“Ah… you said you wanted to meet,” Lillian said. “I brought my homework and…”
“We’ll go to the library,” Nanette said. “I have detention in an hour, so I can keep an eye on your work while I shelve books.”
“Just don’t get caught talking to her,” Penny advised, sourly. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours. We can sneak down to Pendle together.”
Nanette glanced at the clock, then nodded. “And have dinner there? I look forward to it.”
She smiled as she stepped through the door, Lillian following her. It was irritating to have a younger girl dogging her steps, like a lamb following her mother. Nanette had no idea how Emily put up with it. And yet, there was something oddly comforting in the open, guileless admiration in Lillian’s eyes. Nadine would not have been anything like so welcoming. The girl was so shallow that the mere fact Lillian shared a name with Nadine’s hated stepmother would have damned her.
Idiot, Nanette thought. She was used to changing names at the drop of a hat. It isn’t as if she chose the name.
Lillian caught her hand. “I don’t think the Head Girl likes me,” she said. “Why not?”
“She just likes challenging people,” Nanette lied. “She prefers people to stand up to her.”
“Oh,” Lillian said. “But… she’s the Head Girl!”
“Technically, she’s the Deputy Head Girl,” Nanette pointed out. The system made a certain kind of sense, she supposed, but she could see its flaws. If Penny disgraced herself, who would take her place? It made far more sense to have prefects and suchlike appointed by the tutors. At least popularity wouldn’t have that much influence on selection. “She has to survive this year before she becomes the formal Head Girl.”
Lillian shrugged. “Is it that important?”
“Being Head Girl looks very good on your resume, when you leave school,” Nanette said. It didn’t cheer her up. She’d been Head Girl at Mountaintop, but there was no way she could claim the title without revealing herself. “It suggests you’re impressive enough to get your fellows to trust you.”
She felt another pang as they walked into the library. She’d never been trusted, not enough to convince anyone to vote for her. They’d known her as a commoner, then as a tutor’s personal assistant… it wasn’t as if Aurelius had been a monster. There’d been students who’d served really bad masters. Everyone had felt sorry for them. But her? They’d all known Aurelius’s patronage could open doors.
And now he’s dead, she thought, savagely. She’d make Emily pay for murdering Aurelius. He’d been more than a tutor to her. I’ll burn down her world before I kill her.
“Nadine?” Lillian sounded worried. “Are you alright?”
“Just remembering,” Nanette said. “A moment of weakness, nothing more.”
She calmed herself as she looked around the library. It was nearly deserted. Two swots sat at widely separated tables, working through a pile of textbooks; a duty librarian piled books onto a trolley, ready to go back on the shelves. Lillian selected a third table — Nanette was amused to note she was keeping her distance from the other students — and started to unload her bag as Nanette sat down. Her tutors had given her enough homework to keep even an experienced student busy for days. Lillian would have been hopelessly stuck if Nanette hadn’t broken it down for her.
“I managed to cast a luminance charm in class,” Lillian said. “But… I couldn’t figure out how to change the light.”
“It’s a useful spell in more ways than one,” Nanette said. She took the parchment and scanned the spellwork. “It’s actually a difficult spell to block. What do you think will happen if you cast a blinding light into someone’s eyes?”
“You’ll blind them?”
“Perhaps not for long, but you’ll make it very hard for them to think straight,” Nanette said, dryly. She allowed herself a tight smile. Blinding charms were generally forbidden at school, but there was a rather neat loophole if someone used a luminance charm in their place. There was enough plausible deniability to keep someone from being expelled if they went too far. “Thinking outside the box, Lillian, can lead to some really interesting tricks.”
Lillian frowned. “Like what?”
“Cast a washing charm on someone and you’ll drench them in cold water,” Nanette pointed out. “Modify the charm a little and you’ll scald them instead. Cast a summoning charm when someone is between you and whatever you’re trying to summon and that person will be smacked in the back. Cast a painkilling charm when someone is not in pain and you’ll make them numb, very numb. It’s astonishing how many simple household spells have nasty uses if you think about it.”
And thinking outside the box is Emily’s skill, her thoughts added, darkly. Who’d have thought of using mundane means for magic?
She skimmed the homework quickly. “The trick is to know how to cast a particular spell without becoming too attached to any particular version of the spell,” she explained. “The standard washing charm, for example, produces cold water. You work out how to fiddle with the spell to produce hot water, rather than simply casting a hot water spell. And that’ll give you insight into modifying other spells.”
“I see, I think,” Lillian said. “What if I change the variables like this…?”
“Don’t write it down,” Nanette advised. “Try and alter the variables in your head.”
“The teacher said to always write it down,” Lillian objected. “I…”
Nanette had to smile as she broke off. “It’s good to ask, if you don’t understand,” she said, as reassuringly as she could. “You write the spell down to fix it in your mind. But you actually cast the spell in your head.”
It was a little more complex than that, she thought, as she rose to start her detention, but it would do for the moment. The duty librarian glanced at her, then shrugged. Nanette guessed the detention wasn’t considered too important, not in the grand scheme of things. Her lips quirked. It wasn’t easy pretending to be ignorant. She had to make understandable mistakes, without getting booted out of the library and ordered to serve her detentions somewhere else. Thankfully, the shelving system for the open collection was easy to use. A complete illiterate could have emplaced the books, even if she couldn’t read them.
Emily would love this place, Nanette thought. And she’d spend all her time here.
She scowled at the books. Reading was a useful skill, but she’d always preferred action. A magician could read a book and learn a whole new spell, yet actually mastering the magic required practice. She’d read, somewhere, of a magic that only worked when the spells were written down. In her experience, it was utter nonsense. Magic simply didn’t work that way.
The library felt odd as the hours ticked by. The older students would be in Pendle, enjoying their freedom; the younger students would be in the Silent Woods or sneaking their way to the Redoubt. Penny had told her all sorts of stories about the ruined castle, stories that had grown in the telling. Nanette had to smile at the concept of ghosts, goblins and things that went bump in the night, although she knew better than to laugh too openly. Anyone who lived in rural areas knew there were things out there that weren’t listed in any tome.
And the other folk are always listening, she thought. A shiver ran down her spine. Who knows what’s really buried under the ruined castle?