Schooled in Magic (46 page)

“The laundry is at the end of the corridor,” Imaiqah murmured, as they walked down the hallway. It was charmed to prevent people from disturbing students who were trying to sleep, but Madame Razz had been known to reprimand students for making too much noise anyway. “The only problem will be getting inside.”

A door opened ahead of them to reveal Alassa, wearing a midnight black nightgown, studded with jewels that had to be worth a small fortune. “I meant to ask,” she hissed, as she closed her bedroom door behind her. “How did you know about the laundry anyway?”

Imaiqah grinned. It transformed her face from cute to beautiful. “I made a terrible mess in the hallway when I accidentally dropped a bag on the floor,” she admitted. “Madame Strictly”–Madame Razz, Emily guessed–“gave me detention and sent me to help the maids do the laundry. It was not a pleasant task.”

“They must have needed help that day,” Alassa whispered. “They don’t normally allow the servants to interact with us at all.”

Emily frowned, wondering just what–if anything–that meant. She hadn’t seen many of the school’s domestic servants, apart from the cooks–and the cooks seemed to enjoy a higher status than one might have guessed. They
were
very good cooks. But for all she knew, the laundry and cleaning might as well have been done by House Elves.

Her lips twitched. What little they’d learned about Elves in class–and through reading history books–had made it clear that trying to enslave them was asking for trouble. Some places had humans hiring Brownies and suchlike to do the cleaning, in exchange for milk and alcohol, but Whitehall preferred to keep most magical creatures firmly on the outside of the walls. It wasn’t too surprising; the Mimics were enough to give
anyone
nightmares and the thought of introducing one of them into the school ...

She shuddered as a disquieting thought struck her.
How would anyone know if they had?

She pushed that thought aside as they reached a solid stone door at the end of the hallway. “I think the charm on the door doesn’t change,” Imaiqah said as she pressed her hand against the knob. “It should be easy to open.”

Emily exchanged glances with Alassa. Booby-trapping a door was all too easy for students, which meant the staff could easily do it themselves. Maybe it would just refuse to open for them, or perhaps it would be keyed to throw a freeze spell at the person trying to open it–and anyone else standing nearby. But why would anyone want to lock a laundry room?

She laughed at herself a moment later. Their plan was an
excellent
example of why someone
would
want to lock a laundry room.

“It might be time to come up with an explanation,” Emily said quickly. “Something we can tell Madame Razz if this goes wrong ...”

There was a click. The door opened, releasing a wave of hot air and steam. Emily stepped inside, shaking her head in disbelief. The laundry room was vast, with newly-cleaned robes and undershirts hanging from railings or placed in hampers for later attention. It was difficult to see very far because of the steam, but in the distance she thought she saw someone move.

Alassa stepped forward and snapped off a spell Emily didn’t recognize, just before the steam parted enough for her to see a young girl dressed in black at the end of the room. The girl had been frozen solid by Alassa’s spell.

“Don’t worry,” Alassa said reassuringly, as Emily stared at her in horror. “That isn’t your basic freeze spell. Time will just have stopped for her; she won’t realize that she was spelled at all, ever. We’ll do what we came to do and then release her just before we leave.”

“But ...” Emily found it hard to speak. “But what did she do to deserve it?”

“Think about it,” Alassa said, as if she didn’t understand why Emily was alarmed. “She would have told Madame Strictly if I hadn’t frozen her. And then we
would
have been caught and punished and I don’t want to be punished again!”

Emily shook her head, angrily. It was too much to expect Alassa to have reformed completely; she had been brought up to consider servants as objects, rather than people. And Alassa was right. If the maid did report them, Madame Razz would take a dim view of it–and then they wouldn’t be able to hit Melissa with the Idiot Ball. But it was still wrong to treat people like objects, Emily reminded herself, and swore to make her feelings clear later.

Imaiqah moved from hamper to hamper. “All of the clothes belonging to the first year girls are washed together,” she said. “And they should be marked with a nametag just to make sure that we don’t accidentally swap undershirts or knickers. If this hamper here belongs to me, this one here should be for you and this other one for Melissa.”

She paused, holding up an undershirt. “Got her,” she said. “This is Melissa’s shirt.”

Alassa walked forward to take it from her. “Are you sure?”

“That’s her name right there,” Imaiqah pointed out dryly. “There’s only one Melissa, period. If there were two people with her name in first year, one of them would have been urged to take a different name to keep from any possible confusion.”

“Very good,” Alassa said. She produced a sheet of parchment from her pocket and passed it to Emily. “I added a second hex to the charm; can you check it?”

Emily scanned it quickly. Alassa had noticed a flaw in their plan, one that hadn’t occurred to Emily when they’d worked out the original charm. There was no guarantee that Melissa would wear the charmed shirt at once, which meant that it might be several days before their charm took effect. Alassa had added a simple glamour to the spell that would urge Melissa to wear the charmed shirt at once, a glamour so subtle that even an experienced magician would have problems detecting it. Or so Emily hoped.

“It should work,” Emily said, after a moment. The last thing they needed was the spell unraveling before it could take effect. “And it should be unnoticeable.”

“Cast it quickly, then,” Imaiqah urged. “The longer the maid remains frozen, the more likely it is that she will notice something odd when the spell wears off.”

Alassa had no lack of raw power, Emily noted as she felt Alassa cast the spell. There was a long moment of nothingness, and then she felt the charm briefly settle on the undershirt before it faded away into the background. Emily hoped it was firmly attached to the shirt, but there was no way to tell without running a complete set of detection spells - which would probably overwhelm and destroy the charm before it could be activated.

Shaking her head in disbelief at what they were doing–and her own collaboration - Emily put the shirt back on the railing and then looked over at Alassa meaningfully. The Royal Princess nodded, walked over to the maid and altered the charm on her slightly, before heading to the door.

“It will wear off in two minutes,” Alassa murmured as they closed the door behind them. “She won’t notice a thing.”

Emily scowled as they walked down the corridor. The paralysis spell was bad enough, but at least the victim
knew
that she had been paralyzed. Alassa’s stasis spell would leave the victim completely unaware of what had happened, at least unless the person had some precautionary spells set up to alert them afterwards. One of the books she’d read had talked about the charms and tricks wizards used to counter the effect of memory charms, ranging from keywords to memory dumps into the nearest receptacle. She doubted the maid had any magic at all–she would have been studying at Whitehall herself if she did–but that didn’t make mistreating her acceptable. At least Melissa had started the fight.

But the maid was to us what I was to Melissa,
she thought, feeling a twinge of guilt.
Someone in the way
.

They were all far too keyed up to go back to sleep, so they ended up in one of the private study rooms attached to the library. Imaiqah picked up a book on magical herbs and started to read it, leaving Emily trying to think of a way to explain to Alassa that what she’d done to the maid was wrong. But Alassa had been raised in a world where the upper classes were allowed to do whatever they liked to the lower classes, and where magic was often the dividing line between control and servitude. How did one explain to someone like that the error of their ways?

“If I hadn’t frozen her,” Alassa pointed out, after Emily had made a halting attempt at such an explanation, “we would be explaining ourselves to Madame Strictly right now. And I doubt she would be happy with us.”

Emily scowled. She was right, of course, which didn’t make her morally correct. Imaiqah might have objected more–she was from the lower classes, after all–but she said nothing. Emily couldn’t tell if her friend didn’t want to pick a fight with Alassa, or if she
agreed
with the Princess. People on the wrong side of the social divide, but still not right at the bottom, might take it more seriously than those right at the top. It validated their position, or so Emily had read. But it seemed absurd.

“People are not objects,” Emily snapped. An idea occurred to her and she smiled. “Do you know what...what a very ancient civilization used to call their slaves?”

Alassa blinked. “Slaves?”

Emily snorted. “They used to call them Tools That Thought,” she said. The Romans had been smarter than the slave-owners of Dixie, or the Ottoman Empire. They’d known that slaves could become productive citizens and had worked hard to integrate them into Roman society once they were manumitted. “They knew that slaves could be dangerous.”

“They didn’t know any charms for keeping them in their place?” Alassa asked. Emily remembered Void’s servants and shuddered, inwardly. “Or didn’t they know better than to let them take liberties?”

Emily pushed her thoughts aside and glared at her friend. “Melissa was weak while you were supported by your friends,” she snapped. The nagging guilt pushed her onwards. “And when
you
were weak, she attacked and humiliated you. How much more humiliated are the slaves? Be careful which toes you tread on today, because you might be kissing those feet tomorrow!”

Alassa started to speak, but Emily spoke over her. “People
think
, they have feelings; if you hurt those feelings, they’re going to want revenge. What do you expect will happen if you create a mass of angry people under your throne? You might not live long enough to pass it down to your daughter!”

“A maid can’t hurt me,” Alassa protested.

Emily laughed humorlessly. “And you don’t think that what we just did shows exactly how she
can
hurt you? You don’t need magic to make someone’s life a misery.”

And then she shook her head. “Learn that lesson before it’s too late. Your kingdom might depend on it.”

She watched Alassa furrow her brow in thought, considering. It was too much to hope that Alassa would change at once, but at least
thinking
about it was a step in the right direction. She hadn’t
planned
to be born a Royal Princess, after all. Unless that was possible in this world ... Emily considered it for a long moment, and then dismissed the thought. Everyone would be doing it if it were possible.

Changing the subject, she opened up a Basic Charms textbook and started to read and work through the sample exam questions at the rear of the book. Alassa joined her a moment later. They’d been told that they would be tested in a week, and Emily suspected that she wouldn’t be allowed to progress until Alassa passed the test, too. Some of the Basic questions were surprisingly easy, while others were treacherously complicated. Unlike the exams she remembered from back home, she–they–were being tested on what they’d learned and how they could apply it, not just regurgitating memorized facts and figures.

It might work differently here
, she thought, as she answered one question and then glanced at the answer page.
I’ll be using these skills for the rest of my life
.

One particular charm seemed impossible to dismantle until Alassa pointed out that it was actually a set of hexes, all of which had to be cancelled in the right order. Looking at it, Emily suspected that the writer had deliberately created one to make students think on their feet, because when it was cast in real life the results of an unsuccessful attempt to dismantle it were likely to be unpleasant. He’d included a great many spell components that didn’t seem to do anything at all; it took Emily several minutes to realize that they
didn’t
do anything, apart from confusing the unwary student. But she would have to check each component carefully, just in case. Some of them seemed to be woven into the active spell components.

Feeling hungry after an hour of study, they left the library and headed down to the dining hall. A small number of students were already there, eating their way through large plates of food before going to their weekend classes. Emily had been warned that she would have to learn courtly etiquette from a tutor before they risked sending her to any Royal Court, except perhaps for Alassa’s own Court. The Grandmaster had told Emily that the King and Queen were relieved she’d helped save their daughter from kidnapping, or worse.

A crash made them all jump. Melissa and her friends had entered the dining hall to pick up plates of food for themselves, but there was definitely something wrong with Melissa. She’d just dropped a plateful of food on the ground and was giggling, rather like a dumb bimbo. Her friends were gathered around her, trying to either clean up the mess or figure out what was wrong; judging from their comments, Melissa had been out of sorts all morning. She
had
to be wearing the charmed shirt under her robes.