Work Experience (Schooled in Magic Book 4) (38 page)

“Dead,” Lady Barb said, flatly. The prospect clearly disturbed her. “I’d keep those questions to yourself, if I were you. There are people who would take strong exception to you asking them in the wrong places.”

She shrugged. “There was no sign of rapid aging, but the ritual might have worked quickly enough to prevent it,” she added. “Still, it’s a worrying thought.”

They paused outside the headman’s house. “You did well,” she said. “They might not be satisfied, but at least an innocent man has been spared death by torture.”

Emily nodded. “What are we going to do now?”

“The headman invited us to a dance tomorrow,” Lady Barb said. Emily winced. “Yes, I thought that would be your reaction. Besides, I want to head on to Easter as soon as possible.”

She looked up at the sun, poised high in the sky. “It will take two days to reach Easter in any case,” she added. “We might as well start walking now. And besides, you still need more practice.”

Emily groaned. She’d barely recovered from the last set of practice exercises – and, while she knew that Lady Barb was right about them being important, she still didn’t know
why
.

The headman didn’t seem offended when Lady Barb told him they had to leave after they’d changed back into more practical clothes. In fact, he seemed almost relieved.

Emily puzzled over the reaction, then realized that the headman was hoping to quiet everything down. It would be easier if Lady Barb, Emily and Reginald were elsewhere. Lady Barb seemed to agree; she wrote her letter while Emily packed up the bags, took the food the headman’s wife offered her and then led Emily back out the door.

Reginald was waiting for them, sitting on a bored-looking horse. “Make sure the letter gets into the system,” Lady Barb ordered. “And
don’t
leave it lying around.”

“Hexed, is it?” Reginald said. He took the letter, placed it into his saddlebag and then smiled at them both. “Thank you, once again.”

He dug in his heels and cantered out of the village.

“He didn’t have the girl with him,” Emily said, quietly.

“No,” Lady Barb agreed. “He didn’t.”

She shook her head sadly, then led the way towards the next path. Emily was mildly surprised that they weren’t taking the road, but she suspected that Lady Barb wanted to remain unseen. Instead, they started to climb almost as soon as they passed into the trees.

“Tell me,” Lady Barb said. “Did you notice how many children were missing?”

“Two,” Emily said. She’d hardly been able to miss that detail. The headman had repeated it more than Master Tor had repeated his tedious legal facts about the Allied Lands. “Why...?”

She saw it, suddenly. There had been more than two bodies hidden behind the obfuscating charms. “Where did the other bodies come from?”

“That is indeed the question,” Lady Barb said. “Which other villages have also lost people to the mystery magician? And just what is he trying to do?”

E
ASTER CASTLE CAME INTO VIEW LONG
before they saw Easter Town. Like Lord Gorham’s castle, it was a brooding monstrosity perched on top of a mountain, but there was something about it that looked more welcoming than the previous castle. Lady Barb spent several minutes staring at it before leading the way down into the town, a troubled expression on her face. Emily followed her, feeling her body aching from tiredness. She just wanted to get some sleep before she did anything else.

It wasn’t yet sunset, but the town seemed as quiet and fearful as the previous village. Emily saw the faces at many of the windows peek out at them, before vanishing behind curtains. She looked around, half-expecting to see guards, yet no one showed themselves. By the time they reached the guesthouse and started to dismantle the locks, Emily felt thoroughly spooked.

“Someone tried to break in again,” Lady Barb observed, as she opened the door. “But this time they didn’t succeed.”

Emily frowned. “The same person as before?”

“Unknown,” Lady Barb said. She sounded rather perturbed. “I didn’t recognize the traces of magic, but that proves nothing.”

Inside, the guesthouse was clean. Emily checked the potions cabinets and discovered, to her relief, that all of the ingredients were still in place. She put her bag down in the room, then stepped into the kitchen. As Lady Barb lit a fire, Emily unpacked the remaining food and laid it on the table. Welcome warmth slowly spread through the guesthouse.

“This town is as scared as the last village,” Lady Barb said, once she’d made them both some warm soup. Emily took her bowl and sipped it, gratefully. “The fear is almost tangible.”

“They might have lost children too,” Emily said. She finished her soup and moved on to the bread. “How are we going to proceed?”

“I’m going to pay a silent visit to the castle tomorrow,” Lady Barb said. “You’re going to remain here and take care of our patients.”

Emily swallowed. “What if something happens I can’t handle?”

“I’ll be very disappointed in you,” Lady Barb said, lightly. “But if you really can’t deal with it, place the patient in stasis and wait for me to return.”

She finished her bread and stood up. “I’m going to talk to the headman,” she added. “Set up the beds, then plan what you’re going to brew tomorrow.”

Emily groaned –
more
potions – but nodded. If nothing else, she was certainly gaining in confidence while doing something useful. Professor Thande would be pleased, even though she was only creating First Year potions. Maybe she could apply for extra ingredients for Third Year and do some private alchemical work, perhaps with Imaiqah’s help.

“We should teach them how to make their own,” she said, softly. “Would it be so difficult?”

Lady Barb smiled. “Would you like to encourage mundanes to experiment with alchemy?”

Emily shook her head, embarrassed. Away from Thande’s protective wards, alchemical explosions could be even worse. Whole houses might be wiped out by disasters a magician could have avoided, if only by disintegrating the cauldron before it exploded. Besides, she had a feeling that magicians would object to sharing the more complex recipes. Who knew what would happen to them?

She watched Lady Barb leave, then walked into the potions lab and inspected the ingredients one by one. There were enough, she decided, to make everything the townspeople could want – and bottles to store it – if she had the time to do it. She suspected that, normally, an alchemist would have nothing to do with actual patients, which was probably a good thing. Even someone as...innocent as Professor Thande would be unable to resist the urge to experiment on his patients. There were enough horror stories about alchemists to convince her to keep them well away from mundanes.

Once she’d sorted out the ingredients, she walked back into the main room and into the bedroom. It was smaller than she’d expected, with one large king-sized bed rather than several smaller ones. The room was cold enough for people to want to huddle together, but magic would take care of that, suggesting that the designer had had other things in mind. Irked, Emily placed her blanket on the floor and silently promised Lady Barb the bed. The older woman had been ill, after all.

It was nearly an hour before Lady Barb returned, by which time the sun had vanished completely, throwing the entire town into darkness. Emily used the night vision spell as she peered out of the window, but saw hardly anyone on the streets.

Lady Barb was right. This town was definitely gripped by fear.

“The headman was too nervous to talk to me,” Lady Barb said. “But I managed to get some answers out of his wife. They’ve lost at least a dozen children and young men.”

Emily blinked as she boiled the water for a hot drink. “Young men?”

“Conscripted,” Lady Barb said, shortly. “Lady Easter seems to be preparing for war. She’s taken over half of the unmarried men from the town, men the townspeople desperately need to prepare for the coming winter. They went into the castle and haven’t been seen since.”

She ran her hands through her long hair. “And the children have definitely vanished,” she added. “They started to lock them up after three children went picking mushrooms and never came home. It didn’t make any difference. The children kept vanishing at night.”

Emily shivered. “How?”

“Good question,” Lady Barb said. “Most supernatural creatures won’t come into a town, unless summoned. But if it is a necromancer, he should be completely mad by now.”

She took her drink, drank it and then headed towards the bedroom. “We need to be up early tomorrow morning,” she added, as she walked. “Make sure you are ready to brew in the morning.

“Shouldn’t I come with you?” Emily asked. “If it is a necromancer...”

Lady Barb turned and met her eyes. “Could you defeat one through the power of love?”

Emily blushed bright red. One of the ballads bards sang about her claimed that she had defeated Shadye with the power of love. It said a great deal about some of the others that it wasn’t the worst of the bunch. What kind of enemy could be defeated by
love
? Shadye had probably never known the meaning of the word.

“Or,” Lady Barb pressed, “do you have the power to beat one now?”

“I don’t know,” Emily said, thinking of the nuke-spell. But it would be completely devastating – and almost certainly suicidal. “Maybe...”

“I’ve sneaked around necromancers before,” Lady Barb reminded her, gently. “If I don’t come back, you can do as you see fit, but until then you must do as I tell you. Obedience is one of the rules of apprenticeship, is it not?”

Emily nodded. She
was
Lady Barb’s apprentice, at least for the summer, even if she hadn’t taken the usual oaths. Obedience, loyalty and servitude were the terms, in exchange for training and practice. She could argue, she could ask for explanations or clarification, but she couldn’t disobey. Or at least a normal apprentice couldn’t disobey. She felt a moment of pity for Jade, combined with a grim awareness that she might have to take on an apprenticeship after leaving Whitehall. What would happen if she ended up apprenticed to someone less reasonable than Lady Barb?

She followed Lady Barb into the bedroom, then rolled her eyes as she realized the older woman had taken the blankets, rather than the bed. Emily hesitated, then tactfully pointed out that she’d meant to give the bed to Lady Barb.

“I’m not that old,” Lady Barb said, with a smile. “Besides, I cannot get too used to comfort.”

Emily lifted an eyebrow. “Did you sleep on nails at Whitehall?” she asked, remembering that she hadn’t seen Lady Barb’s private chambers. Students were rarely allowed entry to any of the teaching staff’s quarters. “Or did they just give you a hard bed?”

“Go to sleep,” Lady Barb ordered, shortly. “It takes years to build up a tolerance for moving from place to place, but only days to lose it.”

The thought nagged at Emily as she lay in the giant bed, feeling an odd twinge of guilt. It had been fun to camp with the sergeants, but she’d always felt relieved when she finally returned to Whitehall. And yet she’d adapted well to the changes on their walk, sleeping under the stars one night and in an insect-infected hovel the next. But would she have coped so well if she hadn’t had camping experience? Or, for that matter, the magic to make it easier to handle? No wonder so few new magicians went home.

She drifted off to sleep, but her sleep was broken by nightmares that eventually sent her back into wakefulness, two hours before sunrise. Lady Barb snored quietly, her heavy breathing almost hypnotic; Emily sat upright and tried to concentrate, calming her heartbeat until she could sleep again. But she tossed and turned for nearly an hour before giving up, climbing out of bed and slipping into the main room, where she cast a light spell and read until the sun started to rise in the sky. The book wasn’t boring enough to send her back to sleep.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she jumped. “You scared me,” Lady Barb said. “You never wake up before me.”

Emily blushed. At Whitehall, students normally woke up at eight bells, in time to get some breakfast before running to their first classes. The peasants, on the other hand, rose with the sun and went to bed with the moon. Despite living with them, Emily knew her sleeping habits hadn’t improved from Whitehall.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she confessed. It felt oddly warming to know that Lady Barb had been worried. “And I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I normally play Kingmaker or read when I want to sleep,” Lady Barb said. She wandered over to the window and peered outside into the semi-darkness. “And several of the staff have started playing poker.”

Emily couldn’t help snickering. She’d designed playing cards easily enough, although charming them to prevent cheating had required Aloha’s help. But then she’d run into the problem of simply not knowing the rules. Her stepfather had gambled heavily, but he’d never invited Emily to play, let alone taught her the rules. Aloha had listened to what little Emily could recall, then worked out her own set of rules. Emily had no idea how close they were to Earth’s rules, but it hardly mattered. “Poker” had spread through Whitehall like a wildfire. She was probably lucky that most people blamed it on Aloha. Students being students, it hadn’t taken long for them to start gambling for more than matchsticks.

“Yes, I
thought
that was your fault,” Lady Barb added. She smiled as Emily’s flush deepened. “Who
else
would invent a whole new game because she was bored?”

Emily shrugged. She hadn’t really
invented
chess, of course, but it was the story almost everyone chose to believe. It had been Aloha who had invented “poker.” Somehow, it had sparked off a quiet competition among the students to invent new games that held together reasonably well. Emily hadn’t entered, knowing that it wasn’t fair. But she hadn’t been able to resist planning out a Risk-like game for the Allied Lands.

“Make us some breakfast, then go start your brewing,” Lady Barb ordered. In the distance, the sun started to glimmer at the horizon. “I need to make sure that no children vanished overnight.”