“You could ask Cat, I suppose,” Emily added. She didn’t know how many of the other apprentice combat sorcerers had thought well of her. “But he’ll still want you to be qualified by the time he takes you on.”
Frieda looked downcast. “I wish ... I wish it was simpler. I don’t even know how to cope with Celadon.”
Emily sighed. “Did you ask him to break it down for you?”
“He said I should understand,” Frieda said. Her voice was bitterly frustrated. “And I don’t. I don’t know how his plans work, let alone how to explain them. I’m going to fail!”
“It’s only the first week,” Emily said. She wondered, again, if she should have a word with Professor Lombardi. It wasn’t easy to get sorcerers to work together, but it sounded as though the relationship between Frieda and Celadon had turned poisonous. “Have you considered asking to be released?”
“There’s no one else searching for a new partner,” Frieda said. “And if we did, we’d still be in trouble.”
Emily made a face. The project wouldn’t just be graded on their work, although that was a large part of it. They’d be graded on how well they managed to work together, blending ideas from both of them into a coherent whole. If Celadon did all the work, they’d only get half-marks at best; if Frieda left, neither of them would pass. And even if Celadon managed to salvage what was left, he’d still be marked down. There was no way the tutors would allow someone to swap partners without practically restarting the project from scratch.
“You could always threaten him,” Emily pointed out. “If you leave the project, he’ll be fucked.”
Frieda smiled. “And not in a good way.” Her face fell. “But I’ll be fucked too.”
Emily did the calculations in her head. Assuming that Frieda got nothing for the joint project—which was likely—she’d need to do very well in her exams to have a hope of passing Fourth Year. Failing the joint project would probably cost her the chance to proceed onwards to Fifth Year. Hell, she’d have to ally herself with a third-year student ... who might wind up screwed if Frieda wasn’t allowed to retake Fourth Year. It was a terrible mess.
“That’s something you should bear in mind,” she said. “You do have leverage over him too.”
Frieda’s face darkened. “I don’t feel as though I do. What happens if he tells me to go?”
“Then you can complain to your advisor or see if you can work out an agreement with a third student.” Emily gritted her teeth. Grandmaster Hasdrubal had made arrangements for her to work with Caleb over the summer between Third and Fourth Years, but Gordian wasn’t likely to be so accommodating. Maybe if they picked the right third year ... she shook her head. She didn’t know any of the third years personally. “At the very least, you can spread the blame a little.”
She looked down at her hands as the food arrived. The roast beef looked delicious, something she would never have been able to have on Earth. It would have been far too expensive for her family, even if her mother hadn’t spent her welfare checks on drink. She still found it hard to believe how many roast animals Randor and his court could eat at a single sitting. They ate enough meat and fish—and vegetables—to feed an entire city for a month. Conspicuous consumption was part of a monarch’s job, she’d been told, but it still made her feel uneasy.
“I never ate fish, back home,” Frieda said, wistfully. “It was rare, and ...”
“You don’t have to go home now, if you don’t want to,” Emily pointed out. She remembered Gordian’s assignment and leaned forward. “Do you want to go home?”
“They hated me,” Frieda said. Her face darkened, suddenly. Her anger was almost a palatable force. Emily could feel her magic crawling over her skin, demanding release. “I want to go home, I want to make them hurt ...”
She softened. “And I never want to see any of them again.”
Emily reached out gently and pressed Frieda’s hand. “You don’t have to see them again, ever,” she said. The sudden flash of anger had been disturbing. “You don’t have to go back to Mountaintop either.”
“I wouldn’t.” Frieda looked up at Emily. “Thank you. For everything.”
“You’re welcome,” Emily said. The naked adoration in Frieda’s eyes was enough to make her uncomfortable. Frieda had jumped ahead by leaps and bounds ever since coming to Whitehall ... no, ever since meeting someone who actually wanted to help her. “You are doing well.”
“I don’t feel as though I’m doing well.” Frieda rubbed her arms. “I work hard in class—and do everything Sergeant Miles tells me to do—but I still feel as though I’m drowning. How do you cope?”
Emily hesitated. She felt as though she were drowning too. And yet, there was no way she could stop.
“You sort out what you have to do, and then you do it,” she said, finally. “And you isolate what you don’t have to do and put it aside for later.”
“I wish it was that easy,” Frieda said. “I might have taken on too much.”
“Then you have to admit it now, before you get too far into the new year.” Emily took a sip of her juice. It tasted sharp against her tongue. “You really don’t want to burn out.”
Frieda looked grim. “I don’t want to give up either. But Celadon ...”
Emily considered—briefly—attempting to mediate. But Professor Lombardi would consider it an unjustified intrusion into his sphere. And it would be, unless she asked him first. Which would be a vote of no confidence ... she shook her head, annoyed. If she was in his shoes, she would have been glad of the help.
I’m just the Head Girl, she thought. And Gordian would not be impressed if I did his job.
“You have faith in yourself,” she said, firmly. “And make him tell you exactly how his diagrams work.”
She ate the meal slowly, savoring every bite. Whitehall’s food was very good—it was one of the techniques used to convince common-born students to forget their roots—but home-cooked food was often better. The cook had probably been told secrets from her mother which had been passed down in an unbroken line from some distant matriarch. Or maybe it was a male cook. She smiled at the thought. It was funny how cooking for one’s wife was seen as unmanly, on the Nameless World, but cooking for business was not.
“The fish is good,” Frieda said. “Why don’t they cook it like this at school?”
“It’s probably a matter of scale,” Emily said. She’d asked the same question about healing potions. Poaching a single fish would be easy, she supposed; poaching enough fish to feed the entire student body would be a great deal harder. Brewing enough potions to sell them cheaply would be even worse. “I don’t think they’d be able to do this for everyone.”
“Not everyone eats fish,” Frieda pointed out. “Idiots.”