"For fear we'd wonder why you so suddenly left off being in love with and destined to wed Maester Lewis of the lovely red-gold hair and turned your tenacious heart to the beauty of Maester Amadou with his piercing black eyes."
"Which you yourself admit are handsome."
She bent forward to look over the rows of benches and the female pupils seated in pairs at study tables. Given that we were seated in the cramped back row of benches with the other female scholarship students, we could see only the front third of the spacious main hall below us. Maester Amadou lounged in the second row in a chair placed at a polished table close to the podium. His fashionably clothed back was to us, but I could see that he was rolling dice with his tablemate, the equally well-connected Maester Lewis, a youth of high rank who had been fostered out to the court of the ruling prince of Tarrant whose territory included
our city of Adurnam. The young men were both so strikingly good-looking that I wondered if they sat together the better to display their contrasting appearances, one milk white and gold haired and the other coffee dark and black haired. On the dais, pacing back and forth in front of the chalkboard and waving a hand in enthusiastic measure, the esteemed natural philosopher launched into an explosive digression on the natural laws pertaining to the behavior of gases, words scattering everywhere.
"Yes, he's almost as pretty as you are," I retorted, "and well aware that his family's wealth allows him to walk in late and then to game in the front of the hall, all without repercussion. He's the vainest young man I ever met."
"How can you say so? The story of how he and his three sisters and aunt escaped from the assault on Eko by murderous, plague-ridden ghouls-forced to call their good-byes to their parents and cousins left behind on the shore as the monsters advanced. It's a heartbreaking tale!"
"If it's true. The settlement and fort were specifically established at Eko because it is an island, and ghouls can't cross water. So how could ghouls have reached them? Anyone can say what they like when there are no witnesses."
"You just have no heart, Cat. You're heartless." Her scowl was meant to pierce me to the heart, if I'd had one. With an indignant flounce of the shoulders, she turned away to furiously sketch on a blank page of her book, using my good silver pencil with its fresh lead.
"If by that you mean I don't fall head over ears in love with every handsome face I encounter, then I thank the blessed Tank for it! Someone needs to be heartless. His family is well-to-do and well connected, that's certain. His elder sister married the younger brother of the cousin of the Prince of Tarrant. His aunt is known to be very clever at business, with contacts reaching across the banking houses of the south. All points in his favor.
Especially given the always impoverished state of the Barahal finances. Now I want my pencil back."
"You're going to tell me what he asked about me" she murmured without looking up or ceasing her drawing, "because otherwise I will pour a handful of salt into your porridge every morning for the next month-"
"Catherine! Beatrice! The Hassi Barahal cousins are again demonstrating their studiousness, I comprehend."
Distracted by the sound of Beatrice's voice, I hadn't noticed the proctor's slithering approach along the back aisle. She came to rest right behind us, close enough that her breath stirred the hair on my neck. Her gaze swept the balcony. The other female pupils were all intent on recording the formula V(1)T(2) = V(2) T(l), which was shedding chalk dust on the board as the venerable professor repeated Alexandre's law: At constant pressure, the volume of a given mass of an ideal gas increases or decreases by the same factor as its temperature increases or decreases.
The maestra grabbed my schoolbook off the table and flipped through its blank pages. "Is this a new schoolbook, maestressa? Or the sum total of your knowledge?"
Cats always land on their feet. "Flammable air is fourteen times lighter than life-sustaining air. It can be produced by dissolving metals in acid. Gas expands as its temperature goes up. No wonder the mage Houses hate balloons! If it's true that proximity to a cold mage always decreases the ambient temperature of any object, then wouldn't a cold mage deflate any balloon sack just by standing alongside it?"
Her narrowed gaze would have flattened an elephant. But the gods were merciful, because instead of sending me off to the headmaster's office for impertinence, she turned her attention to Bee. My dearest and most beloved cousin hastily set down my pencil and attempted to close her sketchbook. The proctor slapped a hand down, holding it open to the page where Bee
had just sketched an impressive portrait of a personage obviously meant to be me. With a cackling death's-head grimace and denarii for eyes, the caricature gazed upon an object held out before it in a bony hand.
"I see you have been paying attention in*anatomy, at least," remarked the maestra as icily as the draft that shivered over us through the high window slits. "That is a remarkably good likeness of a four-chambered heart, although is a heart not meant to reside in the chest cavity?"
Bee batted her eyelashes as her honey smile lit her face. "It was a moment's fancy, that is all. An allegory in the Greek style, if you will. If you look at the other pages, you'll see I have been most assiduously attending to this recent series of lectures on the principles of balloon and airship design." She kept talking as she flipped through the pages. The babble pouring mellifluously from her perfect lips began to melt Maestra Madrahat's rigid countenance. Buoyed up by a force equal to… gases expand in volume with…
Soon pigs would fly.
"Such fine draftsmanship," the proctor murmured besottedly as Bee displayed page after page of air sacs inflated and deflated and hedged about with all manner of mathematical formulae and proportional notations, balloons rising and slumping according to temperature and pressure, hapless passengers being tossed overboard from baskets on high and falling with exaggerated screams and outflung armsThe maestra stiffened, breath sucked in hard.
Bee swiftly turned to a more palatable historical sketch of the Romans kneeling in defeat at Zama before the newly crowned queen, the dido of our people, and her victorious general Hanniba'al. And she kept talking. "I am so very deeply anticipating our outing to the Rail Yard next week, where we will be able to view the airship for ourselves. How incredible that it propelled itself all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from
Expedition to our fair city of Adurnam! Not a single human or troll lost in the crossing!"
"Imagine," I added, unable to control my tongue, "how the cold mages must be celebrating its arrival, considering that the mage Houses call airships and rifles the reckless tinkering of radicals who mean to destroy society. Do you suppose the mages mean to join the festivities next week as well? It's said half the city means to turn out to see the airship, if only to stop the Houses from attempting something rash."
Every pupil sitting near enough to overhear my words gasped. Hate the Houses if you wished, or kneel before them hoping to be offered a trickle from the bounteous stream of their power and riches and influence, but everyone knew it was foolish to openly speak critical words. Even the lords and princes who ruled the many principalities and territories of fractious Europa did not challenge the Houses and their magisters.
The proctor snatched Bee's book from the table and tucked it under an arm. "The headmaster will see you both in his office after class."
Half the girls on the balcony snickered. The other half shuddered. The twins kept taking notes, although I didn't know them well enough to say if they were that oblivious or that focused. Maestra Madrahat took up her guard post at the entrance, her keys hanging in plain sight to remind us that no one could sneak out and down the stairs and that no venturesome young male could sneak up and in. None of that here, in the abstemious halls of the academy.