After a wonderful dinner at the Crab and Gull, during which Thora and Wren assured Liv that she no longer had to worry about meals at High Hall, she wanted nothing more than to immerse herself in the hot spring beneath Castle Whitehill and clean off the sweat and dirt of the day.

Unfortunately, she would have to make do with the facilities provided at High Hall, instead. Liv had a feeling it would not be the last time she longed for the chance to soak for a bell in the delicious heat.

There was a bath chamber on each side of the second floor, which meant that Liv shared hers with both Sidonie and Edith. The room was divided in half, with a garderobe and basin, both of marble and attached to enchanted pipes, on one side. Those, she’d made use of already. On the other side of a doorless half-wall was a tiled floor that had been cunningly crafted to slope down into a drain at the center. On the wall, where the pipes were exposed, was a tap of the same kind she’d seen at Freeport six years earlier.

Liv expected there was a cistern on the roof, to collect rainwater, just like at Acton House, but she saw no iron tub. Instead, clay pipes ran across the ceiling in an arrangement she did not recognize. Somewhat doubtfully, she stripped off her dirty clothes, turned the tap, and waited to see what happened.

A sheet of steaming water fell from the ceiling, as wide as a broad man’s shoulders, and hit the tiled floor with a splash. Cautiously, Liv reached a hand out to touch the falling water, and found it nearly as hot as the springs beneath Whitehill.

“How is it, m’lady?” Thora asked, from the other side of the half-wall. The maid had brought a basket of soaps, oils, brushes and a thick, fluffy cotton towel.

“It isn’t the baths beneath the castle,” Liv said, stepping under the water. It plastered her hair back from her head instantly, and ran down her body. “But it may be the next best thing. I do wish there was a place to sit down, though.”

It was obnoxious to hold her splinted and bandaged arm out of the water, but she managed, with Thora’s help. By the time Liv crawled into her bed, she was clean and comfortably warm, with the satisfying fullness of the mana from her evening meal in her belly. After fighting three duels over the course of a single day, she had no difficulty at all falling asleep.

In the morning, after casting her spells into her wand, Liv ate at the second floor table with the other girls for only the second time. When a kitchen maid brought up a special plate for Liv, Edith narrowed her eyes, and Liv braced herself for more of the girl’s sharp tongue.

“Oh, good,” Sidonie said, cutting the unpleasantness off before it could begin. “You’ve got your proper food arranged. Those crab cakes look delicious.”

“They are,” Liv confirmed, after taking a bite. “And they go well with the broken eggs. I can’t even tell you how good it feels to finally not be running around with hardly any mana.”

“Your ‘hardly any’ is everyone else’s full,” Sidonie teased her.

“Is that really because you're half Eldish?” Helewise Boyle asked. Liv had hardly seen the girls from the other side of the floor, with the exception of Tephania, since the last time they’d all sat down to a meal together.

“Helly!” Florence chided her, shaking her head so that her dark hair rustled about her shoulders. “That’s rude to ask.”

“At least partly,” Liv confirmed, taking a sip of tea to wash down a slice of buttered bread. The wheat must have been grown on the very edges of a shoal somewhere, for it practically hummed with mana. “Though not even all Eld would have as high a mana capacity as I do. My grandfather is the child of Celris, so the Vædic blood has a lot to do with it, as well.”

“You’re the great-grandaughter of one of the old gods?” Tephania asked. Liv was starting to think that eyes-wide was the girl’s natural state.

The table stilled, with not even the clatter of forks and knives, while the rest of the girls waited for Liv’s answer. “It’s... not that uncommon, among my father’s people,” she explained. “My grandmother is descended from Däivi, the Lady of Time. And then Keri - he’s the one who came south to address the great council a few years back - he’s descended from Bælris.”

“I thought those were rumors,” Florence remarked. “Not actually true.”

“It hasn’t been nearly as many generations for the Eld,” Liv said. “Over a thousand years for humans, and no one knows who’s descended from who anymore,” she said, with a shrug. “But my grandfather remembers the war. He was a child, but he was there. It just doesn’t feel like so long, when you can listen to him talk about it.”

Edith rose from the table, pushing back her chair. “I need to get ready if I’m to be on time,” she said. “You’d all better hurry up, as well.” She strode away from the table and back into her room.

“Did I say something to upset her?” Liv asked, quietly.

“Oh, honey,” Florence said. “Your entire existence upsets her. She’s been pining after your man for the past two years. I think she was hoping you’d be some awful hag his father had found him, and that she could win Cade away and become the next Lady Talbot. But then you show up, and you’re not only pretty as a picture, but you absolutely trounce your entire class in magical combat. And now you tell her you’re descended from literally two dead gods? I think she’s just realizing she hasn’t a hope of ever competing.”

“Do you think I should go and talk to her?” Liv wondered. The idea of another girl wanting to be with Cade made her feel surprisingly irritable and jealous, but she tried not to show it.

“Just give her some space,” Sidonie advised. “I’ll find a moment to feel her out. She was correct about one thing, though, ladies. We need to get moving.”

☙

By ninth bell, Liv was waiting on the stands at the practice yard with at least sixty other students, including Tephania, Arjun and even Rosamund. Wren lingered off to one side, keeping an eye on the proceedings. When Master Jurian - she still had a difficult time thinking of him by the title of ‘professor’ - arrived, he came with several journeymen at his heels.

“We begin with conditioning!” Jurian declared. “Remedial Class, you’re with journeyman Johanna. Basic Class, follow Gamel. Advanced students, you know what to do. I expect you back here before anyone else and stretching.”

“Get moving!” Gamel bellowed, and one of the older girls who’d helped oversee matches jogged toward the road.

“Follow me!” she called, and Liv guessed she must be Johanna. More journeymen fell in along the sides and rear of the pack of students as they set off, like shepherd dogs.

This, at least, was familiar. After more than twenty years of running with Baron Henry’s guards, Liv was confident she could more than keep up. She gathered her skirts in her left hand, so that she wouldn’t trip over them, and followed the mob down the bluff.

“Why aren’t you wearing trousers?” Rosamund said. The two girls had fallen beside each other easily, while Arjun and Tephania had been left behind toward the rear of the pack, amongst the stragglers. “It makes running a whole lot easier.”

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

“I don’t own any,” Liv told her, in between measured breaths.

“Not at all?” Rosamund shot her an incredulous glance. “How? You fence in a skirt, you ride in a skirt, everything?”

“Of course!” Liv said. “Girls don’t wear trousers in the north. I can see it's a bit different here.” In truth, half the girls around them had arrived without skirts, and Liv suspected the number would only increase as the days went on. Only a few of the first years, like Liv, seemed slightly scandalized by the sight.

“I forgot how far out in the country you grew up,” Rosamund said. “Places like that are always twenty or thirty years behind the times.” As they kept on, Liv noticed a bat wheeling in the sky above, and she smiled at the thought that Wren would be close enough to help if she was needed.

Master Jurian’s journeyman ran them a good distance, down the street and then east out of town onto a trail that wound through stands of trees and grasses that Liv hardly recognized. There were pines and maples, but different from what she was used to in the mountains, and then stranger things beside. As they pressed on, fewer and fewer students were able to keep up, and once the journeymen turned them around, Liv found that she and Rosamund were running past students who had stopped along the side of the path to recover, sucking in great heaving breaths.

“They’re going to have a rough year of it,” Rose huffed. “I don’t know what they expected.”

“I always hated running,” Liv admitted. “But now I’m glad they made me do it.” Even for her, however, the last stretch back up the bluff was difficult. The journeymen yelled at them to sprint up the street into the training yard, where most of the students collapsed. Liv knew better, and it didn’t surprise her to see that Rosamund did, as well. They fetched their wineskins from the stands, and walked in a circle around the training yard to cool off.

“Those of you that made it,” Jurian shouted, “Good work. Go to your journeymen.” With that, finally, the classes separated, and Liv had to bid farewell to Rosamund, who joined the older students in the Advanced class with the professor.

Liv, on the other hand, found herself with a group of students she didn’t really know, all put through their paces in pairs so that journeyman Gamel could see what they knew. She couldn’t use her right arm, so Liv made do with her left, but it put her entirely off balance and made her feel both awkward and useless.

By the time the tenth bell rang, Gamel gathered them up in a loose circle around him. “Most of you have a good foundation,” he said. “No, you don’t leave until I dismiss you, so settle down,” he scolded a boy with ginger hair. “I see a few bad habits, and we’ll be correcting them. I recommend you run on your own tomorrow, if you don’t have a combat class. You need to get your endurance up, and taking days off isn’t going to help. Ladies in skirts, I’d also highly recommend you go into town and get something better suited to what we’re doing. Alright, that’s it. Get out of here. If you run, you might have time to clean up before your next class.”

That advice, it turned out, was overly optimistic.

By the time Liv dragged herself back up to High Hall and splashed water in her face, half the hour had already passed. Rather than try to change, she grabbed one of her blank books, a quill, and a pot of ink, and made her way down to the infirmary.

This time, there were far fewer students, and Liv guessed the remedial and basic courses were meeting somewhere else. She was one of only two dozen students, including Arjun, to gather there.

“I recognize most of you from last year,” Professor Annora said, looking them over. “And a few promising first years. Those of you who’ve been here before know the drill: this is a practical course. You’ll be treating students here at the infirmary under my guidance, and the supervision of my journeymen. We schedule our advanced classes just after the combat classes let out for a reason - it’s the busiest time of the day. We’ve got a broken finger to splint, four cases of heat exhaustion, and a sprained ankle from the run. Let’s get to work.”

This, too, was comfortable for Liv, though it brought back memories of her days in the Lower Banks with old Master Cushing. She ended up helping to set the broken finger, with Arjun.

“Cailet Co Costis,” Arjun murmured, once the bone had been straightened, and the poor injured girl, red faced and crying, gave an audible sigh of relief as the healing magic moved through her finger.

“Good,” Professor Annora said, with a nod, having paused to observe.

The woman seemed to be everywhere at once, keen-eyed and quick to offer a word of praise or advice - or to halt a treatment she judged incorrect. When the influx of patients had been treated, and mostly sent on their way, she gathered her students around to quiz them on the ailments they’d treated. Rather than a formal class, she asked and answered questions freely, and seemed happy to be diverted onto tangential questions. By the end, Liv was convinced she was going to enjoy her time in the infirmary.

“I don’t think you’ll be in the class long, though,” she observed to Arjun as they headed out. Wren, who’d found herself a place to sit just outside the infirmary, stood and followed them. “You’re clearly better than anyone but the journeymen, and the professor’s got her eye on you.”

“I need to get through both combat classes, though,” he worried. “At least to the advanced courses, and I’m in remedial now. I was never taught the first thing about fighting; that’s for the warrior jati, not my family.”

“Maybe we can put in some extra work in our free time,” Liv proposed. “I bet Rosamund would help us.”

“You’re assuming that we’ll have free time,” Arjun joked, and they parted ways for luncheon.

After a meal of rabbit stew, Liv made her way to Blackstone Hall for her final class of the day. She had to ask for directions twice before she found the library, but once she stepped into the room, she couldn’t help gasping.

Like the great hall where most of the students ate their meals, the room extended up into the second story of the building, with balconies that ran around the second floor to look down on the open room, and a wooden staircase that led up. Every wall was covered, from floor to ceiling, in wooden bookcases that had been built in, rather than set up as freestanding pieces. In the center of the first floor were desks and chairs, and it was there that Archmagus Loredan waited for his students, standing in front of a massive piece of slate hung on a wooden stand.

Once she’d collected herself, Liv hurried over and found a seat. She hadn’t made much use of her book and quill at the infirmary - in fact, she doubted she’d bother bringing them again - but she set them out on her desk now while she waited for every student to take their seat. This class was smaller than Professor Annora’s group: Liv counted only eighteen students, nearly all of whom looked older than her. The only other first year she recognized was Arianell Seton, the girl she’d defeated in her last match.

“Welcome to Advanced Grammar and Spellcraft,” Archmagus Loredan greeted them, once everyone had settled. “This is the only course that I teach here at the college, and we shall move quickly. I expect you all to keep up, and to make an appointment to see me immediately if you find you are having problems.”

For a moment, he scanned the room, making eye contact with each student individually, and then giving a sharp nod when he was finished. “You should all have a clear understanding of grammar by this point, including the basics of Vædic,” the archmagus continued. “We will now begin to apply your prior knowledge to specific words of power - in this case, Aluth.”

Caspian Loredan took up a piece of chalk in his left hand, and began laying out the conjugation of the mage guild’s word of power on the slate. It looked regular, to Liv, but she found a blank page in her notebook, dipped her quill in ink, and set to copying the chart down, anyway.

“Everyone who joins the guild will be imprinted with this word, if you haven’t been already,” the archmagus said. “The practical exercises I will give you can be adapted to other words, if you do not intend to join the guild. We will focus on adaptation and improvisation. A word of power is only as capable as the mage who wields it, and you must be open to inspiration, ready to think creatively. Expect that I will be asking you to create incantations on the fly.”

Liv grinned: the class already sounded exciting, to her. And she fully intended on learning the word of mana as soon as she could test out of her basic classes.

“I will also be teaching you,” the archmagus said, “how to cast silently, without speaking your incantations aloud.”

“How is that even possible?” a boy Liv didn’t recognize asked.

“The Vædic language is built into the very foundations of our world,” Loredan explained, turning aside from his slate. “Some believe that it was actually used to create the world, and predates what we know as reality. Mana is both the power and the mechanism by which we word our will, and the combination of Vædic and our own intent tells mana what to do. But consider this: how is our intent communicated?”

“It isn’t,” Liv called out. “We speak the incantation, but our intent is only in our minds.”

“And yet, it is understood nonetheless,” the archmagus said. “Does mana not permeate your mind, as well? Apprentice Brodbeck, have you been through the adulthood ritual of your people?”

Liv felt her cheeks flush as the other students looked at her. “Yes,” she said. “A few years ago.”

“And did you need to speak an incantation for the mana of the world to show you distant people and places?” Loredan grinned. “Yes, I have spent time in the north. What I am telling you is this: incantations are a crutch. They exist because most people do not have a mind that is disciplined enough to both shape their intent, and clearly communicate it to the mana that will act on their behalf, without a ritualized, formal structure to act as a sort of scaffolding for their thoughts. I will teach you to discard that requirement.”