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Authors: Caroline Stevermer

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“I'm going to the library.” Menary did not waste a glance at Faris.
“I've just come from there, but I'll walk with you anyway. I was reading the
Almanach d'Ostrogotha.
Are you familiar with the
Almanach?
It's like the Structure of the World. I'm sure the Dean would love it. A place for everyone and everyone in her place.”
Menary uttered a wordless exclamation of scorn and walked on.
“Perhaps you ought to refresh your memory before you discuss my family again. Or should I say our family? My grandmother married your grandmother's uncle. My father's mother, I mean. He was no sea captain. I don't know how you could make a mistake about that, unless you were misled by the fact that he died at sea.”
Menary walked faster. Faris matched her stride.
“It's confusing to foreigners, all these little duchies and kingdoms and protectorates. The names are longer than the census rolls. I think Jane Brailsford finds it quaint.”
Menary stopped abruptly and sneered up at Faris. “What interest does Jane Brailsford take in you?”
“What interest do you take in me? Why confuse someone about our kinship? I'd be distressed if it happened again.”
For the first time, Menary looked at Faris as though she were perfectly visible to the naked eye. “Say I distress you. What of it?”
“Distress me, and prepare to hear the whole history of our families discussed from one end of Greenlaw to the other. I will provide genealogical charts, if necessary. It will be boring and inconvenient, but it ought to clarify our kinship.”
“There is no kinship.”
“No? Let us repair to the library. I will show you the
Almanach d'Ostrogotha.
I even know the page number.”
“Are you trying to threaten me? You'll regret it.”
“Do you find the truth a threat?” countered Faris.
Menary walked away without answering, golden head held high. Warily, Faris watched her go.
 
O
n her first visit to her tutor's rooms, Faris was startled to discover Dame Villette was the woman with tired eyes she had met on her first day at Greenlaw.
“I thought you were a proctor,” Faris blurted.
Dame Villette looked up from the stack of papers spread across the desk before her. “I am. Once I was merely a tutor, but I found that didn't afford me scope to discipline callow youth. So I became a proctor, too.”
“What will you tutor me in? Will you teach me magic? Or will you just hint about it, as the Dean does?”
Dame Villette stifled a sigh. “What subject have you chosen?”
“Does it matter? I've been told all subjects lead to magic in the end.”
“Such candor. Such insouciance. I'll try to match you. Some things can't be taught. Magic is one such. You may or may not learn it. That is entirely up to you. Greenlaw is warded to make magic likelier here than in the world outside. We have one or two traditions which may make learning more likely, too. But just in case no one has told you, or just in case you weren't listening when they did, no student performs magic at Greenlaw. To do so is grounds for expulsion. Do you understand that?”
“No. How can Greenlaw claim to produce scholars of magic when magic is forbidden here?”
“Magic is not forbidden here. But in order to ward Greenlaw, the scholars here have been given charge of the use of magic within our precincts. If we wish to live exempt from the natural laws balanced by the wardens of the world, we must maintain the balance within our walls. Thus, students are forbidden to practice magic.”
“If I were studying medicine instead of magic, I would be given some practical instruction in medicine.”
Dame Villette put her palms together and exhaled slowly. “If you were to study law instead of magic, you would not be permitted to practice until the authorities were satisfied that you were qualified to do so. Perhaps once you qualified, you might still choose not to practice.”
“If I were studying law, I would study law. Not deportment, not geometry—law.”
Dame Villette put both hands flat on the stack of papers before her. “If you studied law, you might master what you studied. Your work from last year shows little sign of such mastery. Many students show sufficient expertise at this stage of their studies that they attend only the early lecture and devote the rest of their time to work with their tutor.”
Faris looked bemused. “Oh? Only the backward attend class after the first year? Yet Odile was worse than I at Greek. And Jane Brailsford took deportment with me. Or is it as Odile said, we are assigned work until we have no time to spare to attend classes?”
Dame Villette widened her eyes very slightly. “Shall we put that theory to the test? Take back this paper you wrote
on the
Georgics
last term. Think through your points again. Find sources to support you. Let me see it when you've finished.”
Faris accepted the paper Dame Villette handed her. It was one she had written for her Latin class, a little dog-eared at the corners and much marked in blue pencil. “When should I turn it in?”
Dame Villette looked mildly surprised. “When you're finished.”
 
V
irgil occupied Faris through the month of October. By that time, most of the first-year students were settled in at Greenlaw, oblivious to the tutoring the more advanced students received in addition to the lectures. When the Georgics paper was turned in, Faris began to discover that there was more to life at Greenlaw than studying and sleeping and complaining about the food. And there was more to being Jane Brailsford's friend, she learned, than eating ginger cake and drinking poisonously strong tea.
Jane Brailsford's acquaintance was wide, her friends drawn from every year. There was wide-eyed Gunhild, a newly arrived student homesick for the village on the Raftsund that she had left for the first time in her life. There was calm Eve-Marie, who would probably take her comprehensives with record high marks, and even more probably stay to lecture at Greenlaw in years to come. And there were Charlotte and Nathalie, second-year students who spent nearly as much time in number five as Jane did. Charlotte, Faris recognized. She had once been so tired she'd forgotten how to eat artichokes.
Faris learned that to be Jane's friend was to be invited into the lair called number five study to criticize three-volume novels of romance and adventure with as much gravity as if they were Latin texts. To be a friend to Jane and Jane's friends meant sharing the contents of the parcels they received from indulgent relations, and arguing over the best way to roast apples and chestnuts over the study fire. Rather to her own surprise, Faris took to this behavior. Rather to her own amazement, Faris found that Jane's friends took to her.
Too busy to be homesick, Faris found that diversion and scholarship sorted well together. There was nothing so entertaining as the amusements that beckoned when she had something extremely pressing to do in the way of scholarship.
If she had done all her work as soon as it was assigned, she would have been free to enjoy the roasted chestnuts, the melodramatic novels, and the part-singing with a clear conscience. Yet, straightaway, the chief charm of their simple amusements would have vanished, for there was nothing forbidden in them, save that they required time, and time was always at a premium in their studies.
Thus scholarship improved diversion at Greenlaw, but Faris found that the reverse was also true.
Greenlaw, grave and scholarly, was filled with music. Greenlaw had stored up years of music from the students who had gone before, and it had music for every day in the college calendar. There were Greek hymns sung on Lantern Night, and Latin aubades for May Day Morning. There were madrigals and part-songs, rounds and catches.
There was the occasional music of the world outside, imported by students who had returned from their holidays with a crank gramophone or a sheaf of sheet music. But the greatest part of the music at Greenlaw came through the voices of students like Jane and her friends, and it was as diverse as the students themselves.
As a student at Greenlaw, Faris learned melody and harmony, found occasional tunes that suited her limited voice, spent the rest of her time in descants that let her sing without damaging the music. “Not the music of the spheres,” Jane observed, after a Lantern Night spent singing the usual Greek hymns and a Norwegian drinking song Gunhild had just taught them all, “but perhaps the music of the hemispheres.”
Even after Virgil ceased to plague her every waking moment, Faris spent many a late night over Latin texts. One night in the library's reading room, her abstracted thoughts upon the structure of the world were broken by the sound of voices calling her name.
From the little topiary garden outside the library, merry voices called her until she unlatched the nearest window and swung it wide. The November night air fluttered the pages of her open books and every student in the reading room stared at her reproachfully.
Faris ignored the cold breeze and the cold looks and leaned out into the darkness. The light from the library's green-shaded lamps reached far enough to show her four upturned faces, hardly more than pale masks in the gloom, but she recognized Jane, Eve-Marie, Nathalie, and Charlotte.
It was not merely their voices she recognized, nor their relative heights, nor the attitudes they struck, with their bat-sleeved academic gowns rustling around them. It was their immense gaiety that betrayed them, their blithe confidence that hailing her from her books at just this particular moment was the best and most hilarious thing they had yet contrived to do.
From the geometrically neat garden below, four voices rose in wobbly harmony:
The moon's my constant mistress,
And the lovely owl my marrow;
The flaming drake, and the night-crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
“The isle is full of noises,”
called Faris, trying not to laugh.
Behind her in the reading room, throats were cleared, papers were shuffled, books were slammed on desks. A cross voice called, “Some of us are trying to study.”
The harmony struggled on, half submerged at times by stifled hilarity.
With a host of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear, and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
“Some of us want to study, not freeze to death,” the cross voice called again. “Close the window!”
Faris marveled for a moment at what kind of life these strict scholars must have led to make them so indifferent to that thread of song from the garden. She had never dreamed college would hold anything half so dear to her. Perhaps it was different when the song was for someone else.
“With a knight of ghosts and shadows,”
Faris sang, or tried to sing, as she climbed from her chair to the sill.
“I summoned am to tourney: Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end; Methinks it is no journey.”
She swung out and dropped feet-first into the garden, narrowly missing the topiary.
Jane said, “Just yesterday, you told me you didn't understand conic sections, yet here we find you, trying to make yourself into one.” She and Charlotte picked Faris up and brushed the gravel off her skirts. Eve-Marie made sure the topiary was not damaged.
Nathalie called up to the reading room,
“Tee hee, quod she, and clapt the window to.”
Before she finished speaking, the window was slammed shut. For a moment, the five of them looked up in silence. The lights of the reading room shone forth undimmed.
“Thank you,” Eve-Marie called.
Then Nathalie took up the song again, and as they left the garden, the rest joined in:
I know more than Apollo;
For oft, when he lies sleeping,
I behold the stars
at mortal wars,
And the rounded welkin weeping.
Autumn at Greenlaw offered its share of discomforts. Bathwater, never entirely warm, chilled with amazing rapidity. Clothing sent to the college laundry returned clean but damp and had to be dried before the hearth, garment by clammy garment. Reading lists grew long, tempers grew short. Competition for space at the study fireside grew keen.
One night in number five study, Faris was supposed to be reading
Metamorphoses,
but in fact was merely nursing a cold and staring absently into the fire. Charlotte was at the table, working on an ink-and-wash illustration for the college's occasional literary magazine,
The Green Book,
while Jane attempted to dry her favorite black woolen stockings on a toasting fork over the fire.
“I think someone sold Menary a bill of goods,” Jane said. “This coal is supposed to burn different colors, like driftwood. But it looks like common or garden coal to me.”
BOOK: A College of Magics
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