The past week, when Ty was not in classes, they had been experimenting with timed intervals in which Livvy moved progressively farther and farther away from Ty. Dimmet Tarn was only just past the Scholomance, less than a quarter of a mile away from Ty’s room, but it was the farthest Livvy had ventured. She’d hovered over the surface of the water for so long she had almost begun to feel hypnotized by the unmoving black stillness beneath her. She had been able to see the reflection of leafless trees on the tarn, but no matter how close she pressed her face to the flat inky surface of the water, she had not been able to see herself. She could see her hand if she held it out, but not the reflection of her hand, and that had made her feel very strange. So instead she looked only at the water and tried to let go of all her unhappinesses and worries. The only thing to hold on to was Ty.

So eventually she had withdrawn her attention from Dimmet Tarn and she had come back to him. She said, “I would have liked to see a Carpathian lynx.”

“They’re endangered,” Ty said. “And very shy.”

“And I am very invisible,” Livvy said. “So I feel my chances are quite good. But please mark down that Dimmet Tarn is quite an ordinary tarn. Those old stories, I think, must be only that. Stories.”

“Further investigation required, let us say,” Ty said. “I will continue to do research in the library.”

They had picked Dimmet Tarn as a destination for Livvy not only because the distance was a useful measure but because there were lots of interesting stories about Dimmet Tarn among the other students at the Scholomance. It had once been a place of great uncanniness, supposedly, but none of the stories were in agreement as to the nature of its uncanniness. Some stories said that it was once a place beloved of the faeries. Others said that there was a great clutch of demonic eggs far down at the bottom of the tarn, so deep down that no sounding rope could give a true measure. Another story said that an unhappy warlock had enchanted the water so that to swim in it would curse the swimmer with a toe fungus that eventually hatched miniature blue and green toadstools, which sounded improbable, but then warlocks were often improbably petty. It was one of the potential side effects of immortality. You got very bad at letting go of things.

“Did you try to submerge yourself?” Ty asked.