Bartido Ballentyne didn't exactly walk up to the library table when two of his fellow apprentices were sitting. "Saunter" was a better description, that posture of confidence and assumed superiority that ended up with so many fashionable young nobles headed off to the dueling ground when the itch to slap them in the face grew too intense to resist.

Somehow, Margarita Surprise decided, he made it work.

"Afternoon!" he said cheerily, pulling out a chair. "Hiram, Margarita, Surely."

"Good afternoon," Margarita's frog responded from his perch on her head.

"Hey, Bartido," the girl herself said, looking up from her grimoire.

"We're trying to study here, Bartido," said Hiram Menthe. He was of a considerably less insouciant and frivolous mindset than Bartido. He was also testier than usual because Ms. Opalneria Rain, the Necromancy professor for whom he'd conceived an enormous crush that he honestly believed Margarita and Bartido hadn't noticed, was away from the Magic Academy for a week.

"I see that. Vergriff's Essence of Philosophy, is it? Weighty stuff."

"We can't all spend our days scouring love poetry for pick-up lines."

Bartido swung his body into the chair.

"Hiram, if you're looking to other people to write your words for when you talk to women, then you've already lost. Especially since anyone you're likely to romance has probably already read the great love poetry if she's at all the type to be affected. So repeating anything from the classics will either be worthless or prove very embarrassing."

Hiram's color rose, not exactly a blush, but enough that Margarita successfully deduced that Hiram was by no means as good at keeping Bartido from seeing his reading material as he perhaps thought he was.

"I suppose I can't deny the voice of experience."

"Not if you're smart," Bartido agreed with a grin. "I tried out a couple of the lines from Fairclough's Folly on a young lady when I was fifteen and lost my best shirt because of it. Which is another tip: never make clumsy advances at a girl who is holding a glass of red wine."

Margarita snickered at that. The ladies of the upper crust, it seemed, were little different in spirit than those of her rustic home village.

"Is there a point to all this?"

"Yes! Since you've decided to be quite the grumpy goose for us today, I've decided to cheer you up with a card trick."

On that cue, he took a pack of cards out of his vest pocket.

"Like the last time, when you started playing around with teleportation magic?"

"That wasn't a conjuring trick, Hiram; it was an experiment in psychology, like I told you at the time."

"An experiment in making me yank my hair out in frustration!"

"Well, this is an experiment in entertaining you with amazement. Watch." He opened the box, took out the cards, and spread them face-up in a fan, showing the myriad of black and gold images, then squared the deck, turned it over, and pushed it across to Hiram.

"Go on; shuffle the cards. Mix them all up."

Reluctantly, for he could see himself ending up as the butt of some joke, Hiram took the cards and shuffled them with mechanical precision.

"All right; they're shuffled. What now?"

"Cut the cards wherever you like and take the top card, but don't let me see it."

Hiram cut and found himself holding the four of swords.

"Now, what I want you to do is to make that card absolutely your own. I want you to fill your thoughts with it, and I want you to communicate that sense of ownership, that essence of yourself onto the card itself."

"That makes no sense."

"On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. Go on, press the card to your forehead and really think hard about what your card is. We're going to imprint that card with the aura of your soul, so that one card out of all the others carries with it your individual nature. Picture it, think of nothing but that card…all right. Go ahead, put it back into the deck, and shuffle it up again."

Hiram obeyed, passing the deck over. Margarita glanced back and forth between the two young men, a smile twitching on her lips as she tried to imagine what would come next.

"All right, then," Bartido said. "If this works, then you've gone and fixed one card only with your essence, the sense of 'Hiram' that separates you from everyone else. You've painted the card with your soul, as it were, and I ought to be able to recognize it."

"You do know that's nonsense, don't you? Souls don't work that way."

Bartido shrugged.

"Well, I'm only an alchemist. The magic of the soul is more your field. But, let's just see if it works. You've heard that sometimes people can do something precisely because they don't know that it's supposedly impossible?"

"Hm. Well, you were admitted here, so there might be something to your theory."

Margarita snickered again.

"…I probably asked for that one," Bartido decided. He took the deck, flipped it over, and fanned out the cards once more. Slowly, he moved his hand, fingers outstretched and palm down, over the cards but without touching them. Seconds ticked by, one after the other, as Surely and the apprentices kept their eyes riveted on him. At last, his forefinger dipped, touching one card, and slid that card out of the fan.

"Is this it? The four of swords?"

Hiram stared at him, dumbfounded; Margarita clapped.

"How did you do that? These cards are all different, and I definitely mixed them thoroughly both before and after. You couldn't have known what I picked!"

"I told you, Hiram; it's the magic of the soul."

"That's impossible!" He scooped up the cards, then began to look them over closely, examining the backs for markings, but found none. He looked back up at Bartido, squinting from behind his spectacles. "You're using some trick like you did last time!"

"I told you that," Bartido repeated, which obviously wasn't what Hiram wanted to hear.

"Not your silly story about soul magic!" He pushed himself back from the table and stood up. The cards were still in his hand and he shook them dramatically towards Bartido. "There's something about these that's letting you know what I picked, and I'm going to find out what!"

He whirled on his foot and marched straight out of the library.

"Do you know," Bartido mused, "I don't think he gets annoyed at being fooled by the card trick so much as he does at the ridiculous stories I tell to explain what's going on. That boy's character just isn't suited for handling nonsense. He probably should have seen more puppet shows as a kid."

"It must have taken a while to set that up," Margarita said. She'd been able to tell at once how the trick was done, of course; she could hardly have avoided it. "Did you do the work all by yourself?"

"Oh, definitely. Dr. Chartreuse wouldn't waste his time on something like this; he's nearly as uptight as Hiram in that way. I hated to use it up now, really, but frankly, I wanted to read that book, and Hiram would be all over it until at least tomorrow if I didn't do something." He suited his actions to his words, stretched out his hand, and picked up the abandoned book and began to read.

Intriguing, Margarita thought. So he's interested in the magical principles behind the Philosopher's Stone, too?

Just maybe, Bartido Ballentyne bore watching.

~X X X~

Hiram stormed through the halls on his way to Ms. Opalneria's laboratory. If Bartido thought that he could pawn off some absurd tale—No, wait, he cut himself off. Maybe I should talk to Dr. Chartreuse. Bartido's specialty is Alchemy. I know that stuff he was saying about souls is nonsense, so why should I let it make me waste my time running a bunch of Necromancy tests?

"Ah!"

Reality came crashing in on him, and he realized that in his haste he'd collided with Amoretta Virgine as the homunculus came around a corner.

"I'm so sorry, Amoretta," he said, extending a hand to help her up. "I was upset and not watching where I was going. Are you all right?"

"I think so," she said.

"That's good to hear. Even so, I am sorry; I should never have let my feelings turn me into a traffic hazard."

"It's all right," she said, allowing him to assist her back to her feet. Her cat, actually a grimalkin that had started tagging along with her a couple of weeks ago, hissed and spat. Hiram was weak in Sorcery, so he wasn't able to tell what the devil-cat had actually said, but he was fairly certain that it was not full of the spirit of forgiveness.

"Hiram, is it all right if I ask you something?" Amoretta said, staring up at him with wide red eyes.

Bartido or Margarita would have probably pointed out that she already had just asked a question, but Hiram wasn't prone to pointing out that sort of thing at someone else's expense.

"Certainly. It's the least I can do after crashing into you as I did."

"Well…it's just that I've never seen something like it before, and I was wondering why it is that you have '4SW' written in glowing letters on your forehead?"

He paused, then blinked, taking in her words, then realizing what they meant.

"Bartido!"