Introduction
When I was designing the world of Schooled in Magic, I threw in a comment about Laughter Academy as a joke, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Cackles Academy from The Worst Witch. This bit me later as I had to send first Nanette (Nanette’s Tale) and then Emily (Little Witches) herself to the school, forcing me to flesh out the academy as a girls-only institution that had only ever had one male student (and that ended so badly the facility swore it would never happen again). This isn’t that story, but I may try to write it one day.
This story was originally planned as an early Emily story, but I decided it made more sense to have it following a different character.
There’s no real time period for this story, but I tend to think of it as taking place between Nanette’s Tale and Little Witches.
A Little Knowledge
The first time I met Rolf, I turned him into a frog. It would have been better if I’d left him that way.
That sounds bad, doesn’t it? Let me back up a little.
Laughter Academy, my alma mater, is an all-girls school. One boy studied there, and it ended so badly the tutors swore they’d never do it again. It was a rule that no boy was allowed to enter our territory without permission, or stay overnight; male tutors, the handful willing to work at Laughter, were rarely granted any kind of authority. And it was a tradition, for reasons lost in the mists of time, that any man discovered on school grounds without permission got hexed and kicked away. The younger girls, like myself, were charged with enforcing the rule.
It was also tradition — I suspect it had something to do with the need to test and update our defences — for the young men of Pendle, the town below the school, to try to sneak up to our walls. They were told that, if they managed to touch the walls surrounding the inner keep, that they’d be granted one favour from the witches they could call in whenever they liked. It was rare, almost unknown, for a young man to even get within a few metres of the walls. We — the junior girls — patrolled regularly and there was a contest to see who could catch the most intruders, as well as threatened punishments for anyone who accidentally let an intruder slip past them. It was all in good fun, you see; trying to sneak up to the school had become a rite of passage for the young men below. There were even a handful of romances that started when the boy tried to sneak though the lines.
And so I was on duty when I heard someone walking through the forest.
He wasn’t trying to be sneaky, something that I should have noticed earlier. He was making no attempt to hide, or to keep the racket down… I wondered, despite centuries of tradition, if it was one of the senior girls or the tutors out for a stroll. I readied the spell — a very simple transfiguration hex, one that would wear off within the hour if it wasn’t lifted ahead of time — and waited. The bushes parted, revealing a young man roughly the same age as myself.
I cast the spell. His mouth opened, as if he wanted to say something, then melted away as he morphed into a frog. He croaked loudly, and angrily, as I picked him up and checked the spells, then threw him down the mountainside. It would be an uncomfortable and bumpy ride — the magic currents surrounding the peaks would carry him right to the bottom — but there was no real danger. The spell I’d used was designed to make it hard, if not impossible, for him to get hurt. I just hoped he had the sense not to hide somewhere too small for a grown man. That had happened once and we’d had to turn the idiot back into a frog just to get him out.
A week later, I saw him again.
I blinked in surprise — it was rare to see the same boy twice within a month or two; some never tried again, despite the jeers of their peers — and froze him on the spot, then levitated him into the air and down the mountainside. This time, I was sure, he’d get the message. It was actually worse to be frozen than transfigured into an animal, or an object that couldn’t move at all. It felt fundamentally, brutally, wrong.
And a week later, he appeared again.
“Wait,” he said, frantically. “I want to talk to you!”
I studied him, keeping a spell ready just in case. He looked… rough, his skin marred with pockmarks and his clothes clearly passed down from someone a little bigger than himself. There was a hint of desperation in his eyes… it was puzzling. Did he have a crush on me? It made no sense. He could have struck up a conversation in town, rather than try to sneak up the mountain… unless he was crushing on someone else. And that made even less sense.
“Really?” It was hard to believe. “Who are you and what do you want?”
He met my eyes, pleadingly. “I’m Rolf. And I want you to teach me magic.”
I blinked. “What?”
It was absurd. Magic ran strong in Pendle, but male magicians inevitably went to Mountaintop or Whitehall, if they weren’t apprenticed to a magical craftsman in the town itself. The idea of a boy studying at Laughter… I shook my head. It wasn’t going to happen. If I suggested it to the Old Woman, I’d be the one turned into a toad. And yet…
“Why?” I stared back at him. “Why me?”
“I wasn’t allowed to go to school,” Rolf said. “It was…”
“There are scholarships,” I pointed out. I’d won one myself. “Or even indentures…”
“Madam Silverknows refused to let me go,” Rolf said. “I’m her indentured servant.”
I winced in sympathy. There was an orphanage in the nearest town with a nasty habit of farming out its children to homes and families prepared to feed them in exchange for service. Some of the orphans became part of the family and wound up being adopted, others were beaten, abused and forced to work for a pittance. Madam Silverknows was a witch with a capital B — all the more ironic as she had no magic of her own — and she was a skinflint with a fair claim to being the worst person in town. I couldn’t imagine her paying for her servant to study magic. She was the type of person who’d sooner wear rags than waste money on a new dress.
“I was tested and I have magic,” Rolf told me. “But she wouldn’t let me go.”
“Of course not,” I said, sourly. I didn’t like Madam Silverknows. I didn’t know anyone who did. “She wouldn’t want you to come back with blood in your eye.”
It was hard not to feel sorry for him. I’d grown up in a poor family, even though my parents were kind and gentle, and I wouldn’t have been able to attend the school if I hadn’t won the scholarship. I wouldn’t have found someone willing to take me as an apprentice either, not unless the terms were truly one-sided. Why would they want an untrained girl when they could come to an agreement with a grown woman? I’d be worried about anyone who did.
My mind churned. I’d never been told not to teach others magic. The tutors expected us to work together, with the more advanced students helping those lagging behind… hell, the senior girls were expected to mentor the juniors. I still thought highly of the girl who’d talked me through my first spells, then my first period, and showed me how to use charms to prevent both cramps and conception. I had a duty to help and… I felt sorry for him. Madam Silverknows wasn’t someone I’d wish on my worst enemy. If she’d had magic, no one would have been safe.
“I can try,” I said, reluctantly. I did have something of a grudge against his mistress. “But you will have to be very careful.”
“I will,” Rolf promised. “When do we begin?”
We met up the following weekend, right at the edge of town, and walked into the forest. The townspeople rarely went too far from the roads, but the witches — me included — had explored it thoroughly. There was an old quarry nearby, with a handful of disused stone huts that had once housed miners — or so we thought. I’d spent a few hours digging through the historical records, just out of curiosity, and found nothing. The records had been destroyed, hidden or simply never existed at all.