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Freyja twiddled her fingers, ribbons of light following her every gesture. “Then we begin.”

I gawked. “That’s it? No enrollment period? No signup with admin, no campus tour, no freshman orientation?”

“You’re adorable, Jericho Frost. That’s why I like you so much.”

She raised her hand. Her smiled dropped. Arcane light in all the colors of the visible spectrum shimmered around her fingertips.

“Prepare yourself.”

“What? Here? Right now?”

Wordlessly, without so much as a whisper or a gesture, Freyja flung her hand forward, hurling a javelin of sparkling force. Like the inside of a gemstone, or the places where the colors of a rainbow meet.

My heart pounded as I dodged and rolled out of the way. Somewhere behind me the spear of light exploded against the ground, throwing up a crater of debris, showering me in soil and bits of grass.

I sputtered, wiping my face and spitting out a clod of dirt.

“No fair! You’re taking me straight to senior-year stuff. How am I supposed to copy your magic when you’re using spells without words and gestures?”

Never mind the fact that this was a goddess casting spells straight at my face. How was I supposed to copy divine magic? Unless — was she lowering herself to mortal magics? Either way, we had to level the playing field.

Freyja’s mouth puckered. “All I’m hearing is whining, and also the part where I think you called me a senior. Very well. Something simpler to start, then.”

Her lips rushed through the incantation, her fingers a blur as she conjured a smaller bolt of magic. If the first shot was a javelin, then this was closer to an arrow. Good. At least it wouldn’t blast me into chunks on contact. And as fast as her mouth and fingers were going, at least this time I could actually glean fragments of a spell to copy.

“What have you learned about the principle of projectile nullification?” Freyja suddenly asked.

“A lecture, now?” I shouted.

My mind raced through the scraps of arcane knowledge I’d gleaned over the years: photocopied pages, notes scrawled on the back of napkins, what little that counted as my informal education.

“That, um, if two magical projectiles — bolts, orbs, whatever — meet in a head-on collision, and they’re of roughly equal power, there’s a good chance they’ll dissipate on contact. They’ll just snuff each other out.”

“Excellent. Which means that you won’t have to waste your arcane essence on a shielding spell, provided your aim is true. Information that may be far more useful if you knew how to cast your own projectiles and shields to begin with.”

I would have scoffed, but I had nothing to stand on. The lady was right. If anything, I should have been begging her to teach me the fundamentals of casting instead.

“With all that said, let’s see you handle this.”

She flung her arm forward, casting the arrow straight at me. Though smaller, this missile flew far faster. Blood thumped in my temples as I recited and copied what I remembered of her spell. I flicked my wrist, casting a smaller, less flashy version of her projectile, the colors not as crisp, its tip not as sharp.

It sang through the air to meet Freyja’s arrow. The missiles sparked and sizzled as they clashed in midair, then vanished with a loud crack.

“Hell yeah,” I whooped. “I did it!”

“Indeed,” Freyja said, eyes dull, voice impassive. “Again.”

“What? Right now?”

She didn’t repeat herself. She repeated her spell instead. Freyja slung an arrow from each hand, a twinned volley of deadly god-fire. Her blank expression, the ruthlessness of her every incantation, the precision of her gestures — this was a goddess of magic at work. And this was her holding back.

Each time, I snatched her magic out of the air and met it with my own duplicate. By the end of the last copy, my head was throbbing, my casting arm numb and limp. How was I supposed to go on a mission with Morrow in this state?

“Hold up,” I cried out, forming my two hands into the letter T. “Time out. I thought you said you were going to teach me how to copy divine magic. I already know how to copy the regular stuff. Why don’t you use your goddess powers on me so I can learn how?”

Freyja quirked an eyebrow. I thought I glimpsed the faintest trace of admiration in her eyes.

“Who said I wasn’t?”