I knew there wouldn’t be one for me. We weren’t close to any other families with wizard kids: the couple of times Mum tried to arrange for us to play together when I was little didn’t go amazingly well. And she wouldn’t have been able to pay someone to give up some of their allotment to bring me a letter. The only thing she had to barter that would be worth as much as a gram’s allowance to another wizard would’ve been her healing, and she doesn’t charge for healing. She told me she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get me anything, and I’d told her it was all right.

But even knowing, I would have been there anyway, and this time I even got to enjoy it vicariously. Aadhya was given a letter by a black girl with her hair in a million braids—each one with a tiny enchanted protection bead at the end, really clever idea. Liu brought over her cousins to introduce them to me, two carbon-copy boys with bowl cuts who bowed really politely like I was a grown-up, and I suppose I was, to them: they were a head and a half shorter than me, with soft round-cheeked faces. Their parents had probably been all but force-feeding them like geese in preparation.

And then a boy with a voice that hadn’t quite finished breaking called, uncertainly, “I’ve got a note from Gwen Higgins?” I didn’t hear it the first time, but there was a little lull after, as people heard it, and he said it again.

Aadhya had come over, bringing both her letter and the black girl, from Newark, whose name was Pamyla—one of the reasons parents will have their kids spend a tiny bit of their precious weight allowance on a letter is that they know they’ll get an automatic older friend on the other side in return. “Do you think it’s that Gwen Higgins? Does she have a kid in here?” Pamyla said to Aadhya, sounding hopeful.

Aadhya just made a shrugging expression. Liu was shaking her head. “If she does, they’re keeping quiet; everyone would be on them for healing magic, I guess.”

Then the boy said, “For her daughter Galadriel?” and both of them—along with the handful of other people around who’d been paying enough attention to hear him—gave me a double take, and then Aadhya shoved me in the shoulder, indignantly. Several other people were having a furtive look around the cafeteria like they thought maybe there was some other girl named Galadriel in the place. I gritted my teeth and went over. Even the kid looked doubtfully up at me.

“I’m Galadriel,” I said shortly, and held out my hand: he put a tiny little thing almost like a shelled hazelnut into my palm, probably not even the weight of a single gram. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Aaron?” he said, like he wasn’t completely sure. “I’m from Manchester?”

“Well, come on,” I said, and gave him a jerk of my head, leading him back past a bunch of staring faces. There wasn’t really an escape from them, though: Aadhya and Liu were eyeing me themselves, Aadhya with a narrowed look that suggested I was in for another good long lecture as soon as she got me alone. I introduced Aaron to the others a bit grudgingly, and he and the other three freshmen started talking; Liu’s cousins both spoke English without the slightest hitch, and as fluently as either he or Pamyla did. Aadhya had a small sheet of enchanted gold leaf in her letter: she showed it to us gleefully. “I’ll put this round the argonet-tooth pegs, on the lute.”

Liu had an almost flat postage-stamp-sized tin crammed full of a fragrant balm that she let us each use a tiny touch of, dipping the tips of our pinkie fingers in and rubbing it on the bottom edge of our lower lip. “It’s my grandmother’s poison catcher,” she said. “It lasts a month or so if you’re careful about brushing your teeth. If you feel your lip tingle when you start to put something in your mouth, don’t eat it.”

And all of that was what induction meant to everyone. A tiny infusion of hope, of love and care; a reminder that there’s something on the other side of this, a whole world on the other side. Where your friends share whatever has come to them, and you share back. Only that had never been induction for me. It was the first time I’d ever been on the inside of it, and my eyes were prickling. I had to fight not to put my tongue out and lick the balm over and over.

Orion joined us with his own mail already in his hand, a fat envelope and a small bag, and whispered to me in a cheerful singsong under his breath, “Busted,” slinging his arm around my neck and grinning at me. I made a face at him, but I couldn’t help smiling a little myself as I carefully unrolled my very own letter—a single tiny strip of onion skin so thin it was translucent, which had been rolled up into a bead not much bigger than the ones Pamyla had on the ends of her hair. It had faint folding lines scored along the length, one every inch: marks for tearing the sheet into pieces to eat. When I held it to my mouth and breathed in, I got the smell of honey and elderflower: Mum’s spell for refreshment of the spirit. Even just that one breath of it was good; I swallowed down a hard lump of happiness that warmed my belly as I brought the strip down again to squint through it. Mum’s writing on it was so small and faint that it took me a second to puzzle out the single line.

My darling girl, I love you, have courage, my mother wrote, and keep far away from Orion Lake.

      For lim, a bringer of light in dark place