Lessons in Etiquette (Schooled in Magic series) (12 page)

King Jorlem was a tall, powerfully-built man who was slowly turning to fat. He seemed to be bald, wearing a heavy crown as if it were the lightest thing in the world. Emily couldn’t help thinking of Henry VIII, before realizing that King Jorlem, at least, had two male heirs. If he had any daughters, none of the genealogical tables Emily had consulted had shown them. But he’d want daughters, wouldn’t he? They could make useful alliances, particularly if they couldn’t actually inherit on their own.

Alassa stopped, two meters in front of the throne, and bowed. Emily felt her heartbeat racing faster as she counted ten seconds, then curtseyed. Despite all the practicing Alassa had made her do, she still nearly tripped over herself. A moment later, she went down on one knee, feeling oddly exposed, almost humiliated. King Jorlem wasn’t
her
King. Besides, no one knelt to the president.

“We welcome you, Crown Princess of Zangaria,” the king said. His voice was thin and reedy, but there was no mistaking the absolute assurance of power behind it. “You are most welcome in Our court.”

“I thank you, in the name of my father,” Alassa said.

Emily listened as they exchanged ritual pleasantries, wondering just how long she was supposed to stay on one knee. No doubt anyone born to this world would be able to stay there as long as necessary, but Emily felt her body going stiff. To distract herself, she looked around as best as she could without moving her head too much, catching sight of a tall handsome youth who was eying Alassa with an unreadable expression. The Crown Prince, Emily decided.
He
wouldn’t be able to marry Alassa. Beside him, his brother looked faintly bored by the whole affair.

One man, wearing long black robes with golden stars, was staring at her. Emily looked back at him, sensing magic spinning around his form; he had to be the Court Wizard. He would have heard of her and, like so many others, wondered just
what
she’d done to defeat Shadye without embracing necromancy herself. She felt his magic field touching hers lightly and stiffened, unsure of quite what he was trying to do. Read her mind? She tightened her defenses anyway, deliberately looking back at the King. After a moment, the intrusion faded away and disappeared.

“And so you are welcome,” King Jorlem concluded. He glanced briefly at Emily, a flash of curiosity in his eyes. “You may rise.”

Emily stood up.

“We shall now proceed to the Great Hall for the welcome feast,” the king added. His face twisted into a grin. “We shall show you proper hospitality.”

He stood up and took Alassa’s hand, as if he were her true father. Emily watched as he led her towards another set of doors, then started to follow them. The rest of the court followed in their wake.

T
HE PROTOCOL OFFICERS DIDN’T SEEM TO
know what to make of Emily. On one hand, the official story explaining her origins placed her firmly in the servant class, suggesting that she should be eating with the other servants in the kitchen, at least until she was a qualified sorcerer. On the other hand, the widely-held belief that she was Void’s bastard daughter meant they risked offending an extremely powerful sorcerer by giving her less than full honors. And she was not only Alassa’s close personal friend–and quite wealthy in her own right - but she was also the student who had defeated a necromancer in a duel. Who knew what she would be capable of when she grew up?

In the end, they’d put her at the high table, sitting next to the Crown Prince. Lady Barb and Nightingale had been given seats at a lower table; Lady Barb didn’t seem to mind, but Nightingale looked furious. He’d been effectively demoted by King Jorlem, Emily realized, after some thought. Seating was based on social class and the mere presence of a handful of guests upset all of the arrangements. It struck Emily as rather silly, although she had a feeling that it served a useful purpose. She just didn’t know what it could be.

“I often thought that I would like to go to Whitehall,” Crown Prince Dater said. He seemed less inclined to take protocol seriously than the junior aristocrats; besides, he could talk to Emily without committing himself to anything. “But I had to stay home and learn how to rule.”

Emily found herself liking the Crown Prince, even though she had the feeling that he was a skilled dissembler. The Allied Lands had quite a few cases of young heirs deciding that it was time to take the throne by assassinating their fathers–and, for that matter, fathers killing sons because they feared their ambitions. All of them were partly covered up in the official records, although the History Monks had recorded the truth. No wonder their books were banned in most of the kingdoms.

“It was Hedrick who had the magical inclination,” Dater added, a moment later. “And he is courting your princess.”

Emily glanced over at where Alassa was sitting, between King Jorlem and Prince Hedrick. Hedrick was handsome enough, in a bland sort of way, but the bored expression on his face didn’t bode well for any future romance. He could at least
pretend
to be interested in Alassa. His father, on the other hand, was bombarding her with questions, some of them clearly about Emily. Alassa didn’t seem to be uncomfortable talking about her friend. It probably served as a distraction from having to talk about herself.

Hedrick had magic? Emily hadn’t sensed anything from him, but then he might not be powerful enough for it to register–or powerful and disciplined enough to conceal his power. He didn’t seem to be carrying a wand, a sure sign of poorly-developed talent, but he
was
wearing a sword…though that might have been protocol. Apart from King Jorlem and his children, none of the aristocrats carried weapons. The king could have ordered them all cut down in a moment.

She glanced at some of the aristocrats, noting that some of them were staring at her, probably wondering just what made her so special. How many of
them
had magic? Some noble bloodlines worked hard to develop their magical talents, even to the point of inviting commoners like Imaiqah–and Emily herself, she acknowledged with an internal scowl–to contribute genes. Others were horrified at the mere thought of sullying their bloodlines with commoner blood. Absently, she wondered just how many of those unions bore the required fruit. Nothing she’d read in the library had suggested much understanding of genetics; there had certainly been no mention of anything resembling DNA.

“Hedrick talked about becoming my Court Wizard, but father wants him to marry someone outside the kingdom,” Dater continued. He sounded almost wistful. “Hedrick himself doesn’t seem to care very much.”

He glanced at his father, who was still chatting to Alassa, and then back at Emily. “So…what really happened at Whitehall?”

Emily flushed. “I beat Shadye,” she said, simply. “And it isn’t something I can talk about.”

“I
am
a Crown Prince,” Dater said. “You can tell me.”

“I can’t,” Emily said, shaking her head. “We have to keep the necromancers guessing.”

Dater gave her a sharp look. He’d grown up in a shark tank, to all intents and purposes, and had to learn how to play the great game of intrigue–as Alassa had called it–very young. If something was being kept a secret, it implied that there was a strong motive to
keep
it a secret–and the mere act of deciding what had to be kept secret often implied the motive. It would be easy for someone to draw the conclusion that Emily was
ashamed
of what she had done, or knew that it would be an instant death sentence if word got out. And that suggested necromancy.

No one seemed to believe that necromancers could conceal their true nature for very long. The mere act of sucking so much mana and life energy through their brains and into their wards unhinged them. A necromancer could easily vaporize someone who looked at him the wrong way, secure in the conviction that the act
wouldn’t
give him away. His warped mind wouldn’t see anything wrong with that at all. By that standard, Emily had shown no signs of necromancy.

But people would always wonder…

“Maybe the grandmaster came up with something,” Dater prodded. “Or maybe he did something careless and died because of it.”

“Maybe,” Emily agreed.

She looked up as the servants brought in the first part of the meal. Hundreds of rabbits had been killed and cooked by the kitchen staff, before being carried upstairs and placed in front of the diners. Emily had known, intellectually, that meat didn’t come out of nowhere, but she’d never truly grasped it until she’d seen the sergeants cooking animals they’d caught to feed their students. Now, it was almost commonplace to see whole animals. But they were rabbits…

And there are people who eat snails
, she reminded herself, tartly.
And cats, and dogs, and insects
.

“This is just the beginning,” Dater warned her, as the servants placed a slice of meat on her plate. “There will be
much
more to come.”

Emily worked a charm Sergeant Miles had taught her to make sure that the food was actually safe to eat. She’d had several bouts of queasiness after eating the food at Whitehall, even though most of it was cooked properly. And then there had been the dinner Cat had cooked for them in Martial Magic, which had left the entire team throwing up. The sergeants had laughed at them afterwards. They’d been warned to make sure that the meat was cooked properly. Thankfully, the charm revealed that the food was safe.

Dater chatted to her about nothing in particular as the servants brought course after course, almost all roasted or stewed meat. There were only a handful of vegetable dishes and slices of bread to go with the meat, as well as large flagons of wine and mead. Emily took a sniff of a drink Dater called Golden Mead–apparently imported from another continent at great expense–and decided that it probably wasn’t safe to drink. The last thing she wanted to do was get drunk and babble all of her secrets to listening ears.

“I had to calm down the Counting Guild after the new numbers reached the kingdom,” Dater said. “They were insisting that they be completely banned. My father trusted me to come to an arrangement with them. And then the abacus made it impossible. We ended up having to disband the guild.”

Emily felt a shock running through her chest. The new numbers had been her fault, one of the simplest innovations she’d suggested to Imaiqah’s father. Arabic numerals were so much easier to use than symbols that made Latin numerals look simple and easy. And then there had been double-entry bookkeeping, which made it much easier for shopkeepers to do their own accounts, and the abacus. The Accounting Guild of Zangaria had been crippled, then ruined, by the innovations. They’d exploited too many people to survive the crash when they’d lost their monopoly.

Dater’s face was unreadable. Did he
know
that Emily had been the one who had ‘invented’ the new numbers? Alassa had deduced it, but Alassa had access to some inside knowledge, knowledge that Dater might well have missed. Not, in the end, that it mattered. The first abacuses had been very basic, designed from Emily’s memories. Now, there was a
sixth
generation design out there and hundreds of craftsmen were competing to come up with the seventh.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said, sincerely. She’d theorized that there would be more work for accountants than ever–and there probably would be, once the first true corporations were established on this world. But the guild in Zangaria had made too many enemies to survive in its current form. She assumed that was true of the other guilds too. “But they could get work on the printing presses.”

Dater’s face flickered, unpleasantly. The first printing press hadn’t worked too well–it had been laughable compared to one Emily recalled from school, let alone a laser printer–but the craftsmen had picked up on the idea and run with it. Now, there was a very basic system for producing paper, which would eventually lead to the mass production of books. Previously, the only way to copy a text had been to do it by hand. Now, hundreds of copies could be produced very quickly. It would be a long time before the process was mature–the craftsmen were still making improvements–but it had already started to have an impact on society.

It would continue to snowball, Emily knew. The Empire’s script, which looked like a cross between Arabic and Chinese, was almost impossible to learn properly unless one started very young. Even the basic script needed years of training to master; Imaiqah had been lucky that her father had been able to afford a tutor for her. And Alassa had never been a very good student, at least before she’d met Emily. But English letters were so much easier to learn and master that they were spreading like wildfire. The Scribes Guild had not been amused.

“You’re supposed to be a Child of Destiny,” Dater pointed out. “Do you
know
where this is taking us?”

Emily hesitated, then decided to be blunt. “I think it will make you stronger, in the long run,” she said. “What good is a newborn baby?”

Dater’s lips twitched. “I have yet to marry myself,” he admitted. “My father is still in the process of selecting a bride for me.”

“Oh,” Emily said. She’d focused on girls being pushed–or forced–into marriage, but it should have occurred to her that boys would face the same pressure to marry. But then, boys had more social freedom than girls, unless the girls happened to be sorceresses. “Do you have any say in it at all?”