Seventeen Stones (6 page)

Sarah’s
polite rebuffs didn’t cool Vivian’s curiosity in the least.  “So the two of you
grew up together?”  Mia shook her head.  “No, she was in the home near my
village…but village children and home children…don’t mix often.”  Vivian seemed
to note the distinction and then continued.  Mia was answering a seemingly
endless list questions (with honest admissions of ignorance in most cases) when
two new girls walked in.  They were identical from their matching shiny black
shoes to the bright blue ribbons in their hair.  They had two pretty smiles on
their faces and quickly claimed the beds between Mia and Sarah, since they were
the only two side by side.  They each dumped an old fashioned suitcase on the
bed as the first said “Hello, I’m Lizzy.”  And they other dimpled.  “I’m
Beth.”  In unison they exclaimed “not that anyone can tell the difference.” 
The girls settled in for a nice chat as the twins unpacked, comparing class
schedules and life stories.  Lizzy had a wicked sense of humor that had all of
them laughing within a few minutes.  They were still giggling when the last
girl walked in.

Her
hair was an eye-popping shade of ruby red that cascaded down her back in
perfect ringlets.  Her skin was that clear creamy color that truly lucky red-headed
women are sometimes born with.  She entered hesitantly, as if worried that the
group might have been laughing at her.  Her dark blue eyes were cautious. 

Emboldened
by the warm reception she’d had from the others, Mia offered a quick
introduction.  “Hello, I’m Mia, and the brown-headed girl over there is Vivian. 
The twins are Lizzy and Beth, though I couldn’t tell you which is which at the
moment.  Sarah’s sleeping in the far bed over there; she’s already in the
study.”  The redhead smiled tentatively.  “I’m Ella.”

She
looked around for an empty bed.  “Oh, you’re over here between me and Vivian”
Mia said helpfully.  She pointed to the remaining bed and Ella levitated an old,
battered trunk onto the floor beside it.

Vivian
announced that she was starving and intended to go down to the kitchen for a
snack.  Lizzy and Beth murmured to each other for a second and mentioned that
they were going to walk around campus a bit to get the lay of the land so they
wouldn’t get lost the next morning.  Ella began unpacking a few uniforms out of
the trunk.  Mia could tell that they were secondhand, as were the shabby books
that she unpacked afterward.  Mia was checking out a map of campus, so she
didn’t notice Ella trying to smooth the wrinkles from her shirtwaists at first. 
When she did, she tossed the other girl a bottle of potion with a nozzle on top. 
“Try this.  My guardian makes it; it takes out wrinkles in a couple of
seconds.”  Ella carefully sprayed the mixture on one skirt first, and her
politely blank face turned to delight while she sprayed the rest of her
garments.  “Thank you!  I would have hated to have shown up all mussed the
first day.”  Mia grinned; she was pleased that Emma’s potion-making was
appreciated even here in the City.  “I know what you mean, it’s a bit much
isn’t it?”  Ella nodded as she finished unpacking.

Mia
dumped her heavy book bag off the bed and into the floor.  “What subjects are
you taking?”  Ella looked positively terrified at the idea of class.  “I’m
taking Healing, Transfiguration, Animal Husbandry, Alchemy, Botany, Music,
Astronomy, Charms, History, and Creation this semester.”  She said the whole
thing in a single breath.  Mia tried not to grin and held out her hand.  “I’m
in all of those as well.  If you hand me your schedule we can see if we have
them together.”  Ella willingly gave Mia the parchment and she compared them. 
“We’ll be together in all of your classes.” She looked at the other girl a bit
shyly “It’ll be nice to have a friend going in.”  Ella nodded fervently.

Mia
watched quietly while Ella packed her books into an embroidered bag.  “Where
are you from?”  Ella answered in her soft, drawling accent.  “My village is south
and east, with over a week’s travel by river and then by carriage.  It’s a tiny
place called Lonely Hold.  I live on a farmstead about twenty miles away from
the village, or I did until three weeks ago.  Basically it’s as far east as you
can go and still be inside the City bounds.  The college arranged for me to
travel up the river on one of the trade freighters.”  She brightened as she
remembered something about the trip.  “They use huge paddles at the back of the
boats to move them up the river against the current.  A boy who works on the
boat told me that a Greatlord had to set the spell on the wheels.”

A
total of two hundred and eighty-nine wanded students were beginning college. 
Mia was one of eighty-three girls.  After three years of study, they would take
their exit exams and apply for apprenticeships.  Only the most talented wand
wielders would receive them.  The others would find positions as their talents
and connections warranted.  Roughly seventy percent of the students were male
during this portion of their education.  But the numbers evened out somewhat
during the apprenticeships, with boys taking roughly sixty percent of them and
girls snagging a disproportionate forty percent.  The percentage of Greatlords
and Ladies remained around ten percent of the wanded population, (depending on
how many potentials managed to get themselves killed during training).

The
life of the average wand wielder was less regulated than that of the Greatlords
and Ladies.  Positions were offered in a variety of fields, and the wand
wielder chose the position that best suited their tastes and skills.  If an ordinary
wand wielder had a comfortable private income, there was no rule explicitly
stating that they had to take any position at all beyond managing whatever
estate or investments that provided their income.  If a Greatlord and a
Greatlady married, the EFC (Expected Family Contribution) rules applied.  They
basically regulated the number of years that a couple had to work, allowing the
partner with the more valuable skill set to take the place of their
husband/wife during the years of childrearing. 

The
subject came up after dinner, while the girls were having a nice chat by the
cozy fire in the study.  Vivian was expounding on how much more civilized their
facilities were in the girls’ dorms.  “The boys are sleeping fifteen to a room,
with community showers and toilets.  They all have to eat at the same time, on
long tables in a single dining room, nothing like the lovely little groups we
have here.  They have a single brightly lit study for each dorm, and they’re
required to be there after dinner for two hours!  They have six hall monitors
on every floor, and three dorm supervisors.” 

Mia,
who hadn’t seen a single hall monitor in the girl’s dorm looked around.  “Do we
have hall monitors?”  Vivian shook her head.  “No, we have laundry pick up and
you pull that rope if the room needs to be cleaned, and the curfew charms of
course…but all that’s done by old spells integrated into the dorm.  The older
students are here if we need help, there’s a talking directory on the bottom floor,
and of course, we have a dorm mother who organizes all the meals, but we don’t
have the supervision the boys do.”  Lizzy murmured “Thank goodness.”

Vivian
nodded.  “I expect they have to keep a sharp eye on the boys, to keep them out
of trouble.”  Mia privately thought that she could get into just a much trouble
as the next person, but she didn’t share that tidbit with her new friends.  The
entire group was here, sipping tea from a pot they’d brought up after dinner,
and nibbling cookies courtesy of Lizzy and Beth’s grandmother.  Even Sarah had
put down her book long enough to join in.

The
talk remained on the subject of boys for another half hour.  Mia tried to
change the subject once or twice, but the other girls brought it back up.  Not
having any tact to speak of, Mia asked outright “Why are we talking about them
again?” 

Vivian
gave her a pitying look.  “You know that there are more boys here than girls,
right?”  Mia nodded.  “Well, according to my grandmother, right now we just
might drown in the attention we’ll get.  But after they get out of school,
quite a few of them will be heading out to the villages to find a bride. 
Village girls don’t have a wand, obviously: so they don’t have to give up
wanded magic to have babies.  They’re more likely to have two or even three
children, as opposed to a wanded woman who normally can’t give up magic three
times before the wand work makes the couple infertile.  So my grandmother says
it’s better for a wanded girl to catch someone during the first three years,
while there’s not as much competition.” 

Sarah
nodded, though she looked somewhat taken aback by Vivian’s frank assessment. 
“My mother agrees.  Every boy with the gift for wielding a wand comes to the
college.  We don’t have the option of marrying a young farmer, not if we want
our children to be wanded.  Fortunately, many of the young wanded men do
realize that we are the most magically powerful girls in the City bounds, so a
lot of the old blood boys look here first.”

Mia found
herself being interested against her will.  “What can you do if you don’t want
to marry?”  Sarah daintily chose another cookie.  “It isn’t much of a life to
tell you the truth.  I have an aunt who never married.  She works on the Magus’
staff doing research eighty hours a week, lives with my grandparents, and still
has an allowance because she doesn’t make enough gold in her position to even
dress like a Greatlord’s daughter when she does make a social appearance, which
isn’t often.”

Mia
digested this.  “What about Headmistress Villanova?”  After all, she was in
charge of the magical education of every wanded child in the City bounds.  Vivian
laughed.  “Well, she’s a Greatlady.  I might be able to marry that rank, but I
won’t score that high on the exit exams, I know I won’t.  The college only
produces a few students with Great status every graduation.  A few test out
after their apprenticeship, but there’s a reason why Greatlords and Ladies have
special status. All of this doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if you have enough
talent.”  She looked around inquiringly.  “Don’t they assign lands to anyone
who tests out for Great status?”   

Sarah
shrugged.  “I couldn’t tell you.  Normally these things run in families, but I
suppose the lands must have been assigned at some point, so the estates must be
part of it.  The Greatlords are more restricted than normal wand wielders, so I
suppose that the City owes them something for everything they do.  My
grandfather wasn’t allowed to come out to even Forestreach very often, because
he’s in charge of the main aqueducts and water treatments.  If those spells
aren’t preformed correctly, everyone in the City could get sick and even die.”

Vivian
topped off her tea cup and levitated the empty pot downstairs.  “It’s much
better to marry a powerful wand wielder and let them contribute, while you see
to the social obligations and the children.  Many of the Greatlords don’t allow
wanded magic on their estates, except with shielding, and they send their
children there to live, if the estates are far enough away from the City, of
course.”

Ella
asked shyly “How far away from the City is far enough?  I saw villages two and
three hours from here with children in them.”  Sarah nodded.  “Yes, but those
were
village
children.  Most wanded parents want to make sure their
children are at least a day or two away from the City.  The City walls have all
sorts of spells on them to keep the magic from leaking out, but nobody really
trusts that.  You find a lot of plants around the walls that are different. 
You know what I’m talking about, odd colors and sizes.  I’ve heard that most
birds won’t nest within the City walls.  But I think it’s because there’s so
much wanded magic going on here all the time.”  Mia caught the re-filled tea
pot and filled her cup thoughtfully, then passed the pot to Beth. 

Talk
eventually turned to other things.  The girls were discussing career paths when
Lizzy piped in.  “Our Grandmother is Greatlady Fairchild.  She ran the main City
Library before mum and dad died when we were three.  Then she retired to her
estate, took us from the home, and raised us there.”  She looked wistfully at
Beth.  Mia was beginning to be able to tell them apart.  Lizzy was more likely
to talk, and Beth had a slightly breathier voice.  They both had the cultured
upper-upper crust accent of the wanded elite (they shared it with Martin
Ainsley and Sarah) mixed with a slight hint of the clipped syllables from the northern
areas.

Beth
sighed.  “It was really lovely.  The manor house sits by a lake, so clear you
can see all the way to the bottom.  Grandmother stocked it with fish, so there
are streaks of gold and purple...”

Mia
leaned over and squeezed Beth’s hand.  “I imagine after tomorrow we’ll all be too
busy to be homesick.”  She glanced at the clock on the mantel.  “In fact, we’ll
be midnight getting to bed if we don’t start getting ready.”

As the girls got ready for bed, the
talk turned to shopping.  Vivian’s father was head of one of the major merchant
families, so she knew her way around the marketplaces (she and her mother had
spent two weeks in the City shopping before term began).  She offered herself
as a guide on a shopping expedition on the next rest day.  Lizzy and Beth were
excited.  Their Grandmother had ordered all of their supplies, and so they
hadn’t done their own shopping.  Ella grimaced.  “I wish I’d known you three
days ago.  I don’t think I did very well haggling for my things…”  Vivian smiled
and promised to help Ella in the future.