Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic) (18 page)

Lady Barb reset him and took back the knife. “The standard healing spells are not capable of fixing such damage,” she said. “You need more complex spells to save someone who has been stabbed. The body
wants
to heal, but it needs direction and those directions provided by the standard spells are...insufficient.”

She looked up, eying her students. “Determining which kind of spell is required to deal with the wound is a vitally important part of your task,” she added. “Standard healing spells require little power, beyond the first casting. More complex healing spells can leave you drained. Yet using the standard ones can be disastrous, if the wound is too deep or the body is too badly mauled. If you don’t know for sure, use the more complex spells—but be careful that there are no hidden curses. You don’t want to start doing two separate tasks at the same time.

“This”—she waved her hand in the air, causing a line of spell components to appear in front of them—“is the most basic form of advanced healing spell,” she continued. “You’ll notice that it bears a strong resemblance to curse-breaking spells, particularly the sections that allow you to control it directly, rather than allowing it to operate on its own. As you can probably imagine, these spells require a great deal of concentration.”

She smiled, then returned the knife to Paddy’s chest. “Princess Alassa, why don’t you try to cast it first?”

Alassa nodded and stepped forward. She removed the curse first, then carefully cast the healing spell. There was a moment when magic flared around her, then Paddy let out a cry and blood splashed everywhere. Alassa jumped backwards, too late. Bright red blood stained her robes and hair.

“Too much power,” Lady Barb said. The blood vanished a moment later. “Healing requires skill as well as power.”

She held up a hand. “For those of you who look sick, I should remind you that healing is not a very clean art,” she added, dryly. “Blood, guts and gore will be common if you go into healing. Grow a strong stomach or give up now.”

Emily had seen horror ever since Shadye had dragged her into a whole new world, but there was something different about working on a living body. Two other students tried, both getting a little further than Alassa before Paddy expired. Lady Barb didn’t seem angry at the failures, although she lectured the third student on not repeating the same mistakes as the prior students. When it was Emily’s turn, she stepped forward, cast the spell and her mind plunged into Paddy’s body.

The experience was deeply disconcerting. Curse-breaking allowed her to see the curses; healing, it seemed, allowed her to see everything inside the simulation of a human body. It felt almost as if she had placed her head under the water. Everything was so loud that she couldn’t help wondering if she had plugged into Paddy’s nervous system, at least to some extent; she was aware of the damage to his body without quite knowing
how
she was aware of it. But actually
healing
the damage was much harder. Basic healing spells would simply have knitted the wrong parts back together and caused worse problems in the future.

She concentrated, but the wound refused to heal properly.

Careful
, she reminded herself. But it didn’t get any better.

“None of you managed to heal him,” Lady Barb said, when they had all finished. “I cannot say that I am surprised. Making the spell work is one thing, actually
healing
someone is quite another. By the end of the term, however, I expect you to have mastered the art.”

Alassa stuck up her hand. “You
expected
us to fail?”

“It takes months of experience to perform an advanced healing spell successfully,” Lady Barb said, flatly. “I did not expect you to heal him on your first try.”

She motioned for them to return to their desks, then stood in front of the classroom at parade rest. “You will realize, of course, that the experience of working inside a person’s body is rather hard to master,” she said. “For your homework, you are to practice exploring each other’s bodies—using the spell, I shall add quickly—and getting used to the sensations that come from being inside someone else.”

Emily had to fight down a giggle. She wasn’t the only one.

“Yes, we sniggered at it too,” Lady Barb said. “And it
is
funny. Failing to master the spell, on the other hand, will cause you to fail this class. Is that so funny?

“You are
not
to attempt to wound each other so that you may practice healing,” she added, tartly. “None of you are anything like ready to actually
heal
. I would also suggest that girls work with girls and boys work with boys. It’s often easier to heal someone of the same sex as yourself, if only because you will have an instinctive understanding of how their bodies work.”

There was a loud groan from the rear of the room. “Detention,” Lady Barb said, aiming her words at one of the transfer students. “Healing is serious business. How many times do I have to repeat myself?”

Emily scowled, inwardly. She disliked being naked in front of someone else, even her closest friends. Alassa, for all her regal dignity, had no real problem undressing in front of servants, male or female. The idea of undressing in front of someone she barely knew...luckily, she could practice with Alassa and Imaiqah. Practicing with the Gorgon might have been possible, but her body might be significantly different from a normal human. She’d have to check before she asked.

Come to think of it, she asked herself silently, did she even
need
to undress?

“You will also look up case studies of cursed weapons and precisely what they did to their victims,” Lady Barb continued. “I will expect five rolls of parchment from each of you at the end of the month, covering the most common ways to curse a weapon and how they can be detected and countered. There is, alas, no shortage of material.”

Emily winced.
Another
essay?

“Now,” Lady Barb said, once they’d written down the essay title. They knew from experience that having to ask for it later in the month would not be well-received by the tutors. “We will take a look at mundane ways to deal with injuries, all of which you
will
be tested on later in the year.”

She launched into a long lecture on basic sanitation that, apart from a few odd points, seemed workable. Emily listened, fascinated, as she talked of tiny monsters in the air that spread disease—germs, in other words—and how they could be stopped. Even something as simple as making sure that everything was
clean
and washed regularly in boiling water, Lady Barb pointed out, would cut down on the risk of infection. Emily had known, intellectually, that some people in Whitehall knew about germs, but she had never looked at
what
they knew before. There just hadn’t been time to look at everything.

They could have shared this knowledge with the world
, she thought, sourly.
I didn’t have to tell them anything about germs. They already knew
.

But the knowledge didn’t seem to be very common, outside Whitehall. Some of the city-states she’d seen had been remarkably clean, others had been ghastly—and the conditions of the peasants in some of the kingdoms was appalling. Even King Randor had to use toilets that Emily wouldn’t have installed in a prison. The stench alone should have been lethal.

She stuck up her hand and waited for Lady Barb to call on her. “Why don’t you tell everyone about the...little monsters?”

“Because there are limits to what we are allowed to tell people,” Lady Barb said. She couldn’t have missed the accusation in Emily’s tone, but she didn’t respond to it. “And because even when we do, there is so much nonsense out there that it is hard to make any headway.”

That
, Emily decided, made no sense. She could see kings or other aristocrats deciding that the great unwashed should
remain
the great unwashed, even if they
did
catch diseases and drop dead in terrifying numbers, but why would they want to deny
themselves
the chance to live healthier lives? But then, they did have better food and drink than the peasants—and access to healing magic. They might reason that they didn’t
need
to take better care of themselves, like a girl Emily had once known who went for liposuction every year.

But
Emily
had introduced the concept of basic sanitation and it had spread wildly...

She mulled it over for the rest of the class, while Lady Barb talked about the dangers of trying to transfer blood from one person to another. They didn’t seem to know about the different types of blood; Emily made a mental note to use the memory spells to recover what she’d heard and forgotten about them. She could write it all down and give the information to Lady Barb.

“While healing,” Lady Barb concluded, “you must remember that a person’s life is in your care. A single mistake could kill him.”

She smiled at the class, then clicked her fingers at the door. It opened with an audible
click
.

“Master the first part of the spell as quickly as possible,” she ordered. “Once you have it mastered, we can proceed.”

Emily waited until the rest of the class was gone—she didn’t share Alassa and Imaiqah’s next class—and then stood. “I need to ask for some advice,” she admitted. “I overslept this morning...”

“Careless,” Lady Barb said. “Which classes did you miss?”

“Advanced Charms,” Emily replied.

“That’s bad,” Lady Barb said, dryly. “Annoying an expert in Charms is
never
a good idea, I’m afraid. Do you have a good excuse?”

Emily blinked, then explained. “I took a sleeping potion last night,” she said, and outlined what had happened in Blackhall. “It didn’t work perfectly...”

“The phobia spell is very good at getting under the victim’s skin,” Lady Barb said, when Emily had finished. “Luckily, it wasn’t a Nightmare Curse. Those things are damn near impossible to remove without a great deal of luck. I’m impressed you threw it off as well as you did.”

“I don’t feel that I did well,” Emily said. “I failed the test.”

“You’ll learn from the experience,” Lady Barb grunted, in a manner that suggested grudging approval. “I would suggest going to see Professor Lombardi now and explaining what happened. He will probably insist that you review the material for today. He’s much more easy-going than the one who taught me.”

Emily winced at the thought. Professor Lombardi didn’t seem to have the abiding sense of dislike that pervaded all of Master Tor’s dealings with Emily, but he was a fussy precisionist who didn’t hesitate to strike his student’s hands when they made a mistake. Emily could see his point—a single mistake could be disastrous—yet part of her also resented the public humiliation. Visiting the Warden was almost preferable.

“Oh, yes,” Lady Barb assured her. “Old Professor Shanks liked to use naughty students as test subjects. He’d have the victim stand at the front of the class and everyone else would practice their hexes on him.”

Emily gulped.

“I’d go see Professor Lombardi now,” Lady Barb said. “And Emily?”

Emily looked up at her, questioningly.

“You did very well yesterday, whatever you may think,” Lady Barb assured her. “Pushing the limits is always a good idea. Even when you fall flat on your face, you learn something from the experience.”

“Thank you,” Emily said. “I’ll try to do better next time.”

“By the end of the year, you should be walking through Blackhall without problems,” Lady Barb said. “And if you can’t...you have quite a few years of schooling ahead of you. You could repeat that class without problems.”

Emily thought, briefly, of Jade. If he’d failed Martial Magic’s first year, he wouldn’t have had a second chance. His hopes of an apprenticeship would have been dashed. Why hadn’t he done it earlier? It wasn’t something she felt comfortable asking him.

“I’ll do my best,” she promised. She turned and walked towards the door. “And thank you.”

Chapter Fifteen

T
HE REST OF THE WEEK WENT
by very quickly as the students fell back into the comforting routine of classes, homework, eating, sleeping and using whatever time they had left for more entertaining pursuits. Alassa and Imaiqah spent most of their free time practicing with the team, leaving Emily to work on her homework as well as her private research project. It was frustrating, at times, trying to figure out how the enchantment spells went together, but she refused to surrender and ask her professors for advice. She wanted to solve it on her own.

Her new trunk arrived on Saturday, along with a note from Yodel asking for written permission to emigrate to Zangaria. Emily wrote out a note for Bryon, then signed it with the seal she’d been given by King Randor. Only Emily or her heirs, she had been assured, could actually
use
the seal. Alassa had demonstrated by trying to stamp it on a sheet of parchment, only for the seal to be completely illegible. Emily sent the note back down to Dragon’s Den, then started transferring her books, clothes and other supplies from her borrowed trunk to the new one. There was so much room in the trunk, Yodel’s instructions assured her, that she could hide an entire library inside and no one would be any the wiser. She had just completed the transfer when Alassa opened the door and stuck her head into the room.

“Aren’t you coming to the game?”

Emily sighed inwardly, but stood. She’d half-hoped that Professor Lombardi’s revision notes from the class she’d missed would provide an excuse, yet all he’d really done was revise some of the charms they’d studied last year and made sure that their spellwork hadn’t slipped while they’d been on holiday. Emily had already mastered the basic charms, although she’d gone through them all one by one, just to make sure. She didn’t want to irritate the professor again so soon.

“Coming,” she said, as she sealed the trunk. She cast a wistful look at the notes on her desk, then decided to leave them till later. “Are you facing Cat’s team?”