Love's Labor's Won (3 page)

She groaned, inwardly, as she took in the sight. The artist had never laid eyes on her and it showed; she would have been surprised if he’d even had a first-hand description or a look at another, more accurate, painting of herself. He’d painted her with long brown hair, which was about the only detail that resembled Emily herself, but the portrait’s hair hung down to the ground and pooled on the floor. The portrait, too, was stunningly beautiful. Indeed, if her name hadn’t been written at the bottom, she would have doubted the evidence of her own senses.

On the plus side
, she told herself,
anyone looking for me using this as their guide won’t find me
.

She took one last look at her doppelgänger, then walked past the portrait and down towards the grandmaster’s office. Here, the walls were lined with suits of armor, carrying everything from sharp spears to broadswords too heavy for Emily to lift. They were part of the school’s defenses, she knew; they’d come to life, when Shadye had invaded Whitehall, and attacked his forces until they were battered into nothingness. Magic crackled around them as she looked into their blank helms, then walked onwards. The grandmaster’s office lay open in front of her. She stepped into the room...

...And stopped, dead.

A tall girl, with hair as black as coal, was standing in front of the grandmaster’s desk. The Grandmaster himself, seated behind his desk, looked coldly furious. His eyes, as always, were covered with a dirty cloth, but Emily had no trouble reading his mood. She hoped — prayed — he would never be
that
furious at her, ever. The girl, whoever she was, seemed to be in deep trouble.

The girl whirled around to face Emily. Her face was so pale that her lips, no redder than Emily’s own, seemed to stand out against her skin. She was striking, rather than pretty, yet there was a grim determination in her face that mirrored Emily’s own. The white dress she wore showed off her hair and drew attention to her face, rather than her body.

“Get out,” she snarled.

“Ah, yes, Lady Emily,” the Grandmaster said. He sounded annoyed, although not at Emily personally. “Wait outside. Shut the door behind you.”

Emily hastily turned and walked outside, making sure to pull the door closed. She’d thought the door was open for her, not someone else! But she hadn’t thought to knock...kicking herself for her mistake, she leaned against the wall and waited, trying to think of something — anything — else. There had been something in the girl’s dark eyes that had scared her at a very primal level, yet she wasn’t sure why. She’d seen so many unpleasant people since coming to the Nameless World that one more didn’t seem much of a problem.

It was nearly half an hour, by her watch, when the door opened and the girl stomped out, closing the door sharply behind her. Her cheeks were still pale, but Emily could see two spots of color as the girl turned to face her. For a long moment, they stared at each other — Emily silently readied a spell to defend herself — and then the girl turned and strode off down the corridor. Her back was ramrod straight as she walked away, suggesting a desperate attempt to remain dignified. Emily watched her go, fighting down the childish impulse to fire a spell at the girl’s retreating back, then turned and knocked on the door. The door opened and she stepped into the room.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, as the Grandmaster looked up at her. “I didn’t realize you had a guest.”

“Knock in future,” the Grandmaster advised, “even if the door is open. You don’t really want to intrude on a magician’s private space without his permission.”

“Yes, sir,” Emily said, feeling her cheeks heat. “Why...why was she here?”

The Grandmaster’s eyebrows twitched behind the cloth. “I am not in the habit of discussing your discipline or the reasons for it with other students,” he said. “Should I not grant them the same privacy?”

Emily looked down at the bare stone floor, embarrassed. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Sorry, sir.”

“Glad to hear it,” the Grandmaster said, dryly. “Now, if you will give me a minute...”

He picked a piece of paper off his desk, and wrote a long series of Old Script letters. Emily looked away, her eyes skimming the office; for once, instead of bare stone walls, there were a handful of decorations. A large painting hung on one wall, while — below it — there was a small table, covered with artefacts and strange magical devices. There was something about the painting that caught and held her attention, reminding her of images she’d seen on Earth. The figure looked like Charles I, a tall aristocratic man with long dark hair, a goatee and expensive clothes. But there was something about the thin smile on the man’s face that sent chills down her spine. He seemed to be permanently laughing at the universe.

“There’s an interesting story about that painting,” the Grandmaster said. Emily turned back to look at him. “There was a wealthy magician who had it commissioned, years ago. The artist was a powerful magician in his own right and infused a great deal of magic into the canvas. Once it was completed, it was hung in the magician’s studio...and then, one night, when no one was watching, the figure crawled out of the painting and killed the original.”

Emily frowned. “If there were no witnesses,” she said, “how do they know?”

The Grandmaster snorted. “Stories have a habit of growing in the telling,” he said. “But as you can see, the painting is surrounded by powerful magic.”

Emily turned back...and started. The figure had changed. Instead of smiling, his face looked disapproving, as if he’d smelled something foul. The eyes were fixed on Emily’s face...she took a step closer, wondering if she’d see the figure move again. But there was nothing until she looked away for a split second, then back at the portrait. This time, the figure seemed to be winking at her.

“It changes,” she said. “Why are you keeping it here?”

“Certain parties would like to lay the legend to rest, once and for all,” the Grandmaster said. She heard him rise to his feet, then walk around the desk to stand next to her. “Or have it confirmed, if it is real.”

He pointed to the items on the desk below the painting. “These were pulled from the house of a magician who was killed in a duel,” he explained. “Most of them are junk, without the owner, but a handful shouldn’t have been in anyone’s possession. Finding that” — he pointed to a gold heart-shaped artefact that looked scorched and pitted — “was worrying enough.”

Emily knew better than to touch it, but she peered closely at the scarred metal. “What is it?”

“A corruptor,” the Grandmaster said. “Certain kinds of magic, as you know, bring emotional resonances in their wake. These...devices...amplify the effects of casting such spells. A magician under their influence will rapidly become addicted to using dark magic, ensuring an eventual collapse into madness. Even the most stable of magicians, a very rare beast indeed, would be threatened by their magic.”

“If one’s mind was changing,” Emily said slowly, “and all the tools one used to measure it were changing too, how would one
know
one’s mind was changing?”

“Precisely,” the Grandmaster said. He waved a hand at the space in front of his desk and a chair shimmered into existence. “Take a seat, Lady Emily. We have much to discuss.”

Emily sat, resting her hands on her lap.

“Your exams were marked ahead of everyone else, including the Fourth Years,” the Grandmaster said. “We needed to know if you were ready to move into Fourth Year yourself or if you needed to retake Third Year. Our general conclusion was that you were ready to move forward, as you did manage to close the gap quite nicely with the other students.”

“Thank you, sir,” Emily said. Mountaintop used the same basic exams as Whitehall, she’d discovered, but the educational pathway was different. She’d mastered some tricks that were only taught to Fourth Years, yet she’d lacked others that had left her ill-prepared for Third Year at Whitehall. “I worked hard.”

“Indeed you did,” the Grandmaster agreed. “No one would have blamed you for choosing to wait out the year, then redoing the Third Year from scratch. You can justly be proud of your achievements. However, they do tend to cause us problems too.”

He took a breath. “The one thing you
don’t
have is a proposal for a joint project,” he continued. “Your classmates had already teamed up, so we had no one for you to work with on your joint project, particularly as there was no guarantee you would go directly into Fourth Year.”

Emily had a feeling that there was no guarantee that
anyone
would make it into Fourth Year, but she held her tongue. Alassa and Imaiqah had been working together from the start, while she’d been at Mountaintop, yet they’d had great problems putting their project proposal together. She...hadn’t had the time to do one for herself.

“This problem caused us some concern,” the Grandmaster added. “The purpose of this project is to teach you how to work with another magician. Allowing you to submit a project of your own, without a partner, would defeat the object of the exercise. Several of my staff felt it would be better for you to repeat Third Year, which would allow you to work with another student. However, as you passed the exams, you could not be held back academically.”

“I could submit a proposal in Fourth Year,” Emily offered.

The Grandmaster smiled. “And would you then actually do the project itself in Fifth Year?”

Emily cursed under her breath. She saw his point; if she had to do both the proposal and the project itself, she would need a full two years. Hell, she couldn’t pass Fourth Year without a completed project — or, at least, a determined attempt at one. The books Lady Barb had given her to read had made it clear that working together was the desired outcome, not a magical breakthrough. None of the tutors seemed to expect any of their students to come up with something
totally
new.

Aloha did
, Emily thought.
But she had a concept from Earth
.

“Luckily, we have an alternative,” the Grandmaster said. “Have you heard of a student called Caleb, of House Waterfall?”

Emily shook her head. She didn’t pay much attention to students from outside her small circle of friends. House Waterfall was one of the smaller magical families, she recalled, from some of the books she’d been forced to study at Mountaintop, but she didn’t know much else about them.

“He is — was — a Fourth Year student,” the Grandmaster said. “His proposal involved working with complex spell-structures. Unfortunately, there was an explosion in the spellchamber during the early weeks of Fourth Year and he took the brunt of the blast, after shoving his partner out of the way. He had to spend the rest of the year recuperating at home.”

“Ouch,” Emily said. Magic could cure most physical injuries, she knew from experience, unless they were immediately fatal. It was odd to have someone recuperating for longer than a couple of weeks. “Why didn’t he recuperate here?”

“His...experiment accidentally tainted his body with magic,” the Grandmaster said. “It took longer for him to recover than it would have done if he’d merely broken a few bones.”

He shrugged. “Be that as it may, Caleb has expressed an interest in resuming his project,” he continued. “It holds great promise, I feel, so I have conditionally given my consent.”

Emily looked down at her pale hands. “Conditionally?”

“He needs another partner, as the last one moved to assist another project team and barely scraped through the exams,” the Grandmaster said. “I would like you to be his partner.”

“I see,” Emily said.

The Grandmaster held up a hand before she could say anything else. “You would have to meet him over the summer and go through his proposal with him,” he warned. “If you rejected the proposal, your only real option would be to redo Third Year from the start, with a partner in the year below you. I have made it clear to him that the final decision will be yours.”

Emily groaned, inwardly. She wasn’t good at working with anyone, even her closest friends. Teamwork defeated her because it meant relying on somebody else — and her childhood had taught her, time and time again, that no one was truly reliable. But she knew the Grandmaster had gone out on a limb for both of them. The rules, stated at the start of Third Year, were being bent into a pretzel. Working with a stranger would be bad, but repeating Third Year would be worse.

If only we could avoid doing some of the classes, the ones we already passed
, she thought, sourly.
But that isn’t allowed.

“I will be at Cockatrice,” she said, slowly. “He will meet me there?”

“His family lives in Beneficence,” the Grandmaster assured her. “He will have no trouble crossing the bridge into Zangaria and reaching your lands.”

Emily braced herself. “I’ll try,” she said. “What happens if we fail? Or if we don’t get along?”

“You get to redo Third Year,” the Grandmaster said. He gave her a rather sardonic smile. “It wouldn’t be the first time a project team managed to fall out, even when the project was working perfectly. Learning to work with someone else is part of the whole idea.”

“You said,” Emily muttered.

The Grandmaster reached into one of his drawers and produced a large sheaf of papers, which he passed to Emily. “This is the proposal he put before the tutors, last year,” he said. “I advise you to take it with you and read it thoroughly once you are in Cockatrice, then get in touch with him to arrange meeting times. Lady Barb will assist with that, if you ask, although she is forbidden from offering any direct help with the proposal or the project itself.”

“I will,” Emily said.

“I would add,” the Grandmaster said, “that these proposals are considered confidential. You could get in a great deal of trouble if you showed it to anyone without his permission.”

Emily swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“And another issue,” the Grandmaster added. “Do you still want to visit the Blighted Lands?”

“No,” Emily said. The idea of returning to Shadye’s fortress was terrifying. “But it has to be done.”

“Then I will have you return to Whitehall a week before the remainder of the students are due to return,” the Grandmaster said. He looked down at his desk. “You will be attending the dance, I take it?”