We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Blood Over Bright Haven, a standalone dark fantasy novel by M.L. Wang—available now from Del Rey.
For twenty years, Sciona has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fueled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry at the University of Magics and Industry.
When Sciona finally passes the qualifying exam and becomes a highmage, she finds her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues are determined to make her feel unwelcome—and, instead of a qualified lab assistant, they give her a janitor.
What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was not always a janitor. Ten years ago, he was a nomadic hunter who lost his family on their perilous journey from the wild plains to the city. But now he sees the opportunity to understand the forces that decimated his tribe, drove him from his homeland, and keep the privileged in power.
At first, mage and outsider have a fractious relationship. But working together, they uncover an ancient secret that could change the course of magic forever—if it doesn’t get them killed first.
Freynan the First
Standing in the center of Leon’s Hall, Sciona felt paradoxically smaller than she ever had and big enough to eat the world. Instead of looking directly at any of the greatest men in Tiran, she let the white of their robes blur together into a general brightness.
“Archmages of Tiran, I stand before you to test for the rank of highmage.” Her voice shook faintly, and she only steadied it by reminding herself that as soon as she got her introduction over with, they would let her at the spellograph. Everything would be all right when she just got her hands on those steel keys. “My name is Sciona Freynan. I studied at Danworth Academy and then here at the University of Magics and Industry.”
Where applicants had studied before the University really shouldn’t have been a consideration. It was just a quick way for the testers to determine the applicant’s social status. There was a stark economic divide between common students who attended public schools and those with the connections to secure a spot at Danworth.
“Excuse me, Miss Freynan.” Archmage Eringale stopped her. “Your paperwork says that you studied at a public school—East Havendel Public School of Magics—and Danworth Academy?”
“Right. Yes, Archmage.” Sciona held her chin up as Bringham had told her, even as nerves writhed through her gut. “I transferred to Danworth through their scholarship program in my second year.”
Papers shuffled among the archmages as a few of them made notes and others seemed to sit up a little straighter. Danworth accepted only five public school transfers per year, and back when Sciona had applied, the number had been three. She hoped this made her someone to take seriously. Not just the requisite female applicant for this decade.
“Thank you, Miss Freynan,” said Archmage Eringale. “Please, continue.”
“I’ve spent the last seven years working in Archmage Bringham’s laboratories in Trethellyn Hall. For four of those, I’ve served as his lead manual sourcer.” Bringham wrote beautiful, demanding action spells that streamlined Tiran’s textile production. Someone had to find the energy to test those spells before they went into factory conduits. “My areas of specialization are industrial siphoning application and experimental mapping spell composition. Thank you again for your consideration today. With the Mage Council’s permission, I will now approach the desk.”
Orynhel nodded his silver head, and Sciona stepped forward.
This time, Archmage Scywin claimed the first prompt, using a click of his timepiece conduit to reset the desk.
“Miss Freynan, before you, you will find twelve pine twigs in a bowl,” said Tiran’s master siphoner. “Using the Kaedor mapping method, ignite the twigs so that they burn slowly.”
Sciona’s hands were on the spellograph before he finished the sentence. She was awake now. She was home. The mechanical give of the keys beneath her fingers settled the sea of her nerves, leaving only the mirror clarity of the task before her.
Action sub-spells for fire were easy to write; as Jerrin Mordra had demonstrated, it was the sourcing sub-spell where things usually went wrong. A smidge too much energy and Sciona would reduce the twigs to ash in seconds. Much too much and she risked self-immolation, which would be an embarrassing way to flub the exam. Fire spell done, Sciona hit the break key, stamping a horizontal line into the sheaf and marking the beginning of the sourcing sub-spell.
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Blood Over Bright Haven
Kaedor mapping spells adhered to a rigid structure that made their composition easy but their use in siphoning difficult. When Sciona activated the mapping spell, the Otherrealm filled the coil before her in glowing white and gray, but inevitably, the simplicity of the Kaedor Method produced a subpar view of God’s Bounty. White shapes crawled and shifted in the gray, indicating potential energy sources, but all were ill-defined. In Sciona’s preferred mapping methods, those energy sources came up crisp, bright, and easy to pinpoint. This was like looking at lantern lights through a thick fog.
Sciona suspected that the blur of the Kaedor Method was precisely why Archmage Scywin had wanted her to apply it to such a fiddly precision action sub-spell. Other mages called Scywin “the Sniper” for his ability to hit the perfect energy source in any mapping coil through any mapping method. He wanted to see if this upstart sourcer could do the same.
The appraising gaze of the Sniper should have terrified Sciona. On some level, it did, but Sciona’s determination converted the fear directly into focus. After years of applied mapping for Bringham, she knew how to pinpoint the right shape and brightness in the swirling gray. This was where desk mages like Mordra the Tenth fell short and where Sciona shone.
She saw her mark and struck its coordinates into the spellograph before the light could move or fade: 40.5 by 23.1. Her finger stabbed the siphoning key, and the magic whooshed into effect. Like the end of a straw placed to her coordinates, the sourcing spell sucked the targeted energy from the Otherrealm through to Sciona’s action sub-spell.
The mapping visual vanished as a finger-sized flame sprang to life in the bowl of twigs. A tidy success.
Sciona breathed easier as the little flame consumed the twigs before her and the archmages made their notes, but it was a small catharsis. Give her something difficult. Now, the insatiable thing in her screamed. Now, now, so she could hurry up and overcome it.
Archmage Bringham went next.
“Before you, you will find a slab of obsidian.” He waved his wand to produce the black rock along with a pair of scales. “Bisect it.”
Sciona glanced up at her mentor in surprise. This was the same spell Jerrin Mordra had just bungled—and she noted Mordra the Ninth shooting Bringham a look of irritation. A few other archmages muttered their disapproval, but Bringham had told Sciona to let him worry about them. So, she ignored the ripples of discontent among their ranks and focused on the magic at hand.
Jerrin Mordra’s mistake had been siphoning too much energy into a narrowly confined cut. Under the sudden excess of pressure, his granite slab had exploded. Given the density of obsidian, Sciona’s task would require a lot of pressure focused to the width of a knife-edge… or a modest amount of pressure focused to an edge no wider than a molecule. The latter ran the risk of slicing straight through the desk and into the floor, but Sciona banked on her targeting precision and defined the edge as one molecule in width.
Watch this one, Scywin, she thought as she finished her mapping sub-spell and locked in her coordinates.
There was no explosion when she siphoned, not even a crack as the rock resisted the spell. The obsidian simply fell into two pieces, mirror-smooth where her cut had passed through. It may not have been professional, but she couldn’t resist a smile as she placed the two halves on the scales before her and watched the needles bob to a stop at the same number. Perfect halves. Even on his second try, Mordra the Tenth hadn’t managed that.
A few of the archmages whispered to one another as they took in the results. Mordra the Ninth looked like he could kill someone— though it was unclear whether his ire was for Sciona, Bringham, or his shame of a son.
“Clearly, she just copied the first applicant,” Archmage Duris said.
“She didn’t, though,” Archmage Gamwen pointed out. “Her composition was entirely different—and superior on multiple levels. Weighing the halves evenly, for one, instead of trying to gauge halves by a measure of length.”
“Still,” Duris said in irritation. “It’s not fair that she saw the spell performed before it was asked of her. I won’t be counting it toward her score. Miss Freynan.” He turned sharp green eyes on her. “Let’s see if you’re up to more than simple cutting and ignition spells.”
At forty-two, Duris was the youngest archmage in a century, and Sciona supposed she couldn’t blame him for scorning her—or any mage who performed in his presence. The master conduit designer had either invented or improved half the devices in modern Tiran. Who were these youngsters to encroach on his hard-won territory?
When he waved his gloved hand, the obsidian and scales vanished, replaced by a row of empty glass bowls.
“Using matter from the Otherrealm, create an incendiary device that activates when thrown over fifteen feet in the air.”
Matter from the Otherrealm? Not just energy?
“I’m sorry?” Gamwen looked incredulously at Duris. “How is this prompt relevant to the skills of a mapping specialist?”
It wasn’t. Alchemy was a highly specialized field that required entirely different training from all other spellwork. Siphoning matter from the Otherrealm was, after all, a fundamentally different practice from siphoning energy. Of the mages who had tested before Sciona, only one had been asked to siphon matter, and industrial alchemy had been his second major.
“I agree with Gamwen.” Duris’s senior conduit designer, Eringale, spoke up in an admonishing tone. “What are you trying to do, Duris? Blow the little lady’s hand off?”
It was Bringham who said, “Let her give it a try. It’ll be all right.”
“Will it?” Gamwen seemed doubtful.
“I believe so. In any case, it looks like she’s already gotten started.”
Bringham knew his apprentice well. Sciona was already at the scratch paper, sketching a flowchart of the spells she would need.
There was no way to map for matter in the Otherrealm because no mage had ever found a way to display the physical reality of God’s Bounty. All a mage could do was choose his coordinates, siphon, and hope he got what he needed. And if he did get the matter he needed, it was often mixed in with a sludge of other elements, crushed together in the passage from one realm to the next. Sometimes, the blind-siphoned sludge was dangerous—explosive, acidic, or poisonous. More alchemists died in their laboratories than any other type of mage.
Before composing for the siphoning itself, Sciona wrote an accompanying spell to scan whatever came through from the Otherrealm and give her a chemical breakdown. Chemistry was not one of her specialties, but she hoped she would recognize a dangerous compound in time to jump back from the desk.
In the end, she had to siphon five times, filling all the available bowls to the brim with mystery muck, before she came up with enough carbon for her purposes. Another painstakingly written alchemic spell pulled the carbon from all the dishes to form a ball the size of Sciona’s fist—her incendiary device. Not that pure carbon was combustible. Sciona couldn’t make a true material explosive because, well, she wasn’t a damn alchemist; she didn’t know the chemical composition of a bomb off the top of her head, and guesswork could kill her where she stood. What she could do was write around the need for advanced alchemy.
With the soon-to-be bomb resting on the floor before the desk, she was back in her element: energy-based magic. Like all sourcing spells for conduits, this one had to make use of Tiran’s energy Reserve. Tapping the Reserve was the only way for a sourcing sub-spell to yield energy without the need for manual mapping and targeting.
She assigned the sourcing spell the name POWER. Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called FIRE, inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name DEVICE and translated the directives scribbled on her notepaper into the runic language of the spellograph:
CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.
ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.
ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.
If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.
The matter siphoning may not have come easily, but throwing the bomb was by far the most daunting part of the demonstration; true to form as a woman and a scholar, Sciona had a terrible arm. Stepping back from the desk, she carefully lowered the carbon ball and eyed her intended trajectory—over the desk but not directly over, away from herself, but not too close to the archmages.
Men sniggered on the benches behind her just as the Danworth boys once had the few times she had tried to play ball with them in her skirts. Back in that schoolyard, she had turned around and hurled the deerskin ball ineffectually at the boys. If she did that here, it would be so much more satisfying—and possibly murder. As tantalizing as the mental image was, she ignored her spectators and kept her eyes focused upward on the murals of the Founding Mages above. On where she was going, not where she had been.
With a deep breath, she drew her arm back and slung the ball toward the ceiling.
DEVICE soared farther forward than she’d intended but successfully hit fifteen feet and—whoosh!—burst into flame.
Fire burned ferociously around DEVICE, using the carbon as an anchor in space, until the ball descended below fifteen feet, extinguished, and fell to the floor, trailing smoke. Another success.
The spells only got harder from there.
If the archmages meant this to demoralize her, Sciona supposed even their wisdom had its limits. The deeper she sank into complex magic, the more focused she became, the more her surroundings fell away until nothing mattered. Not even the opinions of the greatest men in Tiran.
At last, Gamwen leaned over to Orynhel and said, “Archmage Supreme, we’re nearing the maximum prompt count.”
And Sciona was almost disappointed. She was so wrapped up in the work at this exhilarating pace that she didn’t want it to end. More important, she realized she had yet to fail a prompt. Cautious elation welled up inside her. There had been a few stumbles, yes, but no spell that she had failed outright. She was passing.
Nodding, Archmage Orynhel said, “Before we move on to our final deliberation, does anyone have a last prompt for Miss Freynan?”
“I do.” Archmage Duris lifted his white-gloved hand, and a cauldron appeared before the desk—an industrial cauldron, bigger than the desk itself… bigger than three desks stacked one on top of the other, the kind of cauldron a factory worker might fall into and not be discovered until his body bloated and bobbed to the surface.
“Miss Freynan, before you, you will find a cauldron,” Duris’s voice said from behind the wall of metal. “Levitate it.”
Sciona stared blankly at the monstrous vessel between her and the archmages. It had to be a hundred times heavier than anything the other applicants had been asked to move. And Duris wasn’t just asking her to move it; he was asking her to levitate it, a deeply delicate operation. Sciona had to walk partway around the desk to even see the archmages’ panel past the cauldron.
“May I use any mapping method I choose, Archmage Duris?” she asked and thought she saw Bringham smile.
“Sure.” Duris folded his arms as he leaned back in his seat. “But no siphoning the Reserve.” Meaning Sciona couldn’t direct the siphoning to stop when a condition of her action spell was met. She would have to calculate and source the energy on her own. Perfectly. On the first try. “You’ve demonstrated your aptitude with tame—we might say womanly—amounts of energy. A highmage must master far more than that.”
“Yes, sir…”
But this task would require an enormous amount of energy. The prompt was dangerous—unless Duris thought Sciona didn’t have the skill to access that much energy. Or maybe he knew that she had the skill and just wanted to see if she had the nerve.
“Duris, I don’t like this.” Gamwen voiced Sciona’s apprehension. As the leading mapper in all of Tiran, he knew the risks if she attempted the spell. But Archmage Orynhel raised a withered hand, silencing the objection.
“The prompt has been issued, Gamwen. Miss Freynan, please proceed.”
“Yes, Archmage Supreme.”
Sciona approached the cauldron and experimentally pushed on it with both palms. It didn’t budge. Putting her shoulder to the metal and throwing all her weight against it only got her a sore arm and some unhelpful chuckles from the benches at her back. Her heartbeat was picking up again—not in excitement, this time, but in fear. The fact that she couldn’t shift the cauldron an inch meant that she had no read on its weight over a few hundred pounds.
In Bringham’s labs, Sciona had gotten good at estimating the weight of machinery, but always with more information than this. There, she would have been able to ask, What are the dimensions on this thing? What’s it made of? Iron? Pewter? Steel? Some newfangled alchemic compound I should read up on? The material looked like steel, but… She rapped her knuckles on the side and frowned at the sound—muted, like there might be a layer of some other material inside, but she was half again too short to look over the rim.
The cauldron could weigh five hundred pounds. It could weigh five thousand.
“Miss Freynan,” Archmage Orynhel said when Sciona had circled the vessel several times. “You are required to begin composing a spell within the next minute.”
“Right.” Sciona let out a shaky breath and returned to the desk. “Sorry, sir.”
The levitation formula was quick work, but she paused, still stumped, when it came to estimating the cauldron’s weight. Too low and the cauldron wouldn’t move at all. She would fail at this final hurdle. Too high and… well, too high and at least her end would be
a dramatic one. She bit her lip. A memorable death had to be better than the obscurity that awaited if she failed. That thought swallowed all fear. Sciona erred on the side of power and set her values around the estimate of five thousand pounds. Now, to source the energy to lift that much weight… She smiled. This was where Duris assumed she had neither courage nor power, but he had misjudged. This was where her fingers hit the keys and sang.
She had been making borderline heretical adjustments to traditional mapping methods since she was twelve. At twenty-seven, she had her own fully formed methods so heavily adapted and reworked that, save for the base lines, one could scarcely recognize them as Kaedor, Leonic, or Erafin. They were something new. They were Freynan, methods she would have the right to publish under her name if she could just get through this last spell between her and the High Magistry.
Sciona’s custom composition allowed her to map a wide range, like the Leonic Method, but then pull in close on promising energy sources, like the Kaedor Method. On top of that, she had added modified lines from the Erafin Method to sharpen fuzzy patches of energy to bright pools.
The field in her mapping coil seethed with white, but no single source here was big enough to levitate five thousand pounds… In an act of reckless confidence, she entered three different sets of coordinates and siphoned them all at once.
The spellograph rattled with the rush of energy, Sciona seized it to keep it from shaking off the desk, and—
BOOM!
The cauldron shot toward the ceiling—and into it, right through Founding Mage Stravos’s handsome copper-haired head. Cracks burst like lightning across Mordra the First’s inventions and Highmage Sabernyn’s trial, and shouts of shock rang through the chamber. As chunks of the ceiling broke loose, Sciona’s sense of selfpreservation finally caught up with her; she let go of the spellograph and dove under the desk. Limestone thundered onto the desktop, tumbling from the wood to the floor on all sides. In the next moment, the cauldron crashed back to the floor, terrifyingly close, adding a spray of stone tiles to the chaos. And thank God for Aunt Winny and her fussing; the rain of debris bounced off Sciona’s petticoats, leaving her dress torn but her legs untouched.
The cauldron’s final impact reverberated through the chamber as clouds of stone dust settled in a soft hiss. Then, silence.
Rolling to her knees, Sciona peered from under the desk. Judging by the damage to the ceiling and the size of the indent in the floor, she had vastly overestimated the cauldron’s weight. It wasn’t five thousand pounds. It had to be right around one thousand.
She was out from under the desk before she realized what she was doing, brushing rubble from between the spellograph keys. Amid a mess of splintered wood and shattered glass bowls, the machine had waited for her fingers, undamaged, like a sign from God.
“Miss Freynan,” one of the archmages was saying in concern. “Are you all right? Shall we call in the medic?”
“No.” She tore the used spellpaper from the platen and replaced it with a fresh sheet.
“Pardon?”
“No!” Her voice grew stronger as she lay into her action spell—the same one she had written before, but this time with the correct values slotted in. “I have it!”
“Miss Freynan, you have not been asked for any further spellwork,” Archmage Duris said warningly. “Step away from the desk and find your seat.”
But at that point, Feryn Himself could not have stopped Sciona’s hands. The arithmetic came easily now that she knew the weights involved. Within a few breaths, she had hit the break and started her custom mapping spell anew.
“Miss Freynan!” Archmage Duris’s voice sharpened in outright anger. “Failure to follow instructions will result in your disqualification!”
The wrath of an archmage would have shaken anyone with half a brain. It did shake Sciona, setting her stomach churning, but the churning was just another form of energy, one more shot of fuel in the engine speeding her to the end of the spell.
The Otherrealm burst open before her, glowing with a wealth of energy. She found her coordinates.
“Step back this inst—” Duris choked on the rest of his words as Sciona hit the final key.
Her spell roared into action, vibrating the spellograph with more energy than the little machine was built to handle. Sciona finally did as she was told then. She backed away from the desk with both hands raised—in surrender? In triumph? It didn’t matter.
All that mattered was the cauldron, hovering motionless in the air before the archmages. Perfectly controlled.
Excerpted from Blood Over Bright Haven, copyright © 2024 by M.L. Wang.
