Lavina was daydreaming as the headmistress addressed a potential student and her parents. Verity was trying to persuade the young girl's ridiculously wealthy parents to entrust her to the Amordian Lux Manipulation Academy and had insisted Lavina join them on the promenade. A complete waste of Lavina’s time. There were always more applicants to the academy than places, and Lavina was getting tired of teaching spoiled rich brats the difference between orange and yellow, especially when most of them had parents who would just end up spending a fortune to buy a Path Transference Manual once they’d reached the Peak of Mental Refinement anyway and be done with it.

  The girl's father, a man with clipped blonde hair and a golden beard, looked persuaded, but her mother, whose features were set in a perpetual sneer, still seemed to have doubts. The girl herself, a child of twelve, sat on the edge of the stone parapet, kicking her feet, her arms crossed as her parents paid her no heed. Behind her yawned a gulf, vast and intimidating. Lavina never got tired of staring out across the Auroral Void. Flashes of light and color gleamed below them, slowly changing with the moods of the infinite Lumos ocean miles below. The girl seemed oblivious to the danger beyond her. But then, she’d grown up in the Archipelago and expected to be surrounded by the Void, while Lavina, despite her decades in this place, still found it disturbing.

  “Olga will be in the best of hands here," Verity stated. "This academy accepts only girls from the best and most important families. As you can see from myself, we boast teachers from dozens of different lands, able to give our pupils unparalleled insight into the arts of lux manipulation."

  "See?" Sir Petyr told his wife. "You're the one who's been insisting she needs to learn from outsiders anyway. I don't see why my family's teachings aren't good enough for our daughter, but if you want her to have the best, she'll have the best."

  The woman let out a hiss of breath through thin nostrils. Lavina made a note to herself that if Olga was in her class, the woman might be trouble. “No one in your family has made it past the third step in five generations. Ivan has already made it to the fourth step, and he's only five years older than you are, Petyr.”

  The man ran a hand through his thinning hair and groaned. "If I never hear another word about your damned brother and his damned talent again, it'll be too much. Listen, do you want to send Olga here or not? Because if we've wasted an entire day, "

  Lavina felt a soft tug at the back of her mind. She raised a hand. "Forgive me, headmistress. There’s something I need to see to. I'll be back in a moment."

  She kept the pleasant smile fixed on her face as Verity momentarily frowned. The headmistress gave her a curt nod and Lavina hurried from the promenade, into the vast bulk of the Academy, then along three halls, down two stairs, and into her private study. Which of her weaves had just activated? And would it give her a reason, an excuse, to leave?

  When she had agreed to a stint as adjunct professor at the Academy, she had been ready for a bit of peace and quiet. Now, over a decade later, she was starting to run mad. She hated to admit that Kang could have been correct when he'd told her she would never make it as a schoolteacher.

  She locked the door of her study behind her, engaging six lux techniques out of sheer habit, without really thinking about any of them. None of the other professors here at the Academy had ever showed any inclination to eavesdrop on her, but there was no point in letting the habits she had built over hundreds of years grow dim now.

  Lavina sank into her high-backed chair in front of her desk, surveying the various lux devices in front of her. She had a small lux battery feeding into the other devices. Every couple of months, she cracked just enough Lumos to refill the battery and keep her weaves active. It was convenient to be able to crack Lux herself, but sometimes she missed the regular excursion to a cultivation tower. How long had it been since she faced anything more challenging than end-of-semester reports?

  With a sigh, she flexed her Intent and discovered which weave had summoned her. She frowned as her heart skipped a beat. Annoyance and eagerness warred inside her. "What does he want?" she demanded of no one, before digging into the chest beside her desk.

  She found a cloth bag, drew it open, and took the crystal ball from inside. Holding it up to the light, she fed blue and indigo lux inside, activating the weaves she had laid down centuries ago. The project had taken her three months of dedicated meditation and focus. She'd been tempted more than once in the past centuries to smash the ball, releasing the twin drops of blood inside, but had resisted. Right now, she could barely remember why the man had so infuriated her that she'd insisted on taking a vacation.

  Kang’s face appeared in the crystal. She stared at him, feeling that old pang of desire as she studied his features.

  "Hello, Lavina," he said cheerfully. "You're looking well."

  "I must say, so are you," she said. The last time she'd seen him, he'd been coming off of an eight-day Lumos binge and looking like he'd just woken up in a pigsty. Now he had his goatee neatly trimmed. It was missing the strands of grey he had allowed to grow previously. He seemed alert, eager. His eyes shone, and she prepared herself to hear whatever mad scheme he was embarked on now.

  "Are you still wasting your days in that school of yours?"

  Lavina tapped the fingers of her left hand against the desk as she continued to hold the orb in her right. "Education has always been important to me, Kang.”

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  "And to me as well, I've found recently," Kang replied. "In fact, that's why I have contacted you. I'm hoping to get your help with a project of mine."

  "Oh no," Lavina interrupted. "You mean another scheme. I told you when we pulled off the Arsmweisl heist I was done with your schemes. What is it this time? Passing off counterfeit lux treasures? Raiding the vaults of some obscure sect for texts we can copy, then sell? Or are you out of money and looking for gold?”

  “Come now, would I even be able to contact you if I were broke?”

  That was true enough. To have made this contact he must have a decent amount of Lux available to him. "Then, what’s the scheme?”

  "It's not a scam at all this time," Kang said. "I have done just what you were always encouraging me to do. I'm going legitimate."

  Lavina started. "You? Legitimate?" She let a note of disbelief into her voice, at the same time trying to suppress the stab of disappointment she felt.

  "As I recall," Kang went on, "you told me on our last parting not to ever darken your door with one of my cons ever again."

  "Yes," she said. "I did." She felt her heart sinking. That was a ridiculous reaction. Why should she be disappointed he wasn't asking her help in another mad scheme?

  “Which is why, even though I have an entirely legitimate plan I’m putting into place, I understand you won’t care to join me. All I need is a little information—”

  Her eyebrows shot up. She leaned forward as she caught the note of joy in his voice. She had missed that so much. "Entirely legitimate? There's no way. What's the angle?"

  Kang broke into a wide grin. "You always could read me like a book, Lavina. The angle? I've returned to the land of our birth."

  Lavina nearly dropped the crystal ball. She glared at him, wishing her eyes could melt through him. "That's nonsense. We both agreed that was much too dangerous."

  "Yes, well, I found, without your steadying influence, I had trouble restraining myself. As it happens, matters have gone very well indeed. My old sect has been resurrected from the dead, our existence acknowledged again by you-know-who. I've re-entered and claimed the sect headquarters, including the Lux Well."

  Now that was an achievement. “I thought you said your father's vengeful shade was keeping you from the place."

  Kang raised a hand dismissively. "I found a loophole. The point is, I've got a good thing here."

  And there was a hint of the old Kang, the man she had such mixed responses to. "Who are you getting killed this time?"

  His face fell. For a moment his eyes showed pain. "It's not like that," he said softly. "It truly isn't. These children had already started something bigger than they can handle. They, they need me."

  She heard a note of something soft and gentle in his voice, disbelief and care. "I don't want any part of—“

  “No, I understand. All I want is to know where you left the copy of our Ultimate Technique. Three of my students are ready and… you know how my family educated me.”

  She understood his issue at once. As the favored scion of a great sect, Kang had been raised to the Peak of Mental Refinement by the time he was six, then given all the sect’s knowledge by means of a Grand Path Transference Script. She couldn’t imagine treating a child in such a ridiculous manner. Many of Kang’s later issues no doubt stemmed from that poor pedagogy. “So. You want them to learn the sect’s secrets, but you can’t pass them along.”

  “Just as you always said might happen,” Kang told her with a sigh. “You were, as always, correct.”

  Whereas she had been forced to scratch and fight for every scrap of knowledge, working her way up the ranks until she’d learned the deepest sect secrets. “I did leave a copy,” she admitted. “But… it’s my insurance, even now. I don’t know….”

  “Let me tell you about them,” Kang said, his face lighting up. He spoke quickly. By the time he wrapped up, she was entranced at his tale of cultivators rising from nothing to challenge the established order. Her breath caught as she considered it, they had done the impossible. It was so very Kang: rash, bold, foolhardy, and yet at its heart hopeful and daring, just like the man she had fallen in love with all those centuries before. The one she'd thought lost to increasingly mad schemes and hints of addiction. She could sense that same edge still, but perhaps, held back by a modicum of caution. Or was she fooling herself.

  “I— suppose it’s not really doing me any good,” she said at last. “All right. But first, how are you actually doing, Kang?”

  Kang shrugged. "Well, as it happens, thanks to our sect’s new notoriety and the incredible achievements of my disciples, I'm receiving pressure from the Court of Gems. I have, of course, informed them that a valid marriage already exists, but they are pressing me. I have heard rumors that there's a Violet princess they are planning to spring on me in the very near future."

  Lavina stood up. She scowled at Kang, shook a finger at the crystal ball. "You're the master of wriggling out of things. Don't you dare let some violet hussy get her claws into you."

  Kang gave a shrug, raising his hands as if to say, But what can I do? "As you know, my dearest, our marriage took place outside of the Empire and is not recognized by the Gem Court…”

  "I swore I would never set foot in that backwater province ever again," she said as she glared at Kang.

  "And as did I," Kang said. "But circumstances change. When you have a life as full and rich as ours, it's never wise to make such sweeping declarations. You never know how things might turn out."

  She put herself under control again. "I see what you're doing. You're just trying to manipulate me into coming there myself."

  Kang's expression changed again. All his humor and banter slipped away. "I miss you, Lavina," he said softly. "You weren't wrong when you told me to pull my life together. It was the best thing you could have done, leaving me to work on my own issues. I wish you could see what it is I am helping build here. Meet my students. I think you would be proud." He gave a ghost of a smile. "There's one who makes me think a little of what our son might have been like.”

  She dismissed that out of hand, refusing to get drawn into old arguments. “The text you want is stored in the Imperial Library, in the restricted section, under ‘The Tales of Golden Moon and His Sisters’. Unless someone found it in the last six centuries, which they probably did. Good luck, Kang.”

  “You too, my dear,” he said quietly. The weave faded. Kang’s face disappeared.

  Lavina stared at the soft orb for a long moment before taking the locks off her room and striding from its suddenly too-silent sanctum.

  The headmistress was still on the promenade, but the prospective parents were gone, thankfully.

  “Verity, I'm going to need a leave of absence."

  "What's wrong?" The headmistress looked concerned They were not quite friends, but more than mere acquaintances.

  "It's my husband," Lavina said. "He's gotten himself into a jam yet again and come crawling back asking for help. It looks like I've got to make a little bit of a trip."