Emily opened her mouth to ask what would happen if Master Grey lost, but the Mediator blew his whistle before she could speak. Master Grey lowered his staff and waited; his opponent gazed at him, seemingly unmoving. Emily watched, puzzled, as the two magicians stared at each other, neither one making a move. They both seemed to be biding their time.
The newcomer snapped first, hurling a powerful curse at Master Grey. Master Grey blocked it with seemingly effortless ease, then dodged two more before launching his own curse back at the challenger. The challenger caught it on his staff – brilliant green-blue balefire flared around it for a long moment – then threw another curse back at Master Grey.
Emily found herself staring as the two competitors exchanged spells. Master Grey was good, she had to admit, good enough to be intimidating. Some of his spells actually worked on the surrounding arena, rather than on his target; one of them even turned part of the ground to quicksand, just long enough to snare his competitor. Emily felt her heartbeat starting to race as Master Grey unleashed a cutting charm, then a transfiguration spell that turned the quicksand to solid rock. His competitor held up his staff, blocking the cutting charm, but he was hopelessly trapped. A moment later, it was all over.
The crowd went wild. Emily felt sick. She’d seen death – and sudden brutal injury – but she was never comfortable with it. Master Grey held up his staff, then looked towards the wards as the next competitor was shown into the arena. Emily looked at Jade and shivered as she realized just how excited he was. His tutor had probably taught him how to duel.
“Disgusting,” she said, quietly.
“It can be,” Jade admitted.
Emily flushed. She hadn’t realized he could hear her.
“But it can also be exciting,” Jade added, seriously. “Facing someone in single combat, beating someone in single combat...knowing that you’re alive and a victor and he isn’t. It’s addictive.”
It must be a guy thing, Emily thought. She’d faced Shadye in single combat – and cheated. Even so, she knew how close she had come to losing everything. The entire world had been at risk.
“Come on,” Jade said, holding out a hand. “We’ll go get something to eat.”
Emily gave him a surprised look. “You want to leave your master?”
“I think you’re more important right now,” Jade said. “And besides, he’ll never notice.”
Chapter Eight
THE NOISE OF THE CROWD FADED away as Jade led Emily towards a long low building, illuminated by magic lights hanging in the air. Inside, she could hear the sound of people talking, but garbled by a basic privacy ward that prevented her from actually understanding any of the words. A man wearing a butler’s uniform met them as they entered the door and escorted them to a small room, where a candlelit table was waiting. Emily blinked in surprised as she saw it, then looked up at Jade, who smiled back at her. She was touched, despite herself. It was very romantic.
“Order whatever you like,” Jade said, nodding towards the menu. “I’m buying.”
Emily had to admit she was impressed as she looked down at the menu. The Empire might have spread cooking and traditions all over the world, but it was rare for a restaurant or eatery to serve more than one style of food. Here, though, there was food from all over the world, probably prepared in advance and stored in stasis compartments. Magic made preserving food so much easier than freezers and microwaves. And it tasted better too. She picked a dish of chicken cooked in cream, and lime juice. Jade picked roast beef and non-alcoholic wine.
“Master Grey is good at dueling,” Jade said, when the waiter had been and gone. “What did you think?”
“He’s killing his fellow magicians,” Emily said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Is he mad?”
Jade looked surprised, then cast a privacy ward. “He isn’t the one issuing the challenges,” he pointed out, mildly. “He only set the terms of the duels.”
Emily rolled her eyes. “But either he dies or his challenger dies,” she countered. “Either way, the Allied Lands lose a magician.”
“He can’t back out or deliberately allow someone to win,” Jade said. “If he did, someone would call him a coward.”
Men, Emily thought. Did dueling win someone the post of most powerful magician in the world? It couldn’t, she decided; she hadn’t seen Void or the Grandmaster dueling with their rivals. Or Lady Barb, for that matter. It clearly wasn’t necessary to duel to earn accolades.
“If someone challenged me,” she said, “could I avoid having to fight?”
“Depends,” Jade said, thoughtfully. “If you were a duelist, you couldn’t really avoid the challenge without conceding your position without a fight. If you’d insulted someone so badly they felt the urge to wipe the smile off your face, you couldn’t avoid the duel without sacrificing all the respect you’d earned. Otherwise...you could simply decline the duel without consequences.”
He smiled. “But most people are too scared of you to pick a fight.”
Emily shivered. Her status as the Necromancer’s Bane – and now the person who had defeated a Mimic – had given her a formidable reputation, but it was largely undeserved. There was no easy way to duplicate the trick that had killed Shadye, while the Mimic had been overwhelmed by the combined power of several magicians. If Master Grey or someone on the same level challenged her to a duel, she would lose.
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” she muttered. She looked up, meeting Jade’s eyes. “Why doesn’t he like me?”
“I think he thinks you upset the natural order,” Jade confessed. “He wasn’t too happy over me writing to you, I can tell you.”
Emily flushed. Master Tor had been the same, judging her by her reputation before he’d even met her. And Master Tor had tried hard to get her blamed for the Mimic’s first attack and then expelled from Whitehall. He’d had political motives...if she’d realized just how many problems King Randor making her a baroness would cause, she might have refused the honor, even if she had to speak up in front of a giant crowd. Emily might have hoped to fly under the radar, but Baroness Emily was a political figure.
“I didn’t mean to make life difficult for you,” she mumbled. She clutched Lady Barb’s pendant, silently grateful for the protective glamor. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Jade said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“It might well have been,” Emily said. “I...”
She was interrupted by the arrival of the waiter, two trays of food floating in the air behind him. Emily smiled at the display, then watched as the trays were unloaded and spells removed, allowing the aroma of the food to reach her nostrils. The smell was good, although not quite as good as some of the places she’d tried in Dragon’s Den. She waited for the waiter to withdraw, then tasted the chicken. It tasted more than a little dry.
“Someone made you a political pawn,” Jade said, once the waiter had vanished again. “I don’t think that was your fault, no matter what Master Grey says.”
Emily rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache coming on. She knew, intellectually, that people talked about her, but she was still unprepared for the reality. It hadn’t been something she’d had to worry about on Earth, not when she was so utterly unimportant. Here, someone could make a decision concerning her in the White City or Alexis and she would never hear of it until it was too late.
“Still, you might want to be careful,” Jade added. “King Randor might not have expected you to be more than a baroness in name only.”
“I know,” Emily said. The handful of lessons she’d had in estate management had only underlined just how little she actually knew. Aristocratic children, even Alassa, were taught the basics at their parents’ knees, but Emily had only recently been ennobled. How could she hope to learn enough to keep her from depending on subordinates? “But I couldn’t say no.”
“He might have thought he was doing you a favor,” Jade pointed out. “You saved his throne; he had to reward you in a manner consummate w
ith your deeds. Most people would be delighted to be ennobled, even if they didn’t have lands added as part of the deal.”
Emily shuddered. Baroness was no empty title. She was, to all intents and purposes, the owner of hundreds of square miles of land – and thousands of people, some of whom were effectively bound to her family line. The sheer weight of responsibility had fallen on her like a hammer from above, forcing her to hire managers to handle the task. And she’d hidden from it afterwards, she knew. She didn’t really comprehend what she’d been given, not at an emotional level.
“He should have given me a smaller title,” she admitted. Even the smallest title brought a stipend from the Crown, one that could only be canceled in the event of outright treason. “I might have been able to handle it.”
She shook her head. Stipends were one of Zangaria’s major problems, although the coup attempt against King Randor had allowed him a chance to take aim at some of the useless aristocrats infesting his court. Their ancestors had done something useful and had been rewarded, but the current crop merely drew on the King’s money and protested loudly when he hinted they might want to find proper jobs. But then, there weren’t enough positions suitable for all of them in Zangaria.
Or at least positions consummate with their titles, she thought. Muckraker sounds about right for most of them.
“But then he wouldn’t have given you a suitable reward,” Jade said. He smiled, then changed the subject. “I understand that Lady Barb is a hard taskmaster...?”
Emily blinked, then realized that Lady Barb had told him that Emily would be busy on the first day. “She is,” she confirmed. “Healing was the hardest class at Whitehall.”
“Cat told me that she gave no quarter,” Jade said. “And now you have her all to yourself.”
Emily snorted and turned the question back on him. “What sort of person is Master Grey?”
“Tough, very tough, but fair,” Jade said. “He’s taught me more than I ever learned from the sergeants.”
“You should have gone into Martial Magic in Fifth Year,” Emily said, rather tartly. She liked the sergeants. Men less like her stepfather were hard to imagine. “We spent the year learning how to crack defenses and pick our path carefully through Blackhall.”
“So I heard,” Jade said. “And Alassa started her own Ken team?”
“She did,” Emily said. “And she’s definitely having fun.”
She felt an odd flicker of envy. She’d never liked team sports on Earth, yet part of her had always envied those who could throw themselves into the game. Alassa and Imaiqah had done just that, but Emily hadn’t been able to follow them. She couldn’t even play for fun.
“Good for her,” Jade said. “Cat had quite a lot to tell me.”
Emily groaned. “What did he say?”
She listened to a somewhat warped recounting of last year at Whitehall as she finished her meal, pointing out the problems from time to time. The Allied Lands didn’t have the Internet, but somehow rumors still moved at the speed of light, mutating very quickly into something utterly unrecognizable. No wonder Master Grey viewed her with dire suspicion, she decided, as she heard that she’d somehow forced Master Tor to hand in his resignation. The tutor’s decision to leave the school hadn’t been her fault.
“The only true story in all of that,” she said, when Jade had finished, “was the one about us sneaking out of class to go to the library.”
Jade snorted. “What were you thinking?”
Emily shook her head. Once, she’d watched a movie where the hero and his girlfriend had skipped off school and gone to an art gallery. She hadn’t been unable to avoid wondering if there would be fewer complaints from the teachers if all skipping pupils had spent their day off so productively. But then, she had never felt as if she’d learned much in school on Earth.
“They were trying to teach me what I already knew,” Emily admitted, finally. “And I’d taught Alassa and Imaiqah myself.”
“Your class,” Jade said. He laughed, quietly. “I don’t even know why they made you take it.”
Emily wondered, absently, just how many people knew that she was responsible for the New Learning. English letters and Arabic numerals had already worked a colossal transformation in the Allied Lands and there was much more to come. Merely having the ability to write and sound out words phonically made it much easier for people to learn to read and write. There might be no agreed system of spelling yet, but someone who could read could work out what a word was, even if the spelling was different. The Scribes Guilds had had a bumpy introduction to the new system, yet they’d adapted fairly well. Others hadn’t been so lucky.
If the Accountants Guild knew that I’d destroyed them, she asked herself, what would they do?
She had a terrible feeling she knew the answer. The accountants had worked with numerals that made Latin numbers look simple, a system that took years to master. They’d taken ruthless advantage of their position too, charging their clients vast sums of money just to do their accounts. But Arabic numerals, double-entry bookkeeping, algebra and a handful of other tricks had revolutionized the world. The guild had never recovered.
“I don’t know either,” she admitted. But she had a very good idea. “Maybe they didn’t want to call attention to what I’d done.”
Jade nodded as the waiter returned, took away the dishes and offered the desert menu. Emily shook her head and, after a moment, Jade shook his head too. The waiter bowed and retreated, leaving them alone again. Emily watched him go, then looked up at Jade. She knew him well enough to know that he was nervous, even though he was trying to hide it. The sight made her feel nervous too.
“Last year,” Jade said, slowly, “I...I proposed to you.”
Emily nodded, without speaking. It had been no surprise to anyone, apart from her, that Jade had been interested, but he hadn’t said anything until the very last day of term. But then, there were rules governing relationships within Whitehall’s walls. Jade would have ended up in hot water if he’d spoken to her earlier.
She hadn’t been quite sure what to make of it at the time. Part of her had to admit that she liked Jade, part of her thought she only liked him as a friend. He’d kissed her – and she’d enjoyed it – but the thought of going further bothered her deeply. In the end, she hadn’t really given him an answer at all...
And that, she knew, had done him no favors. Jade wasn’t...well, her, but he would have his own set of marriage offers from magical families. If he picked one of them, particularly after concluding his apprenticeship, he would be well-placed for the future. Marrying Emily as she’d been at the end of First Year – a stranger in a strange land, feared more than loved – wouldn’t have been as good for him. It was easy to believe that he had genuine feelings for her. She hadn’t had much to offer him then.
But now...? She was a baroness.
She cringed, mentally. Earth’s modern-day love stories said that love could appear anywhere, among people of any class. But the past said otherwise and the Allied Lands agreed. Alassa wouldn’t have had so many problems finding a husband – she still hadn’t found a husband – if she hadn’t been heir to the throne of Zangaria. Back then, Jade’s proposal had almost been a favor. Now, it was socially laughable.
He’d meant well; she knew he’d meant well. But she wasn’t even sure she wanted it.
Jade cleared his throat. Emily realized she’d retreated into her thoughts.
“I...know that it must be awkward for you now,” he said. “But I gave my word.”
He hadn’t, Emily recalled. He’d made her no promises. She hadn’t asked for them.
But her feelings were a tangled mess. Did she want him? Had he found someone else? The thought stung, even though logically she knew it shouldn’t. She hadn’t promised him anything either; they certainly hadn’t agreed not to look elsewhere. And it had to have been hard for him, studying under a man who disliked Emily herself.
“No, you didn’t,” she said, very quie
tly.
Jade didn’t disagree.
Emily winced, inwardly. She knew she should cut through the tangled mess and talk bluntly, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The fear of hurting him was too strong. She would sooner have faced the Warden with nothing more solid than a feeble excuse. And she wasn’t even sure what she felt herself.
“I liked you – I still like you,” Jade said. He stared down at the table, unwilling or unable to meet her eyes. “But things have changed. You’re a...noblewoman now.”
“I can be a noblewoman and a magician,” Emily pointed out. She was hardly the only noblewoman with magic; Alassa had been born noble, as well as magical. “But I know what you mean.”
She wished she’d sorted out her own feelings beforehand, but she’d shied away from the thought. If she’d known – she had known. But she hadn’t done anything about it.
He doesn’t want me anymore, she thought. She could understand his feelings – in the cold-blooded calculus that governed aristocratic marriages, she was well above his station – but it still hurt. If he married her now, he would be little more than her consort, forever tied to her apron strings. No one would take him seriously.
And Jade was ambitious. He wanted to make a name for himself.
“Look at me,” she said, quietly. Jade looked up, meeting her eyes. “Did you find someone else?”
Jade shook his head, wordlessly. Emily wondered, absently, if that was actually true. One advantage of being in Martial Magic was spending time with older boys, boys who sometimes forgot that Emily was young and female. They’d talked, unaware that she could hear them, about a brothel in Dragon’s Den. It was quite possible that Jade had indulged too...
“I understand,” she said, softly. It hurt – and yet it was also a relief. “Can we just be friends?”
Jade looked relieved, just for a moment. Emily felt a sudden sharp desire to hurt him, to lash out verbally or physically, a desire she forced back into the back of her mind. At least he’d tried to talk to her, openly. She mentally gave him credit for that. Boys found it hard to talk about their emotions, almost as hard as she found it herself. She’d never talked openly to anyone until she’d met Alassa and Imaiqah.
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