Guild Mage 98

Chapter 98: Permutations

Liv and Rosamund walked over to the ballroom together, parting ways with Arjun.  It was an odd reminder that Blackstone Hall, prior to housing the college, had been the manor of a noble family.  While the dance floor wasn’t as large as the one at the royal palace in Freeport, Liv could easily imagine a dozen couples swirling about under lit chandeliers late into the evening.

Now, the room had been filled with desks and chairs arranged into rows and columns, with another large, mounted slate board at the front for the instructor.  Like Liv’s other basic courses, Guild Law and History was taught by a journeyman.  In this case, a young man named Barnabas, who wore spectacles beneath a mop of thick, wiry black hair.

“Find yourselves a seat somewhere,” he called over his shoulder.  A length of white chalk in his hand was already leaving furious marks up and down the slate, and Liv was half-surprised there wasn’t a visible cloud of dust emanating from the front of the room.  She and Rosamund took desks next to each other near the front, which caused the other girl to give Liv a dubious look, complete with raised eyebrows and a little head shake.

“What?” Liv asked, uncorking her inkpot.  She would be very, very pleased when Professor Annora let her take the splint off her right arm – for one thing, her penmanship with her left hand was slipshod, at best.

“Most people prefer to sit a bit further back,” Rosamund pointed out.  Liv glanced behind them to see that the rar rows of desks had filled up first, leaving the front rows mostly empty.

“I don’t see why,” Liv said.  “I want to be able to hear and see without missing anything, and if I have a question I don’t want to have to jump up and down to get noticed.”

“I suppose you are pretty short,” Rosamund teased her.

“Keep talking like that,” Liv shot back, thrilled to have a friend she could joke with, “and I’ll catch you with the coldest fingers you ever felt, just when you least expect it.”  Since Emma had gotten married, she hadn’t really had anyone that she could just have fun with.

“Alright, settle down,” Barnabas called out over the assembled students, though he kept a smile and seemed relaxed enough.  “You’ve got a lot to learn this year, before you make a choice on whether to formally become an apprentice or not, and guild regulations are, frankly, a bit of a mess.”

“Why is that?” Liv asked.  She chose to ignore the way Rosamund rolled her eyes.

“Good question,” the journeyman began.  “When Lamon and Edythe Blackstone founded the college in 1156, the guild was given a charter modelled on those of the merchant guilds.  The college is technically a separate entity, operated by the guild, and Baron Lamon was made the first chancellor.  Bit of trivia, there - though everyone just calls Caspian Loredan by the title of Archmage, that’s his guild rank.  It’s his position of chancellor that puts him in charge of the college. Anyway, that should give you a bit of a glimpse into the problems - we were forced into a charter meant to handle an entirely different kind of organization.  When you’ve got a bunch of chirurgeons, for instance, it makes some sense for a master to take an apprentice and teach them.  Fine.  But our core mission is to not only preserve knowledge of Vædic magic, but to rediscover and develop it.  One person teaching one other person isn’t efficient.”

A few rows behind Liv, Hubert Carver, the boy she’d beat in the first round of armed combat examinations, raised his hand.  “I thought the guild’s purpose was to cull rifts, Journeyman?”

“No.”  Barnabas shook his head.  “That’s the price our founders had to pay for the approval of the crown and the barons at the time.  We provide a service to the kingdom as a whole, and in return we were granted several things that we absolutely needed.  For one thing, the Blackstones were allowed to name the guild as their heir, and pass on not only the property on which our campus is built, but also their word of power.  Aluth became a proprietary guild secret, and under Lucanian law the word can be taught to any member of the guild.  Without a common word holding us together, we wouldn’t have shared research to speak of, and we wouldn’t be able to induct apprentices who weren’t already inheriting magic from noble families.”

He paused.  “We’re a little off track, but that isn’t a bad thing.  The guild structure imposed on us doesn’t really fit with the college.  Oh, we do the best we can, but that’s why you have third years who aren’t journeymen, even if they qualify.  Part of what keeps the barons happy is that we educate their children, even if they don’t join the guild themselves.  So, we don’t generally do one apprenticeship to one master, even if legally we’re permitted to.”

Liv thought that his eyes lingered on her, and the ring on her finger, when he said that.  “Professor Jurian’s explained you need to test out of all your basic courses - including this one - to join the guild,” Barnabas continued.  “And that to become a journeyman, you need to test out of all but one advanced course.  If you get that far, that’s when things change.”

“And if we don’t join the guild?” Pearson asked, from the middle of the desks.  “If we’re an heir, for instance?”

“You still complete your advanced courses,” Barnabas said.  “But you don’t learn the word.  You can be part of a culling team led by a journeyman, and you can still study with any professor who will have you.  But in all honesty, most people who aren’t joining the guild leave after all of their advanced courses are done.”

Liv frowned, wondering about Cade for a moment.  They hadn’t spoken in detail about his studies – there’d hardly been time! – but he had commented about helping out Professor Blackwood.  She knew he wouldn’t be joining the guild, because he was set to inherit from his father.  Did that mean that he’d be leaving the college, soon?

“Now, how do you become a full mage, a master, or an archmage?” Barnabas asked, and tapped the slate.  “A journeyman who completes their first culling mission, outside of the college’s supervision, is a guild mage in full.  That’s it.  Anything the professors bring you to doesn’t count; we’re talking baron whoever calls for everyone to come and help, and you show up.  At that point, once the guild recognizes your rank, you can hire yourself out as a court mage or a tutor if you want, or you can travel around working on culling teams.  We’ll get to how that pays another day.”

Liv tapped the feather of her quill against her cheek, and wondered whether she could make an argument that she’d already fulfilled that particular requirement.  Probably not, she decided.

“If you want to be a master, you need to present original research to a panel of the professors here at Coral Bay,” Barnabas went on.  “Develop a new spell or enchantment, rediscover a lost word of power, something of that sort.  It needs to contribute to the guild substantially.  The panel will judge whether what you’ve done is worth the title, and they don’t take kindly to people wasting their time.  If you become a master, you’re eligible for a position teaching here as a professor.”  He tapped the last title in the list, at the top of the slate board.

“Archmage is a whole other thing,” he said.  “You’ve got to present yourself before no less than three masters, which generally means it happens here, and the requirements are entirely practical.  First, absolute control over all mana within a radius of five feet of your body, which the masters will put to the test.  Secondly, you need to demonstrate a spell that combines two or more words of power into a single effect.”

“But that means they basically have to be a noble,” a boy Liv didn’t recognize broke in.  “Doesn’t it?”

“Used to,” Barnabas confirmed.  “Until about thirty years back, when Professor Jurian and Mistress Arundell brought a new word of power back from Godsgrave.  That’s what got them both the rank of master, by the way.”

“How many archmages are there?” Liv asked, raising her hand.

“A better question is how many ever took the test,” the journeyman said.  “Edythe Blackstone was the first, and she set the requirements.  She was born a Ridley, you see, so she had the one word from her parents, and the second from the guild.  Our current chancellor is the second.  There’s been a few people along the way who came close, and there’s a going bet on when Professor Jurian puts himself forward for the test, and another one whether he makes it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Liv murmured.  She wondered whether Julianne could have passed the test, if politics hadn’t got in the way.  “Is it really that hard to combine words?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the chatter of the other students.

“The fact you're asking that shows you haven’t ever tried,” Barnabas said.  “Not that I’d expect anyone in this room has.  First, you’ve got to be good with two words.  Just imprinting them isn't enough: you need to spend years learning each one before you’re ready.  And then you’ve got to come up with a spell that can actually integrate the intent of two separate words of power.  Some of ‘em just don’t fit,” he explained.  “So Archmagus Blackstone’s two spells are pretty famous, you can find records of them in the library.  She mixed Ces, to cut, with Aluth, the word of mana.”

“The first spell let her use ambient mana in the air around her to cut just about anything she wanted,” the journeyman explained.  “Trees.  Castle walls.  Hillsides.  But the second spell was the real winner,” he said.  “She could cut mana itself, breaking spells cast by other mages. But like I said, she was fortunate.  Two good combinations?  I’m not sure anyone has managed to combine Aluth and Cei yet.  And then try to imagine something stranger.  What about Ved and Aluth - water and mana?  You’re smarter than me if you can think of something.”

Liv leaned back in her chair.  She’d had the idea of using Cel to build up a charge in the clouds overhead, before shifting to Luc so that she could direct lightning where she wanted it to go.  But after hearing Barnabas’ examples, she realized that wasn’t really combining two words: it was using them in quick succession, to aid each other.  What an archmage did would be on another level entirely. 

☙

Over the next few days, Liv slipped into a new routine.  She attended her classes and ate most meals at High Hall, with the other girls on the second floor.  Sometimes, she invited Rosamund to join them; others, she, Sidonie and Tephania would join Arjun in the great hall.  On those evenings, Cade would make a point of coming down to sit with them, as well, but Liv couldn’t eat that kind of food often.

Before coming to Coral Bay, it had been years since she’d gone days without eating mana-rich food.  Now, Liv found that even after missing only a single meal she started to get headaches, and Sidonie had pointed out that she quickly got snappish with everyone around her.

Arjun and Liv met up with Rosamund regularly, to practice wrestling, knifework, and fencing.  For the young man from Lendh ka Dakruim, it was a matter of desperation: he’d never been taught to fight, and Merek Sherard was currently terrorizing the remedial course.  The boy who’d broken Liv’s arm could have tested out at any time, but he seemed to be enjoying grinding the faces of other students into the dirt of the training yard.

Liv wanted to move up to the advanced course before Sherard joined her class, but that wasn’t her only reason for putting in the extra work.  She had to test out of three courses in order to formally declare herself an apprentice and join the guild as an adult.  Enchanting and Guild Law and History didn’t worry her.  She took copious notes during class, and reviewed what had been taught every evening.  Of the two, Enchanting was far more interesting, but neither would be a problem for her.

In Armed Combat, however, Liv’s size worked against her.  She was the shortest person in class, and even the smallest of the other girls had an inch on her.  As a result, she suffered in terms of reach constantly.  When matched with any of the boys, the difference in muscle mass made things even worse.  Over and over again, she found herself tackled, tripped, thrown, or otherwise put on the ground, where a much larger man could pin her easily.

“I’m starting to think it’s a contest or something,” she complained to Rosamund during one of their practice sessions.  “Who can sit on Liv ten times?  A dozen?  If I could use magic I’d thrash them all.”

“If they’re taking bets, maybe I should play too,” Rosamund teased her.  When Liv opened her mouth to respond, the other girl came in for a hip toss, followed her down to the ground, and then wrapped her legs around Liv’s neck in a choke hold.

But despite the frustrations of Armed Combat, there were plenty of bright points.  At Wren’s insistence, Liv took Rosamund and Tephania to the Cedar Closet, where the shopgirl was nice enough, even if she got a bit of a stammer everytime Liv looked at her.  It was on that shopping trip into town they procured breeches for swimming.  The garments ended just below the knee, exposing Liv’s entire lower legs, and the first time she wore them to Master Jurian’s class she could feel her cheeks and ears burning with embarrassment.  It was one thing to bathe with another woman, but showing her legs to men she hardly knew seemed positively indecent.

A thunderstorm rolled in over the bay on the seventh day of classes, a mere ten day before the king tide was due to come, and that was Liv’s first chance to practice with Luc since her day with Duchess Julianne up on Deer Peak.  She put on her winter cloak, pulled the hood up, and had Steria saddled.  The shaggy northern horse gave her a miserable look when she was led out into the rain, and Liv resolved to take her on a more pleasant ride soon.  

Wren went with her, riding behind Liv, and they picked their way north along the strand until they were out of sight of the college.  There, with the waves crashing up onto the shore, Liv stretched her wand up to the sky and practiced calling down bolts of lightning until she was drenched through and shivering.  She ended up making herself a blade of ice, just so that she could use the waste heat to warm up.

It wasn’t setting the lightning in motion that was the difficult part; if anything, it was eager to escape the sky and race down to the ground.  No, the trick was guiding it where you meant for it to go.  If Liv wanted to strike a patch of sand where she’d had Wren mark an ‘x,’ well, the lightning would prefer to hit the nearest tree, instead.  Liv’s practice was made all the more frustrating by the fact she couldn’t do it everyday.  She had to wait for the next storm, and who knew when that would be. 

When they made it back that evening, Liv insisted on putting Wren under the heated water in the second floor bathing room, just to warm her up.  She took her own turn after, only to find herself confronted by Edith Gage when she emerged, wrapped in a thick towel.

“What in the world were you doing out there?” the auburn haired girl asked, with a frown.  “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I wanted to practice changing the temperature of the rain,” Liv told her, because she couldn’t come up with a better excuse in the moment.  Edith gave her a suspicious look, but Liv preferred her concern to the snide comments that had come before she made her peace offering.

On the first market day since she’d come to Coral Bay, Liv and Cade had dinner together at the Crab and Gull – not outside, this time, but on the roof, where Liv was surprised to find there were a handful of private tables under cloth awnings.  She convinced Wren to let them go alone, and the two shared a bottle of wine, along with a great pile of oysters on ice that one had to suck out of their small shells.  It was a wonderful evening, right up until he gave her a package containing a pair of silk gloves that went up to the elbow.

“I know that sometimes people stare at your arms,” Cade explained, as Liv felt the softness of the fabric with her fingers.  Professor Annora had taken the splint off only two days before, despite Liv’s impatience.  “I thought that you might sometimes want to avoid that.”

Liv opened her mouth, then had to think over what to say.  On the one hand, as far as she was concerned, anyone who didn’t like the scars on her arms could go and see how they did fighting their way out of a rift.  On the other hand, in his own way, Cade was trying to be considerate of how she might feel.  She decided to focus on that part.

“Thank you,” she said, tucking the gloves into her belt.  “They’re beautiful.  Shall we walk back?”  He accompanied her up to the second floor of High Hall, which was empty by the time they’d arrived.  The servants had long since cleaned the table, and the other girls had either retired to their rooms to study, or left for their own amusements.

Perhaps it was the wine, but when Cade pressed her up against the wall of the common room and kissed her, Liv didn’t stop him.  She felt warm and fuzzy-headed, and a little bit like she had when Celestria Ward had used her magic.  There was an intense need to be touched, and Liv only came to her senses and pushed him away when he reached under her skirt and put a hand on her bare thigh.

“It’s alright,” Cade gasped, his forehead pressed to hers.  “We’re going to be married.”

Liv thought about pointing out that she’d never actually agreed to wed him, only that he could court her - but after all, she’d kept taking his letters for six years, hadn’t she?  She’d been happy to let him show her around the campus, take her out to dinner, and act in every way as if they were engaged.  If anyone was to blame for giving him the wrong impression, it was probably her.

“I think I should get to bed,” Liv said.  She was shocked out how ragged her voice was, as if she’d just run a mile.  “And you should get downstairs, before someone comes in.”

“Of course,” Cade said.  “Goodnight, Liv.”

“Goodnight.”  She ducked into the sitting room she shared with the other two girls, closed the door behind her, and then leaned her back against it, as if to hold the wood in place despite a raging stone-bat on the other side.