Schooled in Magic (35 page)

“You can’t,” Emily interrupted her. “That isn’t something you can just
kill
.”

“She isn’t human,” the woman said. Emily felt sick, fighting down the urge to cast the botched spells she’d tried to use on Alassa again. Only the danger of challenging a magician of unknown power convinced her to stay her hand. “I bought her fair and square.” Her voice became calculating. “Unless, of course, you wish to buy her for yourself?”

Emily stared at her, not bothering to disguise her loathing. “How much?”

“Interesting,” the woman mused. “You want the entire creature, I presume? That could cost you ten gold coins.”

“Ten gold coins,” Emily repeated. The price for fake Dragon’s Blood made that look like nothing, but ten gold coins was a major chunk of her savings. “How much would you make if you sold her and her wings?”

The fairy howled as she heard the words, a thin sound that almost made Emily’s heart break.

“Maybe seven gold coins,” the woman mused. “But you could easily make your money back if you ground her up and mixed the remains with ...”

“I’ll give you eight gold coins,” Emily said. It might not be a smart thing to do–she had no idea how many fairies there were–but she felt as if she had no choice. She wasn’t going to leave the fairy to be mutilated and then used for whatever horrifying purpose the town’s selectman had in mind. “And that’s the best offer you will get.”

The woman reached into the cage, picked up the fairy by her gossamer wings and pulled her out of the cage. Emily winced when she saw the dark wings, shimmering like a soap bubble on the verge of bursting, just before the fairy was dumped into her hand. She resisted the urge to stroke the creature as she put her down on the table and reached into her coin pouch for the money. Maybe she
had
been cheated, but she couldn’t do anything else. The fairy’s plight had affected her on a very basic level.

“Here,” she snarled, and gave the shopkeeper the money. “Thank you!”

She picked up the fairy and stalked out of the store, into the open air. The fairy’s wings came to life at once, beating against her palm until she opened her hand and let the fairy drift up into the air like a giant bee. Her dark wings were moving so rapidly that the fairy seemed surrounded by inky darkness.

Feeling like a pervert, Emily looked away, embarrassed. When she looked back, the fairy was gone.

Imaiqah was
still
trying on clothes, utterly unaware of what Emily had just done. Some of the clothes looked like silk, which came–if Emily recalled correctly–from living creatures. Were they animals in this world, or were they as intelligent as the fairy she’d liberated? The thought sickened her. Professor Locke had claimed that human mistreatment of other intelligent creatures had helped lead to the wars that had almost destroyed humanity. How many other crimes, beside slaughtered fairies and bled dragons, were committed in the name of magic?

Shaking her head, Emily walked onwards until she happened to glance into a courtyard and saw Alassa sitting in front of a table, a glass of red liquid sitting in front of her. The Princess didn’t look happy at all, Emily realized; in fact, it almost looked as if she had been crying. Emily hesitated, unsure of what she should do, before stepping into the courtyard and realizing that it was an upscale drinking establishment, almost completely deserted. Alassa looked up, saw her, and made a face.

Emily almost walked away, but something told her to stay. She’d worked with Alassa on Basic Charms long enough to know that there
was
a human being buried under the royal arrogance and carelessness that seemed to make up her public persona. Besides, she
had
hurt Alassa very badly, even if it had been thoroughly deserved. No one could experience something like that without being badly scarred, even if nothing was visible.

“Hi,” Emily said, as lightly as she could. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Alassa’s hand twitched, as if she were on the verge of reaching for her wand. “Do you
think
I want to talk about it?”

Emily almost walked away a second time, and then forced herself to sit down. “I think you
need
to talk about it,” she said seriously. Alassa’s face reminded her of her own, back when she’d seen no way out of her life, apart from death. “You seem depressed.”

Alassa began to laugh, bitterly. “Depressed,” she repeated. “I have a problem and I don’t know how to cope with it. I’d say I’m depressed!”

Emily studied her for a long moment. “And what is your problem?”

Alassa’s laugh became a cruel, sardonic giggle. “My problem?” She repeated, between giggles. “My problem is you!”

“M
E?”

Alassa nodded, looking down at her glass. “You. You’ve ruined my life.”

Emily stared at her, puzzled. How, exactly, had she ruined Alassa’s life?

True, the Royal Brat had needed a lesson in the dangers of picking on people, and she was actually making progress on Basic Charms - with Emily’s help.

But then, Emily thought, it was possible that Alassa, unlike many of the other students, had never had to grow up. Instead, she’d been a Royal Princess, coddled from the moment she drew her first breath.

One of Emily’s older teachers from back home had told his class that there was a difference between urban children and those from the countryside. Urban children were rarely taught anything useful, at least in a
practical
sense, while the children from the countryside started helping their parents from a very early age. Emily hadn’t believed him at the time–she knew kids who’d had paper routes to earn money–but right now she understood what he meant. A child like Imaiqah, born to a hard-working merchant, needed to help her father as soon as she could walk, just to repay the resources he’d invested in her. Imaiqah had needed to grow up very quickly; indeed, Emily suspected that Imaiqah’s natural mathematical talents were far greater than anyone Emily had known back home, perhaps because Imaiqah had been figuring sums for her father as soon as she could grasp the concept of two plus two.

Alassa, on the other hand, had never really had to learn anything, let alone work for a living or train for war. A Crown Prince was taken to the field as soon as he could walk in order to be schooled in the arts of fighting, but no one would dream of exposing a Crown Princess to such treatment. Those delicate little girls were the mothers of the next generation of royalty. They were to be cosseted and protected and...

...Whatever else could be said about Alassa’s upbringing, she had not been properly prepared for the real world. Alassa was a Mary of Scotland, Emily decided, rather than Elizabeth of England. And Mary had ended up having her head cut off by her cousin, the first Queen Elizabeth.

“I didn’t mean to ruin your life,” Emily said after a long pause. It was hard to pick and choose the right words. Her school had once sent her to a psychologist and she’d found the entire process maddening. The moron had asked silly questions and then not even bothered to listen to the answers. Now, she felt a twinge of sympathy for him. “And I didn’t mean to get you paddled either.”

Alassa glared at her. “Did you mean to almost kill me?”

“No, but you
did
start it,” Emily said. She wasn’t about to prostrate herself in front of a spoiled brat, even if Alassa
had
started to grow up. “You turned me into ...
something
and you tormented my friend. Didn’t anyone tell you not to do someone a
small
injury?”

Alassa picked up her glass and took a swig. “My parents told me that I would be Queen one day,” she said, absently. “I tried to act like a Princess.”

“I’d say you succeeded,” Emily said, unable to resist the chance to be snide. Of course, Alassa didn’t understand the joke. She turned back to the original topic of conversation. “What happened?”

“I don’t understand,” Alassa said. “Where did I go wrong?”

Emily felt her eyes narrow. “What did your parents say to you?”

Alassa looked up at her, meeting her eyes. “Where do you come from, really?”

“Somewhere else,” Emily said, discarding the thought of lying outright. “Why does it matter?”

“My parents sent me a letter,” Alassa said. She took another sip of her drink. “Their Man-At-Arms has told them that a merchant in their city has introduced his horsemen to something called
stirrups
. This same merchant has also introduced a new system for counting numbers that has pushed the Accounting Guild into demanding action. And all of these innovations already have names. Duncan tells me that the accounting system is
mature
.”

She didn’t take her eyes off Emily’s face. “Even
I
know that a new spell, one created from scratch, needs time and effort before it is workable. Your accounting system seems perfect, too perfect to be true.”

Emily blinked. “
My
accounting system?”

“The merchant who introduced it is Imaiqah’s father,” Alassa said tartly. “How many different ideas can one man have?”

Benjamin Franklin had thousands of ideas
, Emily thought. But Franklin–or even his son–wouldn’t have been considered a suitable influence in this world. And he, too, had stood on the shoulders of giants.

“You gave your friend these ideas and she gave them to her father,” Alassa said. Her voice held no doubt at all. “And now they’re already upsetting the world.”

She tapped the table. “And my parents have told me, they
ordered
me, to get close to the Child of Destiny. They said that I was to encourage you to help us without causing further disruptions in the Kingdom ... They said I was to help
you
, to learn from
you
... I told them that you were tutoring me and they were
proud
! My father said that I could even invite you home for the holidays!”

Emily stared at her in absolute disbelief, and then found her voice. “You have to be kidding. Me? Visit a King and Queen?”

“You’re a Child of Destiny,” Alassa said. “Anointed by a dragon. What am I to you?”

“I - I don’t know,” Emily admitted. She
wasn’t
a Child of Destiny. And yet she’d already upset the world. Did Alassa’s parents believe that Emily could be used to secure their Kingdom, if they made nice with her, or did they think they could use her to keep control as the ripples of change grew stronger? If they had known–or suspected–some of the other concepts that Emily had suggested to Imaiqah’s father, they would have fainted. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“I looked in a book,” Alassa said. “No Child of Destiny has ever
wanted
to be a Child of Destiny. That doesn’t stop them from changing the world.”

Emily suspected they’d read the same book.
Children of Destiny
was thin, barely passing for genuine scholarship. It was really nothing more than a list of Children and their exploits, some rather extraordinary. The one factor that almost all of them had had in common was that they had been declared Children of Destiny
after
they had already changed the world. Hindsight, it seemed, allowed them to be identified easily.

Curious, Emily had tried to determine if magic could be used to see the future. The books had been quite vague on the subject, which suggested to her that it wasn’t really possible, at least not in any useful way. That fitted in with what Emily knew of the many-worlds theory, along with simple common sense. If she were told that doing something would kill her, she’d do something else, which would invalidate the prophecy.

But Shadye had clearly believed that he
could
identify a Child of Destiny–and failed spectacularly.

Yet Emily
was
changing the world.

And if you believe that you’re infallible
, a little voice whispered at the back of her mind,
you’ll fall down hard for sure
.

“I didn’t mean to do that either,” Emily admitted. “And I am sorry for whatever I have done to you.”

“You’re sorry?” Alassa demanded. She swept the glass off the table and watched as it crashed to the ground. “You’re
sorry
?”

Her voice hardened, as if she was trying hard not to cry. “I’m the laughing stock of the school. I can’t even cast a simple spell properly. A girl with barely a week’s experience in magic almost kills me. The Warden whips me and then leaves me to stand, in the corridor, as I cry. My friends snigger at me behind my back. No one takes me seriously any longer.”

Emily saw real tears in Alassa’s eyes as she raged on. “And now my parents tell me that I should cuddle up to you, the girl who shattered everything I ever had, and convince you to be my friend. I’d rather die! Do you know what it’s like to have everyone laughing at you behind your back?”

“Yes,” Emily said flatly. She knew what it was like to be alone, and friendless ... and Alassa hadn’t had any real friends. Maybe no one would dare touch her, or pick on her, but being alone was enough of a torment for a growing teenage girl. Or maybe, now that Emily had escaped serious punishment for almost killing her, others would be emboldened to strike back at their former tormentor. “I used to be very alone.”