“Go ahead and cast summon goo on that target over there, then summon your fat rat pack,” professor Toadwather instructed.

  I did as I’d been told, lobbing the ball of goop at the rough straw mannequin that was set against the wall, then summoning the three celestial rats before dismissing them.

  “Should I do a compact now?” I asked. I’d thought about what kind of creature I’d want to set up my second and final familiar compact with, and even done a little bit of testing.

  “No, no, let’s do the rest and save that for last. I’ve seen you do it, I just want to make sure you didn’t just memorize how to do it for that one class then forget.”

  “What if I did and just re-memorized it?” I pointed out. “That would render the whole thing pointless.”

  “That’s the secret,” she said, shushing me. “Lots of wizards do that. I have hundreds of spells written down. I don’t remember them all. You’ll probably forget how to do some of the spells that you learn during your time here. We’re not teaching you a list of spells to memorize – we teach you the method to learn spells quickly. That’s why I spend so much time breaking down their structure.”

  “Point,” I said, nodding my head to her. “But anyhow. What spell do you want me to do next?”

  Professor Toadweather reached her hand out to her frog, who opened the yawning void chasm that was his mouth and spat up a small ball of metal. Internally, I groaned. I’d done a little bit of practice with the etherius step spell in class, but the alloy was expensive. A single nugget cost well over a hundred silver, even with my ability to purchase it at cost. I wasn’t going to drop that much money on a single casting of a short range teleport.

  I could use blood price to cover the component’s cost, but I’d needed pretty much all of my blood in order to stock up on my spellglyphs, so I’d only done it twice. I didn’t even have the spell woven into my wand, since it just didn’t make sense for me to use it that way.

  Maybe there were some people in the world who could use short range teleportation spells casually – I was sure someone with blink fox bloodline magic had to exist somewhere. But I wasn’t one of them.

  I picked up the nugget and began working my way through the spell. The ether shaping was difficult, but not terrible, the gestures were simple enough, and I still had the incantation memorized. It wasn’t the casting that had me so concerned.

  The metal vanished, and I was sucked away. A carpet of blue light surrounded me, made of my ether, infused with the power of the sacrificed component. All around me, I could feel the weight of the ethereal plane, pushing down, crushing at the protective shell of my teleportation like an omnidirectional wind. I shifted my vessel to let it cast myself forwards along one of the winds of the ether, aiming for the full thirty feet that the spell could travel. It should put me most of the way across the ballroom’s dance floor, and…

  My spell cracked, and a bit of the ethereal slipped in. I was spat out back into the normal, real world, and heard professor Toadweather speak a word of power.

  “Twenty three feet total,” she said. “Not bad, but not perfect. Luckily it’s only one part of the test!”

  I nodded as I shook my hands. There was something disorienting about being pulled through space, and it was far worse when I was the one doing the teleporting. Knowing you were flowing through the ethereal was one thing, but actively being able to feel the vessel was another entirely. Being able to feel the infinite pressing against you… I didn’t like it.

  “What’s next?” I asked, trying to not dwell on the sensation.

  “Summon a greymalkin!”

  I nodded and began drawing the circle in the air. It took a minute for the last syllable to fall from my lips, and when it did, there was a ripple in the air as the faerie cat appeared.

  I hadn’t been familiar with greymalkins before I’d summoned one for the first time. Large cats, easily six and a half feet long from the tip of their tail to their nose, and weighing well over a hundred pounds, they were all lithe grace. They were gray, like the name suggested, but the one I’d summoned’s coat seemed to blend into the brown wood of the floor.

  That innate camouflage was one of the lowest level uses of their bloodline, much like how mine always granted me slightly above human resources. They could also pour more power into it to become the next best thing to invisible, blur the edges of their form, and empower their claw strikes with shadowy venom.

  The pantherlike animal paced around, seemingly unsatisfied with the bright lights and open spaces of the ballroom, and professor Toadweather clapped.

  “Good! Now, summon its eye! By which I mean, cast summoner’s eye on it!”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Really? I would have expected the earth elemental. It’s got the sort of vibrational sense, which I don’t have.”

  Professor Toadweather hummed, her wings fluttering violently as she did.

  “Well, true. Most of the students don’t have your developed sense of smell, and it takes a lot for them to get used to. But I don’t recalibrate the tests for someone who’s chosen to perform the dedication ritual. They get to cast conjuration magic easier. I don’t think I should make you do something harder just because you have an advantage.”

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  I wasn’t entirely sure I agreed that the two were comparable, but I wasn’t about to argue with her, since it worked massively in my favor. The innate senses of elementals were far stranger than the boosted senses of a greymalkin.

  It took me a moment to cast the spell, but after a moment, I felt my senses sink into the large cats. It was staring down professor Toadweather and her toad, wondering if I’d let it eat them, but it could also smell all of the different fae who used the ballroom, the leftovers of the party they’d hosted recently, and more. Its senses were even sharper than my own, but the difference wasn’t so extreme that I was overwhelmed.

  Professor Toadweather started moving to bonk me over the head, and I turned and caught her wrist. She grinned at me.

  “Good! You weren’t turned into brainless goop by the stronger senses! Now for the hard part – I want you to summon all six minor elementals that can be summoned by the spell.”

  “All of them?” I asked, starting up Xander’s massage within myself.

  “Yes indeed! If you need a break to recharge your ether pool partway through, that’s fine, but I can’t let you leave the room and look for secretly hidden study materials… Oh, and I assume you wanted to bond an elemental as a familiar? If so, summon that one during the bonding ritual.”

  I nodded and got to work.

  The first being that I summoned was an earth elemental. The minor elemental resembled a crab or a spider with a huge, stoney center, and several spindly legs made of mud. Its eyes were two glimmering, polished gemstones that resembled obsidian, and I had it skitter around the room for the professor before dismissing it and summoning an air elemental.

  The air elemental resembled a watermelon sized orb of air swirling around in a sort of self-contained tornado. Its eyes were crafted of stormclouds, and it seemed to sprout limbs made of winds every moment, which were folded back into the main body. I guided it through a series of rings that professor Toadweather conjured, and then let it return, summoning a wood elemental next.

  The wood elemental resembled a snail whose shell was a small shrub or bush. The roots had formed the body of the snail, and were how it got around. It had eyes that were seemingly made of berries, but that had a faint glow, and were set deep in the darkest part of the bush, near its stem. I had it demonstrate its bloodline magic by releasing a wave of razor sharp leaves into the air, and then was forced to take a break.

  Even with Xander’s massage running, each of the summoning spells were quite costly, as they were designed to last a good amount of time, and between all the first and second circle spells I’d been casting, I was tapped out. When my ether was restored enough for me to feel confident in finishing the test, I summoned a water elemental.

  The water elemental’s body was somewhat like a sea slug or normal slug, but it was able to float through the air, which had taken me quite a while to get used to. It wasn’t technically flying – the elemental’s bloodline allowed it to ‘swim’ in other substances without harming either of them. It could theoretically swim through solid metal, though that took a massive expenditure, since the closer the substance was to water, the less power it took for the elemental to swim through it.

  The fact that the swimming didn’t harm either party was weird too – apparently, there were some mages who kept water elemental familiars swimming inside their bloodstream and body, so that they could erupt as a surprise attack. It seemed foolish to me, since you could do the same with letting them emerge from the ether pool, but what did I know?

  After the water elemental went through the same course of loops that the air elemental had, I dismissed it and summoned the metal elemental. This one resembled a nest of cogs, wires, tubes, and clockwork, with long, sharp blades for legs. To test this one, professor Toadweather had me move it around her while firing off sharpened bits of metal that it conjured via its bloodline. I dismissed it, and then began setting up the ritual spell.

  I poured the salt out into a rough circle, then started placing the incense from the assorted trees around it. I used a bit of chalk to mark down the etheric runes that were a part of the spell, lit the blue candle in the center of the circle, and began to move my ether.

  Once I finished, I began casting the spell to summon a fire elemental. It bloomed to life in the center of the circle, its body smooth and bright, like the flame of a candle rather than a bonfire. The dark zone in the center where a wick would be was green, which faded to blue within the luminous zone, before transforming to red in the outer zone. That was the only part of it that wasn’t perfectly smooth, as it crackled and sparked slightly. It had two long, thin arms, and its face seemed to be made of similar green flame to the centermost point.

  I spoke in flametongue, the native language of the fire elementals.

  “I offer this compact to you, so that my magic and your blood might entwine, and for companionship.”

  The fire elemental reached out its long tendril of flame and touched it to the chalk. Fire erupted through the circle, and multicolored fire of the elemental mingled with white light, and for the second time since coming to school, I felt a power merge with my ether pool. Unlike with Orla, it didn’t stop there. The power reached through the connection created by the bloodline spellcraft ritual, where it tapped my own fire.

  This was the entire reason that I’d chosen a fire elemental. In the testing I’d done, I’d been able to trade fire back and forth with a summoned fire elemental, somewhat like I had with Albernium, though with cooperation rather than aggression. There was always a bit of loss, but it had worked.

  It suggested to me that bloodline spellcraft would be able to interact with the spell to some extent or another – it would just be a matter of figuring out how. If it reserved a portion of my fire without any benefits, somewhat like it did when I infused dragonfire into a summoning, I probably couldn’t afford to have a fire elemental. The charity would be nice, but I couldn’t afford it.

  The elemental’s bloodline fire spun, and my own spun in response. All of my dragonfire was siphoned away. I had a moment of panic where I feared the elemental had somehow eaten my bloodline, but… no. I could still sense my full capacity. This was more like when I used the fire normally – it would come back in full.

  My flame settled into the embers of the elemental’s magic, where it merged with the coals. The entire elemental grew noticeably stronger as its bloodline density increased considerably, without shrinking down through compression like my own. The density was still a far cry from what mine had been, but to increase so much without loss…

  A spark appeared in my spirit as my own bloodline started to restore itself, and I felt the elemental reach out. It poured power through our link, and my fire started restoring itself even faster, the flames converting between our similar bloodline types. As my fire returned to the point I could use it, at least a little, I felt the name of the fire elemental – he was named Seren.

  I scooped Seren up and settled him on my shoulder, where he sat, merrily burning away without consuming any fuel.

  “Well, apart from etherius step, flawless spellcraft all around,” professor Toadweather said cheerfully. “Is this your last midterm?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “Tomorrow is Applied Mage Combat.”

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