The few dozen refugees streamed through the portal I’d set up to bring them to New Alkerist. Most of them were young mothers with small children, those who couldn’t fight or run on their own. My own family came through last, Nailu in the lead and Father bringing up the rear.

  “—never could have imagined so much water in one place,” Mother was saying as she stepped through the portal next to him.

  “I know! It just went on and on, endlessly,” he replied. “I get why Gravin said you’d need boats to cross it. My arms would get tired and fall off before I got halfway.”

  “You wouldn’t make it a tenth of the way,” Senica said.

  I chuckled to myself. Even seeing it, they still couldn’t grasp the magnitude of an ocean compared to the ponds and streams they were used to. They simply lacked a frame of reference for how long it would take to swim any appreciable distance, or how quickly they’d get tired.

  The portal closed behind them and I walked over. “Gra-vin!” Nailu called, being the first to spot me. He rushed toward me, arms outstretched. I obliged him by scooping him up telekinetically and swirling him around me in a wide arc before plopping him back down onto the street.

  “Son,” Father said, “I know you said it’s over, but is it really over? For good?”

  “For good,” I confirmed. “He won’t be coming back again. No more zombies or skeletons. No more spies, assassins, or saboteurs.”

  “There were saboteurs?” Senica asked.

  “Well, not here,” I admitted. “But once or twice, yes. Honestly, I probably did more of that type of work than anyone on Ammun’s side of the fight. But either way, yes, it’s over. I won. We won.”

  I didn’t have a casualties list. As far as I was personally concerned, no one important had died. But people were gone now, and I didn’t know how many or how they might be connected to my family. There were probably going to be some sad days in the near future as the reports trickled in and they found out that friends from other towns or villages hadn’t made it through Ammun’s attack.

  That was something for another day. Right now, they could just be happy that our family had made it through entirely intact, and that the wards around New Alkerist had been strong enough to defend against the undead Ammun had sent to destroy it. Admittedly, that might not have been the case without the assistance of the two Order mages who’d shown up here. That, more than anything else, had weighed in their favor when I’d decided not to retaliate for breaking my rule about them being on this continent.

  They were going to be a whole mess to deal with, I knew. Organizations like that were, as Andyla had said, rife with politics. The people in charge right now might be interested in working with me, but that didn’t make them altruistic, nor did it guarantee they wouldn’t be replaced by someone else next month. The Global Order of the Arcane needed time to stabilize its leadership before any long-lasting agreements could be worked out.

  “You did good,” I told Senica. “Kept calm. Blocked off the portal and held back the golems that got through.”

  “You still had to save us,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought… But no matter what I did, I couldn’t figure out a way. I wasn’t strong enough to protect everyone.”

  “Give yourself some credit. You’re barely into intermediate spells, which is still fantastic, all things considered. You’ve got a long way to go before you’re an archmage.”

  She sighed, clearly still unhappy about what she saw as a personal failing. Mother reached out to grab her and pull her into a hug, which Senica accepted with far more grace than I could have mustered. “I… I was scared. I thought we were all going to die, that it was going to be my fault,” she said. “I was supposed to protect us, but I couldn’t do it.”

  “Let’s get home,” I offered quietly. We were still standing in a street that was rapidly becoming more crowded as those who’d stayed behind arrived to find their families who’d gone into hiding. “We can talk about things there.”

  It was a quick trip back. Father deflected some of his neighbors who approached, wanting to talk about one thing or another, and promised to see to a few things his position on the town council required as soon as he could, but refused to be dragged away no matter how persistent people got. Eventually, we made it through our front door to find the house more or less exactly like we’d left it.

  “It’s so dusty in here! It’s only been a few days,” Mother complained.

  Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly like we’d left it, but I could fix that. A bit of fine elemental manipulation gathered the thin layer of dust up to be ejected out into the street, and I gave some thought to refining the house’s wards to include air filtration. It wasn’t generally necessary in a home this small, but I supposed it wouldn’t hurt anything to add it. The mana draw would be negligible, especially when weighed against three people with ignited cores, only one of whom was actually training as a mage.

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  Mother watched all the dust stream together to clump into a ball, then rounded on Senica. “All that magic, and I’ve never once seen a cleaning spell out of you, young lady!”

  “Moooooom, I’ve got more important stuff to work on!”

  “In all fairness,” Father said, coming to her rescue, “she’s right about that. Things could have gone a lot differently yesterday if she’d been focusing on domestic magic instead of learning to throw giant balls of fire and stone.”

  “I suppose… Still, maybe she should consider rounding out her education.”

  “You know, you could learn this spell,” I told Mother. “It’s not that hard.”

  Of course, if she did take the time to pick it up herself, she’d probably realize that there was no way Senica didn’t know elemental manipulation. It was the most basic conjuration spell there was, the first thing any novice mage learned. Senica could have dusted the house with it, and quite easily. She just hadn’t been.

  Everyone got settled in—or in Nailu’s case, put down for a nap—and I sat down with Senica to have a serious conversation while Mother and Father puttered around the kitchen.

  “I wasn’t just trying to make you feel better about yourself, before,” I told her. “You did an excellent job. If you hadn’t been there, those golems would have killed everyone before I could have reached you. If anyone screwed up, it was me. I didn’t keep the secret hideout secret enough, and I didn’t have contingencies to get me there in case it was discovered.”

  “Gravin, I didn’t have a plan,” Senica said. “You make it sound like I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. I was panicking the whole time. They were everywhere, and no matter what I did, they just kept coming. I used all my mana and almost all the reserve mana, and it wasn’t enough. Nothing I did made a difference. It was your wards that held them back.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “You were the deciding factor. Without you, the wards would have failed. They damn near did, anyway. You’re a stage two mage right now, but in a couple of years, you’re going to be much stronger. If something like this ever happens again, you’ll be more than ready to meet the challenge, and I’m going to be with you, helping you grow, the whole way.”

  “You always say that, but then something always comes up.”

  I winced internally. It was true. Senica’s education had been a project in the background for years now, always getting pushed off so I could deal with the next catastrophe. It wasn’t fair to her, but she hadn’t complained.

  “I’m not going to say that I’ll never have to leave for a few days to go deal with something, or that I won’t have my own projects going on, but I promise you, now that Ammun is gone, the number of emergency fires I have to respond to is going to go all the way down,” I said. “Besides, I need to make sure you’re learning everything right so that you can teach Nailu when he gets a bit older.”

  “You’re not going to teach him yourself?” she asked, surprised.

  “Oh, I will, a little. But teaching is a great way to learn, too. You’re going to find as you get older that you took a lot of things for granted back in the beginning. Now that you have a greater understanding of how stuff works on a large scale, when you sit down to teach someone else the basics, you’ll see all sorts of connections you missed the first time. It’s a whole cyclical process.”

  “Is that why you agreed to teach me?”

  “Ah, well, no. I’m pretty well past that stage by now. Most of my early teaching experience came about as a result of trading knowledge with other mages. I expanded that into taking on an apprentice as a favor, and things kind of got out of hand from there.”

  Truthfully, I much preferred research to teaching, but the world didn’t always give me what I wanted. Right now, I needed a new generation of mages, and that meant fixing the world core and disseminating knowledge of the proper way to go about spellcraft. A lot had been lost, and what this world had retained, it had done so imperfectly.

  “You don’t like teaching very much, do you?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Depends on the student. Some are a pleasure. Others are not.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re my sister.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Ancestors forbid. You’re the worst little brother ever.”

  We shared a laugh and stood back up. “Feeling better now?” I asked.

  “A little. It’s… It’ll take some time to process, but you’re right. I was scared, and I didn’t have a plan, but I did enough. I’ll keep learning new magic and if something like that ever happens again, I’ll do better.”

  “Gravin!” Mother called, a note of concern in her voice.

  We both turned to look, only to see Nailu clinging to the ceiling while Mother anxiously positioned herself to catch him. The fact that he was crawling around like a giant, toddler-shaped spider did not make that easy for her.

  “I really think that you, as the most experienced mage in the family, are the better choice for teaching Nailu,” Senica said. “I might find my abilities lacking in the face of such a challenge.”

  I didn’t answer. Obvious as it was that Senica was just trying to foist some responsibility off on me, I had to admit part of me was intrigued. Nailu seemed to have an instinctive knack for invocations. That didn’t necessarily mean it would translate into a well-rounded body of knowledge for all things magical, but it was certainly making him a handful to deal with right now.

  “Gravin!” Mother yelled again. “Come help me get your brother down.”

  “You should probably take care of that,” Senica said casually. “Looks like he’s about to run out of mana.”

  A second later, Nailu slipped off the ceiling and tumbled into Mother’s arms, laughing wildly the whole time. I might have slowed his fall just enough to keep it under control so he wouldn’t get hurt, but not so much that I thought anyone would notice. The sly grin on Senica’s face told me otherwise, however.

  “Maybe we’ll both teach him,” I offered as a compromise.