The rain had stopped by morning, but the college yard was still mud.

  Velthur picked his way across the courtyard stones, trying not to soak the hem of his tunic. Students hurried past with wax tablets tucked under their arms and oiled cloaks still dripping. A pair of boys argued about whose turn it was to copy a history text by hand. Somewhere near the kitchens a cook shouted about grain sacks getting wet again.

  Life went on, even after a night of thunder that rattled the city walls.

  Azandra walked beside him, her braid dark with leftover rain. She carried herself like someone used to being watched, even in a place where most people had no concern she was a noble from a house with a royal seal.

  “You look like you’ve barely slept,” she said laughing.

  As they passed the half-built lecture hall, workers were already repairing damage from the night before. Bronze tools rang against chisels. A mason wiped sweat from his face and muttered about foundations that were harder than expected.

  Velthur slowed, looking at the now covered hole.

  “Come on,” Azandra said. “We will be late for Nethira’s class.”

  He followed, but he looked back once. For a moment, he thought he saw a dark shape on the highest beam of the new hall.

  A raven.

  It blinked at him, then turned its head as if bored.

  When he looked again, it was gone.

  Nethira did not ease the students into the lesson.

  “Magic is not a trick,” she said, pacing in front of the low stone benches. “It is not a story you tell to impress someone at a feast. It is a force that can break your mind if you treat it like a toy.”

  Azandra didn’t remember seeing Nethira this firm in a lecture.

  She tapped the bronze bowl in the center of the room with a wooden rod. Inside lay a handful of dull objects. A cracked bead. A bent copper ring. A small stone disk etched with lines.

  “Today we discuss trinket work,” she said. “Minor artifacts. Tools that help those with little natural gift reach a little farther.”

  A boy in the back perked up. “So we finally get to try one?”

  Nethira fixed him with a look. “You will observe. Some may get to try.”

  A few students groaned.

  Velthur felt Azandra glance at him.

  She knew why.

  He could already feel it.

  Not from the bowl itself, but from something around them.

  A faint pressure, like standing near a deep well.

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  Nethira lifted the cracked bead. “This was made by a temple artisan. It holds a simple charm for warmth. Enough to keep frost off a cloak at night. Nothing more.”

  She handed it to a girl in the front row. The girl cupped it, shut her eyes, and muttered the activation phrase Nethira had taught them.

  The bead glowed faintly orange. A few students leaned forward.

  “See?” Nethira said. “No great power. No danger. Just skill and preparation.”

  Velthur swallowed. The air near his feet felt colder.

  The glow in the bead flickered.

  The girl frowned. “Magister, it is getting dim.”

  Nethira stepped closer. “Hmm, it usually lasts longer than that, but all magic fades over time.”

  Velthur’s vision blurred for a second. Not like he would faint. More like the room shifted half a step to the side.

  He saw the bead, and behind it something else. A pattern. Lines like the ones on the old stones they had uncovered near the new hall.

  The bead went dark.

  A murmur spread through the room.

  Nethira took it back, turning it over in her hand. “Strange.”

  Velthur stared at the floor.

  He knew that feeling.

  He had felt it near Nezzarod’s ruins. Like something nearby was drinking in the light.

  “Velthur,” Nethira said quietly.

  He looked up.

  “Stay after class.”

  They met her behind the lecture room, near a stack of unused clay bricks.

  Azandra folded her arms. “It was not just him,” she said. “I felt it too. Like a draft under a door.”

  Nethira nodded once. “I know. But he felt more.”

  Velthur hesitated. “There is something under us.”

  “Under the college?” Azandra asked.

  “Under this part,” he said. “Like a hollow place. Or something built into the stone. I hadn’t felt it before, but since last night everything feels a little off.”

  Nethira studied his face. She had the same calm look she wore when a student admitted to breaking a tool.

  “How certain are you?”

  “Not certain,” he said. “But it feels like… like an artifact that is not an object. More like a space.”

  Azandra blinked. “A space cannot be an artifact.”

  “In old places, it can,” Nethira said softly.

  She looked toward the half-built hall.

  “You both heard the workers. Foundations are off. Stones that do not match the plans. This college was founded after Harbinth, yes. But the ground we stand on and many of these buildings had been used for learning long before that.”

  “The old Lyceum,” Azandra said.

  Nethira nodded.

  Velthur shifted his weight. “Magister Justinus was part of its last class. Tallow read the list of final graduates.”

  “Yes,” Nethira said. “And he does not like to talk about it.”

  “Do you think he knows anything? He did seem off yesterday,” said Azandra.

  “I think,” Nethira said, “that some people remember more than they admit. This stays between us until we get some more information.”

  A shout echoed from the yard. One of the workers was waving others over.

  Nethira turned. “Stay here.”

  She strode off.

  Azandra exhaled. “Every mystery in my life starts with someone saying stay here.”

  Velthur managed a small smile.

  Then the pressure under his feet pulsed.

  He staggered.

  Azandra grabbed his arm. “Velthur?”

  “It is stronger,” he said. “Like it noticed.”

  “Noticed what?”

  “Me.”

  Velthur sat for a moment and closed his eyes. He thought he heard a voice whisper, and he felt wind rushing around him. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. He saw out of the corner of his eye a figure in a dark cloak walking through the yard in the opposite direction from where Nethira had walked.

  He looked up at Azandra and asked, “Who is that?” as he pointed in the direction of the figure.

  “Who is who?”

  Velthur looked back where his finger was pointing, but he didn’t see the person. He felt dumbfounded for a second. “Right now I feel as if the whole world has gone mad, including me.”