Love's Labor's Won (21 page)

“What do you think he would say,” Imaiqah asked, “if he knew you’d suggested these foods?”

Emily shrugged. The Allied Lands might have been unified under the Empire, but no one had ever tried to make everyone eat the same foods. Indeed, while the kingdoms tended to stick to their native foods, the city-states were remarkably multicultural. Burgers, pizzas, kebabs and anything else she introduced from Earth would just blur into the mainstream — or vanish, if they didn’t find niches of their own. It would be quite some time before anyone could set up a proper fast food restaurant.

But that isn’t a bad thing
, she thought.
Is it
?

Once they had eaten, Imaiqah dragged them towards the edge of the Faire, where her father had his stall. A small steam engine sat on the rails, blowing smoke into the air, while dozens of children were eagerly lining up for a ride in the small carriages. Frieda laughed and ran forward, jumping into the rear carriage as the train started to move. Emily smiled before she took a good look at the adults. The mundanes seemed to be terrified, even though the train was moving so slowly anyone could have outpaced it, while the magicians seemed to be thoughtful. They had to know there was no magic in the steam train.

Caleb put their puzzlement into words. “How does it work?”

“Steam technology,” Emily said, uncomfortably aware that
technology
might as well be magic, as far as the Nameless World was concerned. “It...”

She shook her head. “I’ll explain later,” she added. “It will need diagrams.”

Caleb nodded. “I look forward to it.”

Emily smiled at him before turning to watch as the steam train slowly made its way around the Faire, puffing up smoke. It was a basic version; it would be years before more complex versions started to link the cities and towns together. But it would change the world in many ways, just like the railways had done on Earth.

“It’s an iron dragon,” Caleb said, as the steam train returned to the station. “Isn’t it?”

“No,” Emily said.
Iron Dragon
sounded magical, too magical. “It’s a steam train. There’s no magic inside at all.”

“That was fun,” Frieda called, as she scrambled off the train and ran back to them. “Can I go on it again tomorrow?”

“You’ll get bored with it soon enough,” Emily said, smiling indulgently. “You can go on it every day if you like.”

“Unless it breaks down,” Imaiqah said. “Or someone steals the rails. We’ve had problems with people taking up the pins and pinching the rails when we started laying the first mainline tracks.”

Caleb gave her a surprised look. “Why?”

“Because metal is expensive,” Imaiqah said. “And we can’t afford to police every last piece of the line.”

“You could use subtle magic to keep people away from the line,” Caleb offered. “Once you carve out the rails, have the runes stamped directly into the metal.”

“It might work,” Emily said, slowly. She fought down the urge to rub her chest, where the rune was still there. “But the magic might keep everyone away.”

“You would have to tune it properly,” Caleb said. He turned to look at the train. “If the magic was tuned perfectly, you could keep the people on the train safe from its influence, while anyone who tried to steal the rails themselves would be unable to escape.”

“I’ll suggest it to father,” Imaiqah said. “But he’s quite keen to keep magic away from the steam engines. We even had a boiler explode because he didn’t want to put a binding spell on the metal.”

“It might not have saved the boiler,” Emily said. “The blast would have needed somewhere to go.”

“That’s what he said,” Imaiqah said. “He was quite annoyed with me when I pointed it out.”

“He was probably concerned about relying on magicians,” Emily said. “But once the runes were described, he could just produce them for himself.”

“He could,” Imaiqah agreed. “I’ll speak to him later today.”

Caleb frowned. “Your father invented these things?”

“
Emily
designed the first engines,” Imaiqah said. “We’ve improved quite a bit on the original designs.”

“They have,” Emily confirmed. She jabbed a finger at the steam engine as it started its trek around the Faire, once again. “I didn’t design that.”

“You still started it,” Caleb said.

Emily shrugged. She wasn’t comfortable with the look of admiration in his eyes, not when she knew all she’d
really
done was draw out a very basic steam engine from Earth. It had been the designers in Alexis who had really made it work, then started improving the design until they had something they could scale up into a full-sized steam train. And they’d done the same with other ideas too. Gunpowder, in particular, would reshape the world...

And Nanette might well have stolen those notes
, Emily thought. There had been no hope of recovering her original notes, certainly not in time to prevent them being copied and redistributed. God alone knew who else now had the basic formula for gunpowder.
And where the hell is she
?

“I’m going to speak to my father,” Imaiqah said. “If you’ll excuse me...”

“Can I speak to him too?” Caleb asked. “I’d like a chance to talk about these...steam engines?”

“Just talk to him as an equal, and you will be fine,” Imaiqah said. “Emily?”

“I’m going to head back to the castle,” Emily said. She had a feeling she wouldn’t see either of them for the rest of the day. Imaiqah’s father was a great believer in putting his children to work, while he’d probably bond with Caleb over a discussion about steam theory and practice. “Frieda?”

“I’d like to stay,” Frieda said. She looked around at the nearest stalls, then back at Emily. “Do you mind?”

“Just stay close to Lady Barb,” Emily said, firmly. She looked around for Alassa, but saw no sign of her. “And stay out of trouble.”

“We’ll take care of her, if you can’t find Lady Barb,” Imaiqah said. “It might help keep my father from keeping me too long.”

Emily concealed her amusement with an effort. “Stay with them, then,” she said. “I’ll see you all later, at the dance.”

“Don’t forget the fireworks,” Imaiqah said. “They will surprise your guests.”

Emily smiled. There was no shortage of magical fireworks, including some that looked like they had been taken from
The Fellowship of the Ring
, but the fireworks she intended to display were completely mundane, without even a hint of magic. She wondered what the two families, much less all the other guests, would make of them. She shrugged; they’d find out soon enough.

“And don’t forget to bring Frieda back before the dinner,” she warned. “I need company for the night.”

“You’ll probably have to sit in the middle again,” Imaiqah said, unsympathetically. “Try not to let them fight, or you’ll get hexed from both sides.”

“I know,” Emily said. “I almost wish I was sitting between Markus and Melissa instead.”

“That would be worse,” Imaiqah said. “Melissa hates you.”

“Maybe,” Emily said. She had a feeling that Melissa had other problems now. “But she wasn’t very aggressive last year.”

She nodded, turned, and started her stately walk back to the castle.

Chapter Seventeen

“I
S THIS ROOM SUITABLE, YOUR LADYSHIP?
”

Emily stepped into the workroom and looked around. It was larger than she’d expected, with a cheap wooden table, a pair of wooden chairs, and a rickety — and empty — bookcase perched against the far wall. Compared to the spellchambers she’d used at Whitehall, it was pathetic, but it was
hers
. She could organize it to suit herself.

“More than suitable, Janice,” she said. “You have warned the other maids that the rules about my rooms extend here, too?”

“Yes, your ladyship,” Janice said. “This room will remain sealed, without any attempt to clean it, unless you give your specific permission.”

“Good,” Emily said. She levitated her trunk into the room, and nodded. “You may go.”

Janice curtseyed hastily and retreated out the door. Emily didn’t blame her. She remembered touching quite a few things she shouldn’t have in Whitehall, during her first year, and that had been in a school of magic, where help had been available for anyone who ran into trouble. As soon as the door closed, she raised her hand in concentration and cast the first set of wards. Piece by piece, they fell into place, providing both privacy and security. Thankfully, the room was small enough for her to put up a comprehensive set of wards, rather than the relatively weak set covering the castle as a whole.

I need to isolate this section completely
, she thought, as she carefully linked one set of wards to the other.
I don’t need to set off my own alarms when I do experiments
.

Once the final set of wards was in place, she opened the trunk and dug out her equipment, placing it on the table. Some of the equipment was fairly common — by now, she was used to using both wand and staff — while other pieces had been designed by Professor Thande or Lady Barb. They both believed that a magician should have all the tools he or she could possibly require; Emily had purchased everything she thought she’d need, as well as a few other devices that had caught her eye. She rather liked the idea of tinkering on her own, even if she didn’t want to seek total isolation. Magicians who did that tended to be a little strange.

“Well,” she said, although there was no one to hear her. “Here we are.”

She rooted through her equipment until she found an iron ring and placed it in the middle of the table, carefully moving the remainder of the equipment to the bookshelves. There had been nothing particularly special about the iron ring when she’d purchased it, but she’d used magic to carve a handful of runes into the metal, gathering magic that would help shape and contain her own magic. Lady Barb had helped her with the theory — she’d forced Emily to produce a new pocket dimension every weekend — but she’d done the runes herself. It simply felt like the way it should be done.

The more I do for myself, the more it belongs to me
, she thought. It was something she doubted she would ever fully understand. Magic behaved oddly, compared to science; if she performed magic on herself or her tools, it worked better than magic performed by someone else. She rubbed the rune on her chest absently, then walked back to the trunk. Carefully removing a wand and one of her journals, she placed both on the table next to the ring.
And it’s time to finally see if I know what I’m doing
.

She sat down on one of the chairs, which rocked alarmingly, and picked up the journal. Lady Barb had ordered her to protect her writings carefully, using several different security spells, and untangling them all took time. It wasn’t convenient, she had learned from experience, but she’d already had one set of notes stolen. This set would be worse, if it fell into the wrong hands; she’d drawn lessons from Mountaintop’s library as well as the books she had access to in Whitehall. Someone could use them to build a case against her – she knew that all too well.

And there are already idiots who believe I’m a necromancer
, she thought. It didn’t seem fair, somehow — Shadye and Mother Holly had both been completely insane — but logic and reason rarely had any influence with people who already disliked her.
They’d start thinking I was a Dark Wizard, too
.

She shook her head before opening the journal to the correct page to run through her notes one final time. Lady Barb had offered to assist her with the experiment, when she ran through every step for the first time, but Emily had declined. If there were risks performing the experiment, even here, she didn’t want anyone else to face them. The notes seemed as clear as ever, now that she understood the theory...but she knew there was a considerable gulf between theory and practice.

Here we go
, she thought, and picked up the wand.
Please, let this work
.

The wand was nothing more than a piece of wood, she knew. Frieda had told her there were students in Mountaintop who bragged of the modifications they’d made to their wands, but Emily knew from experience that such modifications were pointless. All one could do with a wand was lodge spells within the wood for later activation. In many ways, she reflected, it seemed the ultimate end result of Caleb’s spell mosaics, save for the simple fact that a spell couldn’t be modified, once lodged. It could only be triggered.

She gritted her teeth — she distrusted wands on principle — before assembling the first set of spells in her mind. They glimmered in her awareness, slid through her fingertips and out into the wand. She felt the wood grow hot as the last spell slipped into place — she hastily raised a ward to protect herself, just in case — and then cooled, rapidly. They wouldn’t last, she knew; the spells were too complex to remain in the wand for more than an hour, if she was lucky. But they would last long enough for her to complete the rest of the experiment.

Good
, she thought. Her heart was suddenly racing. Two years of research, two years of practice, all boiled down to the ring and wand in front of her. The first time she’d tried anything like it, Master Tor had been horrified, with reason. Now...now, there was no one at risk, but herself.
Let’s see if this works.

Emily braced herself before picking up the ring. It felt oddly heavy in her palm, even though it wasn’t any bigger than the snake-bracelet and shouldn’t have been much heavier. She eyed it carefully, fixing its dimensions in her mind, then closed her eyes in concentration, running through the first set of spells to form a pocket dimension. For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen...

And then the space inside the ring expanded, like a child blowing up a balloon.

She’d had problems, at first, grasping how it actually worked — Earth science refused to admit the possibility of something being larger on the inside than on the outside — but two years of work had helped her overcome that issue. Besides, it was hard to deny it was possible when living at Whitehall.