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Authors: Caroline Stevermer

BOOK: A Scholar of Magics
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From what Lambert could see at a distance, there was no more activity within the gates of Glasscastle than there was without. It was a sleepy afternoon, but for that constant southwest wind.
Even as he neared the great gate, Lambert weighed the merits of going out again. He'd had enough of sitting still. Yet his stiff collar bothered him. The boots he'd put on for a formal call were too good to hike in. Despite his light flannels and the crisp breeze, he was sweating. Whatever he did for the rest of the afternoon, a change of clothing was the first order of business.
In the cool shade of the gatehouse arch, Lambert greeted the Fellow of the university on duty as gatekeeper, signed the visitors book, and crunched out into the sunlight along the pea-gravel path that crossed the green to Holythorn.
From inside its gates, Lambert could not help but think of Glasscastle as a labyrinth or a maze, walls within walls. Three paths that met at the great gate soon branched into many, as the broad stretch of Midsummer Green yielded to the shadowed passages of the colleges that flanked it. A man could get lost in those passages, Lambert knew. More than once, he'd been lost himself.
Lambert made his way to Holythorn College. Once indoors, he climbed stairs two at a time, eager to reach what he considered home, the rooms Nicholas Fell had invited him to share six months before.
Fell, as a Senior Fellow of the college, had three rooms overlooking a garden. The middle room, spacious and comfortable, served as a sitting room. It boasted a deep window seat overlooking the garden, a sound, well-designed fireplace with a Venetian mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and a handsome old clock ticking industriously on the wall. On either side of the sitting room was a bedroom, Fell's twice the size of the one he'd given Lambert.
Even though Fell had a study filled with books and other reference materials at the Winterset Archive, his rooms at Holythorn were still lined floor to ceiling with his books. Lambert had never seen so many books in one place in his life as he had the first time he laid eyes on Fell's sitting room. Later, when he saw the Winterset Archive, his ideas about what constituted a lot of books had been revised upward radically. Nevertheless, he still found Fell's books a source of abiding wonder and pleasure.
As Lambert had few possessions of his own, his small bedroom was ample in size. All he really needed was a bed and a wash stand, and there was a wardrobe besides. The sitting room held everything else he considered vital to support life: Fell's books, a comfortable chair, and a good reading light. Given free run of such things, the living arrangements at Holythorn suited him tolerably well. He liked Fell and he was grateful to him for his generous hospitality. Compared with life on tour or in a rooming house, life at Glasscastle was a revelation. Never before had Lambert known such comfort, privacy, or peace.
At the moment, however, Lambert found the cosiness of Holythorn, usually so pleasant, stuffy and hot. He needed to be outdoors. He would change his clothes, get back out into that wind, and let good fresh air clear his head and calm him down.
As Lambert had half expected it would be, the sitting room he shared with Nicholas Fell was empty, as was Fell's bedroom. The only sign of recent human habitation in the sitting room was one of Fell's stale cheroots left half smoked and teetering on a scallop shell that did service as an ashtray. That cheroot had been there two days now. Lambert had last seen
Fell at breakfast the day before. Fell had said nothing at that time about any deviation from his usual routine, nor had he left any message for Lambert.
Lambert didn't permit himself to waste any time speculating about Fell's whereabouts. The man didn't need a nanny, after all, nor did he owe Lambert any explanation of his actions. Fell's scholarship—or to be exact, Fell's idiosyncratic notion of scholarship—drove him. That was explanation enough.
Lambert changed from flannels into a linen suit several degrees less impressive than the one he'd put on for tea with Amy. It was that much more comfortable and Lambert moved with ease as he took a circuitous path away from Holythorn. His route led Lambert behind the Holythorn kitchens, between the kitchen garden and the walled garden of St. Joseph's deanery, toward Pembroke gate, to the east side of Glasscastle, to the far side of the university from the Brailsford house.
There, in the shadow of Wearyall's cloister garden walls, Lambert sat on a stone bench and listened. The sound of chanting voices was clear and pure. There were more voices during the regular school year than there were now, so the volume was not as loud as it had been the first time Lambert came there. But the power in those voices had nothing to do with the volume. Many voices sang as one, intoning the pure tones of the chants. That was the source of the beauty, to Lambert. That such disparate young men could each bend his will to serve Glasscastle, that the individual could surrender himself for the good of the whole, that many could become one.
Lambert yielded to impulse and stretched out full length on the stone bench. He balanced his hat on his stomach and gazed up into the shimmer of leaves overhead. The wind in the trees blended with the chanting. Lambert stared upward. Beyond the leaves, the sky was raked with small scudding clouds. Yes, there was bad weather brewing out there somewhere, with more rain to come. Rainiest summer for years, folks said.
It had been raining when he first visited this spot. Lambert had arrived at Glasscastle in February. The grass had been just as green then, but the trees were bare and most of the flowers yellow, forsythia and daffodils within Glasscastle, gorse on the hillsides. The damp cold had sliced through Lambert's clothes courtesy of a wind that seemed never to ease or shift direction more than a degree or two from true north. It had been chilblain weather.
Lambert's arrival at Glasscastle had been in full cowboy regalia. He'd assumed that the men from Glasscastle, stern in their shiny top hats, meant to hire a cowboy sharpshooter, so he'd prepared accordingly. He'd worn his show costume, and he'd brought along the Colt Peacemaker, his most reliable weapon. The effect was all he'd planned. Heads had turned every step of the way, some with a nearly audible snap. It wasn't until he was inside the precincts of Glasscastle that he understood how he'd miscalculated. The Fellows of Glasscastle didn't want a cowboy, they just wanted a sharpshooter.
Lambert considered himself an entertainer, thanks to his time with Kiowa Bob. He had never meant to give anyone as much entertainment as he did that day at Glasscastle. It
could have been worse. His shooting was up to standard. But the intense amusement his costume inspired was more than Lambert had bargained for. On top of that, Lambert had to strain to keep his embarrassment from showing. That had never been a problem before, even back in his earliest days with the Wild West Show. Lambert told himself to perk up. It didn't help much.
Luncheon, when they got around to serving it, made up for some of the social discomfort. After the meal, the Senior Fellows, the men in the shiniest top hats of all, took Lambert around the grounds of Glasscastle, and that was where Lambert understood the magnitude of his error. He'd been standing just here beside the bench, watching the rain drip from the brim of his hat, when his escort paused to listen to the chants from Wearyall College.
The place was beautiful, that much Lambert had noticed at once. The bench was in a spot well sheltered from that tireless wind in winter, ordinarily basking in the sun so that even on that roughest, coldest of days, snowdrops bloomed in the grass beside the ancient foundation stones. Lambert had been admiring the snowdrops in an absentminded way when the sound of chanting transfixed him.
Many voices raised as one, though not raised far, seemed to inhabit the trees, the grass, every mossy stone of the place—and illuminate it. The music filled Lambert's chest and stung his eyes with tears. It opened his heart the way only the sight of home and the sound of certain voices had ever opened it before. The change occurred with a speed that frightened him. One moment he was himself, waiting patiently for the tour to move on, and the next moment he was
clinging to the chant, waiting with his whole soul open, breathless to discover how it would change him next.
Time went away for Lambert as he stood listening, but his escort did not. He stood rapt as long as his guides' patience permitted, but at last Lambert had to yield and let himself be led away, towed along to finish the tour. As the distance from the garden grew and the intensity of the experience faded, the chant became a separate thing again, something Lambert could think about objectively.
Afterward, Lambert couldn't account for the power the chant held for him, couldn't really believe it had seized him with such speed and force. When he was thinking with his head again, not his heart, it was the purpose behind the music that intrigued Lambert most. The notes held a meaning he felt he ought to understand. Lambert was sure of that, yet all the while his rational mind flipped and struggled like a trout to explain to itself how he could possibly know any such thing. How could he be so sure of something he had never encountered before, something he knew nothing about? How could he be so sure that this was the most important thing that had ever happened to him? What had happened to him?
The spell of that oddly uncomplicated music lingered with Lambert when he walked away. Lambert agreed to stay and help the top hats of Glasscastle with their marksmanship project. He didn't know what it was about the chanting that changed things so. He simply knew he needed to hear more. He needed to learn more. He needed to be there.
From that day on, Lambert had adopted the manners of Glasscastle as quickly and as sincerely as possible. He
wanted to fit in there as best he could. He wanted to belong, but failing that, he wanted to spend every moment he could exploring the urgency that chanting roused within him. He had to put up with the teasing reminders of his debut, which embarrassed him a little more every time he remembered it. But they let him stay.
In two days, he was trusted to stick to the paths of the university open to him as a guest. The first chance he had, and every chance after that, he'd made his way back to the bench outside Wearyall. That was where he listened. That was where the music of the massed voices worked its way into his bones. That was where he first met Nicholas Fell.
It had been a miserable day, not raining but just about to, and the wind was unrelenting. After his first disastrous day at Glasscastle, Lambert had worn his best, most unobtrusive clothes, and after half an hour of sitting still, even his heavy topcoat did nothing to keep the chill away.
Lambert had been joined by a rumpled, wiry man with thick dark hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. It was hard to not stare at the dark hair, because the man was bareheaded. His voice, when the man spoke, was low, almost diffident.
“I'm terribly sorry to interrupt you,” the newcomer said as he approached the bench, “but have you seen my hat?”
Lambert couldn't help taking a quick look around. There was the bench, the stone walls, the corner of garden, plenty of trees, and some snowdrops blooming. No hat. “Sorry, no.”
The man sank down on the bench beside Lambert with a weary sigh. “Blast them. Where do they get these notions?”
In reply to Lambert's look of inquiry, he explained apologetically, “My students believe I pay them insufficient attention. In reprisal, they have taken my hat. I thought I had interpreted the ransom note correctly. Apparently not.” He thought it over. “It's a good hat. Worth going to some inconvenience to recover. But it isn't a remarkable hat. I may simply have to resign myself to its loss. My name is Nicholas Fell, by the way. You're the American, are you not?”
Lambert blinked. “I'm
an
American,” he admitted cautiously.
“Around here, that means you're
the
American.” Fell tugged at the corner of his mustache. “Beastly boys. I don't know where they get the time, let alone the energy.”
“I thought the students of Glasscastle led an ascetic life.” Lambert nodded toward the sound of chanting. “Rituals and all.”
“Up at five o'clock in the morning to chant for hours, scrub the floors for a quick diversion, a cup of gruel and a good gossip for breakfast, and then off to attend their lectures?” Fell made a derisive sound. “That still leaves them hours to spend getting into trouble, the young animals. I liked that hat, damn it.”
“If I find it, I'll be sure to report it.”
Fell gave Lambert a long look. It was a piercing look, and Lambert wanted to squirm under the close scrutiny. “You are cold.” Fell rose. “Come to my rooms with me and I'll give you a drink. Brandy all right?”
Lambert got to his feet. He was inches taller than Fell, but he didn't feel it, for all he loomed over him. Fell seemed to consider him an equal, someone of merit not for what he
could do or where he was from, but just for who he was. “You're very kind. I'm not supposed to drink anything stronger than tea, though.”
“Sorry. Tea it is, then. Come along.” Fell beckoned Lambert and the pair of them walked together along the winding paths to Holythorn. By the time they finished tea, Lambert knew he liked Fell. Over the next few days, Fell made it clear that he liked Lambert well enough to solve the problem of housing by letting him share his rooms at Holythorn.

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