Emily frowned. There was something there. She was sure of it. And yet, it was so slight she was half-convinced she was imagining it. She’d often been told she was something of a cold fish, compared to others. Alassa had been far quicker to take offense... normally, Emily conceded, because she’d also been quicker to realize there was a reason to take offense. Emily hadn’t been bothered by the subtle insults because she hadn’t noticed them. Why would she care if she wasn’t invited to a baby’s name-day?
Her head started to pound as she looked closer. Something had touched Karalee’s mind and then... gone away. The traces of its presence were so faint she knew she couldn’t convince anyone else they were there. And yet... she pulled back as her headache threatened to grow worse. Karalee didn’t deserve a pounding headache on top of everything else. No wonder the riot had exploded so quickly, if everyone had been influenced in the same way. The witches would have been so angry they simply couldn’t think straight.
She fell back into her own body, sweat staining her dress. Karalee moaned, one hand coming up to rub her forehead. Emily wished, suddenly, she’d thought to ask someone to stay. Damia already knew what was going to happen. She could have brought them both water and... Emily’s lips twitched as she stumbled to her feet and poured water into a glass, then passed it to Karalee. The younger girl drank it gingerly. Emily understood. She’d probably picked up some of Emily’s headache...
“That wasn’t pleasant,” Karalee said, as Emily drank some water herself. “Are we done?”
“I think so,” Emily said. The memories were already fading. They weren’t hers, after all. “Why did you get so angry?”
“They were being disrespectful,” Karalee said. “I thought...”
She stopped. “I... what happened?”
“Some people just go through life, passively swallowing insult after insult until they can’t take it any longer and explode,” Emily said. She’d met people like that. “Others just have one bad day and, by the end, they’ve destroyed their own life.”
Karalee shook her head. “I don’t...”
Emily sighed, inwardly. Society was just too stratified. The people at the top expected everyone below them to look up to them; the people in the middle looked up to those at the top and down on those below them and the people at the bottom got cricks in their necks. The rights and wrongs didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the people on the top got the respect they thought they deserved...
“No,” she said. She started to make more tea. The pot had gone cold. “Why do you listen to Dionne?”
Karalee blinked. “I...”
Emily had to smile. It was an inappropriate question. Lady Barb was probably the only teacher she’d had, save perhaps for Sergeant Miles or Void, who’d ask a question like that. And Lady Barb had never had to... not really. She’d certainly never expressed disapproval of Emily’s friends... apart from Void. Teachers were not supposed to involve themselves in student social lives. There were some lessons, she’d been told, that students needed to learn on their own. Figuring out who was a toxic friend - and working out how to get rid of them - were only two of them.
“She’s... my family are her family’s clients,” Karalee said. “She... I’m expected to be in her circle, to advance my family’s interests...”
“I see,” Emily said. She felt a twinge of pity. Karalee would be in real trouble if she stood up to Dionne. Her family would probably force her to apologize on bended knee. “Does it work?”
Karalee said nothing, but Emily read the answer in her eyes. It didn’t. Dionne treated her and the others as slaves, as people who had to do as she said and... woe betide them if they defied her. No wonder Karalee had taken advantage of the chance to press Emily for an apprenticeship. If she gained her mastery from the Necromancer’s Bane herself, she’d be in a good position to tell Dionne to go to hell and make it stick.
“Make sure you rest for the remainder of the day,” Emily said. “Try to get some sleep, if you can, or find a quiet spot to meditate. Tell them I gave you detention, if you like. Or found something hard for you to do.”
“I will,” Karalee said. “I... did you find anything?”
“I’m not sure,” Emily lied. There had been something there, but it had been very slight. “But I’ll honor my side of the agreement.”
“Thank you.” Karalee stood and dropped a perfect curtsey. “I’ll contact you when I graduate.”
“And we’ll move on from there,” Emily said. “Just make sure you do well on your exams.”
Chapter Thirty-One
EMILY HADN’T REALLY THOUGHT THAT MATTERS would settle down, even after the witches were confined to the school, but even she was surprised by the backlash. A dozen fights broke out over the remainder of the day and the following morning, including a food fight in the dining hall that had real malice behind it. She heard more than a few girls grumbling about how it wasn’t fair, about how they didn’t all deserve to be punished, about how it wouldn’t happen again once Pendle rose again. Graffiti was everywhere, mocking the teachers and students who didn’t believe in Pendle. Emily herself handed out more detentions over the course of the next two days than she’d done in the rest of her life.
She rubbed her forehead as she dismissed her first-year class and sent them to their next lessons. They knew much less than the other students, but that didn’t keep them from causing trouble. One of the little brats had cast a sneaky silencing charm to ensure no one could hear her... it would have been clever, she admitted privately, if she hadn’t been trying to teach. The lesson on how to recognize dangerous creatures was important, although it wasn’t on the exams. She was tempted to suggest including a section just to see who’d done the reading.
Her heart sank as the fifth-year students entered the room. Dionne and her gang had borne the brunt of the school’s displeasure, something that had only bound them closer together. A pair of sixth-years had hexed them openly, loudly declaring it was worth it as they were marched off for punishment, and they hadn’t been alone. Even the students who hadn’t been involved in the riot had been targeted. Lillian had been hexed by a younger student who’d fled before she could cast a spell in return. Emily wasn’t too surprised - she’d been blamed for things beyond her control at Whitehall - but depressed. Collective punishment was rarely the answer to anything.
Dionne stuck up a hand before Emily could start the class. “My Lady, can I ask a question?”
“You may,” Emily said. “I don’t promise an answer.”
“I was wondering,” Dionne said. She reached into her bag and produced a piece of wood that looked as if it had been hacked from a branch, then carved into a rough shape that resembled a brick. “I cast a pair of spells on this wood.”
She put the wood on the table, then nudged it with her finger. It rose into the air and hovered forward, reaching the edge of the table and stopping before turning and gliding along the edge until it reached the corner. Emily studied it, feeling a flicker of rueful admiration. The spells were pretty good for a student like Dionne. If she spent more time on her lessons and less on being a queen bee, her marks would be a great deal better. She’d programmed the spellware so it could scan its environment and react accordingly.
“Neat,” she said, finally. She’d seen more impressive tricks, but they’d all been performed by far more experienced enchanters. “You would make a good enchanter.”
Dionne looked oddly put out by the comment. Emily frowned, remembering what Karalee had said. If Dionne was high in her family, perhaps even the heir presumptive, she would have no time to study enchantment. Magical families didn’t feel the aristocratic disdain for trade, and those who made a living working with their talents, but they still needed their children putting the interests of the family first. Or... she wondered, suddenly, if it had been someone else who’d cast the spells. It was impossible to be sure without taking the spellwork apart...
And someone else could easily have designed the spells
, Emily thought. There’d be no way to tell as long as Dionne was the one who cast them.
“Thank you,” Dionne said. She stopped the hovering brick with a touch. “My point is, My Lady, that this little piece of spellwork is far more capable than the toys you showed us.”
Emily raised her eyebrows. “And how do you figure that?”
Dionne colored. “Your... ah, locomotive would keep going until it fell off the edge of the desk,” she said, stiffly. “My guided brick” - she flushed, angrily, as someone giggled behind her - “will stop and turn, rather than fall to the floor. If it did, it would just keep going anyway, while your locomotive would shatter. My work is far superior.”
“Is it?” Emily kept her voice calm. “What makes it superior?”
“It is!” Dionne looked as though she thought Emily were laughing at her. “It can do things your locomotive can’t!”
“Yes,” Emily agreed. “But does that make it superior?”
She tapped the brick. “How long did it take you to enchant it?”
“Hours,” Dionne said, vaguely. “I wasn’t keeping track.”
“You’ll have to keep it powered,” Emily pointed out. “That’s easy enough, as long as you are the one who enchanted it. Someone else would have problems feeding power into the spellwork. Wood can channel magic, but it isn’t very good at storing magic. Your enchantments are good, yet how long will they last?”
She leaned forward. “And in the time it takes you to enchant something the size of a full-fledged locomotive,” she added, “how many locomotives can craftsmen put into service?”
Dionne flushed. “That’s not the point,” she said. “My point is that anything they can do, we can do better.”
“That may be true,” Emily said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re wasting their time, does it?”
She tapped the brick, again. “You have magic. You can do this. They don’t and so they need to find other ways to do it.”
“We can still do it better,” Dionne muttered.
“Perhaps.” Emily paused, considering. “Imagine... imagine you live on a small island. Your island is part of a chain of islands, but you don’t really know it. You have no boats. A handful of people have tried swimming to the other islands, but they don’t always return. Your world is really just the island. You don’t have the knowledge to realize there’s a greater world beyond.”
“They could just teleport,” Dionne pointed out.
“They don’t know how to teleport,” Emily said. “Anyway, one day, a trading ship sails past the island. The islanders bug their eyes at it, because they’ve never seen a ship before. They’ve never even thought of the concept! But, over the next year, they build their own sailing ships. Their first boats are little more than toys, by our standards, yet they keep trying. Given a few years, the new sailors spread to the rest of the islands and beyond. By the time they meet the traders, they’re a lot closer to their equals than they were when they saw the ship for the first time.”
She paused. “And they have a big advantage over the traders. Their ships are crude, but they know how to fix them. They can see how they work and make improvements. The traders are far less capable of fixing their ships if they run into trouble.”
“That makes no sense,” Lenore said. “Trading ships know how to make repairs.”
“It’s an example,” Emily said. “Perhaps an aristocratic lady in a horse-drawn carriage canters past a tribe so primitive they haven’t invented the wheel. They see the carriage and start making their own ox-drawn carts and suchlike. Again, they’re crude but the tribesmen know how to fix their work. The lady does not. She couldn’t repair her carriage if she hit a rut and broke something.”
She smiled. “It’s happened,” she said. She’d heard several different versions of the story. None of them ended well. “The lady in question demanded help from the local villagers, blithely unaware they hated the lady’s husband because he taxed them relentlessly. And they killed the lady and dumped her body in a ditch, all because the lady didn’t know how to fix something as simple as a wheel.”
“I know how to magic my way home,” Dionne said. “And I...”
“You are heir to nearly a thousand years of magical research and development,” Emily said, curtly. “How much could you duplicate, if you were suddenly thrown back on your own resources? Could you reinvent alchemy? Enchantment? Charms? Would you even be able to lay the groundwork for their rediscovery?”
She leaned against her desk. “I know what you mean,” she said. “Yes, you can do things the mundanes can’t. Yet. But that doesn’t mean that they’re doomed to failure.”
Dionne didn’t look convinced. Emily shrugged. It would take time before Dionne - and the rest of her class - grasped how badly the balance of power had shifted. She wondered, idly, what they’d make of a supersonic fighter jet. There was no way a witch could break the sound barrier. A biplane from the Earth’s First World War would leave them in the dust.
And it would be harder to shoot down too, she thought. That would be a nasty surprise for the witches.
Emily cleared her throat. “If you’ll turn to page nineteen, you’ll see...”
She followed the lesson plan as best as she could, grateful she’d taken the time to study it and consider what questions might be asked. Dionne was oddly quiet, taking notes rather than asking questions or bullying the other girls. Emily wondered, idly, who’d helped her devise the charms. Jens? It was possible. The older woman had no time for Emily’s ‘toys.’ She was in for a nasty shock. There were quite a few things that were difficult to produce with magic - typewriters, for example - and yet relatively easy to produce using mundane technology. It wouldn’t be long before the last bugs were ironed out and typewriters started spreading across the Allied Lands...
And typists could fix them, simply by replacing broken parts, she mused. Fixing an enchanted typewriter would be a great deal harder.
The bell rang, marking the end of lessons for the day. Emily breathed a sigh of relief and dismissed the class. There was too much paperwork to do, then... she scowled. She had to find the source of the influence, now she was sure it was there. But where? It was hard to believe someone could have sneaked a powerful enchantment through the wards. They’d been tough even before the staff had started improving them, after the crisis had begun.
“Ah...”
Emily looked up. Lillian stood there, wringing her hands. Emily wondered if she was afraid to leave the classroom. Too many students were mad at all the students in her entire year, even though Lillian herself hadn’t been anywhere near the riot. Emily felt a stab of pity, mingled with irritation. The crisis might have been kept under control if the students had been banned from visiting the town earlier... particularly when there wasn’t anyone who could be reasonably blamed for the restriction. Now, it was too late.
“Yes?” Emily raised her eyebrows. “What can I do for you?”
“I wrote him a note,” Lillian said. It was all too clear it wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. “I don’t know what he’ll say.”
“If you don’t send it,” Emily pointed out dryly, “you’ll never find out.”
She sighed. “What do you really want to talk about?”
Lillian glanced at her, then at the open door. Emily muttered a spell, closing the door and slamming a privacy ward into place. Damia would ask questions if she thought Emily was spending too much time with Lillian... Emily let out a breath. It wasn’t something she could help, not now. If she put the younger girl on a steady footing, she’d be much better prepared for life after Emily left the school. She couldn’t take Lillian with her.
“I... I...”
Lillian looked down. “Can I have your word you won’t talk? To anyone?”
Emily blinked. She wasn’t sure she could give her word, even if she wanted to. There were certain things she had to report, according to the notes Damia had given her. She might not have sworn any oaths to do so, but... it wouldn’
t look good if something happened, something she could have prevented if she hadn’t kept her mouth shut. It would overshadow the rest of her life.
“It depends,” she said, finally. Her mind raced. “What do you want to say?”
“Just...” Lillian swallowed. “Just keep my name out of it? Please?”
“I can try.” Emily allowed her voice to harden. “What do you want to say?”
“I don’t want to sneak,” Lillian said. “I really don’t.”
Emily nodded in understanding. A sneak’s life wouldn’t be worth living, if her classmates found out what she’d done. One did not break the code and go to the teachers, not even if lives were in danger. Someone with strong connections, like Dionne, might get away with ratting their classmates out, but Lillian...? She’d be a social outcast for the rest of her schooling and beyond. She would have to travel far to escape the stigma of being a sneak.
Although maybe not that far, Emily thought, wryly. It isn’t as if she’s Alassa or Melissa or... me. Hardly anyone knows who she is.
“I’ll do my best to keep your name out of it,” Emily said. If Lillian was breaking the code... her blood ran cold. It had to be bad. Really bad. “What’s happening?”
“I share a dorm with them,” Lillian said. “I... they don’t really talk in front of me, they like to pretend I’m not even there, but I overhear them anyway. Dionne... she talks a lot, brags a lot. I... I try not to listen.”
Emily nodded, trying to conceal her impatience. She knew how little privacy there was in a dorm. She knew how easy it could be to overhear something, particularly if one was behind the curtains, out of sight and mind. And how easy it was to draw the wrong conclusion from a half-heard conversation.
“They’re going to sneak out of the school tonight, after Lights Out,” Lillian said. “They’re going to get out and down into the woods.”
“Really,” Emily said. She wasn’t sure she believed it. Lillian might be telling the truth, or what she thought was the truth, but... it was quite possible she’d misunderstood what she’d heard. Dionne wasn’t stupid, and she was competent enough when she was concentrating on her work, yet... how did she intend to get through the wards? “How does she intend to get out of the school?”
Little Witches (Schooled In Magic Book 21) Page 30