Little Witches (Schooled In Magic Book 21)

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  Nadine swam to the edge and treaded water, lingering in the pool. “You should practice at least once a week,” she said. “Right now, all you need is practice.”

  “Thanks,” Emily said. Her hair felt as if she hadn’t washed it in weeks. “Do you do that to all your students?”

  “Once they’ve mastered enough of the art to start feeling cocky,” Nadine said. “You’ve had... what? Six years of training? The firsties I teach take weeks to so much as lift themselves off the ground. And then they start thinking they’re the best of the best, if not the best of the best of the best. I have to knock that out of them before someone else does it.”

  She smiled. “Ready for another flight?”

  “Give me a moment to catch my breath,” Emily said. She’d been scared before, but... she’d come very close to blind panic. “What happened to you?”

  Nadine looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

  “When the intruder came,” Emily said. “Four years ago.”

  “You would have to ask that question,” Nadine said. She showed her teeth. “I was... I was a little brat. It took me years of arguing to get Father to send me here. I think it was the hag who agreed, in the end. She wanted me away from Father so she could dominate him. I took a bunch of servants and travelled here, stopped in the inn long enough to get changed and ready to go to the school. I had it all arranged. The servants would stay in the inn and take care of me.”

  “I thought that wasn’t allowed,” Emily said.

  “I was a brat,” Nadine repeated. She flushed. “My memories are a little hazy. I came face to face with myself, then... I was a fish in a fishbowl. They told me I stayed a fish for two months, that the servants fed me and changed the water and suchlike, but I don’t remember much of it. Lady Damia found me, eventually. She changed me back, took me back to the school. Everyone thought it was funny.”

  “It wasn’t,” Emily said.

  “I couldn’t tell them who or why,” Nadine said. “Penny and I became friends. Neither of us had anyone else. When I graduated, I asked permission to stay as a junior flying teacher while Penny went on to newer and better things. It wasn’t as if there was anything for me back home. And then... I asked for asylum after my father died.”

  “I see,” Emily said. “And you don’t have the slightest idea who or why?”

  “No,” Nadine said. “Father thought one of my tutors had been spying on me. The bastard vanished, shortly after I departed. Father... he thought it might have been the king, but the hag was never convinced. She thought Randor wasn’t dumb enough to pick a fight with a magic school.”

  “Not over that,” Emily agreed. “We don’t even know what the intruder wanted!”

  “No,” Nadine said. “I did wonder if they wanted to ruin me, perhaps to make it impossible for me to marry well, but... the hag would have blocked any match that didn’t suit her purposes. Maybe she was behind it. I never thought she’d been stripped of all power and influence, whatever the king said. Father just didn’t have the will to stand up to her.”

  “She’s dead now,” Emily said. “You can go home.”

  “This is my home,” Nadine said. She waved a hand towards the distant hills. “If I go back to Zangaria, what am I? The bastard daughter of a nobleman who was retroactively declared a traitor himself? I wouldn’t be an heiress, would I? But if I stay here, I have the pleasure of being myself.”

  She pulled herself out of the water. “And besides, I need to swim all the time,” she added, grimly. “Water feels like home.”

  “Because you spent two months as a fish,” Emily finished. She’d heard of the effect, but she’d never actually seen it. “Are you...?”

  “Sane?” Nadine shrugged. “It could have been worse.”

  Emily frowned. “If I can catch the intruder...”

  “It was four years ago,” Nadine said, briskly. “Whoever she was, she’s long gone.”

  She stood, water dripping down her trousers and pooling beneath her feet. “Come on,” she said. “It’s time to flap your wings and fly.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “LADY EMILY,” NADINE CALLED. “HOW DO you feel?”

  Emily gritted her teeth. Flying over the mountains would have been delightful, if it hadn’t been so much work. She felt as if she were flapping her hands desperately, as if she were swimming through thick soup and... the water trickling from her hair was a grim reminder that she could plunge to her death at any moment. Her arms and legs were aching, even though she wasn’t really using them. And, of course, Nadine glided in front of her with the greatest of ease.

  “Sore,” she managed. The Redoubt rose up in front of her, a deserted ruin that dominated the horizon. She would have been awed, if she wasn’t doing her level best to stay in the air. It looked strange, almost creepy. The sense of age - and time - was almost overwhelming. “Is that normal?”

  “It can be,” Nadine said. She dropped towards the ground, landing neatly in what had - probably - once been the courtyard. “Come on down.”

  Emily landed, badly. Her ankle twisted. She swore as she fell, barely catching herself a moment before she slammed face-first into the ground. Her ankle hurt... she rolled over and rubbed it, trying not to cry out. It wasn’t broken, she thought, but it was painful enough to make it hard to concentrate. She muttered a painkilling spell, reminding herself - severely - not to put any weight on the ankle until it was better. Her body ached as she sat up, slowly relaxing as the spell took effect. She’d have to be careful. Pain was the body’s way of signaling something was wrong and the spell would make sure the message wouldn’t reach her brain.

  Nadine knelt beside her. “Do you want me to take a look at it?”

  “It should be fine,” Emily said. She still felt as if she’d been swimming in pudding. “Why did you want to come here?”

  “It can be easier, sometimes, if you can see your destination,” Nadine said. “What do you think?”

  Emily had the oddest feeling she was being watched as her eyes drifted over the ruins. The Redoubt looked very much like Laughter, but it had clearly been badly damaged - to the point of being abandoned - hundreds of years ago. The walls were torn and broken, the stones covered with lichen and ivy and strange creepers that crawled in and out of chinks in the walls. The wind echoed oddly as it blew through the stone, faint hints of ancient magic echoing in the air. There didn’t seem to be anyone within the broken castle, but it was hard to be sure. The ruins left plenty of cover for anyone who wanted to remain undetected.

  “It looks odd.” Emily thought it might look worse to Nadine. She’d grown up in a castle. “What happened to it?”

  “Brier will happily bore you to tears about her theories,” Nadine said, a hint of affection in her tone. “But really, we don’t know.”

  Emily frowned as she stumbled to her feet, careful not to place too much weight on her sprained ankle. There were hints of claw marks against the stone, although the wind and rain had eroded them to the point she knew she could be imagining them. The traces of magic grew stronger as she concentrated. They seemed harmless, as far as she could tell, though she knew not to take that for granted. A little magic in the right place could do a lot of damage.

  She looked at Nadine. “Do the girls come up here often?”

  “Every so often, a bunch of students will dare themselves to spend the night here,” Nadine said. “They say the ruin is haunted, that the ghost of Pendle herself walks the corridors and will share secrets of magic... if, of course, the correct rites are performed. I spent a night here myself, when I was a student, and all I got out of it was a cold and detention.”

  Her lips quirked. “Mistress Greenstone marches the girls up here for advanced classes, sometimes,” she added. “And Brier keeps trying to explore the ruins, convinced she’s the one who’ll unlock the big secret. Personally, I think she’s wasting her time, but if it makes her happy...”

  Emily glanced at her. “Why do you think it’s a waste of ti
me?”

  Nadine shrugged. “Lady Dorchester once paid an archivist a thousand crowns to trace her family tree,” she said, “and then she had to pay another thousand crowns to cover it up, because the results weren’t as illustrious as she’d hoped. And then she discovered that the secret got out anyway, because the mere act of paying for the research convinced others that there was something there to find. What she dug up, she couldn’t bury again. It might be better to let sleeping dragons lie.”

  “I understand,” Emily said. They stepped into a ruined chamber that might, once, have been a dining hall. A damaged fireplace sat against the broken wall. Someone had scrawled PENDLE IS COMING HOME on the stone. “I’ve been seeing that everywhere.”

  Nadine laughed, humorlessly. “There’s always been chatter about Pendle returning to introduce a whole new generation of witchcraft,” she said. “That she will rise from the grave or reincarnate in a child’s body, reborn once again to change the world. Every year, Lady Emily, there’s a handful of girls who claim they’re Pendle reborn. Some of them even believe it.”

  “Really?” Emily found it hard to believe. “What do you do with them?”

  “Normally, we wait for them to get over it,” Nadine said. “Some of them are just trying to boost their social status. Others... they discover they have a talent for magic and, instead of crediting it to luck, prefer to believe they’re the reincarnation of an older witch. Given time, they get over it. It’s just another silly thing that comes out of the dorms.”

  Emily raised her eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t in the dorms?”

  “I wasn’t,” Nadine said. “But Penny had a lot of stories to tell.”

  She grinned. “You could be Pendle, Lady Emily.”

  Emily shook her head. “No. Definitely not.”

  “You could be,” Nadine said. “There isn’t a single witch - or magician - who has done as much as you, not in such a compressed timeframe. The really powerful and dangerous magicians are in their later years, some even in their second century. You, on the other hand, can’t be much older than twenty...”

  “Twenty-three,” Emily said, although she wasn’t really sure. She’d long since lost track of her birthday. She might be pushing twenty-four now, for all she knew. It didn’t matter that much, not to her. She was old enough not to have to worry about fitting in with the other students. “And I am not Pendle incarnate.”

  Nadine’s grin grew wider. “That’s exactly what I’d expect Pendle to say.”

  Emily shook her head. She’d heard of reincarnation, but she’d never placed any particular stock in it. She certainly didn’t believe she could be the reincarnation of a long-dead witch. The thought was absurd. She’d either learned her skills honestly, by studying and practicing, or imported ideas and concepts from Earth. Pendle wouldn’t know anything about the letters and numbers she’d introduced, let alone gunpowder and steam engines. She certainly wouldn’t introduce them.

  “I am not,” she said, firmly. “Sorry.”

  “I’m sure some of the girls will be disappointed,” Nadine said. “They’ve been hoping and praying for years.”

  “I’m sure,” Emily said. She frowned. Could there be some truth in the story? She’d seen enough, over the past few years, to know the world was stranger than she could imagine. It wasn’t impossible that Pendle could have placed herself into an enchanted sleep, perhaps under one of the castles. And yet... she shook her head. “I am not her.”

  She put the thought out of her head as they walked through a darkened chamber and stopped in front of a broken stairwell that led up to nothing. Emily peered upwards, into the bright blue sky, then turned her head away. A witch might find it fun to glide up the stairs and into the air, but she wasn’t ready. Not yet. Her body felt dull, almost numb. She was going to pay for that tomorrow.

  “What do you think of the school?” Nadine led the way down a corridor that opened into what might have been a classroom, once upon a time. “Do you intend to stay?”

  No, Emily thought.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “I hope to see out the year” - she had no intention of mentioning her real job to Nadine - “but I don’t know about anything beyond that. As for the school...”

  She grinned at Nadine’s back. “Brier is friendly, but the rest of the staff are a little reserved.”

  “Brier flirts with everyone,” Nadine said. “Don’t take her too seriously. She’s a good friend, but she’s also a terrible flirt.”

  Emily flushed. “And the others?”

  “Brier and I are the youngest amongst the senior staff,” Nadine said. “The others will remain reserved unless you join the school permanently. They won’t open up to you until you become part of the family.”

  “You make it sound like a cult,” Emily said.

  Nadine snorted. “It’s more like a family,” she said, as they stepped into the light. “They are united in their loyalty to the school, even if they have different ideas how things should change in the new world order. Damia will fight tooth and nail to keep things from changing, while Jens and Allworth both want major changes. They’ve been jockeying for power for years, Emily. And now the necromancers are gone, they see a prospect for actually changing things.”

  “I see,” Emily said. “And which side are you on?”

  “I don’t take sides,” Nadine said. “All three factions have a point.”

  She shook her head. “Perhaps we should talk about something more cheerful,” she said, dryly. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Perhaps we should talk about something else,” Emily said. She’d never liked talking about her romantic life, not with strangers. “Anything else.”

  “As you wish,” Nadine said. “There I was...”

  Emily listened as Nadine outlined a story about catching a pair of girls in the middle of a midnight feast, explaining how they had set up a trap to delay any teacher who wanted to come into the dorm in the hopes of giving them enough time to hide the evidence and jump back into bed. Nadine sounded almost impressed, as if she were pleased with their ingenuity, rather than being outraged. The girls had forgotten to hide the smell, she said, but she’d been so impressed she’d deliberately not noticed as she finished checking on the dorms before returning to her rooms. Better to let them think they’d gotten away with something, she explained, then convince them to start looking for newer ways to outwit their teachers.

  “But the second time, I called them out for it,” she finished. “I wasn’t going to let them get away with it twice.”

  “Good, I suppose,” Emily said. She chose her next words carefully. “Why are the girls so... rowdy?”

  Nadine considered it. “You went to Whitehall, didn’t you? And before then, you were raised by a sorcerer?”

  “Something like that,” Emily said, vaguely. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was raised in a household with very strict expectations,” Nadine said. “I might have been a... natural-born child, but Father still hoped he could marry me off to someone who needed to be bound closer to his side. Or something. I was never allowed to be myself, which is why I acted out so much. Father didn’t really care about me.”

  Her lips twisted. “That’s true of most of the girls here,” she added. “They were raised like... little dolls. Even those who weren’t raised so strictly spent most of their time with the boys, putting on an act for them. I’d bet that Whitehall has a lot of flirting between male and female students.”

  “You’d win that bet,” Emily said, quietly.

  “Here, the girls aren’t expected to live up to strict standards,” Nadine told her. “They’re not treated as inferior, because they’re girls; they’re not told they have a duty to marry well and produce children for the sake of the family. They don’t have to primp and preen to impress the boys. Is it any surprise, then, that they act out? The school is nowhere near as strict as an actual parent.”

  She looked down. “And a lot of them tend to act out,” she
added. “They were powerless” - she held up a hand, a white spark dancing over her skin - “and now they have power and they want to use it. The results are not always pleasant.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Emily said.

  “There’s always dangers in mingling magicians and mundanes,” Nadine said. “The Isolationists are not wrong about that, I think. There are always... incidents... when the two meet. But the girls had no power—until they did—and so they tend to get... drunk with power.”

  Emily nodded, slowly. “Do you think magicians and mundanes cannot co-exist?”

  “I think we don’t have a choice,” Nadine said, dryly. “The Isolationists say that magicians are a tiny percentage of the population, but that’s still pretty large in absolute terms. How many magicians would be willing to pack up and move to the Blighted Lands, just to isolate themselves from the mundanes? Not many, I’d bet. And even if they did, how could we support them? Our economy is interlinked with the mundane economy to the point they’re not really separate at all.”

  “No,” Emily agreed. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “Father insisted I study estate management,” Nadine said. “The principle is the same.”

  She turned and led the way back through the corridors. “Do you think you can fly back to the school? Or do you want to walk?”

  Emily hesitated as they reached the ruined courtyard and looked towards Laughter. The school looked vaguely sinister, needle-like spires reaching up to the skies. There was something about it that nagged at her, something she’d seen before. It looked a little like Heart’s Eye, she supposed, but there was something more... she frowned. She couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “I’d prefer to walk,” she said. She needed the exercise. “Do you want to come with me?”

  Nadine shook her head. “There’s a track leading through the woods and back to the school,” she said. “Follow it... if you get lost, just keep walking towards the school. Don’t try to fly unless you feel confident. When you get back, go straight to the dining hall and eat. You drained a lot of your magic in the last couple of hours.”