The divination classroom was different from the runes classroom in the way that suggested the person who decorated it had very strong opinions and no one had ever successfully talked them out of anything. Curtains of deep purple hung from ceiling to floor. Candles burned in clusters on every available surface. The ceiling had been painted to resemble a night sky with considerably more stars than was astronomically accurate. Several crystal balls sat on shelves along the walls, doing nothing, looking important.
Professor Abano was already there when they arrived, standing at the front of the room with the contained energy of someone who had been waiting and was very deliberately not pacing.
Her eyes found Hermes the moment he walked through the door.
He sat down quickly and looked at the desk.
"Today," Abano announced to the class, her voice carrying the particular brightness of someone who had been planning this, "we will be attempting rune divination."
A ripple of reaction moved through the room. Not quite enthusiasm. Not quite dread. The specific ambivalence of students who had been told they were doing something that sounded interesting but weren't sure yet if it was going to be embarrassing.
"Rune divination is one of the oldest methods of reading what is to come," Abano continued, moving between the desks and distributing small cloth pouches to each student. "Each pouch contains a set of divination runes. You will clear your mind, focus your intent on a question or a subject, and cast the runes onto the cloth provided. The pattern they form and the runes that land face up will be interpreted."
Hermes accepted his pouch and turned it over in his hands. It was heavier than he expected. He loosened the drawstring and looked inside — small flat stones, each carved with a rune, smooth with what felt like long use.
He had made his decision. He was leaving tonight. He had nothing more to gain from staying and every reason to go.
And yet.
He looked at professor Abano, who was now explaining the casting method to a student two rows ahead, her hands moving with the practiced ease of someone who had done this ten thousand times and still believed in it completely.
She genuinely thinks I'm something special.
The heavy feeling settled somewhere behind his ribs without announcing itself.
These people might not be real. The Nightmare Spell had constructed this scenario from history, populated it with figures who were not truly alive in any meaningful sense.
He knew that. He had been reminding himself of it since he arrived.
But they did actually live once. And they had died. Was he feeling guilt?
"Mr. Gaemond." Abano appeared beside his desk with much enthusiasm. "I would like you to go first."
Of course she did.
"Of course, Professor," he said.
She spread a square of dark cloth across his desk and stepped back — but not far. She stayed close, her hands clasped in front of her, her expression carefully composed into something that was trying very hard not to be desperate. Close enough to observe. Close enough to reach out and touch the cloth if she wanted to.
Hermes looked at the pouch of rune stones in his hand.
Well here goes nothing, thought Hermes to himself as he cast the runes.
They scattered across the dark cloth in a loose pattern, some face up, some face down, some clustered and some isolated at the edges. He stared at them without any particular understanding of what he was looking at.
He looked up at Abano.
She wasn't looking at him anymore.
She was looking at the runes.
The carefully composed expression had gone. She stood very still, her eyes moving slowly across the pattern, and something in her face had shifted — not the feverish excitement he had come to expect from her but something quieter and more unsettled, like a woman who had spent her entire life pointing at a distant cloud and had just felt the first drop of rain.
Her lips moved. He couldn't hear what she was saying.
"Professor?" he said quietly.
She didn't respond immediately. Her eyes continued their slow careful circuit of the runes, pausing here and there, her brow drawn together.
The class had gone silent.
"Professor Abano," said a boy near the back. "What does it say?"
Abano looked up.
"Invasion," she said quietly. "Destruction. An old protection overcome."
For a moment nobody said anything.
Then the room erupted.
"Oh how convenient," came a voice from the middle of the class, sharp with barely concealed contempt. "The professor who claims to be a seer just happens to interpret the reading in a way that perfectly matches the vision her favourite student already described. What a remarkable coincidence."
Approving murmurs rippled through the room.
"They planned this," someone else said, not bothering to lower their voice. "Obviously. She told him what to say in the first lesson and now she's reading exactly what she wants to see. It's embarrassing."
"It's fraud is what it is," muttered another.
"Enough," Abano said sharply. But her voice lacked its usual force and the class felt it.
"With respect, Professor," said a carefully measured voice from the front row, "can you explain why your interpretation differs so completely from what anyone else would read in that pattern? Because from here it looks like a perfectly ordinary casting."
"Because you lack the ability to read it properly," Abano said. The words came out more wearily than angrily. "A seer does not simply look at the runes. A seer feels the resonance between them."
"Or," said the boy in the middle of the class, "a seer makes up whatever story she needs to justify her salary."
Several people laughed. Others had the grace to look uncomfortable without actually disagreeing.
Hermes said nothing.
He was looking at Abano.
She wasn't arguing anymore. She was looking at the rune pattern on his desk with that same quiet unsettled expression and he realised with some discomfort that she wasn't performing. Whatever she had seen in those runes had genuinely shaken her. She wasn't trying to convince the class. She had already moved past caring what they thought.
But she has to be wrong, he thought. She doesn't have any attributes. She's mundane. There's no possible way she actually—
And yet she looked like someone who had just seen something they hadn't expected to see.
He didn't know what to do with that. He didn't know how to hold both things at once — the certainty that she couldn't be right and the nagging uncomfortable possibility that she wasn't entirely wrong either, she did have a seer ancestor right?
For some reason, when he looked at her he remembered a Greek myth. Of a seer named Cassandra. A Trojan princess who was a priestess of Apollo. Apollo, who was love struck by Cassandra's beauty, had gifted her the power of prophecy to win her love. When she rejected him, he cursed her so that her prophecies, despite always ending up as the truth, would never be believed by anyone. She met a terrible demise later on which she had also prophesied. The Greek myths were always like that.
He had been using her from the moment she called him a seer in front of the class. He had taken her belief and her enthusiasm and her forty years of desperate hope for his own benefit.
It wasn't a particularly good feeling.
"The lesson will continue," Abano said finally, straightening. "Everyone will attempt a casting. Focus your intent clearly before you throw." She carefully gathered the edges of the cloth on Hermes's desk, folding it with the runes still in place. "This reading will be presented to the headmaster this evening."
She didn't look at him again for the rest of the lesson.
He sat with the empty desk in front of him and thought about tonight and tried very hard not to think about her face when she looked at those runes.
He mostly failed.