Work Experience (Schooled in Magic Book 4) (33 page)

“I’ve been better,” Lady Barb grated. She managed to sit upright, crossing her legs. “You may have to entertain yourself today.”

Emily looked at her, stung. She might be inexperienced – perhaps even naive – compared to the older sorceress, but she didn’t know she was being babysat. Or perhaps she was. There were dangers in the countryside she wouldn’t even have noticed, if Lady Barb hadn’t pointed them out to her.

She finished making the cup of Kava and passed it to Lady Barb, who took it and drank carefully. Every movement she made looked precisely calculated, rather like Professor Lombardi; it took Emily a moment to realize that Lady Barb was carefully controlling herself, trying not to lose control of her body. She had to be dangerously ill.

“I need to know,” she said, quietly. “What is happening to you?”

“I told you,” Lady Barb snapped. She took a breath, then continued in a quieter tone. “I spent a great deal of magic to repair the damage Lord Gorham suffered, under the influence of the runes. In doing so, I weakened my life force and became vulnerable to backlash shock.”

She finished her mug and passed it back to Emily. “This is manifesting as a disease,” she added, darkly. “Don’t worry. You can’t catch it from me.”

Emily winced. She hadn’t even
considered
the possibility. But she should have, considering this world didn’t have vaccines or even a proper theory of medicine. Or at least not a non-magical one. Emily knew she was unprepared for diseases that had been wiped out on Earth decades ago, diseases that would eat her up as soon as they infected her body if she hadn’t had access to magic or magical healing. What might she catch, simply by not having the immunities that were conferred by being born in the Allied Lands, if she hadn’t had magic herself?

“I was hoping that it would fade today, but no such luck,” Lady Barb added. “That means it has yet to reach its peak. When it does...just keep giving me water, when I ask for it. Don’t try any magic, whatever happens.”

Emily frowned. “Why?”

“Because my magic will regard yours as an intrusion,” Lady Barb explained. She sighed and lay back on the blanket. “This isn’t a normal disease or a broken bone, just my magic responding to my abuse. Give it time to recover and I’ll be fine.”

“What if you’re not fine?” Emily asked. “What should I do?”

Lady Barb gave her a long considering look. “If I die...you should have a contingency plan,” she said. She chuckled, rather harshly. “You seem to move between complete dependence or complete independence, depending on how far you trust your companion. Go back to the town, use the money in my pouch and catch a ride with the postal coach. He can take you down to the nearest city, where you can get a portal to Dragon’s Den. Make sure you take everything useful from my body before leaving it.”

Emily swallowed. The matter-of-fact instructions were more worrying than shouts and screams. She wanted to retort that Lady Barb’s death would be more than a minor inconvenience, but she didn’t quite dare. “What should I do with your body?”

“Burn it to ash,” Lady Barb said. “Don’t worry about prayers. You don’t know the ones my family uses, so...”

She shook her head. “Just leave me to sleep, now,” she added. “Make yourself breakfast, then do some practicing...but nothing with the staff. Leave the staff alone.”

“I will,” Emily promised. Lady Barb had told her not to experiment without supervision, but she hadn’t expected to get unwell. “Can I practice with pocket dimensions?”

“Carefully,” Lady Barb said. “Very carefully.”

She closed her eyes. Emily watched her for a long moment, then turned and stepped past the wards, one hand raised in a defensive posture. Nothing moved to attack her, nothing moved at all, apart from a rabbit at the edge of the clearing. Emily shot a stunning spell at the creature and knocked it out before it could escape. The sergeants would have reproved her for wasting magic, but she didn’t have time to set traps. She certainly didn’t want to leave Lady Barb alone for longer than strictly necessary.

Gritting her teeth, she picked up the creature, snapped its neck and started to cut it apart for food.

L
ADY BARB REMAINED ASLEEP, EVEN WHEN
Emily cooked several pieces of rabbit in the fire and ate them with Kava. Emily watched her, concerned, then placed several more pieces of meat under stasis spells, so they would be ready when Lady Barb was awake. Reaching into her bag, she found one of her notebooks and started to brainstorm, working out how best to create a pocket dimension that could serve as an emergency shelter. When she ran out of ideas for that, she jotted down everything she could remember about the very first aircraft to leave the ground on Earth. Maybe, just maybe, a craftsman in Zangaria could produce his own version of the
Kitty Hawk
.

She looked back at her earlier pages and sketched out an idea for a slide rule that might be useful for craftsmen. But she couldn’t remember enough about the concept without memory spells to write down everything. She made a silent promise to herself to explore the concept more thoroughly when she returned to Whitehall, then opened a new page and jotted down more ideas for her bank. One branch would be opened in Cockatrice, but another would be opened in a nearby independent city-state. She had the feeling that it would be better to keep the bank as separate as possible from her other innovations. And sticky-fingered aristocrats.

It would be a headache to make it work properly, even with magical versions of ideas from Earth. She would need to find someone to manage it full time, someone she could trust, but who could do that in Zangaria? Bryon was busy with Cockatrice, Imaiqah’s father had his own business...and besides, neither of them could stand up to King Randor. And yet, political interference would doom her bank as surely as anything else. She might be better starting the whole project somewhere well away from Zangaria.

“I wonder if Aloha would like the job,” she mused, out loud. Aloha had worked out a word processor-like device, using the concept Emily had taught her, even if it would be years before they came up with a working computer. But it was possible to devise a spell processor...Emily had sketched out notes, although she wasn’t sure how to make them practical. Or, if that happened, what it would do to society if it worked.

She went back to her patient and touched Lady Barb’s forehead, wincing at the heat. The older woman seemed to be burning up from the inside. Emily placed a mug of water next to her, then stood up and walked out of the wards, carrying the bag with her. Once she was outside, she started to practice with the pocket dimensions again, carefully. She managed to put together two stable dimensions in a row using the square before placing it behind her and concentrating on creating one in thin air. But it took several tries before she managed to make it work properly.

“The wood must be a crutch, too,” she muttered, as she sat down just outside the wards, exhausted. She didn’t see how the square prevented the pocket dimension from expanding outwards, but perhaps it was just a matter of perception. She saw nothing, so there seemed to be no barrier to prevent expansion. Concentrating, she tried to visualize it in her mind, but she lost it every time she opened her eyes and saw nothing. “Or maybe I’m not doing it properly.”

She glanced over at Lady Barb before getting one of the books she’d brought along and starting to read. It wasn’t as interesting as she’d hoped, but it did help to pass several hours while she recovered from using so much magic. The writer knew what he was talking about, yet he wrote in such a boring manner that Emily found herself yawning halfway through the first chapter. It was odd – Alchemy was exciting, sometimes terrifyingly so – but this style of boring readers to death seemed to be typical of half of her textbooks. But then, maybe the writer was trying to
discourage
experimentation.

Emily sighed as she reached the end of the third chapter. Part of her just wanted to whine that Alchemy would never be one of her skills, while the other part of her knew that she needed a basic grounding in the subject even if she never sought mastery. Potions and concoctions brewed by oneself worked better, she’d been told, than anything brewed by anyone else. But her rational mind refused to grasp why this was so. Maybe it was just the simple fact that she’d never been very good at cooking...or maybe it was her inability to understand things that the locals took for granted.

She found herself worrying about the future, distracting herself from the present. Would she pass her exams in Fourth Year? Like Alassa, she could skip the exams without threatening her future...but she didn’t want to skip or fail them, not when she’d worked so hard. Exams on Earth were largely useless, in her opinion; exams in Whitehall were terrifyingly important, at least to students without an aristocratic background. And she didn’t want to disappoint her supervisors by refusing to take the exams or flunking them. And yet...

Maybe I can hire a tutor
, she thought. Professor Thande was a genius, but he didn’t have enough time to give one-on-one coaching to his pupils. Whitehall’s teaching staff were overworked and underpaid, yet they weren’t the only masters of their subjects. Emily made a private resolution to hire a tutor at the end of Third Year, if she didn’t improve by then, and study intensely over the summer.

She looked over at Lady Barb, then stood up and started to cast spell after spell, cycling through every pattern she remembered. Her magic seemed to sparkle as it danced around her, then faded back into nothingness as she finally relaxed, gasping for breath. Her tutors had told her to practice often, but they probably hadn’t expected her to practice so furiously – or to be alone, without supervision. Not for the first time, she realized just how lucky the students were to have Whitehall. Their spells could be carefully monitored, even without a tutor in the room, and emergency measures could be taken if necessary.

Tiredly, she sat back down and tried to relax. But the book was boring rather than relaxing, and she was too worried about Lady Barb to do any more brainstorming. Instead, she pulled the bracelet off her wrist and placed it on the ground, then undid the spell keeping the snake as a bracelet. Her mind twisted uncomfortably as the snake returned to its natural shape, then relaxed. It seemed unbothered by the experience of being held in stasis.

Emily reached down to pet it before catching herself. The snake might not be poisonous to her, but the only way to test the snake’s skin was to touch it – and if it still threatened her, she risked losing a hand. She got an odd sense of reassurance from the snake, yet she still didn’t dare touch it. Instead, the snake slithered over towards the bloodstains on the ground and sniffed at them. Emily had a mental impression of a reptilian-like creature stalking the countryside in pitch darkness. It didn’t seem to worry the Death Viper.

“But it wouldn’t bother you,” Emily said, addressing the snake. “Would it?”

The snake didn’t seem to understand. Emily was almost disappointed. Some familiars she’d seen at Whitehall seemed almost intelligent – but then, they’d spent long enough with their owners to bond with them completely. They’d picked up a little of human intelligence, if she recalled the books correctly, although they would never be autonomous entities. The Death Viper, on the other hand, hadn’t been with her for more than a day—at least, it hadn’t been awake.

“Not fair, is it?” She said. The snake seemed to bob its head in agreement. “I have to wear you as a bracelet, so the bond can never really deepen.”

On impulse, she picked up a twig and tossed it towards the edge of the clearing. The snake gave her an unreadable look – she felt a sense of puzzled amusement coming from its mind – then gave chase. It picked up the twig in its mouth, then carried it back and dropped it in front of Emily. Emily smiled and looked down at the twig. It was marred slightly where the snake had bit it. She didn’t dare touch it with her bare hand.

The snake’s amusement seemed to grow stronger. It was laughing at her!

“I should have gone for a dog,” Emily said, reprovingly. “What do you think of that?”

The snake seemed to twitch, as if it knew the humans didn’t really get to choose what animal they bonded with. Dogs were among the best, because they were faithful and loyal; cats seemed more inclined to take advantage of the bond, as if the human was their slave. Snakes...she knew nothing about how snakes reacted to the bond, if only because there were no other snake familiars in Whitehall. Maybe they were just as faithful as any other familiar, they just showed it differently.

Emily sighed and reworked the spell. The snake shrank down into a bracelet, which she picked up and put back on her wrist. It wasn’t intelligent enough to know that it was losing time by being transfigured. She felt a moment of guilt – being an inanimate object was bad enough, but she thought it would be worse if she wasn’t even aware of time passing – which she ruthlessly pushed aside. The snake was simply too dangerous to treat as a normal pet.

She heard a gasp and spun around. Lady Barb shuddered violently, then started to choke on her own tongue. Emily had thought that was impossible.

She jumped through the wards and lifted the older woman into a sitting position, grimacing at the sweat that now stained Lady Barb’s clothes. There were spells to help someone who was having difficulty breathing, yet she didn’t dare use any of them. She tried frantically to remember how to give CPR, but apart from a few snide jokes she couldn’t recall a thing. It was a skill that should be taught in school. Desperately, she took a breath and then pressed her mouth against Lady Barb’s lips, blowing into her chest, time and time again. There was a hiccupping sound, then Lady Barb started to breathe again. Emily almost collapsed in relief.

This must be the peak
, she told herself, as she held the older woman tightly. Lady Barb was shaking, magic sparkling around her body. Emily tightened her grip, shivering herself as the temperature started to drop. She couldn’t tell if it was a side-effect of the magic or something else, something darker. Could Lady Barb’s coldness be seeping into her? Or was she just imagining it?