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The wooden ball hit Arram in the middle of the chest – not hard, but enough that Arram noticed it was there. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he fumbled and dropped the ball. He retrieved it. ‘I wasn’t—’
‘Catch.’ Yadeen calmly tossed another ball at him. Arram reached for it and dropped both that ball and the one he already held.
‘The idea,’ Yadeen said, ‘is for you to catch the first ball one-handed so you will be able to catch the second ball with your other hand.’ When he saw Arram glance around at the shadowy room, he said, ‘Let’s go outside, where we’ll have more light.’ He led the way to a patch of bare earth next to the building.
‘I don’t understand,’ Arram said when they halted. ‘What is this for?’
Yadeen collected the balls from Arram’s hands and walked until he was fifteen feet away. ‘It is for concentration and coordination,’ he said, raising his deep, accented voice so Arram could hear. ‘Until you can fix your attention on one thing while your hands do another, you will be a very dangerous young mage, and not for the proper reasons. Catch.’
Arram caught the first ball with both hands. This time he only missed the second ball, since he remembered to keep the first in one hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he called.
‘Don’t apologize,’ Yadeen ordered. ‘Learn.’
Through autumn, Midwinter, and into spring term, Arram, Ozorne, and Varice worked hard. Arram might have felt sorry for himself given the extra hour with the stern Yadeen in the mornings, but the same day that Arram began the study of juggling, Ozorne announced he was to apply himself to an hour of swordplay, on his mother’s orders. Varice, who never slept past sunrise if she could help it, decided to volunteer in the kitchens, in defiance of her father’s wishes. Unlike many of their fellows, the three never complained of trouble falling asleep.
At Midwinter, Arram had the pleasure of buying more than trinkets for his friends. He got a fine pocket dagger for Ozorne and a carving knife of good steel for Varice. Each of them had obtained books that he had coveted all season but refused to buy, since he’d been saving his coin for presents. And for his birthday he got more gifts, not just from his friends, but from Masters Cosmas, Dagani, and Yadeen.
‘It is the custom for a master to do this for the student, but not the other way around,’ Yadeen said when he handed a package to Arram. ‘It is assumed the student needs every nit he can find, if not for now, when he has a stipend, then later, when he is on his own. Don’t bother to be grateful,’ he said when Arram opened his mouth. ‘I do poorly with gratitude. Open it.’
Arram gently unfolded the beautiful blue-violet shoulder drape the master had used for wrapping – where he’d wear such an elegant garment he had no idea! – to find a polished red wood box, figured with dragons and griffins. He opened it to discover hand-sized balls, six of them, each different shades of reddish, brown, or black wood.
‘Juggling balls,’ he said blankly. He looked up at Yadeen and realized the master’s eyes were dancing. It was the first time he’d seen the man look humorous. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he joked, keeping his tone flat.
Yadeen clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I knew you would be pleased. Try them out before classes begin again.’
Gifts from Cosmas and Dagani were books. Dagani’s was on great illusions, including one that was supposed to have lured all the world’s griffins out of the Mortal Realms and back to the Realms of the Gods. Cosmas’s book told of unusual mages: those who did not follow the normal path to a position as a teacher or a serving mage for a government or for a noble or royal house. Ozorne and Varice both leafed through it and shrugged, uninterested. They didn’t offer to show Arram the books they had received from Cosmas and Dagani, and Arram didn’t ask. He was too interested in his own books.
If asked later, Arram would have said he didn’t remember the passing of the weeks. He did recall students from the Upper Academy lingering around Varice in the late afternoons. Arram was taking evening strolls through the halls with dark-eyed Sheni in January and early February, before she tired of his ‘headache-making big words.’ She left him for a student who hoped to be a healer when he reached the Upper Academy. It was just as well: Ozorne was bleak again and needed attention and reminders to take his medicine, as he had the previous spring.
Varice ignored the older students. She made extra money giving new turns to spring garments for other girls, stitching on lace, taking in seams or letting them out, and sewing on embroideries. When Arram pointed out one evening that surely her stipend covered all her expenses, she looked down her nose at him.
‘There’s the future to think of,’ she informed him, holding her work up so she could be certain the seam was even. ‘I’m putting money by for that.’
They were in one of the empty cubicles in Arram’s room. Although they tried to talk quietly, Ozorne heard. He was in bed; they thought he’d been sleeping off another shadowy spell. ‘I told you, you’re going to live with me,’ he called. ‘We’ll have our own place, in the mountains or a forest …’
‘And if we’re sent journeying once we’re working for a mastery?’ Varice enquired. She picked up a handful of lace and began to roll it neatly. ‘You know they do it to a lot of them. I for one don’t intend to sleep on the ground on a ragged blanket, eating charred rabbit I cooked on a fire!’
Arram snorted. Ozorne began to chuckle. The idea of Varice – of any of them – living in such conditions was too amusing to consider seriously.
‘You know they’ll settle us with a master elsewhere in Carthak, or somewhere north,’ Ozorne said as he sat up and threw off the blanket. ‘They don’t just cast people they’ve taught so much into the winds of chance!’
Varice sniffed. ‘I hope so, but I’m not taking those chances if I can help it.’
‘I wouldn’t permit it,’ Ozorne told her cheerfully. Arram believed him, and his heart sank a little. It would be fun to wander alone, learning whatever he pleased. Perhaps Ozorne would let him off the leash now and then, when the time came.
The afternoon of the following day, he was so fascinated reading a book Yadeen had loaned him that he lost track of time. It began to rain. Only the appearance of a wet spot on the page, and the boom of the sixth-hour bell, jarred him from his trance. He yelped. He had promised to work on illusions with Ozorne and Varice; he was an hour and a half late!
Hoping to gain time, he jumped the waist-high wall to a herb garden. His plan was to run crossways over the rows of bare mounds that waited for warmer weather, which would cut his distance in half. He had not expected there to be a line of large jars positioned on the other side of the wall.
Down he went with a crash, spilling forward onto a mound with several shattered jars. The ground beneath him was decidedly damp. When he struggled to his feet, he found he was muddy from chin to toe.
His first instinct was to run and let someone else take the blame. His second thought was that this would be truly stupid. A mage could track him by the print his body had left in the mud. This occurred to him just as a man who had been kneeling near the corner of the wall rose to his feet.
He was stocky, not much taller than Arram, with skin a ruddy golden-brown. His black hair was cut short and streaked with grey. Dark eyes with long, sloping lids that lengthened at the corners looked Arram over. He wore a sturdy wool shirt under a sleeveless vest equipped with a number of pockets. His breeches, also covered with pockets, were heavily burdened with the tools of a working gardener. When he stood, it was easy to see that his legs were widely bowed, like someone who had spent a large part of his life on horseback.
Arram knew him. Everyone did who paid attention to the university gardens. He gulped. ‘Master Hulak, I’m so sorry! I never would have jumped the wall—’
‘If you knew I was here?’ the school’s head gardener, also a master in the study of plants, medicines, and poisons, asked gently.
Arram’s knees wanted to give way. ‘No, Master!’ he protested. ‘If I’d known there was work being done here! I thought it was too early for …’ His voice locked in his throat.
Hulak studied him for painful moments before he said, ‘So you think because you see no plants there is no work to be done? It is fine to gallop over my rows?’ He raised a hand for silence when Arram would have defended himself. Clearly he was still thinking. At last he enquired, ‘You are Arram Draper, Varice’s friend?’
Arram nodded. ‘Yes, Master.’ Everyone knows Varice, he thought.
‘Not Master, only Hulak. You are said to be clever.’ The older man watched him, his eyes seeming not to blink.
‘I’m trying to be,’ Arram replied honestly.
‘You have left me with’ – in a form of exquisite torture, the gardener pointed to each shattered jar and counted its number aloud – ‘seven broken vessels I had planned to use in the morning. These things are money out of my spring term budget.’
Arram saw coins – his coins – flying out of a drawer in the bursar’s office. ‘How mu—’
But there was that upraised palm commanding silence again. ‘No. More important is a student silly enough to think a garden is dead because he sees nothing above the ground.’
To add to Arram’s enjoyment, it began to truly pour. Hulak did not even seem to notice. Arram did, as mud ran down his chest, breeches, and feet. He said nothing, feeling that the worst was about to come.
‘You repay me by coming each school day, at this time, for an hour.’
Arram heard himself whimper softly.
Hulak ignored him. ‘Today I am in the third garden from the river. Tomorrow I will be in the fourth garden, and so on, until I reach the end of this long corridor. The next day I will move south, to the first garden on that corridor, and on. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Arram mumbled.
‘I will bring you better clothes for gardening, and sandals.’ Hulak looked him up and down. ‘Mages should understand plants. Varice knows this. Now it is your turn. Tomorrow, after your monkey lesson.’ He looked along the row. ‘Pick up the jar pieces, take them to the shed over there. Put them in the basket with others.’ He returned to the row where he had been working.
Arram heaped as many shards of pottery as he could carry in half of a broken jar and bore them to the shed, walking around the garden instead of through. As he worked, one question plagued him: How had Hulak known who he was?
‘Of course he knows,’ Varice said when he finally met her and Ozorne for supper. ‘Master Hulak knows everything!’ She patted Arram’s arm. ‘You’ll learn.’
Ozorne nodded. ‘The university paid a royal sum to woo him here from the Mohon tribes that live north of Jindazhen.’
Varice giggled. ‘It wasn’t the money,’ she informed her friend. ‘Master Lindhall – he was the one who brought Master Hulak here – told him about all of the plants and trees in the East that Hulak had never seen. You just have to know how to talk to him.’
‘Not this afternoon I didn’t,’ Arram grumbled. ‘Now I have even more work before I can do my classroom studies!’
Ozorne patted his shoulder. ‘Just wait till we get to the Upper Academy, my dear fellow,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You will dream of these happy, lazy days in the Lower Academy with wistful sorrow.’
Exhausted after his trying day, Arram gratefully fell into bed and slept almost immediately. It seemed as if he’d barely started a decent dream of a blonde girl who beckoned him to her when thunder crashed overhead. She vanished and Arram prised his eyes open.
‘That was going to be a good one,’ he muttered to the gods of dreams.
The thunder – no, not thunder, but pounding on the door – resumed.
‘Make it stop or I’ll make it stop,’ Ozorne growled from his cubicle. ‘They teach me explosive spells now.’
Arram crawled out of his blankets and stumbled to the door. ‘What the —?’ he demanded as he threw it open.
He stopped. The burly fist raised to pound again belonged to Yadeen. He looked no more awake than Arram. ‘If I am up and about, someone will share my misery,’ he informed the youth. ‘The marble slabs that are the face of the imperial platform – at the great arena – fell during an earth tremor. Did you feel it?’
Arram shook his head.
‘I would like you to help me put new stones in their place,’ Yadeen explained. ‘To do so I need you to let me use your power as well as my own. Normally no one would ask this before you had learned the spells to stop another mage from drawing on you, but this is an emergency. Will you help me? I swear by Mithros, Minoss, and any god you prefer that I will make you do no lawless thing, nor hold back any amount of Gift to keep you subject to my will in the future.’
Arram gawped at the older man. Finally he found the wit to say, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have one of your personal students? The older ones, I mean?’
Yadeen grimaced. ‘For a task such as this, they lack …’ He hesitated, then continued, ‘Sufficient raw power of the right order. I would need two or three of them, and one of my three is about to leave to serve at a quarry for a year. Rather than deal with all that, I would prefer one student, if possible.’
Arram jumped. ‘Yes, sir, of course, sir!’ he said, and grabbed the clothes he had placed on his chair for the morning.
‘Say nothing to anyone with regard to my evaluation of how many of my older students could do this,’ Yadeen said, accepting a cup of tea from Irafa, who had emerged from her own room. ‘Both of you.’ He raised his voice and looked towards Ozorne’s cubicle.
‘Your secrets are safe,’ the prince called back. ‘Though I’d say you need new students if your senior ones are this useless.’
‘Their skills are elsewhere,’ Yadeen retorted after a sip of tea. ‘Have you been asked to throw fire yet, or to work a simulacrum of yourself good enough to fool a master?’
‘No, Master Yadeen,’ came the grudging reply.
Yadeen took another gulp of tea. ‘In any case, our task is better done with a younger student if that one is strong enough. Older students have trained their Gifts in complex mental webs. It gets harder to pull them into solid ropes for great tasks. Arram, are you ready – ah, good. Enjoy your sleep, Your Highness.’ Yadeen closed the door once they were in the hall with Irafa. ‘You brought your workbag? May I see?’
Arram handed the bag over.
Yadeen examined the items and returned the bag to Arram. ‘With luck you won’t need this, but there’s no telling.’ He looked at Arram. ‘Coat and hat?’
Arram pointed to the door to the outside corridor and yawned.
Yadeen smiled. ‘Make certain they are there.’ As Arram went outside for his things, Yadeen returned his cup to Irafa and exchanged a few words with her. Arram was struggling with his coat when the master joined him in the outer corridor.
Yadeen gripped Arram’s coat sleeves and drew them properly onto the youth’s arms. Next he thrust Arram’s broad hat onto his head. As they set off, rain blasting their faces as the wind blew, he explained.
‘The emperor hosts the ambassador from the Copper Isles in three days. They wish to see our new wild beasts. The platform must be as good as new,’ he said. ‘Old Mesaraz gets cross if things aren’t perfect when he’s showing off, particularly since this Kyprish fellow is here to talk trade. The emperor would also like to find out how he took ship at this time of year and arrived safe and sound. Lucky for us, all we need to do is smooth and polish some tons of rock and put them in place.’
Arram trotted beside the master, bubbling over with questions. He chose the one that worried him the most: ‘Is it true, what you said, that it’ll be hard, later, to get a single pure line of my Gift? One that isn’t already tangled with spells?’
Yadeen glanced at him, a wry look on his face. ‘It depends on the mage. I was largely trying to plant the idea in your friend’s head, to see if he believed it enough to hobble himself a bit. I would prefer that you didn’t say as much.’
‘No, sir.’ Frankly Arram didn’t believe any suggestion would have power over Ozorne, and he hadn’t felt magic pass from Yadeen when he’d said that to his friend.
‘You’ll find, as you grow older, that the Tasikhe line can be erratic. There hasn’t been a mage for a generation, but the stories about the family are all about unusual behaviour.’ They had reached the end of the corridor. It opened onto the Fieldside Road, on the opposite side of the university from the river and its road to the city. Waiting for them were two hard-looking men in leather armour. Yadeen handed his pack to Arram and went to talk to them.
At last the master beckoned him forward. The youth tied the strap that fixed his wide hat on his head and plunged through the gate. A bubble of light bloomed from Yadeen’s hand, casting illumination over four horses standing in a roadside shelter. Arram gulped. It had been a long time since he had ridden a horse, and it hadn’t gone well.
‘Can’t we walk?’ he asked Yadeen.
‘If the coliseum master had wanted us to walk, he would not have sent horses,’ Yadeen said, his voice tight. Arram raised the brim of his hat to get a better look at him and understood: Yadeen didn’t want to ride, either. Feeling sorry for both of them, he said nothing more. He let an armoured man try to help him into the saddle three times before he made it all the way. At least Yadeen mounted his horse creditably. ‘Hand me your reins,’ he ordered.
‘Shouldn’t I have them?’ Arram enquired, obeying. ‘You know, to pull on?’
‘That is what I fear. I shall lead your horse. You will hold the horn and try to remain seated.’ Yadeen folded the extra reins in his hand.
Arram looked about. There were so many bits and pieces on the horse’s head! ‘What is the horn?’
‘Mithros, Minoss, and Shakith!’ cried Yadeen, calling on the ruler of the gods, the judge of the gods, and the goddess of seers. ‘Have you never ridden a horse?’
Arram gulped. ‘Once, Master. The second time it wouldn’t go.’
Their guides bellowed their laughter. Yadeen wiped his rain-soaked face with a wet forearm. ‘It’s that thing that sticks up from the saddle’s edge, like a man’s part,’ he said. ‘Grip it before you do fall. And you two, up front!’
One of them had the courage to glance back; the other straightened in his saddle.
‘My student can do more with a finger than you can on these huge beasts,’ Yadeen said. ‘If you cannot behave decently, I shall let him show you. Now pick up the snake-sliding pace!’
Arram gawped at the master. No one but Varice and Ozorne had ever defended him before. ‘Master—’
‘Hush,’ Yadeen said as he urged his horse into a trot. Arram’s horse followed along. ‘They should know even the smallest viper is a killer.’ Arram opened his mouth to ask the question, but Yadeen held up a hand. ‘Ask Ramasu or Lindhall about vipers. They’ll say I can’t teach you about them, for all I cut one off Ramasu once.’
Arram knew vipers. Lindhall had a number of them in the menagerie, and Arram had dissected at least two, carefully, in his reptile class. Arram shuddered. Vipers made him nervous, though Ozorne liked them and had never been bitten.
Instead he asked the real question on his mind. ‘Is your using my Gift going to hurt?’ he called. ‘Me, that is. Will it hurt me?’
‘Not at all,’ Yadeen called. ‘You’ll control the thread. If it gets to be too much, all you need do is ease down on the thread. You’ll see.’ He looked back at Arram. ‘Are you saying you doubt my judgement?’
Arram shrank in the saddle. He knew that tone. ‘No, sir. Not at all, sir.’
By the time he thought his member and balls had been pounded to paste, he saw a bulk even darker than the rainy night looming ahead. It grew larger, until he realized it was a wall, not a hill. Torches with magicked shields stood in brackets on either side of a broad gate. A guard emerged from a small shed beside the gate to open one of its broad leaves, and the riders passed through.
The moment they did so, Yadeen’s power rose to cover himself and Arram with a glimmering shield. ‘Have to,’ he murmured when he drew Arram’s horse up beside him. ‘This is the gladiators’ encampment. They should remain in their dormitory buildings, but it’s always best to protect yourself. Just in case.’
‘But the guards aren’t warded,’ Arram said as they followed their guides.
‘The fighters know what happens if they assault a guard.’ Yadeen pointed. The area was spotted with shielded torches, offering something of a view. ‘This open ground is where they practise. Barracks are over there.’
Arram nodded. Ozorne was going to be so jealous – whenever the emperor insisted that the princes attend the games, Ozorne made sketches of the gladiators and wrote down all the information he could glean. He would give anything to see this, rain or no. ‘What are those things? The big white rolls, the log stick figures, and the barrels?’ he asked, pointing.
‘The white rolls are practice dummies for wrestling and hand-to-hand combat,’ Yadeen replied. ‘The log figures are for weapons practice. The barrels hold weapons. They must have taken the weapons themselves indoors. I didn’t know you were interested.’
Arram was saved from having to explain that the information was not for him, when more guards opened another gate in a massive wall before them and waved them through. ‘The arena,’ Yadeen told him. To the escort he said, ‘We can manage.’
