The rains had come in. Late summer rain was the most violent, the water pouring down in an almost solid wall and turning every road and field into the poor woman’s version of quicksand. Iwy hoped the weather wouldn’t pass over Riansfield.

  They found shelter in an abandoned stable only populated by a family of badgers who kept themselves to the roof. The small campfire and Iwy’s lantern gave barely enough light to read by.

  Triand decided to call it a research break. She had looted more literature from the library than Iwy had thought possible. It was all spread out between them as they sat with their backs to the wooden boxes that had once housed horses. Triand had her search for any mention of a crucible or any kind of magical destruction. In between breaks she made her do the coin nonsense again, holding the thing up with one hand and turning pages with the other.

  “This book mentions the city of Peophia.” Triand checked the spine. “The book is also about a thousand years old and Peophia was destroyed around the same time.”

  “It might be in the ruins,” Iwy said. The damn coin jiggled but made no move towards her, no matter how hard she pulled on her imagined thread. She tried picturing it flying, tried to recall the feeling of its cold surface in the palm of her hand. Nothing happened but a faint itching.

  “No, when I say destroyed I mean flattened. There’s forest there now. They got druids.”

  “Might be buried?”

  “They wouldn’t leave the crucible behind. And as far as I can tell it’s pretty hard to destroy.”

  Iwy took her eyes off the coin and looked through her notes. She had something about that somewhere ... “There’s mention of a wizard named Wruhgend, he was part of the order that protected the crucible, maybe they took it with them.”

  “Any name?”

  “Order of Uyane. U-yah-nee? Am I saying this right?”

  Triand pinched the bridge of her nose. “Magical history knowledge, don’t let me down now ... The Uyane became the Crimson Circle, then Bregor the Weird split and formed the Arcane Allegiance, then those turned into the Yzjasti over union disputes ...”

  “Is all that even true?”

  “I don’t know but they made me learn it.”

  Iwy tried to concentrate on the coin again. It budged and danced this way and that but never left the mage’s hand as she mumbled on about the political struggles of the Chosen Ones of Fento.

  “... and they became the Paragons of the Black Sign ...”

  If this was hard already, how much power did she need to lift a book? Two books? Half the floor?

  “... and they’re all dead, so ... I have no idea who could be managing the crucible these days.”

  Get over here already!

  The coin dashed up and out and hit Iwy on the nose.

  Triand beamed at her. “Hey! You did it!”

  “Maybe we should take a break,” Iwy said surly, rubbing her face.

  “Good idea. I need a new perspective anyway.”

  Iwy got up and leaned in the doorframe for a while, watching the downpour and wondering if, theoretically, she could make a sort of flame shield around herself to vaporise rain. Like the umbrellas the fancy folk used, only on fire. That might be the only use she had for this whole magic power thing, no matter what the old wizards might have thought she could do. Speaking of ... “Hey, question?”

  “Hm?”

  There was a series of thuds and when Iwy turned around her master had climbed onto the door of the horse box, hooked her knees over it and let the rest of herself hang down. Her much too long shirt flapped down until it covered her eyes. Iwy winced involuntarily as the stubborn garment unveiled a long scar running across Triand’s torso. It didn’t look very old.

  “What’d you do there? Is that from the library?” Iwy asked, the theories of magic momentarily forgotten.

  “Huh?” Triand fought the shirt into her trousers with one hand while summoning one of her books with the other. It came to a rest hovering upside down in front of her face. “Oh, that. Nothin’. It’s old. You should see the other guy. What did you wanna ask?”

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  Granted, Triand travelled a lot by herself and didn’t show a tendency of getting along with most people. Maybe she didn’t always have a healing potion ready when things turned pear-shaped and the pears were armed. Iwy tried to remember what she had been thinking about. “The wizards told me about this prophecy ...”

  Halfway through her brief summary she discovered that this was decidedly the wrong topic to discuss with Triand.

  “Oh, forget that! Prophecies are rubbish, no one ever seems to know where they come from and they’re always intentionally vague. So some big shot can pick a poor happy-go-lucky kid looking for adventure and glory, tell ‘em they’re the chosen one, and send them on a suicide mission he’s too chicken to do himself. If that works, great, the kid was the chosen one, didn’t even have to put in any work, so no reward necessary. Or, which happens more often, if the kid gets flattened, they weren’t really the chosen one. You see how this works? Prophecy, my aunt Fanny!”

  “You’re not very believing.”

  “There’s a hundred thousand seers in the world, and if not one of them can predict what I’m gonna drink next, they sure as Hell can’t predict the end times.”

  “Apple brandy, because that’s what’s in your flask, because that’s what you nicked at our last stop.”

  “You’re good.”

  “But I don’t have to worry, right? About that prophecy? Do you know what kind of teasing I’d get back home if I was in a prophecy?”

  “You’d think the folks would be proud.”

  Iwy could picture it clearly. This was worse than being thought a witch. “Yeah, right, every time something goes wrong, like I’d burn the milk or something, someone would say ...” She made her voice go deeper, imitating her father. “‘How are ya going to save us all when you can’t even heat milk’. I’d get a cold and it’d be, ‘Can we get a new Chosen One in here, this one’s broken.’ Gods, I’m not even sure if my dad or my siblings would be worse.”

  It was the thing she missed most about them. They could be serious if they had to, but most family meals consisted of equal parts eating and banter.

  Derek would love to be in a prophecy. He’d prance around the entire village making up tall tales about his heroic deeds that he was going to get around to eventually. He might even throw in a dragon.

  After a minute of staring at more rain, Iwy forced herself to read on in the Beginner’s Guide to Pyromancy. But her concentration was shot and she couldn’t get farther than “is the powerhouse of the magical cell”. She finally gave up and tried the coin again – this time Triand had her try to lift it off the floor. It was going to be a long day.

  “It’s probably not about you,” Triand said. “Fire abilities ain’t that unusual. It might also be made up.”

  Iwy came out of her thoughts about her older brother swinging a spoon like a sword. “What?”

  “Some tale that was popular back then and got written down and somehow lumped in with a bunch of prophecies. Happened before. You know, until fifty years ago everyone believed the whole story about a group of nine adventurers destroying a dark wizard’s powerful earring was historical fact, but then they found out there have never been any volcanoes in that area and there are no other texts about it anywhere ...”

  Iwy let her ramble on. She wondered how often this had happened. How many prophecies could be, say, children’s stories? Or some drunk tale overheard at a pub late at night?

  “... and then they found angry letters of one bard to Alfrid the Harpist about how the fellowship of the earring was his idea and that he’s going to sue him for sixty gold pieces or the equal value in goats ...”

  When Triand returned to her scrolls, Iwy stole a look at The Casebook of Magical Depletion she kept at the bottom of her bag.

  It was nearing midnight when Triand closed all her literature in frustration and jumped back into the right vertical world. She went through her and Iwy’s damp notes again. They hadn’t found anything recent. The only other mention of a crucible had been a saucy metaphor by Parurhan the Historian and Iwy had wondered out loud if ‘historian’ was an old word for ‘I can write, and someone left all this paper unsupervised’. They were still stuck on Wruhgend and the army of wizarding orders that had come and gone.

  “This is not enough information. We need ...”

  “Reinforcements?”

  “Research! Resources! A town with an actual library.” Triand spread her map on the ground. “Let’s see ...”

  Iwy leaned over the parchment on which she recognised exactly nothing. “Cirrane looks big,” she ventured.

  “Can’t, got arrested there once.”

  “What about Larkinge?”

  “Too many angry husbands.”

  “Are you kidding me right now?”

  “Of course. We need ... a wizard library with a strong focus on ancient history ... spanning a thousand years to now ...” She dragged her finger northeast across the lines that represented the main roads, across the squiggles of mountains. “It’s a bit farther ...”

  Iwy followed. The mage was pointing at a city called Prey. “This seems like a bad idea.”

  “It has a long magical tradition. The Healers of Iwohone originated there. It’s also the seat of the Order of the Elder Flame, they’re world-famous hoarders.”

  “Know anyone there?”

  “Used to, I think he moved away. And the other problem is, since we can’t take the main roads ...”

  “Why?”

  “If anyone’s looking for us, where d’you think they’ll look first? So, it’s going to take, uh ... give or take ... a week to get there.”

  “Do we have a week?”

  Triand tapped her lower lip while keeping her eyes on the map. “So far we shook ‘em off.”

  “You hope.”

  “Ah, well. Look on the bright side, we’ll finally have time to teach you some decent spells.” She waved How to Burn Foes and Incinerate People in her apprentice’s face.

  This was the opposite of a bright side, but Iwy kept quiet.