Schooled in Magic (27 page)

Emily swallowed the urge to point out that Alassa wouldn’t have done anything without Emily’s help and tapped the charm in some frustration. “I cannot see what is causing the noise,” she said. She took a careful look at the lock and blinked in surprise as she realized that the answer had been right in front of her nose all the time. The lock had never been cleaned, let alone oiled. She explained what she’d deduced and then looked over at Alyssa, puzzled. “What do we do to stop that?”

Alassa smirked, rather like a cat that had swallowed the canary. “It’s simple,” she said. “We just stick a silencing charm on the lock first.”

She moved her wand, casting the charm, and then repeated the unlocking spell. The lock clicked open in absolute silence. After a moment, Emily looked down at the original spell and added a third component, muffling sound as the charm did its work. When she finally cast it, it worked perfectly.

“Good work, both of you,” Lombardi said. The rest of the class seemed to have finally figured out the missing link as well. “You may go to a study room and tackle your next assignment.”

Emily would have liked to have had the study rooms in her old school. They were small, but comfortable; equipped with parchment, pencils and a jug of something that tasted rather like fresh orange juice. If Alassa hadn’t been there ... her back twitched, almost as if she expected Alassa to slam a spell into her while she was looking away, but nothing happened. Instead, Emily picked up the assignment and studied it. They had been ordered to compose a spell that would create an image of herself that floated in midair. The instructions didn’t use the word hologram–absently, she wondered how many other words were missing from their lexicon–but she couldn’t think of it as anything else.

“You could have killed me,” Alassa said as she knelt on the chair rather than sitting properly. There were no cushions in the room. “I ... ”

Emily felt her temper rise and fought it down savagely. “Listen to me,” she said, as calmly as she could. “You are a Royal Princess who will be Queen, one day, of a very powerful country. That country will not survive your reign unless you start realizing that there are limits to your power and you learn how to handle people properly!”

Alassa flushed, one hand twitching towards her wand before she caught herself. “Who are you to lecture me on
anything
?”

“I’m a Child of Destiny,” Emily said, before she could think better of it. “What might happen to you if you pick a fight with someone like me? What might happen to your
Kingdom
?”

The whole concept still seemed a little absurd to her, but Alassa rocked back as if she had been slapped. If someone like George Washington was a Child of Destiny, did that mean that he simply
couldn’t
fail? But Washington had lost battles and come alarmingly close to losing the entire Revolutionary War on more than one occasion. Could one
really
claim that a higher power had been guiding and protecting him, or was he merely that rare combination of vision and practicality? And if there
was
a higher power, what did that say about General Howe, or Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne ... or Benedict Arnold? Arnold hadn’t been a traitor to the newborn United States at first, and might never have become a traitor if Congress hadn’t kept unjustly attacking him. Had a higher power pushed him into treason to boost Washington’s statue?

But if that were true, she asked herself, what happened to free will?

“You make enemies,” she said out loud, “and some of them are going to become
real
sorcerers. Others might become necromancers if you treat them so badly they forget the dangers and reach for whatever source of power they can find. Or maybe one day, all of your population will rise up and hang you in the streets.”

“They
can’t
,” Alassa said, genuinely shocked. “They
love
their princess ... ”

“Caesar talked about himself in third person too,” Emily muttered. “But Caesar had a hell of a lot more reason to be pleased with himself.”

She took a breath. The life of Julius Caesar wouldn’t mean anything to Alassa. “There once was an Emperor”–the word Tsar meant Emperor–“who shared the same delusion. But he was an incompetent man trying to govern a country by himself, unwilling to either let his subordinates have enough authority to solve problems themselves or to grant his people the freedoms they desperately needed. Eventually, his land collapsed into civil war and the Emperor and his entire family were executed by the rebels. The rebels were so hardened by their experience that they effectively created their own Emperor to rule their country. And it kept falling apart around them until it was too late.

“You want to rule? Learn
how
to rule first,” Emily snapped. “Not just how to give orders, but how to give the
right
orders–and when to step back and
not
issue orders. Because you have enemies and the next one might deliberately set out to kill you!”

She found herself wondering just what Alassa’s more distant relatives would do when they realized how close the princess had come to death. Would they see advantage in pushing her into tempting fate again? Or would they suggest–snidely–that Alassa return home, crippling her magical studies? Or ... there were just too many possibilities, few of them good.

Emily shook her head. “We’re going to pass Basic Charms. And you are
going
to work with me, parsing spells out piece by piece. And once you master it, you can finally go on to the advanced classes.”

Alassa’s blue eyes stared into Emily’s for a long moment, before Alassa nodded. Up close, she looked alarmingly fragile, as if the healing spells hadn’t been quite perfect. Or perhaps the Healers had just wanted to leave her with a mark to remind her of her own foolishness. It would probably fade away sooner or later.

“Good,” Emily said. “Now, where should we begin?”

“T
ODAY’S LESSON PLAN HAS BEEN ALTERED,”
Sergeant Harkin said, glaring at his students. “It has, in fact, been altered because of one of you.”

Emily stood as close to ramrod straight as she could, trying to keep her expression blank. She would be astonished if he were talking about anyone else. The Sergeant knew that Emily had nearly killed Alassa and if Emily had done something so stupid in
his
class she would have been expelled on the spot. And everyone else should know it too. The rumors that she’d killed Alassa had faded away when the girl had returned to classes, but it didn’t stop
all
the whispers.

“Emily, step forward,” Harkin ordered.

Reluctantly, Emily obeyed.

“In the military, it is vitally important to learn from your mistakes–and you will make mistakes. It is also important”–his gaze swept the remaining students–“to learn from someone else’s mistakes. And cheaper than learning from your own.”

Emily braced herself, knowing that this wasn’t going to be pleasant.

“Emily did not seek out conflict with Princess Alassa,” Harkin informed them. “But when challenged, she was too slow to strike at her enemy before she was already affected by Alassa’s spell. She managed to break it–a not-inconsiderable feat–and then allowed rage and panic to blind her. By putting two spells together, she nearly killed the Princess.”

His voice tightened. “Neither spell on its own was meant to be lethal. Put together, the results could have been disastrous.” He tapped his baton against his leg as he paused to allow the message to sink in. “You will all be casting spells intended for battle in this class–and, should you graduate, you will have the opportunity to serve the Allied Lands in combat. You cannot allow panic, or rage, or fear, to govern your response to a threat. If you did, the results can be dangerously unpredictable.”

He looked at Emily, his scarred face impassive. “To add to that, Emily did nothing to knock down Alassa’s cronies. If they had decided to kill her there and then, they could have done so. Emily allowed the horror of her own mistake to paralyze her. The ultimate objective of warfare is victory; Emily could have won one battle and lost the overall war. She took her eyes off the prize out of horror at what she had done.

“We will be teaching you how to react calmly and appropriately to threats, whatever the provocation,” he concluded. “And I will be expecting you all to learn to keep your minds focused, even when your bodies are hurting and enemies are pressing in from all sides. Using poorly-cast spells in combat can be more dangerous to your own side than to the enemy.”

Emily felt the students staring at her, even though she didn’t dare take her eyes off the Sergeant. “Step back,” he ordered, finally. “And
don’t
be so careless in my class.”

There was a long pause as the class digested the unexpected lesson. “Now,” the Sergeant said, “can anyone tell me how many
official
spying spells there are at the moment?”

“Five hundred, or thereabouts,” Jade said. He seemed to have everything memorized, Emily thought; her own reading had been nowhere near as complete. But then, he’d had five years at the school to memorize everything he could. “I think there are some that are not recommended.”

“Five hundred and sixty-four, as of the last publication of
Peeking Toms
,” Harkin said. Some of the students giggled and he glared at them. “The sorcerer who edits it has a warped sense of humor. How many
unofficial
spells are there?”

Jade hesitated and one of the girls jumped in. “I read that there were thousands of makeshift spells to spy on someone. There were so many variants that most of them were related to others in some way.”

“Indeed,” Harkin agreed. “Spying spells are fairly easy to design, so the same spells have been created by several different magicians at the same time. Some magicians tried to keep their own personal spells to themselves, only to read with horror that someone had independently duplicated their work and published it for everyone to see.”

He smiled, unpleasantly. “So tell me ... how effective are those spells?”

“They’re not,” Emily said, quickly.

Harkin turned his gaze on her. “All those spells are not effective? And are all those sorcerers wasting their time inventing them?”

Emily refused to allow him to intimidate her any further. She’d seen spells for spying on friends, enemies and love interests in the book of practical jokes, only to see that someone had scrawled, just past the front cover, a droll note that most of the spying spells wouldn’t work inside Whitehall’s protective wards. It was, apparently, a quick way to get a very unpleasant encounter with the Warden.

“Spying spells can be countered,” she said. Professor Lombardi had pointed out that there was no such thing as an invincible charm, even if it was produced by a necromancer and powered by mass murder. “If you were a sorcerer who wanted to work in privacy, you’d put up wards to prevent someone from peeking in on you. They might come up with something new, but it would quickly be analyzed and countered by the other sorcerers. Any advantage someone gained by inventing a new spell wouldn’t last very long.”

“Quite right,” Harkin said. He turned his gaze back to the rest of the class. “And what, from a military perspective, does this mean?”

“It means you can’t spy on your enemies,” a burly boy said. He seemed to be from the same year as Jade and the look he tossed at Emily was far from friendly. His gaze made her want to cringe back and hide. “You’d never know
what
they were doing.”

Emily frowned, considering the possibilities. Yes, you could move an army under cover of magic, creating a giant blank spot where spying spells couldn’t work properly. But if you did so, the watching defenders would surely spot the zone where their magic didn’t work and conclude that the enemy army was hiding in the void. She had a sudden vision of enemy sorcerers creating dozens of blank spots to confuse the defenders, with only one blank spot hiding the real army. Or they might not conceal the army at all, gambling that the defenders would spend so much time trying to penetrate the blank spots that they wouldn’t realize that the advancing army was in plain sight.

“True enough,” Harkin said. “Although unless they establish a base camp and stand still, their passage is going to be noted. You cannot move upwards of a thousand men without leaving a trail–and that trail will be very visible once the concealment spells fade away.”

He smiled, rather darkly. “One sorcerer had the bright idea of trying to create a single spell that would blanket an entire country,” he added. “What do you think went wrong?”

Aloha spoke up before anyone else could say a word. “The defenders were affected by the spell directly and they were able to dispel it. That was the Battle of Thornton’s Reach.”

“A classic example of a sorcerer coming up with a brilliant idea and then being so impressed with his own brilliance that it blinded him to the spell’s shortcomings,” Harkin agreed. “The idea was tried again the following year, with some slight modifications. It didn’t work because the defenders were still able to analyze the spell and, instead of breaking it, simply altered their own spying spells to look through the loopholes. That particularly brilliant and stupid sorcerer died in the second battle, thankfully. Who knows
what
he might have thought of next if he had survived?”