Emily leaned against the wall and took a long breath. “What did you do to Melissa?”
Alassa didn’t answer for a long moment. “She was irritating me. I cast a jinx on her that ensured that she would say the wrong thing at the wrong time. She called a tutor a nasty name and ended up being sent to the Hall of Shame.”
“Oh,” Emily said. It was hard to blame Melissa for wanting to strike back, and yet Emily was still very angry. How in all the universe had Melissa blamed Emily for what Alassa had done before she’d even arrived in this world? It struck her a moment later: Emily had shocked Alassa, befriended her and then started to teach her how to cast spells properly. Melissa probably suspected that Alassa would become even more of a terror once she knew what she was actually doing. “What were you thinking?”
“I was a fool,” Alassa said bleakly. She looked up, her bright eyes blazing with anger. “We have to strike back.”
Emily hesitated. The mature and responsible part of her mind pointed out that Melissa had a good reason to be angry with Alassa, and perhaps, now that she’d had her fun, it wouldn’t happen again. But the part of her mind that had been a target of bullying knew that it wouldn’t end so easily. Children who were bullied often became bullies themselves because it was the only way they knew how to take care of themselves. Melissa and her two friends might start casting charms and hexes on Emily and her friends at every opportunity.
And she’d been rendered helpless, forced to watch as Alassa was transfigured, then wait for what felt like hours before the spell had finally worn off. She was angry at Melissa, just as she’d been angry at Alassa when she’d hexed Emily. And poor Imaiqah hadn’t done anything to deserve being frozen in place either.
And Emily was unused to having friends. What would happen if she said no?
Imaiqah spoke into the silence. “But Melissa’s a skilled spell-caster,” she said, weakly. “We can’t just walk up to her and start casting spells...”
“No,” Alassa agreed. She bitterly looked down at her hands. “Maybe we should play a joke on her.”
Emily winced at her tone. The Royal Princess had never had to face an equal - much less a superior - opponent before, unless one counted the kidnappers. And Alassa had beaten one of them halfway to death. She might be a stubborn girl, unwilling to use her intelligence when her status would do, but she didn’t give up.
“I think we should go back to my bedroom and sort ourselves out,” Emily said. They’d missed tea while frozen, but the kitchens produced late meals for some of the students, as well as emergency food for those who overstrained themselves. “And then we can decide what to do.”
There was no sign of Aloha when they entered her bedroom, so Emily picked up the books on practical jokes while Alassa first undressed and in private, then dressed again, properly. There were thousands of different charms they could use for amusement, but most of them would be easy for someone like Melissa to detect and remove before it was too late. Emily hadn’t seen Melissa at all before now, which meant that she had definitely tested out of the basic classes and gone on to prepare herself for her second year. She was certainly more competent with charms and hexes than Emily.
“We could just turn her into something unpleasant,” Alassa said as she finished dressing. “A spider perhaps, or a crab, or ...”
Emily shuddered. The people of this world might regard forced transformations as a harmless prank, but it wasn’t an attitude she shared. Maybe she would have felt differently if she’d grown up in a world where magic existed. Besides, she’d come alarmingly close to killing Alassa through merging a transfiguration spell with another charm. The results could have been disastrous.
“Or we could hit her with the Idiot Ball,” Imaiqah offered. “That would give her a nasty fright.”
“I don’t know how to cast it,” Alassa admitted. The distance between her and Imaiqah seemed to have faded away through shared adversity. “Do you?”
Emily frowned. “The Idiot Ball?”
“It’s a spell that dampens the target’s intelligence,” Alassa explained. She smirked. “I admit that it is sometimes easy to believe that the boys here have been struck by the Idiot Ball ...”
“You can’t just cast it on someone, because all of their basic protections will ward them against it,” Imaiqah added. “You have to stick it on something and then slip it into their presence, perhaps by dropping it into their robes. And then it starts affecting them at once. A simple sum like two plus two becomes impossible.”
Emily hesitated. All of the practical jokes she’d seen involving mind manipulation had been very limited, because even this world admitted that mind manipulation wasn’t funny. A post-hypnotic suggestion could cause some amusement, but it could also cause disaster; the Idiot Ball might even cause worse problems.
“Or there’s the Gender Key,” Alassa suggested. “Do you think she’d enjoy waking up to discover that she’s a boy?”
“That would get us all in very hot water,” Imaiqah reminded her. Emily stared at them both blankly. “Someone introduced a gender-swapping spell into Whitehall two years ago, or so I was told. The results were absolute chaos. Eventually, the spell was banned and we were warned that if we used it, we would be sent to face the Warden.”
Emily shook her head in disbelief. She had grown accustomed to her new world, a process made easier by the fact that there was nothing and no one back in her old world who she wanted to see again. And yet there were times when the sheer strangeness of the new world came up and slapped her right across the face. A spell to turn someone into an idiot, a spell to turn a girl into a boy or vice versa ... or, for that matter, a school that allowed its children to carry lethal weapons everywhere. Because that was what magic was, a lethal weapon. If Alassa had been dangerous with only a few spells, how dangerous would a combat sorcerer be to his enemies?
“A good thing too,” Emily said, remembering the boys from her old school. They’d been jerks, every single one of them, particularly after they’d discovered that girls weren’t just oddly-shaped men. The mere flash of a smile from one of the popular girls turned them into drooling zombies. Boys were dirty and smelly and gross and there was no way that she would want to be one.
But then, some of the girls hadn’t been so clever, either. There was more to life than counting the number of guys who would do something stupid if you batted your eyelashes at them. Or trying to make yourself popular by dating the most popular guy in the school.
A thought struck her as she looked over at Alassa. “If your parents wanted a boy,” she said, “why didn’t they just use magic to alter your sex?”
Alassa gaped at her, and then swallowed. “Wherever you come from has to be a very long way away. Don’t you know that such magic doesn’t always work properly?”
“It doesn’t always alter the mind,” Imaiqah added. “You could end up with a boy in a girl’s body if you weren’t careful.”
“And if you messed around with their mind,” Alassa said, “you might make a bad situation much worse.”
Emily nodded in understanding. Most transfiguration spells were configured to avoid causing mental damage, because the long-term effects of mind manipulation could be dangerously unpredictable. In this case, if a girl became a boy, she’d still think of herself as a girl on the inside, presumably also being attracted to other boys. Her lips twitched; it was quite possible that she–he–would become homosexual, at least by the strict definition of the term. And vice versa for a boy who became a girl. Actually, if the boys back home could have been put into female bodies for a few days, it might teach them a valuable lesson. They’d picked on weaker boys they’d accused of being homosexual, even though Emily had known that those weaker boys lusted after girls too. They’d picked on everyone who had seemed weaker than them.
She had no idea what this world thought of homosexuality, but it would likely be disastrous for a monarchy. She had no idea how Alassa’s Kingdom in particular would react to a homosexual m
onarch–particularly if they didn’t know that he’d originally been female–but at the very least it would call his/her ability to continue the succession into question. And what if he literally couldn’t have children, even with a woman who had been born a woman? The line of succession would be destroyed. Or if...
Her imagination produced too many possibilities, none of them good.
“If we hit her with the Idiot Ball,” Alassa said finally, “how do we get it into her possession? She is a little paranoid about locking her door.”
“With reason,” Emily pointed out. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go ahead with it, but Melissa did need a lesson in picking on the wrong person. “Maybe we should just throw a hex at her when her back is turned.”
Imaiqah giggled. “I know how we can hex her,” she said. Emily and Alassa both stared at her in surprise. “Her clothes will be drying off in the laundry after being washed. All we have to do is hex her undershirt, then wait for her to put it on.”
“Very good,” Alassa said. She rubbed her hands together with glee. “Tomorrow...we strike!”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I MUST BE OUT OF MY MIND, Emily thought as she opened her eyes. A glance at her watch revealed that it was five bells, precisely when she’d timed the sleep spell to lift. I must be completely out of my mind.
She rolled over and pushed the blanket aside, climbing out of bed. Imaiqah was waking up too, but Aloha still slept soundly after coming in late the previous evening. Emily had heard that Aloha had been practicing with her Martial Magic team, something that Emily intended to suggest to Jade the next time she saw him. There had to be some way to practice the dangerous spells outside class without getting into trouble. Perhaps Sergeant Harkin expected them to figure it out for themselves.
It was Saturday morning, a day that was used more for revision and private study than actual classes. Emily knew most students wouldn’t bother to get up until later, allowing those who did to have unimpeded access to the library and the spellcasting chambers. Tapping her lips at Imaiqah–they didn’t want to wake Aloha, who might ask questions if she saw them leaving so early–she pulled on her robe, then splashed water on her face. As soon as they were both dressed, they slipped out of the room and into the deserted hallway.
“The laundry is at the end of the corridor,” Imaiqah murmured, as they walked down the hallway. It was charmed to prevent people from disturbing students who were trying to sleep, but Madame Razz had been known to reprimand students for making too much noise anyway. “The only problem will be getting inside.”
A door opened ahead of them to reveal Alassa, wearing a midnight black nightgown, studded with jewels that had to be worth a small fortune. “I meant to ask,” she hissed, as she closed her bedroom door behind her. “How did you know about the laundry anyway?”
Imaiqah grinned. It transformed her face from cute to beautiful. “I made a terrible mess in the hallway when I accidentally dropped a bag on the floor,” she admitted. “Madame Strictly”–Madame Razz, Emily guessed–“gave me detention and sent me to help the maids do the laundry. It was not a pleasant task.”
“They must have needed help that day,” Alassa whispered. “They don’t normally allow the servants to interact with us at all.”
Emily frowned, wondering just what–if anything–that meant. She hadn’t seen many of the school’s domestic servants, apart from the cooks–and the cooks seemed to enjoy a higher status than one might have guessed. They were very good cooks. But for all she knew, the laundry and cleaning might as well have been done by House Elves.
Her lips twitched. What little they’d learned about Elves in class–and through reading history books–had made it clear that trying to enslave them was asking for trouble. Some places had humans hiring Brownies and suchlike to do the cleaning, in exchange for milk and alcohol, but Whitehall preferred to keep most magical creatures firmly on the outside of the walls. It wasn’t too surprising; the Mimics were enough to give anyone nightmares and the thought of introducing one of them into the school ...
She shuddered as a disquieting thought struck her. How would anyone know if they had?
She pushed that thought aside as they reached a solid stone door at the end of the hallway. “I think the charm on the door doesn’t change,” Imaiqah said as she pressed her hand against the knob. “It should be easy to open.”
Emily exchanged glances with Alassa. Booby-trapping a door was all too easy for students, which meant the staff could easily do it themselves. Maybe it would just refuse to open for them, or perhaps it would be keyed to throw a freeze spell at the person trying to open it–and anyone else standing nearby. But why would anyone want to lock a laundry room?
She laughed at herself a moment later. Their plan was an excellent example of why someone would want to lock a laundry room.
“It might be time to come up with an explanation,” Emily said quickly. “Something we can tell Madame Razz if this goes wrong ...”
There was a click. The door opened, releasing a wave of hot air and steam. Emily stepped inside, shaking her head in disbelief. The laundry room was vast, with newly-cleaned robes and undershirts hanging from railings or placed in hampers for later attention. It was difficult to see very far because of the steam, but in the distance she thought she saw someone move.
Alassa stepped forward and snapped off a spell Emily didn’t recognize, just before the steam parted enough for her to see a young girl dressed in black at the end of the room. The girl had been frozen solid by Alassa’s spell.
“Don’t worry,” Alassa said reassuringly, as Emily stared at her in horror. “That isn’t your basic freeze spell. Time will just have stopped for her; she won’t realize that she was spelled at all, ever. We’ll do what we came to do and then release her just before we leave.”
“But ...” Emily found it hard to speak. “But what did she do to deserve it?”
“Think about it,” Alassa said, as if she didn’t understand why Emily was alarmed. “She would have told Madame Strictly if I hadn’t frozen her. And then we would have been caught and punished and I don’t want to be punished again!”
Emily shook her head, angrily. It was too much to expect Alassa to have reformed completely; she had been brought up to consider servants as objects, rather than people. And Alassa was right. If the maid did report them, Madame Razz would take a dim view of it–and then they wouldn’t be able to hit Melissa with the Idiot Ball. But it was still wrong to treat people like objects, Emily reminded herself, and swore to make her feelings clear later.
Imaiqah moved from hamper to hamper. “All of the clothes belonging to the first year girls are washed together,” she said. “And they should be marked with a nametag just to make sure that we don’t accidentally swap undershirts or knickers. If this hamper here belongs to me, this one here should be for you and this other one for Melissa.”
She paused, holding up an undershirt. “Got her,” she said. “This is Melissa’s shirt.”
Alassa walked forward to take it from her. “Are you sure?”
“That’s her name right there,” Imaiqah pointed out dryly. “There’s only one Melissa, period. If there were two people with her name in first year, one of them would have been urged to take a different name to keep from any possible confusion.”
“Very good,” Alassa said. She produced a sheet of parchment from her pocket and passed it to Emily. “I added a second hex to the charm; can you check it?”
Emily scanned it quickly. Alassa had noticed a flaw in their plan, one that hadn’t occurred to Emily when they’d worked out the original charm. There was no guarantee that Melissa would wear the charmed shirt at once, which meant that it might be several days before their charm took effect. Alassa had added a simple glamour to the spell that would urge Melissa to wear the charmed shirt at once, a glamour so subtle that even an experienced magician would have problems detecting it. Or so Emily hoped.
“It should work,” Emily said, after a mom
ent. The last thing they needed was the spell unraveling before it could take effect. “And it should be unnoticeable.”
“Cast it quickly, then,” Imaiqah urged. “The longer the maid remains frozen, the more likely it is that she will notice something odd when the spell wears off.”
Alassa had no lack of raw power, Emily noted as she felt Alassa cast the spell. There was a long moment of nothingness, and then she felt the charm briefly settle on the undershirt before it faded away into the background. Emily hoped it was firmly attached to the shirt, but there was no way to tell without running a complete set of detection spells - which would probably overwhelm and destroy the charm before it could be activated.
Shaking her head in disbelief at what they were doing–and her own collaboration - Emily put the shirt back on the railing and then looked over at Alassa meaningfully. The Royal Princess nodded, walked over to the maid and altered the charm on her slightly, before heading to the door.
“It will wear off in two minutes,” Alassa murmured as they closed the door behind them. “She won’t notice a thing.”
Emily scowled as they walked down the corridor. The paralysis spell was bad enough, but at least the victim knew that she had been paralyzed. Alassa’s stasis spell would leave the victim completely unaware of what had happened, at least unless the person had some precautionary spells set up to alert them afterwards. One of the books she’d read had talked about the charms and tricks wizards used to counter the effect of memory charms, ranging from keywords to memory dumps into the nearest receptacle. She doubted the maid had any magic at all–she would have been studying at Whitehall herself if she did–but that didn’t make mistreating her acceptable. At least Melissa had started the fight.
But the maid was to us what I was to Melissa, she thought, feeling a twinge of guilt. Someone in the way.
They were all far too keyed up to go back to sleep, so they ended up in one of the private study rooms attached to the library. Imaiqah picked up a book on magical herbs and started to read it, leaving Emily trying to think of a way to explain to Alassa that what she’d done to the maid was wrong. But Alassa had been raised in a world where the upper classes were allowed to do whatever they liked to the lower classes, and where magic was often the dividing line between control and servitude. How did one explain to someone like that the error of their ways?
Schooled in Magic Page 33