Emily hesitated. It had been seven hours since they had left Cockatrice, but it felt longer, even though she’d managed to catch some sleep in the coach. Part of her wanted to stay long enough to chat with Alassa, congratulate her and Jade on their impending marriage, and then make arrangements for Frieda. The rest of her didn’t want to stay any longer in Alexis than strictly necessary.
“I think I should go with her,” Emily said. If nothing else, she had a lot to talk about with the older woman. “But will you take care of Frieda?”
“I will ensure she is looked after,” Randor said, gravely. “You may go.”
Emily rose, hastily curtseyed, and walked out of the room and up towards Alassa’s chambers. Somehow, Emily wasn’t surprised to see Lady Barb when she entered, chatting with Jade and Alassa while Frieda read a book, boredom clearly written on her face. Emily smiled at her, and grinned at Alassa.
“Your father has approved the match,” she said. “Good luck.”
She looked away as Jade and Alassa embraced. She was happy for them, really she was, but part of her felt nothing more than envy. It would be nice to have a caring partner. Lady Barb shot her a sharp glance and rose.
“I have some preparations to make,” she said, “so we will leave in an hour. Be ready.”
Emily nodded, and turned to her friends. “Make sure you don’t have too big a wedding,” she warned. “You’ll be overwhelmed.”
Alassa sighed. “I have to invite everyone,” she reminded Emily. “Or someone will start feeling left out.”
“We’ll survive,” Jade said.
Emily hoped he was right, both for the wedding and for the rest of their lives. She’d only ever known one couple intimately — her mother and her stepfather — and that had been an awful descent into shouting matches and drunken crying fits. Lady Barb wasn’t married...none of the adults she knew, apart from King Randor, were married. She had no idea how Jade and Alassa would live together, but she hoped they would do better than her mother...
Alassa wouldn’t tolerate anyone treating her like that, she reassured herself. And Jade wouldn’t treat her like that.
She turned to look at Frieda. “Will you be all right here?”
“I think so,” Frieda said. “But can’t I come back to Whitehall with you?”
“I don’t think so,” Emily said. She’d been allowed to stay at Whitehall for a few extra days, but only because of special circumstances. Somehow, she doubted the teachers stayed in Whitehall outside term-time. “But I can ask.”
“Don’t,” Alassa advised. “I can take Frieda around and show her everything. And try to get her ready to play Ken.”
Emily laughed. “Are you trying to teach her how to play?”
“Yes,” Alassa said. She reached out and ruffled Frieda’s hair. “She’s going to be a right terror in the maze.”
Emily smiled, then stood up. “I’ll get my bags, then write a few notes. And then I suppose I will have to wait.”
Chapter Forty
“WE NEED TO TALK,” LADY BARB said, as the teleport spell let go of them. “Now.”
Emily nodded, clutching the older woman’s arm until the world had stopped spinning. Teleporting didn’t cause her as many problems as stepping through a portal, but it wasn’t that much easier. She closed her eyes for a long moment, gathering herself, and looked up at Whitehall. It shone against the dark mountains, barely visible in the darkening gloom. And beyond them, Emily knew, the Blighted Lands waited.
“Tell me something,” Lady Barb hissed. Eerie light flickered around them as she cast a light globe, followed by a privacy ward. “What were you thinking?”
She spun Emily around so she was facing the older woman. “What were you thinking when you allowed Markus and Melissa to fall in love under your roof? What were you thinking when you let it happen?”
Emily stared at her, feeling betrayed. “I didn’t let it happen,” she mumbled. “It just...did.”
“You were immensely lucky that they didn’t call your bluff,” Lady Barb said. “You used up the entire battery powering that ward, didn’t you? You couldn’t have maintained it if they had started to fight back!”
“I know,” Emily said. She couldn’t help feeling betrayed. Why had Lady Barb left her to face the crisis all alone? “I didn’t ask for any of this!”
“You agreed to host the Faire, without considering the consequences,” Lady Barb spat out. “You then allow your steward to expand the Faire, including your technology. You completely fail to lay on security until the very last moment, which means that everything has to be improvised at short notice...and then you allow a love affair to develop under your roof!”
“I didn’t know,” Emily snapped. She felt tears prickling at the corner of her eyes and brushed them away, angrily. “I didn’t realize the problem!”
Lady Barb shook her head angrily, long blonde hair flapping around her shoulders. “You could have asked!”
“You could have told me,” Emily countered.
“You should have asked,” Lady Barb said. She made a visible attempt to cool her temper. “I don’t expect you to know everything, Emily, but I do expect you to think about something before you agree to it!”
“You could have warned me,” Emily protested.
“You’re not a child,” Lady Barb reminded her. “I don’t understand you, at times, even knowing your origins. It’s like...it’s like you’re a child trapped in a woman’s body.”
She might have had a point, Emily knew. Adulthood in the Nameless World came earlier, at least for non-magicians, than it did on Earth. A child of twelve could be married off, a child of sixteen could inherit his father’s lands and property, a person of thirty could be a grandparent...and it was rare, vanishingly rare, for anyone without magic to last longer than sixty years, at least in the fields. There was no real awareness that teenagers were teenagers, and why should there be? The teenagers had no time to become teenagers before they were expected to be adults.
But, at nineteen, someone might still not be considered a responsible adult on Earth.
“I didn’t think,” she said. “I...”
“No, you didn’t,” Lady Barb said. She placed her hands on her hips, leaning forward intimidating. “And, because of you, two entire houses have been humiliated. You could have managed to get hundreds of people killed.”
“You were there when I was asked to host the Faire,” Emily muttered. “You could have warned me.”
“I’m not your mother,” Lady Barb said. “And if I was...”
Emily felt stricken. “I think of you as a mother,” she interrupted. She had never been able to put it into words; no, she’d never really dared admit it. To have said it out loud might have ruined it. But it had to be said now. “I...I liked being with you.”
“I’m not your mother,” Lady Barb repeated.
“But you act like it,” Emily said. She swallowed, then pressed on. “You helped me when I needed it, you advised me when I needed it, you...you even disciplined me when you felt I needed it. I thought you cared.”
Lady Barb reached out and took her by the shoulders, gently. “Emily, there is a difference between caring and doing everything for you,” she said. “A magician needs to learn to stand on her own, not...not depend on others. Even if I was your mother, you would be too old to have your mistakes corrected before you get your fingers burnt.”
“I know,” Emily said. “But it was nice to feel that I had someone who cared.”
“I do care,” Lady Barb said. “But I cannot do everything for you.”
She squeezed Emily’s shoulder, but went on. “You took me for granted, I think, and now I see why,” she added. “I hadn’t realized how you were feeling, and I am sorry for it.”
“Me too,” Emily said. “Should we have talked about it in the Cairngorms?”
Lady Barb gave her a sardonic look. “I assure you,” she said, “that if my daughter had risked her life by taking a dangerous menace as a pet, sai
d daughter would regret it for the rest of her days.”
“At least you would have cared,” Emily said. She remembered, bitterly, being seven years old and trying to cook. God alone knew how she’d avoided scalding herself, let alone accidentally eating something poisonous. “My mother didn’t give a damn about me.”
“And what about following me into the lair of a potential necromancer?” Lady Barb asked. “You could have died.”
“I would have died trying to save you,” Emily said. She gritted her teeth and went on before the older woman could interrupt. “And it would have been worth any amount of punishment just to see you alive again.”
“You might regret saying that,” Lady Barb said, darkly. “If I didn’t happen to know you need every last moment of the coming term, Emily, you would be in detention so often that you wouldn’t see the sun rise or set.”
Emily swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I was doing the best I could.”
“You should probably have done a little more research before agreeing to host the Faire,” Lady Barb said. “Or simply asked my advice. I would have told you to hire someone like Master Grey to handle the security arrangements, then leave it in his capable hands. Or did you assume the committee would see to it?”
“They thought I would,” Emily muttered. “And I thought they would.”
Lady Barb poked her arm, hard enough to make her yelp. “But you were wrong,” she said, flatly. “Next time, do a great deal of research before you agree to anything.”
“I will,” Emily promised. She took a breath. “What...what about...?”
“I would make a poor mother,” Lady Barb said, tartly. “And even if you thought otherwise, I could not adopt you. It would raise too many eyebrows, given who everyone believes to be your father.”
“I had a worse mother,” Emily said. She’d known it wasn’t really a possibility, but part of her had liked the idea of being adopted. “You care, at least...”
“Sometimes you scare me,” Lady Barb said. “Your ignorance is staggering, all the more so as you are ignorant about things that we consider to be so obvious they are simply not worth mentioning. And then you blunder into worse trouble trying to fix your earlier mistakes.”
She sighed. “There isn’t a single person on the continent who would have invited both the Ashworths and Ashfalls to anything,” she added. Her voice rose sharply. “Except for you. And then you manage to humiliate both parties...”
Emily wilted under her gaze. “I...”
“And if the grown-ups hadn’t been looking for a reason to disengage,” Lady Barb thundered, “you might have seen your ward torn apart, yourself the first victim of their spells. You were lucky.”
She smiled, sardonically. “But at least it burnished your reputation,” she said. “Both as a Child of Destiny and as the Necromancer’s Bane.”
“I don’t care about that,” Emily said. “I care about you.”
“I cannot be your mother,” Lady Barb said. “You saw Fulvia...and how the rest of her family reacted to her. Do you want to be Melissa, struggling against invisible ties? Or her brother, alternately praised and kicked? I cannot steer your life for you, Emily, and if I did there would be no guarantee you would like the results.”
“I know,” Emily said.
“But I can try and be there for you,” Lady Barb added. “And that is something I can promise.”
Emily nodded, one hand playing with the snake bracelet. Part of her wished that she could convince Lady Barb to marry Sergeant Miles, then they could both adopt her, but she knew it would never happen. Even if they did marry, even if Void raised no objections, Lady Barb was right. It would raise far too many eyebrows. And besides, Emily was nineteen. Even as a magician, she would be considered close enough to adulthood not to need adopted parents.
But it would have been nice to have parents, true parents.
“Thank you,” she said, finally.
“The Grandmaster wishes to depart in two days,” Lady Barb said. “That should give us long enough to talk about what you did with the battery, then find a way to improve it. There are all sorts of potentials in the battery.”
Emily shrugged. She didn’t really want to talk about it right now — or anything else, for that matter. It was nearly night — her mind, still operating on Zangaria time — insisted it had to be past midnight — and she wanted her bed.
“And you should start charging a new one,” Lady Barb added. “It might come in handy.”
“It will,” Emily agreed. She swallowed. “It’s been one hell of a summer.”
“Better than last year,” Lady Barb pointed out, dryly.
Emily nodded, and looked at the mountains. Shadye’s lands lay on the far side, utterly untouched since his death. Aurelius had suggested that Emily was the rightful owner of those lands. But she knew, from experience, that mere ownership didn’t always confer more than the title. Were the necromancers scared of her? Or were they merely biding their time?
Or something so mad as to be utterly unpredictable, she thought. Shadye was completely insane by the time he died, and Mother Holly wasn’t much better.
She looked back at Lady Barb. “Where were you?”
“There was an incident with a newborn magician,” Lady Barb said. “Someone had to tend to it.”
Emily saw her pinched face and knew she wouldn’t be told anything else, not now.
Lady Barb took her arm and started to lead her towards the school. “You will spend tomorrow cramming,” she said, firmly. “Everything you can read about the Blighted Lands, you will read. And there will be a test. If you fail, you will not like the consequences.”
Emily glanced at her. “Detentions?”
“Death,” Lady Barb said. She nodded towards the mountains. “Who knows what’s waiting for you on the other side?”
She paused. “And one other thing.”
Emily looked at her, expectantly.
“You made several new enemies over the last month,” Lady Barb said. “Marcellus is unlikely to be too disappointed by the outcome — he’s young enough to have more sons, if necessary — but Fulvia is going to hate you. Balbus won’t be much better, because you made him look like his mother’s puppet. And Gaius will hate you worst of all.”
“He was a better magician than I thought,” Emily confessed.
“Never get on the bad side of a small man,” Lady Barb said. “He will do whatever it takes to humiliate you, as you humiliated him. You destroyed his hopes of marrying into the Ashworths, but also made him a laughing stock — well, Melissa helped, I suppose. All the stories I heard agree that he was utterly humiliated. I expect you will be seeing him again in the future.”
“I hope not,” Emily said.
“You’ll be lucky if you don’t,” Lady Barb said. “And one other thing?”
Emily blinked. “Another thing?”
“If you were my child, I don’t think you would make the same mistakes,” Lady Barb said. “I would have taught you from birth. But I am proud of you, despite everything. Your mistakes were bad ones, but you recovered. Few others would have done so well.”
And that, Emily told herself as they stepped into the school, was enough.
Epilogue
SHE HAD BEEN HUMILIATED.
Fulvia sat in her private room, protected by layer upon layer of custom-designed wards, and brooded. She had been humiliated. Worse, her mastery of the family had been called into question. All the little secrets, all the uncomfortable truths, were being dragged into the open and examined by the members of her family. Once, she had ruled without question; now, even her eldest son was considering how best to remove her from power.
Child of Destiny, she spat, mentally. Child of Destiny, Child of a Lone Power...and the Necromancer’s Bane.
Fulvia hadn’t been impressed when she’d first met Emily. The girl was young, only nineteen, and acted younger. Fulvia would have made something of Emily, she was sure, if she’d married into the
Ashworth Family, but her father had resisted any and all blandishments designed to lure his daughter into Fulvia’s clutches. There had been no trace of great power behind her smile, behind her clear nervousness at having to sit between Fulvia and Marcellus. Fulvia had come to the conclusion that the girl had been vastly overrated...
And then she’d cast a powerful ward and held it in place long enough to force everyone to calm down. A ward so powerful that even a Lone Power would have had problems holding it in place for more than a few minutes.
Clearly, everything had been an act.
The girl hadn’t been nervous at all; she’d been amused, laughing at them. And no wonder! She’d been able to shut them down with a single ward.
It was galling, but the Ashworths were grateful. A fight in such close quarters, no matter the cause, could only end in mutual slaughter. Fulvia had never lost her hatred of Felix and his descendants, and she would happily have cheered if they had all died, but the prospect of losing her entire family staggered even her. Who would have thought that Melissa, obedient little Melissa, would have dared to fall in love with an Ashfall? And who would have thought she would have resisted her entire family for love?
Cold hatred prickled along Fulvia’s spine. Melissa was not important. If she managed to retain control of the family, her son could always marry again and churn out a few more children, if Iulius was unsuitable. And if she didn’t, the future of the family hardly mattered, not to her. Melissa had been right, even though she hadn’t known it at the time. Fulvia had not been born into the family.
But all that mattered, right now, was revenge.
A figure stepped into the light, entering from a passage so old that only Fulvia and her closest allies knew of its existence. She looked up, then nodded slowly as the figure bowed to her, then sat down without being asked. He treasured his independence, or at least the appearance of independence, but he would do as he was told.
Fulvia had seen to that, over the years. A favor had to be repaid...
“There is nothing to discuss,” she said, simply. “I have given you the opportunity. Lady Emily must die.”
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