That was all it took. In very little time, the three of them were going back up the stairs, laden with big platters of leftovers. By this point it was all cold, of course, but they’d made sure to pick out things that were just fine eaten cold.

There was more than enough for all of them and Mags too. Rather than bother with setting the table, Mags declared a picnic, and they all ate with their hands, sitting together on the rug. And when the now empty platters were sitting outside the door to be collected by the servants, Kat and Abi went to her room. Abi had intended to study, but Kat had other plans.

“Tell me about the Healer!” she exclaimed, flopping down on Abi’s bed, when Abi had taken out the firebird feather her brother Perry had given her, and stuck it in its holder to light up her little room.

“There’s not much to tell,” she protested, but she told it all anyway. Kat listened without interrupting until she was finished.

“I guess your Gift really is something no one knows what to do with,” she said. “Trey and Niko and I all have very set lessons and exercises, and they even have Kee doing Shielding practice so he keeps his Shields up. A good thing too, or he’d probably be going crazy right now, what with Mama in labor.”

Kee had demonstrated he had Empathy—usually a Healer’s Gift—remarkably early. Fortunately, thanks to Perry among others, people had noticed before the Gift had developed enough to become a trouble for him.

“I really wish it was a normal Gift, or none at all,” Abi replied, restlessly running the hem of her tunic through her fingers. “I like things to be . . . orderly.”

“Which is why you’re going to make a great Artificer,” Kat teased. “All math and tidy numbers, where everything always works the same way every time.”

“It’s not like that,” Abi protested, except she knew it actually was like that, and that this was the reason why she was beginning to enjoy the classes she had been a bit dubious about not that long ago. If you knew the way a problem worked, then working the problem always gave you the same answer. Math was reliable.

“You can’t fool me, I’m your best friend and I’ve known you forever,” Kat reminded her.

“I wouldn’t want to fool you, except if it was a joke,” she replied. “You might order my head chopped off.”

“They won’t let me do that,” Kat giggled. “Or I swear, I’d have had Trey’s head off a long time ago. Here, read something besides musty math books,” she added, shoving something with a cover Abi didn’t recognize at her. “This just came into the Royal library, and I swiped it before anyone else could.”