“You first,” she said, to the magician. “What happened?”
“I was volunteered to help move supplies down here,” the magician said. His voice brimmed with righteous anger. “He”—he jabbed a hand at the craftsman, who flinched—“told me to put the box there. And now he’s saying he told me to put it somewhere else!”
“That’s because I did tell you to put it somewhere else,” the craftsman said, his face reddening as the audience tittered. “Putting it there is stupid! S-T-U-P-I-D!”
Emily glared the growing crowd into silence, then took a breath. “Why is it stupid?”
“He told me to put it there,” the magician snapped. “Why wasn’t it stupid ten minutes ago?”
“I didn’t tell you to put it there!” The magician waved a hand at the box. “Can’t you see people running in and out of the doors? Someone will trip over their feet and land on the box, smashing the printing press to rubble! What sort of idiot would put a box there?”
The magician smirked. “You?”
“Enough!” Emily stepped between the pair before one of them could start something. “We’ll settle this debate easily.”
She took a moment to compose herself, then cast a basic truth spell. It couldn’t compel someone to talk—she was reluctant to use such a strong spell without a better cause—but it would detect any lies. It was also surprisingly difficult to fool, certainly without making the effort noticeable. Beside her, Master Highland grunted. Emily suspected he thought the magician was about to be proved right.
“The air will turn red if you lie,” Emily said. “If anyone lies...”
The craftsman eyed her sharply. “How do we know it’s working?”
“I have blonde hair,” Emily lied. The air around her turned red. “As you can see, the spell reacts badly to anyone trying to lie.”
She met his eyes. “Where did you tell him to put the box?”
“Over there, in the corner.” The craftsman pointed to the corner. “And I swear this before all the gods.”
The spell didn’t respond. Emily silently tested it, then turned to the magician. “Where did he tell you to put the box?”
“There.” The magician jabbed a finger at the box. “Right there!”
Emily blinked in surprise. The spell didn’t respond, which meant... she hastily retested the spell, trying to determine if the magician—or Master Highland—had managed to subvert it. But the spellware seemed intact, the spell structure completely independent... no one had placed their finger on the scales. It made no sense. They couldn’t both be telling the truth...
“You both think you’re telling the truth,” Emily said. That explained their anger, at least. No one could survive long with a reputation for lying. They had to defend themselves—with force, if necessary—against the slightest suggestion they might have been economical with the truth. “You must have had a misunderstanding.”
“He was as plain as the nose on your face,” the magician said. “He wanted the box there...”
“I told you I wanted it there,” the craftsman snapped. “And...”
Emily held up a hand. “You made a mistake,” she said. “Both of you. Now”—she looked from one to the other—“take a deep breath, move the box to where it’s supposed to be and then go sit down for a bit. Or I can find something else for you to do instead.”
“I...” The magician scowled mightily. “I don’t understand it.”
“People make mistakes all the time,” Emily said. “People mishear or misunderstand and wind up in trouble because they don’t realize what they’re actually saying. Or do you think I messed up the spell?”
The magician shook his head, quickly. Emily didn’t blame him for looking nervous. If she’d rigged the spell, she would have had to fool Master Highland as well as the magician himself. And Master Highland would have called her out for it. And... if he’d made that accusation, in public, it could have destroyed him. Emily might have been inclined to excuse someone for what they said in private, if tempers were running high, but not in public. She’d learnt enough about leadership, even though she hated it, to know there were things she couldn’t let slide.
Which is unfortunate, she thought, as the audience dispersed. And...
She frowned. Caleb and she had had a similar disagreement over something minor. She refused to believe that Caleb had lied to her and she knew she hadn’t lied to him. And it had been the start of a trend, of disagreements that seemed utterly petty and pointless. People weren’t picking fights because they were segregationists or simple bastards, but because they felt they were being slighted. Or ignored.
It made no sense.
Subtle magic? But the rune at her breast was cold. Or simple cabin fever?
She turned and headed to the door, thinking fast. The school was huge—large enough for everyone to have a private room, once they’d swept the entire building for traps—but it was also enclosed. There was little outside beyond endless sand dunes, ruined buildings and faint traces of magic. No one wanted to walk outside the school, certainly not for very long. The closest place anyone could go for any real rest and relaxation was Farrakhan, hours away by camel. Emily didn’t mind—she’d happily spent weeks inside at Whitehall—but she could see how it might grate on others. The craftsmen from Cockatrice had been used to the freedom of the barony.
Master Highland stepped up beside her. “Can we talk?”
“Sure.” Emily led him out the door. “Shall we go find an office?”
They walked down the corridor, up a flight of stairs and into the barren office beside the Great Hall. Emily caught sight of her reflection in the mirror—she looked tired and grouchy, as if she hadn’t had anywhere near enough sleep—and scowled. Lady Barb would have handled things better, she was sure. Perhaps if she’d assigned grunt work to both of them... she shook her head. Both had been convinced they were right... they had been right, as far as they were concerned. She couldn’t punish them for a simple misunderstanding.
She leaned against the wall, wishing she’d thought to bring a handful of chairs from the dining room and put them in the office. The wall felt reassuringly solid, but... she pressed her fingers against the stone, wondering what it actually was. She was fairly sure it wasn’t sand, held in place by magic; logically, the entire castle would have collapsed into a pile of sand when the nexus point died. Her lips quirked at the thought of a sandcastle collapsing into dust. She really had to be exhausted. The thought was almost funny, rather than utter disaster.
“Lady Emily,” Master Highland said, formally. “It might be time to consider moving the mundanes down to Heart’s Ease.”
Emily was too tired to play games. “You mean it might be time for me to start considering moving the mundanes out, right?”
“Yes.” Master Highland’s voice was very calm. “The experiment isn’t working.”
“We’ve barely started,” Emily pointed out. “It’s only been two weeks.”
“And we’ve already had a string of... incidents,” Master Highland countered. “Jack spent two nights in bed after someone smacked him over the head with a club. We still don’t know who did it.”
“Jack didn’t name his attacker,” Emily said. She had her doubts. It would be perfectly in character for someone who’d been to school to keep the name to themselves, so they could seek revenge later rather than risk being considered a sneak. “And it wasn’t just magicians who were attacked.”
“No.” Master Highland conceded the point without a fight. “The point is, magicians and mundanes cannot coexist. We need some distance between us.”
Emily let out a long breath. “Are you going to keep raising this point, time and time again?”
“Yes.” Master Highland met her eyes. “It is my duty, as a member of the school board.”
“University board,” Emily corrected. She looked back at him, as evenly as she could. “If we gave up at the slightest hurdle, if we allowed one single problem to derail us, where would we be
? Where would society be? We wouldn’t even have invented the wheel!”
“The clashes between our two factions are not slight hurdles,” Master Highland said. “We need some distance between us, for our own good.”
“Really?” Emily raised her eyebrows. “For whose good?”
“Both of us,” Master Highland said. “And you know it.”
I do, do I? Emily allowed her irritation to show on her face. “Explain.”
Master Highland flattened his palm. Light danced over his fingertips. “We have magic. They don’t. They will never be able to match us, no matter what they do. They will always be inferior... and weak. What do their opinions matter in the face of overwhelming force? We can make them say or do or believe anything we like... and if they object, we can make them stop objecting. You know it. Do you think a strong man would pay any heed to you if you didn’t have magic?”
Emily remembered how easily Cat had manhandled her, when he’d tried to show her how dangerous life could be without magic, and shivered.
Master Highland had a point. She knew she was stronger than she’d ever been, physically as well as magically, but she wasn’t the strongest person she knew. Lady Barb had taught her to fight dirty, cautioning her there was no such thing as a fair fight. Emily had known that even before she’d been yanked into the Nameless World.
“And it isn’t good for us either,” Master Highland pressed. “How can we respect people who can’t stand up to us? How can we resist temptation to abuse them? To take their lands and property and women... how can we?”
“Being tempted isn’t wrong,” Emily said, coldly. “Giving in to the temptation, on the other hand...”
She shook her head. She’d heard of men claiming that they’d been forced to commit rape because the woman had worn skimpy clothes and inflamed their lusts. She had no patience for that sort of argument. No one had forced the rapists to do anything. They’d made their choices and they’d have to live with the consequences.
“It happens,” Master Highland said. He looked pensive. “And not just in the way you might think.”
“I seem to recall people making the same argument about women in the public sphere,” Emily said. “Women are too weak and intellectually feeble to be rulers.”
She sucked in her breath. She’d heard a great deal of nonsense from aristocrats—and not all of them male, something that had surprised her—about how Alassa was too emotional to be Queen. She might have understood someone who’d known Alassa in first year making that argument, and they might have had a point, but the aristocrats hadn’t known her. They’d prejudged her by her gender, not by her personality.
“And if that were true,” she pressed, “there would be no high-ranking women in magical society at all.”
“Those women have magic,” Master Highland pointed out. “You could stop a swordsman in his tracks with a wave of your hand. What would you do if you didn’t have magic?”
That struck a nerve. “My point,” Emily said, “is that people can overcome such problems.”
“Not here.” Master Highland kept his voice level. “The gap is just too wide.”
“That’s what they said about women too, in the past.” Emily remembered Lord Whitehall, who’d been a very permissive father by his standards. He’d thought that women couldn’t learn magic because it destroyed their ability to have children. In one sense, he’d been right; in another, he’d been wrong. It hadn’t been that hard to minimize the danger once the early magicians had comprehended what they were actually doing. “And the gap was closed.”
“You can’t give everyone magic,” Master Highland said. “And you can’t convince the strong they are weak, and the weak they are strong, just because you want it to be.”
“No.” Emily stood upright. “But I can insist on mature behavior.”
Master Highland quirked his eyebrows. “How old are you?”
“Old enough to know that having power doesn’t make me superior to those who don’t,” Emily said, tartly. “And young enough to feel that the world can be changed for the better.”
“Perhaps.” Master Highland shrugged. “It would be better for all concerned if you put some distance between the two groups. Perhaps we could open factories at Heart’s Ease, once we overcome the transport problem. Or perhaps... we could send the mundanes there while we finish clearing the school. They’d be safe...”
“And once there was a gap between us,” Emily pointed out, “it wouldn’t be hard to make that permanent.”
Master Highland let out a sharp breath. “The gap already exists,” he said. “It will not go away, no matter what you do.”
“I know.” Emily resisted the urge to snap. “But we can start closing the gap...”
“Really?” Master Highland leaned forward. “And how do you plan to close it?”
“During the war, I shot a magician in the chest,” Emily said. It wasn’t quite true. She’d shot Jacqui after the war, when Jacqui had kidnapped her. “It nearly killed her. It would have, if I’d shot her through the head.”
And perhaps I should have aimed for the head, she added, silently. But I might have missed, even at close range.
“So you got lucky.” Master Highland didn’t sound impressed. “I’m sure luck will be with everyone who wields a... gun.”
“It’s harder to craft a ward to block physical force,” Emily reminded him. “And harder still to hold it in place, when its being tested.”
“And while you’re holding it in place,” Master Highland said, “you can also kill the gunman with a fireball.”
“Perhaps.” Emily held up her hands. “The point is, things will change. And we should embrace it.”
“I hear that a lot,” Master Highland said. “You’re not the first magician, freshly graduated, to say that things should change. Sometimes, they have a point. Sometimes, they’d be too concerned with their own personal issues to think about the wider picture. Sometimes, they’re too ignorant to understand the depths of their own ignorance. And sometimes...”
He shook his head. “Which one are you, I wonder?”
“The one who killed a bunch of necromancers,” Emily said, dryly.
Master Highland smiled, conceding the point. His face sobered a moment later.
“It is only a matter of time before someone gets seriously hurt or killed,” he said. “Wait... someone already has been killed. This is a dangerous environment for mundanes. You know it. How many of them have to die before you realize that you’re putting them in danger?”
“They know the risks,” Emily said.
“Roland will never be the same,” Master Highland said. “Seth will recover. Roland will not.”
He met her eyes. “Who’s next?”
Chapter Eighteen
“EMILY,” JAYSON CALLED, AS EMILY ENTERED the library. “How are you?”
“Tired.” Emily sat on a wooden chair and watched as he filled a trolley with books. “How are you?”
“Tired, but happy.” Jayson grinned at her. He looked as though he’d been having fun. “I’ve been moving books into the next room and shelving them there.”
“Good.” Emily rubbed her forehead. “Have you found anything on mirror magic?”
“Very little,” Jayson said, as he sat on the desk. “All I’ve found is a fairly basic textbook, one you could have found anywhere a few years ago. It isn’t particularly useful—it just talks about enchanting mirrors and suchlike. The spells aren’t really worth keeping.”
“I’ll read the book anyway,” Emily said. She eyed the pile of books. It didn’t look that much smaller. “Have you found anything interesting?”
“The necromancer was particularly interested in books on mental magic,” Jayson said. “He pulled a whole string of textbooks off the shelves, read them and dumped them. I think the only book he kept in pristine condition was a textbook on bilocation. I don’t know why.”
I do, Emily thought. He remained sane by splitting his mind over two bod
ies.
She put the thought aside. “I guess he wanted to try to compel himself to remain sane,” she said. She doubted that would work, in the long term. “Or force people to do his bidding.”
“Probably.” Jayson shrugged. “I also found a handful of books on the banned index. I was wondering what you wanted to do with them.”
Emily frowned. “What should we do with them?”
“Technically, we have a choice between guaranteeing their security or handing them over to the White Council.” Jayson grimaced. “My family would say keep them, of course. They wouldn’t care about the risks.”
Emily nodded, slowly. “And there would be risks for us, wouldn’t there?”
“If we keep them here, someone—a student—might manage to get into the restricted section,” Jayson said. “It will be harder to keep them out when they’re already keyed into some of the wards. And then we’d be blamed for whatever they did with the forbidden knowledge.”
“I’ll review them later,” Emily said, after a moment. She disliked the idea of parting with books, even if they were dangerous. “Is there anything in them we can use?”
“I don’t know.” Jayson met her eyes, steadily. “But we should be careful about using anything from a forbidden book.”
“I know.” Emily had read enough horror stories to know that even looking at a forbidden spell could be dangerous. Some of the books were enchanted to lure their readers into the dark arts, others—perhaps less overtly dangerous—talked about knowledge from illegal or immoral experiments. It was all too easy to justify reading those books—and using the knowledge—because someone else had done the dirty work. “I promise, I’ll review them later.”
“Good.” Jayson picked up a book and eyed it for a moment. “Is something bothering you?”
Emily blinked in surprise. “What makes you say that?”
“You’re not quite yourself,” Jayson told her. “And if I can see it, others can.”
You met me when I was powerless, Emily thought. She wondered, sourly, if Jayson would have been attracted to her if she’d had power. You never knew me before...
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