Work Experience (Schooled in Magic Book 4) (23 page)

Emily wasn’t sure if she should be angry or relieved. Cleaning was something else she’d done as a child, but she’d never liked doing it. And, at Whitehall, she’d once been forced to clean an entire suite of rooms by hand as a punishment. She’d found a way to cheat, slightly, but it still hadn’t been a very pleasant experience.

“They shouldn’t have left it in such a mess,” she said, tiredly. “Why...?”

“The runes seem to have been degraded slightly,” Lady Barb said. “Several of them have been destroyed completely. I think someone tried to break in at one point.”

“And disabled the runes that should have kept the building safe,” Emily concluded. She felt oddly better to hear that it might not have been their predecessor’s fault. “Who would dare break into a magician’s residence?”

“I don’t know,” Lady Barb confessed. “A mundane couldn’t have entered the building without permission, while a magician shouldn’t have had any problems breaking and entering. The wards weren’t designed to keep out anyone with magic.”

She stroked her chin. “An odd puzzle. Maybe we’ll stay long enough to figure out the answer.”

Emily frowned. “The missing heir?”

“It’s a possibility,” Lady Barb agreed. She turned and started to pace the room. “I don’t recall if there was any magic in the lord’s bloodline, but it is definitely a distinct possibility.”

She paused, then turned away from Emily. “But local politics aren’t one of our concerns, not now,” she said. “Our task remains the same.”

Emily wasn’t so sure – the heir could easily have been kidnapped by the unknown magician, if there
was
a magician – but she held her peace. Their task was to use magic to help people while searching for new magicians, not get caught up in petty politics.

“The town is effectively occupied,” Lady Barb told her. “I’d advise you to stay inside unless you’re with me. Or are you feeling confident enough to stand up for yourself?”

“I am,” Emily said. After what she’d done to Hodge, she felt more confident than she’d ever been in her life. “I can go out.”

“Make sure you wear your robes,” Lady Barb told her. She paused. “There’s no point in trying to cook here. We’ll go out to eat. Get changed.”

Emily nodded and scrambled back up the ladder, carrying her bag with her. It would be so much easier to carry a bag that was linked to a pocket dimension, but Lady Barb had forbidden it. Instead, she opened her bag, removed her robes and then looked around for the sink. It turned out that the only place to wash was in the main room. Grateful that there were no boys around, Emily carried her robe back down the ladder, then washed and dressed quickly and silently while Lady Barb merely pulled a robe over her outfit.

Something clicked in Emily’s mind. “How did he know you were a sorceress?”

“Few women would move from place to place unescorted, not here,” Lady Barb told her. “The ones who do have protections...magic, for instance.”

She opened the door and led the way outside. Night was falling, the final rays of sunlight cascading off the darkened castle. Emily shivered at the sight – the castle looked spooky in the semi-darkness - before following Lady Barb through a twisting network of streets and into a small inn. Inside, it was warm, but there were only a handful of visitors. The innkeeper looked up at them with interest, then pointed to a nearby wooden table. Emily sat down gratefully as Lady Barb pointed to a chalkboard. It listed only three different kinds of food.

“There are only a few people here,” Emily muttered. “Is that a bad sign?”

“There are soldiers in the town,” Lady Barb muttered back. “Most visitors will have moved on, even if they were planning to stay a few days.”

The innkeeper marched over to stand by the table. Emily had to smile when she saw him clearly; he was a fat balding man with a pleasant smile and a tunic that clung to the wrong places. But he was definitely a decent person. Compared to the people she’d met in the last village, it was something of a relief.

“Lady Sorceress,” he said, addressing Lady Barb. “What can I get for you?”

“The meat pie would be fine,” Lady Barb said. “Millie?”

Emily started, then remembered what she was being called. “The meat pie for me, too,” she said, quickly. “And drinks?”

“Two beers,” Lady Barb said. Emily gave her a sharp look. “Your finest, if you please.”

Lady Barb waited until the innkeeper had retreated, then explained. “You can use spells or potions to remove the alcohol,” she reminded Emily. “But you shouldn’t drink water in the towns up here, not unless there’s no alternative. There’s no way to know what might have gone into it.”

Emily shuddered, remembering her reading. Alcohol was often safer to drink than water, certainly in eras before they’d understood the value of using boiling water to kill germs. It made sense for the villagers – even the children – to drink alcohol all the time, but it did nothing for their behavior.

The innkeeper returned, carrying two foaming mugs of beer, and a large sheet of paper. Emily looked at it and had to fight down a laugh.

“The latest broadsheet,” the innkeeper assured them. “It came all the way from Garn, it did.”

Emily took the paper and examined it, carefully. It was shoddy material, compared to anything from Earth, and there were only a handful of pages, but it was far superior to anything they’d had before she’d arrived. The words used English letters – she parsed them out, one by one – and talked about news from across the Allied Lands. There was even an article on the Mimic attack on Whitehall!

“Your influence,” Lady Barb said, once the innkeeper had departed. “You should be proud.”

“Maybe,” Emily said. “At least they’re not printing nude pictures yet.”

She read through the article – noting just how many inaccuracies there were – and then passed the paper to Lady Barb. Investigative journalism clearly had a long way to go. But then, the writer had probably only heard garbled rumors.

She shook her head. Somehow, an entire market for romantic stories had appeared in Zangaria, competing with regular news and informational bulletins. King Randor had encouraged the spread of such bulletins, hoping to ride the winds of change. Emily had a private suspicion that he’d come to regret it, even though it did have some advantages. The population of Zangaria seemed to have an instinctive respect for the written word, perhaps because so few of them had been able to write in the old system. That was probably about to change.

The meat pie smelled good when it was placed in front of her, but Emily found it hard to eat. Much of the meat was gristle, rather than actual meat, and the potatoes that came with it were either too hard or too soft. It was a far cry from the food at Whitehall or Zangaria’s castles, a reminder that anyone who went to Whitehall might well be seduced away from their homes and families.

“There’s only ever one inn in the major towns,” Lady Barb explained, once she’d erected a privacy ward. “The innkeeper has a captive audience. But if you were born here, you wouldn’t be rejecting the meat.”

Emily flushed, ashamed of herself for being picky. She wouldn’t have rejected the meat on Earth, either. But Whitehall’s food was perfect.

“I see,” she said. There were several inns in Dragon’s Den, encouraging competition. But here, one innkeeper could charge whatever he wanted. “What happens if there’s no inn?”

“Travelers tend to offer money to locals in exchange for a place to sleep,” Lady Barb said. “But accommodation can be uncomfortable.”

Emily envisaged sleeping on the floor in a cramped room and shuddered. It was bad enough sharing a room at Whitehall, even though there was some privacy. The peasants and their guests would have a far harder time getting any privacy. And there might not be enough food or drink, no matter how much money the guests offered. What good was money to the peasants if there was nothing to buy?

They finished their dinner, paid the innkeeper and walked back to the building. Darkness had fallen completely, a faint glow over the horizon showing that the moon had yet to rise. Emily followed Lady Barb, who seemed to have no difficulty in navigating in the dark, and carefully avoided a handful of soldiers on patrol. The soldiers gave them a wide berth.

“Don’t forget the insect ward this time,” Lady Barb reminded her, as they climbed up the ladder and into bed. “You don’t want to be bitten again.”

Emily nodded, cast the wards, and lay down on the bed without bothering to undress. She was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow.

T
HE SOUND OF A COCKEREL JERKED
Emily out of a dreamless sleep, leaving her staring blankly for a long moment. It was an unfamiliar room – another unfamiliar room – and there was no sign of Lady Barb. After a moment, Emily rolled over and stood up, silently cursing her decision to sleep in her clothes. They felt icky and uncomfortable after a night in a hot bed.

“Better get up and washed,” Lady Barb called, from the lower floor. “They’ll be here soon enough.”

Emily scowled and headed for the trapdoor. Once she was downstairs, she washed up quickly, then donned her working clothes. Lady Barb passed her a plate of bread and cheese, telling her not to dawdle over her food. They had plenty of work to do.

“I think you’re giving me all the boring jobs,” Emily said, as she tucked into the plate of food. “Is that what always happens in an apprenticeship?”

“Of course,” Lady Barb said. There was no rebuke in her tone, merely a hint of droll amusement. “The apprentice trades her services in exchange for training.”

Emily nodded, finished her plate of food and walked into the potions lab. It was a mess, worse than she’d realized; several bottles of potions and ingredients had been left unsealed, their contents decaying and leaking into the air. She cursed under her breath, trying to imagine Professor Thande’s reaction to such carelessness in the alchemy classroom, then started to sort out the damaged bottles. She knew better than to risk using any of the decaying ingredients.
Anything
could happen if she did.

“We’re short on a dozen ingredients,” she said, once she’d separated out the useable ingredients from the unusable ones. “I don’t know if I can brew all the potions.”

Lady Barb stepped inside and examined the damaged bottles, then nodded. “It looks as though our mystery burglar actually
did
manage to get inside,” she said. “Such carelessness would be rare for a trained magician.”

Emily couldn’t disagree. One lesson that had been hammered into her head, time and time again, was that stupid magicians tended to kill themselves before too long. Magicians who pushed the limits, in the meantime, were often exiled to deserted mountaintops or deserts where they could carry out their experiments with no risk to anyone else. There were very definite limits to just how far an untrained magician could go before risking madness – or death.

“Put the spoiled ingredients out for disposal, then clean up the rest of the lab,” Lady Barb ordered. “Once that’s done, brew pain-relief and quick-heal potions first; we’ll see what you have left afterwards.”

Emily nodded and started to work. There were spells to clean tables and instruments, but Professor Thande had told her that alchemical tools should never be cleaned by magic. He’d told his class enough horror stories to convince even the laziest that there were worse things that could happen then spending a few minutes washing their tools manually. But, after scrubbing the table until her hands were aching and sore, Emily found herself wishing she could use magic. The table had been used for years, and it showed.

Muttering under her breath, she gathered herself, then found a handful of cauldrons in one cupboard. Three of them looked clean, but one had clearly been used and not put away because it was still coated with the remains of the last potion someone had brewed. Emily swallowed a curse before washing the cauldron thoroughly and placing it out to dry. It struck her, a moment too late, that she should have tried to study the residue to determine what the last brewer had actually tried to create.

Lady Barb will have checked
, she told herself.
But how could she get any answers out of this mess
?

She heard the sound of voices, male and female, outside as she set out the clean cauldrons and filled them with water, lighting non-magical fires under them. Once the water was heating up, she glanced out the door and saw a handful of young men and women enthusiastically scrubbing the floor and table in the main room. Lady Barb was nowhere to be seen, but Emily heard her voice drifting back from the kitchen. Emily had to smile – Lady Barb could pay the teenagers more than they would earn elsewhere – and turned back to the cauldrons. Brewing more than one potion at a time required careful concentration and was generally discouraged unless there was no alternative. She dropped in the first set of ingredients and watched, carefully, as the potions slowly brewed.

Lady Barb stepped into the room and nodded, approvingly. “Keep a sharp eye on that one,” she instructed, pointing at the last cauldron. “It smells funny.”

Emily flushed, embarrassed. Alchemy was definitely not one of her skills. Professor Thande seemed to have a sixth sense for alchemical combinations that were about to go disastrously wrong, but Emily didn’t share it. There were times she suspected that she wouldn’t be allowed to take Alchemy past Fourth Year, no matter how well she did in other subjects. No matter how she tried, she had no idea that something was going wrong until it was too late to fix.

“I will,” she promised. She glared down at the shimmering green liquid, trying to tease out whatever it was Lady Barb had sensed. But nothing came to mind. “What can you smell?”

Lady Barb shrugged. Emily gritted her teeth in frustration. Some magic senses could be described easily, but not alchemy. Either she understood it instinctively, she suspected, or she would never understand it at all. She shook her head, then lowered the temperature for four of the cauldrons. The potion needed to cool down before it became drinkable.

“We’re short of bottles,” she said, as Lady Barb inspected the potions and pronounced them satisfactory. “Can we buy more here?”