“Kraem. No. Not like this.” Kilvin growled out a couple words and pounded his fist on the table, each thump as his hand came down was accompanied by a staccato burst of reddish light that welled up from his hand. “No sympathy. I do not want an ever-glowng lamp. I want an ever-burning one.” He looked at me again showing his teeth, as if he were going to eat me.

“Lithium salt?” I asked without thinking, then backpedaled. “No, a sodium oil that burned in an enclosed ... no, damn.” I mumbled my way to a stop. The other applicants hadn’t had to deal with questions like these.

He cut me off with a short sideways gesture of his hand. “Enough. We will talk later. Elxa Dal.”

It took me a moment to remember that Elxa Dal was the next master. I turned to him. He looked like the archetypal sinister magician that seems to be a requirement in so many bad Aturan plays. Severe dark eyes, lean face, short black beard. For all that, his expression was friendly enough. “What are the words for the first parallel kinetic binding?”

I rattled them off glibly.

He didn’t seem surprised. “What was the binding that Master Kilvin used just a moment ago?”

“Capacatorial Kinetic Luminosity.”

“What is the synodic period?”

I looked at him oddly. “Of the moon?” The question seemed a little out of sync with the other two.

He nodded.

“Seventy-two and a third days, sir. Give or take a bit.”

He shrugged and gave a wry smile, as if he’d expected to catch me with the last question. “Master Hemme?”

Hemme looked at me over steepled fingers. “How much mercury would it take to reduce two gills of white sulfur?” he asked pompously, as if I’d already given the wrong answer.

One of the things I’d learned during my hour of quiet observation was this: Master Hemme was the king-high bastard of the lot. He took delight in student’s discomfort and did everything he could to badger and unsettle them. He had a fondness for trick questions.

Luckily, this was one I had watched him use on other students. You see, you can’t reduce white sulfur with mercury. “Well,” I drew the word out, pretending to think it through. Hemme’s smug smile grew wider by the second. “Assuming you mean red sulfur, it would be about forty-one ounces. Sir.” I smiled a sharp smile at him. All teeth.

“Name the nine prime fallacies,” he snapped.

“Simplification. Generalization. Circularity. Reduction. Analogy. False causality. Semantism. Irrelevancy....”I paused, not being able to remember the formal name of the last one. Ben and I had called it Nalt, after Emperor Nalto. It galled me, not being able to recall its real name, as I had read it in Rhetoric and Logic just a few days ago.

My irritation must have shown on my face. Hemme glowered at me as I paused, saying. “So you don’t know everything after all?” He leaned back into his seat with a satisfied expression.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I had anything to learn,” I said bitingly before I managed to get my tongue under control again. From the other side of the table, Kilvin gave a deep chuckle.

Hemme opened his mouth, but the Chancellor silenced him with a look before he could say anything else. “Now then,” the Chancellor began, “I think—”

“I too would ask some questions,” the man to the Chancellor’s right said. He had an accent that I couldn’t quite place. Or perhaps it was that his voice held a certain resonance. When he spoke, everyone at the desk stirred slightly, then grew still, like leaves touched by the wind.

“Master Namer,” the Chancellor said with equal parts deference and trepidation.

Elodin was younger than the others by at least a dozen years. Cleanshaven with deep eyes. Medium height, medium build, there was nothing particularly striking about him, except for the way he sat at the table, one moment watching something intently, the next minute bored and letting his attention wander among the high beams of the ceiling above. He was almost like a child who had been forced to sit down with adults.

I felt Master Elodin look at me. Actually felt it, I suppressed a shiver. “So-heketh ka Siaru krema’teth tu?” he asked. How well do you speak Siaru?

“Rieusa, ta krelar deala tu.” Not very well, thank you.

He lifted a hand, his index finger pointing upward. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

I paused for a moment, which was more consideration than the question seemed to warrant. “At least one,” I said. “Probably no more than six.”

He broke into a broad smile and brought his other hand up from underneath the table, it had two fingers upright. He waved them back and forth for the other masters to see, nodding his head from side to side in an absent, childish way Then he lowered his hands to the table in front of him, and grew suddenly serious. “Do you know the seven words that will make a woman love you?”

I looked at him, trying to decide if there was more to the question. When nothing more was forthcoming, I answered simply, “No.”

“They exist.” He reassured me, and sat back with a look of contentment. “Master Linguist?” He nodded to the Chancellor.

“That seems to cover most of academia,” the Chancellor said almost to himself. I had the impression that something had unsettled him, but he was too composed for me to tell exactly what. “You will forgive me if I ask a few things of a less scholarly nature?”

Having no real choice, I nodded.

He gave me a long look that seemed to stretch several minutes. “Why didn’t Abenthy send a letter of recommendation with you?”

I hesitated. Not all traveling entertainers are as respectable as our troupe, so, understandably, not everyone respected them. But I doubted that lying was the best course of action. “He left my troupe three years ago. I haven’t seen him since.”

I saw each of the masters look at me. I could almost hear them doing the mental arithmetic, calculating my age backward.

“Oh come now,” Hemme said disgustedly and moved as if he would stand.

The Chancellor gave him a dark look, silencing him. “Why do you wish to attend the University?”

I stood dumbfounded. It was the one question I was completely unprepared for. What could I say? Ten thousand books. Your Archives. I used to have dreams of reading there when I was young. True, but too childish. I want revenge against the Chandrian. Too dramatic. To become so powerful that no one will ever be able to hurt me again. Too frightening.

I looked up to the Chancellor and realized I’d been quiet for a long while. Unable to think of anything else, I shrugged and said, “I don’t know, sir. I guess I’ll have to learn that too.”

The Chancellor’s eyes had taken on a curious look by this point but he pushed it aside as he said, “Is there anything else you would like to say?” He had asked the question of the other applicants, but none of them had taken advantage of it. It seemed almost rhetorical, a ritual before the masters discussed the applicant’s tuition.

“Yes, please,” I said, surprising him. “I have a favor to ask beyond mere admission.” I took a deep breath, letting their attention settle on me. “It has taken me nearly three years to get here. I may seem young, but I belong here as much, if not more, than some rich lordling who can’t tell salt from cyanide by tasting it.”

I paused. “However, at this moment I have two jots in my purse and nowhere in the world to get more than that. I have nothing worth selling that I haven’t already sold.

“Admit me for more than two jots and I will not be able to attend. Admit me for less and I will be here every day, while every night I will do what it takes to stay alive while I study here. I will sleep in alleys and stables, wash dishes for kitchen scraps, beg pennies to buy pens. I will do whatever it takes.” I said the last words fiercely, almost snarling them.