A College of Magics

by Caroline Stevermer

  “Oh, don’t speak in metaphysics. It’s bad enough when the Dean does.”

  “I can’t help it.” Faris stared out at the empty gray sky. “It’s all Dame Villette wants to hear. I’ve become quite fluent at calling a hawk a heron.”

  “The doctrine of signatures,” said Jane with loathing. “Every single thing in the world symbolizes something it isn’t. It’s a wonder anything gets done.”

  “Does anything get done? Isn’t it all part of the divine struggle of order and and chaos, rising to fall, falling to rise again?”

  “If you can’t speak sensibly, you can leave.”

  “Is there any tea left?”

  “No. And that was the last of the Darjeeling. I’ll have to write away for more and Mother probably won’t send it because I’ll be home from school so soon.” Jane sighed. “Three months left.”

  Someone knocked at the study door.

  Faris turned away from the window to meet Jane’s surprised look. The first-year students of their acquaintance were all virtuously in class, and few of the older students stood sufficiently on ceremony to knock at doors.

  Jane opened the door. No one was there. Puzzled, she crossed the threshold to look up and down the hall, then stooped to retrieve the paper dropped outside the door.

  Faris watched Jane closely as she unfolded the sheet of paper, read it, reread it, and folded it again.

  Jane looked at Faris. “It’s tonight,” she said, her voice perfectly prosaic.

  “What’s tonight?”

  “My vigil.”

  Faris did not sleep that night. It wasn’t merely the knowledge that Jane was outside, huddled in every blanket she could borrow, shivering at the very top of the Gabriel Tower. It wasn’t just the flight of geese that went over at midnight, their faint cry like hounds hunting overhead. It wasn’t only the south wind, which had been blowing steadily for days, bringing the fragrance of plowed fields with it.

  All these things conspired, but most of all it was time that kept her awake. Faris realized that her stay at Greenlaw was not an interminable exile from Galazon. It would come to an end, inevitably. Unlike Jane, Faris welcomed the end of her time at school, longed to go home. There was no doubt that she had been ignoring a great deal that Greenlaw had to offer. If it was too much to expect to learn magic, and apparently it was, it was likewise too much to expect her to spend three years in a place, any place, and learn nothing.

  But it seemed to Faris, lying wakeful in the quiet darkness of the dormitory, that nothing was precisely what she’d managed to learn. She could stand at ease for hours, graceful as a strand of pearls. She could look complacent with a head cold. But that was as far as her education went.

  Bitterly, Faris tolled over the days that she’d been away from Galazon. She’d spent half her time there prodigally, reading novels. In that time, her uncle could have cut down every tree in Galazon Chase.

  By dawn, Faris was red-eyed as a ferret and nearly as cross. She met Jane at the foot of the Gabriel Tower and helped her bundle up blankets.

  “Thank you,” said Jane, when the last blanket was folded.

  “Any luck?” Faris was surprised at how gruff her own voice sounded.

  Jane looked pensive. “The story of Puss in Boots makes much more sense to me now.”

  “You’re not supposed to tell me.”

  “Oh, it isn’t a cat. What does it matter? You don’t believe in it.”

  “You do. I suppose you’re going to the morning lecture now?”

  “Well, yes. After that, I will probably start to study. Unless I take a bit of a nap first.”

  Faris sighed heavily. “I will probably start to study, too. Everyone else does. It will help to pass the time.”

  “Yes, indeed, it’s just the thing for that.”

  Side by side, they took the blankets back to the dormitory. Neither of them looked happy.

  5

  News from Home

  Faris spent the rest of the term wrestling with Greeks in general and Aristotle in particular. For Dame Villette, she read Metaphysics. For herself, she read Politics and anything else that seemed likely to be of use to an aspiring ruler. By the time comprehensive examinations were administered to the third-year students, she was virtuously annotating the Metaphysics structure of the world in the light shed by the Dean’s lectures.

  Jane set her sails to bear her deep into the uncharted seas of mathematics and magic. The place on the staff tacitly reserved for Eve-Marie was now free to all comers. Jane considered such an opportunity to be a gift straight from heaven and studied accordingly. She emerged from her comprehensives victorious. Not only was she a graduate of Greenlaw, she was invited to remain at the college.

  On an afternoon in May, when most of the students were accompanying their trunks to the Pontorson station, Jane and Faris met on the seawall near the Cordelion Tower. Fully recovered from the torments of scholarship, Jane was as neatly turned out as ever. Faris had attempted to pin her hair up into a copy of Jane’s neat coiffure, but the offshore breeze was doing its best to unknit the untidy knot she’d achieved.

  Faris had a book under her arm. Jane carried a bottle of champagne in one hand and two dining hall glasses in the other. In companionable silence they clambered up the ramparts and sat atop the wall. Faris took the glasses while Jane struggled with the champagne cork.

  “Finally,” Jane exclaimed. “Hold out the glasses.”

  Faris obeyed, and admired the play of sunlight on the wine as Jane poured. At the sight of the label, Faris drew a breath of admiration. “I had no idea the shops of Greenlaw held such luxury.”

  “They don’t. I brought this with me when I came back to school this year. I thought that if I passed my comps, I’d want to celebrate, and if I didn’t, I’d jolly well need something to cheer myself up.”

  Faris handed Jane her glass and lifted her own. “Here’s to the celebration. Congratulations.”

  Jane returned the salute. “Here’s to the chinless lads of England.”

  “Here’s to that notable witch of Greenlaw, Jane Brailsford.”

  “May they never meet again.” Jane touched her glass to Faris’s.

  They drank. Jane smiled blissfully out at the horizon where the seagulls dived and circled. “A fair end to a fine year. May your last year go as merrily.”

  “Not much merriment these past months.”

  Jane took another sip. “I’m gratified that you’ve noticed a change, but you know it is largely your own fault. You’ve been far too studious. You’ll have to mend your ways next term. I bequeath number five study to you and Charlotte and Nathalie. You’ll have to indulge in cakes and ale occasionally, just to keep up the tone of the place.”

  Faris’s eyes widened. “Thank you. Will you pay us a call now and then to keep the merriment up to standard?”

  “If I’m invited.”

  “You may join us for tea and three-volume novels, provided you have any left I still haven’t read.”

  “Too kind.” Jane poured champagne. “What have you been reading lately?” Her tone was elaborately casual.

  “Whatever Dame Villette thinks I ought.”

  “No, I mean reading.”

  “Oh. Well. Let’s see. Three Men in a Boat.”

  “What, again?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “Faris, you read that in February. Do you mean to tell me you’ve been doing no reading but schoolwork since then?”

  “What about you? You’re the one who’s spent the past six months sleeping two hours a night and spending the rest of your time in the library preparing for your comps.”

  “Ah, but that’s the rightful pursuit for third-years. I intend to spend my life around libraries, if I can contrive it. You, on the other hand, have been there every day this week and classes concluded ten days ago.”

  Faris studied the bubbles rising in her glass. “Why do you sound so shocked? All I’ve been doing is a little serious reading to counterbalance the novels I s
oaked up at the beginning of the school year.”

  “My, how prim you’ve grown while I wasn’t looking. How long do you propose to sustain these virtuous habits? Is it too much to hope you’ll indulge in a little holiday traveling?”

  Faris kept her eyes on the bubbles. Most of them knew their mission and fizzed up dutifully to the surface of the wine. What became of them then, poor bubbles? Or worse, what became of the laggard bubbles that lurked in the bottom of the glass? Faris put the question firmly away. Jane in an inquisitive mood required her undivided attention. “My uncle wrote to the Dean. My board is paid until next Whitsuntide. Here I stay.”

  Jane looked grave. “If you keep on at this rate, you’ll never last until then. They’ll send you to Switzerland to learn to breathe again.”

  Faris grimaced. “What’s the matter with me, anyway? Everyone else studies. No one says a word. I flounder about for months, getting cold looks from the proctors daily, and no one thinks a thing about it. Then, once I finally do set to work, you lecture me as though I’d gone off my head. Do you think my intellect can’t manage the strain? Do you think my brain has turned?”

  “No more than anyone else’s. If you spend all summer at your studies, however, I won’t vouch for you. And if you grow any smugger about counterbalancing the three-volume novels, I won’t speak to you.”

  “No studies? What shall I do instead? Count seagulls?”

  “If you wish. Can’t you think of anything more useful?”

  “Studying is useful. Learning how to run Galazon is useful.”

  Jane threw back her head and stared into the depths of the sky, endlessly blue above. “Magic is useful.” She gazed upward for the time it took to draw a dozen breaths, then looked at Faris. “Wouldn’t you like to learn some?”

  After a long silence, Faris asked, “Is this a trick?”

  “No tricks. I don’t think you believe in magic and I can tell you right now that if you don’t believe in it, you’ll never pass your comprehensives.”

  “Oh, come. I can’t be the first skeptic ever to grace these halls.” Faris put her glass down carefully. “Is belief a requirement? If it is, I must resign myself to failure.”

  “You needn’t.”

  Faris clenched her fists. “Then why don’t they teach us? Here we sit for three long years, waiting. Why don’t they teach us anything?”

  “Teaching is meaningless if you can’t find your own way to it. If I can only convince you that it’s true—that magic is here waiting—you can find your own explanations.”

  Faris frowned. “You don’t need to convince me. Eve-Marie did that. A wooden block would sense something in her presence. Like a kettle about to boil. But it’s one thing to know it’s true for her, and something else altogether to believe it’s true for me. If it were, wouldn’t I know by now?”

  Jane put down her empty glass. “It’s probably against every rule ever written—but then, I’m not a student here anymore.” She picked up the champagne cork and held it out on her open palm.

  Unable to look away, Faris watched the cork tremble in Jane’s hand. Slowly at first, but with increasing speed, the cork altered shape, detail by detail, until what sat on Jane’s palm was a sparrow, feathers ruffled and black eyes bright with a fevered gleam. Jane breathed gently into her palm. The sparrow spread its wings, dropped from Jane’s hand, and plummeted off the seawall.

  Faris and Jane craned over the rampart to watch. Inches from the water, the sparrow’s wings found purchase in the air. With fierce little strokes, it flew. Up it climbed in sharp swoops, to a level not much below their vantage, then away toward the open channel. Fifty yards from the seawall, in response to some change in the air itself, the sparrow’s flight ended. The sparrow vanished. A champagne cork fell into the sea and bobbed lazily, tossed by the waves.

  “That is how far the wards of Greenlaw reach. Beyond that barrier, magic exacts a higher price. The wardens of the world rule out there. Here, the witches of Greenlaw balance their own magic.” Jane rubbed her forehead and frowned a little.

  In silence, Faris watched the ceaseless, aimless motion of the waves.

  Jane looked at the sky again. “I wish it had flown up instead of away. It would be interesting to know how high the barrier goes. Perhaps it extends over us like a glass bell.”

  “Why did you do that?” Faris’s voice held no emotion, not even curiosity.

  “I thought you’d be interested.” Jane regarded Faris closely. “Are you interested?”

  Faris was still watching the cork. “If I could do that, I could own Galazon.” Her voice was small and dry.

  Jane looked surprised. “I thought you did.”

  Faris shook her head. “My uncle rules Galazon the same way he rules me. If I come back to Galazon a witch of Greenlaw, then it will truly belong to me. I can care for it as Galazon should be cared for, as my mother cared for it.”

  “Is that all magic means to you? Power over your uncle?”

  “You don’t understand.” Faris picked up her book, offered it to Jane. “The Prince. A very practical book. It demonstrates the futility of statecraft. Without the skill to read hearts, a ruler must always fear. A frightened ruler must rule through fear. Nothing else will serve. If my uncle taught me nothing else, he’s taught me to fear.”

  Jane looked alarmed.

  Faris waved a hand to dispel the concern in her friend’s expression. “Oh, I don’t mean anything melodramatic. But I must fear the things he could do, whether he chooses to do them or not. It isn’t a question of me wanting power over him. It’s a question of his very existence. I’d be a fool to ignore him. And now you ask me, ever so casually, if I’m interested in learning magic. Well, let me ask you this. Can the magic of Greenlaw teach me to read hearts?”

  Jane took the book and put it down between them. “Think, Faris, Greenlaw has turned out witches for three hundred years. Diplomats, judges, ambassadors, mediators, magistrates—but no saints. We don’t live in paradise. We live in the world, where there are still wars and plagues and anarchists and all manner of assorted mayhem. Greenlaw doesn’t hold the cure. It teaches us to balance what we can, as best we can, as the wardens of the world balance our sphere within the great model.”

  “Just let me balance Galazon,” Faris countered. “I’ll show you such a paradise as will turn the heart in your breast to see it. We have soil rich enough to put a French garden to shame, and meadows enough to graze every sheep in Scotland.”

  “Is that what you’ll do with what you learn at Greenlaw? Raise sheep?”

  “And oats. All kinds of oats. Where there are horses, there should be oats. We have wonderful horses in Galazon, not big, but very strong. When the Haydockers were harrowing the rest of Lidia, it was our light cavalry that let many-times-great-Uncle Ludovic keep them out of Galazon. Mother used to say that we had the Haydockers to thank for our borders. If it hadn’t been for them, Ludo might have had time to go knocking at the gates of Aravis himself. It’s the grazing the horses get in the high meadows all summer long. There’s limestone in the meadow country, good for bones. But the oats are what make the difference.”

  Jane held up her hand. “Spare me. Your point is taken. You needn’t belabor the details. We have the summer before us to discuss these matters. I’ll give you all the help I can.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble with the Dean?”

  “I don’t think so. The Dean told me to tutor you.”

  Faris stiffened. “What?”

  “It was that or go home. I knew my parents would never let me come back here, so I accepted the duty.”

  “In other words, I’m your first pupil.”

  Jane smiled. “The Dean tells me I don’t know much yet, so you’re unlikely to pick up too much from me. You need the attention because you may turn as early as Eve-Marie. In eighteen months here, you haven’t been outside the wards of Greenlaw for more than a few hours. Living here all year round has its effects, you know. How much have you grown sinc
e you came here?”

  “The seamstress told me five inches. She says I’m as good as an annuity.” Faris’s eyes widened. “That’s because I spent last summer here? Do you mean to tell me that the Dean thinks I may turn earlier than I ought to because my uncle kept me here instead of allowing me to go home between terms?”

  “It takes some people that way.”

  Faris laughed until her hair came loose and fell into her eyes. “Oh, how cross he’ll be when I tell him.”

  After luncheon a few days later, Faris and Jane returned to their favorite spot near the Cordelion Tower. The tide was in, so they sat side by side, staring vacantly at the waves that slid tirelessly against the seawall.

  At Jane’s insistence—and expense—they had eaten at Greenmantle’s, a restaurant in the village, which served many of Greenlaw’s tutors and proctors, and was, as a result, strictly off limits for students. Jane had scoffed at Faris’s fear that the Dean would catch her there, and Faris had to admit that the quality of the food was well worth the risk. Both the quality and the quantity led them to eat more than usual.

  Very full, tranquil to the point of sleepiness, Jane and Faris sat in the sunlight. They spoke little, and that little almost at random. After a lengthy silence, Jane asked, in connection with nothing at all, “When will you marry, do you suppose?”

  Faris stopped swinging her feet and looked at Jane. “Are you mad? I’m not going to marry.”

  Jane looked surprised. “Not at all? That’s rather careless of you, isn’t it? Who will you leave Galazon to, then?”

  “Not Uncle Brinker.”

  “His children? What if they’re worse than he is? Children often are, I believe. Look at Prince John.”

  “I don’t have to look at his children, thank goodness. He’s a bachelor.”