The same whistle that signalled lunch, long and brassy, called for the end of the shift. Dalliance packed away the final jars of glossy white tallow and stretched. Around him, men closed boxes, popped their backs noisily, and talked about their plans for the night.

  A mage with an arcane focus stood near the exit, extending it to each worker in passing. Dalliance felt a mild shock as thaums grounded themselves against his skin—”don’t touch it if you’re full up, that’s just wasteful,” chided the mage—and he was outside the warehouse, in the cooler air of the early evening, naturally drifting to the side of the tide of newly freed labor.

  “A moment, boy,” came the petty officer’s voice from behind him.

  Dalliance found a space between two of the massive cooper’s wagons, left parked (though not, of course, hitched up to anything) by workers likewise streaming out the stockyard gates, and waited for the petty officer to catch him up. The massive man didn’t take very long, men parting around him like a stream around a stone. “I had an idea,” he told Dalliance."Might be a bad one. How about I pick your brain about aeromancy, and I cover dinner?"

  Dalliance shrugged. He’d just wasted his day’s pay, so he wasn’t happy—but then, he hadn’t expended any mana today either, and his tokens were already full. If Malcolm wanted to make up the difference, it didn’t exactly bother him. “Okay.”

  The massed humanity was moving slowly, congregating into moving clumps that struggled to squeeze past one another through the double stockyard gates. Dalliance would have flown if it had just been him. “What’d you want to know?”

  “Just so you know, we don’t get many aeromancers in logistics,” Malcolm said. “You lot usually get snapped up by command—couriers, scouts, cannon crews. That sort of thing.”

  He shrugged.

  “Having you down here is a resource. One I don’t much like wasting hauling jars from pallet to shelf. But before I can think about a better use, I need to know what you can actually do.”

  He glanced at the rows behind them.

  “Unless you like stocking, I suppose.”

  Dalliance shook his head.

  “All right then,” Malcolm said. “What’s your aeromancy look like? What do you do?”

  “Well, I’ve only just started at King’s College,” Dalliance admitted. “My spell list isn’t very impressive.”

  It was mostly true. Still, he felt a small frisson of pleasure at the memory of his new spells from the night before, each one carefully recorded in his ever-growing spellbook.

  At present, that spellbook was a four-times-folded sheet of paper, cut to make pages like a little booklet, stitched together into a crude spine. It lived tucked against his thaumic token in his wallet—hung from purse strings threaded through a belt loop and kept inside his trousers, pressed to his left hip beneath his loose shirt.

  Dalliance had heard about pickpockets. He had no interest in that experience.

  “Can you fly, or . . . move cargo, do you think?”

  Dalliance, who’d been watching the milling press failing to move an inch through the gates, nodded. “I can do both, sort of.”

  “And if you fail, do you . . . I don’t know, fall from the sky? Drop things?”

  “I guess I could,” Dalliance admitted. “Why?”

  “I need to figure out how much you could lift if you were . . . say, moving air under a mage-kite. I’ve got a logistical issue, and I think I can see the shape of a solution, assuming that’s possible. Depending on how much you can lift.”

  Dalliance thought about it. He’d never tried lifting something as the wind. “Two hundred pounds if I do it normally,” he said, semi-automatically as he tried to match ‘mage-kite’ to a mental image. “I don’t think I understand the principles behind a mage-kite.”

  He’d seen some on the first day of classes. Giant triangles, like sails on the lake, billowing with wind and holding up passengers who hung down below. “Probably a lot?”

  Malcolm looked a bit disappointed, but rallied. “I guess you’re still new—” he allowed.

  “I’ll show you,” Dalliance said, his impatience dovetailing with the fear of being undervalued. He hadn’t really liked stocking jars, though it wasn’t hard. Just the tedium.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Do you mind if I touch your shoulder?”

  The big man looked at him in bemusement.

  “Sure, kid.”

  “This is going to be a little bit strange,” Dalliance told him, understatement of the century.

  He reached out, and the pair dissolved into a roaring rush of wind, flattening the Imperial flag against the warehouse, kicking up a storm of dust and a chorus of yelled imprecations, most from the mage doling out wages, and then rose up into the evening air, bearing North, to Water Street.

  "Hells!" Malcolm breathed, taking a long draw of his beer. "I don't know what I had in mind, but that wasn't what I pictured. To fly as the wind. My mother'd never believe it."

  Dalliance had set them down next to an open-air cafe. After a day under a roof, it didn't feel right to be inside. True to his word, the sergeant had bought them both steaming plates of chicken and gravy, and Dalliance, hungrier than he was accustomed to but arms aching from the effort, was doing his best approximation of 'eating with a will'.

  He wondered how ridiculous it would be to just lift the chicken with [Locomotion].

  And, as the warm broth hit his stomach, he wondered how long he'd have to stay up. Bed was starting to sound inviting.

  "Right, so here's the thing. I drew the short straw this rotation—I've got to reprovision the tower larder up in the Citadel. You know the main tower?"

  He didn’t wait for an answer: "Half a mile straight up. Normally, we do a full provisioning run every two months—haul everything up the stairs in relays, takes a full day and half the men are useless the next morning. Between times, we winch up daily supplies, but that's slow work, and the winch can only handle so much weight at once. It’s taking too many men—you probably noticed we didn’t get anywhere near done with stocking today, that’s not normal—and I’m thinking there has to be a way to get it done with magic. I can get ahold of a heavy mage-kite—we use them for supply runs to the scouts, it’s just not done in the city. But, of course, no idea how much you can carry, or how far, and we can’t go risking your neck either.”

  Dalliance frowned. “I don’t want to become necessary,” he admitted. “I don’t want to be doing this forever.”

  Not to mention that spending mana to do a job . . . well, he’d have been doing that on the walltop too, he supposed. Being a mage had some hidden downsides.

  Malcolm nodded immediately. No argument. “Wouldn’t expect you to.”

  He tipped his mug toward the darkening silhouette of the Citadel.

  “While you’re here, though, you could be rolling barrels up the stairwell by hand.”

  That landed.

  Dalliance hesitated, then sighed. “All right. Sure.”

  Malcolm thumped the table with an open hand, smiling broadly.

  “Good. I’ll whip something up tomorrow.”

  Dalliance was most of the way up the stairs towards Penitence Hall when the feeling of being watched came over him, like a sudden blanket of paranoia.

  He didn’t appreciate it. He cast [Obscuration] immediately.

  The feeling receded immediately, but over the next few minutes began to build again, doubling, and re-doubling. By the time he entered his own room, he felt the sensation as strongly as ever.

  Well, if they want to watch me, he thought defiantly, they can be bored alongside me.

  He had planned to use his new spells, but this could be another student from his classes. He remembered what Effluvia had demonstrated in her own duel: that whether or not she eventually had to reveal her spells, she seemed to consider it a strategic advantage not to do so upfront. A competitor could be watching him even now.

  So they already know that I now know [Breath of Fog], it occurred to him. If a [Breath of Fog] is cast, it's unlikely anyone scrying me could get any good information: They could watch me chanting, but not see my hand; watch my hand, but not see my face or the book I was trying to read.

  He could read with prediction. The thought made him smirk. He would close his book so it couldn’t be read, use his prediction to cast as if he had his spells memorized, practice in a foggy room, and whoever was scrying him could choke on it.

  The fog didn’t spread quite like Dalliance had expected. It filled his room immediately, then nearly as quickly began to thin toward the balcony and the corners of his room. Of course. He should have realized the doors hung loosely in their frames, and there were vents between floors as well for breathability.

  Oh well.

  Dalliance lost himself in spellcraft and almost didn’t notice when the sensation of being watched finally went away. But it wasn’t until he cast [Obscuration] again, in the course of his usual practice, that Topaz appeared, a finger to her lips.

  "Dalliance," she said from his shoulder an inch away from his ear. "That wasn’t the first time today your apartment has been scryed upon.”

  This intelligence was unexpected and unpleasant after the day he'd had.

  "While you are being scried upon," she said. "They can hear, but not see, and not well unless they know where to focus. Speak quietly, and it would be prudent to avoid saying my name."

  "What do we do?"

  "Well, you recast that spell every couple of minutes, for starters," she said. "Keep it renewed."

  "Great," he complained, but quietly, and complied.

  He was going to have to get a better spell for this.

  "Do you think it’s my Divination instructor?" he asked.

  "Have you done something to displease your Divination instructor?" she countered. "It is bad form to scry upon someone without their permission. Even your instructors will hesitate without a defined purpose. For now, all we can do is guess and wait, and hope nothing comes of it."