It wasn’t yet sunset, but the town seemed as quiet and fearful as the previous village. Emily saw the faces at many of the windows peek out at them, before vanishing behind curtains. She looked around, half-expecting to see guards, yet no one showed themselves. By the time they reached the guesthouse and started to dismantle the locks, Emily felt thoroughly spooked.
“Someone tried to break in again,” Lady Barb observed, as she opened the door. “But this time they didn’t succeed.”
Emily frowned. “The same person as before?”
“Unknown,” Lady Barb said. She sounded rather perturbed. “I didn’t recognize the traces of magic, but that proves nothing.”
Inside, the guesthouse was clean. Emily checked the potions cabinets and discovered, to her relief, that all of the ingredients were still in place. She put her bag down in the room, then stepped into the kitchen. As Lady Barb lit a fire, Emily unpacked the remaining food and laid it on the table. Welcome warmth slowly spread through the guesthouse.
“This town is as scared as the last village,” Lady Barb said, once she’d made them both some warm soup. Emily took her bowl and sipped it, gratefully. “The fear is almost tangible.”
“They might have lost children too,” Emily said. She finished her soup and moved on to the bread. “How are we going to proceed?”
“I’m going to pay a silent visit to the castle tomorrow,” Lady Barb said. “You’re going to remain here and take care of our patients.”
Emily swallowed. “What if something happens I can’t handle?”
“I’ll be very disappointed in you,” Lady Barb said, lightly. “But if you really can’t deal with it, place the patient in stasis and wait for me to return.”
She finished her bread and stood up. “I’m going to talk to the headman,” she added. “Set up the beds, then plan what you’re going to brew tomorrow.”
Emily groaned – more potions – but nodded. If nothing else, she was certainly gaining in confidence while doing something useful. Professor Thande would be pleased, even though she was only creating First Year potions. Maybe she could apply for extra ingredients for Third Year and do some private alchemical work, perhaps with Imaiqah’s help.
“We should teach them how to make their own,” she said, softly. “Would it be so difficult?”
Lady Barb smiled. “Would you like to encourage mundanes to experiment with alchemy?”
Emily shook her head, embarrassed. Away from Thande’s protective wards, alchemical explosions could be even worse. Whole houses might be wiped out by disasters a magician could have avoided, if only by disintegrating the cauldron before it exploded. Besides, she had a feeling that magicians would object to sharing the more complex recipes. Who knew what would happen to them?
She watched Lady Barb leave, then walked into the potions lab and inspected the ingredients one by one. There were enough, she decided, to make everything the townspeople could want – and bottles to store it – if she had the time to do it. She suspected that, normally, an alchemist would have nothing to do with actual patients, which was probably a good thing. Even someone as...innocent as Professor Thande would be unable to resist the urge to experiment on his patients. There were enough horror stories about alchemists to convince her to keep them well away from mundanes.
Once she’d sorted out the ingredients, she walked back into the main room and into the bedroom. It was smaller than she’d expected, with one large king-sized bed rather than several smaller ones. The room was cold enough for people to want to huddle together, but magic would take care of that, suggesting that the designer had had other things in mind. Irked, Emily placed her blanket on the floor and silently promised Lady Barb the bed. The older woman had been ill, after all.
It was nearly an hour before Lady Barb returned, by which time the sun had vanished completely, throwing the entire town into darkness. Emily used the night vision spell as she peered out of the window, but saw hardly anyone on the streets.
Lady Barb was right. This town was definitely gripped by fear.
“The headman was too nervous to talk to me,” Lady Barb said. “But I managed to get some answers out of his wife. They’ve lost at least a dozen children and young men.”
Emily blinked as she boiled the water for a hot drink. “Young men?”
“Conscripted,” Lady Barb said, shortly. “Lady Easter seems to be preparing for war. She’s taken over half of the unmarried men from the town, men the townspeople desperately need to prepare for the coming winter. They went into the castle and haven’t been seen since.”
She ran her hands through her long hair. “And the children have definitely vanished,” she added. “They started to lock them up after three children went picking mushrooms and never came home. It didn’t make any difference. The children kept vanishing at night.”
Emily shivered. “How?”
“Good question,” Lady Barb said. “Most supernatural creatures won’t come into a town, unless summoned. But if it is a necromancer, he should be completely mad by now.”
She took her drink, drank it and then headed towards the bedroom. “We need to be up early tomorrow morning,” she added, as she walked. “Make sure you are ready to brew in the morning.
“Shouldn’t I come with you?” Emily asked. “If it is a necromancer...”
Lady Barb turned and met her eyes. “Could you defeat one through the power of love?”
Emily blushed bright red. One of the ballads bards sang about her claimed that she had defeated Shadye with the power of love. It said a great deal about some of the others that it wasn’t the worst of the bunch. What kind of enemy could be defeated by love? Shadye had probably never known the meaning of the word.
“Or,” Lady Barb pressed, “do you have the power to beat one now?”
“I don’t know,” Emily said, thinking of the nuke-spell. But it would be completely devastating – and almost certainly suicidal. “Maybe...”
“I’ve sneaked around necromancers before,” Lady Barb reminded her, gently. “If I don’t come back, you can do as you see fit, but until then you must do as I tell you. Obedience is one of the rules of apprenticeship, is it not?”
Emily nodded. She was Lady Barb’s apprentice, at least for the summer, even if she hadn’t taken the usual oaths. Obedience, loyalty and servitude were the terms, in exchange for training and practice. She could argue, she could ask for explanations or clarification, but she couldn’t disobey. Or at least a normal apprentice couldn’t disobey. She felt a moment of pity for Jade, combined with a grim awareness that she might have to take on an apprenticeship after leaving Whitehall. What would happen if she ended up apprenticed to someone less reasonable than Lady Barb?
She followed Lady Barb into the bedroom, then rolled her eyes as she realized the older woman had taken the blankets, rather than the bed. Emily hesitated, then tactfully pointed out that she’d meant to give the bed to Lady Barb.
“I’m not that old,” Lady Barb said, with a smile. “Besides, I cannot get too used to comfort.”
Emily lifted an eyebrow. “Did you sleep on nails at Whitehall?” she asked, remembering that she hadn’t seen Lady Barb’s private chambers. Students were rarely allowed entry to any of the teaching staff’s quarters. “Or did they just give you a hard bed?”
“Go to sleep,” Lady Barb ordered, shortly. “It takes years to build up a tolerance for moving from place to place, but only days to lose it.”
The thought nagged at Emily as she lay in the giant bed, feeling an odd twinge of guilt. It had been fun to camp with the sergeants, but she’d always felt relieved when she finally returned to Whitehall. And yet she’d adapted well to the changes on their walk, sleeping under the stars one night and in an insect-infected hovel the next. But would she have coped so well if she hadn’t had camping experience? Or, for that matter, the magic to make it easier to handle? No wonder so few new magicians went home.
She drifted off to sleep, but her sleep was broken by nightma
res that eventually sent her back into wakefulness, two hours before sunrise. Lady Barb snored quietly, her heavy breathing almost hypnotic; Emily sat upright and tried to concentrate, calming her heartbeat until she could sleep again. But she tossed and turned for nearly an hour before giving up, climbing out of bed and slipping into the main room, where she cast a light spell and read until the sun started to rise in the sky. The book wasn’t boring enough to send her back to sleep.
A hand fell on her shoulder and she jumped. “You scared me,” Lady Barb said. “You never wake up before me.”
Emily blushed. At Whitehall, students normally woke up at eight bells, in time to get some breakfast before running to their first classes. The peasants, on the other hand, rose with the sun and went to bed with the moon. Despite living with them, Emily knew her sleeping habits hadn’t improved from Whitehall.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she confessed. It felt oddly warming to know that Lady Barb had been worried. “And I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I normally play Kingmaker or read when I want to sleep,” Lady Barb said. She wandered over to the window and peered outside into the semi-darkness. “And several of the staff have started playing poker.”
Emily couldn’t help snickering. She’d designed playing cards easily enough, although charming them to prevent cheating had required Aloha’s help. But then she’d run into the problem of simply not knowing the rules. Her stepfather had gambled heavily, but he’d never invited Emily to play, let alone taught her the rules. Aloha had listened to what little Emily could recall, then worked out her own set of rules. Emily had no idea how close they were to Earth’s rules, but it hardly mattered. “Poker” had spread through Whitehall like a wildfire. She was probably lucky that most people blamed it on Aloha. Students being students, it hadn’t taken long for them to start gambling for more than matchsticks.
“Yes, I thought that was your fault,” Lady Barb added. She smiled as Emily’s flush deepened. “Who else would invent a whole new game because she was bored?”
Emily shrugged. She hadn’t really invented chess, of course, but it was the story almost everyone chose to believe. It had been Aloha who had invented “poker.” Somehow, it had sparked off a quiet competition among the students to invent new games that held together reasonably well. Emily hadn’t entered, knowing that it wasn’t fair. But she hadn’t been able to resist planning out a Risk-like game for the Allied Lands.
“Make us some breakfast, then go start your brewing,” Lady Barb ordered. In the distance, the sun started to glimmer at the horizon. “I need to make sure that no children vanished overnight.”
Emily wanted to insist on coming with her, but bit her tongue and walked over to the kitchen, where oats and milk had been stored in preservation cabinets. She made oatmeal, then waited until Lady Barb returned to eat.
“Eat at once, next time,” Lady Barb said. Her voice was stern, but her eyes looked distracted, preoccupied by a greater thought. “There’s no point in waiting for me.”
“It’s rude to eat without you,” Emily said. The older woman seemed caught between two different priorities. “What’s wrong?”
“A baby was taken from his mother last night,” Lady Barb said, once she finished eating. “There were strange traces of magic around the house.”
Emily sucked in her breath. “Can you follow them?”
“I think so,” Lady Barb said. “Stay here. Do your brewing, then see patients. Can you handle it?”
“Yes,” Emily said, stung. “I’ll wait for you.”
She left Lady Barb to put the dishes in the sink, then walked into the potions lab and started to brew, one after the other. Her irritation caused two potions to spoil before she managed to calm herself enough to brew properly. If nothing else, she told herself, the remaining potions could be bottled and handed over to the headman for later distribution. There would be no need to waste anything. She had worked her way through five potions when there was a sharp knock at the door.
Shaking her head, Emily walked over – readying a spell in her mind, just in case – and opened the door. A young man was standing there, resting on a cane. Emily listened to a story of accidentally damaging his leg while climbing a tree, then motioned for him to sit down while she worked on the wound. It had been treated by a mundane doctor, she realized, who had bound up the wound, but done nothing else.
“This may hurt a little,” she said. “Do you want something to dampen the pain?”
The man shook his head. Emily rolled her eyes – some of the male students in classes were just the same, showing off how much pain they could endure – and cast the spell without any further hesitation. There was a faint crunching sound as the bones were knit back together; the man let out a strangled gasp, then went very pale. Emily concealed her amusement as she concentrated on completing the job. Thankfully, he managed to remain still long enough for her to do it without complications.
“Take it easy for a few days,” she said, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy for him. The town was bigger than any of the villages, but it wouldn’t have much room for freeloaders. “If you put too much weight on that leg, it will probably break again.”
She rolled her eyes again as the young man stood up, clearly resting his weight on the repaired leg. “You’re much nicer than Mother Holly,” he said. “And you did a better job.”
“Thank you,” Emily said, puzzled. “Who’s Mother Holly?”
“A witch,” the man said. “She lives some distance from town. If someone is badly injured, they will go to see her. Sometimes she helps.”
A shadow crossed his face. “They also say she’s the one stealing the children.”
Emily frowned. A hedge witch? She didn’t know much about them, save for the fact that most magicians looked down on them as untrained amateurs. They were sometimes related to the Travellers, sometimes completely isolated from the magical mainstream. But she was the first magician Emily had heard of since beginning her time with Lady Barb.
“Tell me,” she said. “Why didn’t you go there?”
“She can be very unpleasant if she doesn’t think you’re worth her time,” the young man said. “Or so I have been told.”
Resolving to discuss the matter with Lady Barb, Emily chased the young man out just in time to see a child with a problematic tooth. Her mother and father insisted on staying with her at all times, watching Emily as if they expected her to snatch the child and run. Emily tried not to keep one eye on the scythe the man was carrying as she gave the child some healing potion, then inspected the rotting tooth. She wasn’t an expert dentist, insofar as the Allied Lands had dentists. The only thing she could do was pluck the tooth out of the child’s mouth and reassure the parents that a new tooth would grow in time.
She watched them go, then started working her way through the other patients. It amazed her just how quiet and orderly the waiting townspeople were, not even chattering amongst themselves as they waited in a meek little line outside the building. The handful of times she’d been to a clinic on Earth, the waiting room had been noisy and the doctor’s staff had been driven almost to distraction. But here...she could turn them away, if they annoyed her. Lady Barb would understand.
One girl was having problems with cramps. Emily gave her a bottle of potion – the same she used at Whitehall – and told her to take one sip the day her cycle began. An older man worried over a nasty cough, which Emily handled, telling him to stop smoking home-grown tobacco. She had no way to be sure, but she suspected that it was stronger than anything she’d seen on Earth. The man didn’t seem too happy with her suggestion. Tobacco, like alcohol, helped relieve boredom and calm the nerves.
Emily sighed, then went on to the next patient. A red-faced boy confessed to having problems with his penis, which Emily noted down before telling him to come back and see Lady Barb later. She wouldn’t be happy about that, Emily knew, but she couldn’t force herself to be clinical. It had been hard enough practicing on the training homun
culus. By the time she had worked her way through the entire line, it was early afternoon and she was exhausted.
There was a knock on the door. Cursing under her breath, Emily stood and opened the door to reveal another young man who seemed oddly familiar. It still took her a moment to place him. He’d changed his clothes – he looked like a merchant now, rather than a peasant – but his hands were still dead giveaways.
“Rudolf?”
“The same,” Rudolf said. He gave her an oddly hopeful smile. “Can I come in?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
RUDOLF LOOKED FAINTLY...ODD TO EMILY as he stepped past her and took a seat at the table. It was impossible to place her finger on it, even though he carried himself like an aristocrat while wearing clothes belonging to one of the lower orders. She wondered, suddenly, if Rudolf could be the mystery magician, but there was no scent of magic around him. Unless he was masking very well, he didn’t have the potential for magic, let alone actual access to his powers. He was just a mundane.
She closed the door, cursing herself for forgetting Sergeant Harkin so quickly. He’d been a mundane, and yet he’d taught at a school for magicians. Rudolf might have no magic, but she shouldn’t dismiss him out of hand. He might still be very dangerous, even though his servants all agreed that he was a good person, for an aristocrat.
She mentally prepared a spell before sitting down at the table, facing him. This time, she didn’t want to let him get away.
“Your father was under outside control,” she said, placing her hands on the table. “He wasn’t in his right mind.”
Work Experience (Schooled in Magic Book 4) Page 30