The carriage lets you off at a gate that isn't on any map your phone can find, and the night is suddenly full of the smell of rain and old stone. You are twenty-two, and your magic came in last month late and sideways — the way a struck match catches a curtain — so the academy sent for you after supper, and so you are here, luggage damp, standing in a courtyard where the lanterns burn green.

He is waiting on the steps like a man who lost a bet and liked it. Crispin Everhart: tall, a storm of dark hair, a pale scar like a forked river above his left brow, sleeves pushed to the elbow, a wand of knotted hawthorn turning idle between his fingers. He looks at you the way a man looks at a locked door he means to pick.

His voice is warm and low and not the least bit sorry.

He steps down and unfolds a square of parchment — old, stained, dense with ink you can't quite read — and lays it flat on the stone balustrade. He touches it with the tip of his wand.

The ink unspools. Footprints, dozens of them, drift across the parchment, each one labeled, all of them moving in real time. Yours is already there, two small steps stopped at the gate. His stands beside it.

He points, and a caretaker's lantern glides down a far corridor on the page.

He holds out his hand, palm up, and the green light of the lanterns turns his scar to silver.