The Gordian Knot (Schooled in Magic Book 13)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “I know Fourth Year isn’t easy,” she said, finally. “But you do have to carry on.”

  She leaned forward. “Are you taking all the classes?”

  “All of them,” Frieda confirmed.

  “Then maybe you should consider dropping a couple,” Emily suggested. “Are you actually planning to be a healer?”

  Frieda shook her head. “I want to be a combat sorceress.” Her face twisted, suddenly. “No one will ever laugh at me again.”

  “Maybe they wouldn’t,” Emily said, with the private thought that no one had ever laughed at Lady Barb. “But you don’t need healing to try to become a combat sorceress. You could drop it tomorrow.”

  “But I like healing,” Frieda protested. “What about alchemy? Or charms?”

  Emily shook her head. “You’d need them both if you wanted to be considered for an apprenticeship,” she said. “I don’t think anyone would want to take you if they had to drill those subjects into your head too.”

  “You could ask Jade to take me.” Frieda looked up. “Or someone else you met during the war.”

  “Jade has other duties,” Emily pointed out.

  She smiled at the thought. Being Alassa’s husband and Prince Consort was a full-time job, but King Randor had made Jade a Baron as well. On one hand, it had boosted Jade into the aristocracy so he could marry Alassa; on the other, it was something of a poisoned chalice. The Barony of Swanhaven had been rebellious. It had even killed the legally-appointed baron. Matters had calmed down now, but even so ...

  “You could ask Cat, I suppose,” Emily added. She didn’t know how many of the other apprentice combat sorcerers had thought well of her. “But he’ll still want you to be qualified by the time he takes you on.”

  Frieda looked downcast. “I wish ... I wish it was simpler. I don’t even know how to cope with Celadon.”

  Emily sighed. “Did you ask him to break it down for you?”

  “He said I should understand,” Frieda said. Her voice was bitterly frustrated. “And I don’t. I don’t know how his plans work, let alone how to explain them. I’m going to fail!”

  “It’s only the first week,” Emily said. She wondered, again, if she should have a word with Professor Lombardi. It wasn’t easy to get sorcerers to work together, but it sounded as though the relationship between Frieda and Celadon had turned poisonous. “Have you considered asking to be released?”

  “There’s no one else searching for a new partner,” Frieda said. “And if we did, we’d still be in trouble.”

  Emily made a face. The project wouldn’t just be graded on their work, although that was a large part of it. They’d be graded on how well they managed to work together, blending ideas from both of them into a coherent whole. If Celadon did all the work, they’d only get half-marks at best; if Frieda left, neither of them would pass. And even if Celadon managed to salvage what was left, he’d still be marked down. There was no way the tutors would allow someone to swap partners without practically restarting the project from scratch.

  “You could always threaten him,” Emily pointed out. “If you leave the project, he’ll be fucked.”

  Frieda smiled. “And not in a good way.” Her face fell. “But I’ll be fucked too.”

  Emily did the calculations in her head. Assuming that Frieda got nothing for the joint project—which was likely—she’d need to do very well in her exams to have a hope of passing Fourth Year. Failing the joint project would probably cost her the chance to proceed onwards to Fifth Year. Hell, she’d have to ally herself with a third-year student ... who might wind up screwed if Frieda wasn’t allowed to retake Fourth Year. It was a terrible mess.

  “That’s something you should bear in mind,” she said. “You do have leverage over him too.”

  Frieda’s face darkened. “I don’t feel as though I do. What happens if he tells me to go?”

  “Then you can complain to your advisor or see if you can work out an agreement with a third student.” Emily gritted her teeth. Grandmaster Hasdrubal had made arrangements for her to work with Caleb over the summer between Third and Fourth Years, but Gordian wasn’t likely to be so accommodating. Maybe if they picked the right third year ... she shook her head. She didn’t know any of the third years personally. “At the very least, you can spread the blame a little.”

  She looked down at her hands as the food arrived. The roast beef looked delicious, something she would never have been able to have on Earth. It would have been far too expensive for her family, even if her mother hadn’t spent her welfare checks on drink. She still found it hard to believe how many roast animals Randor and his court could eat at a single sitting. They ate enough meat and fish—and vegetables—to feed an entire city for a month. Conspicuous consumption was part of a monarch’s job, she’d been told, but it still made her feel uneasy.

  “I never ate fish, back home,” Frieda said, wistfully. “It was rare, and ...”

  “You don’t have to go home now, if you don’t want to,” Emily pointed out. She remembered Gordian’s assignment and leaned forward. “Do you want to go home?”

  “They hated me,” Frieda said. Her face darkened, suddenly. Her anger was almost a palatable force. Emily could feel her magic crawling over her skin, demanding release. “I want to go home, I want to make them hurt ...”

  She softened. “And I never want to see any of them again.”

  Emily reached out gently and pressed Frieda’s hand. “You don’t have to see them again, ever,” she said. The sudden flash of anger had been disturbing. “You don’t have to go back to Mountaintop either.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Frieda looked up at Emily. “Thank you. For everything.”

  “You’re welcome,” Emily said. The naked adoration in Frieda’s eyes was enough to make her uncomfortable. Frieda had jumped ahead by leaps and bounds ever since coming to Whitehall ... no, ever since meeting someone who actually wanted to help her. “You are doing well.”

  “I don’t feel as though I’m doing well.” Frieda rubbed her arms. “I work hard in class—and do everything Sergeant Miles tells me to do—but I still feel as though I’m drowning. How do you cope?”

  Emily hesitated. She felt as though she were drowning too. And yet, there was no way she could stop.

  “You sort out what you have to do, and then you do it,” she said, finally. “And you isolate what you don’t have to do and put it aside for later.”

  “I wish it was that easy,” Frieda said. “I might have taken on too much.”

  “Then you have to admit it now, before you get too far into the new year.” Emily took a sip of her juice. It tasted sharp against her tongue. “You really don’t want to burn out.”

  Frieda looked grim. “I don’t want to give up either. But Celadon ...”

  Emily considered—briefly—attempting to mediate. But Professor Lombardi would consider it an unjustified intrusion into his sphere. And it would be, unless she asked him first. Which would be a vote of no confidence ... she shook her head, annoyed. If she was in his shoes, she would have been glad of the help.

  I’m just the Head Girl, she thought. And Gordian would not be impressed if I did his job.

  “You have faith in yourself,” she said, firmly. “And make him tell you exactly how his diagrams work.”

  She ate the meal slowly, savoring every bite. Whitehall’s food was very good—it was one of the techniques used to convince common-born students to forget their roots—but home-cooked food was often better. The cook had probably been told secrets from her mother which had been passed down in an unbroken line from some distant matriarch. Or maybe it was a male cook. She smiled at the thought. It was funny how cooking for one’s wife was seen as unmanly, on the Nameless World, but cooking for business was not.

  “The fish is good,” Frieda said. “Why don’t they cook it like this at school?”

  “It’s probably a matter of scale,” Emily said. She’d asked the same question about healing potions. Poaching a single fis
h would be easy, she supposed; poaching enough fish to feed the entire student body would be a great deal harder. Brewing enough potions to sell them cheaply would be even worse. “I don’t think they’d be able to do this for everyone.”

  “Not everyone eats fish,” Frieda pointed out. “Idiots.”

  Emily nodded, although for different reasons. She’d never been allowed to be fussy, not on Earth. Ramen noodles, baked beans ... cheap, crappy and very unhealthy food. Her fellows at school had moaned about the school dinners, but Emily had cleaned her plate and gone back for seconds every day. Maybe it had come from the lowest bidder. It was still better than eating nothing. The idea of refusing to eat just because someone didn’t like the taste was absurd.

  Frieda never got enough to eat, either, she thought. She knows better than to waste food.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. She caught the serving girl’s eye and waved. “You can come here every weekend, if you like.”

  “Only if you come with me,” Frieda said. “There’s no fun in eating alone.”

  Emily lifted her eyebrows. “You don’t have anyone who’ll go with you?”

  “Not really.” Frieda looked down at the table. “No one I want to spend time with, at least.”

  “Oh,” Emily said. “What will you do when I leave?”

  Frieda stared at her. “I don’t ... you don’t have to leave.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to leave,” Emily said. It was true. Whitehall was the first place she’d considered a real home. But she had an apprenticeship in her future. “What will you do when I go?”

  “I don’t know,” Frieda said. “But I’ll think of something.”

  Emily paid the bill, then passed the serving girl a silver coin. It was one of the newly-minted coins from Beneficence, with a stable value. Oddly, it would actually be worth more if it was sold as a curiosity, rather than used for currency. But that wouldn’t last as more and more minted coins entered circulation.

  “It was very good,” she said, as she rose. “And thank you.”

  “Thank you.” The serving girl curtseyed formally, then picked up the plates with practiced ease. “Please come again.”

  Emily smiled. “We will.”

  She looked at Frieda. “Come on. There’s still some daylight. We can go shop before we go back to the school.”

  “Sure,” Frieda said. She still looked down. “Why not?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “REMEMBER WHAT WE DISCUSSED,” EMILY SAID, as the doors of the Great Hall opened. “And stick to the rules.”

  Cirroc nodded, affably. Jacqui and Cerise looked artfully blank. Emily eyed them both suspiciously—they’d been surprisingly quiet when she’d outlined the rules—and then looked away. Dozens—perhaps hundreds—of students were flooding into the Great Hall. It looked as if a third of the student body wanted to join the club. Emily couldn’t help wondering, despite herself, if Gordian had a point. There was definitely a demand for a dueling club.

  She sucked in her breath as she surveyed the students. Two-thirds of them had followed instructions and donned shirts and trousers before coming, the remainder wore everything from robes to dresses. Emily glanced at some of the latter and decided they’d come to encourage their boyfriends rather than taking part themselves, if only because anyone wealthy enough to buy a dress wouldn’t have any problems buying a cheap shirt and second-hand trousers. There were families who objected to girls and women wearing male clothes, but they tended not to have magic. Magical families put learning ahead of almost anything else.

  And what happens in Whitehall stays in Whitehall, Emily reminded herself. Magicians enjoyed a certain level of freedom from sexual mores, particularly when no one outside the school knew what they’d done. No one is going to talk about it when they go home.

  She climbed onto the podium and looked down. Frieda stood with a group of Fourth Years, her eyes fixed on Emily. Several of the students she recalled mentoring last year stood near the front, chatting happily amongst themselves; others were strangers, students she couldn’t even recall passing in the corridors. There were fewer Fifth and Sixth Years ... she was oddly saddened to realize that Caleb had decided not to attend. It would have been awkward, but she could have relied on him to be sensible. She wasn’t sure that was true of some of the others.

  Cirroc wants to be a dueling master, she thought. He’s got every incentive to make the club work.

  The thought made her smile as she gathered her magic, drawing their attention to her like moths to a flame. Perhaps, after a month or two, she could pass most of her dueling club duties to Cirroc. He wanted the job, after all, and it would look very good on his resume. A dueling master would definitely see it as a plus, even if a combat sorcerer would have doubts. She could make a reasonable case that passing control to him would actually have beneficial effects in the long run.

  Gordian might not buy that argument, she reminded herself. And he has the final say.

  She cleared her throat. “Welcome to the first session of the dueling club,” she said, using a simple spell to amplify her voice. She made a mental note to thank Sergeant Miles for teaching her the spell, even though she’d thought it useless at the time. “How many of you are actually here to duel?”

  Nearly all the students—including some of the girls in dresses—held up their hands. Emily resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Perhaps someone could fight in a dress, if the whole scene was carefully choreographed by a dedicated director—but it wasn’t something she would care to try for herself. Sergeant Miles would have had quite a few sharp things to say, she thought, if she’d turned up in a dress. He’d probably make her run laps or swim in it, just to teach her that impractical clothing could be dangerous.

  They’ll learn, she told herself, firmly.

  “Those of you who are not here to duel, please go to the back of the room,” she ordered, putting her thoughts aside. “We’re going to run through the rules first, which I expect you to obey. Anyone caught breaking the rules will be kicked out and not allowed back.”

  A low rustle ran through the crowd. Emily found it hard to care. She didn’t want any accidents—or serious injuries—on her watch. Gordian might just have given her the job in the hopes she’d do something to blot her copybook spectacularly. Or something might happen anyway. Even a basic duel could lead to broken bones or spell damage that proved alarmingly resistant to treatment.

  “We will fight our duels until one party is unable to continue,” she said. “We will not intentionally fight to first blood, nor will we battle to the death. Spells that might cause serious injury are not to be used, whatever the circumstances. You are not to bring wands, staffs or any other charged objects into the dueling circle. And if someone throws up their hands and surrenders, that surrender is to be honored.”

  She ran through the other rules, ignoring a handful of discontented mutters. It wasn’t illegal, in a duel, to make someone’s clothes fall off, but it was rare. A real duelist wouldn’t take the risk, knowing that while he was casting something effectively harmless, his opponent might be trying to cast something nastier. But she’d chosen to ban such spells, along with a handful of cruel pranks. They might turn out to be valid tactics in her duels, making it harder for the duelists to adapt to the real world.

  “Anyone who breaks these rules will be kicked out,” she warned, again. “And they will not be allowed to return.”

  She took a breath. “We will hold the first round of the actual contest a week before half-term. Those of you who want to take part will have until then to put your name down for the first round. You can withdraw your name up until the moment I start assigning partners, at which point you will be recorded as having forfeited the match if you withdraw. The remainder of the rules can be found on the notice board outside my office or in the common rooms. Make sure you read them before you put your hat into the ring.”

  There was a long pause. “We won’t be going outside just yet,” she said, as she sn
apped her fingers. A number of circles appeared on the floor. She smiled at their astonishment, although she knew that Gordian and Professor Armstrong had set up the wards beforehand. “If you have some experience in casting spells, we will now divide you into teams which will be supervised by my assistants; if you don’t, I’ll teach you some of the basics now.”

  Cirroc stepped forward. “Everyone with experience, over here,” he bellowed. “Now!”

  Emily concealed a smile as the group slowly split in two. Cirroc and the others had by far the largest group, if only because anyone who’d survived a year at Whitehall would know a number of defensive spells. She watched them for a long moment, then turned her attention to the firsties. They stared back at her with varying degrees of awe and fear.

  “I’m going to teach you the basics,” she said, as she led them to a corner. “You’ll need to go to the library to learn more spells and practice, always practice, to develop your skills in combat. Some spells which sound ideal are actually useless in a real duel.”

  She smiled, thinly. Sergeant Miles had talked about sorcerers who’d tried to be clever, only to have someone more practical blast them through a wall while they were trying to cast their brilliant spells. Or have his head bashed in with a brick, in one particularly humorous example. It was better to be practical than brilliant, in a fight. A brilliant man could overlook the flaws in his brilliant plan until they caught up with him.

  Gathering herself, she talked them through a very basic set of spells. They were largely harmless, although she doubted that anyone without magic would agree. A magician might take being turned into a frog or frozen solid in stride, but a mundane would find the experience terrifying. Emily had found it terrifying, years ago. Now ... it was just part of her life.