Love's Labor's Won (16 page)

Emily frowned. Caleb moved with an eerie precision, as if he was carefully considering each and every movement before he made it. Or, perhaps, as if he didn’t dare to relax and move naturally. Had he been genuinely clumsy as a child? Or was something else wrong?

“I don’t think it would have helped,” she said. “
Manaskol
has a tendency to blow up if you look at it the wrong way.”

“Tell me about it,” Caleb said. “I had to convince Professor Thande to teach me how to make it a year ahead of schedule, just so I could produce it for the project. Father was not amused when he saw the bill.”

“I bet he wasn’t,” Emily said.
Manaskol
was expensive, largely because the ingredients were expensive...and because most magicians would prefer to purchase it from someone else, rather than make it for themselves. “You didn’t actually try to buy it for yourself?”

“I need to modify the recipe in the final moments,” Caleb said. “It’s detailed in the proposal.”

Emily could have kicked herself. She’d seen it, but she had not remembered.

“I can make it,” she said, instead. “But I don’t know if I would be any more reliable than you.”

“I think you’d be doing most of the brewing,” Caleb admitted. He held up his bandaged hands. “My hands twitch like...a recruit facing his sergeant for the first time.”

Emily nodded. “We can certainly try and make it work,” she said. They would be graded on how well they worked together, rather than what — if anything — they managed to produce. “Do you mind working with a Third Year?”

“You’re not just
any
Third Year,” Caleb pointed out. “And besides...we’ll both be in Fourth Year. I barely got through a couple of weeks before I managed to put myself in a bed for the next few months.”

“It won’t be easy,” Emily warned.

It was a galling thought. She paid little attention to anyone outside her circle of friends, but she had heard that students who were held back a year rarely had an easy time of it. They were older than their new classmates, yet regarded as suspect because they’d already failed once. It didn’t make sense to her, but magicians regarded incompetence with more than a little fear. Not that they would ever admit to it, of course.

“It’s that or go back to Stronghold,” Caleb said. “And I don’t think they would want me back.”

Emily frowned. “What’s it like?”

“Horrible,” Caleb said. “You’d hate it.”

“Worse than Mountaintop?”

“I’ve never been to Mountaintop,” Caleb said. “You walk into the school and you’re instantly assigned to a regiment. That regiment will be your family for the next six years. If you do well, that regiment will be composed of your best friends; if you do badly, the regiment will turn on you. The life of a social outcast at Stronghold isn’t worth living. Oh, and if you make a mistake, everyone in your regiment gets punished.”

Emily shuddered. “Were you a social outcast?”

“I might have been, if I hadn’t had an important father and pompous older brother,” Caleb said. “As it was, I got a little leeway...which is what saved me from nearly being expelled, once upon a time. But they wouldn’t take me back now, even if my father pulled strings.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “What did you do?”

Caleb looked embarrassed. “I turned one of my regiment into a snail,” he said. “The bastard deserved it, but...they would have expelled me, if my father hadn’t had a few words with them.”

“That’s it?” Emily asked. She’d lost count of how many times she’d been turned into something small and embarrassing...or done it to someone else, for that matter. “They wanted to expel you for
that
?”

“Stronghold isn’t just for magical students,” Caleb explained. “Two-thirds of the regiment were mundanes, without magic. Using magic on one’s fellows is considered a grave offense, no matter how much they deserve it.”

“I see,” Emily said. She’d always had the impression that magical students were gathered together, at Whitehall and Mountaintop, to keep them from being a threat to the mundanes around them. A little spell, nothing more than a prank, could be devastating if used against a defenseless mundane. “But if you were defending yourself...?”

“You are expected to defend yourself using your fists,” Caleb said. “Not magic.”

Emily looked down at her pale hands. She couldn’t help understanding, through bitter experience, what it was like to go through school as an unpopular child. It would be worse, she suspected, if everyone’s marks depended on hers. The staff didn’t need to expend effort in keeping the students in line, not when the regiment would do it for them. And children who were pushed out of the regiment entirely would fall by the wayside, lost forever.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.

“Don’t be,” Caleb said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He sighed. “I understand we will be spending the summer rewriting the proposal,” he said. “Or we could simply sign your name to the bottom, then send it back to Whitehall.”

“I think I need to read it first, then understand,” Emily said. She’d signed quite enough papers without reading them. “I’ve had a room prepared for you here, if you want to stay in the castle. I don’t know how much time I will have, though.”

“We have a couple of months before we’re due back at Whitehall,” Caleb said. “I dare say we will have enough time, if you want to go through it line by line.”

He reached into his pocket and produced a small bag. It must have been charmed to be larger on the inside, Emily realized, as he produced more spell mosaics from the bag than should have been reasonably possible. Piece by piece, he put them together on the desk, pressing his fingertip against the head piece. There was a flare of magic, and a tiny light globe appeared at the far end.

“It works,” Emily said.

“This is something so basic that anyone could do it, with a ward,” Caleb said. “It’s the more complex spells I need to make work, but they don’t hold together so well.”

“Maybe you need to bind them together,” Emily mused.

“I tried,” Caleb said, with a hint of irritation. “But anything I use to hold them together would interfere with the magic.”

“Then use something mundane,” Emily said. She reached for a sheet of paper and drew out a very basic jigsaw pattern. “Something like this, perhaps.”

Caleb looked at it, then frowned. “It might work,” he said. “But I’d need something very precise to make sure they fit together.”

Emily smiled, remembering one of her old teachers from Earth. He’d tried to teach his students how to produce chessboards, something so complex that few of the students had managed to master it. But she still recalled the basic idea...

“You made these small,” she said, picking up one of the spell pieces. “Why not make one big sandwich” — she demonstrated with a piece of paper — “and then carve them out piece by piece. Pile two or three layers on top of one another, and you might have something that would work.”

“That might work,” Caleb agreed. He gave her a look of unmitigated respect. “They said you were a genius.”

Emily blushed. “I’m not that smart,” she said. “And I don’t know if it
will
work...”

“It’s better than my idea,” Caleb said. “But we’d still need to...”

He broke off. “We could make it work,” he said. “I
know
we could make it work.”

There was a tap on the door, which opened a moment later to reveal Frieda.

“Emily, there’s a party at the door,” she said. She gave Caleb a long glance before she looked again at Emily. “Lady Barb says you’ll want to meet the Duchess of Iron personally.”

Caleb blinked. “The Duchess of Iron?”

“A legal fiction,” Emily said. Alassa wouldn’t be fooling anyone...but traveling as the duchess would save her from tedious formalities. “Please ask Lady Barb to show the duchess and her party into...into my living room. I’ll be along in a moment.”

She rose. “I’ll see you for dinner?”

“Of course,” Caleb said. “By then, I might have rewritten the proposal.”

Chapter Thirteen

“I
DON’T KNOW WHO YOU THINK
you’re fooling,” Emily said, as she stepped into her living room. It was one of the few rooms she’d managed to have redecorated since she’d inherited the castle, lining the walls with bookcases and stuffing ugly, but comfortable furniture into the room. “Everyone knows who the current Duchess of Iron is.”

“Yes, but everyone also knows the Duchess of Iron doesn’t have to be greeted by everyone in the castle,” Alassa countered. She sat on an overstuffed sofa, next to Jade. Imaiqah sat opposite her, wearing a long dark dress. She’d accompanied Alassa from the city. “Or would you rather have everyone line up so they can bow in unison?”

“Not really,” Emily said. She touched the parchment in her pocket. “You could have warned me you were coming.”

Alassa looked embarrassed, although someone who didn’t know her would probably have missed the faint flush of her cheeks. “I forgot,” she confessed. “Besides, I didn’t know I would be coming until yesterday, when father finally agreed to let me go.”

Emily sighed and sat down next to Imaiqah. “How are things in Alexis?”

“Good enough,” Alassa said. “Father wanted me to hear a couple of complex court cases, but the lawyers have been very inventive in coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t.”

“They remembered you from before Whitehall,” Emily commented, dryly.

“Probably,” Alassa agreed, ruefully. “How much time did I waste when I was a child?”

She elbowed Jade. “The good news is that this...
person
is now my personal bodyguard,” she added. “Father wouldn’t let me come here without someone watching my back.”

“You mean you convinced him to let you go with a combat sorcerer, instead of a small army,” Imaiqah offered. “I thought he was going to ban you from leaving the castle before he finally changed his mind.”

Emily lifted her eyebrows. “Why did he change his mind?”

“I’m Confirmed,” Alassa said. “I imagine he thought I should be treated as more of an adult now.”

“Oh,” Emily said. She doubted that was the truth — or
all
of the truth. King Randor should never have let his only heir risk her life, not when there was no one else who could succeed him without triggering a civil war. She glanced at Jade. “He must have been very impressed by you.”

“All that arm-wrestling,” Alassa said, before Jade could say a word. “It was a dreadful male-bonding experience.”

Jade colored. “He
actually
asked me hundreds of questions about my training,” he said. He gave Emily a sharp look. “And about you.”

Emily frowned. “What did he ask about me?”

“Your life, basically,” Jade said. “I had to tell him that I’d only shared one class with you before I went to apprentice under Master Grey.”

“He’s here,” Emily said. “Did you know that?”

Jade shook his head. “Because of me?”

“I think Lady Barb called him,” Emily said. She quickly outlined the problems with the Faire. “I’m glad to see you here too.”

“Call Sergeant Miles,” Jade advised. “There aren’t many young combat sorcerers who weren’t taught by him, once upon a time. He’d command respect with ease.”

“I’ll suggest it to Lady Barb,” Emily said. But surely Lady Barb would have thought of asking her lover, if she’d thought he’d come. “Do you think I’ve made a mistake?”

“Yes,” Alassa said, flatly. “You are the baroness. You need to live up to the title.”

“Lady Barb said the same thing,” Emily said.

“She was right,” Alassa said.

Emily shook her head slowly. “Is it wrong of me to want to give up the title?”

“Alicia would give her...her maidenhead to get her title confirmed,” Alassa said, sarcastically. “And you just want to abandon it?”

“I’m not suited to this life,” Emily said.

“My father said the same thing,” Imaiqah said. “But he’s doing better, now that he’s organized himself.”

“Your father knew how to run a small business,” Emily countered. “I don’t know how to run my own life, let alone the lives of thousands of others.”

“Yes.” Alassa raised her eyebrows in emulation of Lady Barb. “I heard about your judgements. The broadsheets were full of them.”

“Some people agreed with you,” Imaiqah added. “But others thought you acted badly.”

“The marvels of a free press,” Emily muttered. Somehow, she doubted the other barons would be anything but amused at the outcome. “How did I act badly?”

“You chose to alter the terms of a contract, after the contract was signed,” Alassa said. “It didn’t exactly
break
the contract, but it did upset the signers. Then you chose to turn a law intended to prevent farmers from dividing their lands on its head, by choosing the person you wanted to inherit, rather than the person who should legally have inherited.”

“But he abandoned his claim,” Emily said. “Even his own father told him he’d abandoned the farm and everyone on it. All he wanted was land. How was I wrong?”

“I don’t think you were,” Imaiqah commented. “But messing with the inheritance principle could be dangerous.”

Emily scowled. “I did the right thing.”

“You still have to live with the consequences,” Alassa pointed out.

“You’ve had years to study the history of this country, the laws and judgements, the precedents and exemptions,” Emily snapped. “I haven’t had time.”

“Then
make
the time,” Alassa said. “Or allow my father to send someone to act in your name.”

Emily considered it, seriously. It was tempting...but who would King Randor send to govern her Barony? Would it be someone smart enough to keep up with the reforms she’d championed, or would it be someone bent on rolling them back? She wasn’t blind to some of the long-term implications of the changes she’d made...and, after the printing press had blossomed into life, nor were most of the aristocracy.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, slowly.

“I suggest you do,” Alassa said. “But if you gave up power, the title would be largely worthless.”

Emily nodded. There was no shortage of exaggerated titles in the Nameless World, now the emperor and his family were gone. A person could call himself Lord High Admiral and Noble Ruler of the Seven Seas, if he wished, and no one could deny him. But if the title came with no power, it would be effectively meaningless. She might be baroness in name, if she gave up the power, but she wouldn’t have any power to change the world. Or even to defend herself.