The morning after Ria's arrival began with an argument about eggs.

  The argument was not, strictly speaking, between Levin and Ria.

  It was between Ria and the eggs themselves, which she had cracked into a pan with the confident authority of someone who had been cracking eggs since before she could spell the word, and which had responded by sticking to the iron surface with the grim tenacity of barnacles on a hull.

  Marda's pan had not been oiled in what appeared to be several geological epochs. The eggs clung to it with a devotion that bordered on the romantic.

  "You have to season the pan," Ria said, scraping at the eggs with a wooden spatula that was losing the engagement on every front. "You heat it, you rub it with fat, you let it cool, you do it again. Four times. Five, if the pan's been neglected."

  "The pan hasn't been neglected," Marda said, from the doorway.

  "The pan has been abandoned," Ria said. "This pan has been through something. This pan has seen things and decided to stop caring."

  Marda's jaw tightened by approximately one-sixteenth of an inch, which was, in the complex semaphore of Marda's facial expressions, equivalent to a lesser woman hurling crockery.

  Levin sat at the bar with his tea and watched the exchange with the detached interest of a man observing weather patterns from indoors.

  The eggs were eventually liberated from the pan through a combination of vigorous scraping, applied butter, grunts from Ria, and what Levin suspected was sheer force of personality on Ria's part.

  They arrived on three plates — one for Marda, one for Levin, one for Ria — looking slightly battered but fundamentally edible, which represented a significant improvement over Marda's usual breakfast offering of bread and the vague implication that wanting more was a character flaw.

  Ria ate quickly, with the efficient enthusiasm of someone fuelling up for an event she had been anticipating since approximately the moment she'd fallen asleep the night before, which was to say: the magic.

  She had asked about it four times during dinner.

  She had asked about it twice while helping Marda wash up.

  She had asked about it once through the floorboards of the attic, where Levin slept, from the small room below that Marda had grudgingly cleared for her, and Levin had pretended to be asleep, which was difficult because Ria's whisper had the carrying power of a stage actor's and the subtlety of a cavalry charge.

  "So," Ria said, setting down her fork. "When do we start?"

  Levin took a sip of tea. He set the cup down. He looked at the cup. He looked at Ria. He looked at the cup again, as though hoping it might offer guidance, or possibly an escape route.

  The cup offered neither. Cups rarely did.

  "After tea," he said.

  "You've had three cups."

  "I'm a thorough person."

  "You're stalling."

  "Stalling is a form of thoroughness."

  Ria's eyes narrowed.

  Her braid — re-done this morning, tighter, more combat-ready, though neither of them had used that phrase — sat over one shoulder like a brown rope. Her hands were flat on the bar, fingers spread, in the posture of someone who was prepared to wait but wanted it known that the waiting was being done under protest.

  Levin finished his tea.

  He set the cup down with the careful finality that had become, over six weeks, his signature gesture — the full stop at the end of the morning's only sentence that mattered.

  "Right," he said. "Come on."

  They walked east out of Thornwall, past the farms and the goat pastures and the field where old Tommas grew turnips that he claimed were the finest in the valley, a claim that went unchallenged primarily because nobody else in the valley grew turnips and therefore the competition was, by default, nonexistent.

  Ria walked beside Levin with the barely contained energy of a terrier being taken for a walk — technically maintaining pace, technically staying on the path, but vibrating at a frequency that suggested the restraint was costing her something.

  "Where are we going?" she asked.

  "Greenmoss Cave."

  "What's in Greenmoss Cave?"

  "Spiders."

  Ria's stride did not break.

  Her chin did not drop.

  Her pace remained constant.

  But her left hand, which had been swinging freely at her side, closed into a fist and then opened again, and her right hand drifted to the strap of the small pack she carried and gripped it approximately two degrees tighter than was strictly necessary for the purposes of keeping a pack on one's shoulder.

  "Spiders?" she repeated.

  "Cave spiders. Greenmoss variety. About the size of a dinner plate, if the dinner plate had legs and opinions."

  "How many?"

  "Depends on the season. This time of year, probably fifteen to twenty in the main chamber. They're Level 1, mostly. A few Level 2s deeper in. They eat moths, beetles, worms, the occasional bat. They're venomous, technically, but the venom's mild — causes swelling, itching, and a headache that lasts about four hours. Unpleasant, but survivable."

  "You want me to fight spiders."

  "I want you to survive spiders. There's a difference. Fighting implies aggression, strategy, intent, and success. Surviving just means being in the same place as something dangerous and still being there when it's over. It's a much lower bar. Most of civilisation is built on it."

  Ria processed this.

  Her braid swung as she walked. A muscle in her jaw worked, doing something complicated with the information it had received.

  "Until when?" she asked.

  "Sundown."

  "Sundown? You want me to survive in a cave full of spiders until sundown?"

  "It's about six hours from now. The spiders are mostly nocturnal, so the first few hours should be relatively calm. They'll get more active as the light fades. By late afternoon, you'll have their full attention."

  "And what will you be doing?"

  "Sitting outside."

  "Sitting outside?"

  "At the cave mouth. Drinking water. Possibly thinking about clouds and a certain cat."

  Ria stopped walking.

  Levin walked three more paces before he noticed, and turned.

  She was standing in the middle of the path with her arms crossed and her chin raised and her braid hanging over one shoulder and her boots planted in the dust with the firmness of someone who had decided that this particular patch of earth was where the negotiation was going to happen.

  "That's your teaching method," she said. "Throw me in a cave? With spiders? And sit outside?"

  "I told you I didn't have a method."

  "I thought you were being modest."

  "I was being accurate. Modesty implies I have something to be modest about. I have a staff, a bronze disc, and a reservoir of power I don't understand. My qualifications for teaching are identical to my qualifications for dentistry, which is to say: none, and anyone who lets me try deserves what happens."

  "Then why did you agree to teach me?"

  Levin opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again.

  The honest answer involved Berta, and the broom, and the running goblin, and the warmth behind his sternum, and the particular quality of Ria's shrug on the south road — the shrug that had filed "Level 1" under "noted" and moved on — and none of these things could be compressed into a sentence that didn't sound either sentimental or insane.

  "Because you brought rosemary," he said.

  Ria stared at him.

  "That's the reason?"

  "The soup was significantly improved."

  "You agreed to take on an apprentice because of soup?"

  "I agreed to let you follow me around on a provisional, temporary, trial basis with conditions to be determined. The soup was a factor. Not the only factor. But a factor."

  Ria uncrossed her arms. She looked at the path ahead, where it wound between two low hills toward a limestone outcrop that was visible against the treeline like a grey tooth in a green jaw. She looked back at Levin.

  "Fine," she said. "Spiders. Sundown. What do I get if I survive?"

  "A lesson."

  "I thought this was the lesson?"

  "This is the entrance exam. The lesson comes after, assuming you pass."

  "What happens if I don't pass?"

  "You get bitten by spiders and develop a headache and we go home and you fix Marda's soup and we never speak of it again."

  Ria considered this. Her fingers drummed against the strap of her pack — a rapid, staccato rhythm, like rain on a tin roof.

  "And if I pass?"

  "Then tomorrow, we do something harder."

  "Harder than spiders?"

  "Everything is harder than spiders. Spiders are the floor. Spiders are the absolute minimum baseline of difficulty against which all other difficulties are measured. If you can't handle spiders, you can't handle anything, and the most useful thing I can teach you is which direction Greymarch is so you can walk there and enrol in a proper academy where they have curricula and classrooms and a notable absence of arachnids."

  Ria's drumming fingers stopped. She took a breath. She let it out. She adjusted her pack.

  "Let's go," she said.

  They went.

  Greenmoss Cave was exactly what its name promised, which was unusual for geographical features in this region, most of which had been named by people who were either drunk, lost, or operating under the assumption that future generations would appreciate the irony.

  The cave entrance was a rough oval in the limestone face, approximately eight feet high and six feet wide, framed by a thick carpet of the green moss that gave the cave its name. The moss was lush, damp, and had the particular vivid green of something that was thriving in conditions that would kill most other plants, which gave it an air of quiet, vegetative smugness.

  Inside, the cave extended back into darkness. The first twenty feet were lit by daylight filtering through the entrance. Beyond that, the light gave up and the dark took over with the abruptness of a curtain falling.

  The smell was cool, mineral, earth, and faintly organic — the smell of stone and water and things that lived in the absence of sun and had adapted accordingly.

  Levin stopped at the entrance.

  He set his staff against the limestone wall. He sat down on a flat rock that had been worn smooth by weather and time and possibly by previous people sitting on it while sending other people into caves, though this seemed like a niche enough activity that the wear was probably just geological.

  Ria stood beside him, looking into the cave.

  Her pack was on her back. Her hands were at her sides. Her breathing was steady and controlled, the breathing of someone who was managing their breathing, which is a different thing entirely from breathing naturally and tends to produce a rhythm that is slightly too even, slightly too measured, like a metronome that has been wound by someone who is trying very hard to appear calm.

  "Before you go in," Levin said, "I'm going to give you something."

  He held out his right hand, palm up.

  A point of light appeared above his palm. It was small — smaller than the Arcane Bolt, smaller than the gust that had deposited the bandit in the ditch. It was warm and golden, the colour of late afternoon sunlight, and it hovered above his skin like a soap bubble made of luminescence.

  "This is a shield spell," he said. "Basic. Tier zero. It creates a barrier of light around you — thin, fragile, good for maybe two or three hits before it breaks. Think of it as a soap bubble that doesn't like being touched. It won't stop anything serious, but it'll stop a spider bite, which is all you need."

  He held the light toward her.

  "Take it."

  Ria looked at the light. She looked at Levin. She reached out with her right hand, fingers slightly trembling — a tremor she controlled almost immediately, pressing her fingertips together and then spreading them again, the way a musician flexes before a performance.

  She touched the light.

  The golden point flared once, briefly, and then sank into her palm like water into sand. A warmth spread up her arm — she gasped, a short, sharp intake of breath — and for a moment, a faint golden shimmer traced along her skin, outlining her hand, her wrist, her forearm, before fading to invisibility.

  "It's inside you now," Levin said. "To activate it, think about the light. Picture it around you. A shell. A bubble. A wall between you and everything else. It'll respond to intent. The stronger your focus, the stronger the shield. Lose focus, lose the shield."

  "That's it? Just... think about it?"

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  "Magic is thinking about things very hard and having the universe occasionally agree with you. The universe is not always cooperative. But for a basic shield, it's usually willing to play along."

  Ria flexed her hand. She closed her eyes. The golden shimmer reappeared — faint and unsteady, like a candle flame in a room where someone kept opening and closing the door. It wrapped around her hand, her arm, her shoulder, and then guttered and went out.

  She opened her eyes.

  "It's hard to hold," she said.

  "It gets easier. Concentration is a muscle. Use it or it atrophies. Right now, yours is the magical equivalent of someone who has never exercised trying to do a push-up — the intent is there, the capability is theoretical, and the result is mostly just shaking and hoping."

  "Encouraging."

  "I'm not here to encourage. I'm here to sit on this rock. You're here to go into that cave."

  Ria looked at the cave entrance. The darkness beyond the twenty-foot mark looked back, which was a trick of perception rather than an actual property of darkness, but the effect was the same either way.

  "Any advice?" she asked.

  Levin considered.

  "Don't move," he said. "Spiders don't fly. If you stay still, they have to come to you, and they have to come on the ground or the walls, which means you can see them coming. If you run, you run into webs, and webs mean more spiders, and more spiders mean more running, and the whole thing becomes a feedback loop that ends with you screaming in a corner covered in silk. So. Don't move."

  "Don't move."

  "Find a spot. A defensible spot. Back against a wall. Shield up. Wait."

  "For six hours?"

  "For six hours."

  "In the dark?"

  "Ah." Levin raised his left hand. A small orb of blue-white light formed above his palm — cool, steady, the size of a walnut. He flicked it gently, and it drifted forward, floating through the cave entrance and coming to rest approximately fifteen feet inside, where it hung in the air like a tiny, patient moon, casting a circle of pale light on the stone floor and the moss-covered walls.

  "There. That'll last until sundown. Stay near it. The spiders don't like the light. They'll approach from the edges, from the dark. You'll see them coming."

  Ria looked at the floating orb. She looked at the cave. She looked at Levin, sitting on his rock with his staff beside him and his legs crossed and his expression carrying all the emotional investment of someone who had just set a kettle to boil and was now waiting for it to do its thing.

  "You're really just going to sit there," she said.

  "I'm really just going to sit there."

  "What if something goes wrong?"

  "Define 'wrong.'"

  "What if I get overwhelmed? What if there are more spiders than you said? What if the shield breaks and I can't get it back up and they're everywhere and I'm—"

  "Then you scream, and I come in, and the spiders have a very bad day. But you won't need to scream. You're going to be fine."

  "How do you know that?"

  Levin looked at her.

  He looked at her for a long moment — longer than he usually looked at anything, longer than he looked at the ceiling each morning or the tea each afternoon or the blue status box that he had stopped checking weeks ago.

  He looked at her the way a person looks at something they are trying to understand, and the looking produced no answers, but it produced something adjacent to an answer, which was a feeling, and the feeling was: this one is going to be fine.

  He did not say this.

  Saying it would have been encouragement, and he had already established his position on encouragement.

  "Go," he said.

  Ria went.

  She walked into the cave with her pack on her back and her hands at her sides and her braid over one shoulder and her boots making soft, careful sounds on the stone floor. She passed the twenty-foot mark where the daylight ended. She reached the floating orb and stood beneath it, bathed in its pale blue-white glow, and looked back at Levin.

  From the entrance, she was a silhouette edged in light — small and very still.

  She raised one hand in a wave that was either confident or desperate, and at that distance, in that light, the difference was impossible to determine.

  Levin raised one hand in return.

  Then he leaned back against the limestone, crossed his arms, and looked up at the sky, where cumulus clouds were building in the east with the slow, architectural patience of things that had all day and intended to use it.

  The first hour was quiet.

  Levin sat on his rock and listened.

  From inside the cave came the occasional sound of Ria shifting her weight, adjusting her pack, breathing in the controlled-too-even way that indicated she was still managing her breathing rather than simply doing it. Once, she sneezed, and the sneeze echoed off the cave walls and returned to her multiplied, which produced a small yelp that she immediately suppressed.

  The spiders, during this first hour, were doing what spiders do during daylight hours, which is to say: very little. They hung in their webs in the deeper chambers, legs folded, bodies still, asleep, conserving energy with the patient efficiency of creatures that had perfected the art of waiting long before humans had invented the concept.

  Levin counted clouds.

  He identified a cumulus that looked like a boot — specifically, a left boot, partnerless, sitting on top of something — and spent several minutes considering whether this was a coincidence or whether the universe was developing a theme.

  The second hour brought sounds.

  Small sounds. The dry, clicking patter of legs on stone. The faint, papery rustle of silk being produced. The almost subliminal vibration of webs being tested, tightened, adjusted — the infrastructure maintenance of creatures whose entire civilisation was built on architecture and patience.

  From inside the cave, Ria's breathing changed. It was still controlled, still measured, but faster now. The metronome had been wound tighter.

  "Levin?" Her voice echoed out of the cave mouth, small and hollow.

  "Still here."

  "There's one on the wall. To my left. About ten feet away."

  "Describe it."

  "It's... brown. Hairy. About the size of my hand. It's just sitting there."

  "That's a Greenmoss hunter. Female, probably, based on the size. She's assessing you. Deciding if you're food, threat, or furniture."

  "Which one do I want to be?"

  "Furniture. Furniture doesn't move. Furniture doesn't scream. Furniture is boring. Be boring."

  A pause. Then: "I can be boring."

  "I know. You farm turnips."

  "That's — that's actually quite rude."

  "Hold the shield."

  Another pause. Longer this time. Then, very quietly: "It's moving."

  "Toward you?"

  "Along the wall. Sideways. It's — oh. Oh, there's another one. Behind it. Smaller."

  "Male. Following the female. They do that. Ignore him. He's irrelevant. Focus on the female."

  "She's getting closer."

  "Hold the shield."

  "I'm holding it. I'm — it keeps flickering. I can't—"

  "Breathe. Not the way you've been breathing. Actually breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Slow. The shield responds to your focus, and your focus responds to your breathing, and your breathing responds to your fear, and your fear responds to the spider, and the spider responds to your movement. It's a chain. Control one link and you control all of them."

  Silence came from the cave. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.

  Then: "It stopped."

  "The spider?"

  "She stopped. She's about four feet away. She's just... looking at me. Can spiders look at you? She has eight eyes. It feels like she's looking at me with all of them."

  "She is. Greenmoss hunters have excellent vision for cave spiders. She can see the shield. The light confuses her. She's never encountered a glowing human before, and she's trying to fit you into her categories, and you don't fit, and this is making her cautious."

  "Good. I like cautious."

  "Cautious is temporary. She'll make a decision eventually. When she does, she'll either retreat or charge. If she retreats, stay still. If she charges, the shield will stop the first bite. Use the impact to push her back — flare the shield, think bright, think expand. She'll recoil. Spiders hate sudden light."

  "And if the shield doesn't hold?"

  "It'll hold."

  "But if it—"

  "It'll hold, Ria."

  Quiet followed his words. The clouds moved overhead. A bird landed on a branch near the cave entrance, regarded Levin with the critical eye of a creature that had opinions about humans who sat on rocks doing nothing, and flew away.

  From inside the cave, a sound — sharp, sudden, a crack of golden light that flared bright enough to cast shadows on the cave walls visible even from the entrance. The light pulsed once, twice, and then steadied.

  A spider — brown, plate-sized, moving with the horrible fluid speed that arachnids achieve when they've committed to a course of action — skittered backward across the stone floor, legs scrambling, eyes swimming, recoiling from the golden flare like a hand pulled from a hot stove.

  Ria's voice, breathless: "It worked."

  "Of course it worked."

  "She charged and I — I thought bright and the shield just — it pulsed. Like a heartbeat. And she went back. She went back."

  "Good."

  "Good? That's — I just repelled a spider with magic. With a spell. A spell that you gave me. That I activated. With my mind. And all you can say is good?"

  "Would you prefer 'adequate'?"

  "I would prefer enthusiasm."

  "I don't do enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is for people who haven't seen how the story ends. Hold the shield. There are more coming."

  "More?"

  "The flare got their attention. The ones deeper in. They're curious now. Curiosity, in spiders, looks a lot like hunger, because it is. You've got about four hours until sundown. The light orb will hold. The shield will hold if you hold it. Don't move. Don't run. Don't—"

  "Don't move, spiders don't fly. I remember."

  "Good."

  "Adequate."

  Levin almost smiled. The almost-smile was a subtle thing — a fractional relaxation of the muscles around his mouth, a slight softening of the jaw, visible only to someone who was watching very closely, and nobody was watching very closely, because he was alone on a rock outside a cave and the only potential observer was the bird, which had left.

  He leaned back against the limestone and closed his eyes.

  The third hour was louder.

  The fourth hour was louder still.

  By the fifth hour, the sounds coming from Greenmoss Cave had achieved a complexity and volume that suggested a small, enclosed war was being conducted between one human girl and an indeterminate number of arachnids, with the human girl holding her ground through a combination of magical shielding, creative profanity, shouting, and what sounded like the occasional deployment of a boot as a secondary weapon.

  Levin sat on his rock and listened.

  He listened to the crack-and-flare of the shield activating — once every few minutes at first, then more frequently as the afternoon wore on and the spiders grew bolder. Each activation was a pulse of golden light that lit the cave entrance like a lantern being switched on and off.

  He listened to Ria's breathing, which had abandoned its earlier artificial control and settled into something rawer and more honest — the breathing of someone who was genuinely exerting herself, genuinely afraid, and genuinely refusing to stop.

  He listened to her voice — the occasional yelp, the muttered "no you don't," the one memorable instance of "get OFF my PACK you horrible THING" that echoed out of the cave with such clarity and force that a squirrel in a nearby tree sat bolt upright and reconsidered its afternoon plans.

  He listened, and he did not go in.

  This was the hard part. The sitting. The waiting. The deliberate, conscious choice to remain on the rock while someone he had agreed to be responsible for was inside a cave doing something difficult and frightening and potentially painful, and the only thing standing between her and a very unpleasant afternoon was a spell he had given her hours ago and a set of instructions that amounted to "don't move and think hard."

  The warmth behind his sternum pulsed. It had nothing to do with kills or percentages or the reservoir. It was the other warmth — the one the blue box didn't track.

  The unfamiliar one.

  He ignored it.

  He was very good at—

  From inside the cave, a sound that was different from the others. A crack, but higher-pitched, thinner. The sound of something breaking. Glass, a window, or crystal, or—

  A shield failing.

  Ria screamed.

  It was a real scream — full-throated, involuntary, the sound a person makes when the barrier between them and the thing they're afraid of disappears and the fear arrives all at once, unfiltered, like water through a broken dam.

  Levin was on his feet.

  He did not remember standing.

  One moment he was on the rock; the next he was upright, staff in hand, and his left palm was already raised, and the blue-white light was already forming — brighter than the orb he'd left inside, brighter than the Arcane Bolt he'd used on the goblins, bright enough that his shadow stretched behind him across the hillside like a long, dark accusation.

  He took one step toward the cave entrance.

  He stopped.

  From inside, another sound. Golden light — flickering, unsteady, pulsing, guttering like a candle in a gale. But there. Present and alive.

  Ria's voice, ragged: "I've got it. I've got it back. I'm — stay there. I've got it."

  The golden light steadied. It pulsed once, twice, three, four times — each pulse stronger than the last, each one pushing the shadows back a little further, each one accompanied by a sound that Levin had not heard before: a hum.

  Low, warm, resonant.

  The hum of a shield being held by someone who had lost it and found it again and was now gripping it with the ferocious concentration of a person who had discovered, in the space between losing something and getting it back, exactly how much it mattered.

  Levin stood at the cave entrance.

  His palm was still raised.

  The blue-white light still burned there, ready and waiting. A coiled spring of force that could cross the distance between him and Ria in less than a blink and turn every spider in that cave into a memory and a stain.

  He held it for five seconds.

  Ten.

  Fifteen.

  Twenty.

  The golden light inside the cave held. Steady now. Strong. Ria's breathing was audible — harsh, fast, the breathing of someone who had just sprinted a mile — but it was slowing. Controlling itself and finding its rhythm.

  Levin closed his hand.

  The blue-white light winked out.

  He sat back down on the rock.

  His hands, he noticed, were shaking.

  This was new.

  He looked at them — both hands, palms up, fingers slightly spread — and watched the fine tremor run through them like a current. It lasted perhaps five seconds, and then it stopped, and his hands were still again, and the warmth behind his sternum settled back into its usual hum, and the afternoon continued as though nothing had happened.

  He picked up his waterskin. He took a drink. He set it down.

  He looked at the clouds. The cumulus had merged into a single large formation that looked, from this angle, like absolutely nothing. Just a cloud. Just water vapour suspended in atmosphere, shaped by wind and temperature and the blind mechanics of a world that did not care about lone boots or spiders or the sound of a girl screaming in a cave.

  He sat.

  He waited.

  Sundown arrived the way sundowns do — gradually, then all at once, the light draining from the sky like water from a bath, the shadows lengthening and merging until they stopped being shadows and became simply the dark.

  Levin stood. He walked to the cave entrance. He cupped his hands around his mouth.

  "Time," he called.

  Silence met him for a second. Then footsteps — slow, heavy, the footsteps of someone who was very tired and placing each foot with the exaggerated care of a person who had been standing in one spot for six hours and whose legs had filed a formal complaint.

  Ria emerged from the cave.

  She was covered in web. Long, gossamer strands of it clung to her hair, her pack, her arms, her braid (which had come undone again and was now decorated with silk in a way that might, in certain very specific cultural contexts, have been considered fashionable). Her dress had a tear at the left shoulder. Her right hand was swollen — a spider bite, the skin around it pink and puffy, already developing the characteristic Greenmoss welt that would itch for two days and then fade.

  Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her cheeks were flushed. Her lips were dry and cracked.

  She was smiling.

  It was a terrible smile — exhausted, lopsided, slightly unhinged, the smile of someone who had been through something and come out the other side and was now experiencing the particular euphoria that arrives when the body realises it is no longer in danger and celebrates by releasing every chemical it has been hoarding for the past six hours simultaneously.

  "I did it," she said.

  "You did it," Levin said.

  "Fourteen spiders. I counted. Fourteen charges. The shield held for thirteen of them. The fourteenth — it broke, and I had to — I grabbed it back. I grabbed it. Out of nothing. It was gone and I reached for it and it came back."

  "I heard."

  "You heard me scream."

  "I heard you scream, and then I heard you fix it."

  Ria looked at him.

  Her red-rimmed eyes searched his face for something — approval, praise, the acknowledgement that what she had done was remarkable, that surviving six hours in a spider cave on a borrowed spell and sheer bloody-mindedness was an achievement worth celebrating.

  Levin's face offered its usual inventory: calm and faintly distant, the face of a man who had watched the whole thing from a rock and was now assessing the results with the clinical detachment of a farmer checking whether the seeds he'd planted had come up.

  "Your shield recovery was fast," he said. "Faster than I expected. The initial casting was shaky — too much tension in the focus, too much effort. You were gripping the spell like a rope. By the end, you were wearing it. That's the difference. Gripping costs energy. Wearing is passive. You figured that out on your own."

  Ria blinked. Web silk drifted from her eyelashes.

  "Is that a compliment?"

  "It's an observation."

  "It sounded like a compliment."

  "Observations and compliments occasionally share vocabulary. Don't read into it."

  Ria's smile widened.

  It was still terrible — still exhausted, still slightly unhinged — but it had acquired a new quality, a warmth that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the particular satisfaction of having been tested and having passed and having been told, in the most roundabout and emotionally constipated way possible, that the passing had been noted.

  "Tomorrow," she said. "You said tomorrow would be harder."

  "I did say that."

  "What's harder than spiders?"

  Levin picked up his staff. He handed Ria the waterskin. She drank deeply, water running down her chin and cutting clean lines through the dust and web silk on her face.

  "Spiders that are bigger," he said.

  "Of course."

  "And faster."

  "Naturally."

  "And in a cave that's darker."

  "Wouldn't have it any other way."

  They walked back toward Thornwall. The last light was fading, and the village below was a scatter of warm windows in the darkening valley, and the bell-ringer was striking the evening bell with the weary reliability of a man who had been doing this for years and would continue doing it for years more, because bells did not ring themselves and someone had to do it and it might as well be him.

  Ria walked beside Levin.

  Her stride was slower than it had been that morning — fatigue pulling at her legs, the spider bite on her hand throbbing in time with her pulse — but her back was straight and her chin was up and her ruined braid swung behind her like a banner that had been through a battle and survived.

  "Levin?" she said.

  "Hm?"

  "When the shield broke. When I screamed. Were you going to come in?"

  Levin walked four more paces before answering.

  "The shield came back," he said.

  "That's not what I asked."

  He walked two more paces.

  "Yes," he said. "I was going to come in."

  Ria nodded.

  She pushed her destroyed braid behind her ear — the gesture automatic, habitual, performed every forty-five seconds regardless of the braid's actual position or structural integrity.

  "Thank you," she said. "For not coming in."

  Levin said nothing.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed. Five hundred and eight percent. No kills today. No percentage gained. The reservoir sat exactly where it had been that morning — vast, patient, unmoved.

  And yet something had changed.

  Something small, unmeasurable, untracked by any blue box or status screen or cosmic bookkeeping department. Something that sat in the space between "mentor" and "stranger" and had no name and no number and no column in any ledger.

  He ignored it.

  He was very good at ignoring things.

  But he was, he noticed, getting slightly worse at it.

  They reached the tavern. Marda was in the kitchen. The smell of soup — improved soup, rosemary soup, soup that had been touched by someone who understood that flavour was not optional — drifted through the common room.

  Ria went straight to the kitchen.

  Within thirty seconds, she was telling Marda about the spiders, her hands moving in wide, animated gestures that scattered web silk across the cutting board, and Marda was listening with an expression that contained, beneath its usual fortifications, something that might have been interest.

  Levin put the kettle on.

  He counted to two hundred. He thought about clouds, cats, and spiders, and the sound of a shield breaking and coming back.

  He poured his tea.

  He took a sip.

  Acceptable.

  The broom was where he'd left it. It pulled left. He corrected.

  Outside, the stars were coming out, one by one, like lights being switched on in a house where someone was home and expecting company. The evening settled over Thornwall with the quiet weight of a blanket being drawn up, and the village sighed, and the tavern creaked, and somewhere in Greenmoss Cave, fourteen spiders were reassembling their webs and processing the events of the afternoon with whatever passed for memory in an arachnid brain, and arriving, collectively, at the conclusion that glowing humans were best avoided.

  Levin swept.

  The broom pulled left.

  He corrected.