She dismissed that irrelevancy with a flick of the thin hairs along her brow. ”You have been skulking around the fringes of the court, asking a great many curious questions, and yet never entering the palace itself. Shandie is quite worried about you. He.told me so.”
“Then I must call on him and reassure him!”
“Yes, you must.” The ugly old harridan reached out her knotted fingers and lifted a silver bell from the tea table. “I think they will have arrived by now.”
Umpily’s ample innards seemed to drop a substantial distance. “Who should have arrived, ma’am?”
The bell tinkled.
“Mutual friends, my lord.” The waxy, sagging features contorted themselves into a smile. “Persons who will be happy to escort you to the palace to impart that reassurance you just mentioned.”
The door opened in perfect silence. The big man who stood in the entrance was coated in gleaming bronze. There were other large men at his back. Umpily laid down his tea cup with a clattering noise.
“Lord Umpily!” the expected harsh voice said. “We meet again! At last.”
Umpily must have done well. His prying must have alarmed somebody, or annoyed somebody. It was a very great honor to be arrested by Legate Ugoatho himself.
2
“Here she comes now,” Mist said. “About time!” Thaile snapped.
Within the Meeting Place clearing, they sat side by side within an airy, open-sided cabana. The outside was smothered in flowers, the inside furnished with hard wooden benches. On a hot summer’s day she would have judged the building totally unnecessary except to hold up the vines—why not just lie on the grass in the shade of a tree? On a dank, gray morning with rain falling in ropes, the shelter was miserably inadequate. Water streamed from the eaves in torrents and danced in the puddles on the grass; a faint spray blew through all the time, soaking everything.
The three other novices were seated on the upwind side, which was wetter, but a safe distance from Mist. Their names were Woom, Maig, and Doob, although Mist still referred to them as Worm, Maggot, and Grub. While they were not as loathsome as he had described, Thaile had no great desire to make friends with any of them. That was fortunate, for Mist seemed to believe that she was his property—either because he had found her first or just because he was the oldest and biggest. If any of the three as much as smiled at her, he shed his normal affability, becoming harsh and aggressive. Normally such arrogance would have annoyed her greatly, but she had ignored it so far because she had worse things to worry about.
The woman coming striding along the Way in a floppy hat and ankle-length sea-green cloak was Mistress Mearn herself, who had summoned all five novices here to attend their first day of classes. There was no one else in sight in the Meeting Place on this foul morning.
About time!
For six days, Thaile had endured the College—angry, frightened, resentful, and bored. For six days she had endured Mist, too. He had shown her all the places she was supposed to know, and none had been particularly interesting. He had clung to her like lichen, impervious to hints, appeals, and the worst insults she had cared to throw at him. No matter how she tried to dissuade him, he just gazed at her with soulful, butter-yellow eyes full of hurt and disbelief. After that first calamitous night, he absolutely could not be convinced that she did not want him to make love to her every night. He wouldn’t mind mornings or afternoons, even. He promised to be gentler, rougher, faster, slower, more considerate, more insistent—any way she wanted, he would oblige. .
Yet he was tolerable company when he was not explaining why they should be in bed together. He was easygoing and sometimes witty and usually bone lazy, although he was capable of astonishing bursts of exertion when he was in a canoe with a paddle in his hands. He was all she had. She had not seen Jain since the day she arrived, and no one else paid any attention to her at all. Novices were obviously just a necessary nuisance in the College, like small children underfoot. They might be even less than that, because everyone else seemed to have occult powers.
Thaile had no idea how many people abode within the College—probably more than she had ever met in her life. More than a dozen of dozens maybe! She had tried speaking with some of them, at the Commons or the Market. They had discouraged her, usually with a tolerant “Things will be explained to you soon.” Sometimes she’d met rudeness, and a couple of women had just vanished before her eyes rather than converse with a mere novice. To sorcerers, all mundanes must seem less than children, clumsy and foolish and ignorant.
When shed remarked to Mist that there seemed to be no old people around, he’d assumed the owlish gaze he used instead of a grin. “Who would trust a sorcerer who grew old?”
Who would trust a sorcerer at all?
Archivist Mearn was a sorceress. She was closer to young than old, more than twenty, less than forty. She stepped into the cabana and removed her hat, then swung it so that wetness flew off in a shower. She tossed it onto a bench and unclipped the neck of her cloak, pouting at the awful weather. Mearn had a small, prissy mouth like a perch’s, and she wore her hair in a very large bun on the top of her head, probably to display the pointedness of her ears. Her eyes were an ugly brown, her blouse and striped skirt smart and well chosen.
She threw her cloak down beside her hat and looked over her charges with disapproval: Thaile and Mist sitting at one side, Woom and Maig and Doob at the other. They stared back with fear or resentment or both.
Woom was about Thaile’s age, and nasty. He picked his nose and ate with his mouth open, and she knew he was deliberately being annoying because she could Feel his emotions. He seemed to have chosen her as a special victim. He became very excited and pleased with himself when he managed to provoke her to any show of anger. She had concluded that Woom’s talent was to make people dislike him, and he was so good at it that his Faculty must be very strong.
Doob was much younger, a short, skinny child. Thaile had rarely heard him speak, and he emitted black terror most of the time. She was sorry for Doob, who should be sent home to grow up for a couple of years. If he had a talent for something, it had so far escaped her notice.
She ought to feel sorry for Maig, too, but he wore the vacant smirk of the half-witted, and his surging, confused emotions made her queasy. His talent was juggling, and juggling seemed to be his only interest. He could keep eight plates in the air, or five knives. At the Commons that morning he had been trying for six knives, until a sorcerer had ordered him to go outside before he maimed someone.
And there was Thaile herself, who had tried to run away from the recorders, Thaile who had fallen in love when she was not supposed to. Who was Leeb? Where was Leeb? Was he tall and heavy-shouldered like Mist? Somehow she did not think Leeb could resemble Mist in any way. If she had fallen in love with another Mist, she ought to be ashamed of herself.
Last there was Mist, oldest and largest of the novices, leaning back with his legs stretched out in tight-fitting scarlet pants and royal blue boots. In spite of the chill weather, his ruffled lemon shirt was wide open, hanging loose. He, at least, gave Mistress Mearn a winning smile. He put an arm around Thaile and looked pleased with himself.
“Is there a war on?” the mistress of novices inquired snidely, looking to and fro. “As it happens, I can see out of the back of my head. However, I think the atmosphere would be improved if you all sat together. ”
The obnoxious Woom lurched to his feet at once, and shambled over to Thaile. He spared Mist a triumphant sneer in passing. He seated himself on her other side, moving in close and whistling happily, staring at the roof. Doob and Maig joined him, neither comprehending the foolery.
Mearn had noticed, though. “One of the first things you will learn at the College,” she proclaimed sharply, “is how to behave in a civilized manner. Close up your shirt, Novice. You are no longer a peasant, wandering around in seminudity.”
Mist colored. He straightened up and began buttoning. Woom sighed, shaking his head sadly.
Mistress Mearn settled primly on a bench facing them. “Later I shall outline the standards of behavior expected of you. Promiscuity is strongly discouraged.” She glanced at Thaile with undisguised contempt.