“We’re due to leave tomorrow,” Jade said, softly. “Will you write to me?”
“I will,” Emily promised. Hadn’t she been doing that all term? “Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure,” Jade confessed.
He led her back to the house, then stopped outside and gave her a tight hug. Emily returned it, but she felt nothing, no sense that she wanted it to go further. She’d felt more the first time he’d kissed her, almost a year ago. Was there something wrong with her?
“I will write,” she said, pushing her thoughts aside. There would be time to think about them later. “And you take care of yourself.”
“You too,” Jade said. “I’ll see you soon.”
Emily watched him walk away into the darkness, then turned and stepped through the gate into the house.
Chapter Ten
THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED SURPRISINGLY quickly. Emily spent her mornings brewing potions and her afternoons reading her way through Lady Barb’s library or writing letters to her friends. Lady Barb took her around the Faire one day and introduced her to a handful of people, but most of them weren’t particularly interested in just another apprentice. Emily rather preferred their indifference to the interest they would show if they knew who she actually was.
On the final day, Lady Barb took her into a different chamber and produced a small pencil-sized stick from her bag. Emily stared down at it, unable to escape a nagging sense of familiarity. It was tiny, yet somehow she knew she already knew what it was; she just couldn’t place it. Lady Barb snorted and removed the miniaturization spell. The staff snapped back to its normal size in her hand.
“Your staff,” Lady Barb said. She held it out for Emily to take. “I trust you recall how to use it – and the dangers of using it?”
Emily nodded. Sergeant Miles had taught her how to shape spells and embed them within the wood, but he’d also warned her of the dangers of excessive use. It was far too easy to lose the ability to cast spells without a staff or a wand...and, if she did, she would be dependent on someone else to prepare the wand for her. Alassa, thankfully, had mastered the art after spending years using a wand, but Emily wasn’t sure she could match it. Only sheer determination had kept Alassa trying until she’d gained the skill.
She took the staff in her hand, feeling it quivering against her bare palm. It felt...seductive, the magic in her responding to the handful of spells lodged within the wood. She had to smile, wondering what a psychologist would make of men using staffs, then carefully let go of it. As always, it stood on its end without falling over.
“You are to carry it with you, but you are not to use it without permission,” Lady Barb told her. “Shrink it down and keep it hidden.”
Emily nodded. She was seventeen – at least she was fairly sure she was seventeen – and it was rare for anyone to start working with staffs until they were at least twenty. Using it in public would suggest either vast power or little skill, both of which would attract unwanted attention. She cast the shrinking spell, then stuck the staff up her sleeve. If nothing else, she could use it to fight physically, rather than using magic. Sergeant Miles had taught her how to use a staff for that too.
“Good,” Lady Barb said, once the staff was safely concealed. “Have you packed everything?”
Emily nodded. She’d spent half of the previous day washing her robes without using magic, then hanging them on the line to dry. Lady Barb hadn’t been very understanding when Emily had asked why they couldn’t use magic, pointing out that they had to learn not to use magic for everything. Emily couldn’t help wondering what Whitehall would make of a washing machine or an iron. It was astonishing just how easy life was, in many ways, on Earth.
“Splendid,” Lady Barb said. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”
Emily followed her back into the library, then stopped in front of a bookcase. For a moment, she thought they were returning to the spellchamber, but it was very definitely a different bookcase. Behind it, there was another staircase leading down into the darkness. Lady Barb cast a light spell, then started to walk down the stairs. Emily followed her, nervously. The last time hadn’t been fun at all.
She swallowed. “How many secret passages are there like this?”
Lady Barb turned and grinned at her. “That’s a secret,” she said. “But there are quite a few.”
Emily smiled, trying to calm her nerves. Secret passages seemed to be common in Whitehall, Zangaria’s castles and now magical houses. But it did make a certain kind of sense, she knew. The Grandmaster, King Randor and the others would want a way of moving around without being seen – and besides, looking for the passages in Whitehall was one of the great student traditions. Emily knew where a handful of them were, but there were dozens of others.
They reached the bottom and stopped, on the edge of a patch of earth. Emily watched as the light spell grew brighter, revealing patches of earth intermingled with stone, as if it were a giant chess board. No, she realized suddenly, as she saw the runes carved into the stone; it was a graveyard, a crypt. None of the names below the runes were familiar.
“My family members have been buried here for centuries,” Lady Barb said, very softly. In the distance, Emily was sure she could hear dripping water. “One day, I’ll be buried here too.”
Emily looked up, peering into the darkness. It was impossible to tell how far the chamber stretched, but it had to be colossal. Hundreds of people could be buried here, deep below the ground. She looked back at Lady Barb and saw that she was pale, suddenly much older.
“When I was a child,” Lady Barb said softly, “we were told that the dead held parties here while the living slept. I always envied them, because my father wasn’t inclined to hold many parties in his hall. One night, I slipped down into the crypt and saw...nothing.”
She shook her head. “My mother’s people taught that the dead are reborn as part of the world surrounding us,” she added. “I like to believe that’s true.”
Emily felt a moment of sympathy. As a child, she’d known that Santa Claus wasn’t real; he’d never visited her house. She’d never really understood until she was older why so many other children had believed in him. They hadn’t lost the illusions that came with being a child, the belief that their parents could fix anything and the Tooth Fairy was real. Emily had never been allowed such illusions.
Lady Barb turned. Emily hesitated, then called out to her. “Why did you bring me here?”
“I wanted you to see it,” Lady Barb said. She walked up the stairs, but her voice floated back. “Don’t linger, Emily. There are dangers down here.”
Emily took one final look at the nondescript patches of earth, then followed her up the stairs and into the light. Lady Barb’s expression was tightly controlled, suggesting that she was upset about something. The last time she’d looked like that, she’d been scolding Emily, Alassa and Imaiqah for skiving off their classes. This time, however, she didn’t look unhappy with Emily, but someone else.
“Grab your bag, then make sure you have everything,” Lady Barb said. “I’m going to be sealing the house and I will be very upset if I have to unseal it before the end of the summer.”
“Understood,” Emily said. She looked at Lady Barb for a long moment. “Are you all right?”
“Go,” Lady Barb snapped.
Emily fled. She’d never been very good at noticing when someone was hurting, or when someone was feeling anything at all. It had surprised her when she’d realized just how badly depressed Alassa had become, or that Jade was interested in her...she pushed the thought aside as she walked into her room and picked up her bag, then checked around for anything she might have left behind. The notes she’d written had been copied into her notebooks and then reduced to dust in the fire. Taking the bag, she walked back downstairs. Lady Barb was waiting at the door, a pinched expression on her face and a wand in her hand.
“I’ll meet you outside the gates,” Lady Barb said. “Just wait for me the
re.”
It took ten minutes before Lady Barb joined her, putting the wand into her bag as she closed the gates behind them. The wards shivered back into place, sealing the house. Emily wondered, absently, just how long they would last before they collapsed into nothingness without a magician to sustain them, but there was no way to ask. There were questions it was unwise to ask out loud.
“Come on,” Lady Barb said. “Our transport is waiting at the other side of the Faire.”
Half of the visitors had already departed, Emily discovered, as they walked through the area where the Faire had been. The others were busy shutting up their stalls and loading their remaining goods onto carts, protected by magicians or armed mercenaries. Emily reminded herself, sharply, of her plans to set up a proper bank. It was something she intended to do, either in Cockatrice or somewhere else, once she had enough money to make it work. But she hadn’t worked out all the details yet.
“They normally sell some books cheaply after the Faire officially ends,” Lady Barb commented. “Would you like to stop and see what they have?”
Emily hesitated, tempted, then shook her head. “I’d have to carry them all, wouldn’t I?”
“Yep,” Lady Barb said. She smiled, brightly. “But I wouldn’t have minded.”
“Of course not,” Emily agreed. “I’d be carrying them.”
Lady Barb laughed as they walked past the half-dismantled stalls and headed towards a number of gipsy-like wagons. They looked almost too small to be real, she saw, as if they were expensive toys rather than real wagons. A handful of young children, some of them wearing ragged clothes, were running around them, playing a game of chase. Behind them, their older relatives were slowly loading some of the wagons with supplies and the remains of their stalls.
A dark-skinned girl who looked no older than Emily herself stood and walked over to meet them. “Karman,” Lady Barb said, formally, “I would like to introduce Millie, my apprentice. Millie, this is Karman of the Diddakoi Travellers.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Karman said. Her voice was oddly accented in a manner Emily didn’t recognize. “You are welcome among us, if you come in peace.”
“I do,” Emily said, formally. She couldn’t help a flicker of envy as she studied Karman. The girl was naturally beautiful, without the inhuman perfection of Alassa. Her long dark hair reached all the way down to her thighs. There was a suppleness to her body that suggested she spent most of her time in the open air. “I thank you for accepting us.”
“We will leave in an hour, we hope,” Karman said, addressing Lady Barb. “You will ride in the guest wagon.”
Emily couldn’t help being charmed as they walked past the family wagons. They were decorated with carved wood, tiny icons and runes, almost imperceptible behind a concealing glamor. The guest wagon was larger, but the bunk beds were tiny and there was no room to swing a mouse, let alone a cat. And there was someone inside already. Emily blinked in surprise as she recognized the singer from the first day of the Faire. The girl looked back at her shyly.
“We don’t bite,” Lady Barb assured the girl, dryly. “Don’t worry about us.”
The girl would have no problems in the bunk beds, Emily saw, but both she and Lady Barb would have real problems. Even Imaiqah, who was shorter than Emily, couldn’t have fitted into one of the bunks safely. There were certainly no charms expanding the space inside the wagon. Lady Barb saw her face and grinned, mischievously.
“We’d normally sleep under the stars,” Lady Barb told her. “Unless it was raining, of course.”
She motioned for Emily to climb into the wagon, then left her and the singer alone. Emily exchanged glances with the young girl – at a guess, she couldn’t be more than thirteen – then opened her bag and found a book. She was engrossed in it when Lady Barb returned, leading a large horse by the reins. The horse looked larger than any of the riding horses Emily had seen, but definitely tamer. Emily smiled in relief as Lady Barb hooked the horse to the wagon, piece by piece. Alassa might like riding over the countryside at breakneck pace, jumping hedges and ditches with abandon, but Emily had never liked riding. She always had the impression that the horse was just biding its time before throwing her off and bolting.
“Most people sit on the edge of the wagon and watch the countryside go by,” Lady Barb pointed out, as the first wagon started to move. The guest wagon, it seemed, would be at the very rear of the small convoy. “Don’t you want to see where we’re going?”
Emily sighed, put the book aside and peered into the distance. A handful of mountains could be seen, rising up until their peaks were hidden in the clouds. Mapping wasn’t one of her skills, even after months spent working with the sergeants on following map-based directions, but she was fairly sure that the mountains were the Cairngorms.
“Right,” Lady Barb said, when Emily asked. “The Travellers won’t be going up the mountains themselves, but they’ll let us off when we finally reach the bottom of the mountainside. There’s a road there we can follow until the first village.”
Emily nodded, feeling nervous. The first village was where their mission would truly begin and, despite all the preparation, she felt unready.
It was a bitter thought. I have risked my life, for my friends, she thought, but why would anyone put other lives in my hands?
She shuddered. There were no shortage of ways to make mistakes that would risk lives, if she were trying to heal, or poison someone, if she made a potion that went bad...she swallowed at the thought, shivering. What if she made a mistake and someone died?
She wanted to crawl back into the wagon and hide, but instead she found herself looking at the countryside as the convoy moved onwards. The disorganized woodland slowly gave way to fields, with peasants working the farms and a small castle in the distance. She guessed that Lady Barb’s extended family owned the land where the Faire had been held, while the territory outside it was owned by the local nobility.
“I should have read more about this area,” she muttered.
“Yes, you should,” Lady Barb agreed. “Did you read the material I gave you on the Cairngorms?”
Emily nodded. It hadn’t sounded very welcoming. The region had been ruled by a king for the first fifty years after the Empire had collapsed, but then something had happened to the monarchy and the Mountain Lords had ruled the territory ever since. Reading between the lines, Emily suspected that the lords had actually assassinated their monarch. Relations between them and the Allied Lands were fragile at the best of times, with only the distant threat of the necromancers to keep them working together.
“You’ll need to keep it in mind at all times,” Lady Barb warned. “We don’t need to get entangled in local politics.”
“I understand,” Emily said, silently reminding herself to reread the material. Lady Barb had told her she could keep that particular set of notes in mind. “But what happens if we do?”
“We try to get out of it,” Lady Barb said.
The farmland gave way to a river running down towards the sea, too deep and rapid for them to dare to cross. Instead, the wagons turned and headed northwards until they found a bridge and crossed over. Emily felt an odd shiver of magic as they passed over the running water, but couldn’t attach a name to the sensation. Lady Barb didn’t seem surprised when she pointed it out.
“There’s often traces of magic in water,” Lady Barb explained. “Didn’t you learn that from Professor Thande?”
Emily nodded, embarrassed. Alchemy was all about releasing the natural magic in raw materials. Water was normally neutral, but it could pick up magic and transfer it elsewhere, under the right conditions. She couldn’t help wondering what such magic would do to someone who drank the water. Perhaps, she decided, it accounted for the appearance of magic talents. She’d read a fantasy story where a magic fountain had gifted its first drinkers with magic powers.
“I did,” she confessed.
“My parents wanted me to go to school,” the singer said, piping up
suddenly. “But my uncles said no.”
“That’s not uncommon among Travellers,” Lady Barb said. “They’re not counted as new magicians, so their fees are rarely paid by the Allied Lands. Most of them have to learn from their parents and never really qualify as trained magicians. My mother might not have let me go, if I’d stayed with her.”
Emily looked at the singer, feeling an odd hint of pity. She was a good singer, one who could charm anyone who heard her...and she would never have a chance to develop her magical talent. Her family considered it more important to let her sing for money then pay for her to go to Whitehall. But there were other sources of cash...
I could fund her, Emily thought, wondering if Lady Barb would read her face. I have the money.
She looked down at the girl, silently resolving to discuss the matter with Lady Barb as soon as they were alone. Whitehall wasn’t that expensive compared to her income from Cockatrice; she could easily fund one student. Hell, she could fund a dozen students and never notice the loss. But she had no idea of the practicalities of the situation.
Lady Barb gave her a sharp look, as if she had understood what Emily was thinking. “Do you want to take the reins for a while?”
Emily shook her head. She didn’t trust horses, even horses that acted docile.
“I’ll take them,” the singer said. “Horses like me...except when I tried to clean them as a kid.”
“If you like,” Lady Barb said. “What’s your name?”
“Jasmine,” the singer told her. There was a hint of pain in her voice. “Just plain Jasmine. My parents died years ago.”
Poor girl, Emily thought, bitterly. She loved her parents before they left her.
Chapter Eleven
THE SUN WAS SETTING AS THE convoy pulled into a clearing in the middle of a forest. Emily jumped down from the wagon, her body aching from sitting too long, and stretched until she had worked some of the kinks out of her muscles. Lady Barb stepped down with more dignity, then released the horse and led the beast over to a place he could pick at the grass. Emily watched as the Travellers organized their wagons and started to prepare dinner. She wanted to help, but she wasn’t sure what to do.
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