Past Tense (Schooled in Magic Book 10)

by Christopher Nuttall

  And it will give whoever is in control vast power over the school, she thought, as she made her way up to the bedroom. They’ll be able to see into every last nook and cranny.

  She tensed as she turned the corner and saw Tama, standing next to two other apprentices and scowling fiercely. He balled his fists, then muttered a couple of words as he hurled a spell towards her. Emily felt too tired to try to catch and dissect it, so she stepped aside and allowed the spell to splash harmlessly against the stone wall. Tama grunted and tossed another spell at her, a lightning bolt that flashed through the air and spent itself uselessly against her protections. There was no shortage of power in his magic—although he was nowhere near either Bernard or Robin—but he had almost no control at all.

  The apprentices are going to go mad, she told herself. She didn’t want to fight, but she was so tired. Tired of being treated either as an inferior or someone who needed to be protected, someone who couldn’t look after herself. They’re slopping magic through their brains ...

  “Fight me,” Tama snapped. He hurled another lightning bolt at her, brilliant flashes of light dancing off her wards and making her hair want to stand on end. “Robin’s not here to defend you, bitch.”

  Emily fought down the urge to throw a lethal curse—or something too far out of place—back at him. Instead, she shaped a spell in her mind and cast it, hurling it right towards him and his watching friends. He was going to hate her more—they were all going to hate her—but she found it hard to care. The spell she’d hurled wasn’t powerful, nowhere near as powerful as the lightning spells he’d cast at her, yet that hardly mattered. He’d underestimate the spell ...

  Tama’s eyes went wide as his lower body suddenly froze, sending him and his friends tumbling to the ground. Emily felt a flicker of sympathy for one of them—he’d cracked his head against the stone floor—but he didn’t look to be seriously injured. Tama stared at her, then let loose a flurry of inventive curses as he cast another spell. He didn’t even seem to be trying to free himself.

  He thinks my spell won’t last, Emily thought. Against Robin or Bernard, he might well have been right. He hadn’t even tried to ward the spell off because it had been weak, but that had been a fatal error. He’s trapped and he doesn’t even know it.

  She lifted a hand and cast a prank spell on all three of the boys. Their hands were suddenly glued to their sides, held in place by an invisible force. A second spell shut their mouths, holding their lips together ... Tama’s eyes went wide with shock. He’d genuinely thought she wasn’t a true magician, she realized. And his friends hadn’t even talked to her ...

  “You underestimated the spells I used,” she said, “because they weren’t very powerful.”

  Tama glared at her, his magic field flaring around him. Emily watched him warily for a second, then decided he didn’t have the power or the precision to break the spells ahead of time. He’d definitely learned far too much for his own good before losing his master and fleeing to the commune. What had he thought would happen? He’d overwhelm her magic and then have his way with her? Or merely humiliate her in front of his friends?

  “Their power doesn’t matter,” she added. Tama had definitely not been trained in casting spells without using his hands. “All that matters is that the spells are designed to make it impossible for you to break free. Your power is nowhere near sufficient to break free before I cut your throats.”

  She felt a stab of guilt at the sudden panic on his face and told herself not to be silly. He probably hadn’t planned to rape her—Whitehall would have killed him, quite literally, if he had—but humiliating her would have been a different story. Would Whitehall have reacted quite so badly if she’d been stripped naked and displayed to the world?

  But if he was right about how I became his apprentice, she thought, my master would be insane with rage.

  She shook her head. Tama was an idiot. It never seemed to have occurred to him that he might have been wrong ... and the consequences of actually being right would be a great deal worse. Village boy or not, he should have known better. Perhaps his father had been the headman, like Hodge. The bastard hadn’t had the wit to think twice before trying to rape a magician either.

  “You need to learn how to use your power more efficiently,” she added, forcing the thought aside. “Right now, even a weaker magician with more skill can tie you up in knots. I could kill the three of you, right here, and you couldn’t hope to stop me. I suggest, very strongly, that you go to Master Wolfe and beg him to teach you before it’s too late.”

  She walked past them, resisting the urge to kick Tama while he was down. “The spells will wear off, sooner or later,” she told them. “When they do ... learn from the experience. Or die, the next time you challenge a more capable magician.”

  Gritting her teeth, she kept walking, feeling sweat running down her back. It was hard to walk slowly—she wanted to run—but she forced herself to keep going at the same pace until she was round the corner and heading up a flight of stairs. God alone knew what Master Whitehall would say, when he heard about what she’d done. But then, it was quite possible that no one would stumble across the trio until the spells had worn off. Would they make a complaint?

  They’ll be laughed at if they do, she thought.

  She couldn’t help smiling at the thought, even though it wasn’t particularly funny. It was one of the ironies of a world that was blatantly sexist, if not misogynistic. She’d seen it in Cockatrice. A man might beat his wife—perfectly legally—and she might complain to her father or the local headman, but no self-respecting husband would dare complain about his wife beating him. He’d be a laughingstock. And while a man could be punished for excessive beating, a wife couldn’t be punished without making her husband the butt of countless bad jokes.

  And I’d better tighten up my protections, she told herself as she entered the bedroom and closed the door behind her. Thankfully, Julianne was somewhere else. Tama might just learn a lesson—but he might also take another shot at me.

  She shook her head as she started to put the spellwork together. The past had always fascinated her, but living in it ... that was a different story. And she wanted to go home.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “OPEN YOUR BAG,” LORD ALFRED ORDERED, as Emily entered the small chamber. “Lord Whitehall insists that I need to see what you’ve packed.”

  Emily scowled, but opened the knapsack without comment. A change of clothes, a couple of potion gourds, a handful of pieces of vellum ... there wasn’t anything else. She would have liked to bring a book or two with her, but there weren’t many books in the castle and those that were there were literally irreplaceable. It would be nearly a thousand years before the printing press was invented, allowing them to be copied easily. Master Wolfe’s small collection of books was a treasure beyond price.

  “Good,” Lord Alfred said. “I trust you have everything you might need?”

  “Yes, My Lord,” Emily said. “Julianne assured me that we should be able to get our clothes washed at the Gathering.”

  “Of course,” Lord Alfred said. “We have to look our best.”

  Emily hid her amusement with an effort. Alassa wasn’t quite as obsessed with cleanliness as Emily herself, but she’d insisted on changing her clothes every day. Emily didn’t really blame her, either. But then, Julianne had only a handful of outfits and she’d already loaned two of them to Emily. Thankfully, altering borrowed dresses to fit her was the work of a few hours.

  And there will be hardly anywhere to wash along the way, Emily thought, morbidly. We’ll going to be smelly by the time we arrive.

  “We won’t be coming back to the castle for at least a month,” Lord Alfred warned. “If you leave something behind, we won’t be able to go back for it.”

  Emily nodded as she started to repack her bag. There was no way she could take any reading matter along—she would have been glad to have anything to read—and everything else was in very short supply. Whit
ehall and Bernard intended to hunt for food along the way, she’d been told, if they failed to buy it from nearby villages. And if they failed to catch anything ...

  We can eat plants, if necessary, she reminded herself. We just have to be careful what we put in our mouths.

  She watched as Lord Alfred hastily packed his own bag. He seemed to be bringing more clothes than Emily and Julianne combined, although she supposed he was going to be carrying his bag. Whitehall had made it clear that they wouldn’t be bringing servants along with them. Emily would have suspected that she and Julianne would be expected to do all the work, but Whitehall seemed to have accepted his daughter as a promising magician in her own right. Perhaps she, Julianne and Bernard would be expected to do all the work instead.

  “It will be an interesting journey,” Lord Alfred commented. “I haven’t been on the far side of the mountains for years.”

  It took Emily a moment to realize he meant the Craggy Mountains. They’d be heading into the Blighted Lands—or what would become the Blighted Lands, in her time. She tensed, recalling the long walk from Whitehall to the Dark Fortress, then dismissed the thought. The Faerie Wars had yet to begin, let alone the rise of the Necromancers. There was no reason to worry about walking into the Blighted Lands.

  But then, the Manavores are on the prowl, she reminded herself. We might never make it to the Gathering.

  “It should be interesting,” she agreed, neutrally. “Do you think ...”

  She stopped as she saw Lord Alfred open a drawer and pick up a heavy book. An aura of pure evil filled the room. She took a step backwards reflexively as he placed the book on the table, its malice so powerful that it dominated the room. It was suddenly hard to remember that there was anything else in the room. The book was ... it was just there.

  “That’s a Book of Pacts,” she said. She hadn’t touched it, but merely being so close to the book made her want to hurry to the shower and scrub her skin raw. “You ...”

  Lord Alfred gave her an affable smile. “I am a DemonMaster,” he said, reprovingly. His fingers traced the sigil on the cover. “And I have fifty-seven under my command, bound to my name and my blood.”

  Emily found her voice. “Does Lord Whitehall know?”

  “Of course,” Lord Alfred told her. There was a reproving tone to his voice. “We have been partners for decades, young lady.”

  “But you voted against bringing demons into Whitehall,” Emily said. “You ...”

  She cursed herself a moment later. The book had rattled her more than she cared to admit—and she’d practically just confessed to eavesdropping on the fateful meeting. Unless Whitehall had told her afterwards ... she knew she didn’t dare claim that was true, if Lord Alfred asked. He might well check it with Whitehall.

  “Demons are tools,” Lord Alfred said. If he noticed her slip, he gave no sign. “And like most such tools, they are best used once the user actually knows what he’s doing.”

  Emily frowned. “You intend to teach your apprentices how to summon demons?”

  “If they ask,” Lord Alfred said. He smiled, thinly. “I haven’t survived so long by being careless, my dear. My apprentices will be made very aware of the dangers before they draw out their first circle.”

  “They might not want to summon demons,” Emily pointed out. “They’d be able to do everything themselves.”

  “Perhaps,” Lord Alfred said.

  He sighed, heavily. She couldn’t escape the impression that he was suddenly a great deal older. “When I was a young man, there was an ... incident,” he said. He leered cheerfully at the book. “I had seduced and bedded the daughter of a local headman—she wasn’t much of a lay, but it was quite a challenge. She was devoted to the Crone, you see.”

  “I’m sure she was,” Emily said, disapprovingly.

  “The headman sent out his goons to capture me,” Lord Alfred added. He didn’t seem to notice her disapproval. “I fled into the night, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before they tracked me down. And so I summoned a demon and bargained for my life. I wanted to be hidden from the trackers and guided to the nearest safe town. A thunderstorm sprang up, hiding my tracks; the demon told me that the next town was only a mile away. It didn’t take me long to reach it.”

  He looked up at her. “Now tell me,” he said. “Did the demon cause that thunderstorm to take place ... or was it going to happen all along?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said, after a moment.

  “Nor do I,” Lord Alfred told her. “Demons are cunning, my dear. They will take whatever loophole you offer them and turn it against you. I might well have reached that town anyway, if I’d just continued down the path. Was it really worth the price I paid?”

  Emily shrugged. “And what happened to the girl?”

  Lord Alfred ignored the question. Instead, he packed the book into his knapsack—the aura of evil vanished as soon as the book was out of sight—and slung the bag over his shoulder. He seemed younger, somehow, as he headed for the door, even though there was something wrong with the way he walked. But then, if he hadn’t been reasonably healthy for his age, he wouldn’t have lasted long in any case. The Nameless World was not kind to the elderly.

  Unless they happen to be magicians, Emily thought, as she followed him through the door and down to the courtyard. I wonder how old he really is.

  She puzzled over the problem for a long moment, then pushed it aside as they stepped into the courtyard. Four horses were waiting, Whitehall and Bernard brushing them down while Julianne checked and rechecked her potions bag. Emily had watched her put it together the previous evening and she’d been quietly impressed by just how much Julianne could do with a few herbs and a little water. She could brew cures for a dozen ailments if necessary, without needing to harvest anything else from the surrounding forest.

  “You’ll be riding behind Julianne,” Whitehall said, as he nodded to the nearest horse. The beast gave Emily a disdainful look. “We have to leave the remaining horses here.”

  Emily nodded, privately relieved. She could ride, but she didn’t like it. She’d half-hoped there would be a carriage—there was no hope of anything better—yet Julianne had pointed out, when she’d asked, that there were hardly any roads near the castle. The network of Roman-like roads Emily had seen in the future simply didn’t exist. And she had a private suspicion that what few roads there were would be nowhere near as good. The peasants had no particular desire to make it easier for royal officials and tax collectors to make it around the kingdom.

  “It’s better this way,” Julianne whispered, as her father walked back into the castle. “I don’t have to be trapped behind father—or Bernard.”

  Emily nodded in agreement. She was mildly surprised that Julianne knew how to ride—women were rarely taught how to ride unless they were nobility—but she had no hesitation in taking advantage of it. Julianne felt the same way too, she suspected. Being forced to ride behind her father would have been bad enough, but riding behind her boyfriend would have been indecent. And Emily would have had the same problem if she’d ridden behind Whitehall ...

  “Just try not to gallop too fast,” she muttered back. “I think the horse hates me.”

  Julianne gave her an incredulous look as Whitehall re-emerged from the castle and ordered them to mount up. Bernard climbed into his horse’s saddle with admirable skill, but Emily had to scramble up after Julianne. Alassa had taught her how to get onto a horse without using a stand, forcing her to do it again and again, yet she’d never been very good at it. The horse twitched uncomfortably as she settled, wrapping her arms around Julianne, then started to amble towards the gates. Bernard and Whitehall cantered past, while Lord Alfred seemed to be bringing up the rear. His horse snorted unpleasantly.

  It probably senses the Book of Pacts, Emily thought, darkly. And really doesn’t want to be anywhere near it.

  “Here we go,” Julianne said. “Hang on!”

  Emily swore out loud as the horse lunged forward, gall
oping out of the castle and towards the forest. There was a path, she saw now; the commune had hacked and slashed their way through the foliage, clearing their way to the castle. But it had already started to close, the trees and bushes pressing closer and casting long shadows over the path. Emily hunched low as the horses rode into the forest and cantered along the path. She couldn’t escape the sense that it was only a matter of time before she cracked her head against a low branch and tumbled off the back of the horse.

  “You don’t need to hold on so tightly,” Julianne teased. She didn’t seem bothered as the horse picked up speed. “What happened to the girl who killed Master Gila?”

  Emily felt her cheeks heat. “She doesn’t like riding horses,” she said. She thought she saw something moving, within the shadows, but they were past before she could get a clear look at it. “And she would prefer to walk.”

  Julianne laughed. “And would she prefer to spend months traveling to the Gathering?”

  “No,” Emily said.

  She cursed under her breath. If she’d known where the Gathering was going to be—or if she’d had a decent map—she could have tried to teleport. But no one—not even Whitehall—knew that teleportation was possible, at least without the help of a demon. The spell—and the spell for portals—was far too advanced for her to introduce, at least until Master Wolfe had built up enough expertise with spellware to make it work. Coming to think of it, she hadn’t read any reference to teleporting before the Second Faerie War. It was possible that the spells wouldn’t be invented until then, centuries after Whitehall.

  The horse seemed to move faster and faster as they plunged through the forest and out onto a muddy track. Emily realized, to her shock, that they were actually approaching the Craggy Mountains, heading towards a pass that had long since been closed in her time. The mountains grew closer and closer, the horses slowing as they picked their way through the stony ground; the temperature fell sharply as they made their way through the pass, then out into the far side. Emily silently tried to match up the geography to what she’d seen in the future, but rapidly decided it was impossible. Too much was going to change in the next thousand years.