Love's Labor's Won (Schooled in Magic Book 6)

by Christopher Nuttall

  No magic, Emily saw, as the two fighters thrust and parried at one another. Just skill.

  She shivered as Lady Barb jumped backwards, narrowly avoiding a thrust that would have skewered her. The sergeants had taught Emily the rudiments of sword-fighting, but it wasn’t something she’d taken as seriously as her magic studies. Somehow, the prospect of injury or death seemed much more real when swords were involved. She looked down at the smooth floor, then up at Lady Barb, just in time to see her knock her opponent’s blade out of his hand. It clattered to the floor and lay there.

  Her opponent held up his hands. “I yield,” he said.

  “Honor is satisfied,” Lady Barb said. She returned the blade to its scabbard, then shook her opponent’s hand firmly. “You fought well.”

  She turned to face Emily before her opponent could say a word. “Emily,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you,” Emily said, feeling her cheeks flush as the soldiers sniggered. “Can we talk somewhere?”

  “Of course,” Lady Barb said. She strode past Emily and out of the room, motioning impatiently for Emily to follow her. “What can I do for you?”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” Emily said. “What time?”

  “Seeing it’s just you, Frieda and I,” Lady Barb said, “we will try to leave around nine bells. I suggest you don’t spend the entire night dancing, not tonight. Make sure you don’t let anyone put a mark in your dance card.”

  Emily nodded, quickly.

  “I’ll just stay for the meal,” she said. There was always an opportunity to slip away after the dinner, if one didn’t want to dance. Alassa would have to stay, of course, but she would understand Emily leaving early. “And I’ll tell Frieda to do the same.”

  “That would be wise,” Lady Barb said. She paused, her eyes sweeping Emily’s face. “And what else do you want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. She wanted to ask about Alicia, but she wasn’t even sure how to frame the question. “Do you...do you know about the king’s plans for the minor orphaned children?”

  “I believe I can guess,” Lady Barb said. She’d lived in Zangaria for several years before meeting Emily — and, perhaps more importantly, she knew Randor personally. “And this bothers you...why?”

  “It just feels wrong,” Emily confessed.

  “I imagine it does,” Lady Barb said, briskly. “Now, tell me. If you were in King Randor’s shoes, what would you do?”

  Make friends with them, Emily thought. But that might not be an option. Alicia was hardly a child...and the others, too, might be nearing their age of majority. They might already be as dangerous as Alassa had been, when she’d first come to Whitehall. Or find them somewhere to go, out of the country.

  “I don’t know,” she mumbled, reluctantly.

  “King Randor will organize matters to suit himself,” Lady Barb said, “but I do not believe he will be openly abusive. You can watch and wait and protest, if necessary, should that change. Or, if you like, you can offer the children the chance to give up their ranks and titles and go elsewhere. There are places for them to go, if they wish.”

  “But then they would lose their lands,” Emily said. “They would lose everything.”

  “Yes, they would,” Lady Barb agreed. She reached out and gave Emily a tight hug. “Emily, young lady, you can’t fix everything.”

  She cleared her throat. “Enjoy the rest of the day with your friends, then report to the gates in time to leave tomorrow,” she added. “You will have no shortage of work at Cockatrice, I promise you. The Faire alone will consume most of your working day.”

  Emily swallowed. “I will,” she said. “Can we go through the papers on the way?”

  “We can try,” Lady Barb said. “Make sure you get plenty of rest. You’ll need it.”

  Chapter Eight

  EMILY WAS MILDLY SURPRISED THAT KING Randor wasn’t present as she and Frieda prepared to take their leave, but he might have just been trying to give Alassa more time with her friends. His daughter looked tired — Emily had learned to recognize the signs, even though her face was as beautiful as ever — as she hugged Emily goodbye, then gave Frieda a hug too. Frieda, who had gratefully changed back into her working clothes, hugged her back and scrambled into the coach.

  “Take care of yourself,” Alassa said. “And remember to at least try to relax along the way.”

  “I can try,” Emily said. “You take care of yourself too.”

  Alassa gave her a quick hug, then waved goodbye as Emily climbed into the coach. Lady Barb was already inside, a leather folder of papers resting on her lap. The door was closed, then the coach rocked once as the driver cracked the whip, encouraging the horses to move. Moments later, the spells designed to compensate for every jerky motion started to work, ensuring a smooth trip. If they hadn’t been there, Emily knew from bitter experience, it would be impossible to do anything while the coach was driven over potholes and cracks in the road.

  Springs, she thought, sourly. The idea was on the list of concepts to develop. We’d make a fortune.

  “A word before you start,” Lady Barb said, as she held out the folder. “I cannot give you advice on the proposal or how best to make it work. Furthermore, I am required to inform your supervisors of any attempt to wheedle information out of me. It will be counted against you when they consider your work.”

  Emily swallowed. “I understand,” she said. “We could be marked down for it?”

  “Yes,” Lady Barb said. “If the supervisors are in a particularly vile mood, they could insist you redo Third Year from the beginning, even after having worked your way through Fourth Year.”

  “Ouch,” Emily muttered. Redoing Third Year wouldn’t have been too bad, but redoing Third Year after Fourth Year would leave her two years older than everyone else in the class, alternately bored and humiliated. And they would have made her redo all the practical work, including the lessons she had mastered on her first run through the year. “What am I allowed to ask?”

  “How to contact your partner,” Lady Barb said. “There’s nothing else that you can ask me without compromising yourself.”

  Emily tugged at her hair, nervously, and looked over at Frieda. The younger girl had pulled a book out of her bag and started to read, her lips moving soundlessly as she parsed out the English letters. Emily was amused to note that it was one of the newly-published novels, although she privately suspected it would be forgotten within the year. The Nameless World had yet to produce any great writers, as far as she knew. Most stories had been handed down from person to person before the printing press had been introduced.

  She smiled, and started to read through the project proposal. It was comprehensively detailed in so much minute detail that she started to wonder if Caleb was as obsessed about magic as Aloha. Every section was explained in tedious detail. Caleb seemingly had never seen fit to use a word when a sentence could do, nor a sentence when a paragraph could explain everything. And yet, she had to admit, it left little room for misunderstanding. Everything was detailed, defined and carefully placed in context.

  Clever, she thought, as the idea slowly took shape in her mind. Did he learn something from the magical computer?

  It was a tempting thought. She’d tried, back in First Year, to explain a computer to Aloha, who had produced something akin to a typewriter. Unfortunately, it had required constant replenishment of magic to make it work for longer than an hour or two, while it hadn’t been able to master even the simplest functions of a computer. But Caleb seemed to have put his finger on the key to eventually producing a real computer...and even if it couldn’t stretch that far, it would revolutionize some aspects of magic.

  They must have thought it was workable, she told herself, as she came to the final sheet of paper. The Grandmaster wouldn’t have approved the proposal if he’d thought it couldn’t be made to work.

  She bit her lip as she read through the final sheet. Unlike the other par
ts of the proposal, it was short and to the point. Caleb and his partner had been producing a variant of Manaskol they could use for their experimental devices. Somehow, the modifications they had made to the recipe had caused an explosion, which had crippled Caleb and sent him home for the year. They hadn’t quite known what they were doing, Emily realized; Mountaintop taught Third Year students how to produce Manaskol, but Whitehall waited until Fourth Year, believing the students needed more grounding first. Caleb would have had to learn very quickly, once he’d realized it was necessary...and he might not have considered just how temperamental the liquid could be.

  “It could have been worse,” she muttered to herself. “They could have killed themselves.”

  “They could have,” Lady Barb agreed. Emily looked up to see the older woman eying her with a sardonic eye. “I don’t believe anyone told them that producing Manaskol was safe.”

  Emily nodded. It had taken months for her to master the recipe...and she still lost one wok in three, whenever she brewed it for Professor Thande. She was mildly surprised that they’d let her keep producing it, but in hindsight she suspected the Grandmaster had intended to pair her with Caleb all along. He must have seen real potential in Caleb’s proposal for spell mosaics. Looking at the papers, Emily could see it too.

  “I would like to try to work with him,” she said, nervously. Working with others wasn’t one of her strengths, particularly when the other was a boy she didn’t know. “Would you send him a message?”

  “I’ll have a letter sent on from Cockatrice,” Lady Barb said. “He should be here in a week or so, just in time for the Faire. Do try and find some time to actually work together, all right?”

  “I will,” Emily promised. She had plans for the summer and they didn’t just include the proposal. It was high time she put everything she’d learned at Mountaintop to work and actually started on the first magical battery. “Do you know him?”

  Lady Barb shrugged. “He wasn’t in my classes at Whitehall,” she said. “I know his mother, if that’s any help. She is — was — a strong-minded woman.”

  “Like you,” Emily said.

  “You have to be strong-minded if you want to be a Mediator,” Lady Barb said, bluntly. “The people you have to work with won’t respect you if you seem weak, or inclined to compromise. I was surprised she married a general. We’re normally inclined to bicker with senior officers instead of marrying them.”

  “Maybe it was love,” Frieda said, abandoning her book. “They might have been deeply in love and chose to spend the rest of their lives together.”

  “I think you should spend more time on your schoolwork and less on soppy romantic novels,” Lady Barb said, crossly. She hadn’t been in a good mood since the coach had left the castle, although Emily had no idea why. “The real world is rarely driven by people who fall in love at first sight.”

  Emily rolled her eyes as Frieda blushed. She’d read a couple of what passed for romantic novels in the Allied Lands and she hadn’t been impressed. One of them had been incredibly soppy, to the point where she’d found herself wondering how anyone could stand the heroine, while the other had been a tale of a strong macho man who beat down a shrewish woman and convinced her to marry him. It hadn’t seemed to occur to the writer that there was something wrong with the hero’s actions...or, for that matter, that the heroine might have good reasons for being something of a bitch. And the less said about the sex scenes, the better. She’d read bad fan fiction that had included more realistic sex scenes.

  She placed the papers back in her bag and looked at Lady Barb. “When I went to see the Grandmaster,” she said, “there was someone already there. Who was she?”

  “I heard about that,” Lady Barb said. She thinned her lips. “Let us just say that Cabiria did something she shouldn’t have done, something no sensible magician would have done. And I hope you will never be stupid enough to do the same.”

  Emily sighed, inwardly. She knew Lady Barb wouldn’t be drawn if she didn’t want to be drawn.

  “If she doesn’t know what Cabiria did,” Frieda piped up, “how would she know to avoid it?”

  “Common sense,” Lady Barb said, crossly. She looked back at Emily. “And you shouldn’t try to pry, young lady. People will be prying about you.”

  “I get that anyway,” Emily said.

  “Then don’t do it to someone else, if you don’t like it,” Lady Barb said. “What happened was enough to get Cabiria suspended for a whole year, so I suggest you leave it at that.”

  They stopped, briefly, at an inn to find dinner and answer the call of nature, then resumed their journey up towards the mountains. Emily read a book she’d borrowed from Whitehall’s library, while Frieda, tired of her book, closed her eyes and went to sleep. Boredom didn’t sit well with her, Emily knew; she’d always been kept busy at home, then at Mountaintop. It had been all Emily could do to stop Frieda from acting as her servant.

  And if we were allowed servants, she thought, Alassa would have had a small army crammed into her room.

  She smiled at the thought, and returned to her book. It was complex and engrossing, so enthralling that she barely noticed when the coach came to a halt and Lady Barb peered outside. A moment later, she leaned back and tapped Emily on the knee, making her look up.

  “I think you’ll want to see this,” Lady Barb said, as she opened the door. “Come and look.”

  Emily put the book to one side — Lady Aliya would do something unspeakable to her if the book got damaged — and clambered out of the coach. The cold air struck her at once, making her hastily cast a warming charm as she peered into the distance. Cockatrice Castle rose in front of her, near Cockatrice City...surrounded by tents. Hundreds of tents. Emily recalled the last Faire, near Lady Barb’s house; surely, she asked herself, it hadn’t been as big as this.

  “It’s huge,” she said, in disbelief. “How big is it?”

  “At least three times the size of the last one,” Lady Barb said. “I’d say you should be expecting hundreds of thousands of visitors. They’re probably planning to set up a few portals in the city, or perhaps closer to the Faire itself.”

  “I didn’t realize it was going to be so large,” Emily stammered. “It...it just grew.”

  Lady Barb gave her a reproving look. “That’s what happens when you leave the matter in someone else’s hands,” she said. “I just hope Bryon had the sense to organize a roving patrol of Mediators. Holding the Faire this close to a proper city means there will be no keeping the magicians apart from the mundanes.”

  Emily shivered. Lady Barb had told her more than a few horror stories about previous gatherings, back when she’d been a full-time Mediator. They always ended with drunk — and sometimes not so drunk — magicians playing tricks on helpless mundanes. Sorting out the mess was never easy.

  She looked at Lady Barb, who was watching her with a gimlet eye. “Can I count on you?”

  “I should charge you a salary,” Lady Barb said, sardonically. She motioned Emily back into the carriage with one hand. “But I dare say I could stick around for a while, unless something pops up.”

  Emily sat down in the carriage, again, as the driver cracked the whip. This time, she pulled back the curtain and watched as the Faire came closer. It wasn’t due to open for another week, she knew, but there were already thousands of people there, preparing their stalls for the grand opening. Last time, there had been potions, books and rare magical artefacts; this time, there would be all of that and more. Her eyes narrowed as she saw a set of iron rails, carefully embedded in the ground. A railway line?

  Imaiqah said her father intended to show off a few things, she recalled, as she felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. What have I let myself in for?

  The coach drove around the city and up towards the castle. It was a squat brooding monstrosity, dominating the landscape around it by its sheer presence. The previous baron, a thoroughly unpleasant man, had bragged that his castle could never be taken by st
orm, but he hadn’t counted on being caught red-handed trying to overthrow the king. His execution had been pretty much a foregone conclusion. And now it was hers. Emily braced herself as the gates opened, feeling the thin edge of the wards pass over her as they acknowledged their mistress. Inside, only Bryon was waiting for her.

  “I was expecting a crowd,” Lady Barb said, tartly.

  “I asked him not to organize a greeting party,” Emily said. She packed her books in her bag, and placed it on the seat. “I always hated being greeted by everyone.”

  She opened the door as soon as the coach came to a halt and jumped down to the stone courtyard. Bryon went down on one knee as soon as he saw her, lowering his head until he was looking at the ground. Emily sighed inwardly, and took a long moment to study him. He seemed to have grown up a little since they’d last met, but he was still terrifyingly thin, with short brown hair. Perhaps that was a good thing, Emily decided. He’d certainly had ample opportunity to eat himself sick while he’d been working for her.

  “You may rise,” she said.

  “My lady,” Bryon said. “I welcome you back to Cockatrice.”

  Emily nodded. The castle — and all the surrounding lands — were hers, but she didn’t feel as if she owned them. It was strange and terrifying to realize that she effectively owned hundreds of thousands of people, people who would have no recourse if she went mad and started to abuse them. The previous baron had written so many laws that no one could live without breaking a few, giving him a ready-made excuse for killing or jailing anyone he didn’t like. Emily had repudiated most of the laws when she’d been granted the barony, but she knew there were still problems. How could there not be?

  “I thank you,” Emily said. She turned and beckoned Frieda out of the coach. “This is Frieda, my friend. I trust you have prepared a room for her?”

  “I have,” Bryon said. He bowed to Frieda, then straightened up. “Would you like to be shown to them now?”