Nevertheless, both ladies manage to fall back asleep, just not as well as they could have, probably because their brains are still processing the sheer volume of knowledge they might have absorbed in the dream walk.

  The following morning, Nurcan is awakened by a wind gust close to her cabin. Said gust also blows some snow away from the cabin’s door.

  “Look out!” Jannat yells at her parents.

  “Maybe it’s another karakoncolos or some other creature!” Nurcan yells at her family, trembling in fear.

  “Honey, it doesn’t look like a creature, but rather a freezing witch who might be lost among the fog!” Vincent tells her after looking out of the cabin’s window.

  Outside their cabin, it seems like a witch on a flying carpet landed with the snow to smooth out her fall. She struggles to get back up, trembling in the cold and snow outside. And the carpet is not rolled over.

  Finally, another witch: in Istanbul I could meet with a lot of wizards, discuss things such as the latest developments in medicine as well as in potions. Here all I have is Nurcan and the kids: sometimes it’s nice to meet another wizard, Vincent starts lamenting while verifying whether he might fall into some trap.

  That witch goes straight for Nurcan. “Oh, Miss Irad-I Cedid! It’s been a while since we last met!”

  “What’s your name, please?”

  “Taalia!”

  “Well met, I’m Vincent; do you want any coffee?” he asks Taalia.

  “Yes, please…”

  “If you could please just not talk about the Irad-I Cedid to people outside this cabin, it would be well-appreciated!”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me, I might be a geomancer-architect, but I stayed out of it!” Taalia explains to the family.

  “Mom, what’s a geomancer?” Yusuf asks them.

  While Vincent brews the coffee, Taalia starts discussing geomancy in a construction context, what she’s been up to, such as building konaks for wizards in the Levant, after the Acre aqueduct project was stalled at al-Jazzar’s death. And, of course, discussing other aspects of their past Vincent asks the two ladies.

  “Both her and I went on exchange under the Nizam-I Cedid Exchange Program!”

  “Nurcan never told me about the Nizam-I Cedid exchange!” Vincent gasps. “For me, the Nizam-I Cedid was about French-style uniforms and techniques, muskets and cannons!”

  “That’s the Muggle Nizam-I Cedid; the magical one is a student exchange program…” Nurcan explains to the geomancer, for whom the Muggle Nizam-I Cedid is a memory from 1799, if that.

  “You were the only Nizam-I Cedid student to have any real interest in statecraft; everyone else went on exchange for magical expertise. While you risked Statute breaches at every turn in Istanbul, we used our expertise to build a better magical world!”

  After she starts drinking the coffee, Taalia is then absorbed into her own memories of her time attending Fenghuang, in China, under the magical Nizam-I Cedid, as a fifth-year student.

  At the same time, Nurcan starts wondering how Taalia’s life differed from hers since they graduated from Karakalem in 1794. About her traveling all over the Levant to design buildings for wizards, and perform geomancy readings for Muggle general contractors.

  “You might not be aware of it, but Russia and the Ottoman Empire are at war on the Muggle theater!” Nurcan breaks the news to Taalia.

  “Really?” Taalia gasps. “A lot of wizards consider Muggle wars as just background noise, but not me, especially not after Acre!”

  “May I have a sheet of paper please? I need to write to the Bab-I Humayun about ensuring that a magical theater doesn’t open!” Nurcan asks Taalia, in a tone of voice that leaves no doubt to her urgency. “Russia received our warning, and, knowing the Qajars, they must have delivered theirs by now…”

  “Qajars?” Jannat rolls her eyes. “Are they at war against Russia, too?”

  Taalia also rolls her eyes. “Oh, really? We never hear about Qajars in the Levant, only about the French and the British…”

  Nurcan answers both. “Yes! Speaking of the British, they are the only European power whom we can trust to keep a Muggle war out of the magical world!”

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  While the children ask geography questions that Vincent answers for them, Taalia hands a sheet of paper to Nurcan. Which she duplicates with magic so that she can have a few loose leaves to use with the children.

  Once the duplication of paper sheets is complete, she then writes about the nature of the magical secrecy risks she warned about, who she warned among the Russian magical administration, and points of contact for Bab-I Humayun officials. Pakrantiev in Kyiv, and then Vaidi in Vilnius if Pakrantiev refuses.

  When Nurcan is done writing the letter, with special instructions to make as many copies of the Risale-I Nizam-I Cedid manuscript as there would be stakeholders, she whips it out from her horse pocket so that the officials in Istanbul can make the required number of copies out of the copy she’s about to make.

  She also whips out her wand, aiming it at the leather-bound manuscript she’s about to gift for diplomatic purposes:

  “Geminio!”

  The duplicate then has the letter attached to it, and, as such, Nurcan hands the book to Taalia, who keeps answering questions the children ask about the situation in Caucasus, geomancy, as well as about Qajars.

  Once Taalia has warmed up, both due to the coffee and the cabin’s insulation, she gets the carpet out again, under the region’s fog.

  “Thank you. Now, I must go, my next gig is in Ahiska, in the Caucasus…”

  “It must not be obvious for the kids, if any, when you move around so much for your work…” Vincent sighs.

  “My family in the Levant understands it’s too dangerous to move to a war zone like Ahiska!” Taalia explains to them.

  “Goodbye…” Nurcan sighs as Taalia leaves the cabin.

  Upon leaving the cabin, Taalia puts her carpet back on the snow, eats a few dates with her cokelek, and takes off among a dense fog, flying to Ahiska to the northeast, with these documents that she’ll send to Istanbul wherever she can find a magical mailbox.

  Taalia mentioning that she found work in the Caucasus requiring her to move from the Levant triggers Nurcan. Her mind starts flashing these defters full of expenses related to preparations for war against Russia, and how the engineers on fortification sites claimed expenses for unidentified “foreign experts”.

  Why? Why does she remind me of what the Irad-I Cedid went bankrupt over, and of these poor Muggles I abandoned just a few months ago? Of what my work of the past 12 years was supposed to fund? She starts to sound way too much like she’ll work on a fortification project. But, so long as Taalia doesn’t use any visible magic on-site, Istanbul won’t realize anything! The pain of these memories starts to sear her forehead. As smart as she is, does she realize that, even if Ahiska could hold the line against Russia, it might be for nothing if the empire it’s supposed to protect is crumbling? That’s often the kind of thing even magical Nizam-I Cedid alumni, who’s supposed to represent the Empire’s academic and intellectual elite of its magical world, may not realize… but, at the same time, she made me realize that perhaps my own vision of the world made me live in a gilded cage in Istanbul for the past 12 years. Sure, I could fight abuses of iltizam and muafiyets, but I was mostly confined to Besiktas Palace, and this konak in Sihirli Mahalle, devoid of any recognition in the Muggle world.

  But then she starts crying when this realization hits her like a ton of bricks.

  “What’s wrong?” Vincent sees her crying.

  “It seems like the Risale-I Irad-I Cedid of 1789 destroyed any hopes I could have had to have the kind of life that I hoped to come to Karakalem to get!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In my first year at Karakalem, I believed I could live the life of my dreams, that I could become everything I might have wanted at the time. But no, I had to be at Beauxbatons when the Estates-General were summoned, and, because of these, I lost my shot at any kind of normalcy!” Nurcan keeps ranting. “Because of the Risale, the Sultan saw fit to make me the secret defterdar of the Irad-I Cedid, and hence I held the Empire’s destiny from day one post-graduation, in a way that not even a Muggle-born oubliette serving as a kadi in the Muggle world would have!”

  “Aren’t oubliettes supposed to maintain magical secrecy?” Vincent asks.

  “Yes. While Muggle-borns are dominant among oubliettes, not many of them could be on the legal track! They could become kadis, and the most senior of them could even lord over major cities! But most oubliettes sell potions they can disguise into medicines!”

  Vincent rolls his eyes upon hearing about “But why would the ICW allow wizards to have so much power over Muggles? The power you once held over the Imperial treasury was, yes, limited in scope, but it would have been unacceptably high if the ICW knew about that!”

  “To the ICW’s eyes, these kadis, of which there are only a handful, are officially there to enforce magical secrecy, just like any other oubliette. However, they have no reason to intervene until breaches occur! And yet, maybe other countries might not be able to use their Muggle legal systems to enforce magical secrecy the way an Ottoman kadi would…”

  “And yet, you must have realized by now that life among the circles of power in Istanbul was like living in a gilded cage with the Meclis as the other occupants…”

  “Here, in this mountain cabin, in the Surmene forest, we’re both trapped in a cage made up of snow and trees, and that you must get down to Surmene itself every week to get food, peddling analgesic potions. Here children have no other peers their age. Now, if you may excuse me, I think I need to go to bed…”

  After Nurcan burst into tears, she returns to her bed, with memories resurfacing, possibly from a dream walk. If only Alejandra or Vaidi were here with me… they must be the only two witches in Europe who lived through the exact same thing I lived through. They were both anointed their respective countries’ only magical governance hopes while still in school, robbed of their innocence too quickly for their own good by having to shoulder the burden of an entire country’s expectations. About how then-Poland-Lithuania’s Magical Sejm imposed upper-division History of Magic, taught by Mélisande, on her to grant her transfer from Durmstrang to Beauxbatons. And yet I can’t just use a dream walk to confide in Alejandra because she’s wide awake. But why am I reminded that, even as defterdar of the Irad-I Cedid, when I fought abuses of iltizam and muafiyets, I was still beholden to the Sultan and the military, and to some extent, the judiciary? That I was in a gilded cage until the Edirne Incident happened?