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Magister Titus nodded. “Galina Verus was one of the best students I’ve ever had, for all she was a woman.”
My jaw dropped, and I could have been knocked over with a feather. “Galina?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d always assumed that Galina—the woman from Gravlock who had saved Magnus’s life when Edik stabbed him, who had seen potential in me as a healer, and who was now one of the Justices from Gravlock and served on the Central Justice Council—had come from the frontier, like nearly everyone else in the Wolf River Kingdom. I’d never dreamed she was from the Old Realm.
“But Magister Titus, how is that possible? Women aren’t allowed to train as healers,” the young man, Lucius, said, as stunned as I was, but also indignant, or so it would seem. “Well, with a very notable exception.” His face flushed pink.
“They aren’t,per se,” Magister Titus said, a sly smile tilting up the corners of his otherwise severe mouth. “You know as well as I do that some women find ways around that, Lucius.”
I couldn’t understand why, but Lucius seemed to be the type who only knew how to be sour and resentful. I would have compared him to Anton in the way he scowled so much, but that would have been a grave insult to Anton.
“Welcome to the Royersford Healer’s College, Master Conrad,” Magister Titus said, extending a hand to me at last. As I shook it, he said, “Classes are already in session. Lucius here will take you to your dormitory so that you can relieve yourself of your things, and then I suggest that you hurry to your afternoon class or risk punishment from your instructor, eh, Magister Flaccus?” He glanced to salamander man.
“I do not tolerate tardiness in my classes,” the man, Magister Flaccus, said.
I gulped, stuffed my acceptance letter back into my stationary box, then shoved that into my pack. “But I’ve only just arrived. I don’t know where anything is. I don’t know what I need for classes. Are they books? Do I need something to write with? I don’t know what to do.”
“Then you’d best figure it all out as soon as possible,” Magister Flaccus said, turning to walk way.
“Magister Titus, you can’t mean to accept this frontier idiot into the course when he’s already late,” Lucius protested to the remaining magister. “And he can’t have a place in the dormitory. There…there isn’t room.”
Magister Titus sighed and shook his head at Lucius. “Four rooms, four students,” he said, though I didn’t know what he meant.
“Yes, magister, and we already have four,” Lucius protested.
I froze in the middle of hoisting my pack over my shoulder, beginning to have an idea what was going on.
“Leander and Darius have already volunteered to share,” Magister Titus said with a shrug. “That leaves one extra room for Conrad Kettering.”
“But Leander and Darius cannotshare,” Lucius protested, though at this point I was completely lost. “It isn’t right. It isn’tnatural.”
“It isn’t any of my business, nor yours,” Magister Titus said. “Now if you will excuse me, I have quite a bit of work to get done. Welcome to the college, Conrad,” he added before turning to go.
Lucius gaped at his back, making a sound of indignation that, again, almost reminded me of Anton’s usual sneer of disgust. Anton was only ever joking with his grunts and sniffs, though. Lucius was a true ass.
And it appeared I would be sharing a dormitory with him, whatever that meant.
“Unbelievable,” Lucius mumbled, then glanced my way. He shook his head, then marched off to another large door at the far end of the room, opposite the main entrance. I watched him for a moment until he turned back to me like I’d offended his mother and said, “Well? Are you coming?”
I lurched into motion, wondering what sort of mess I’d landed in now. It had been one thing to have Wat talk my ear off through the mountains and Horacio fuck me incompetently, but now it seemed my luck had run out.
I was distracted from that as we passed through the far door and out into another courtyard and garden area. This one was smaller, but just as beautiful as the area in front of the large building. The plants were all still medicinal, but fruit trees of a variety I’d never seen before grew along with the herbs and grasses.
The main building—I didn’t know what else to call it, but I would ask at some point—was just one of many buildings within what I assumed was the area enclosed by the walls. Two medium-sized buildings, each still three stories tall, flanked either side of the smaller garden. Then came a covered walkway that turned out to have three sides, almost like a cloister, but unfinished.
On the other side of the walkway was what looked to me like a small, beautiful, well-kept village of white buildings. Each one had a red-tiled roof that extended for several feet beyond the buildings themselves, giving the feeling of a porch that wrapped all the way around. Indeed, most of them had furnishings of one sort of another in the shaded areas under the overhangs.
“These are the dormitories,” Lucius said, as if giving me a begrudging tour. “There are eight on this side and eight on the other.”
He failed to say on the other side of what.
“There’s a bathhouse in the center of each square, though each of the houses has a cesspit outside where you can dump your chamber pot.”
Again, I had no idea what he was talking about.
“The dining hall is in North Building,” Lucius went on, gesturing vaguely to his left, back the way we’d come. “Most of the classrooms are in the same building on the upper floor. The clinic and infirmary are in South Building, but you won’t be going there, I’d wager.”
I frowned. “Why not?” I’d treated plenty of patients before now, and I was certain I could hold my own in an infirmary, if that was what was needed from me.
“Only advanced students are allowed to treat patients seeking care from the college,” Lucius said as though I were a dolt, walking around the first two houses and heading for the third on the left. “You’re only considered advanced in your third session. I doubt you’ll make it past the first session, since you’ve already missed a week of it.”
