Little Witches (Schooled In Magic Book 21) Read online

  Effectively over, she corrected herself. There’s still a bunch of necromancers out there.

  The thought made her smile. They might still be there, but their power had been broken. She’d reignited the nexus points, devised battery-powered spells to cripple or kill a necromancer... it would be a long time, if ever, before they were wiped out completely, yet they would never pose a threat again. The curse that had lingered over the Blighted Lands had been broken, once and for all.

  She stepped into the shower, allowing the water to run down her body and smooth away the aches and pains. Void had cheated - in hindsight, she should have expected a trick of some kind - but she knew she’d done well. She’d come as close to winning a duel with him as she ever had. She would have won, if he hadn’t stuck a wand up his sleeve. She had to admit she’d never expected it. A powerful sorcerer rarely needed a wand to duel.

  Shaking her head, she turned off the water and dried herself with a towel. She’d learnt spells to dry herself, but using a towel felt better. The apprenticeship robe felt a little small, as if she’d outgrown it. She frowned - she hadn’t expected to grow any more - and then shook her head. Perhaps she was on the verge of outgrowing the apprenticeship itself. It was hard to imagine what, if anything, could surpass defeating the necromancers. She didn’t think anyone would question Void if he declared she’d completed the apprenticeship and let her go.

  But you don’t want him to send you away, her thoughts pointed out. You want to stay.

  She rubbed her forehead, then tied back her hair into a neat ponytail. She’d spent the last few months digging her way through Void’s vast collection of magical tomes, studying spells and theories that had been painstakingly worked out over the last thousand years. Void had cautioned her that not everything was trustworthy - something she knew from personal experience - but it had still been fascinating. Part of her would have been happy to vanish into a library and spend the rest of her life studying. The remainder yearned for a way to put the spells to use. Some of them were clearly nonsense - there were entire volumes on magic that followed no discernible rules - but some held hints of practicality, if only she studied them long enough.

  Her lips quirked. Life as a magician was complicated enough without the ancient mages writing their books to conceal, rather than reveal. She’d grown used to the little additions to the spells, the twists and turns that would lead to failure - if not outright disaster - if the caster didn’t work his way through the spell piece by piece first. Someone had even joked the warning should be written at the back of the books, just to make sure they were actually read. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so serious. She’d learnt that lesson the hard way, too.

  She took one final look in the mirror, then turned and headed through the door and up the stairs to her chambers. The tower had revealed some of its secrets to her, in the last few months, but others were still beyond her, tantalizingly close and yet still out of reach. Void had hinted the tower was growing to accept her, perhaps even to like her, but she wasn’t sure that was true. The tower could only accept one master. There would be secrets, she was sure, that wouldn’t be revealed to anyone beyond the tower’s master.

  Silent stood in the chamber, her hands clasped behind her back. Emily felt a flicker of irritation. The maid was a constant presence, yet she more than lived up to her name. She was so completely reserved, particularly in the tower itself, that Emily had never managed to befriend her. It made a certain kind of sense - they were so far apart that they could never be true friends - but it was irritating. Even now, seven years after entering the Nameless World, she wasn’t used to having servants. She’d sooner do the work herself than have a maid hanging around, moving in and out of her rooms as if she owned the place.

  “My Lady.” Silent’s voice was clipped, precise. “I have placed your letters on the table.”

  Emily looked at the table and felt her heart sink. There were a lot of letters waiting for her. She’d chafed at Void’s insistence she stay in the tower, and out of contact with everyone, while she recovered, but... she stared at the pile and wondered if she’d made a mistake. A number of the letters would be useless, ranging from offers of marriage to requests for patronage, yet she thought she should look at them. It was better to know what she was ignoring - on the grounds she didn’t have the time or resources to reply - than to risk being blindsided by an unknown threat. Her heart sank still further as she spotted a couple of letters from Jan. Void had made it clear he didn’t approve of their relationship, such as it was. He’d cautioned her that they should both put their apprenticeships first.

  It isn’t as if we started a proper relationship, Emily thought, curtly. We’ve only met up a handful of times.

  “The Master requests the pleasure of your company for dinner, in one hour from now,” Silent informed her. “Would you like something to drink before then?”

  “Yes, please,” Emily said. She sat down and stared at the pile, then reached for the first letter. “And then you can go back to your room.”

  The maid curtsied and withdrew. Emily picked up the first letter and opened it, scanning the text quickly. An inventor wanted her to invest in his invention - the details were very vague - and offered to share the profits in return. It looked like a con to her, although she had to admit there was no way to be sure. She put the letter to one side, wondering if she should hire a secretary. Alassa could probably recommend someone with a combination of common sense and trustworthiness, someone who would agree to take binding oaths to keep whatever they learnt to themselves. The nobility might have problems accepting that their servants were people, with minds of their own; Emily knew better. An untrustworthy servant could do a great deal of damage, if they wished.

  Silent returned, carrying a steaming mug. Emily nodded absently and continued to work her way through the letters. A nobleman she’d never heard of wanted her to be his daughter’s guardian and tutor. Emily snorted and put the letter aside for disposal. A young magician she vaguely remembered from Whitehall had written to her, proposing marriage. Judging by the way the letter was written, it had been dictated by someone old enough to be her grandfather. She couldn’t remember enough about the purported writer to decide if she liked him or not, but it didn’t matter. He - and his family - didn’t have anything to offer her.

  She felt her head begin to pound as she kept going. It was hard to believe that everyone sought her favor, or her advice, or... her body. She couldn’t think of anyone on Earth who attracted so much attention, not since the intellectual and academic worlds had blossomed into giant communities. The days when everyone of note wrote to each other, maintaining lively correspondences that transcended racial, sexual or national barriers, were long gone. But here... everyone wanted her opinion on everything. She stared at a letter that asked her stance on a border dispute between Alluvia and Red Rose and snorted. She’d visited Alluvia twice and Red Rose once, but she was hardly an expert. She didn’t have the slightest idea what was really going on. And no one with half a brain should trust her opinion on the subject.

  Jan’s letter was mildly charmed to ensure that she - and only she - could read it. Emily suspected Void could have opened it without detection, if he wished. It would be tricky to duplicate the magical aura surrounding the parchment, but she’d seen Void twist and redirect magic before. She felt her cheeks heat as she opened the letter and scanned it, quickly. Jan was asking her on a date. In Celeste.

  A flicker of magic shot through the tower before she could compose an answer. It was dinnertime. Emily stood, put a spell on the remaining letters to make sure they stayed in place and headed for the door. The urge to just throw the whole lot on the fire was almost overwhelming, but... she was expected to file them away for the rest of time. She rolled her eyes as she headed down the stairs. She’d spent time digging through archives left behind by powerful sorcerers. The vast majority of the paperwork had been worse than useless.

  It’ll only get worse, Emil
y predicted. She reached the dining room and stepped inside. The entire world can write letters now.

  Void stood to greet her. “Emily. Feeling better?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Emily sat, resting her hands in her lap. “You held back my letters for too long.”

  “Too many of them?” Void snorted as he summoned the maid. “You needed time to rest before you started to slip back into the real world. You split yourself in two and then one of your selves died. That always leaves a mark.”

  Emily made a face. She still had nightmares about her final moments... about her other self’s final moments. Rangka had snapped her neck, effortlessly. She’d woken screaming, more than once... she felt her temper darken as something clicked in her mind. She’d never discussed her nightmares with her master.

  Her eyes hardened. “Silent told you?”

  “It is her job,” Void said, bluntly. “Don’t take it out on her.”

  Emily winced, choosing to ignore the implication she would. Silent was a servant. She could be dismissed instantly - or worse - if she disobeyed her master.

  She frowned, returning to the original subject. “And I can go back into the real world now?”

  “If you wish,” Void said. “My advice would be to be very careful, as I told you, but you have the right to spend some time away from the tower.”

  “Yes.” Emily leaned forward. “Jan invited me to Celeste.”

  Void’s expression darkened. “That young man should be concentrating on his studies, not courting you. Master Lucknow was foolish to leave him unattended for so long.”

  “I never understood why Master Lucknow didn’t take Jan to the war,” Emily said. “There were other apprentices in the field. Me, for one. And Penny.”

  “I suspect Jan’s interests are more scholarly than practical,” Void said. He studied her for a long moment. “Are you determined to go?”

  “Yes,” Emily said. She didn’t want him to think he had a veto on what she did outside the tower. “It’ll be something different.”

  “Make sure you wear a disguise,” Void said. “You don’t want to be noticed.”

  Emily blinked. “Why not?”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my long career,” Void said, “it is that the Allied Lands are led by a pack of ungrateful bastards. Everything I’ve done for them and yet” - he shook his head - “no one regrets what you did, Emily, but now the war is over you may find they have less gratitude than you might expect.”

  “I know,” Emily said, quietly.

  “I kept you isolated for several reasons,” Void said. “One of them was for the good of your health, in all respects. Another was in the hope things would cool down. They haven’t. The end of the war has unleashed all manner of forces, each one threatening to lead to war and bloody chaos. The temptation to blame you for the chaos is overwhelming.”

  “You said they blame me for the nexus points,” Emily said. “I didn’t know...”

  “Like I said, they’re ungrateful bastards.” Void shrugged. “Try and keep from being noticed, if you can.”

  Emily nodded as Maddy entered, carrying a tray of food. The maid placed a dish in front of her - a beef stew with potatoes, she thought - and a glass of water, then turned to offer the same to her master. Void didn’t seem to like the fancy foods that dominated the tables of magical and mundane aristocrats. She’d never been quite sure why. He could have had the rarest delicacies in the world, if he’d asked for them. But then, she’d never really liked fancy foods either. The thought of eating little mice made her stomach queasy.

  Void motioned for her to tuck in, which she did. He rarely allowed conversation over dinner, at least until the first hunger pangs had been silenced. Emily’s mind churned with questions, questions she knew wouldn’t be answered. Void liked to make her solve problems for herself, instead of simply giving her the answers. She understood his logic, but there were times when it was more than a little frustrating. She was powerful and experienced and yet she sometimes still felt like a child.

  “The White City’s nexus point has reignited, as you know,” Void said. “And so have most of the others. Perhaps all of them. The results have been quite interesting.”

  Emily frowned. “In the sense they fried necromancers?”

  “In the sense that a handful of quick-thinking sorcerers have set out to claim them,” Void said. “They don’t think you own the nexus point network, not in any real sense. Some of them have even announced their intention to found whole countries of their own, as the Blighted Lands steadily return to sanity...”

  “That could take years.” Emily shivered, remembering the hellscape. “Centuries, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” Void agreed. “It’s impossible to be sure. But even if they cannot heal the land surrounding the nexus points, they can set up bases and bring in food from the north. Given time, who knows what they’ll be able to do?”

  “It won’t be easy to take control of the nexus points,” Emily said. “Lord Whitehall and his commune nearly killed themselves trying.”

  Void nodded. “But you did, at Heart’s Eye.”

  “Yeah.” Emily studied the remains of her meal. Void had insisted on going through everything she recalled from the past, after she’d completed her mission in Dragora. “I... I think it worked because the nexus point was only just flaring to life. It wasn’t burning brightly, not when I took control. The other nexus points had longer to power up.”

  She frowned. There’d been almost nothing in the textbooks about precisely how Lord Whitehall had taken control of the nexus points. The other nexus points might have been tapped - she wasn’t the first person to take control of Heart’s Eye - but the techniques were very different. It was quite possible that anyone trying to take control of one of the reignited nexus points would blow himself to bits, along with a sizable chunk of the surrounding landscape. It had happened before and would probably happen again. She wondered if that nexus point had reignited. It was quite possible.

  “You were alone,” Void said, slowly. “How did you do it?”

  Emily hesitated, then started to explain. It wasn’t wholly her secret. Caleb and she had worked together to reverse-engineer the spells tapping Whitehall’s nexus point, unaware they were falling into a stable time loop. She’d been able to help Lord Whitehall create the spells she’d studied because she’d studied the spells... she grinned at the thought. Better not to discuss that with anyone outside her small group of friends. Controlled time travel was almost impossible, but she could easily imagine someone trying if they thought it could be done.

  “Interesting,” Void said, when she’d finished. “A collection of tiny spells, each one feeding on the others, rather than a single brute-force spell.”

  “Yes,” Emily said. It looked fragile, but it wasn’t. She could snap a single thread with ease, but a cluster of threads would be a great deal harder to break. “And they grow and develop as the spell network gets stronger.”

  “Clever,” Void said. “It’s easy to see why no one else thought of it.”

  “The power requirements looked too high,” Emily said. She waited for Maddy to take the empty plates away, then frowned. “What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Void said. “There are too many... issues... that were buried, or frozen, as long as the necromancers threatened our borders. Too many resentments, too many claims, too many problems that are now coming back to life. There will be winners and losers and the winners will want to keep what they’ve got while the losers will want to refight the war or reshape the gameboard and I have absolutely no faith in their ability to come to a reasonable solution. And yes, many of them blame you because it’s easier than blaming themselves.”

  He snorted. “That would mean they’d have to change. Gods forbid the kings and would-be kings actually change!”

  “Alassa knows better,” Emily said.

  “She’s one monarch amongst many,” Void said. There was a hint of disappro
val in his voice. He’d never liked Emily getting involved in Zangarian affairs. “And she’s getting some of the blame, too.”

  He shrugged. “Go have your date, if you want. Just keep yourself safe. And we’ll resume your apprenticeship when you return.”

  Emily felt her heart leap. “I can’t wait.”

  Chapter Three

  CELESTE WAS A CITY OF MAGICIANS.

  Emily felt the magic flowing through the air as she teleported to the pads outside the city, then walked through the gates and onto the streets. Magicians were everywhere, from powerful enchanters and alchemists to charmsmiths and herbalists. She saw thousands of people thronging the streets, an air of celebration echoing through the city even though it had been two months since the end of the war. Dozens of street artists were performing skits or singing songs or telling tall tales about how the necromancers had died. It was easy enough to tell who was funding the bards. They were praising their funders to the skies, while quietly overlooking everyone else. Emily concealed her amusement as she walked past a particularly loud bard, who was singing the praises of Prince Louis, Defeater of the Necromancers. She wasn’t very good with names and faces, but she was fairly sure there hadn’t been a Prince Louis in the army. She was entirely sure he hadn't bested Rangka the Necromancer in single combat.

  She rolled her eyes as she walked up the streets, doing her best to ignore the hawkers as they tried to sell her everything from protective charms to prank spells more suited for children than grown adults. The items probably weren’t very well charmed, she thought, or the charmsmiths would have shops of their own, rather than trying to sell crap to unwitting tourists. She stepped past one particularly persistent hawker and stopped, dead, as she spotted a large statue of a fantastically endowed woman. That hadn’t been there, the last time she’d visited the city. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted the words carved under the statue. EMILY, NECROMANCER’S BANE.