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Authors: Caroline Stevermer

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A
fter 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.”
“Bachelors marry. The world must be peopled, after all. Why don't you people it yourself? I'm surprised you don't already have an ‘understanding' with some sprig of the nobility. What was your mother thinking of?”
“Very possibly she was thinking of her own ‘understanding.' She didn't have a very high opinion of marriage.”
“No doubt she had her reasons. I don't have a very high opinion of it myself.”
“And how is it that you feel exempt from the necessity?”
“Brothers, Faris, brothers. They are good for something, you know. The Brailsford name can go sailing on down the centuries without my help. Come on. Tell All. Haven't you ever even considered it?”
“Have you?”
“Oh, I left that notion in the nursery. I remember the moment distinctly. I was four years old. The guest of honor at a birthday party I had been lured into attending took a
fancy to me. The little blighter tried to kiss me. I bit him on the nose. By the time all the fuss was over with, I'd made up my mind it was just an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”
“Precocious, weren't you?”
“Weren't you?”
Faris sighed. “Quite the contrary. I've never been the sort, somehow.”
“What, never?” Jane demanded, then answered herself merrily, “No, never!”
“Never,” Faris insisted.
“What,
never
? Hardly ever!”
Faris blushed. “Well. I spent a few summers away from home when I was younger. There was a boy my age there.”
Jane hooted. “I knew it.”
Beguiled by her memories, Faris ignored the interruption. “The summer we were eleven, when we went fishing, he taught me to take my catch off the hook, but then he did it for me so I wouldn't have to. The summer we were twelve, he let me shoot his rifle sometimes. He stole a cigar from his father's humidor once, and when he'd turned quite green, he let me have a puff. We were sick side by side in the ornamental border. I liked him. I think he liked me, because at the end of the summer we were thirteen, he gave me his pocketknife.”
“He sounds quite perfect.”
“He'd been given a much better knife for his fourteenth birthday, a few days before.”
“Still.”
“I never saw him again.” After a thoughtful pause, Faris
added, “I wonder if that was why they never sent me back. Just shows, doesn't it? One should never tell adults anything. Even mothers.”
“Particularly mothers.” After another lengthy silence, Jane added, “Perhaps you'll meet again someday.”
Faris shook her head.
“You're right. It's better this way. Whenever you see a humidor, you'll think of him. Unfortunately, whenever he sees one, he'll probably think of you.”
“I must admit, I've never cared for ornamental borders.”
 
F
aris thought she knew all about Greenlaw. But during the long days she spent at Jane Brailsford's heels, she learned Greenlaw from the marks of low tide below the seawall to the spire that crowned the college like a sword held up to heaven. The seawall ramparts were Jane's favorite retreat in sunny weather. The crooked streets of the village, they visited occasionally. Most of the rest of their time was spent in exploring the heights, the secret heart of Greenlaw.
Within the outcrop of granite that provided Greenlaw's foundation, under the piles of dressed stone, piers, and vaulting, lay the first chapel built at Greenlaw. Long buried by the ambition that had balanced a college atop a pinnacle of granite, the chapel was a single room, a simple barrel-vaulted space containing an altar and nothing more. In the heat of the summer, in the chill of winter, the chapel held a constant coolness, a balance of the seasons.
Standing beside Jane, just inside the door of the chapel, Faris felt the silence, as tangible as the temperature. In the dimness, relieved only by the lamp at the altar, Faris could
sense the weight of time pressing in on her, just as her imagination told her she could sense the weight of masonry pressing on the barrel vault above.
“When this place was dedicated to St. Margaret, slayer of dragons,” Jane murmured, “it was already old. It was old when the wardens of the world held court in splendor. It was old before that, when they walked abroad in the world, as free as minstrels. Time sings in the stones here.”
“How very poetic.”
“Don't even attempt to patronize me. I am a witch of Greenlaw, you lowly undergraduate, and I shall be as lyrical as I please. Now, pay attention. The ward that balances Greenlaw has two anchors. We're very near the lower anchor here. Because there is a difference between the balance within Greenlaw's bounds and the balance beyond. there's a silent spot near the anchors. That's what you don't hear.”
“Then we're near Greenlaw's south pole.”
“If you care to think of it that way. I prefer to think of Greenlaw and its wards as a bubble in a glass of champagne.”
“Where is the other anchor?”
Jane looked pleased. “Follow me.”
Faris followed Jane out of the chapel, across the nave of the new chapel, so called since it was a mere two hundred years old, and into the south transept. There, through a low-linteled door, Jane led Faris up a spiral staircase. And up. Swiftly at first, but slowly after three hundred steps, they climbed the dimly-lit stair.
Too stubborn to protest, Faris followed Jane in silence.
As she climbed with her left hand on the central pillar of the stair, the spiral was so tight that Faris's right sleeve brushed the outer wall. There were narrow windows every hundred steps, just wide enough to shoot an arrow through, which gave them enough light to guess at the degree of wear of the stair wedges.
When Jane stopped, it took Faris a moment to realize they weren't merely resting. Jane stood on the top step, her hand on the latch of another low-linteled door. She lifted the latch and led the way through the door.
As she followed Jane out onto the roof, sunlight assailed Faris. She reeled as the world wheeled around her. She put out a hand to catch at the door and stood, eyes wide, panting and gaping at the view flung out before her.
To the east and far below, the sea made a silver skin across the bay to the blue hills of Normandy. Here and there, the shifting sands were visible beneath the shallow tide, like winding rivers running under the sea. From the perfect flatness of the bay, the seawalls of Greenlaw rose like a child's sand castle.
As she looked down, Faris admired the tidy stack of gardens, dovetailed with slate roofs, that marked the village wreathed around Greenlaw's base. At her back was the neat pepper-pot tower that sheltered the stair. At her right was Jane, squinting against the sunlight as she gazed into the depths of the sky. At her left was the sheer face of the spire, spangled gold and silver with patches of lichen on gray stone.
Faris looked up at the faceted heights of the spire. At the tip, foreshortened into a tangle of wings and swords, she
knew St. Margaret stood back to back with St. Michael, trampling the dragon tirelessly into a lump of green bronze. As she looked, the drift of clouds across the sky behind the spire made Faris dizzy.
“Welcome to the north pole. We can't stay long. Just standing here we upset the balance of the wards. But I thought you would like to see.”
“Oh, yes,” said Faris softly, eyes on the horizon, “I would like to see.”
After twenty minutes of silence, Jane sighed sharply. “We must go.”
“So soon? My heart is still pounding from climbing the steps.”
“Shameful. I must see to it that you take healthful exercise this summer.”
“Climbing steps?”
“Climbing trees. Come along.”
“Must I?”
“Don't whine. Follow me.”
“You
English
.” Faris cast a last wistful look at the view and followed Jane back to the spiral stair. “You're so
strict
.”
 
O
bedient to Jane's orders—or the Dean's—Faris spent the rest of the summer enjoying Greenlaw out of season. With help from Jane's purse, she was able to experience the joys of the patisserie. Though she climbed the more convenient trees of the Dean's garden, Jane spent just as much time slumbering in their shadow as she did in healthful exercise. Faris learned what it was like to watch the pattern of
shadow cast by tree leaves until the random scatter of sun and shade made her sleepy.
Most days, the weather was good, and walks along the causeway or at the foot of the seawall were inviting. When the weather was not, there was refuge from the rain to be found in the library. There, on one of the last days of the summer term, Faris actually found herself reading Greek for pleasure, an illuminated manuscript of
Works and Days
. She put the book down hastily the instant she realized her transgression but it was too late. The season had turned. Summer gave way to autumn.
At Michaelmas, the other students returned. Faris found herself sharing number five study with Charlotte and Nathalie, but all three of them were so intent upon their studies that they scarcely spoke to one another.
By November, Faris had almost grown accustomed to hearing her friend referred to as Dame Brailsford.
 
T
here's a message for you,” Nathalie said, when Faris came into number five study one night in late November. “Jane—that is, Dame Brailsford—left it. She was on her way to the Common Room.”
Faris put her books down and picked up the folded page. The crisp paper, the elegantly illegible slant of the Dean's handwriting, told her the contents before she read it. Jane had received an identical message. On their vigil nights, Eve-Marie and Odile and every qualified third-year student had received just such a summons. Faris unfolded the sheet of paper.
The Dean of Greenlaw College invites
Faris Nallaneen to keep vigil tonight, the
twenty-eighth of November, until the
rising of the sun on the twenty-ninth.
“It's my vigil.” Faris folded the sheet of paper in half again, then into quarters, and so on, without thinking, until she could fold it no more. She put the resulting untidy wedge of paper down on the table without realizing she did so.
“I thought it might be.” Nathalie didn't look up from her book. “Is it cold out?”
“Of course. May I borrow your goose feather comforter, the one Eve-Marie used, just for luck?”
“What about your double bind, then?”
Faris laughed. “May I?”
Nathalie closed her book. From behind her chair she produced a shapeless armful of folded comforter. “I thought you'd ask.”
 
W
earing Nathalie's comforter over her shoulders like a cloak, Faris left the dormitory and stepped out into the night. The evening air was chill but Faris was too excited to be cold. She had spent most of her time at Greenlaw being skeptical about magic. In the past few months, she had set aside skepticism, but no conviction had replaced it.
Now, although she could not find words to describe the feeling, even to herself, Faris found herself possessed of a peculiar restlessness. Since the arrival of the message from
the Dean, she had known that something had changed for her. She was certain of the change, though nothing else was clear. At any other time, such irrational certainty would have worried her. On this night, it delighted her. She was a student of Greenlaw, this was her vigil, and on this night, of all nights, magic was afoot.
BOOK: A College of Magics
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