Andrea Höst: The Sleeping Life

"I’ve a different exercise for you then," Rennyn said, in the extra-reasonable tone Kendall distrusted. "Seb brought a small chest up to Illidian’s quarters. The contents are in poor condition since it wasn’t under any form of preservation—there’s cloth gone rotten and turning to powder. Take it out to the Sentene practice ground and try unpacking it without touching it. You can toss the rotted cloth, and sort the rest into colours."

Kendall shrugged, but decided this meant Rennyn was feeling better now she was sitting down. "Do I have to do it out in the practice ground?"

"Since there doesn’t seem to be any way to unpack it without getting everything in the vicinity filthy, yes."

"All right."

Suppressing her irritation, Kendall headed out, wishing she hadn’t decided to stick out playing student while Rennyn was still sick. When Sukata’s mother, Captain Sarana, had withdrawn her daughter from Tyrland’s best school of magic and made formal arrangements with Rennyn for Sukata to be her student, Kendall hadn’t resisted the same arrangement being made for her because she thought she’d learn more than she had staying in the annoying and useless Arkathan. Huge mistake.

Rennyn and Sebastian were both totally in love with how magic worked, and kept trying to get Kendall to understand how to create original spells, when all Kendall wanted to do was learn how to cast the common ones she could get paid for, like how to create the protective Circles around settlements, and make light and heat and cold stones. She was the wrong sort of student for Rennyn and everyone knew it. And felt the need to tell her.

A mage like Rennyn Claire deserves the best students the Arkathan can offer. Don’t you see, the time she spends teaching you the basics could be put to better use? Such a pity. Such a waste.

Those were just the outright rude, but most of the conversations she’d been having lately hadn’t been any more fun. Kendall had had more than enough of mages telling her how lucky she was, and to be properly grateful, and never once minding their own business. Maybe worst of all was Sebastian trying to make her catch his enthusiasm for how things worked, so that she could be a fancy-pants true mage instead of what he called a rote mage.

Rennyn at least didn’t do that. She just said that Kendall could decide what kind of mage she wanted to be after she had a command of the basics, and that memorising a bunch of spells someone else had made up wasn’t the basics. But so far that had meant absolutely nothing but boring lifting exercises and lectures, and if Rennyn hadn’t been so sick, Kendall wouldn’t have stayed a day. She’d already made plans to find a better fit of teacher after Rennyn had recovered some more. She’d miss Sukata doing that, but Sukata would understand, and it’s not like they wouldn’t be able to meet up. No, it was the smart thing to do. Kendall would grit her teeth and put up with being a charity case until then.

Back in Captain Faille quarters she changed out of her best clothes. Finding the chest behind a chair, Kendall carried it down to the sandy triangle where the Kellian came and danced around each other with swords, and their supporting Ferumguard sharpened their musket skills. Fortunately no-one was about, since Kendall hated practicing with an audience. Not only because it had taken her so long to get the things she was trying to move to do what she wanted, but because everyone was all too interested. Rennyn was—or had been—the most powerful mage in centuries. And not only that, she and Sebastian did magic differently from everyone else, using three methods instead of just the one that was safest. It was hard to concentrate when people watched you as if you were about to give away some great big secret.

Sighing, Kendall sat down cross-legged in front of the chest. Thought Magic—Force Magic as most people called it—wasn’t taught because students kept accidentally hurting themselves when they were trying to learn it. Yet the first thing Sebastian Claire had done when he’d met Kendall was give her a Thought Magic exercise to do, just because he couldn’t imagine being a mage without it.

It was simple to explain, if not to do: you willed things to move about and they did. It had taken Kendall a month to be able to pick up a pebble, and now after more than two months she could move things about and turn them over so long as they were light. She had no idea why it was so hard to turn something over, or how this was going to end up making her like Rennyn, who could do all sorts of unlikely things without having to spend loads of time writing out sigils like the other mages.

Unpacking a chest should be simple, though Kendall knew she’d end up feeling almost as tired as Rennyn for the rest of the day. Magical strength was something you built up through practice, and Sebastian had told her to think of herself as a two year-old trying to move furniture.

The chest had a catch, not a lock, and it was easy enough to turn this and then lift the lid, letting out a stink of dust and rot. Inside were little bags, and rolls of velvet that had once been dark blue and now were a faded and mottled grey. Kendall realised she should have brought something to sort it out into , but figured the lid would do. Unpacking the chest was going to be a bit more involved than she’d expected, since getting stuff out of little bags was more than just lifting and turning.

The rolls of velvet looked easier, but even just picking one up was a surprise. It sagged. Kendall sat for a while trying different ways of holding a sausage of cloth that shed little fragments of itself at each attempt to make it sit flat and still. It was a lot harder than making a rock turn over, but before Kendall could puzzle out what to do she caught it somehow by a corner and the whole thing unravelled.

A waterfall of colour. Ruby. Emerald. Sapphire. Necklaces tumbling from the roll of cloth to lie winking in the mid-morning sun. Kendall stared, stunned, then snorted.

"Sort it into colours? Bet you thought that was funny."

An entire chest of the Black Queen’s jewels. The Claires had spent less effort looking after it than the stupid books they were donating to the Houses of Magic, which at least had been under some sort of spell not to fall apart. But what would you expect from a pair who’d never had to earn a coin in their lives?

From the looks of their home, the Claires had lived modestly. They hadn’t kept any servants, had maintained an ordinary three-bedroom house in a smallish town. Sebastian said they owned four other similar houses in Tyrland, and moved between them to keep from becoming too known in one place. Owning five houses seemed a lot to Kendall, but a Duchess was supposed to live in mansions and have crowds of servants and things. Rennyn wouldn’t get that kind of money out of the Duchy she had inherited, since everyone knew Surclere was chicken-scratch poor. Kendall wasn’t entirely certain how much a mansion cost compared to a chest full of jewels, but it looked like Rennyn’d at least be able to pay the dressmaker.

Most of the necklaces were ugly, clunky things: the metals tarnished to black and green. It was hard to picture Rennyn or even the Black Queen wearing them. It didn’t seem likely they were fake though, and it was going to take a while for Kendall to decide how much she didn’t appreciate Rennyn giving her a chest full of jewels to see what she’d do with them.

Still, it was better than bowls. Kendall was well into making piles of red and blue and green and yellow and white when the faint crunch of sand warned her of an onlooker.

The sprat standing before her was no-one Kendall knew, though his robe gave him away as a student of the Arkathan. He was maybe a little older than her, though not much taller, with pale blond hair, peach-fuzz cheeks, and a look like porcelain too fine to use. Peaky.