The Royal College of Ashfox
From THE DAILY CRIER, Thursday, Court and Society
A party from the Veldran Empire arrived at Central Cross on Tuesday evening by the northern express, occupying four carriages and, we are informed, nine horses, and proceeded under escort to the Cross Hotel. The party is understood to include a young gentleman who will sit the College entrance on Monday, the first of his nation to do so in four hundred years. The Ministry declines to say whether he will also sit for the service years. A crowd gathered at the arch. It was not, on the whole, a friendly one.
At Harrow Cross, which was a major junction, the carriage filled: market people with baskets, a family of six, two clerks arguing about a horse. Then, last of all, at the far door, a large man in an overcoat with his hat already in his hand and a satchel of papers under his arm, looking hopefully down a carriage in which there was exactly one seat left.
It was beside Lucian.
“May I?” the man said, and had already begun the business of sitting before anyone could work out an objection. He was stout, and entirely comfortable about it. He put his satchel on his knees, because there was no room for it anywhere else. “Barnaby Croft. Forgive me, I am not usually so forward. That is the last seat between here and the capital, and I have a job interview on Monday.”
“Lucian Grey.”
“Grey.” Croft shook his hand with both of his own. “Bound for Meridian?”
“Meridian.”
“Everyone is bound for Meridian.” Croft laughed, and several people looked round, and he did not notice. “That is rather the trouble with it.”
“And the interview?”
“The Royal College.”
He said the two words, and then he stopped and added nothing to them. Then he did, unsurprisingly.
“I sat my Highers in the spring. Did rather well, as it happens.”
The Highers was what everybody called the Royal Ashfox Standard Examination in the Higher Circles. Nobody used the whole of it except the man who printed the certificate.
“How well?”
“Oh.” Croft looked up at the luggage rack. “Second.”
“In your district?”
“In the kingdom.”
Lucian put his newspaper down. “That is not a small thing, Mr. Croft.”
“No. No, it is not.” Croft said it to his satchel rather than to Lucian. “Nine papers. Theory and practical both. And it is the only remarkable thing about me.” He looked up at Lucian. “I have been living high on it since April.”
“You deserve it.”
“I appreciate it.” He was still cheerful, which was the odd part. “You see, being a fourth Circle gets you a licence, Mr. Grey. And a licence gets you a shop.” He laughed. “Everybody says Ashfox is the frontier of magic. Nobody ever says why.”
“Why, then?”
“The frontier does not care what Circle you are. It cares what you have done.”
Nobody was looking at Penny. She broke the corner off a biscuit and opened a thin book that had not been in her hands a moment before. The crumb went between the pages; then the book closed, and disappeared.
“And you have no achievements?”
“Nothing exciting. You see, I study the history of magic. And as a good many of my friends like to remind me, history is boring.” Croft said it without any particular weight; he had said it to himself a great many times.
Then he went on. “The College does not advertise its posts, you understand. Never has. There are two doors.”
He held up two fingers. “The Highers, along with an interview. I have placed my hopes on that one.”
“And the other door?”
“The Hall. You stand up in front of the whole faculty and do something they have not seen before.” Croft snorted. “Which is for the very brave or the very rich, and I am neither. So I am going up for the history of magic. The department nobody funds.”
Two of Lucian’s minds went to work on the man.
Has read everything about a department he has never been inside.
“And what takes you up, Mr. Grey?”
“The same thing.”
Croft’s face turned warm and complicated. It lost about half its cheer and then, remarkably, got all of it back. “Then we are rivals, and I have still got the best seat on the train. Which door?”
“The second, I think.”
“The hall.”
Croft looked at the cream suit, then at the top hat on the rack. He made the arithmetic that everybody makes.
“Well,” said Croft. “Well. Then I hope I am in the room.”
In Lucian’s inside pocket were his licence, his right glove set with two ambers that doubled as his wand, and four loose ambers wrapped in paper. Amber could store mana in this world, but only amber from one particular family of trees. A mage’s body cannot store mana. He draws it from the spirit world through his grimoire, and whatever he does not spend can be stored in amber.
Some mages use tamed spirits instead, but a spirit is always dangerous, so most sensible mages use amber. Even then, the storage is imperfect; amber leaks mana slowly, whether you touch it or not, so a mage spends his life filling stones and emptying them again. Fortunately, Lucian’s Atomic Spirit made storage almost irrelevant.
Croft waited. Lucian let him wait.
“And what will you show them?”
“I have not decided.”
“You have not decided.” Croft turned in his seat as far as a stout man can turn in a third class seat. “Mr. Grey. Forgive me. Men who spend time deciding have never left their hometown.”
“And here I am,” said Lucian. “Maybe I am just terrible at it.”
Croft laughed, then stopped, rather abruptly, and looked at him a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he laughed again, because there was nothing else to do with it.
“And these young ladies,” he went on, turning, “are going back a day early for the winter term, which is a thing I have never once seen a student do.”
“There was a ball,” said Penny.
“There was,” said Clara, “and we were not going to be on the last train with the whole city trying to get on it.”
“Very sensible. Very sensible indeed.” Croft beamed at them both. “And what are we called?”
“Penelope Holloway.”
Croft’s eyebrows went up. “Holloway. Not the Minister’s…?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” said Croft again. He said it exactly the same way he had said it to Lucian. “Your father has cut the budget of the department I am hoping for four years running, Miss Holloway. Do give him my regards.”
“He does not read the ones from the College,” said Penny. “He reads the ones from the Navy. They put a ship on the top of the letter.”
Croft laughed until he had to take his spectacles off. “And you, my dear?”
“Clara,” said the tall girl.
She said it pleasantly and said nothing after it. Then she looked at Croft with the calm of a person who has given a complete answer.
“Ah,” said Croft, and left it.
There it is, thought Lucian. A girl who hands a stranger her first name and stops there.
He had seen her picture that morning, in the paper he was still holding. The chief guest at Lord Ashcombe’s ball.
Two of the most connected girls in the kingdom, travelling in a third class carriage. What are the odds!
He looked at Penny, who had gone back to her window and her almonds. Then at Clara, who was reading her book upside down and had not yet noticed.
“You have picked an interesting year to try us, Mr. Grey,” Croft was saying. “I mean them. You will have heard about the headmistress.”
“Only what everyone has heard.”
“Lara Allard.” Croft took off his spectacles and polished them on his sleeve. “Youngest in the history of the College. And the history of the College is longer than the history of the kingdom.”
“So I gather.”
“There is a great deal of talk. Half the Senate thinks she is a scandal and the other half is frightened of her, and not one of them will tell you which he is.” He put the spectacles back on.
“And what do you make of her?”
“Me? I have never been in a room with the woman.” Croft shrugged, and the shrug took a while. “But I have read every paper she published in the years when she was nobody. And I will give you this for nothing, since we are rivals. Do not try to be interesting in front of her.”
“No?”
“She notices interesting.”
“I shall be as dull as a Tuesday.”
“Good man.”
Penny turned round from the window. “She is very nice,” she said.
“You know her?” said Croft, delighted.
“Everyone knows her. She is the headmistress.” Penny put another almond in her mouth. “You should not fight her, though.”
There was a small pause in the carriage. “Penny,” said Clara.
“I only said she is nice,” said Penny.
The train stopped again at Ostley, and the milestone beside it said ninety-one. One person got on. He came down the aisle sideways, because he was carrying more than a man could comfortably carry facing forward: a canvas bag on his back, a smaller bag under one arm, and a long bundle wrapped in oilcloth, held across his chest with both hands. He did not put it on the rack and did not put it on the floor.
He was sixteen or thereabouts, and large for it. His coat had been a good coat about twenty years ago, on somebody wider. His boots had walked. He got to the end of the carriage and stopped, because there was nowhere left.
“Here,” said Clara, and moved along.
She did it without any fuss at all, and Croft beamed at her. The boy looked at the space, then at her collar, then at the space again. Finally he sat down on the very edge of it, with the bundle on his knees.
“Thank you, miss.”
“You are very welcome.”
“And what are we called?” said Croft, who had been waiting about four seconds.
“Leon, sir. Leon Grey.”
Croft’s eyebrows went up, and he turned round in his seat, delighted. “Grey! So is he.”
Lucian inclined his head. Nine minds went on with what they had been doing. One of them stopped. After the kingdom made last names compulsory, Grey became the name given to those who had none.
“Are you for the College?” said Croft.
“Yes, sir. The entrance.”
“Ah! Then you are the only one of us who is not begging.” Croft laughed at his own remark. “Students they must take. Faculty they may refuse.”
“Where are you from?” said Penny.
“Up past Ostley, miss. Two hours’ walk.”
“Is there a school?”
“No, miss.”
“Then who taught you?”
“My grandfather, mostly. And the parish curate did letters.”
Penny considered this and appeared to find it satisfactory. “What is in the bundle?”
“Penny,” said Clara.
“It is a reasonable question. He is holding it like a baby.”
“It is fishing tackle, I expect,” said Croft comfortably.
“No, sir,” said Leon.
He did not say what it was. He also did not put it down.
The train went on, and fields went by, then a brickworks, then more fields. The milestone said seventy-four.
“You have a mark on your hand,” said Penny.
The carriage did not go quiet, but the four of them did. Leon turned his right hand over slowly and put it flat on the oilcloth, back downwards, which was where it had been in the first place.
“Yes, miss.”
“Penny,” said Clara, and this time there was no lightness in it at all.
Croft had not spoken. He had taken his spectacles off and was holding them, but he had not begun polishing them.
“Forgive me,” he said, and his voice had gone careful. “I have no right at all to ask, and you may tell me to go to the devil. Who bound you?”
“Ma Fenn, sir. Up our way. She is dead now.”
“How long?”
“Four years.”
“And did she hold a licence for it?”
Leon looked at him. “A what, sir?”
Croft put his spectacles back on, slowly. He took a very long time over the second ear.
“I have written to nine parishes in four years,” he said, to nobody in particular. “Asking if anybody still knew the old way. Every one of them wrote back and said no. Died out before their grandfathers, they said.” He almost laughed. “Of course they did. Who would put that in a letter?”
“Sir?”
“Listen to me.”
Croft put his satchel down on the floor between his boots, which he had not done all afternoon. Then he leaned in.
“They will find it. At the entrance they look at everybody’s hands.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So when they ask who marked you, you say a wise woman of your parish, when you were small. You were a child. You did not know what it was for.”
Leon had gone very still.
“Do not give them her name. Do not say the word rite.” Croft held his eye.
“Is it against the law, sir?”
“It has been against the law since before you were born.”
“Nobody ever told us.”
“No,” said Croft. “They never do.”
He took his notebook out of his satchel then and looked at it for a moment. Then he put it back.
Lucian looked at the hand flat on the oilcloth, then at the coat that had belonged to somebody wider, then at the two bags that held everything the boy owned. A binding costs more than that coat, more than the bags, more than the boots and the fare together.
Somebody paid for him, said one of his minds.
Not a service, said another. Nobody buys a boy that dear and sends him up third class.
And he does not know what he is, said a third. Which is probably why he is still alive.
Lucian turned a page of a newspaper he had now read four times.
The milestones came faster after that, and they got smaller, too. Somewhere past thirty the country began to turn into town. It went from brick and smoke to long black canals with barges on them, and streets running away on both sides with washing strung across them. Leon had turned to the window and forgotten the four people beside him.
Then the air changed.
Leon sat up. He put a hand out and touched the glass, then took it back and looked at his own fingers.
Nobody else in the compartment moved. Clara went on reading, Croft went on looking out of his own window, and Penny ate an almond.
Lucian did not touch the glass; he had felt it a hundred yards back. Meridian was built over a Well. Wells connected this world to the spirit world, and here the ambient mana density was high enough to feel in the air.
He put the newspaper in his pocket as the train whistled and slowed towards the platform. The great central station came into view, iron and dirty glass, four hundred feet of it. The daylight went out of the windows, and in its place came lamps, hundreds of them, hanging in rows that went further than a man could see. The train slowed, then slowed again, and came to a stop under the great roof of Central Cross.
“Well,” said Croft, standing up and putting his hat on and getting his satchel down and dropping it. “Here we are, then. Meridian.”
Leon did not move for a moment. He was looking down the platform, where the lamps went on and on. A man was selling wares off a barrow, and at the far side the fog came in under the roof and sat there.
“They say it is like a great beast,” he said. “Where I am from. They say once you are in its belly you do not come out.”
“Who says that?” said Croft.
“Everybody, sir.”
“Well.” Croft got his satchel up on the second attempt. “They are not wrong.”
They came down onto the platform in a body. The crowd took them and moved them along.
A ward went over them.
It came down the platform at the pace of a man walking and passed across the five of them without slowing. It was not looking for anybody. It was counting.
Leon looked round, though he did not know why he had. Then he went on walking. Lucian did not turn his head.
Once a minute, he thought. All day and all night, counting people.
“Three,” said Penny suddenly.
Clara sighed. “Three what?”
“Three. On the train. I had three things and I lost the third one.” Penny put her hat on. “I have got it back.”
“Well?”
Penny looked up at Leon, who was a head and a half taller than she was and still watching the roof.
“Do not tell anybody in Meridian what you are best at.”
“Why not, miss?”
“Because then they know,” said Penny.
Leon thought about that for the whole length of the platform.