Past Tense (Schooled in Magic Book 10) (19 page)

“A terrible punishment,” she said. Whitehall’s eyes sparkled with brilliant amusement. He knew she knew it was no real punishment. “Should I be begging for something else?”

Whitehall gave her a sharp look. “He was my friend,” he said. “And while I know he had to die, I do not ...
like
... the thought of losing him.”

“I know,” Emily said. “And I am sorry.”

“You know healing spells that are unknown to us,” Whitehall mused. “Why don’t you try to teach them to Apprentice Sake? He has good reason to hate you.”

Because I killed his master
, Emily thought.
Does that mean he can’t earn his mastery?

“I will try,” she said. She didn’t know how Sake had felt about Master Gila—
she
wouldn’t have cared to be so close to a madman—but he’d resent being kicked back to join the unattached apprentices. “Will he be denied his mastery?”

“That is a matter to be discussed,” Whitehall said. He nodded to the door. “Go.”

Emily bowed, then turned and walked out. Robin was waiting outside, keeping a sharp eye on Bernard and Julianne as they talked in hushed voices. He smiled at her as she closed the door.

“So,” he said. “How bad was it?”

“I’m to be denied mastery for a while,” Emily said, flatly.

“Ouch,” Robin said. He sounded genuinely sympathetic. “That’s bad.”

“Yeah,” Emily said. She yawned, despite herself. She wanted to go to bed and rest, but she knew she couldn’t—not when there was too much else to do. “It’s pretty bad.”

E
MILY COULDN’T HELP FEELING SURPRISED
, over the next few days, at just how calmly most of the commune took Master Gila’s death. She’d expected to find herself hated, she’d expected to be ducking hexes and curses in the corridor, but hardly anyone seemed angry at her. Even Apprentice Sake—who was due to be tested after the funeral by the assembled masters—seemed torn between dislike and a kind of wary respect. On one hand, Emily reasoned, he had to dislike her for making it harder for him to gain his mastery, but on the other hand she’d saved him from constant beatings and death threats. Master Gila’s wife, it seemed, was hardly his only victim. He’d abused his apprentice too.

She’d seriously considered not attending the funeral, but Bernard and Robin had practically dragged her out of the castle and forced her to watch as Master Gila’s body—already decaying faster than it should have—was placed atop a funeral pyre and burned to ashes, while his friends spoke a handful of words each about his life. Emily couldn’t help feeling a little guilty as Lord Chamber and Lord Alfred spoke about how Master Gila had saved their lives, more than once, but it made no difference. Whatever he’d been in the prime of his life, at the end Master Gila had been a monster.

“Lady Emily,” Whitehall said, afterwards. “The Book of Pacts was burned with him.”

Emily nodded, relieved. She’d half-expected to hear the screams of burning demons, to watch the flames flicker eerie colors as the book burned with its owner, but there had been nothing. Perhaps it was for the best. Robin had already asked her what she intended to do with the book and hadn’t believed her when she’d told him that she had asked Whitehall to destroy it, although Bernard had looked relieved. He didn’t feel so unhappy, Emily guessed, about not being allowed to play with demons when there was someone else under the same restriction.

“Thank you, Master,” she said.

Whitehall looked tired. “Apprentice Sake will be tested in an hour,” he added, after a moment. “Did you teach him some spells?”

“A couple,” Emily said, carefully. She’d insisted on testing the spells on the mundanes who were still nursing wounds from their flight to the castle. “But I don’t know if he mastered them.”

“We will see,” Whitehall said. He scowled at Bernard, who was sitting just a little bit too close to Julianne. It didn’t look remotely indecent, not to Emily, but she knew Whitehall had different standards. “There will be drinking afterwards, Lady Emily, so we may bid Gila a proper goodbye. Take my daughter to your rooms and stay there until dinner.”

Emily nodded, relieved. She wouldn’t have wanted to join a wake, even if she’d been invited; Bernard and Robin had talked about it as though it was a celebration, an excuse to get drunk, rather than a final goodbye to a madman. Perhaps she should have protested, she thought, as Whitehall summoned Julianne to his side, but it wasn’t worth the effort. She didn’t
want
to get too close to a bunch of drunken magicians. There was a
reason
alcohol was largely banned at Whitehall, in the future.

The castle felt empty—it
was
empty—as they walked back to their room. They were still sharing, but they had been moved into a bigger room once Julianne started to unpack her tools and ingredients for brewing. There was no sign of a proper bed—they were still using blankets—but there was a table and a pair of rickety stools. Julianne could—and did—use the room as a workplace, despite the risks. Emily would hate to know what Professor Thande would have said about it.

“You promised me lessons,” Julianne said, once the door was closed. “Are you going to keep your promise?”

Emily sighed, inwardly. Julianne had been very good about not nagging her, in the wake of Master Gila’s death, but Emily
had
promised. She motioned for Julianne to sit down on the floor, then picked up one of the newer wooden spoons that a carpenter had carved for her. It wasn’t quite a wand—and wands could be dangerous anyway, if the novice used them too often—but it would suffice. She cast a pair of privacy wards around the room and then sat facing Julianne. The younger girl’s eyes were alight with anticipation.

This could go very badly wrong
, Emily thought, grimly.
What if she doesn’t have magic?

It was a chilling thought. Lady Barb had told her, during their preparations for visiting the Cairngorms, that some students chose not to study magic. Sometimes, they could—and did—pick it up later, but at other times they lost the ability altogether. Julianne came from a powerful bloodline—Emily had no doubt that Whitehall was incredibly strong—yet she’d been denied the chance to practice. And she might have lost the ability through no fault of her own.

“If you want to learn, you have to do what I tell you,” she said, firmly. She wasn’t a teacher who
had
to put up with a disobedient student. “If you disobey me, for any reason, there won’t be any more lessons.”

Julianne nodded. “I understand.”

Emily held the spoon up as she carefully embedded a spell into the wood. It didn’t seem to work perfectly, much to her annoyance, but it would suffice. “Take this,” she said, passing the spoon to Julianne. “Can you feel anything?”

“There’s .... there’s a tingle,” Julianne said, after a moment. “What is it?”

“Magic,” Emily said. She braced herself. Julianne sensing the magic was a good sign, but it was only the beginning. This could
definitely
go very wrong. “Try to reach out with your mind and trigger the spell.”

There was a pause. Nothing happened.

“I don’t know,” Julianne said. Her voice was level, but she was clearly worried. “How do I do it?”

Emily winced. “Imagine you’re standing above the spell,” she said. Lady Barb had talked her through a handful of procedures, but she’d never actually had to use them. “And then imagine power flowing through your hands and into the spoon.”

There was a surge of magic. Emily barely had a moment to throw up a shield before the makeshift wand exploded into splinters. Julianne stared at the stub in her hand, then started to giggle helplessly as she dropped it. Emily joined her a moment later, shaking her head in amused disbelief. The wood hadn’t been strong enough to take the magic.

“Well,” Emily said. “At least we know you can do
something
.”

“It feels like ... like when I make some of the more complex potions,” Julianne said. “But different, too.”

Emily frowned. Alchemy and potions were sometimes considered separate subjects, although there was so much overlap that Professor Thande preferred to keep them together and ignore the times when they were separate. But she’d seen enough to know that while potions
could
be brewed by mundanes, alchemical concoctions needed a magician to brew them. The magician used his magic to force the ingredients to blend in a particular way.

“You may have been using magic all along,” she mused. “Can
anyone
make your potions?”

Julianne shrugged. “Not everyone wanted to learn,” she said. “Fanny was asked to study with her mother—my aunt—but she refused. She wanted to get married and have children.”

Emily looked up. “What happened to her?”

“She got married to a magician and moved away,” Julianne said. “I don’t know what happened afterwards.”

Of course not
, Emily thought.
No email, no telephones ... even letter-writing doesn’t really exist here. Julianne’s cousin might as well be on the other side of the moon.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said. She picked up a second spoon and turned it over and over in her hand, then embedded a spell into the wood. “Shall we try again?”

Julianne nodded and took the spoon. This time, the spoon merely cracked in two places before warming up so rapidly that Julianne yelped and dropped the remains on the floor.

“We’re going to need better wands,” Emily said, finally. “I’ll work out something for the carpenters to do.”

“Thanks,” Julianne said. “But ... what about my lessons?”

“They’ll have to wait until we get the wands,” Emily said. “You need to learn how to channel power properly.”

She held up a hand before Julianne could say a word. “And you are
not
to experiment with anything on your own,” she added. “You would run the risk of hurting yourself quite badly.”

“Very well,” Julianne said. She sounded disappointed. Emily just hoped she had enough sense to listen to instructions. But then, it hadn’t taken Emily long between learning to use her magic and finding new spells to cast, with or without supervision. “Do you want to learn a recipe?”

“Yes, please,” Emily said.

She watched, thoughtfully, as Julianne started to sort out her ingredients, naming them as she worked. Alfalfa and Chamomile, Fennel and Ginger, Burdock and Chaste Tree ... it was easy to work out that Julianne was trying to make a potion to comfort the drinker and provide mild pain relief. And as Julianne worked, Emily could sense sparks of magic crackling around her and flowing into the liquid. They were so subtle that she suspected Whitehall couldn’t sense them—his senses were used to far more powerful magicians—but they were there.

“Done,” Julianne said. She sniffed the brew, then left it to cool. “You’ll probably need some of this yourself.”

Emily frowned. The potion—she thought she’d seen something like it among the Travellers—was designed to help women cope with their menstrual cycles, dulling the cramps and making the experience easier to endure. It wasn’t something she’d given any thought to—she’d taken a monthly potion at Whitehall and felt nothing—but she had a feeling it would be a problem soon. Her last dose of potion would be out of her system by the time that point in her cycle rolled around again.

And there aren’t any sanitary pads here
, she thought, grimly.
How the hell do they cope?

“I’ll have some later, when the time comes,” she said. How
did
Julianne cope? “How ... how do you handle the blood?”

Julianne gave her a sharp look—clearly wondering how Emily had managed to avoid the problem—and then launched into a clinical explanation that left Emily feeling dreadfully embarrassed. She’d never
liked
talking about it, even when some of the girls at school—back on Earth—had bragged about having their first period. For them, it was a step into adulthood; for Emily, it had been the start of her stepfather looking at her with lusty eyes ...

“I can help,” Julianne said, finally. She sighed. “I used to help quite a few people back in the village. Their parents didn’t want to talk about it to them.”

Emily rolled her eyes, although—if she was forced to be honest—her parents hadn’t talked about it to her either. But then, she’d had the internet and largely-pointless classes on sex education. Villagers ... she was surprised that village women didn’t tell their daughters the facts of life. Imaiqah had definitely known how things worked long before she’d gone to Whitehall.

She put the matter aside for later consideration and leaned forward. “There’s something you have to know,” she said. “When you’re making a potion, you’re using magic.”

Julianne stared at her. “I’m using
magic
?”

“Yes,” Emily said. “You’re using magic to encourage the ingredients to blend together to produce the effect you want.”

“You ...” Julianne slapped the table, making everything jump. “Are you ... are you telling me that I’ve been using magic all along?”

“I think so,” Emily said. “You were taught—accidentally—how to use magic to make potions. And you never realized this because you only met a couple of other brewers.”

“There are people who do make potions without magic,” Julianne said. “Aren’t there?”

Emily met her eyes. “How would you know?”

“Father doesn’t know,” Julianne said. “He would have forbidden me from brewing if he knew.”

“Probably,” Emily agreed. “But you
are
the only brewer the commune has, aren’t you?”

“Until I train someone else,” Julianne said. “I never ... I never thought it might need
magic
.”

Emily shrugged. “How do you feel when you’re brewing something?”

Julianne hesitated. “It depends on the potion,” she said. “There are some recipes that are quite forgiving, ones you can throw together in a hurry if necessary; others that require intensive concentration, recipes that will go wrong very quickly if you take your eye off them or stir harder than strictly necessary. With them, I feel ... intensely focused.”