with dignity as if girding her loins before battle. Externally, this manifested itself as her putting down her cutlery. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “Are you listening closely, Apprentice Cane?”

“Yes, sir!”

“I’ve seen all the signs that this is a Bouldus year. We’re not having an abstract conversation. You’re not being given one of those What if all the crops in County X fall sick and you have to determine which curse has been placed and by whom, show your work exam questions. You’re not going to write an essay about it. This is the real world, and you’re going to save real people.”

“But—”

She held up her hand. “Rule thirteen, don’t interrupt. Now, I look at you and I know down to my bones that you’re not in wizard college because you were one of those prodigies who signs up, aged ten, already able to charm the birdies out of the trees. You had a little talent, just enough to pass admissions, not enough for a scholarship, and you’ve worked your arse off for four years. Am I right? Yes, nod, nod. Now all that’s left is your apprenticeship and the Tribulation. Fail those, and you’ll have no choice but to go home. And you’d do anything to not go home. Not as a failure.”

Her voice had sunk to a whisper; Cane was still hanging on every word, though she could also see that he was staring at something over her shoulder: the three framed certificates on the wall, busy with gilt and illumination, B.Wiz, M.Wiz, Ph.W all in a row. Not in envy or awe, she thought, but a doorway, open, beckoning: Here is how you escape. Here is how you get away from them.

She knew nothing about his family, nothing about who or where or what he wished to escape, except that they had produced a young man like a kicked dog, all whimper and cower. And she could work with that.

She said, “If you figure out how to drive off the Bouldus this year, and if you survive, I’ll mark your apprenticeship as fulfilled … and then I’ll sign off an exemption from the Tribulation. You’ll graduate as soon as we’re done here and go wherever the winds take you.”

He stared at her, his mouth unabashedly hanging open, putting it together. “You … you can do that?”

“An instructor may, at their own discretion, determine that the fieldwork component of the apprenticeship is sufficient to replace a formal Tribulation in a university setting, and may therefore exempt an apprentice to whom these conditions apply,” she recited. “It’s not common, but it is accepted. And I certainly don’t see how they’d argue it in this case. If I opted to put it forward.” She tapped the book. “Do we have an agreement?”

“Yes! Yes, sir. Yes.”

“Good. Now I’ll hold you to that,” she warned him. “You have to determine a method, implement it, and survive.”

“I will! I promise!” He clutched the book to his chest, then laid it flat again. “But I … I can’t read the Old Speech yet. That’s what the apprenticeship is supposed to teach m—”

“But you know the characters. You could recite them for me right now, if I asked.”

“Yes, but …”

She waved a hand airily, as if indicating the simplest task in the world lay ahead; but her heart was pounding no less violently, she suspected, than that of her apprentice. “There is something inside a wizard that is not simply the natural endowment of a magical ability,” she said grandly. “More than talent, more than aptitude. More than the memorization of the shapes of the letters, more than the pitch and tone we must use to pronounce them. It is a spark, a flame that catches inside you, which allows the words to appear on the page. This is what we are striving to develop. Only when you strike the flint against the steel within yourself can you read this book and devise a new spell.”

“Can you show me?” he breathed, his eyes glowing with excitement. “What does it look like when the words appear?”

“No,” she said. “To show you will not teach you how to do it yourself. That is something you must do. That is the skill you must take from this apprenticeship. I will provide you with guidance, but I cannot create that spark. It will require all your willpower, all your strength, all your courage.”

“I’ll do it! I can do it! I promise!”

“Very good,” she said. “Up.” She had to keep herself from grinning as she led him around the cottage, picking books and scrolls from the shelves chipped into the cave walls and loading them into his outstretched arms. It had worked—this tiny, administrative, forgivable deal, made with (she reminded herself stubbornly) an adult, not a child, practically a wizard already, who would never have to know about her little … problem. Of course he would learn while he was here! She had her reputation to consider, after all. And while he occupied himself with solving his problem, she could occupy herself with solving hers.

When the wet and treacherous spring became a typical coastal summer, Firion picked a day between (she was pretty sure) two dramatically querulous thunderstorms and took her apprentice down to the village to have the gap in his teeth filled by Omosu the blacksmith, who owed her any number of favours for the successful backwards-and-upside-down delivery of his only daughter two winters ago.

“I am going to give your apprentice to my apprentice,” Omosu said, jerking his head back at the glowing depths of his workshop. “We’ve got some ivory bits in reserve, and she’ll make him a nice tooth. And you and I need a drink, great wizard.”

“Do we?”

“We do.”

She had her staff and could, moreover, walk perfectly well, but Omosu offered his ham-sized forearm for her to lean on, so she took it as they traversed the salt-dusted cobblestones to the Vulgar Glory, which served the village as a combination dairy, butcher shop, brewery, and tavern.

“I don’t suppose you’ve noticed the birds this year,” Omosu said after they had gotten their pints and found seats under the wrackwillows shading the front of the building.

Firion took a protracted pull from her stein, staring out at the sea. “Don’t suppose you have.”

“Do you think it’s …” The blacksmith looked down into his pint, avoiding Firion’s gaze. “A Bouldus year?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Of course. Impossible to be sure.”

Firion turned her mug between her hands and listened to the regular thumping coming from the side of the building, a couple of youngsters in white aprons trotting on the treadmill that ran the butter churn. The village was growing every year. People were so quiet in their pride about it. It was a hard life sometimes but it wasn’t like in the cities; the air was good here, the kiddies got fresh milk, the elders ran the place more or less reasonably and kept the lighthouse in good nick, neighbours didn’t solve their property disputes at the end of a sword. Nobody ever went hungry, not in a place where the other families would—secretly and grudgingly, but with utter reliability—drop covered dishes on your doorstep at night if times had gotten hard. And, of course, they were protected by a powerful wizard. Not a powerless fraud.

“How’s Tulun and Squeaky?” she said after a while.

“Tulun is good. She bought some new breed of chickens when that caravan passed through town and she spends all her time with them now. Strange little things. They chirp, they don’t cluck. Won’t eat kitchen scraps except for meat. And they hunted and killed all the mice around the house.”

“Good for them.”

“And Squeaky talks big now,” Omosu said, smiling despite his evident uneasiness. “Talk, talk, talk. You know that age where you can’t say anything but they repeat it right away. I watch my mouth when she comes to the forge.”

“No cursing when you hit your thumb, eh.”

“Tulun would kill me.”

Firion studied her friend’s round, brown face from the corner of her eye, trying to think of what to say. They drank their drinks. A girl came by, blushing and curtseying at serving the great wizard, and brought them new ones in clean steins.

The sea was beautiful today, just enough wind to shiver the surface and make it dance and sparkle, deeply coloured under a fresh sky. No hint of monsters. No hint of anything beneath. The little girl arriving all the wrong ways, weeks late, blue as a berry, two years old now. Not old enough to run. Not old enough to fight.

Firion said, “Do you still have a horse I can borrow?”

She returned five weeks later, hoping without much hope that her apprentice had heeded the exceedingly long list of harvesting and housekeeping she had left him on top of his studies. She had not wished to travel during an apprenticeship, nor during a Bouldus year, because what if something happened on the road and she never came back? It wasn’t every bandit that would spare a rickety old lady on a slow horse.

Inside, Cane made her a cup of tea and wisely kept his mouth shut about the empty socket of her staff where the amethyst had sat. “Did you find what you were seeking, sir?”

“I don’t know.” She rubbed her temples, looking around. Everything seemed to be in order; the boy’s desk was neatly arranged, with paper, ink, wax, pens, books, and scrolls each in their place. She tried to feel some kind of joy at homecoming, at being surrounded by her familiar things, back near her beloved ocean in her cottage inside the cave, but everything still seemed dull and false somehow. The pile of mail looked particularly loathsome, even though Cane had sorted everything and stacked it by size on her desk.

On her journey she had brought a single book, small enough to fit into a cloak pocket, containing a few dozen very simple spells—all of which she had memorized in the first months of undergrad. She knew the spells backwards and forwards, every letter, every intonation.

For the first week on the road she had tried every night to force the letters to appear on the page. And every night, nothing happened, and the next morning she felt slightly but perceptibly more drained. Eventually she had given up, and the book had ridden with her unopened for a month, thudding gently against her chest like a second heart.

“I was looking for things that might help you with the Bouldus,” she said, gesturing at the two enormous leather sacks slumped by the door that he had helped her pull out of the saddlebags. “Trying to stack the deck. Obviously, anything like that is tricky to find; it takes a certain knack to sniff it out in the first place and I don’t even know how many strange places I’ve been, hunting things down. I couldn’t be everywhere. As for whether they’ll be of any use, we’ll have to do some testing.”

Cane nodded uncertainly, eyeing the size and weight of the sacks. “Spells, you mean?”

“No, no. Artifacts, tools, and receptacles. There’s a shard of vangonite there, that might be helpful, and a Jarnaran bead of decay … look at your face. I just watched the tide of intelligence go out, never to return. What are they teaching at the university these days? Look, there’s accessing magic, like us with the Old Speech and with a modicum of natural ability and training; there’s also things that have magic, and anyone can use those without knowing anything about it or having any inherent qualities whatsoever, like those singing daggers that were all the rage about ten years ago and were sold to any fool on the street. There’s things that store magic, like artifacts, certain locations, wells, lakes, structures. There’s also intrinsically magic things, like dragons and basilisks and unicorns and vangonite, and they don’t use it or have it or store it, they just … be it.”

“Are it,” Cane said helpfully.

“I don’t teach grammar. Rule thirty-two. How’s your plan coming along?”

He smiled shyly as he opened his own notebook—a large and handsome gift that Firion had been planning on throwing out, since the cloth cover smelled faintly of mildew and she could never get the smell out—and turned to the ribbon-bookmarked page. As he passed his finger down the page, words crackled and bloomed, light grey at first, darkening to violet, then black, the colour of the good walnut ink she had given him.

Firion wondered for a moment whether it was possible to pass out from relief, then caught herself. So he could do magic, could read and write the spells. That was step one, not the end of the journey. He might still prove a dud. And look at him: smiling but not too much, proud but not too proud, as if he were still waiting for her to scream at him or slap him for being too full of himself. When would he stop fearing her? She said, “I see you’ve been working hard while I’ve been gone.”

“I … yes, sir. I tried to work hard. And it was quite amazing, feeling that spark! I knew right away it was what you were talking about, and then of course it was so much easier to research in all the books you gave me. Do you … it’s not quite done, but do you want to review the plan so far?” He removed his hand; the letters faded back into the stiff white surface.

Firion leaned back in her chair. “No, no. Can’t get any sense from a half-made thing. Look at a trebuchet—useless till the very last piece is in place, and looks like a bundle of sticks and ropes before then. Spells are like that. I’ll review it when it’s done.”

“Yes, sir.”

Surely she would have recovered by then; ridiculous to think she wouldn’t. She resolved to think about it as little as possible, in fact, and insisted the boy help her unpack the saddlebags and puzzle out which labels had fallen off or become smudged on the way home.

Surely by then. There would be lots of time. Months to go.

In her younger years there had been parts of dragon song she could hear, the bit right up high that they sang into the air before the notes slid down low and loud to travel far through the water. Tonight, she woke up with her heart pounding, hearing nothing, only feeling the call shaking her bed. Early warning. Half the reason she lived out here like a hermit, away from the village and its forests and folds.

She scrambled into her clothes and crashed into Cane in the hallway, the boy still in his scants, barely half-awake and pawing at his ears. “What’s going on, sir?” he slurred. “Something woke me up—the most horrible sound—”

“Up to the tower with you, and you just wind that wheel for all you’re worth!”

He jerked upright as if she had thrown cold water on him. “Yes, sir!” His bare feet flashed down the darkened hallway, giving the impression of a large white rabbit, and in moments she heard them thumping on the steps above her head. Silence while he got the mechanism going—she counted to ten, and nodded as the bell began to ring. Here the sound was muffled by the interstitial stone, so she dearly hoped it would be loud enough to reach the village outside, where the tones were amplified and directed by the scoop of rock carved out behind the bell.

Cane returned, panting. “Fire’s lit too,” he said. “Should I—what should—”

“Put some clothes on first, and then what’s step one in your plan?”

“I—I can’t—”

“What’s step one?” she repeated.

“Get out to the lighthouse.”

“And so.” She gave him a shove. “Go!”

As they rushed down the stone steps, the calls increased in power, rumbling up through the soles of their boots at eerily precise intervals. In all her memories this night-time dash was lit with the comforting glow of her hovering travel lantern; tonight it seemed jarring and unpleasant to let the moonlight suffice.

From the half-mile to the village she could hear the shouts of people desperately attempting to round up their families and livestock, nearly drowned out by the frightened noises of the said confused livestock not expecting to be driven anywhere in the middle of the night. Someone had gotten the temple bells going too, adding to the general cacophony and disarray.

At the base of the cliff the boy paused, gaping; Firion let him, because she remembered her first time. Out to sea, the female sea dragons had begun to surface, slicing the water with arrow-shaped heads on long sinuous necks, shaking spray from their iridescent dorsal fins. Where they congregated the ocean was churned white as milk. A handful of the bigger males had come into the shallows, daring what the smaller ones could not, though instinctively wary of becoming beached.

The closest male, a cathedral-sized colossus, shifted uncomfortably as it waded into the shallows, bellowing for all it was worth so that rocks and shells jounced rhythmically on the beach and the water shuddered around it in concentric circles. It was perhaps fifty paces distant; Firion could count every tooth in its mouth, a dense nest of backwards-pointing swords with wickedly serrated edges.

“Is … is that …” Cane began shakily.

“No, no. Trust me, you’ll know the Bouldus when you see him. But let’s get a move on—they’ll start fighting once the calling’s done.”

The boy had the sack with their equipment; Firion had taken nothing but her staff, yet she felt as if she were carrying something exponentially heavier, and she panted as she followed her apprentice down the beach to the lighthouse. Or perhaps it was just seeing herself as dead weight that made her feel that way, she consoled herself. It was an illusion; it was vanity and self-pity. And still those stairs ahead!

They were halfway up the lighthouse steps, their way now lit with the keeper’s lamps, when the calling stopped—the sense of stillness was startling and absolute, sending the boy reeling on the steps. Firion grabbed his arm. “Here they go,” she said. “Won’t have long before the scuffle attracts the old man.”

“You didn’t write any of this in the book!”

“Well, I assumed no one else was going to read it. Come on.”

At the top, Firion allowed them a precious few minutes to sit on the floor of the keeper’s room and to catch their breath; she was used to stairs, she had been going up and down her cliff for decades, but now dark spots danced in front of her eyes and she felt faint. “All right,” she heard herself say, as if from a long way away, “now, remember we rehearsed two scenarios—two versions of your plan …”

Cane was frantically sorting through the items from the satchel, but he paused and stared up at her, his eyes devoid of colour in the bright light from the lighthouse lens. “Yes?”

“The one where you have two wizards,” she said, staring up at the peaked ceiling and wishing away the dots clouding her vision, “and the one where something happened to the great wizard Firion, who is not getting any younger, and you have to do it alone …”

“Sir! Are you all right?”

“Of course I am. This is a test.” She got up and struck a casual pose with her staff. “You are going to do this by yourself, Apprentice Cane. If you want that exemption certificate,” she added, firmly, because the boy was visibly preparing for at least a token effort to beg her to help, don’t make him do it alone, not alone.

“Yes, sir,” he said faintly.

“We practiced this,” she said. “We ran through everything.”

“Not the spells!”

“If you figured them out, they’ll work,” she said complacently. “Now, on we go. Door’s over there. Don’t worry, I’m right behind you.”

Razor-sharp, her intelligence, they called it. Forgetting that razors are next to useless in most contexts and useful in a very few. The blades are too thin and delicate to be used for butchering meat or chopping wood; they dull unless constantly and meticulously maintained. Come to think of it: not inaccurate. Maybe that’s where the saying came from. She shook her head.

When she could see properly again, she let herself out onto the gallery and leaned against the cold iron, watching the dragons fight and hunt, negotiate and preen, embrace, ignore, and seduce. Some of the younger males were so much smaller than the females that they were simply slapped aside; many bore fresh scars from tonight’s scuffles, bleeding luminescent blue goo into the frenzied water. Huge chunks of armour washed ashore, as neatly angular as dressed stone. A lucky male surfaced in the distance, teeth clenched around an enormous fish thrashing violently for escape. It was all chaos and desperation.

Next to her, Cane was quickly assembling the device for his spell, and finding, she observed, that muscle memory worked quite a bit better when one wasn’t under pressure. She was about to remark upon this, perhaps lighten the atmosphere, make up another apprentice rule, but her quip was cut off by a tremendous roar that swallowed all other sound.

Cane yelped, dropped a bagful of powdered sulphur, and recovered it without spilling too much. Out at sea, the male who had caught the huge fish breached—seemed to breach—kept flying into the night sky, higher and higher, obscuring the stars, caught in the maw of a dragon the size of a mountain.

In the next moment the smaller dragon was gone, gulped down with its ungifted gift, and the Bouldus smacked his great stone lips together with every evidence of enjoyment—then turned to face the shore.

“Just like we practiced,” Firion murmured, but it didn’t come out as reassuringly as she had hoped, more of a strangled warble. The apprentice wasn’t listening anyway, busy dividing his attention between increasingly panicked glances up to see where the Bouldus was and down to his device, which did not appear to be as complete as Firion would have predicted at this stage of things.

The Bouldus swam steadily towards the beach, movements powerful but choppy due to the thickness of his armour, the great head rising, shoulders next, water shedding swiftly from his scales, and then it was clear that the dragon was standing, no longer swimming or wading, but standing on the seafloor and walking in. Its strides were so long that the village had a few minutes, at best.

“I‘m done!” Cane leapt to his feet, holding the miniature trebuchet triumphantly, then goggling at the Bouldus and how far it had gone in the brief time he had been looking down to complete the thing. “I … I …”

“You know what to do next!” Firion barked, fed up. “You came up with this! What do you do next?”

Cane shrank back, glanced at the dragon, and took a deep breath. “I do know. I didn’t forget.” Moving with great care, he fastened the device to the balustrade, made sure the pivot worked, then took the second device from his cloak. It was unrecognizable as the simple wooden flute it had once been, the shape buried in an adhered mass of beads, clay sigils, herbs wrapped in copper wire, and (for good measure, and in case it helped) the shard of vangonite, a baleful green in the moonlight.

This one Firion had helped to test (cautiously, in the cellar); she covered her ears as the boy lifted it to his lips and began to blow.

The sound wavered at first, but he had big lungs; as he continued it straightened out, turning from a single note to a set of silvery chords that hung like moonbows in the cold, stagnant air. The vangonite began to glow; the herbs emitted wisps of fragrant smoke.

“Should I try ag—” Cane began, then cut himself off, for the Bouldus—ponderously, but definitively—had turned, unable to resist the nearness of this call, the audacity of it.

“Wait till he’s in range,” Firion said.

“I know that! I came up with this plan! I know what I’m doing!”

She regarded him appraisingly. “Of course you do.”

The ancient lighthouse, sturdy as it was, trembled as the dragon approached. Cane kept a hand on the trebuchet, steadying it, adjusting the angle of the tiny sling, touching his fingertips to the springwheel to feel its tension. His lips were moving silently—rehearsing the spell, Firion thought. Not counting down to disaster, not praying to his family’s gods. Like a real wizard.

Three more steps. Two. One. The jostling finally shook the lighthouse flame out of its cavity, the fire collapsing behind the lens into a dull orange glow.

And Cane hit the trigger, firing the clay ball high above the Bouldus, and shouted the words of the spell in one long fluid phrase.

Firion stared, but in actuality both the dragon and the projectile were so close that it would have been harder to avoid staring. The ball exploded exactly as designed, ejecting a shower of smaller spheres that burst open in their turn, sending crackling bolts of white light into the Bouldus’s upturned face.

For a heartstopping moment it seemed to be working—as the magic landed, a smell of burning rose from the armour, and chips of it rained down, jingling as they hit the stones far below. The Bouldus roared, snarled, and turned towards the open sea again, putting its back to the lighthouse and the village.

Cane started to shout something triumphant, then swallowed it with a squeak of dismay. For the Bouldus was pivoting back, swiping one enormous forelimb angrily over its face, irritated only, not defeated. Most of the little spheres still in the air continued to bravely send out their stinging lights, but they were no longer floating high enough, and were slowly, lazily drifting to the beach.

For a moment there was no sound except armoured claws scraping across armoured face, but that was swiftly replaced with a low and unmistakably menacing snarl that began softly and increased in volume until Firion thought her bones would shake loose from her flesh. The Bouldus blinked its four blank white eyes, staring at the lighthouse, tilting its head until it spotted the two humans cowering behind the balustrade.

“All right, all right, very all right,” Cane babbled, grabbing her arm. “We planned for this too, I mean this was in my plan, we have to work together, if we both—I don’t care if I get the exemption certificate, sir, not any more, anyway it won’t matter if we’re dead, so if we—”

“I can’t,” Firion said.

Cane looked up desperately at the incoming dragon, then back down at Firion. “I know you think because we made an agreement—”

“It’s not that,” she said, raising her voice as the dragon began to snarl again, scenting them. “I can’t. I can’t read the Old Speech any more, I can’t call it up to cast a spell.”

“What?”

“It stopped sometime last year,” she shouted, not caring any more, hurt by the hurt she saw in the boy’s horrified face. “I don’t know. The spark is gone. I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?!”

“I thought I wouldn’t have to!” She shook her arm free and pointed. “Get around to the far side, quick!”

“I can’t believe this!” He stayed beside her all the same, scuttling till they were on the landward side, still hearing the Bouldus snuffling and grumbling on the far side of the lighthouse. “The whole time you were telling me I had to learn it myself, feel it myself—”

“Well you bloody did, didn’t you? Anyway, I’m sorry,” she said, catching her breath. “I suppose if those are my last words …”

“I didn’t think of any last words,” Cane said. “I wish I had.”

Firion barely heard him; instinct had folded her small, as if it would help, and the movement had driven something into her ribs. She pulled out the small spellbook, flicked automatically through its blank pages, and put her thumb on the spell, still invisible. “Add this,” she said.

“What is it?”

“You’ll see.”

“But my trebuchet—”

“Nope. You’ll have to throw it,” she said, getting up and edging back around, clinging to the thick, salt-pitted iron. “I’ll get him as close as I can.”

“Firion! Don’t! What if I—”

“Don’t worry about it,” she called back, wincing as the Bouldus spotted her and visibly perked up. “You can do this!”

She thought about the old days, meeting the villagers and shaking her head in disbelief at their tales of the dragon’s depredations; she thought about the first time she’d encountered it herself, freezing up with surprise before unleashing Yvorque’s Precision Nightbolt at the last moment; she thought about how she had slept for three days afterwards, about how families had sent their kids up with bread and pies and thick uneven bottles of ale to make sure she could eat when she came to; she thought about how fed up she had been, all night staring into the dark doorway between Tulun’s legs, pondering whether there was a spell to loosen things up at the exact moment the baby slid out into her waiting hands, all turned around but alive, alive, alive.

The Bouldus stared at her as if it knew her, and maybe it did, who knew how their memories worked. Firion stared back to make sure it knew that she knew it in return. She held her staff in both hands as if lining up for a joust, and trembled and bared her teeth in threat and breathed the creature’s breath.

And then the clay ball came sailing over her head, arcing up and up, entirely unnoticed by the Bouldus. The words of the first spell cracked out like a whip, followed by—Firion smiled—the second.

This time when the magic-packed sphere exploded, it went like a rotten fruit—thick strings of glowing violet mucus joining all the tinier spheres, twirling like a thrown net. As each began to blast out its miniaturized lightning, it stuck furiously to the armour, to eyes, nose, lips, and did not detach no matter how the startled dragon tried to wipe them off.

“Get back inside!” Firion shouted; they rushed down the steps again and back to the beach, fleeing the howling, infuriated creature with a headful of lightning in case it took a swipe at the lighthouse.

They scrambled up the slope on all fours and turned just in time to watch the Bouldus weakly swing at the railing, missing it by a mile. Then it turned, heading for the open ocean again, where the lights could be seen for some time before it submerged.

Firion sat down heavily in the grass and tossed her staff aside; Cane flopped onto his back.

“Warban’s Adhesion,” he said faintly. “I saw someone use that in first year. She stuck one of the house wardens to the ceiling.”

“It’s a very strong glue.”

“It’s not permanent, though.”

“No. But by the time he gets that stuff off his face and your spell stops firing, he won’t be in the mood for raiding any more. That’s all you need, really. Just to drive him off. It’s like throwing rocks at a bear that gets too close to the farmyard.”

“I see. And the shaking, when does that stop?”

“Oh, that’ll always happen,” she said, running her hands through the grass, staring up at the stars. “That’s magic, you see.”

“You look after that. All possible precautions.” Firion handed him the bulging envelope, her wax seal protected by an additional wrapping of ribbon. “Don’t let that melt, not even get soft. That’s your ticket out and they won’t accept it if the seal’s not perfect.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you,” he said. “For everything. I should have expected no less from the great wizard Firion.”

“And you,” she said, “were an exemplary apprentice, and I am proud of you for not dying.”

They shook hands, and if this was an unspoken promise to keep one another’s secret for as long as they both lived, they refused to comment on it; she watched him head down the steps until he was just a dot at the bottom in his red-and-white cloak. Then she went back inside and put the kettle on, and then poured herself a large mug of plum brandy to tide her over while she waited for the whistle.

Should she clean the cottage? It looked a bit more lived-in than usual, and the dishes were starting to pile up. No, perhaps later. Just the kitchen table, which was getting difficult to eat at. She sipped her brandy and opened the Book of the Bouldus, smiling at the coloured illustrations Cane had added. They were good; the boy had an eye for detail.

The kettle began to tick and bubble. She flipped to a spell page, running her fingers across the smooth paper, then hesitating. A trick of the firelight? Of the gulls flicking past the window? Could be both, or neither, perhaps she was imagining it—or perhaps something truly was appearing on the page, striving to rise to the surface, the letters distant but swimming surely out of the depths to meet her sight.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors