And, with a terrible crash, it came. The weighted end hit with the sound of a hundred hand mirrors hitting a pavement; the mirror spiderwebbed—and shattered.
A profound and dreadful silence fell over the salle, broken only by a belated series of musical chinks, as a few of the shards that were left detached themselves and landed on the wreck of the rest of the mirror.
Chink. Chinker-chink. Chink.
“Uh-oh,” said Adain, in a very small voice.
Chink.
***
Alberich stood behind the two miscreants with his arms crossed over his chest, as they faced the desk of the Acting Dean of Herald’s Collegium. Elcarth was not alone; the Dean of Bardic Collegium, Bard Arissa, had joined him for this particular conference. While Elcarth, slight and birdlike, with an inquisitive face and mild manner, was not normally the sort of person who might inspire trepidation in a student, the look he wore today would have frozen the marrow of anyone’s bones.
The two boys huddled unhappily in their chairs. It was the first time within his knowledge that Alberich had seen these two subdued. Their shoulders, under gray and rust-colored tunics respectively, were hunched with misery; their dark heads were both bowed, and two sets of hazel eyes were bent upon the floor.
“What, precisely, possessed you two to demonstrate your—new fighting techniques today?” That was Bard Arissa, a slim, autocratic woman, dark as a gypsy and resplendent in her full formal Scarlets, and you could have used the edge in her voice to cleave diamonds.
“It seemed like a good idea?” Adain suggested, in a whisper.
“And why did you not ask Herald Alberich if you could show him these things in private?” asked Elcarth, his voice like a wintry blast from the snowstorm outside.
“Um. He’s very busy?” Adain seemed to be doing all the talking; Mical was sitting like a stone. Alberich knew why; Mical was from a family prosperous enough to possess one or two real glass mirrors and he knew just how expensive they were, although he probably had no idea that the price increased exponentially with the size. Adain was highborn; until he came to the Collegium, he had never had to pay for anything himself in his life, and he had no idea what even a hand mirror cost, much less one of the huge panels in the salle. Mical thought he knew, and he was scared, just thinking it would cost about the same as a good horse; Alberich knew better, knew that you could buy a nice house with a garden in a good part of Haven for less than one of those mirrors.
“Never, to my knowledge, did you inquire of me, these new moves to observe,” Alberich said from behind them. “My duty it is, to make time for such things.”
“You wanted an audience,” Arissa said, in that same hard, sharp voice—which, given that she was a Master Bard, was certainly deliberate. And, given that she was a Bard, and so was one of the miscreants, her statement about their motive was probably correct. “You couldn’t bear not to have an audience. You wanted to show off what you thought you could do.”
Alberich’s surmise that she had uncovered what had really driven the match today was borne out by the way that both the boys winced.
“Well,” she continued, “you got an audience. I trust you’re pleased. You’ve made fools out of yourselves in front of that audience, not to mention the damage you did in the salle.”
Now it was Elcarth’s turn. “Speaking of damages . . . are either of you aware of just how difficult—and expensive—it is to replace a mirror of that size?”
Identical head shakes.
Elcarth named a figure. Both of them went white as the snow falling outside. Even Alberich was impressed, hearing the exact cost; it made what he had paid for his stained-glass window look like pin money by comparison.
“Now,” Elcarth continued. “Naturally, some of this is going to come from your stipends. We shan’t take all of your stipends, but you’re going to be down to less than half of what everyone else gets.”
Mical finally said something. “But—we could never pay all that back, not even if we stayed Trainees for a hundred years!” He gulped audibly.
“Which is why you are both going to be spending all of your free time working for the Master of the Glassworker’s Guild until he finishes the new mirror,” Arissa said flatly. “We intend for you to see why, at first-hand, such things cost so dearly. We intend for you to have a very proprietary interest in the replacement. When the mirror is finished, I trust you will have an entirely new understanding of your folly.”
“And a new set of muscles,” Elcarth added enigmatically. “Now you may go, and reflect on the fact that you will not have any time to get up to any more clever ideas for the duration. This will be your last evening with any leisure in it, because you’ll be spending your mornings, your afternoons, and half of your evenings down at the glassworks for a while. Enjoy it.”
As if they could, with a sentence like that one hanging over their heads. The two rose, heads hanging, and shuffled out of the room, the very image of dejection.
Elcarth sighed once they were gone, and ruffled a hand through his hair. “I wouldn’t mind so much if they’d gone about their little project sensibly,” he said. He motioned to Alberich to sit; Alberich did so. “Consulting with their instructors, for instance. Not that all of that gymkhana nonsense would have worked, mind you. I wonder where they got such a notion?”
“Out of their imaginations, I suppose,” growled Arissa, sitting on the other chair. “Which are entirely too active if you ask me. Or perhaps out of some idiot play or other; the two of them are always running down into Haven to see some fool drama whenever there’s one to be seen. I presume they’re going to be put to working the bellows at the glassworks for the next moon or so? It could be worse; this could be summer.”
“It will be summer before they see the end of their labor,” Elcarth said. “I intend to leave them down there for more than a moon. Master Cuelin tells me his apprentice is ready to go on to more complicated work, and he doesn’t have a junior apprentice to start on the bellows or do any of the other simple labor in and around the place. So our lads can serve until he gets one. It could have been worse. At least it was only one mirror panel, not two or more.”
“How often does this occur?” Alberich asked curiously. “Assume, I must, that accidents do happen. Stupidity probably rather more often than accident.”
Elcarth shrugged. “About once every hundred years or so. I mean, we designed the salle to minimize the possibility of an accident, and you Weaponsmasters rarely permit flying objects in the salle itself. It does happen, and it isn’t always a Trainee’s fault, though I must say that this time is probably going into Myste’s Chronicles for sheer wrongheadedness. The panels are all a standard size, and the glassworks has the dimensions in their records from the last time, so Master Cuelin won’t even have to come up here to take measurements. I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take to replace the mirror, though. The Master will have a lot of failures before he gets a success.”