A College of Magics

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Authors: Caroline Stevermer

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This book is respectfully dedicated
to the inhabitants of
Denbigh's back smoker 1975—1977.
You know who you are.
And time is not a gulf, nor space a bar;
Our hearts are loyal, even when we're far;
As once we were, again tonight we are.
 
—Georgina Goddard King
The Structure of the World
Greenlaw College
F
aris Nallaneen arrived at the gates of Greenlaw on the same day winter did. It was late afternoon, just as gray daylight began to fade into blue twilight. Behind her brougham, hired in Pontorson to bear her on the last stage of her journey, the causeway stretched back to the coast, a spine of paved road amid the sands of low tide. Before the carriage and pair was the wooden gate of Greenlaw, and in it the gatekeeper's grille with its little green shutter, tightly latched.
As Faris watched from the carriage window, Gavren got stiffly down from the box to knock at the green shutter. Gavren was not an old man, not yet, but there was gray brindled in his hair, and the marks of a long journey were plain in his bearing.
The offshore wind blew steadily, an edge of frost in it. The coach horses shifted in harness, heads down against the cold. Daylight was failing fast. Soon the green shutter would lose its color and fade into the grays of sea, sky, and stone.
Gavren grimaced at the chill and knocked again. As he dropped his hand, the shutter snapped open and a face appeared
at the grille. It was a round face, chapped red, its owner grim at the call out into the weather.
“Who goes there?” the gatekeeper demanded.
“The duchess of Galazon and her escort,” replied Gavren.
The gatekeeper regarded Gavren for a moment, then looked past him at the well-worn brougham and its tired horses. He eyed Reed, the weary driver, who had remained on the box, and sneered at Faris, the only passenger. He glanced at the sky. There was at least a chance of sleet. His face folded into satisfaction. “We have no use for titles here.” He closed the shutter.
Gavren let out a long slow breath and knocked again.
No answer.
Faris opened the carriage door. “Let me.”
“We must put up the horses and I suppose we'll have to beg our way in to do it. But try to maintain some decorum. If you give in to them at once, you'll have no mercy from them,” Gavren said. “Stay there and let me handle things.”
Bunching her creased black skirts, Faris sprang down from the brougham and joined Gavren at the gate.
“You may be forbidden to use your title once you are a student, but don't abandon it before you've even seen the place. Don't sacrifice it before you make it do you some good.”
Faris nodded at Gavren, her pale blue eyes serious, her brows knitted. Although she was eighteen, the black serge traveling suit she wore, twenty years out of fashion, in a style twenty years too old for her, made her look like a
twelve-year-old playing dress up, in clothes nearly too small for her. Her red hair sprang untidily from beneath the brim of her uncompromising hat, and her bony wrists showed distinctly in the gap between frayed cuffs and worn leather gloves.
“Don't worry. They'll have no mercy from me.” She smiled crookedly at Gavren. Her bitter smile revealed uneven, almost pointed teeth, and made her long nose look even longer. She glanced up at Reed, who was watching from the box, smiled again to herself, and knocked briskly on the shutter.
After a moment, the shutter snapped open. “Well?”
Faris put a hand against the gate to lean close to the grille. “It will be a cold night. My companions and I require lodging. We can pay well.”
The gatekeeper studied her and sneered again. “Your name and business?”
“Both too trivial to concern you. I am but a humble acolyte, come to apply for a place at Greenlaw College. My uncle Brinker thinks I will prove an apt student.”
The gatekeeper regarded her with loathing for an instant, then clapped the shutter closed. There was a hasty scrape and the wooden gate swung open.
Faris Nallaneen, duchess of Galazon, nodded again to Gavren. He rolled his eyes as he took her elbow, helped her back into the brougham, and took the seat beside her. Reed drove the carriage through the gates of Greenlaw.
Once on the other side, Faris put her hand on Gavren's sleeve. His rap on the ceiling called Reed to a halt. The
gatekeeper closed the gate and barred it, then turned to the brougham with an expectant air as Faris opened her door and leaned inelegantly out.
“So this is Greenlaw.” Faris looked about her at the courtyard and the narrow street before her, winding steeply up the stone mount. “And these are the gates, the visible built of oak, the invisible built of the Dean's will. But both guarded by the same man.”
She gave the gatekeeper a faint smile of apology. “It's the custom to tip heavily, isn't it? I'm so sorry I can't oblige you. It would look as though I tried to bribe my way in. Absurd, don't you agree? But I can't risk it.” She closed the carriage door and settled back into her seat.
From the box, Reed tossed the gatekeeper a coin. “See you do a better job keeping her in than you did keeping us out.” He managed reins and whip and the carriage moved on.
“We're to stay at the White Fleece,” Gavren told Faris. “Send word to us when you are accepted and Reed and I will go back to tell your uncle the news. If Reed can get this barge all the way up the street, we'll leave you at the door of the college. If not, we will escort you on foot.”
Faris craned her neck to see what she could of the closely built street. “Which one is the White Fleece?”
“On our right, just ahead.”
“Excellent.” Faris rapped smartly on the ceiling of the carriage. Reed drew rein. Grateful to stop, the horses halted a few yards from the White Fleece.
“I will see the proctors when I'm ready,” said Faris, before
Gavren could protest, or Reed enliven the coach horses. She opened the carriage door and sprang down into the street. “Just now I'm cold and hungry and I smell of horse. All three of us will put up at the White Fleece or I go not a yard farther. When I've had a hot bath, a decent meal, and a full night's sleep, I will consider the proctors.”
Gavren let out a breath of slow control. “Very well. There is no need to make a scene in the street about it.”
Faris smiled. “Great need. They must take me for a shrew, not a mouse. And see you don't forget to ‘your grace' me.”
“You put no stock in such things,” Reed said. He looked at Gavren. “Does she?”
“They have no use for titles here, so if I don't use mine, they'll think I'm meek.”
“God forbid,” said Reed. As Faris looked down her long, red-tipped nose at him, he added hastily, “your grace.” Since he dressed with the same severity as Gavren, he seemed far older than Faris, though the difference in their ages was barely five years.
Gavren folded his arms and sighed. “Then command us, your grace. Must we keep these nags standing much longer in the street, your grace? If they freeze in their tracks, doubtless the hostler at Pontorson will demand damages. Your grace.”
“Stable them, by all means. If they freeze in their tracks, they'll make very evil-looking statuary and the rest of the street is pleasantly gothic. It would be a pity to spoil it with hired horses.”
 
 
A
t the White Fleece, though titles were of no use, money secured them rooms and a large meal, served at one of the well-scrubbed tables in the common room.
Faris sat between her companions, oblivious of the stares of the other diners in the room. Gloves pulled off and crumpled in her lap, the cuffs of her suit halfway to her elbows, she was too hungry to worry about her appearance. She took up her spoon with exaggerated care, but after the first taste of soup she discarded her affected manners and devoted herself to the meal with enthusiasm.
When the bowls were cleared and the plates were empty, the innkeeper paused to ask them if they cared for a sweet or a savory to finish.
“Your grace?” asked Gavren, with heavy emphasis.
Faris put her mug down and nodded graciously at the innkeeper. “Yes, please.”
“Which, your grace?” asked Reed, patiently.
“Both, please.”
The innkeeper went away without acknowledging Gavren's signal to replenish their glasses.
“Greedy, aren't you?” Reed said to Faris. He turned to Gavren. “Was she born this way, or was she raised to it?”
“She was raised to know better, though she doesn't always behave the way she knows she should. Perhaps she'll learn better here.”
Serenely, Faris began to butter a morsel of bread. “If the proctors accept me, this could be my last decent meal for years. If they don't, we'll have a long trip back to Galazon, and a longer explanation to make when we get there.”
“The proctors will accept you.” Gavren's voice was heavy and cold. “It's all been arranged.”
“Of course it has. I don't know why I need to be involved at all. Everything's been arranged. Did you know, Reed, we have a spell at home in Galazon far more powerful than any I can possibly learn here? I used it to open the gates. Didn't you hear me? Just those three words—my uncle Brinker.” She swirled the ale left in her mug and looked thoughtful. “I wonder how much the proctors of Greenlaw College cost him? I wonder how much bad behavior he was able to afford to pay them to overlook.”
Gavren banged his mug on the table. “You put that right out of your mind, young madam. You're going to Greenlaw College and you are not, most certainly not, going to get yourself expelled.” He gestured emphatically for more ale. When the mugs had been refilled, he turned back to Faris. “Do you think that failing here will get your uncle out of the wardship of Galazon? Do you think antagonizing the proctors will accomplish anything? What are you planning? Do you think you can fail your admission? If you expect us to wet-nurse you back to Galazon so we can be torn into strips by your uncle's observations, I suggest you think again—your grace.”
The innkeeper returned with a flat dish of flan, creamy under a glaze of burnt sugar, and a reed basket lined with seaweed and heaped high with clams and snails and mussels, steamed in their gleaming shells. With the shellfish came a bowl of garlic butter and a handful of sharp implements of arcane design.
“I know you aren't overjoyed to be here,” Gavren continued,
“but it's more than I can do to figure out why not. There are those who would give a great deal to be in your place. Oh, you'll miss Galazon, I suppose, but it's for your own good. Behave yourself and you will do well here. At least you'll learn something besides when to plant oats and how to shoe a horse. And you and your uncle are spared the sight of each other for three years. That ought to be worth something to you.”
Faris selected a mussel and probed it savagely. “If I don't like it here, I can always go home—I'm sure Uncle will let me, once he's squeezed every penny he can out of the land.”
“If you don't like it,” said Reed, “why don't you learn what you need to learn here so you can come back and do as you please, even if your uncle does wish you elsewhere?”
Gavren put down his mug with such violence that ale splashed on the table. “Mind your tongue, Drayton Reed. Talk like that is folly—talk like that before the duchess is worse. Who pays us? Lord Brinker Nallaneen is head of the clan.”
Faris regarded Gavren with the same crooked smile she'd displayed at the gate. “Brinker Nallaneen is head of the family until I reach my majority,” she said. “What then?”
Gavren frowned at her. “That isn't for years yet.”
“Two years, twenty-three days,” agreed Faris. “No, I'm wrong. Next year is a leap year. Make it twenty-four days. What then?”
“In two years, and however many days it is,” Gavren
replied, “you will have learned that there's more to running Galazon than the legal right to try it.”
Faris nodded. “Yes, but would you side with my uncle against me?”
Disapproval and suspicion were evenly mixed in Gavren's expression. “First I'd have to see how three years at Greenlaw Collage sat with you. Now don't you go pestering Reed to answer the same stupid question.”
“I don't need to ask him. I already know what he'd say.”
“Oh, you do, do you? I'd like to hear it.”
Faris picked up a snail and set to work with the winkle pin. “You'd follow me against my uncle this minute, though it cost you your head.”
“Why, you vain little baggage. Side with a carrot-haired gawk like you against the wiliest man in Galazon? I'd be a fool to consider it.”
Faris kept her attention on the winkle pin. “Leave my hair out of it. If Gavren should follow me, it would be because I have the right. But when you follow me, it will be because you hate my uncle. Don't trouble to deny it. Those with the same ailment recognize the symptoms.” She looked up and her calmness stilled his protest before it was uttered. “Don't rebel against him yet. I have a lot to learn before my name is as potent a spell as his. Three years worth, perhaps more.” Faris discarded the empty snail shell and poked at the seaweed pensively. “It's a pity, though. I'll be homesick for Galazon the whole time.”

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