CHAPTER ONE

You should be writing. hexing people who tell you that you should be writing.

—NOTE ON THE BLACKBOARD IN THE MAGE STUDENT COPY ROOM, EDITED IN ANOTHER HAND

THE CLASSROOM DOOR SHIMMERED, AND I SCOWLED AT IT. Twenty minutes ago, the door had been normal. Mundane, even. A steel slab with a hydraulic hinge that had a nasty habit of seeming to swing slowly shut before slamming all at once. It opened onto a fluorescent-lit room overstuffed with motley desks and accessorized with a decrepit whiteboard. Inside, I’d drawn my containment circle using a piece of chalk pilfered from the lecture hall down the way and cast my working. Then, I’d stepped out for a coffee.

Now, two minutes late to my own class, I pressed my palm to the door and felt a frizzle of static ghost its way up my arm and into my hair. My bangs went blowsy. I swatted them out of my eyes and shook the sting from my hand.

So much for making a professional first impression.

Of all the ill-starred winter terms I’d experienced in this program, this one was already well on its way to being the worst, and it was only day one. If I was being fair, it wasn’t the door’s fault. Someone else teaching in this room had thrown up a ward to penalize late students. I was going to have to take it down, or spend the next ten weeks fighting with it. But I wasn’t in the mood to be fair. Not with an 8 a.m. class to teach and a meeting with my advisor immediately after.

Sighing, I levered the door handle down and pushed through the field of prickling magic. Thirty-five

heads—according to my course roster—swiveled in my direction as I stalked toward the front of the room. I pretended not to notice them, smoothing my bangs with my fingertips in an effort to compose myself.

“Hey! The professor’s going to be here any minute, dude. Stop messing around,” someone called out.

As a young, femme, and heavily tattooed instructor who habitually dressed in faded jeans and the nicest clean top I could find in the laundry basket—today’s wasn’t wrinkled . . . much—I was used to that reaction. Instead of replying, I set my satchel on the long table that served as the room’s makeshift lectern and fished out a dry-erase marker.

Concerned whispers soughed through the room. I ignored them, scrawling information on the board:

Spell Composition I

Under that, I added:

Ms. Dorothe Bartleby (she/her)

As I wrote, the whispers quieted until the only sounds were the squeaking of my marker and the high-pitched flickering of the fluorescent lights.

When both my nerves and the room were well and truly calm, I turned back around with a flourishing bow that triggered the working I’d cast earlier.

Students gasped and giggled as syllabi winked into existence above each occupied desk and slowly fluttered into place. They wouldn’t be as impressed if they knew my housemate, Cy, had given me his spell for the working just a couple days earlier. Still, their delighted bafflement was almost enough to make me smile, despite the morning’s irritations.

“My name is Dorothe Bartleby, but you can call me Ms. B.”

I paused to gesture at the board. “I teach Spell Composition I. If you’re here for another class, this is your cue to exit.”

A couple of students scurried out of the room as inconspicuously as possible. Which of course meant that the sound of their packing, bags zipping, and sneakered tiptoeing on the waxed vinyl flooring was so loud it was pointless to continue until the capricious classroom door swung shut behind them.

The remaining thirty-three or so students watched me warily. Smiling, I reached for my heavily annotated copy of the syllabus.

“This course is part of a learning community with Ms. Darya

Watkins’s Herbalism 101. The work you do in Spell Composition I will complement your work in that class. By the end of the term, you will have drafted and revised two academic-quality spells.”

The corresponding groan came from nowhere and everywhere at once, an overwhelming expression of sentiment that shuddered me back into freshman year. My shoulders tensed with the sense-memory of panicked drafting, late-night grappling with the arcane rules of the Mage Language Coven’s style guide, the growing certainty I’d never be a real practitioner because I couldn’t even format my grimoire citations correctly on the battered electric typewriter I used for my assignments.

I took a breath and dropped my shoulders, forcing myself to focus on the students in front of me. Someone had helped me, and I would help them. They might still hate the class at the end. Hec, most of them probably would. It was a gen-ed, designed for gatekeeping and consequently loathed by the student population. But they’d make it through. I’d see them through.

Quiet settled in as I regarded them.

Tangled auras, pained grimaces, sleep-crusted eyes . . . This group was so starkly different from last term’s Spell Composition I students that I couldn’t help a sudden rush of sympathy. There was something special about the off-cycle students, the unwieldy or unlucky or un . . .something few who’d fallen out of the campus’s natural rhythm. And it wasn’t just that I had recently become one of them.

Students who took this course in fall term, as admin recommended, tended to be bright eyed and happy-go-lucky, brimming with the magic of sun-dappled October days and pumpkin-flavored beverages. But it was January, skies glowering with rain clouds, and these students were in for a bumpier ride. They knew it. And they’d persist, despite it.

I looked at them and they looked back at me, wearily expectant.

“Most of my students come to class with a very specific preconceived notion,” I told them. “Maybe it’s self-imposed, or maybe it’s something you were told again and again until it stuck.”

I stalked back to the board and scrawled a giant number across it.

“According to our preclass survey, eighty-five percent of you self-identify as ‘bad spell writers.’ That’s bullshit.”

The class gasped and tittered.

“You’ve been hexed, or hexed yourselves, into believing one of the biggest lies in academia—that there’s only one kind of ‘good spell writing,’ or that only certain kinds of practitioners can be good spell writers. Bull. Shit.”

Fewer titters this time, because I’d gotten their attention. Hexing was a serious accusation—workings intended to cause harm violated the student code—and right about now they’d be trying to sort out whether I meant it literally or metaphorically. The thing was, it didn’t matter whether someone had literally hexed them to think of themselves as bad spell writers. The only thing that signified was that 85 percent of them did. It was part of the story they’d learned to tell about themselves. And reality reshapes itself around stories.

“Does anyone have a hunch about why I’d say that?”

Silence. Stillness. As though I was a predator who could only hunt when prey was in motion or making sound. I folded my arms and waited, even though the approximately seven seconds that went by felt like an eternity.

Finally, a hand climbed skyward.

“Yes? You in the striped shirt. What’s your name?”

“Alse. Um, Alse Hathorne.”

“Hi, Alse. Any thoughts?”

“Well . . .” Alse fidgeted with their glasses and scrunched their face, as if uncertain whether their thoughts were worth sharing. “It’s okay to speculate. Take a wild guess.”

Alse huffed. “Okay, thanks. It’s just . . . When you said spell writing isn’t just one thing, it made me wonder what actually counts. Like, am I writing when I’m flipping through old grimoires for research? Does daydreaming about what I want my spell to do count?”

Their tone was half-sincere, half-sarcastic, but I could work with that. I smiled, waiting to see if any of their classmates had a response before sharing mine.

A blonde in a pink tie-dye T-shirt waved, excited.

“Um, yeah, Reed here. Like, are we writing when we select spell ingredients?”

More hands flew up, and for a little while I forgot it was an ill-starred term. I lost myself in discussion.

BLEAK REALITY CROWDED BACK IN AS MY STUDENTS FILED OUT OF THE classroom. In a matter of minutes, my advisor would be giving me the come-to-Hecate talk I’d been dreading since last term. Her email yesterday hadn’t said that, but I could read between the lines of her vague Let’s chat. Can you stop by my office tomorrow?

A knot formed in my stomach as I repacked my satchel.

Every mage student got two attempts—and only two—to pass the Branch and Field exam, our program’s version of the qualifying exam that marked the transition from coursework to dissertation work. I’d failed my first attempt, and this term I’d get one last chance to convince my committee that I had what it took to be a mage.

Except, I wasn’t certain I believed it anymore. I had magic, sure. I was one of the lucky few born with the ability to see past consensus reality to other possibilities. But I didn’t belong here. Not really. Not in the way my housemates did. They were stars in their respective branches, innovating and winning awards. I was squarely middle-of-the-pack among my fellow Thaumaturgy students. A mediocre practitioner in a branch that I’d heard laughingly referred to as the underwater basket weaving of Magic more times than I could count. It wasn’t true. Thaumaturgy was so much more than a catchall for the bits and bobs of magical scholarship that weren’t interesting or important enough to make it into the curricula of Necromancy or Alchemy or even Divination. But my branch’s undeserved reputation didn’t help my confidence.

And now Professor Husik wanted to chat. She was going to tell me I didn’t get a second attempt, after all. That my first try had been so egregiously bad the committee wanted me to pack my things and go. I was so engrossed in the thought that it took me a minute to notice the student who’d stopped in front of my desk, smiling nervously. I blinked a few times, forcing myself to refocus. 

“Sorry—”I dredged my memory for the student’s name “—Alse. Do you have a question?”

Alse rummaged in their bag. “Not a question, really, just, uh—”

They handed me a piece of paper and backed away quickly, as if the slightly crumpled page was actually a detonation charm. A ghost of static tickled up my arm as I skimmed the photocopied text, achingly aware that I was going to have to sprint to my advisor’s office to make it on time.

It was an accommodation letter. The requests were common ones: time and a half on exams, an extra week to compose spells, use of an object-based sensory working to manage attention and focus.

I looked up. Alse had used the time to shrink into themself. 

“Thank you.” If only I could will away their nerves with my smile. “I know these letters don’t always give me a full picture of how I can best support you. I’d love to chat about that. Can you make it to my office hours today?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“My last professor nearly exploded when I gave her the letter.”

I couldn’t help but wince. Some faculty took the letters as a personal affront, rather than expressions of students’ desire to be able to actually do the work.

“Is everything okay?”

Alse shrugged. “Sure.” Their tone wasn’t convincing, but every nerve in my body was shouting at me to get moving.

“Okay, good. The directions to my office are in the syllabus. Now, I apologize, but I have to run to another meeting.”

I was halfway down the hall and already out of breath by the time that traitorous classroom door slammed behind me. When it slammed again, signaling Alse’s departure, I’d rounded the corner and hauled open the stairwell door.

I swore under my breath as I climbed. Most elevators on campus were too old and slow to be relied on in a rush. But teleportation wasn’t an option—not even for disabled students.

A group of them had lobbied administration for a change to the policy last year. Their requests were met with a volley of excuses. Teleportation was banned in the student code of conduct due to its disruptive nature and disrespect to the hallowed halls and grounds of this fine institution. It was federally restricted. Over and above all that, though, it was expensive.

I shoved the thought aside, taking the stairs two at a time. I had until the last full moon of term to pass my exam and convince my committee, and myself, that I deserved to be here. That I was ready to advance to mage candidacy, write my dissertation, and join the ranks of full mages out in the world.

I didn’t have time to worry about anyone else’s problems. Even without my advisor’s cryptic summons, I had more than enough of my own.

Excerpted from Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd. © 2025 by Courtney Floyd, used with permission from HarperCollins/MIRA Books.

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