It only took me a matter of weeks to learn what Headmother Heprose meant by the ‘heavy stuff.’ There were two parts to living at the Eastwall National Sorceress Convent, and they couldn't have been more different.

  The first part was life with the girls, the sisters and apprentices. That part was a bit like being tossed into a chilly lake with everyone splashing you, having to swim when you hadn't expected to be going in at all. The girls were unbelievably rambunctious, and they took every opportunity imaginable to try and get a rise out of me or in some way invade my privacy. My only respite was that I was older, and that I was on the taller side, and that it was clear the headmother favored me because of my good marks and my knack for listening.

  The other part of it all, though, was the instruction itself. It was soon obvious one of three Headmother Heprose had chosen to treat with special attention. Josephine, my de facto mentor, was the second. Mea, the darker-skinned sister full of wry snark, was the third.

  Instruction was not at all chaotic, or lascivious, or noisy. No one spoke out of turn. The stakes were high, and we all knew how furious Headmother Heprose could get if a sorceress was failing to live up to the Corps’ strict expectations. I preferred the strict tension of instruction, I must admit, to the chaos of dormitory life.

  By the third week, I was standing in the shadow of the convent spires in the back garden and cemetery that formed our grounds. A gray wall surrounded the overgrown expanse, to separate us from the city beyond. Because we were up on a hill, nobody in any of the buildings in Archcove could see down into the premises. We were, as usual, very much in private and alone.

  I was alone with Josephine, Mea, and the headmother that day, just a few strides from the convent's back wall. We were all dressed identically in the National Sorceress Corps uniform of black trousers, black hoods, and black robes. The first time I had put on trousers, I’d felt constricted. I was not used to having material resist me when I moved to take a long stride or step. Quickly, though, I realized their liberating power. I realized, too, why boys seemed so free and rambunctious when they put on this sort of attire. With trousers and a blouse, one could almost do anything, bend or leap in any position, and not have to worry about keeping her layers all proper. I knew within the first hour of wearing them that these garments would completely transform the way I moved through the world.

  I say the four of us were alone in the garden, but in truth there were three more. These three were men, prisoners with shaved heads, chained and shackled, shirtless in the dirt. All three of them knelt, silent, having been well prepared for us by the Secret Police who had delivered them to the headmother that morning. The youngest seemed to be in his early twenties, and the oldest in his forties, though the cowls covering their eyes made it hard to tell their ages with precision. Above them stood the silent white stone of our convent's deathsgate.

  I was in a line with Josephine and Mea, all three of us standing at attention. Headmother Heprose, as usual, was instructing.

  "All three of these men have been condemned to death," said our headmother, extending a hand in the direction of the prisoners. I had heard a rumor from the girls that morning that the incoming prisoners were Clementics. I didn't know much about Clementics, but I knew they were some kind of cult, a fanatical religious faith that had spread to our neighbors, the Vernans, in the north. I knew that the luminous government and emperor were dead set on keeping Clementism out of Paxana at any cost. I knew that they said it was a cancer.

  “So,” the headmother went on, "seeing as they are already sentenced to the grave, you can think of what we're doing here as just a little stop along the way. Do what you will to them. Search their minds. This will be graded."

  I shifted my feet and tried to cultivate focus. The test, the headmother had told us that morning, was information extraction. We had been doing similar the past week, with goats and other livestock, showing them certain objects or foods and then using deathsgate ritual to search through their minds for the memories. The way the headmother spoke of it, this was one of the most important skills a National Sorceress had to learn.

  Josephine, who always stuck close to me, pointed to a raised white burn on the nearest prisoner’s skin. It was a few inches wide, in the shape of a half moon, on his underfed chest. "Were they branded for Clementism?" she asked me in a murmur.

  I noticed that the other two men had the same exact brand. "They do it themselves," said the headmother, overhearing Josephine. "In devotion."

  I considered this. It seemed awfully dangerous for members of any secret society to put a permanent mark of it on their bodies. "Not so good for hiding out. For traitors, I mean," I said.

  The headmother seemed a little annoyed by our chatter. "Yes, well," she said, "if we catch and kill enough, they'll probably get wise, but for now they do these cattle brands like they're serving themselves up for the Secret Police on a platter."

  Mea chuckled a little at this, and from her chuckle I knew she was nervous. She always got a bit jokeier once she was nervous. "The great spirit Codannahar consumed the flesh of wicked men," she said. "Maybe we should, too. Make a meal of them."

  Whenever the headmother was tense, she took it out on Mea, and this was no exception. "Sister Mull," she snapped, turning to our third, "we are not communing with Codannahar. We are performing a basic memory extraction examination. You first, don't dawdle."

  I did not envy Mea going first. It seemed hardest to go first. She approached her prisoner, one of the younger ones, and fully removed the black cowl that had been partially obscuring his face. Mea let the cowl fall to the dirt. With a better view of the man, I could see that he was Paxanan. He looked very much like the sort of fellow I could see pushing a cart down the street. Adjusting to the brightness of a clear winter day, the man blinked and looked around. He looked shocked when he saw the white stone deathgate above and behind him.

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  "You'll have a short trip," said Mea, sardonically, referring to his imminent death.

  "I don't go to your afterlife," said the prisoner. Considering his circumstances, I thought his tone was surprisingly calm. "I join the Clementic Eternal."

  "Sure. Hey, what's with the half moon?" asked Mea. I could feel the headmother growing sour as she watched the half-foreigner ramble. "Is it waxing or waning?"

  "Waxing," said the prisoner.

  "Ah," said Mea.

  "It stands for mercy," the prisoner explained, holding his head as high as he could while on his knees.

  "Mull, no dawdling," Headmother Heprose murmured.

  "I'm warming him up," said Mea, terse. She then stepped forward and placed her bare, ungloved palm on the shaved head of the man.

  "Eternal protect me," he murmured to himself.

  "We'll see," said Mea. She shut her eyes, and I felt a sudden cold wind blast upward from the ground. I watched it take up Mea's wavy hair as it flew like a spirit into the clear, cold sky.

  From the gust, I could tell Mea had entered the man's mind rather roughly. His scream of disorientation further confirmed this. Just a moment later, the man fell back, landing with a thud in the sparse grass near a gravestone. Hot, opaque, almost chunky red blood flowed from his mouth, nose, and eyes, so vivid that I thought it might be painted first. Just like that, he was dead.

  Sister Mea stumbled back, and with concern I noticed she had darker blood running from her own nose. "Agh!" she shouted, stumbling, nearly falling.

  "Mea!" Josephine cried out, and made a move to try and catch the girl.

  "Back, Josephine!" the headmother snapped. "She's fine. Let her be. All right, whatever you two do, don't do what Mea did."

  Mea looked like she might faint, except that she was too angry to faint. "You rushed me!" she shouted at the headmother, furious. "I was working up to it."

  In the span of a blink, Helena Heprose snapped her fingers, and a new gust of deathly cold air threw Mea down onto her backside. The grass around the splayed sister shriveled up with frost as Mea stared up with fearful, wounded surprise.

  "Never use that tone with a headmother," said Helena, pointing a warning finger at the frightened sister. "Shrineborne, you next."

  I swallowed and tried not to overthink what I was about to do. "Just like a goat," I said to myself.

  The headmother nodded, "Just like a goat."

  I approached my own prisoner and removed his cowl. This man, too, was young, and I saw from the redness and wetness of his face that he had been weeping.

  "Oh, she's got a crybaby," said Josephine, who also got glib when her nerves were turning shaky.

  "Quiet, please," I said with calm.

  "Won't be quiet when you're at a terror bombing site and they're scraping old ladies off the walls," said Josephine. "Interrogation can't always wait for the right state of mind."

  I didn't appreciate Josephine throwing wrenches into my examination, but I knew that her broader point was true. We couldn't always expect the luxury of time and ethereal calm when we were out there in the field dealing with enemies of Luminous Paxana.

  In a silent moment, I caught the gaze of the prisoner. Then I put my hand upon his buzzed head and shut my own eyes.

  "Show me how you got the bombs," I said to him, trying to spur his memory so it would be easier to see it in my own mind. I knew only from what Heprose had told me that these men were would-be bombers.

  Nothing manifested in my mind’s eye. I started to sway just so slightly as I held his skull, trying to use the rhythms of my body to connect to the rhythms of his mind. Then I found my way inside his thoughts, and he showed me the small congregation of a secret underground Clementic church. The faces of the worshippers were a little too blurry to make out.

  “Not the congregation,” I said to him, nearly whispering, "Show me the bombs."

  I searched and searched, and I felt our connection straining. I didn't want to put too much force into his mind and have him wind up dead like Mea's subject. "I'm not seeing them," I said, speaking so the headmother could hear.

  "Breach the mind wall," said Headmother Heprose. Of course, I had already done so.

  "I'm in his mind," I said back. "He's never heard of any bombs."

  "They weren't ours," said my prisoner, speaking aloud to my surprise. I could feel that it was truth as he said it.

  "Impossible," said Heprose. "The bombs were found in the very same district where you Clementics meet."

  I searched deeper and found nothing. "I don't think he even knew about them."

  "He's playing you, Violet," said Heprose.

  I considered whether this might be true, but I didn't think so. "No, there's no resistance," I said back. He was giving me his mind willingly, all that it contained. He was not resisting.

  Again, I heard the headmother's voice turn irritable. "What's more likely, that the whole of the Secret Police got it wrong, or an apprentice sorceress can't make a reading?"

  I felt myself getting prickly, and I knew that I could not sustain the mind connection in that state. I removed my hand from the man's shaved head and watched him slump over, unconscious but not dead, from the exhaustion. It took all my concentration to not fall over from dizziness as I turned to the tall, hooded headmother.

  "I don't know what to tell you," I said. "Respectfully, ma'am, I’ve reported my findings, per the test. They never saw any bombs. That’s my determination, per the evidence."

  The third hooded prisoner, the older one, spoke gruffly under his cowl. "You're all going to feel pretty stupid when you find out it really wasn't us who hid those bombs."

  I watched Headmother Heprose stare at the cowled man, and for the first time she seemed to really consider that these Clementics might be falsely accused. "Dismissed, everyone," she said, changing her tack. "Josephine, get leywater and houndspaw for Mull. She's going to be quite shaken up for a bit."

  Josephine looked frustrated to be denied her own examination. "I was ready," she said, stamping her foot with petulance. "I was ready to make my assessment. I was going to get the information for you. Honest."

  Helena Heprose waved a dismissing hand, and for the first time since I'd met her, I heard her curse. "If the Secret Police intelligence really is fucked, I can't waste our last man on an exercise. I'll go in myself."

  I looked over at Josephine, who did not retort. Together, the two of us helped lift woozy Mea from the icy circle of grass where she had been knocked. As we made our way back inside, I saw Headmother Heprose pull the cowl off the third man and prepare herself solemnly for a solo psychic entry through his mind wall.