36 Nieba, midday
881st year of the Sabrian Realm

"Here we are, Damoselle de Vernase." My escort drew aside the overhanging pine branches so I could better view the disturbed ground. A raven flapped away, screeching, scraping my already stripped nerves. The shallow ravine was heavily wooded, preventing any glimpse of the severe gray walls or the round, slate-roofed towers my younger sister had called home for the last seven years.
    Lianelle had once told me that forests were the perfect representation of magic: roots that delved deep into the rich, layered loam of all that had come before, shadow and light, growth and decay, mystery and life. All of it connected and balanced, ever changing, yet old beyond history. My sister had lived for magic. And now she had died for it - all her merry teasing, her laughter, her brilliance wasted on lies, dead dreams, and superstition.
    The wiry little man shuddered and licked his pale lips with an overlong tongue. "Mage Bourrier says that, for the last tennight, Acolyte Lianelle has scarce been seen about the collegia. Whatever she was working on, it was certainly not her assigned duties or lessons. The alchemical stores were dreadfully out of order, the aviary unswept, and she had not yet submitted her essay on theoretical formulae for shape transformations. One of the tutors found her out here. Evidence bespoke a magical explosion . . . as I told you. Horrid."
    And then they had dug a hole and thrown her in without a song or a prayer or a kinsman's touch to bid her farewell. A girl of seventeen. Horrid could not even begin to describe it. What of despicable, vile, unconscionable?
    Yet another spasm of pain shivered my heart. Anger and resentment burned in my chest like fiery ingots, and I wanted to yell and weep and curse every stone of this place and every bastion of Heaven. But I swallowed the knot in my throat and clamped my jaw tight. Anne de Vernase did not crumble before strangers.
    The patch of raw earth scraped out of the scorched bracken had been outlined with salt and sprinkled with herbs, likely some magical foolery intended to keep evil away - or contain it. Unbelievable that anyone could countenance such nonsense, when academicians could view the structure of a salt crystal through magnifying lenses and write treatises cataloging its properties. Every day scholars and academicians unmasked another enchantment as a fraud.
    Only Lianelle had ever been able to fool me into thinking there was any substance to sorcery. "Certainly not in the common practices," she would say, with a mixture of excitement and worldly wisdom laughable in a girl who had spent almost half her life within these walls. "Most large magical workings are illusion, and anything for sale in the marketplace is a waste of good coin. But the fundamentals - spellwork, binding power, elemental linkages between natural objects - those are real. That's what I study at Collegia Seravain." And then an oriole would settle on the top of her head or the hearthfire would flare into stringy flames the deep blue of iris, and Lianelle would swear she had not thrown lamp oil in the hearth to make it burn so strangely or sprinkled seeds in her hair to attract the bird, but had done it all with magic. Laughing.
    I folded my arms in front of me as if by force of will I might not lose the last bits of her. My sister. My dearest friend in the world. How could she be dead?
    Their salt barrier had not lasted even a sevenday. Rain or animals had already blurred and broken the white lines.
    "You've not marked her burial place with so much as a stick," I said, the magnitude of the hurt leaving privacy and dignity in ruins. "Did no one recall she had family to mourn her, to give her honor to ease her Veil journey? Why was she not taken to a proper deadhouse?"
    My companion's fluttering hands dismissed my concerns, his bony wrists protruding from his sleeves as if he had put on a younger apprentice's gown. "The chancellor determined we could afford no delay in such untidy circumstances. A master mage came from Merona and laid heavy enchantments about her body to ensure nothing of her mistakes lingered to harm others. Being ungifted, you perhaps would not understand."
    Ungifted. Paeans to the Pantokrator and his saints that I was ungifted in the ways of magic! Better to be plain, plodding Anne than dead like my gifted sister or locked away unable to tell day from night like my gifted mother. With my brother four years' hostage to a king's vengeance, I seemed to be the only functioning member left of a family my father had once named "as perfectly balanced as the elegant ellipses of the planets." My father, who had explained the world to me, only to prove his every word a lie. My father, the royal diplomat, the man of science, the traitor.
    I squeezed my arms tighter, fingers pressing to the bone. "This land belongs to the collegia?" I scanned the rugged landscape for some fence or marker.
    "Yes. Though much of our lower, flatter land has had to be sold off, a disgraceful result of the king's new tax levies¾the forest reaches and cliffside lands remain under our hold."
    "Then certainly the mages will not object to me placing a stone marker scribed with my sister's name here. A small thing. Out of the way." Too little, too cold, too hard to remember a bright spirit. "She died while in the school's care."
    "Um . . . I will have to inquire, of course. I was told only to show you." The balding man, not a day younger than fifty years, chewed his nails like a schoolchild. The masters of the collegia had sent an aging apprentice¾a nobody¾to guide me here. Someone who could answer not one of my thousand questions. No adept, no mage, and certainly no master could spare the time to explain why a sixth-year student at Collegia Magica de Seravain had been found half-buried in last year's leaves, her flesh scorched and her fingers missing. I supposed I should be grateful they had notified me at all.
    My guide scuttered up the slope of the ravine on his way back to the forest path.