It was a long, gruesome afternoon. Gruesome mostly because Iwy regretted her decision to know more about the artefact. She had planned to establish a timeline, see if anyone had ever tried to destroy it, but the authors’ commitment to unnecessary details made her wish she had skipped lunch.

  It wasn’t so much history as it was a legend, and not a popular subject; Iwy had to dislodge the scrolls from behind tractates on the history of thaumaturgical analysis. The few texts she could find were so old they almost crumbled. What she could tell was that the Eye had been used for an impossibly long time. Iwy circled similarities in her notes. It might be the same as the Hungry Eye the priestess Cuthal had banished to the bottom of the sea, a thousand years before Queen Boud had united the human tribes. This text said it fed on blood.

  The most famous text she found described the story of a wizard named Manisum who had kept the Eye for a hundred years during which he apparently established a reign of terror over an area of countries Iwy had never heard of. His order grew in number every day and his followers seemed to delight in torturing and decimating the population. Iwy wondered if this Acarald character had gotten his ideas from this story. Manisum kept feeding the Eye, but it would not be satisfied, draining a hundred mages every day, which seemed plain exaggerated, but the author was really getting into it. Iwy skipped to the next paragraph as soon as she got to “wading knee-deep through viscera”.

  It wasn’t clear what happened to the Eye afterwards; apparently it was lost in the First War. One of them, anyway. There was a ‘First War’ every few centuries. Details got fuzzy from there. Erunos the Younger claimed that the Eye had been in the hand of one Clebahna, Scourge of the Arid Fjords, while Oszor the Scribe maintained it had belonged to Hilior the Watcher at the same time, among others. At times, it seemed they were not even the same Eye, or the wizards of centuries forgotten had been playing an elaborate game of musical chairs with the thing. What if there were more of them? But if that was the case, surely someone would be using one right now. Were they all lost except the one Triand found?

  Beside her, the two older mages mumbled on about the wizarding orders. Iwy noticed Triand giving Lady Grey the eye as she passed with her wooden cart to return books to the nearby History of Haunt Rituals shelf.

  She glanced at Triand’s staff, which leaned innocently against the table. Burying didn’t work. Tossing it in the sea hadn’t worked. Someone always found it again. Wouldn’t destroying it be the first thing someone would try if they wanted to keep it out of the wrong hands? Was it impossible to destroy?

  She noticed the librarian looking at them from behind the cover of History of Delightful Dark Arts. Triand winked at her. Lady Grey’s grey cheeks flushed pink.

  Iwy sat over her scrolls until they had frustrated her enough with their lack of definite answers and turned to the others. “Find anything yet?”

  “Hm, about halfway through the orders,” Eliphas said and stretched his back. “About the 15th century. Think we get the remaining six hundred years in before they close in ten minutes?”

  “Nope,” Triand said, rubbing her eyes.

  “I’ll take these back,” Iwy said, loading her arms. She remembered their original places fairly well. Perhaps the library was helping. All it left to be desired was a new spell that instantly returned books to their designated places.

  Lady Grey stopped her halfway between Miraculous Items and Mythology. “Excuse me, young woman?”

  “Yes? Did I put it back in the wrong order?”

  “Never mind the books,” she said haughtily. “Tell your handsome friend that I’m, uh ... interested. In what she has to say.”

  Iwy nodded for her own safety. “I’ll give the message.”

  She returned to the table with an eyeroll. They could not pass a single town without ... “Triand, you’re wanted. That grey lady wants to know what you have to say, and I don’t want to know what that means.”

  A broad grin spread across the mage’s face. She spied between the rows of shelves to spot the librarian. “Oh, nice.”

  Eliphas poked his head out between two shelves where he was putting scrolls in order. “Not really, right?”

  “You two returned all your literature?”

  “Yes. We should get going anyway, Woras gets antsy when his routine is interrupted.”

  Triand left them outside the library doors. “You kids go on, I have some steppin’ out to do.”

  “Can you believe that?” Iwy said, mostly to herself.

  Eliphas shrugged. “I know, I put my money on the innkeeper.”

  “What?”

  “They’re both her type, so it was a tough decision.”

  “She has a type apart from ‘everyone’?”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He shook his head, trying to conceal a laugh. “Let’s get home and get some dinner.”

  Eliphas told her three times that she didn’t have to help prepare the stew he had in mind, then finally gave up. It felt strange for Iwy to have someone cook for her without doing anything; she could hardly let her own mother do it without at least cutting the vegetables. That was something for sick days when you really couldn’t work.

  Eliphas was a surprisingly good cook. His former husband had taught him most recipes he knew, but he said it with such a sad smile the topic was soon dropped. Instead, he asked her about her home and her family since he didn’t come around the Midlands often. Whether anything had changed in the area, but, of course, it hadn’t.

  When Iwy set the table, she realised her muscles had stopped tensing, even her jaw. She finally felt relaxed; he was the exact opposite of Triand. He was predictable. With Triand you never knew if she was going to sit still for hours or jump up and break into a library or chat with a dragon or try spells that by rights should be illegal. At one point, they’d had a cat for two days. Triand had found it outside some village they stopped at, fed it scraps she’d stolen from someone’s plate at the inn, and it had stuck around until there were too many miles between the animal and its next meal. She had named it Oatcake. She insisted the cat had named her Mackerel.

  Eliphas shrugged out of his robes as he sat down; he wore a blue tunic and black trousers underneath that both seemed different from the city style. Iwy wondered which part of the country he was from originally, but he turned the topic to her before she could ask anything.

  “I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve never seen you use your powers since you’ve been here.”

  It was bound to come up. Iwy gave a half-hearted shrug, reaching for the bread. “It’s because I can’t. I can’t really do anything. It ... sort of comes and goes.”

  “Are you specialised in anything?”

  “Fire, I guess. At least that’s the part that keeps ruining my life.”

  Eliphas nodded appreciatively as he ladled out bowls. “Add more pepper if you like. Fire’s fairly common but few people can properly control it.”

  The great news just kept coming. “I can’t control anything.”

  “She’s going to help you.”

  Iwy glanced at her hands lying on the table. “I don’t think anyone can help me.”

  “You’d be surprised what she can fix if she puts her mind to it.”

  “I mean, she did just talk a dragon into working regular hours, but ...”

  Eliphas stopped mid-chew. “She did what?”

  Iwy told him about the interlude at the town and then had to wait five minutes for the wizard to stop laughing. “That is so dangerous, what was she thinking?” Eliphas said, wiping his eyes. “That could have gone so wrong.”

  “I know. All I could think of was, I can’t even help her.”

  “That must have been difficult for you.” Eliphas fidgeted with the tablecloth before he continued. “You know, I ... I had a similar problem when I was young. One day everything was fine and the next ... nothing. It just stopped. Complete depletion. It took three years until I could control my powers again.”

  Iwy sat up in her seat. “How does that happen?”

  “I don’t know. It had everyone stumped. Like I said, it was very sudden.”

  The girl slumped back. “That’s not reassuring.”

  “What I’m trying to say is everything can be fixed.” He patted her shoulder kindly, and Iwy was glad that he had completely misunderstood her.

  “Did Triand help you with it?”

  “No, my old master did. I still suppose he only took me on out of pity. He’d had a similar problem in youth. I didn’t know Triand back then. She, uh ... doesn’t know this about me, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell her.”

  “Alright, but how come don’t you want her to know? She’ll understand.”

  “It’s a sensitive subject for me. I don’t want her to worry. You didn’t grow up in a sorcerer community, did you? It’s a bit of a family embarrassment. I only ever told Triand that I have a condition that makes me weaker. I mean, that part is hard to hide.”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “Lighting chimney fires or filling tubs is not as powerful as you might think. The only time I attempted a decent wave I collapsed, and she had to take care of me for a week. She used to tell me I need to seek other avenues. Maybe even try witch magic. Witch magic, can you believe it?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Triand seemed to be getting by fine with witch magic. And druid magic. And strange combinations and whatever else she was doing. Of course she’d advise her friend to try different ways if they worked for her.

  Eliphas shifted in his seat. “You can’t just mix disciplines. Things explode when you do that.”

  “That explains a lot,” mumbled Iwy, thinking back.

  “Besides ... it’s different for me. It’s why I only made it to researcher and not even close to Archmage. I’m not even a very high rank in my order.”

  Up until now, Iwy hadn’t even thought about the wizard orders in that way. They just seemed like a way to keep the magical folks’ hands where the general population could see them. “Why is that important?”

  “It simply is,” he shrugged. “I see you share Triand’s opinion on this. She’s not in favour of orders either.”

  “No, it just seems ... silly. Sort of like a really fancy guild. Only I’m not sure you’re even doing anything useful,” Iwy added with a little more contempt than she had intended.

  “Sometimes I think so too. These days, maybe you’re right.”

  “Why do you even have orders?”

  “Well, back in the old days they were meant to emulate the covens. Protect us from the non-mages, safety in numbers and all. But also to find better ways of performing magic, better ways to help people ... then history happened and now they’re ... what did Triand call it? An elite club of tossers who think they’re better than the rest even though they can hardly find their own elbows under all the sequins?” Eliphas’s fingers bunched the tablecloth for a moment. “It’s ironic. She could easily be an Archmage if she wasn’t so committed to doing as she pleases.”

  “I thought it was because ... y’know, her parentage.”

  “Oh, that, right. I keep forgetting that.” He sighed. “What can you do, people are close-minded. I better take care of these dishes.”

  The dishes took flight to the already filled basin and took care of themselves. Iwy’s parents would have loved a spell like that.

  This was the most relaxed evening she’d had in a while. It was nice to talk to someone about magic who had his share of trouble with it. Triand, she made everything seem easy. And everything that wasn’t easy for her, she found an elaborate way around it. Nevertheless, Eliphas had been a better student than Triand; he told her about the blood hypothesis, that magic was inherited, though Iwy couldn’t pinpoint who in her family might have been a mage. Her mother had indicated her own grandmother, who Iwy had never met, but you’d think people would talk about it. This was completely different from Triand’s hypothesis, Eliphas explained, that magic consisted of tiny invisible parts that technically everyone could manipulate given proper practice and equipment, something she had picked up abroad. She had sent him a nineteen-page letter about it some years ago. It was far from the only strange hypothesis she had.