“There was a girl who could make the most beautiful toys,” Frieda said, sounding rather impressed. “She hadn’t had any formal training—she’d never been to school—but she was still a skilled enchanter. Her parents have been making toys and tools for years. I was hoping to talk her into making something for me, but she didn’t have time. She really should move to Beneficence, if the city has recovered by now. She’s got a handful of siblings who can take over the family business.”
She smiled. “And then there was a boy who kept talking me into taking long walks ...”
Emily grinned. “A boyfriend?”
“We just fooled around.” Frieda’s fingers touched her cheek, gently. “I ...”
She paused, just for a second. “You’re Head Girl,” she said. An unpleasant smile spread across her face. “You can send Caleb to be caned.”
Emily flushed. “I don’t think that’s allowed ...”
“Of course it is,” Frieda said, briskly. Her face darkened. “He deserves it, doesn’t he?”
“No,” Emily said. She wasn’t sure if she meant it or not. There were times when she wanted to be angry, really angry, at her former boyfriend. “We are talking again, now.”
“Hah,” Frieda said.
Emily opened her mouth to point out that she could send Frieda to be caned too, then stopped herself firmly. She had no intention of abusing her power, unlike Master Tor or Master Gray. And besides, she could handle her problems herself. She and Caleb would just have to work together long enough to pass their exams, then ... if they still had problems, they could part on good terms.
“It sounds like you had a great time,” she said. “But you do realize that Fourth Year is going to be hard.”
“The hardest,” Frieda agreed. “But I’m looking forward to it.”
She produced a pile of books from her trunk and dumped them on the bookshelves. Most of them were freshly-printed magical textbooks, but a couple were blue books. Emily groaned inwardly, knowing Frieda had just placed her in an invidious position. Blue books were banned at Whitehall, no exceptions. If she confiscated them, Frieda would be mad at her; if she ignored them, Gordian would point out she wasn’t doing her job. Either way, she’d lose something ...
“Take those books out of here before term starts,” she said, pointing to the blue books. “Or you’ll get us both in trouble.”
Frieda looked embarrassed. “... Sorry.”
Emily sighed. She’d read a handful of blue books, but none of them had been particularly decent. They’d read more like bad fan fiction, crammed with IKEA erotica, than anything else. There were only so many times one could read them without feeling they’d read the exact same story a dozen times over. She’d known they were poorly written and staggeringly unrealistic even before losing her virginity.
“Just keep them out of sight,” she said. “Take them to the house, if you want.”
“I’ll keep them out of your sight,” Frieda promised.
Emily sighed, again. “I don’t think you’ll have time for reading them,” she added. “You’ll have to do a joint project ...”
She saw a flash of hot anger cross Frieda’s face. “Celadon is useless. I should never have paired up with him!”
Emily blinked, alarmed. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Oh, we had a plan to go on work experience to get the training we needed to complete the project,” Frieda said. “And then he started coming up with new ideas of his own.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” Emily pointed out. “You don’t want to do all the work ...”
“He wants to change everything, even after we spent the summer working on our skills,” Frieda snapped. “And he didn’t listen to a single word from me!”
Emily looked up. “Frieda, what’s wrong?”
“He won’t listen to me,” Frieda said. Her face darkened. “He just won’t listen!”
Emily sucked in a breath. “What are you actually trying to do?”
Frieda hesitated. “Are we allowed to tell you?”
“I think so,” Emily said. She hadn’t talked about her joint project, but it had wider implications than anyone apart from her and Caleb had realized. “I’m just not allowed to actually help you.”
“We were working on using rare materials to design a whole new generation of alchemical tools,” Frieda said. “It was something that grew out of the New Learning, a concept that might ...” she trailed off and knelt down beside the trunk, then started to dig through it. “I’ll see if I can find you the papers.”
“Leave that for the moment,” Emily said. “What does he want to change?”
“We had a plan for crafting the tools,” Frieda said. “And now he wants to change it!”
Emily cocked her head. “How do you know his way isn’t better?”
“Because he didn’t suggest it to me,” Frieda, sounding furious. Magic crackled over her fingertips. “He told me. Just ... wrote and said we were going to be changing everything. I don’t even know everything he wants to do!”
“I see,” Emily said. “When he gets here, why don’t you sit down with him and work through it, piece by piece? If his idea is truly better, you can use it.”
“And then he gets all the credit,” Frieda pointed out.
“No, he doesn’t,” Emily said. She could see Frieda’s point, but it didn’t work like that. “He would only get all the credit if he did all the work. He’s not talking about dumping you, is he?”
“He doesn’t seem to need me,” Frieda muttered. “Emily, what happens if he does shove me out of the project?”
“I don’t think he can,” Emily said. The joint project was meant to be joint. Neither Celadon nor Frieda would get high marks if their partnership failed, even if their work was pure genius. And, somehow, they’d managed to get through the first stage without going down in flames. “You have to work together to complete the project.”
Frieda scowled. “And what stops him from doing all the work?”
“You,” Emily said. “At the very least, you have to know what’s going on.”
“I don’t know if I do.” Frieda’s face twisted as she closed the trunk and stood. “I don’t think he listens to a single thing I say.”
“You were exchanging letters and chat notes, right?” Emily asked. “You’ll probably get on better face to face. Sit down with him, go through what he wants to do, run a few basic experiments and then ... and then, decide how you want to proceed. If things really fall apart, you can probably talk to your tutor.”
“He’ll probably blame me,” Frieda said, sourly. “Professor Thande doesn’t like me.”
“You don’t blow up enough cauldrons.” Emily stood and nodded to the door. “It’ll be several hours until dinner, so come for a swim. Or a walk. It’ll make us both feel better.”
She smiled. “And you can help me think of something we can do instead of a dueling club.”
Frieda blinked. “What?”
Emily explained, quickly.
“But that would be fun,” Frieda said, when Emily finished the explanation. “I’d love to duel.”
“I fought in two real duels,” Emily pointed out. “They weren’t fun.”
“You’re also a champion,” Frieda said. “Aren’t you?”
Emily shrugged. Casper had beaten her in a duel before his death. She assumed the title had fallen to the next person in line, rather than returning to her. No one had tried to challenge her since Casper’s death, if nothing else. That meant she’d probably fallen a long way down the league table. But it wasn’t something that bothered her.
“Come on,” she said, instead. “Let’s go for a swim.”
Chapter Five
EMILY HAD HOPED—DESPITE FRIEDA’S ENTHUSIASM—to find something that would serve as an alternative to the dueling club, but a week of brainstorming and research turned up nothing remotely practical. Some of her ideas had been tried before, while others would have required too much effort to make them work.
She simply hadn’t been able to find anything that would satisfy the requirements without demanding too much from her.
“At least this way you can be sure of getting willing helpers,” Frieda pointed out, as they waited outside Gordian’s office. “A homework club wouldn’t raise quite so much enthusiasm.”
“I suppose,” Emily said. She wished, not for the first time, that someone else had been elected Head Girl. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted the post. There had been class presidents back home, but the role had been purely ceremonial. The schoolchildren certainly hadn’t had any real authority. “You’d think they’d want help with their homework.”
“No one wants to do homework,” Frieda said.
Emily had to agree. She’d never met a student who liked doing homework, even if they considered the subject to be fascinating. And, on Earth, she’d had problems finding a place to do homework without encountering her stepfather. Having an older student help her with her homework—at Whitehall—might have made life easier, but it wouldn’t have made it any more enjoyable. Besides, students were supposed to learn to manage their own time. A homework club—even one that wasn’t compulsory—wouldn’t teach them skills they’d need for future life.
But it might have made sure they actually got their homework done, she thought. But then, anyone who didn’t get it done would be in real trouble.
Her lips quirked—she’d heard students argue, earnestly, that their homework had eaten the dog. The door opened. Madame Griselda stood there, eying Emily and Frieda as if they were something unpleasant she’d scraped off the sole of her boot. Emily looked back at her, wondering what Gordian’s secretary had against her. But then, Madame Griselda seemed to be unpleasant to all the students. Perhaps she felt the school could be organized perfectly if all the pesky students went elsewhere.
“Lady Emily,” Madame Griselda said. “The Grandmaster will see you now.”
“Thank you,” Emily said.
She sighed. She’d had the morning free—insofar as she’d spent it doing more research than schoolwork—but she had an orientation meeting with the rest of the Sixth Year students in an hour. She wasn’t even sure which tutor would serve as their Year Head. The note she’d received when classes resumed, detailing her first week, hadn’t said. She was fairly sure it wouldn’t be Master Tor, but there were too many other possible candidates.
“I’ll see you this evening,” she said to Frieda. “Have fun.”
Frieda looked downcast. “I have to read through his latest set of proposals.” A flicker of anger crossed her face. “Is it too much to ask that he makes up his mind?”
“Probably,” Emily said. She and Caleb hadn’t had so many problems, had they? But then, students were expected to show they could think for themselves, not single-handedly solve magical conundrums that had baffled older and wiser minds. Even drawing out a new line of enquiry would be more than anyone was expected to do. “You don’t have to stick with him after the project is completed.”
“You did,” Frieda said.
Emily felt her cheeks heat. She’d been confident enough in the joint project that she’d agreed to apply for extra credit, rather than putting the whole concept aside until after she and Caleb graduated. It had been a risk, but she’d had faith in her ability to turn the project into something viable. And besides, it would have allowed her—it had allowed her—to spend more time with Caleb. It was clear that Frieda wouldn’t be dating Celadon anytime soon.
“I didn’t have to,” Emily said. “Nor do you.”
Madame Griselda cleared her throat, meaningfully. Emily winked at Frieda, then turned and walked into Gordian’s office. It was empty, but a door was open at the far end, a door she was sure hadn’t been there before. Was Gordian experimenting with manipulating the school’s interior dimensions? Or had it merely been concealed behind a haze of powerful charms? After everything that had happened last year, it would be a long time before anyone—Emily included—wanted to meddle with the school’s interior. The risk of triggering another collapse was too great.
“Emily,” Gordian called. “Come on in.”
Emily walked to the new door and peered through. The compartment looked like a comfortable study, complete with armchairs, a small wooden table, a pot of Kava on the sideboard and a warm fire burning merrily in the grate. A handful of portraits hung from the walls, one marked as Master Whitehall. Emily smiled when she saw it. Lord and Master Whitehall—most history books didn’t seem to realize that Lord and Master were combined—hadn’t looked anything like that. The man in the painting looked like someone had crossed Dumbledore with Gandalf and added robes at least five hundred years out of time. The next picture—Grandmaster Bernard—might have been more authentic. She had no idea what Bernard had looked like as an older man.
No sign of Julianne, of course, she thought cynically. Whitehall’s daughter—and Bernard’s wife—had practically fallen out of the history books. And no mention of me either.
Gordian followed her gaze. “I was meaning to ask you how close they were to reality.” He sounded friendlier, for once. “Is that really him?”
“That isn’t Lord Whitehall.” Emily studied the portrait for a long moment. “I don’t think he would have aged into that.”
“Times change, people change,” Gordian said, his voice oddly reflective. “Others stay the same.”
He cocked his head. “I was hoping to discuss history with you at some later date,” he added, after a moment. “And there are a handful of historians who would be very interested in your story.”
Emily frowned. Gordian was the only one who knew she’d gone back in time and played a vital role in the founding of Whitehall School. She hadn’t told anyone else, not even her closest friends. The last thing she wanted was to encourage magicians to start experimenting with time travel, despite the fact that her equations insisted it wouldn’t be easy to navigate without a nexus point and a checkpoint. Random jumping through time would be incredibly dangerous.
And Gordian has his own reasons to keep it quiet, she thought. He wouldn’t want to admit that I can take control of the school’s wards. It would undermine his position as Grandmaster if everyone knew I could overrule him.
“I thought you wanted to keep it quiet,” she said. Professor Locke’s dream of long-lost spells had never materialized, but there were secrets in the past that should be left there. Demons and DemonMasters, for one. And Manavores, whatever they’d been. She’d seen signs of their presence at Heart’s Eye too, back when she and Casper had sneaked into the fallen school. “It would give people ideas.”
“The historians would be under oath not to disclose anything without clearing it with me first,” Gordian assured her. “Your name would never be mentioned.”
Emily wasn’t so sure. It was hard to tell just what clue would allow someone to untangle the whole story, even though time travel wasn’t even a concept in the Nameless World. Or perhaps it was, in a sense. Going forward in time wasn’t impossible, as long as one had the power. It was getting backwards that was impossible.
Without a nexus point, she reminded herself. And even if they had a nexus point, they’d find it hard to navigate ...
“Perhaps I could talk to them later,” she said. She understood the urge to dig up the past, even though there were some secrets definitely better left buried. “But it would be hard to prove anything.”
“We will see,” Gordian said. “We haven’t even begun to explore all the tunnels below Whitehall.”
“That would be dangerous,” Emily warned. “We don’t know what we might do.”
“Or what else might be on the verge of going wrong,” Gordian said. “I can’t even use the wards to scan below the school. Can you?”
Emily shook her head. The lower levels hadn’t quite been excluded from the wards, but the spellware that monitored the school didn’t work down there. She suspected the surveillance spells had been designed and implemented after the lower levels had been sealed off
and forgotten. Whoever had designed them hadn’t known to look below the open levels.
“We’ll be very careful,” Gordian said. “But we do have to know what might be under us.”
Emily nodded, reluctantly. Whitehall’s spellwork had lasted for nearly a thousand years, but she could understand Gordian’s concern. Something might have been steadily going wrong—or falling out of alignment—for all that time. Or Lord Whitehall might have buried a basilisk under the school. She didn’t think that was likely—he’d have had more sense—but it was a possibility.
“Just be careful,” she said. “And leave the wards alone.”
“We will,” Gordian assured her. “Who knows how many more books and records are hidden below, just waiting for us to find them?”
Emily shrugged. As far as she knew, there had only been one cache of books. But if Master Wolfe had somehow been active after his presumed death, there might be more. He—or someone—had left a cache in Beneficence, after all. Why wouldn’t he have hidden one in Whitehall?
Because it would be the first place anyone would look, if they knew who’d written the books, her own thoughts answered her. He’d certainly have fewer problems hiding them here.
“It might come to nothing,” Gordian said. “But we have to search the lower levels thoroughly.”
He motioned for her to sit down. “Please, be seated. Would you like a mug of Kava?”
Emily hesitated. She’d really drunk too much caffeine over the last few hours. But etiquette demanded that he offer and she accept. It was a way of saying she was welcome, even if she wasn’t.
“Yes, please,” she said, finally. It wasn’t as though it was that late. “Milk, no sugar.”
Gordian rose and poured her a mug. “I trust you spent the week productively,” he said, as he passed it to her. “Did you find an alternative to the dueling club?”
“No, sir,” Emily said. It galled her to admit it, but all of the practical ideas had been done before. A couple of failed ideas had been reasonably promising, yet she doubted Gordian would have let her try to make them work. He’d say they’d already failed once and he would be right. “Nothing I found would be workable in the time I have.”
The Gordian Knot (Schooled in Magic Book 13) Page 5