“Rolf,” Rolf said. “I didn’t lie to you about my name.”
“Just everything else,” I snarled. I put the pieces together, one by one. He knew I knew Madam Silverknows. He’d told me he was her servant to make me sorry for him. And if he knew I was from the town, he had to know there was a good chance I’d never realise he’d lied to me. “What else did you tell me? Poor little orphan boy?”
“That’s true.” Rolf shot me a twisted smile. “I killed my parents. I am an orphan.”
“And are you going to ask for clemency, on the grounds you don’t have parents?” I tested my bonds carefully. “What are you doing here?”
“Laughter is a very interesting school,” Rolf said. “There are books inside that I want to read, and people inside I want to meet. But how to get inside? How to learn what I want to learn without someone watching over my shoulder?”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “Why…?”
“My father was a scribe,” Rolf said. “Daddy dearest taught me how to read and write. He thought I’d become a scribe too… I wanted to be a magician and he said no, even though I had the talent. He had the money to send me to school and he wouldn’t and so I killed him and his wife and…”
“Your mother,” I said.
I saw it now. Rolf had travelled to Pendle because Laughter was the only school that wouldn’t take him as a pupil. A few weeks of exploring the town — I knew he had a gift for making people like him, even as he eyed their backs for the knife — and he’d know everything he needed to know to seduce me. My mother was fond of talking about her witchy daughter and gossiping about the rest of the town, including Madam Silverknows. And Rolf might even have taken some of her blood. It would be easy to use it to locate me.
“She deserved it,” Rolf said. “She never listened to me.”
I barely heard him. I’d assumed Rolf couldn’t read and write. The New Learning was still in its infancy and, even if he knew how to write Lady Emily’s letters, most spellbooks were written in Old Script. But if he could read them… I remembered the bookshops in town and shuddered. No wonder he’d been leaping ahead. He’d been studying like mad while I’d been in my classes. The cuts and bruises… he’d been experimenting with some really dangerous magics.
My heart sank. “Rolf… they’re going to be looking for me.”
“By the time they find you, it will be too late,” Rolf told me. “And I will have the power.”
Pure horror washed through me. “You’re going to become a necromancer? You’ll go mad!”
Rolf smiled. I saw utter madness in his eyes.
“I worked it out,” he said. “I can use a rite to stabilise the spell and keep the power from driving me insane.”
“You’re already mad.” It was hard to speak clearly. “If you do this…”
“I will,” Rolf said. “And without your magic, how are you going to stop me?”
I gritted my teeth and kept working on the bonds as he turned and hurried out of the hut. He thought I was helpless. He thought I’d grown up using magic all the time, that I was helpless without it. Maybe he’d have been right, if he’d picked on a girl from a magical family. But I’d grown up in a shop, working from the moment I could walk. I was a lot stronger than I looked and used to getting by without magic. His bonds were tight, but not impossible to escape. It took me everything I had to pull my hands free, just as I heard him coming back to the hut. I hastily hid my hands again.
“Are you ready?” Rolf raised a glittering knife. It wasn’t stone… I kept that to myself, trying not to even think about it. If he used a metal blade, he might kill me but the rite wouldn’t work. I hoped. I didn’t know much about it, beyond the basics and horror stories about what happened to the madmen who tried. “Are you…?”
He bent over me. I punched him in the groin. Hard. Rolf staggered — it wasn’t the first time I’d struck a man there — but didn’t fall. Magic sparked around his fingertips as he dropped his knife — I darted to the side, nearly tripping, and yanked up the knife.
Rolf cast a spell — a flash of white-hot light blasted past me — and came at me.
I raised the blade and stabbed him in the throat. Blood cascaded down, spilling over my hands. He opened his mouth to say something but choked on his own blood instead. I watched him fall to the floor, tears in my eyes. He’d really messed me up. I felt as if I’d done the wrong thing.
“Well,” a cool voice said from the doorway. “What happened here?”
I looked up to see the Young Woman, the Deputy Headmistress. My heart sank. The Young Woman was strict… not, I supposed, that anyone would be less than strict once they worked out what I’d done. I was probably going to be expelled. I doubted anything less would suffice.
And now I am waiting to learn my fate.
They made me write this, partly to understand what I was thinking and partly for me to reflect on my mistakes. Rolf was a sociopath, a manipulative liar who spun a tale so artfully tuned to me that it didn’t start to unravel until it was almost too late. They checked on his story for me and discovered a bad egg, a boy who’d been alarming the neighbours well before he came into his magic. They’d suspected he’d killed his parents, yet nothing had been proven. I wondered, at first, why he hadn’t taken his inheritance and used it to pay his way, but it made a certain kind of sense. The red flags wouldn’t be ignored in a magic school. Even a dark wizard would be wary. He’d needed a tutor too naive to realise the danger. He’d found me.
I take full responsibility for my actions, and now I await your judgement.
I ask only that it not be too long before I learn my fate.
Afterthoughts
One issue that pops up in a number of more thoughtful wizarding school novels and worlds is the question of precisely what happens to magical students who don’t get to go to magic school? Do they remain untrained, seek training elsewhere, or… or what? In Schooled in Magic, most of the potentials do try to get training from hedge witches and suchlike if they can’t get into schools, but what happens if that goes badly?
Sometimes, as the (deliberately) unnamed girl from this story found out, it ends very badly indeed.
Again, this story might become a full novella or novel. Are you interested? Let me know.