A College of Magics

by Caroline Stevermer

  The day of Faris’s audience was sunny and, even for Aravis, unseasonably warm. By noon, Faris was too nervous to speak. She was unable even to remonstrate when Jane took away the merino gown Faris had planned to wear and made her put on a severely simple black walking suit instead. Jane pretended not to notice Faris’s anxiety.

  “I know you don’t like to wear red.” Jane fastened the scarlet sash at Faris’s shoulder and hip. “The sash is terribly official looking, though. What a pity you don’t have few orders to wear with it. Here, take your gloves.” She stood back and admired the play of fabric as Faris moved. “Now the hat, that’s right. Very nice.”

  Faris found a lookingglass and examined her reflection warily. Except that she seemed in imminent peril of strangulation from her high white collar, she looked very well. With difficulty, she was even able to swallow. “Are you certain this is the proper thing to wear when one must present credentials to a king?”

  Jane nodded. “There’s really no feminine equivalent for a cutaway, more’s the pity. Still, it could have been worse. It could have been silk stockings and satin knee breeches.” She handed Faris the leather portfolio containing her credentials. “National dress is considered proper, too. I can just see you striding up to the king wearing boots and baggy trousers, with a pistol stuck in your sash.” She held up her hand before Faris could answer. “I know—you’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you? Well, too late. You’re ready.”

  Down in the Esplanade, a state coach and an escort of carbineers, under the stern eye of a master of ceremonies, waited to convey Faris from the Hotel Metropol to the castle. Faris let them put her in the coach and concentrated on not mislaying her portfolio as they thundered slowly up the street.

  Since she was alone, there was plenty of kneeroom in the state carriage. Although the plush lining was faded and worn, and the gold-leafed trim was slightly chipped, the coach was as spotless inside as out. The narrow seat was as hard as a wooden bench, though here and there its leather upholstery had cracked slightly, enough to betray the horsehair stuffing within. Faris wondered if all the king’s coaches were in similarly worn condition. Or perhaps Galazon’s ambassador was not deemed important enough for them to send one of the very best conveyances.

  Back straight, head high, face pallid, and hands clammy, Faris rode in solitary threadbare splendor as they entered the grand court of the castle. The carriage drew to a halt. The guards presented arms, and a military band played a chorus of Long Live Queen Matilda.

  It was a spectacle intended to impress. It might have, if Faris hadn’t been so nervous. As it was, she was intent on her mission—to present her credentials to the king without embarrassing anyone, particularly herself. Impatiently, she waited for the attendants to open the carriage door and help her down. She wanted to have the whole thing over with. A little thing like a military band playing the old Lidian anthem could not be permitted to distract her from her duty.

  Faris followed the master of ceremonies, a thick-necked man with very red ears, from the grand court into the great hall. He led her to the foot of a staircase so perfectly detailed it might have come from a confectioner, and so large it might have come from a nightmare.

  At the foot of the staircase a second master of ceremonies accepted Faris from the first. He led her in awe-inspiring silence up the gleaming marble steps. The footing was slippery and Faris wondered how safe the steps were. She kept her eyes fixed on the back of the second master of ceremonies’ neck, which was thick and rather bristly, and made the climb without incident.

  At the head of the staircase the second master of ceremonies turned Faris over to the grand master of ceremonies. The grand master of ceremonies wore his hair in a black mane well past his collar, so she could not tell if his neck was thick and red or not. He marched her down a long gallery lined with civil and military members of the household.

  At the extreme end of the gallery stood the prefect of the palace, who was quite bald, and of rather sallow complexion. He preceded Faris to the king’s presence chamber and retired the moment he announced her. “Your Majesty, here is her excellency, Faris Nallaneen, the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of Galazon.”

  The king’s response was an amiable nod. “Good afternoon.” His voice was not particularly loud, but it was curiously penetrating, the kind of voice that would carry a long distance.

  Faris stared unabashedly. Julian Paganell, the king of Aravill, was a man in his middle fifties, perhaps an inch shorter than Faris for all his barrel-chested bulk. His proud bearing made his stiff collar seem natural. He wore normal morning dress, save for his extraordinary jacket, a long-tailed cutaway, tailored in peacock blue velvet. Faris could only wonder what Jane would have to say about that jacket.

  The peacock blue was not a flattering shade. The king’s broad face showed the patchy ruddiness of one who has drunk a great deal of claret and port. His hair might have been glossy black once, but it was silvered now. His dark blue eyes regarded Faris keenly.

  Under Jane’s tutelage, Faris had prepared a speech, an obligatory speech, about the relations between Galazon and Aravill. It was obscurely phrased but extremely civil. Faris drew breath to begin.

  The king did not give her the opportunity to deliver it. Instead he crossed the room toward her. “Welcome to Aravis, Faris Nallaneen. We hope you’ll enjoy yourself here.”

  Too nervous to stop herself, Faris demanded, “Why?”

  The king looked surprised. “Because Aravill can be a very enjoyable place. Perhaps it isn’t what you’re used to, but we think you’ll find it entertaining.” He smiled at Faris, yet she thought she detected a watchfulness behind his eyes. He seemed preoccupied, for all his friendly informality.

  Somehow Faris kept herself from saying crossly, I didn’t come here to be entertained. Instead, she said, “I know that you, if anyone, will understand the work I left behind me at home. As long as I can be of service to Galazon, I will enjoy my stay here.”

  “If not our nearest neighbor, Galazon is surely our dearest. We hope that we may work together in the same way Galazon and Aravill do.”

  We hope we do better than that, Faris thought. “I’ll work for Galazon with a will.”

  The king laughed at her. His lips were chapped and drooped in an unappealing way. Yet it was a charming laugh, rich and merry. “Such zeal. Yet we wish to entertain you, too. And we have the right—or at least we have the right to try.”

  Belatedly, Faris remembered the portfolio under her arm. “If I may?” At the king’s nod, she presented her credentials.

  The king accepted them without a glance. His eyes measured Faris. “You will now be entered upon the list and you may work as hard as you like, if work is what gives you pleasure. You must call upon all the other ambassadors as fast as you are able. Be finished by Twelfth Night. That’s when we give our New Year’s masked ball. We invite the entire diplomatic list. Even your uncle will attend, provided Agnes permits him. You’ll be obliged to be entertained then.”

  “It seems I must make haste.”

  The king smiled again and summoned the grand master of ceremonies. As she followed her escort through the icy perfection of the castle’s antechambers, she remembered with chagrin that she had forgotten to deliver her speech.

  Something of Faris’s confusion lingered over the next five days, although she worked hard enough at paying calls and receiving compliments to forget her chagrin. Even at their worst, the other ambassadors were nothing like Dame Brachet in a temper. Faris found her social footing quickly, though she often had the feeling she had stepped where someone was already standing.

  Whether through her own efforts or Brinker’s, Faris found the diplomatic circles in Aravis accepted her eagerly. Almost every invitation she accepted, after the first two days, brought her another encounter with the king. At formal dinners, at musical evenings, at the opera and the theater, she saw him everywhere. He was unfailingly polite, determined to make her enjoy her stay in Aravis, and his in
terest did more than anything to ensure Faris’s success in society.

  Faris put her trust in Dame Brachet’s training and Jane Brailsford’s genius for clothes. Correctly as she behaved, however, she could not rid herself of the notion that there was something more to the king’s attention than mere civility. It made her uncomfortable. But then, almost everything in Aravis made her uncomfortable.

  Far smaller than Paris and far larger than Greenlaw, Aravis seemed very strange to her. It was not easy to get her bearings. The steep streets and high walls shut out much of the sky and made it difficult to find directions. There was noise night and day, even in the Esplanade. At times the streets grew very dirty, with a smell that was hard to bear even with the winter chill to restrain it. At other times the mysterious cisterns under the city were made to disgorge their water and the gutters ran clean in a few hours.

  Faris approved of the plumbing arrangements she encountered in Aravis, grew resigned to the strange coil of streets that sprawled below the Esplanade, and became accustomed to the noise. But she could never accept the castle itself.

  It rose, solid enough to all appearances, over the city like a mountain crag. Yet mountain crags do not have sash windows set into the solid rock. Mountain crags do not always wear a becoming ring of mist around their uttermost heights, no matter the weather. Mountain crags do not conceal, behind their solidity, a sense that there is less there than meets the eye.

  Yet that was precisely the sense that Faris had, whenever she looked unwarily in the direction of the castle. It seemed to her that there was nothing beyond the first few levels of the castle. Any appearance of rooftops and chimneys and battlements and bartizans were only her imagination. If she looked at them out of the corner of her eye they were still there—yet they did not convince.

  Faris discussed these impressions with Jane and no one else. Jane found them interesting and wondered if the rift was perhaps to blame. Faris put them down to fatigue. Never mind the noise at night, she was having dreams.

  She had always dreamed. In her time at Greenlaw, Faris had dreamed of Galazon so exclusively, she’d nearly forgotten there were other sorts of dreams to have. Yet in Aravis she never dreamed of Galazon. Instead she dreamed of the castle.

  Night after night she passed through the palace halls to the foot of the white icing stairs to the king’s antechamber. Sometimes she walked. Sometimes she rode in the state carriage with its benchlike seat. Sometimes she rode in a tumbrel, usually with Tyrian beside her, but once unaccompanied save by a sense of impending doom.

  Night after night she passed through halls hung with blue and gold and found herself in endlessly twisting passages that took her in directions she did not wish to go. She had a sense, in the dreams, that the passages followed some pattern but she could not recognize it. Despairing, she would turn and double on her tracks, pause at crossed corridors and strain after the pattern, ever just out of her reach, knowing with the certainty of any dreamer that she had seen the pattern in full not very long before. Yet she could not get anywhere, it seemed, but deeper into the muddle that she had made. She welcomed waking.

  Jane found the intricacies of the diplomatic list in Aravis a welcome change from ordering around the hotel staff. She accompanied Faris on those social occasions for which a chaperone was indispensable. As Faris was twenty years younger than the youngest ambassador and forty years younger than most of the others, she found Jane’s company extremely welcome. Sometimes, however, Faris had to venture out alone, as when the Spanish ambassador invited the entire list to hunt with him.

  “I explained that I keep no horses here,” Faris told Jane in the hotel suite, late on the evening before the hunt. “He promised me a mount from his own stable. He has the entire list coming, from all accounts. The king is to ride with us. Apparently they are great cronies. The Spanish ambassador is staying at the next manor house but one from his. Is there any graceful way out?”

  “I thought you liked to hunt?”

  “I do. But not when I have strong sympathies for the fox. I think this invitation comes out of the same drawer as the box at the opera with the Austrian legation, where the king just happened to look in, and the musical evening at the Danish embassy, where the king paid his respects to the ambassador’s wife and asked her to sing ballads from Galazon. Lucky she didn’t know any. There are quite a few that mention Aravill, and almost all of them are extremely rude.”

  “You could be indisposed. Let me see. There are a few diseases that never fail. What about a nice old-fashioned case of gout?”

  “How soon could I recover? The Twelfth Night ball is less than a week away. Dare I dance so soon after claiming to have an attack of gout?”

  “No gout, then.” Jane considered. “Still, it’s a pity not to make an appearance at least. Your riding habit came out so well. Why don’t you just fall at the first fence?”

  Faris slumped into the wing chair by the window. “And then?”

  “Oh, dear. Heroic rescue by his majesty, I suppose.” Jane frowned abstractedly into the fire. “Is he really so dreadful?”

  Faris rubbed her forehead wearily. “No. Perhaps not. But his mouth is too red and his lower lip droops. And I’m half afraid he’s going to hunt himself into a heart attack.”

  At nine the next morning, Faris rode out with the rest of the Spanish ambassador’s guests. It would probably be a fine chilly day later, for the sky was clear overhead. There was still mist on the ground, and not a sign of frost. It was too foggy to see clearly and too chilly to be sociable but Faris did her best to look amiable. The prospect of hunting over strange country on a strange horse depressed Faris more than the fit of her new riding habit could cheer her.

  She knew there was no flaw in her appearance, from the tilt of her high crowned topper, veiled rakishly in tulle, to the snood that confined her unruly hair, to her gloves of Russian leather, to her highly polished boots. Riding sidesaddle was about appearance, after all. If there were any work to be done, one would ride astride and be safe. But to be highly ornamental, sidesaddle was mandatory.

  The Spanish ambassador had evidently decreed that she be ornamental, for he had loaned her the largest horse she’d ever ridden, a brilliant bay gelding, well up to her weight, with a neck curved like a roundabout pony’s. So huge was he that Faris suspected she might even look delicate atop him. “An aesthetic triumph,” she muttered, as the bay stamped and snatched at his bit.

  “I beg your pardon?” The rider beside her was the Danish ambassador’s American wife. “Did you speak to me?” She seemed too worried about her own mount’s behavior to pay much attention to Faris’s musings.

  “A perfect morning, I said.”

  “Perfect for sleeping. Still, this is better than shooting. If we keep moving, we may keep warm.”

  As they spoke, they had followed the rest of the hunt from the forecourt of Crail, the ambassador’s extremely ugly country house, down a lane of rhododendron. Far ahead, the hounds muddled along under the supervision of the huntsmen. Far behind, the hunt servants brought spare horses along at a sedate amble. Reed and Tyrian were among them, to Faris’s secret relief.

  “Do you hunt much here?” Faris asked, in hope of advice about the terrain.

  The ambassador’s wife shuddered elegantly. “I intend to follow the others as far as the first likely lane, where I shall detect some lameness in this poor animal. I’ll be back before they’ve cleared the breakfast dishes.”

  A familiar voice spoke, deep as a bassoon but as penetrating as an oboe. “We’ll tell your husband you said that.” The king had ridden up behind them. He greeted the ambassador’s wife and Faris and rode beside them companionably. His hunting clothes were almost unexceptionable. Almost. Instead of the customary buff waistcoat and scarlet coat, both waistcoat and coat were the same shade of bottle green. The fabric of the waistcoat reminded Faris of the interior of the state coach, as it might have looked when new.

  “You won’t surprise him,” predicted the ambas
sador’s wife.

  “And you won’t alarm him, we hope. We are here to enjoy ourselves, after all. We’ll accompany you and young Faris. It never hurts to have a faithful cavalier to manage the gates for you. And to summon assistance if necessary.”

  Faris regarded him narrowly. Wrap your legs up like a bolster and see how you fare, she thought. Aloud, she said, “How is the country here about?”

  “Fine high banks and lots of them. We should have excellent hunting—if this pack ever finds.”

  “What crops?” Faris inquired. “Are the fields fallow now, or should we keep out of the plowing?”

  The king looked surprised. “We came to hunt, not farm.” At the sudden change of expression on Faris’s face, he added apologetically, “We should have said we are here to relish the hunt. And we know we shall, in your company. Don’t worry about missing the death. We will simply do the best we can and divert ourselves together.”

  So, it’s do the best we can, is it? Faris kept her eyes on the space between her bay’s ears and tried to sustain a pleasant expression. Fox and hound and horse willing, I shall do the best I can to leave you in a ditch, you care-for-nothing. Patronize me, will you? Anger washed nervousness away and for the first time since her arrival in Aravill, Faris felt wholly herself, at ease and annoyed. “Do you get much hunting?” To her own vast surprise, she sounded perfectly civil.

  “It’s been a bit off these last few seasons, but we get out when we can. The doctors tell us the fresh air does us good.”

  They reached the covert and drew rein. Across the rocky patch of shrubbery the huntsmen worked the hounds with care. The other riders in the field ranged themselves around the covert. Positions were chosen partly in accordance with etiquette, for it would be very bad form to interfere with the huntsmen and their hounds, and partly in accordance with strategy, for a good start could make all the difference to a run. Protocol, for once, didn’t seem at issue. Precedence meant nothing to the master of the hounds.