Professor Elowen began their first Magic Foundations lesson by banning spells. Harper's hand went up before Elowen had finished the sentence. "Then what are we doing?"

"Learning why banning spells for one morning is sensible."

"That sounds like not doing magic."

"It will feel disappointingly similar."

The Foundations room was circular, with low benches around a floor marked in pale rings. Every student had been given a square of cloth, a wooden bead and a glass marble. There were no wands, staffs or glittering instruments waiting beside them, which Jasper had secretly expected even though Dr Maren had already told him there would not be. Elowen stood in the centre and held up one hand. "The first word you need is Essence." A few students immediately sat straighter.

"Essence is the part of magic you can actually use," she continued. "You have it. I have it. Every trained magic user learns to notice it, direct it and stop directing it when enough is enough. It is not stored in your fingers, and it does not disappear because you put your hands in your pockets."

Harper put both hands in her pockets to test this. Elowen looked at her. "Thank you for the demonstration." Harper grinned.

"For beginners, the hands are useful because you already use them to point, catch, measure and reach. That makes them an easy place to focus. The important thing is not how hard you want something to happen. The important thing is whether you can move a small amount of Essence on purpose."

She lifted the wooden bead from her palm. It hovered for two seconds, then settled again.

"Power is not control," Elowen said. "You will hear that sentence until you become sick of it."

Harper whispered, "Already there." Ava heard and wrote it down. Their first task was insulting in its simplicity: move the cloth one centimetre. No lifting. No folding. No dramatic bursts. One centimetre. Jasper stared at the blue square in front of him and tried to remember what Dr Maren had said during his assessment. Feel first. Push second. He felt nothing.

Around the room, cloth twitched. A bead rattled somewhere it was not supposed to. One boy managed to move the bench instead of his cloth and nearly tipped his partner onto the floor. Harper's square stayed perfectly still for several minutes. Her face became more offended every time someone else's moved.

"Stop glaring at it," Ava said.

"I'm concentrating."

"It looks frightened."

Harper tried again. The cloth shot half a metre and slapped into the next student's shoe. Elowen retrieved it. "Too much Essence."

"But it moved."

"Too much."

"Impressively."

"Still too much."

Ava's cloth slid two centimetres in a perfectly straight line. She frowned. Harper stared at her. "You are upset because you did it twice."

"The instruction was one centimetre."

"You are exhausting."

"You're welcome."

Jasper tried again. The old assessment returned to him: four failures, then one wooden bead flying hard enough to hit his father's shoe. He had spent weeks assuming magic worked if he wanted an effect strongly enough. Maybe that was the problem.

Instead of pushing at the cloth, he pictured the empty strip of floor beside it. He lifted one hand and imagined moving only enough Essence to put the cloth there. A faint warmth travelled through his palm. The square shifted. Not much. Perhaps half a centimetre. Jasper blinked. Elowen crouched beside him. "Again." The second attempt moved it slightly farther.

"What changed?" she asked.

"I stopped trying to shove it."

"Good."

Harper leaned across. "That makes no sense."

"It will."

By lunchtime Jasper's head felt heavy in the oddest way, as though concentration had become a muscle and he had spent the morning lifting something with it. Elowen explained that beginners often noticed Essence use as tiredness, shakiness or loss of precision before anything dramatic happened.

"If your hand starts trembling, you stop," she told them. "If your spell gets stronger because you are tired, you definitely stop. If you think hiding either of those things will impress me, it will not."

The first week taught them that magical school contained a disappointing amount of safety. They learned how to recognise a ward before crossing it, how to cancel a small effect instead of panicking and feeding more Essence into it, and why lowering an object gently was harder than lifting it in the first place. In Making and Mending they sealed tears in cloth, warmed water without boiling it and dried wet paper without turning it brittle. Harper overheated a sock until a thin line of smoke curled from the heel. Professor Ward looked at the sock, then at Harper. "A tool. Not revenge." The class laughed hard enough that Harper had to sit down.

Ancient Selari Foundations was less explosive. Their first lesson involved copying characters onto lined paper while Professor Ilyan explained that a single badly drawn stroke could change one word into another.

"Does anyone actually speak this?" Harper asked.

"Some scholars. Some ceremonial speakers. A few people who enjoy making dinner unnecessarily complicated. In ordinary life, no. Selari is ancient."

That word interested Jasper more than he expected. Ilyan wrote two simple words on the board.

SAEL. Magic.

SAELI. Spell.

Ava copied both carefully. Then Ilyan added a third symbol beneath them.

TAIRA.

He did not translate it. Harper raised her hand. "You forgot that one."

"I did not."

"What does it mean?"

"It is an old word with a complicated history, and you are seven. Today I would like you to concentrate on making the second stroke face the correct direction."

Harper narrowed her eyes at the board as if she had been personally challenged. Jasper copied the word anyway. Nothing happened when he wrote it. No strange pressure. No dream. It was only dark ink on pale paper. Still, he circled it once before closing his notebook.

By the end of the week, Room Fourteen had begun developing habits. Harper threw clothes at her chest of drawers and considered this a storage system. Ava wrote down everyone's practice results while insisting the notebook was not about them specifically. Jasper learned that the eastern window caught the first light and that the Academy bells sounded different depending on which courtyard they came from. Magic was becoming ordinary surprisingly quickly. The sea was not.