"I HAVE YET to encounter any problem that logic could not solve." The young professor paces the front of her classroom. The skirts of her dress skitter around her feet, and in the back of her lecture-laden mind, she fervently hopes she won't trip on them like last semester. To that effect, she stops, folds her hands in front of her, and faces her class.

Faces might be a strong turn of phrase when, in fact, Constance Wylf rarely looks at their faces at all. She learned early on that trying and failing to decipher their various emotions only serves to distract her. (After all, how they feel about her has no bearing on the content of her lecture, except that should she suspect they feel negatively toward her, the quality of it might go down.)

The only logical thing, therefore, is to assume they are as enthusiastic as she is and look somewhere just above their heads. Today's point of focus becomes the large pointed window at the back of the class, and past that, the old Library of Gifts. It's smoking today, a dark, sparkly mist that rises from the boarded up windows and swirls into shapes like skulls. Constance frowns.

"Logic," she continues, shaking the library's habitual peculiarities off, "is the root of all modern progress. Not magic, though of course that's what you've all come here to study, and we will learn to harness magic. But magic without logic is utterly, indefensibly useless."

A slight ripple goes through the room, that sort of susurration you only get when everyone looks at their neighbor at the same time. A tiny, wry smile steals her lips.

From her lectern, she hefts a book, not much bigger than her hand, bound in green leather. Inscribed vines trail from edge to spine, and she turns its face to her class. "Who knows what this is?"

A student, a man only a handful younger than her, raises his hand. Chin up, he says, "A fairy-companion tome, professor."

She is pleasantly surprised. Many students assume that fairy tomes must be much bigger or glow or some other such nonsense. Last semester, someone thought her unassuming tome was the textbook; another, to her chagrin, guessed her diary.

She nods encouragingly—or what she hopes is encouragingly. A stray strand of hair tickles her cheek. "And do you know how it works?"

Here, he sputters and stalls. Taking pity on him, she picks up her chalk and spins to the blackboard. In large (but admittedly spidery) print, she scrawls HOW DOES MAGIC WORK? Circling it, she turns back to her class. "Let's fill in the gaps, shall we? Tell me what you know, or what you've heard, and we'll piece the truth together."

They're hesitant, but she waits, the same way her father always would when he asked her questions. Wait long enough and someone will proffer an answer, if only to break the silence.

A tentative hand goes up. "Fairies... do it?"

Her chalk strikes the air. "Excellent!" She spins and draws a line off her question to take down their answer. "Fairies are in fact the ones performing the magic. A common misconception is that we—wizards, spellists, scribes, whichever name you prefer for the people writing spells. Personally I prefer logicians." Constance draws a breath, back-tracking her runaway train of thought. "But the common misconception is that logicians do the magic. However, that is in no way the truth. I am no more magical than you or anyone." She looks over her shoulder. "What else?"

"Well," a girl says, "you have to write spells for it."

Constance nods, but before she can expand, another student interrupts. "But what about wild magic?"

"Fantastic question." On the board, she writes Structured magic requires spells and Wild magic alternative. "Structured magic, which is what you will learn in this class, and in your entire time in the Fairy Logic department, requires a well-formed spell. Wild magic is the kind of effects fae produce naturally. All the things that happen in fairy tales—the people turned into trees, the houses plucked up into the sky, the jewels spouted from a girl's mouth—are the result of wild magic. Wild magic is the antithesis of everything we do here."

Constance realizes she's pacing again, but this time she lets her feet go. "Wild magic results where human emotion meets fae power. Fairies grant heart's desires, which sounds wonderful until you realize that most human hearts' desires are flawed at best and evil at worst."

Another disgruntled ripple. Constance keeps her pace. They always disbelieve at first—people like to think themselves good. But she can prove it to them.

"Consider the tales I mentioned. The men turned into trees: what did they wish for?"

The students confer, trying to cobble together a memory. "A long life?" someone offers, as another says, "To... be at peace with nature?"

"Both are correct. One a king, the other a poet. But their desires were inherently flawed. The king wanted more life for himself; the poet wanted to flee what he considered the flaws of humanity." Constance turns on her heel. "The widow who sent her house to the sky: what did she want?"

A girl in the front row's nose scrunches up. "Didn't she just want a place to live that didn't leak?"

"That's what she said she wanted, yes. But the fae knew she wanted more than that, that she dreamed far beyond her means, and so they gave her a castle in the clouds, splendid in all aspects—except in its ability for her to reach the ground again."

Students rustle uncomfortably. Constance is stealing the delight out of their magic, she knows, and a tiny bit of guilt pricks beneath her breastbone. But delight doesn't form spells, and fantasy doesn't protect them from reality.

"Professor Wylf," one student ventures. "The girl who spoke and jewels came out. Didn't she just wish for love?"

Constance's fingers tighten on her chalk. Her heart twists uncomfortably, and she silently scolds it. That particular tale always bothered her the most.

Pausing, she turns to offer a rare face-to-face look to the girl. "Yes," she explains, "but that's what I'm trying to tell you. Wishes aren't pure. Hearts aren't good. She wished for someone to love her, and a husband followed the trail of jewels right to her door. She was rich and beautiful and adored. She got everything she wanted, but in the end, it wasn't what she wanted at all. It never is."

Her words hover in the air like a eulogy to all their dreams. She ought to let it hang there longer, let it sweep the cobwebs of myth from their minds. But they look so miserable that she clears her throat. "What we teach in this class is the beginnings of getting around that. Science is magic applied, magic that is governed by logic—not by emotion."

She erases their how does magic work thought bubble and replaces it with the name of the class. "Welcome to Fairy Logic 101."

She spreads out the rest of her lecture like a picnic. For a snack, a sample spell, only three statements long (drawn, of course, to no effect on the magicless blackboard). For the main course, a lengthy discussion of the differences between natural languages (like German or French or Latin) and formal languages (like music or math or, more pertinently, spellspeak).

For dessert, she opens her fairy tome to introduce them to her companion. The pinky-sized fairy rises from its pages, unfurling her arms like the petals of a rose. She stretches, as if cooped up for a long while, but in reality, the vain little thing is just showing off for them. Her lithe arms move like a dancer's, and her pink hair floats around her almond face in gravity-defying curls.

"Meet Rosaline. Now, I must be careful," Constance explains, "not to touch the pages she's bound to and make any request aloud. Requests in a natural language can be misinterpreted. But"—Constance picks up a pen and sets it over the page—"if I write in her pages using spellspeak, the scope of what I'm able to request shrinks, but so does the chance for misinterpretation. Spellspeak only ever has one meaning."

Rosaline blows kisses at the students, and Constance narrowly refrains from rolling her eyes.

"With the ability to restrain our meaning arises the ability to control it. If," Constance stresses, "we approach problems logically."

She sets her pen to the fairy tome's pages to copy the example spell on the board: one to draw ten drops of water out of the air and hold them over the class for exactly five seconds, after which point the spell will end and nature and gravity will sprinkle a few students and everyone will be delighted with the cheap parlor trick. A (hopefully) memorable first class.

Except no sooner does her pen touch the page than, outside, a black burst erupts from the old library and the classroom window implodes.