“Congratulations on your victory,” Bernard said. He sounded genuinely pleased. His gamble of allowing me to study at the school had paid off. After this, I was sure, no one would question my right to be a student. “We will feast in your honour.”
Master Falladine picked up my wand and held it out to me as another tutor, one I didn’t recognise, levitated Cemburu out of the hall. “You did well,” he said, “but don’t get overconfident. The next challenger will be a great deal harder.”
I nodded in understanding. I had passed through the first hurdle, but there were more.
A lot more.
Chapter Six
The next few weeks were the happiest of my life.
It felt as if everyone wanted to be my friend. Or my adviser. Or even friendly rival. My peers finally accepted me as one of them, while the upper students stopped pretending I didn’t exist when they saw me. This wasn’t wholly a good thing. I had previously been spared the older students using me as a servant, unlike my peers, but now they ordered me around as much as the rest. The other students grumbled about being used for labour, yet I didn’t really mind. It was proof I had been accepted, and it was also a great deal easier than life on the farm. I didn’t point that out to them. I didn’t want them thinking about harder tasks for me and my peers.
I had never really had anyone to talk to about magic, save for Hilde, and much of her advice had been confusing or contradictory. Now, I had students from a range of backgrounds who could tell me everything I needed to know and discuss magical theories with me. I practised my spells with the boys, who seem to have decided I was an honorary boy rather than a girl. Master Falladine told me, when I pointed that out, that the price for being one of the boys was actually being one of the boys. If I acted like a boy, and held my head high like a boy, they would treat me as a boy. I wasn’t sure how well that would work, but I had to admit the boys were paying much less attention to my body and more to my magic and mind. It was … different.
They also told me a great many things I had barely realised mattered. To the north, the Kingdom of Alluvia was slowly taking shape and sending students to Whitehall; to the south, several smaller kingdoms were slowly being absorbed into bigger kingdoms that would eventually be a match for Alluvia and the barely-known kingdoms further north. One student had travelled with his father, before going to Whitehall, and he told me about people far to the east who looked a little like me. It was strange to think about the man who had been my biological father, although I told myself - quite firmly - that my real father was the man who had accepted me as his own and raised me until I was old enough to decide my own path. The idea of travelling to see the east was attractive, but I doubted I would ever get the chance to go. Magic was just so fascinating. I could never give it up. And besides, I had no idea if my biological father had ever known he had sired a child.
And one of the other things they taught me left me feeling oddly sympathetic to Cemburu.
He was, apparently, a bastard. This was no surprise to me, for the obvious reason, but apparently he was a real bastard. He was not the son of a nobleman, born out of wedlock; he was the son of a noble woman. A nobleman could pretend his son wasn’t his, and pay for the mother to bring the child up, but a noblewoman could not hide behind a polite veneer of secrecy. Cemburu had been lucky to be acknowledged by his mother’s family, I was told, and it had cost her dearly. There was no prospect, now, of a good match. I couldn’t help thinking the nobility were crazy. But then, it was more important for them to ensure their children were actually theirs. It made me grateful, once again, for my father’s willingness to treat me as his own.
And I would have felt sorrier for him if he hadn’t been such a pain.
He returned to class two days after the duel, to find himself a pariah. No one had any time for a loser, not even his former cronies. They shut him out, refusing to have anything to do with him. Cemburu tried to tell everyone that I had cheated, that I had lured him into a trap, but no one believed him. Ironically, I discovered, it would have impressed people if I had. There was nothing morally wrong about setting a trap, or tricking one’s opponent into making a deadly mistake. I haven’t planned it that way, and if Cemburu hadn’t stopped to gloat he would likely have won, but it didn’t matter. I was up and he was down and that was all that mattered to our peers. The nasty part of my mind hoped he was enjoying being right at the bottom of the hierarchy. It was a taste of what he had doled out to me.
The teachers didn’t give us a break. They kept us practising magic from dawn to dusk, as well as practical skills such as swordfighting and harvesting potion ingredients from the herb gardens and wild animals. It made me smile to meet a unicorn and convince it to let us take some of its hairs, not least because unicorns could only be approached by maidens. It was clear proof I was still a virgin, embarrassing Cemburu still further. He shut up after that, save for the occasional snide remark about me still having a private room. I told him that that would change the moment another female student arrived. Who knew? One might arrive tomorrow. I couldn’t be the only girl who wanted to study magic, could I?
It pushed me to my limits and beyond. It was hard to keep up with my training as I dug further and further into advanced magic. Master Falladine was surprisingly understanding as I had to go straight to bed some nights, rather than practising with him, but I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. I had promised I would be his assistant when the time came and not keeping that promise didn’t sit well with me. I knew I hadn’t developed the skills, not yet, but still … it bugged me. I felt embarrassed at the failure to be the person he needed. But what choice did I have?
Spending more time with my fellow students meant going on walks with them, either in the mountains or down to the nearby town. I decided fairly quickly I didn’t like the town and I was glad - very glad - I hadn’t gone there. It was bigger than the village, bigger than the nearest town, big enough for everyone to be strangers to everyone else. The pubs and shops and brothels felt weirdly disconnected from each other, even as they served the nearby school. I suspected they were hoping the school would protect them, when the kingdom tried to take control of the town. It was just a matter of time. The town had something to lose too.
Back home, we knew how to hide crops from taxmen, I thought. The kingdom’s inspectors were easy to fool. Most of them knew nothing about farming and we had no trouble hiding our produce in plain sight. Here, it might be a little harder.
I didn’t really worry about it. The first set of exams were coming up and I needed to practice. And practice. And practice some more. The teachers had made it clear that if we failed the exams we would be going back to the start, remaining as junior students even as the rest of us went up a level. Cemburu got mocked, harshly, by students who expected him to fail, pointing out they would soon have the authority to make him fetch and carry for them. I didn’t join in. I didn’t like Cemburu, for obvious reasons, but I knew better than to count my chickens before they had hatched. I knew how easy it was to lose a crop before you could harvest, how easy it was to lose everything in a single catastrophic moment. I hoped I would pass, but I couldn’t count on it. No one could.
But at least I can practice with the others, I thought. It felt good to test my spells against my peers. None of them took me lightly any longer. What happens to those who can’t?
The thought bothered me slightly, as exams neared. I had grown up in a community where helping people who needed it was highly praised. It was self interest as much as anything else. You never knew when you might be knocked down, when you might need help yourself, and helping people who had been knocked down to get back on their feet incentivised them to help you when you needed it. Part of me thought I should reach out to Cemburu and offer assistance; the rest of me thought it was pointless to try. Cemburu was not capable of understanding the importance of helping others, even now. His peers were certainly not trying to build him up again. To them, education was a zero-sum game. For someone to win, everyone else had to lose.