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‘You do, Mistress,’ said Clariel eagerly. ‘But I have worked as such, off and on, since I was thirteen. If I can only plead my case at Greenstilts, and show my skills, I think there might be a chance they will take me.’

Ader looked at her for a moment, then slowly shook her head.

‘No. This is not achievable. Not now.’

‘Why not?’ asked Clariel. ‘I am as good … almost as good a hunter and tracker as Sergeant Penreth, I have learned a great deal of herblore from my aunt Lemmin, I –’

‘Stop,’ said Ader, without raising her voice or changing her tone. ‘It is not simply a matter of your skills. While it is very unlikely the Borderers would enlist someone so young in normal times, they simply could not enlist you now, no matter if you were half-beast yourself and the finest hunter ever seen.’

Clariel opened her mouth to ask why not, but Ader held up one forceful finger and continued to speak.

‘They could not, because like all the royal institutions, they have no money, and their future is in doubt. In fact, if the King does not reassume his authority, or if the Guilds do not take over the Borderers as they have done the Royal Guard and the Wall Garrison, then the Borderers must eventually be disbanded, when they run out of whatever funds they still possess.’

‘But that would be madness!’ said Clariel. ‘The Great Forest alone needs constant attention, lest it run totally wild, and there is the West Wood, Great Sickle Wood …’

‘Madness is unfortunately not incompatible with government,’ said Ader. ‘So. You cannot join the Borderers, not now, perhaps not ever. What else might you do?’

Clariel was unable to answer. She stood there, cold inside, part of her grappling with the idea that the Borderers might not be there to join, that her dream was even more foolish than she’d thought, while another part of her wanted to erupt in fury, to show this over-calm old woman that she would be a Borderer, that she would make the King pay them again, though she didn’t know how she would do that …

‘What else might you do?’ repeated Ader.

‘I can still be a hunter,’ said Clariel. ‘Live in, and off the Forest. Make what coin I need on top of that by guiding those from the town or the city who wish to hunt, but do not know the woods.’

‘You will need capital to establish such a business,’ said Ader. ‘It would be slow to start, particularly at your age, but it is not an impossible notion. If you can talk your parents into supplying say … at least fifty bezants a year, for your first five years, I would adjudge it an achievable ambition.’

‘Really?’ asked Clariel. ‘I thought you would …’

Her voice trailed off. She did not want to say that she thought that the Academy was the kind of place that would make its pupils only want one kind of life.

‘You thought that we limit the choices of our students?’ asked Ader. ‘We do not, but it is a sad fact that the great majority limit themselves. You might find it best to keep your ambition secret, Lady Clariel. Many here would consider it too small, a thing to be made fun of. However, all I am concerned with is that we equip you both for the possibility of other futures, and for the one you yourself envisage.’

She lifted the lid of her writing desk and removed a piece of thick paper, which had a list of twelve things printed in a large legible type in bright blue ink down the middle, leaving a very generous margin to the top, bottom and either side. Closing the desk again, she put the paper down, carefully inked a quill, and drew two nearly perfect lines through two of the items on the list. Then she renumbered the list from one to ten with large numerals in the margin, not in the order they were originally written.

‘This is our standard curriculum for those young people who will be venturing into their own business or enterprise,’ said Ader. ‘I think two subjects would be superfluous in your case. You will attend the other ten lessons, starting with number eight, as that is about to begin, and work your way through each day. Each room in the Academy has a name; you will find the location of each lesson in this list, and the name of each instructor. Your immediate class is in the Three Window Room. Take the southwest stair there down two floors, walk twenty paces along the hallway and the door will be on your left, with a nameplate. After your lesson today, I suggest you walk around and learn the names and locations of all the rooms; there are only nineteen.’

Clariel took the paper, running her eyes quickly down the list of lessons. The two that had been crossed out were ‘Keeping a Count of Monies, the Twice-Written Method’ and ‘The Calculation of the Cost of Making Stuff and the Setting of Prices Thereof’, both familiar to her from her work with her father. The remaining ten were:

On the Writing of Letters, Reports, Epistles, Writs, Bills and Such

The Proper Obtainment, Direction and Discontinuance or Severance of Servants, Apprentices and Partners-in-Business

Music and Dancing, Courtly and Otherwise

The Role of Each Person in Households, Great to Small

The High, Middle and Low Guilds and Great Companies of Belisaere

The Direction of Feasts, Celebrations, Festivals and Fairs

Geographical Understanding and the Flow of Trade

The Serving of Tea

Matters of Law, Royal, City and Guild

The Exercise of the Body, Martial and Merely Aesthetic

‘The Serving of Tea?’ asked Clariel. She knew what tea was – a new herbal drink that had been introduced to the Kingdom from somewhere far off five or six years before, though she had never drunk it herself. There was even a teahouse in Estwael that had been open a year with little sign of it becoming a permanent fixture. ‘How can that be helpful to anyone?’

‘Go and find out,’ said Mistress Ader. ‘I shall see you again in due course, to discuss your progress. You may go.’

Clariel hesitated, then bowed and turned around, heading for the southwest staircase. She had just taken her first step down when Ader called after her.

‘Lady Clariel. One more thing.’

Clariel looked back from the top of the stairs.

‘I understand you are to study Charter Magic. It is a good thing for one of your heritage to study Charter Magic, as ignorance of it may prove fatal. Please pass on a message from me to Magister Kargrin when you see him this afternoon. Tell him I said, “None have yet passed through, but I shall keep watch.”’

‘None have yet passed through, but I shall keep watch,’ repeated Clariel. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It is a private message,’ said Ader. This time, perhaps because of the angle, even at the greater distance, Clariel saw that there was a Charter mark on Ader’s forehead, showing through the whiteness. Or was there? When she blinked and looked again, she couldn’t see it.

As she stood there, staring, Mistress Ader raised one eyebrow, and this was enough to send Clariel quickly down the stairs. It was odd, she thought, that she should feel more nervous about going against that raised eyebrow than she had when facing down a boar armed with nothing but a boar-spear, trusting to its cross-guard to stop the boar running up the shaft and slicing her to death with its tusks, teeth and sharp trotters.

She didn’t feel particularly nervous about the class she was going to, because she didn’t care about the people, or about the subject. ‘The Serving of Tea’ sounded like an awful waste of time, but Clariel supposed she could endure it.

Particularly as she now had a plan with a definite object. Fifty bezants a year. It wasn’t a great sum compared to the amounts her parents earned in the business. And there might be a simple way to get it. Clariel had always presumed that her mother was the stumbling block for her desire to become a Borderer, but perhaps it was really her father. Now she thought she had been wasting her time trying to get Harven to agree to her going to live in the Great Forest, when she should have been talking to Jaciel. Not that she ever really did talk to Jaciel, Clariel had to confess to herself. But surely this same question had arisen for her, and led to the falling-out with he

r father the Abhorsen. So she should be sympathetic.

The big question was when to talk to Jaciel, or more importantly, how to get her to pay attention. Timing was everything, and it would depend upon what she was working on at the moment. If the necklace of golden tears was close to being finished, then there would be an opportunity soon, as Jaciel typically did not start a new major work for a few days after finishing the previous one. Not that she stopped work, she just didn’t pursue it with the same level of intensity.

Clariel was thinking about this, and going through various lines in her head, wondering which would work best to broach the subject, when she reached the door that had a bronze plaque set squarely in the middle with the words ‘Three Windows Room’ engraved upon it in an ornate script. The door was ajar, and she could hear the murmur of conversation on the other side. Clariel pushed it open and walked in.

Five heads turned towards her, and the conversation stopped. Four of the heads belonged to people roughly her own age, somewhere in the vicinity of sixteen to twenty years old. There were two young men and two young women. The women wore the layered tunics of differing length in their Guild colours, and had their scarves tied around their necks rather than on their heads. The men had sleeves cut to show the inner lining of different colours and were bareheaded. None of them wore swords or daggers, or carried any obvious weapons at all.

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