The World Is Not Fair
Back then he had wanted it so badly that he insisted he had passed. Yanking his hand out of the water so quickly, watching the yellow-robed mage for any flicker of reaction—both had come from that same unease.
Chris worried over it, and worried again. In the end he seized on how exacting the yellow robe had been and decided that must mean he had talent. He drilled the notion into himself until it stuck.
I passed, didn't I? That's enough.
Even so, the anxiety never left him. It lay deep in his mind, settled like dregs.
The carriage bearing that anxiety arrived at a plaza halfway up the mountain. Chris climbed down and his eyes went wide. He couldn't help marveling. By what means had anyone carved a square this enormous into the mountainside?
He was still breathing out his wonder when Smith jabbed him in the back of the head.
"You trying to look like a country hick?"
Smith clicked his tongue.
"Close your mouth before you swallow a fly."
With Jack gone, this bastard had taken to poking him in the back of the head. Chris gave an awkward laugh and stepped aside. All the way to the tower, there had been so much he wanted to ask Smith.
What is this good thing that's supposed to be in the air? Did you really feel it? What happens when you do? What can you actually do? How did you make those ripples?
He had hoped a few answers might ease the anxiety gnawing at him, but his distrust of Smith kept the questions locked behind his teeth.
The two of them did not get along. If he opened his heart and asked plainly, and Smith ran to a mage to tattle—This bastard says he didn't feel a thing. There must have been a mistake on the test—then simply being thrown out would not be the end of it.
Chris had never forgotten the indifferent, icy eyes of the red-robed mage who burned Jack to death. He recalled them at least twice a day.
What would happen if that ruthless mage came to suspect him?
He would meet the same end as Jack.
He had heard that burning was the most painful way to die. Chris did not want to die in that kind of agony. If he was going to die young, he would rather have his head taken off in a single stroke.
"Jack."
The name slipped out while he was thinking of him. Smith frowned.
"Why are you calling that unlucky bastard's name?"
Chris scratched at the faint whiskers just beginning to prickle along his jaw.
"It just came to me."
"Out of nowhere? Why?"
"It keeps coming back."
"So why think about him? He's dead."
"Because he's dead."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"If Jack hadn't gotten greedy at the very end, he would have lived, and we would have left the barony with easy hearts. Jack would have stayed a man from the past, someone we were never going to meet again. Of course we wouldn't have thought of him. Twenty years from now, or thirty, I might have been eating and suddenly remembered. 'I had a hard time when I was young. There was a real piece of work in our village named Jack, and he made my life hell.' I might have gossiped about him. Might have chewed him over with the drinks."
Chris shook his head.
"But he died wretchedly. Jack is never going to be forgotten. Time can pass all it wants. He'll keep coming back."
Smith snorted.
"Well, look at you. Full of surprises."
"How?"
"You're sentimental as a girl."
He yanked Chris's ear.
"Quit the nonsense and look at the tower."
Behind the plaza, a staircase of white stone climbed high. It rose past three stories, and it was wide enough to feel thoroughly imposing.
The building itself stood five stories, but set above that tall stair it seemed higher still, as if it were stabbing the sky.
The sign read Mick Tower—Chris couldn't read, so he had asked someone else—and they said it was the building that stood for the magic tower.
Chris looked around. The mages who had brought them were nowhere to be seen. The thirty-odd successful candidates unloaded from ten carriages paced the square, caught between dread and excitement over what lay ahead.
Smith poked him in the side.
"Go ask where Mage Randal and Mage David went."
The red-robed mage was named Randal, and the yellow-robed one was David. It had taken Chris and Smith eight full days of traveling together just to learn their names. They still didn't know the surnames.
Chris shrugged. The gesture was vague, but the answer was firm.
"No."
"Hey."
"I said no."
The apprentices who had traveled with them kept the pair at a distance for having been slaves. Chris made no protest.
Mage David said that once we enter the tower, status disappears.
Let's not look down on one another, not when we're all apprentices.
Hard days are ahead. We ought to help each other and get along.
He never said anything of the kind, not even as a joke. He took it as the way the world was, and he never drew any closer to them.
Smith reacted differently. The moment he passed the test for magical talent, he decided he had entered a privileged class, and so he tried to get friendly with the nobles. He went up to them constantly and struck up conversation. The noble-born apprentices ignored him at first, then answered with contempt and mockery.
Their coldness wounded him badly, and now he couldn't bring himself to speak to them. Whenever he had a question for a noble classmate, he kept jabbing Chris. You ask.
Chris had no reason to indulge him. He changed the subject.
"Another carriage's coming in over there."
Carriages were climbing the mountain road in a long line. The road was wide and well paved, so they barely rocked.
"They smoothed it out nicely. A paved road through mountains this rough—mages really are something, aren't they?"
Pride rose on Smith's face.
"I'm going to be a mage, too."
Chris couldn't echo him. He wanted desperately to become one of them himself, but it didn't look easy. Every time he tried to think hopefully, he saw Jack burning to death. And Randal's indifferent eyes.
He roughly counted the people the line of carriages disgorged and guessed there were about three hundred. Not one of them wore a robe. Only a few had yellow sashes tied at the waist. The mages escorting them seemed to have peeled off somewhere else before reaching the plaza.
Smith's eyes lit as he watched the newly arrived apprentices.
"Let's go talk to them."
"No. I'm good."
Chris shook his head, watching Smith head toward them.
If I speak to them, they'll ask where I'm from...
Answer that he had been a slave, and the cold shoulder would follow.
Chris circled their outskirts, reading the room. An orphan who meant to survive had no choice but to sharpen his sense for other people's moods. Jack and his lackeys had called Chris an idiot, but Chris was not stupid. He had only acted stupid in order to survive among them. Thanks to that, he had survived. Poor food had left him skinny and short, but he had survived all the same—survived, and come this far.
I'll survive in the magic tower, too. Whatever it takes.
He firmed that resolve while he watched faces and took the measure of the mood.
Some people have a gift for getting along—people who love a gathering and enjoy talking to strangers, the sort who would make friends even in the middle of a war. There were a few of that kind among those assembled here. Conversation formed around them, and groups formed of their own accord.
The standard by which those groups formed was status. For Smith, who had been nosing about and trying to join in, that was a regrettable thing.
The successful candidates in the plaza divided into six kinds. The first group was made up of royals and the children of high nobles, the loudest of the lot and the freest in how they carried themselves. The second consisted of middling nobles whose power did not reach so high. The third was mostly the offspring of fallen nobles who kept a title but no land, together with nobles of only a single generation. Children of the officials and knights who served on noble estates belonged to that third group as well. Those three were the so-called noble bloc.
The fourth and fifth were mostly commoners. Wealthy households went into the fourth, and households with little property into the fifth.
Commoners rich enough to run great merchant companies sometimes entered the second group, though there were very few of them. Within a few years their families were likely to buy titles and turn themselves into noble houses.
The sixth group was made up of former slaves. Once the groups had settled, Chris stopped wandering and slipped quietly into the one he belonged to.
Commoners were the most numerous, and nobles came next. He could grant that commoners, with their vast numbers, would be many—but it made no sense that there were fewer slaves than nobles, when the slave population was far larger than the nobility's.
Chris folded his arms and thought it through. A difference in education seemed to have produced this result. Children of noble houses would have known beforehand what they were supposed to sense in the air, and what they had to do to pass. Perhaps they had even tested their own first, and sent only the ones who passed to sit the tower's exam.
Chris turned over, once more, a truth he had known for a long time. The world was not fair.
"Let's introduce ourselves."
Even among the slaves, cowed by the discrimination of rank, there was someone lively.
"I'm Alice."
Smith, who had been watching the royals, took one look at Alice and suddenly cursed.
"Damn. She's ugly."
Even at a remark that rude, Alice didn't get angry.
"Thanks for the honest answer. But you're no prize yourself."
Chris burst out laughing. The other slaves laughed with him, and thanks to her reply the gloomy air hanging over the former slaves lifted.
"Sorry."
Smith apologized with unexpected courtesy, and Alice accepted it readily. Chris looked at her with friendly eyes. Her nostrils tilted up in a snub nose, her teeth were badly crooked, and her cheekbones were flat—a face that would be hard to call pretty even as a courtesy. But her eyes alone were truly beautiful. They seemed to sparkle like stars.
"I'm Chris. Same hometown as this rude one here. Smith."
The slaves introduced themselves one by one. Few people put any serious thought into naming a slave, so the names were all common. There were two more Smiths, more than three Jacks, and Robert came up often as well.
Smith spoke.
"Those ones are obnoxious, aren't they?"
His finger indicated the fourth and fifth groups. Slave habits still lingered in him. He couldn't bring himself to speak ill of royals or nobles, so he picked on the commoners.
Alice said,
"Don't mind them."
"Why do you keep talking to me like that?"
"How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"I'm sixteen."
Listening to the two of them, Chris laughed to himself. Alice did not look sixteen. Smith had said fifteen, and she seemed to have tacked a year on top of it.
Then the noisy noble group went quiet. Chris felt the change and turned. A party of mages was coming down the white stairs—red robes, blue robes, brown robes, white robes. They wore robes of every color.
From Randal's robe and David's, Chris had assumed high mages wore red and lesser ones yellow. Seeing older mages dressed in all sorts of colors, that didn't seem to be it.
Do they just wear whatever suits them?
He picked Randal out among them and shuddered. The memory of Jack burning came back again.
The barony where Chris had lived, and Mickclonia Magic Tower, where he would live from now on, both belonged to the Grant Kingdom.
The one who spoke for the first group was Mark Grant, seventh son of King Alfred Grant, who currently sat the throne. As Mark approached the stairs, he said,
"Mage Thomas—when did you disappear on us?"
The mage called Thomas smiled. He wore a blue robe.
"I came ahead to sort you into groups."
"I see."
Randal's tone was brutally businesslike.
"Let's get this done."
Thomas nodded.
"All right."