Emily hesitated, organizing her thoughts. The hell of it was that her stepfather’s treatment of her had been nothing like as overt as the treatment of the poor boy in the village. There had been days when she was sure that he meant her nothing but harm and days when she had been able to convince herself that she was imagining it. It might have been easier if he had beaten her, she reflected. She could have taken that to her teachers and asked for help.
“My father left us when I was very young,” she said. Her memories of him were faded and worn, leaving her wondering if they were just the product of her imagination. “I don’t know why. My mother never talked about him.”
Lady Barb nodded, inviting her to continue.
“She married again, soon afterwards,” Emily said. “My stepfather ignored me as much as possible. I don’t know what he was thinking. My mum crawled into a bottle soon afterwards and never really emerged long enough to look after me. I had to cook my own food and sort out my own clothes.”
The memories mocked her. Cooking hadn’t been easy, not when she was still a child. She’d lost count of the number of near-disasters she’d had trying to cook with an oversized pan, learning the hard way. And then she’d had to buy clothes on her own...and manage what little money her stepfather had given her. Most of her clothes had come from charity shops and second-hand stores. She simply hadn’t been able to afford anything else. She had never understood why so many other poor children could afford expensive cell phones and fancy clothes.
Lady Barb said nothing, merely listened.
“I could never bring other children to the house,” Emily confessed. “They started to mock me because of my clothing, so I retreated into myself once I learned to read. Books were my friends; most people simply ignored me as much as possible. When I grew older...”
She swallowed, feeling her throat constrict. “I started to grow breasts,” she admitted. “And I grew up, despite the food.”
Lady Barb tilted her head. “And people started to take an interest in you?”
“It took me a long time to notice,” Emily said. “My stepfather was looking at me. He would watch me from time to time...and he’d never showed any interest in me before. I used to think he didn’t even know that I existed.”
“You could have been tapping into your magic, without knowing it,” Lady Barb said. “Some very young magicians do it. Remaining hidden isn’t difficult if you’re not trying to hide from a magician.”
Emily shook her head. Outside rumors, Earth had no magic...at least as far as she knew. It was vaguely possible, she supposed, that Hogwarts really existed and Harry Potter was a genuine person, but it seemed unlikely. The existence of cell phones with video cameras and orbital satellites would inevitably lead to the end of the masquerade. Besides, she’d never managed to cast a spell until she’d reached Whitehall. But then, she’d never even tried.
“I don’t think so,” she said, finally. “I think he just didn’t care.”
She looked down at the ground. “He kept staring at me...and I kept trying to avoid him,” she explained. “Sometimes he would say things, disturbing things. I wore shapeless clothes, showered at school and spent as much time as I could away from home. He...just kept looking at me.”
“And you were afraid that, one day, he would rape you,” Lady Barb said. There was no condemnation in her voice, only quiet understanding. “Did you not have anyone else?”
Emily shook her head. Her mother had been an only child, as far as she knew, and she had no idea what had happened to her father. She wouldn’t have asked her stepfather’s family for water if she was dying from thirst. And she’d never trusted her teachers enough to ask for help.
“Then Shadye kidnapped me,” Emily added. “I’ve never looked back.”
“Nor should you,” Lady Barb said, simply. She hesitated, then pushed on. “It’s no consolation, Emily, but I have seen worse.”
“I know,” Emily said, quietly. She’d seen worse now, too. “But I still felt vulnerable.”
“Which is why you froze in Zangaria,” Lady Barb said, thoughtfully. “It isn’t everyone who can take lessons learned during training and apply them to the real world.”
Emily nodded. Once, she’d looked up military training, thinking that it might provide a way out of her dead end existence. Soldiers on Earth were pushed to the limits during boot camp, trained extensively by men who’d been there and done that, but even they sometimes froze when faced with real combat. Training was made as realistic as possible to hammer it out of them, but it wasn’t perfect. It couldn’t be perfect.
“So tell me,” Lady Barb added. “How do you feel now?”
Emily hesitated, trying to parse out her own feelings. The sense of fear had faded, somehow, after watching Hodge run for his piggy life. She knew she could have taken him even without magic, after spending two years practicing with the sergeants and boys who were bigger and stronger than Hodge – and better trained too. But she still wasn’t sure how she felt about men.
“Strange,” she said. “I don’t feel so scared anymore.”
Lady Barb smiled. “He’s the one who’s scared,” she said. “You taught him a lesson.”
Emily looked up. “You’re not mad at me?”
“Should I be?”
“I don’t know,” Emily said. Lady Barb had told her to try to avoid using magic where possible, but she hadn’t told Emily not to defend herself. “Did I do the right thing?”
“Tell me something,” Lady Barb said. She placed a hand on Emily’s shoulder, making it impossible for Emily to look away. “How many girls do you think he’s forced into opening their legs for him?”
“Too many,” Emily said. It was the only possible answer. “Even if it wasn’t the girls in the village...”
“The headman was appointed by the local lord,” Lady Barb told her. “I doubt the morals of his son were considered when the man was given the job. All that mattered was squeezing as many taxes from the village as possible – and the headman is very good at that. As long as he keeps the taxes and tithes coming, the lord wouldn’t care if every girl in the village was attacked by Hodge. I’d bet good money that he forced himself on most of them.”
Emily shuddered. If she’d grown up in such a place...
“Not just him,” Lady Barb added. “There are places where it is traditional for the husband’s father to have...access to his daughter-in-law, if he feels like it. Or where a widow can be pushed into marrying a man who already has a wife, if she wants someone to help take care of the kids. Or...there are countless horrors hidden here.”
“So you said,” Emily said, feeling sick. She didn’t want to know, but she thought she should ask. “What happened to him?”
“Hodge?” Lady Barb smiled. “I turned him back, told him that the curse would snap back if he ever tried to force himself on someone else, then gave his father a stern warning. If nothing else, the lord wouldn’t have objected if I’d killed him – and he knew it. But I think he’s a changed man.”
Emily shook her head, doubtfully.
“Oh, he is,” Lady Barb assured her. “He spent several hours as a pig, without any mental defenses or prior experience. What do you think that did to his mind?”
“I used a prank spell,” Emily said. “Didn’t I?”
“You didn’t cast it perfectly,” Lady Barb said, reprovingly. “Let’s just say that parts of him are still convinced he’s a pig.”
Emily snickered. She knew it was wrong, yet she couldn’t help it. The thought of Hodge eating at the trough instead of at the table, convinced it was where he belonged, was darkly amusing. She recalled the struggle to recall who and what she was when she’d turned herself into a rat and snickered again. Hodge would have absolutely no preparation for the transformation at all. Somehow, it was hard to feel any pity for him.
“You need practice,” Lady Barb added. “We’re going to work on that once we get back to Whitehall.”
She shrugged. “I also t
old him that he was lucky that I hadn’t turned him into dinner,” she said. “I think the lesson will have sunk in – and if it hasn’t, the next time he transforms will leave him stuck that way.”
Emily nodded, wondering if a girl in the village would be brave enough to manipulate Hodge into trying something. The thought of leaving someone – anyone – stuck as a pig forever was nightmarish, but it would be worse in Zangaria. She still shuddered when she thought about the wild boar Alassa and her suitors had hunted, wild boar that had actually been transformed humans. It had horrified her at the time – executions would have been kinder – and she’d banned the practice in Cockatrice.
Lady Barb clapped a hand on her shoulder. “You made a good stride forward today,” she said, as she turned to lead the way further down the path. “All you have to do is build on that success.”
Emily hesitated, then asked the question that had nagged at her mind earlier. “Did you...did you take a lover?”
“I was a little older than you when I fell in love for the first time,” Lady Barb said. She didn’t seem offended by the question. “It didn’t last. He was a little too much like my father and wasn’t too keen on the idea of marrying a combat sorceress. We parted reasonably, kindly.”
She looked back at Emily. “Is there a reason you asked?”
Emily looked down at the ground. “Is it normal to be so conflicted?”
Lady Barb laughed. “Welcome to the wonderful world of adulthood,” she said. “People mature at different speeds, Emily. You may be physically seventeen, old enough to be a mother, but you may not be mentally ready to have a relationship with anyone. And, unlike most of the boys and girls in the Allied Lands, you will have all the time you need to make your choice.”
“I don’t,” Emily said, miserably. “I have to provide an heir for Cockatrice.”
“True enough,” Lady Barb agreed. “And it would have to be your child. You couldn’t simply adopt someone and declare him your heir.”
She looked back along the path. “What sort of man do you want?”
Emily shook her head. Once, she’d dreamed of Prince Charming...but that had been part of her childhood. After she’d started to mature, she’d become too unsure of herself to dream of a prince – or even a princess – coming to take her away. It struck her suddenly that she could get a prince now and she giggled, despite herself. But if the princes who had courted Alassa were any indication, she wouldn’t want any of them.
But what did she want?
She mulled it over as she walked behind Lady Barb. A gentle man, she decided, someone clever enough to hold a conversation, yet also willing to give her time to herself. Jade wouldn’t be that kind of husband, she had to admit, not if the way he’d courted her was any indication. He would always want to be doing things with her; riding, swimming, exploring...and everything else. She would never be alone.
“This looks a good place to stop,” Lady Barb said, as they reached a large clearing. It didn’t look particularly natural. Someone had carved it out of the trees and then done something to ensure that nothing grew to replace them. “Set up the cauldron and make us some Kava.”
Emily realized, to her surprise, that her legs ached. How far had they walked? She nodded and set to work, while Lady Barb paced the clearing and set up a handful of wards, then strode back to her and watched as the Kava boiled. Emily poured it into a pair of mugs, blowing on the liquid to cool it down. Using magic to cool drinks never seemed to work quite right.
“So,” she said, as she took a sip. It always tasted better in the open air. “Why are we here?”
“Miles from anyone else,” Lady Barb said. The smile on her face took the sting from her words. “Good a place as any to practice some magic that cannot be performed in Whitehall.”
Chapter Seventeen
EMILY COULDN’T HELP FEELING A FLUSH of excitement as Lady Barb started to draw runes on the ground.
“The first time you tried to create a pocket dimension,” she lectured, “you tried to do it inside another pocket dimension. You were very lucky not to be expelled for gross stupidity.”
Emily winced, remembering Master Tor’s anger – and the dead Warden. Most students were given a list of things they shouldn’t try to do in Whitehall, but Emily had accidentally fallen through the cracks in the system. Void had assumed that the Grandmaster would teach her, she suspected, and the Grandmaster had overlooked the fact Void hadn’t taught her. And, as Master Tor had believed Void was her father, he had assumed that she was deliberately breaking the rules.
“This time, you shouldn’t have any external problems affecting your magic,” Lady Bar continued. “However, you should still be very careful. Pocket dimensions can be tricky things to create and maintain.”
She finished drawing runes, then reached into her bag and produced a handful of sticks, which she fitted together to make a square. Emily looked down at it in puzzlement, then realized that they were going to focus on the most basic pocket dimension design of all. There was no point in trying to run, she knew, before she could walk. The book Yodel had loaned her had skipped quite a few steps.
“The simplest form of pocket dimension is a bubble attached to an object,” Lady Barb continued. “They can be moved with the object, but not separated from it. Nor can they be easily accessed without the object. Should it be destroyed, the pocket dimension will collapse, blasting its contents outwards. Most dimensions have safety spells woven into their structures to prevent that from happening.”
Emily nodded. There were pocket dimensions that could be accessed from anywhere, or not bound to a particular object, but they were far more complex. Even the most powerful sorcerers, she’d been told, preferred to avoid them, if only because anyone with the right coordinates could get into the dimension. It was easier to carry a bag that was larger on the inside then risk losing one’s property.
“Sit down,” Lady Barb directed. She passed Emily the square, motioning for her to hold it up so she was looking through it. “Are you ready?”
Emily nodded.
“I want you to close your eyes and imagine that the interior of the square is solid,” Lady Barb said. “I want you to try to visualize the fabric of reality itself.”
Emily concentrated. It was easy to imagine a shimmering layer inside the square, like a soap bubble, but harder to convince herself that it was real. The pocket dimension would expand outside reality, just like a far smaller version of the TARDIS...or was she actually expanding the space inside the square? Not entirely to her surprise, the books hadn’t been too clear on what she was actually doing. There were entire fields of study that were unknown at Whitehall.
“Now,” Lady Barb said. “I want you to imagine the fabric expanding, becoming a bubble.”
Just like blowing bubbles, Emily thought. She felt her magic shift in response, then fade again as her imagination faltered. The pocket dimension didn’t seem to be manageable without her constant attention and she couldn’t concentrate on anything for that long. She opened her eyes, just in time to see the light bending around the magic...and then the pocket dimension collapsed.
“Not too bad, for a first attempt,” Lady Barb said. She didn’t sound angry, merely calm and thoughtful. “Try again?”
Emily nodded and closed her eyes again. This time, the magic seemed to flow easier and, when she opened her eyes, she had the strange impression she was looking through a reversed telescope. It took her a moment to realize that light itself was actually bending around the dimension, distorting her perceptions. A moment later, the dimension snapped back out of existence. Emily rubbed her forehead and felt sweat prickling there. It might not feel like a huge effort, but it was definitely draining.
“Close enough, for the moment,” Lady Barb said. “The real trick is stabilizing it, then binding it in place.”
She rested a hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Ready to try?”
Emily swallowed. Two years at Whitehall had helped her get casting basic spells
down to a fine art. Where she’d once had to build the spells up piece by piece, she could now cast many of them with a thought. But now she would have to go back to first principles and start building the spell-structure up from scratch. And she would have to do it while maintaining the pocket dimension in place.
“Yes,” she said. She took out her notes and stared down at them, then closed her eyes. “I’m ready.”
It was, she decided, rather like building something that had to be anchored to the seabed. An open tube could be lowered to the bottom of the water, then the water could be pumped out and concrete poured into the tube. This time, the spells that held the pocket dimension together had to be placed, one by one, inside the dimension, each one forming part of a chain that was greater than the sum of its parts. Each spell was simple by itself, but the real trick was getting them to work together.
Her first attempt at splitting her attention failed miserably. One of her teachers on Earth had assured her, with a particularly nasty smile, that girls could do two things at once, but she couldn’t hold the dimension in place and assemble the spells at the same time. The second time, she managed to get two spells inserted before the dimension collapsed, striking her with a backlash from her own magic. Her hands tingled, forcing her to slap them against her thighs,
Crossly, she tried for the third time...and discovered that she could only get a handful of spells inserted before her concentration slipped. She honestly didn’t understand how Yodel had made something as complex as her trunk.
“Drink this,” Lady Barb said. “And then try to relax.”
Emily took the mug of water and sipped gratefully. She hadn’t realized how parched her throat had become until she drank. Lady Barb passed her a bar of sour chocolate and she ate it, wondering bitterly how Yodel managed to make a living. It was terrifyingly easy to manipulate dimensions with a nexus point – Emily knew that, better than anyone – but without one at her disposal she was just playing with sticks and stones. There had to be something she was missing.
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