“I didn’t have to,” Emily said. “Nor do you.”
Madame Griselda cleared her throat, meaningfully. Emily winked at Frieda, then turned and walked into Gordian’s office. It was empty, but a door was open at the far end, a door she was sure hadn’t been there before. Was Gordian experimenting with manipulating the school’s interior dimensions? Or had it merely been concealed behind a haze of powerful charms? After everything that had happened last year, it would be a long time before anyone—Emily included—wanted to meddle with the school’s interior. The risk of triggering another collapse was too great.
“Emily,” Gordian called. “Come on in.”
Emily walked to the new door and peered through. The compartment looked like a comfortable study, complete with armchairs, a small wooden table, a pot of Kava on the sideboard and a warm fire burning merrily in the grate. A handful of portraits hung from the walls, one marked as Master Whitehall. Emily smiled when she saw it. Lord and Master Whitehall—most history books didn’t seem to realize that Lord and Master were combined—hadn’t looked anything like that. The man in the painting looked like someone had crossed Dumbledore with Gandalf and added robes at least five hundred years out of time. The next picture—Grandmaster Bernard—might have been more authentic. She had no idea what Bernard had looked like as an older man.
No sign of Julianne, of course, she thought cynically. Whitehall’s daughter—and Bernard’s wife—had practically fallen out of the history books. And no mention of me either.
Gordian followed her gaze. “I was meaning to ask you how close they were to reality.” He sounded friendlier, for once. “Is that really him?”
“That isn’t Lord Whitehall.” Emily studied the portrait for a long moment. “I don’t think he would have aged into that.”
“Times change, people change,” Gordian said, his voice oddly reflective. “Others stay the same.”
He cocked his head. “I was hoping to discuss history with you at some later date,” he added, after a moment. “And there are a handful of historians who would be very interested in your story.”
Emily frowned. Gordian was the only one who knew she’d gone back in time and played a vital role in the founding of Whitehall School. She hadn’t told anyone else, not even her closest friends. The last thing she wanted was to encourage magicians to start experimenting with time travel, despite the fact that her equations insisted it wouldn’t be easy to navigate without a nexus point and a checkpoint. Random jumping through time would be incredibly dangerous.
And Gordian has his own reasons to keep it quiet, she thought. He wouldn’t want to admit that I can take control of the school’s wards. It would undermine his position as Grandmaster if everyone knew I could overrule him.
“I thought you wanted to keep it quiet,” she said. Professor Locke’s dream of long-lost spells had never materialized, but there were secrets in the past that should be left there. Demons and DemonMasters, for one. And Manavores, whatever they’d been. She’d seen signs of their presence at Heart’s Eye too, back when she and Casper had sneaked into the fallen school. “It would give people ideas.”
“The historians would be under oath not to disclose anything without clearing it with me first,” Gordian assured her. “Your name would never be mentioned.”
Emily wasn’t so sure. It was hard to tell just what clue would allow someone to untangle the whole story, even though time travel wasn’t even a concept in the Nameless World. Or perhaps it was, in a sense. Going forward in time wasn’t impossible, as long as one had the power. It was getting backwards that was impossible.
Without a nexus point, she reminded herself. And even if they had a nexus point, they’d find it hard to navigate ...
“Perhaps I could talk to them later,” she said. She understood the urge to dig up the past, even though there were some secrets definitely better left buried. “But it would be hard to prove anything.”
“We will see,” Gordian said. “We haven’t even begun to explore all the tunnels below Whitehall.”
“That would be dangerous,” Emily warned. “We don’t know what we might do.”
“Or what else might be on the verge of going wrong,” Gordian said. “I can’t even use the wards to scan below the school. Can you?”
Emily shook her head. The lower levels hadn’t quite been excluded from the wards, but the spellware that monitored the school didn’t work down there. She suspected the surveillance spells had been designed and implemented after the lower levels had been sealed off and forgotten. Whoever had designed them hadn’t known to look below the open levels.
“We’ll be very careful,” Gordian said. “But we do have to know what might be under us.”
Emily nodded, reluctantly. Whitehall’s spellwork had lasted for nearly a thousand years, but she could understand Gordian’s concern. Something might have been steadily going wrong—or falling out of alignment—for all that time. Or Lord Whitehall might have buried a basilisk under the school. She didn’t think that was likely—he’d have had more sense—but it was a possibility.
“Just be careful,” she said. “And leave the wards alone.”
“We will,” Gordian assured her. “Who knows how many more books and records are hidden below, just waiting for us to find them?”
Emily shrugged. As far as she knew, there had only been one cache of books. But if Master Wolfe had somehow been active after his presumed death, there might be more. He—or someone—had left a cache in Beneficence, after all. Why wouldn’t he have hidden one in Whitehall?
Because it would be the first place anyone would look, if they knew who’d written the books, her own thoughts answered her. He’d certainly have fewer problems hiding them here.
“It might come to nothing,” Gordian said. “But we have to search the lower levels thoroughly.”
He motioned for her to sit down. “Please, be seated. Would you like a mug of Kava?”
Emily hesitated. She’d really drunk too much caffeine over the last few hours. But etiquette demanded that he offer and she accept. It was a way of saying she was welcome, even if she wasn’t.
“Yes, please,” she said, finally. It wasn’t as though it was that late. “Milk, no sugar.”
Gordian rose and poured her a mug. “I trust you spent the week productively,” he said, as he passed it to her. “Did you find an alternative to the dueling club?”
“No, sir,” Emily said. It galled her to admit it, but all of the practical ideas had been done before. A couple of failed ideas had been reasonably promising, yet she doubted Gordian would have let her try to make them work. He’d say they’d already failed once and he would be right. “Nothing I found would be workable in the time I have.”
Gordian’s lips twitched, as if he’d scored a point. Emily silently conceded he had.