Schooled in Magic (45 page)

Time seemed to slow down until she felt the spell slowly begin to unlock. Her entire body went wobbly, just before she crashed to the stone floor like a sack of potatoes. A second later, she heard a gasp of pain as Imaiqah hit the deck behind her.

But Alassa, it seemed, was still a rat. Emily somehow managed to roll over and look at Imaiqah, who looked on the verge of tears. She wanted to comfort her friend–both of her friends–but it was so hard to move. Her body felt completely drained.

Chocolate
, she thought, as she reached into her pouch. She’d made a habit of carrying a bar ever since experimenting with the
Berserker
spell. Slowly, she managed to swallow a couple of chunks, then she passed the rest to Imaiqah. The chocolate gave her enough energy to stagger to her feet and look down at Alassa, who was
still
a rat. Melissa probably hadn’t intended the spell to be removed easily, if at all.

Alassa looked up, her nose twitching in a manner that would have been comical if it hadn’t been so serious, and waved her paws in the air. It was easy to understand what she wanted.

“I’ll try,” Emily said. “I just don’t have much energy.”

She cast a single dispelling charm in the air and watched, unsurprised, as it failed to return Alassa to human form. It figured that Melissa had thought of that simple countermeasure and ensured her spell was designed to resist it.

Next, Emily cast the analysis spell and watched as Melissa’s transfiguration spell appeared in front of her face. It looked to be a simple copy of a spell she’d seen in the book of practical jokes–again, it struck Emily that no one sane could regard a forced transformation as a practical joke–but Melissa had added a nasty component to make it harder to remove.

“We’ll have to cast the charm together,” Imaiqah said. Her other friend looked completely exhausted, but her eyes were bright. “That particular twist can be beaten because it can only react to one charm at a time. On three. One, two, three ...”

The dispelling charm worked perfectly the second time around. Alassa’s form twisted uncomfortably, then returned to human, leaving her crawling on the floor. Emily looked away as Alassa grabbed her robe and pulled it over her head, muttering words in a language that her translation spell declined to adapt properly. Or maybe it was a perfect translation. Most insulting remarks from foreign countries and mindsets didn’t seem so insulting when translated into plain English.

“I’m sorry,” Alassa said, after another minute. Her voice was muffled as she tried to pull her undershirt on after donning the robe, rather than the other way round. “I didn’t think.”

Emily wasn’t too surprised. Before she’d arrived at Whitehall, Alassa had her reputation, her family and a gang of cronies who did her bidding, even though she wasn’t a strong magician in her own right. No doubt the cronies had the magic skills to keep Alassa from having a knife shoved in her back by one of her victims. But now...what had happened to the cronies anyway? Had they been sent home in disgrace?

“They don’t want to be with me anymore,” Alassa admitted when Emily asked. “Their parents said I was
dangerous
.”

Emily leaned against the wall and took a long breath. “What did you do to Melissa?”

Alassa didn’t answer for a long moment. “She was irritating me. I cast a jinx on her that ensured that she would say the wrong thing at the wrong time. She called a tutor a nasty name and ended up being sent to the Hall of Shame.”

“Oh,” Emily said. It was hard to blame Melissa for wanting to strike back, and yet Emily was still very angry. How in all the universe had Melissa blamed
Emily
for what Alassa had done before she’d even arrived in this world? It struck her a moment later: Emily had shocked Alassa, befriended her and then started to teach her how to cast spells properly. Melissa probably suspected that Alassa would become even
more
of a terror once she knew what she was actually
doing
. “What were you thinking?”

“I was a fool,” Alassa said bleakly. She looked up, her bright eyes blazing with anger. “We have to strike back.”

Emily hesitated. The mature and responsible part of her mind pointed out that Melissa had a good reason to be angry with Alassa, and perhaps, now that she’d had her fun, it wouldn’t happen again. But the part of her mind that had been a target of bullying knew that it wouldn’t end so easily. Children who were bullied often became bullies themselves because it was the only way they knew how to take care of themselves. Melissa and her two friends might start casting charms and hexes on Emily and
her
friends at every opportunity.

And she’d been rendered helpless, forced to watch as Alassa was transfigured, then wait for what felt like hours before the spell had finally worn off. She was
angry
at Melissa, just as she’d been angry at Alassa when
she’d
hexed Emily. And poor Imaiqah hadn’t done anything to deserve being frozen in place either.

And Emily was unused to having friends. What would happen if she said no?

Imaiqah spoke into the silence. “But Melissa’s a skilled spell-caster,” she said, weakly. “We can’t just walk up to her and start casting spells...”

“No,” Alassa agreed. She bitterly looked down at her hands. “Maybe we should play a joke on her.”

Emily winced at her tone. The Royal Princess had never had to face an equal - much less a superior - opponent before, unless one counted the kidnappers. And Alassa had beaten one of them halfway to death. She might be a stubborn girl, unwilling to use her intelligence when her status would do, but she didn’t give up.

“I think we should go back to my bedroom and sort ourselves out,” Emily said. They’d missed tea while frozen, but the kitchens produced late meals for some of the students, as well as emergency food for those who overstrained themselves. “And then we can decide what to do.”

There was no sign of Aloha when they entered her bedroom, so Emily picked up the books on practical jokes while Alassa first undressed and in private, then dressed again, properly. There were thousands of different charms they could use for amusement, but most of them would be easy for someone like Melissa to detect and remove before it was too late. Emily hadn’t seen Melissa at all before now, which meant that she had definitely tested out of the basic classes and gone on to prepare herself for her second year. She was certainly more competent with charms and hexes than Emily.

“We could just turn her into something unpleasant,” Alassa said as she finished dressing. “A spider perhaps, or a crab, or ...”

Emily shuddered. The people of this world might regard forced transformations as a harmless prank, but it wasn’t an attitude she shared. Maybe she would have felt differently if she’d grown up in a world where magic existed. Besides, she’d come alarmingly close to killing Alassa through merging a transfiguration spell with another charm. The results could have been disastrous.

“Or we could hit her with the Idiot Ball,” Imaiqah offered. “
That
would give her a nasty fright.”

“I don’t know how to cast it,” Alassa admitted. The distance between her and Imaiqah seemed to have faded away through shared adversity. “Do you?”

Emily frowned. “The Idiot Ball?”

“It’s a spell that dampens the target’s intelligence,” Alassa explained. She smirked. “I admit that it is sometimes easy to believe that the boys here have been struck by the Idiot Ball ...”

“You can’t just cast it on someone, because all of their basic protections will ward them against it,” Imaiqah added. “You have to stick it on something and then slip it into their presence, perhaps by dropping it into their robes. And then it starts affecting them at once. A simple sum like two plus two becomes impossible.”

Emily hesitated. All of the practical jokes she’d seen involving mind manipulation had been very limited, because even
this
world admitted that mind manipulation wasn’t funny. A post-hypnotic suggestion could cause some amusement, but it could also cause disaster; the Idiot Ball might even cause worse problems.

“Or there’s the Gender Key,” Alassa suggested. “Do you think she’d enjoy waking up to discover that she’s a boy?”

“That would get us all in very hot water,” Imaiqah reminded her. Emily stared at them both blankly. “Someone introduced a gender-swapping spell into Whitehall two years ago, or so I was told. The results were absolute chaos. Eventually, the spell was banned and we were warned that if we used it, we would be sent to face the Warden.”

Emily shook her head in disbelief. She had grown accustomed to her new world, a process made easier by the fact that there was nothing and no one back in her old world who she wanted to see again. And yet there were times when the sheer
strangeness
of the new world came up and slapped her right across the face. A spell to turn someone into an idiot, a spell to turn a girl into a boy or vice versa ... or, for that matter, a school that allowed its children to carry lethal weapons everywhere. Because that was what magic was, a lethal weapon. If Alassa had been dangerous with only a few spells, how dangerous would a combat sorcerer be to his enemies?

“A good thing too,” Emily said, remembering the boys from her old school. They’d been jerks, every single one of them, particularly after they’d discovered that girls weren’t just oddly-shaped men. The mere flash of a smile from one of the popular girls turned them into drooling zombies. Boys were dirty and smelly and gross and there was no way that she would want to be one.

But then, some of the girls hadn’t been so clever, either. There was more to life than counting the number of guys who would do something stupid if you batted your eyelashes at them. Or trying to make yourself popular by dating the most popular guy in the school.

A thought struck her as she looked over at Alassa. “If your parents wanted a boy,” she said, “why didn’t they just use magic to alter your sex?”

Alassa gaped at her, and then swallowed. “Wherever you come from has to be a very long way away. Don’t you know that such magic doesn’t always work properly?”

“It doesn’t always alter the mind,” Imaiqah added. “You could end up with a boy in a girl’s body if you weren’t careful.”

“And if you messed around with their mind,” Alassa said, “you might make a bad situation much worse.”

Emily nodded in understanding. Most transfiguration spells were configured to avoid causing mental damage, because the long-term effects of mind manipulation could be dangerously unpredictable. In this case, if a girl became a boy, she’d still think of herself as a girl on the inside, presumably also being attracted to other boys. Her lips twitched; it was quite possible that she–he–would become homosexual, at least by the strict definition of the term. And vice versa for a boy who became a girl. Actually, if the boys back home could have been put into female bodies for a few days, it might teach them a valuable lesson. They’d picked on weaker boys they’d accused of being homosexual, even though Emily had known that those weaker boys lusted after girls too. They’d picked on everyone who had seemed weaker than them.

She had no idea what this world thought of homosexuality, but it would likely be disastrous for a monarchy. She had no idea how Alassa’s Kingdom in particular would react to a homosexual monarch–particularly if they didn’t know that he’d originally been female–but at the very least it would call his/her ability to continue the succession into question. And what if he literally
couldn’t
have children, even with a woman who had been
born
a woman? The line of succession would be destroyed. Or if...

Her imagination produced too many possibilities, none of them good.

“If we hit her with the Idiot Ball,” Alassa said finally, “how do we get it into her possession? She is a little paranoid about locking her door.”

“With reason,” Emily pointed out. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go ahead with it, but Melissa
did
need a lesson in picking on the wrong person. “Maybe we should just throw a hex at her when her back is turned.”

Imaiqah giggled. “I know how we can hex her,” she said. Emily and Alassa both stared at her in surprise. “Her clothes will be drying off in the laundry after being washed. All we have to do is hex her undershirt, then wait for her to put it on.”

“Very good,” Alassa said. She rubbed her hands together with glee. “Tomorrow...we strike!”

I
MUST BE OUT OF MY MIND,
Emily thought as she opened her eyes. A glance at her watch revealed that it was five bells, precisely when she’d timed the sleep spell to lift.
I must be completely out of my mind
.

She rolled over and pushed the blanket aside, climbing out of bed. Imaiqah was waking up too, but Aloha still slept soundly after coming in late the previous evening. Emily had heard that Aloha had been practicing with her Martial Magic team, something that Emily intended to suggest to Jade the next time she saw him. There had to be some way to practice the dangerous spells outside class without getting into trouble. Perhaps Sergeant Harkin expected them to figure it out for themselves.

It was Saturday morning, a day that was used more for revision and private study than actual classes. Emily knew most students wouldn’t bother to get up until later, allowing those who did to have unimpeded access to the library and the spellcasting chambers. Tapping her lips at Imaiqah–they didn’t want to wake Aloha, who might ask questions if she saw them leaving so early–she pulled on her robe, then splashed water on her face. As soon as they were both dressed, they slipped out of the room and into the deserted hallway.