“Our next guest,” Instruktanto Miratova announced, “is Lord Castlemaine of the Grand Circle, who has taken valuable time out of his schedule to come here today.” She shot the class a scorching look that said louder than any words could ‘if you embarrass me, you’ll end up worse than my hand’, before opening the door.

Instruktanto Miratova looked, for the first time I’d ever seen, nervous. Several of the class, even the ones not from mage families, looked awestruck. But Lord Castlemaine wasn’t all that imposing. In fact, he looked exactly how I’d expect Max to look in about fifteen years.

Well, not exactly. His hair was a sandy brown that looked impossible to style, and he had a roundish face without the sort of goatee I always imagined would immediately manifest on Max’s face the moment he was capable of growing a beard, but he stood tall and perfectly poised in a manner that was somehow confident without being commanding. His navy suit was impeccable (and somehow scandalous – while technically a shade of blue like the masters wore in Refujeyo, I got the sense he’d chosen it simply because the colour suited him, and wore no indication of his magical rank). His glasses sat completely straight on his face and were so clean that the lenses were invisible. The leather suitcase in his hands had a worn enough handle to indicate years of use, but absolutely no scratches or scuffs at all.

He was also young. He couldn’t have been older than thirty, but he swept the classroom with a gaze hat suggested he’d seen it all and nothing could ever surprise him. Directly between his eyebrows was a small, unobtrusive mage mark, an almond shape with a teardrop in the middle, like a third eye with the world’s wierdest iris. It was the most basic mage mark design I’d ever seen.

“My name is Robert Castlemaine,” he said, “and I am here because I have a fetish. Yes, I’ve heard every possible permutation of the obvious joke, so that out of the way – any questions?”

One girl raised her hand. “What is a fetish?” she asked. “In this context?”

“Good question. You have just discussed familiars, yes?” Lord Castlemaine waited for her nod before continuing. “To create a familiar, one creates a secondary bond between one’s spell and a living creature. This allows the strain of casting to be shared and the associated risks lessened. Fetishism is conceptually a very similar process, although the physical methodology is quite different. A fetish is a physical object bound to a spell, to allow for better control and power channelling in casting. In my particular case, these glasses.” He pulled his glasses off long enough to flourish them briefly, then immediately put them back on.

“It provides several advantages and disadvantages in relation to familiarity. The obvious advantage is stability; adding a living creature to your bond adds a lot of unpredictable factors, and it means that you can only make use of your familiar when it is nearby. There are many places where it is inconvenient or forbidden to bring living animals, and since mages and familiars both tend to suffer when separated for too long, this can cause all sorts of logistical issues. Using a fetish instead of a familiar also allows one to cast without risking the life of an animal; burning a wand or shattering a globe is regrettable, but such things can be replaced. The main disadvantages of fetishism as opposed to familiarity are their lack of durability and limited use. While it is perfectly possible to make a fetish that will last a long time if you have the skill and the right kind of spell for it – I’ve been using the same one for just over eight years now – a spell’s connection with an inanimate object is inherently weaker and less flexible than one with a living creature. Some count this as an advantage, and will create new fetishes whenever they wish to explore a new style of spellcasting, but doing so is generally a waste of energy.”

“Can you have more than one fetish at once?” someone else asked, ignoring the poorly disguised giggles behind him.

“Technically, yes; a skilled individual with a cooperative enough spell can create multiple fetishes, or multiple familiars for that matter. In practice, it is very impractical to do so. Creating such things requires a significant investment of time and energy, and the associated problems increase exponentially as you add more anchors to your spell, while their benefits do not. Two or more familiars or fetishes tend to start costing more energy and creating more instability than they fix.

“There is a technique called ‘fetish burning’ which you may be inclined to look into, if you are aiming to use fetishes with a priority to casting flexibility and power. But like any aspect of spell strain management, a lot of what works for you will depend on the sort of spell you get.”

I raised my hand. Lord Castlemaine nodded at me.

“I’ve seen magic objects get used by people who don’t have magic,” I said. “Are they fetishes?”

“No. There are a few different casting techniques that can result in the phenomenon that you describe, but I expect that you are talking about enchantment. Greater enchantments, also called pure enchantments, are extraordinarily difficult and somewhat dangerous to produce – in fact, the most common demonstration of mastery used to earn Refujeyo’s blue robes is the enchanting of an object. Enchantment is the most extreme and most difficult logical extension of fetishism – it involves linking a spell to an object and divorcing it from its human host. Throughout most of the world, they are extremely rare and extremely valuable, but here at Skolala Refujeyo you will have the opportunity to observe many of them, created as master projects, so if you are interested in such devices you have ample opportunity to research and analyse them. Such as the tablet in your hands right now.”

I stared down at the tablet in my hands. I’d really been thinking about Simon’s ring, but I supposed that the tablets, the light sources, even the forcefields in the bedrooms were probably similar magic. How many ‘extremely rare and extremely valuable’ enchanted objects did Skolala Refujeyo have?

I must have gotten lost in my thoughts, because when I looked up, Lord Castlemaine was leaving. Intruktanto Miratova shut the door behind him, and seemed to relax.

“Okay,” she said. “Now, let’s talk about the third method of magical strain management, externalisation. Externalisation is the purest method of strain management. I don’t mean that in an elitist sense – all three methods are viable and have their strengths and weaknesses – but in the sense that it’s the only common method that involves only you and your spell. Externalists simply push a certain amount of their spell outside themselves and allow some of its power to manifest as physical effects in the environment. It works very well for evocation and some change spells, and is less appropriate to contract or prophecy magic. You can generally tell an externalising mage by simply detecting their spell around them – an area of warmer or colder air, a gust of wind, a strange smell or slight glow.”

“Or a twinkle on their shoulder?” I asked.

Instruktanto Miratova nodded. “Would you like to see it properly?”

Most of the class, including the family mages, leaned forward in their seats. Instruktanto Miratova retrieved a candle from her desk and set it on the burned, metal-dotted desk at the front of the class. She lit it with two pinched fingers, then placed her hand on the desk. The thing on her shoulder rushed down her arm to settle on top of the candle.

From outside, light passed right through the spell, rendering it mostly invisible. But from inside, it bounced around on the edges and caused the spell glow just enough to be clearly visible.

It looked like a dragon.

A tiny dragon, about the size of a puppy, glowing with candlelight. It curled up on the table, stretching and then relaxing a pair of long wings and wrapping its thin, whiplike tail around itself. Behind me, somebody muttered, “Awwww!”

“I should stress that this is an extraordinary amount of precision for an external spell,” Instruktanto Miratova said. “Taking specific forms like this is uncommon. Usually they manifest in far less directed and predictable ways.”

“But you could turn yours into a dragon?” someone whispered, awed.

“Do not misunderstand. It does not take this shape at my direction. This was something it picked up from another mage, before I was born. This is something else you must be prepared for; spells are not sentient, they are not thinking beings, but they will pick up… habits. The repeated use of a spell in the same way will make it more refined at that use and clumsier at others, so the spell you end up with will have quirks based not only on its initial nature, but on how it was used by previous hosts. Some are more difficult to deal with than others. This specific spell manifests as a dragon, for some reason I don’t understand and had nothing to do with.”

“If people can externalise the power of their spells like that, why does anyone mess around with familiars and fetishes?” someone asked.

“All three strain management methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. Externalisation is good for people who rely on regular spellcasting; that is, people who direct their spells through effort of will, which is how most magic is done. It promotes the maximum speed, flexibility, and power in the casting, but it also comes with a lot of risks. For example, externalisation is the strain management method that requires the most constant focus and attention. A familiar requires a some regular attention, but far less. Fetishes are simply set-and-forget a lot of the time. In both cases, there’s something else to take the strain, something else the spell is anchored to. This one is anchored only to me, and if I miscast badly enough, that energy will go rushing right back into me and quite probably kill me.”

We stared.

“Is that a common cause of death among mages?” Max asked.

“Not responsible ones. It’s a risk that only appears when people channel more power than they can handle, but since the whole point of adopting a strain management method is to be able to do that, we spend more time doing it than we should. The problem mostly arises when people are not realistic about their own abilities or level of focus.” She clenched her burned hand at that; I wondered if she realised she was doing so. “Most deaths related to externalisation accidents happen the other way – a mage will feel the backlash of spell power and push it away, causing it to flare out in the environment instead, where it might set him on fire or throw him into a wall hard enough to kill him or some such thing. This is equally dangerous for bystanders, of course. If you decide to learn externalisation for your spell, one of the first things you will be taught is how to direct the force of this backlash towards a safety object such as a bucket of water or a lightning rod. The more powerful externalising mages get in the habit of carrying such a safety device with them.”

“If you need to carry around an object anyway, why not just make a fetish?” Simon asked. “It would be safer.”

“Some agree with your logic, and do so,” Instruktanto Miratova said. “But spells imprisoned in a fetish are by nature less powerful and flexible, although a lot safer to use. The decision largely depends on the quirks of your spell and how you intend to use it. It also depends on your career goals – magic scientists like myself tend towards externalisation because familiar and fetish bonds interfere with a spell’s operation and make it more difficult to analyse, but if you’re going to work among the commonfolk and need to manage strain, a fetish is usually the best way to go as animals are inconvenient and actually seeing magic makes them nervous.”

she continued to explain, but I was no longer really listening. I already knew that I didn’t want to externalise my curse. I’d spent my life trying to keep it inside, and the one time it got out, it pushed a kid off a roof. And I definitely didn’t want to endanger some poor animal by cursing it as well, which left fetishism, I supposed. Less power and less flexibility didn’t bother me; they were bonuses. I didn’t want something strong inside me, that could do all kinds of things I wasn’t ready for.

I looked down at my tablet again. A spell, imprisoned in plastic.

Attached to no mage.

Malas had said that he couldn’t remove my curse, but there might be another way. The sheer number of enchanted objects at Skolala Refujeyo suggested that a lot of people could learn to make them, surely. They probably accumulated over time and I didn’t know how old the school was, but the tablets alone… well, surely they weren’t making those thousands of years ago. They were recent, and the school had enough to give them to every student.

Ordinarily, the fact that students enchanted things to get the highest qualification the school offered would give me pause. That suggested it was very difficult. But those students were also busy learning how to be really good mages, and probably wanted to create impressive, fancy enchantments that did cool things. All I wanted to do was get the curse out of me; I didn’t care what the object did. It could be useless for all I cared, so long as it was being useless in something that wasn’t me.

The class was filing out around us. I looked at Kylie.

“Meet me in the valley?”