Fox grinned with his entire sharp-toothed mouth, and his eyes flared with the expectation of mischief. Rapidly loosening his belt, Fox slipped a cucumber into his trousers. Huffing, he adjusted the vegetable so it fit naturally.
“Oh! Tonight we’ll dance with my love, Farri!”
Embracing an imaginary partner, he danced a few steps with his face set in a romantic expression; the hidden cucumber shook in time to his steps as, apparently, he had intended it to.
“It’ll work,” remarked Fox, “just so long as I hold her firmly. Let’s just hope it doesn’t fall out. Well, I’m off.”
Stuffing the cucumbers in his pocket, he drew his patched cloak closed. As he walked out the door, he tossed over his shoulder, “By the way, Dean Luayan asked about you. Have a good evening.”
Egert sat and listened as Fox’s loud steps withdrew down the vaulted corridor. Both Gaetan with his ridiculous cucumbers and the Tower of Lash with its strange yowl instantly fled from his thoughts.
Dean Luayan asked about you.
The dean seemed to relate to Egert exactly the same as he did to all the others; it was as if he had never brought him to the university at dawn, as if they had never had that difficult conversation by the well. Egert was simply an auditor, but one who lived in the annex like a student, and since no one brought up the subject of tuition, he too avoided talking about it with the elderly bursar. The dean, his benefactor, nodded affably to Egert whenever they met, but meanwhile Toria was his daughter, and the slain Dinar was meant to be his son-in-law.
From the time of his arrival at the university, the dean had shown no interest in him, so why was he doing so now? Did he notice that Egert was not going to lectures? Or was it about that encounter, that memorable encounter in the corridor?
It happened four days ago.
Egert arrived at the lecture later than usual. The booming voice of the headmaster wafted through the closed doors. Egert realized that he was too late, but he felt neither chagrin nor regret at this fact, only tired relief. He was turning to walk away when he heard wooden wheels rolling across the stone floor.
The low sound startled him. From around the corner appeared a trolley: a small table on wheels. The table was sagging under a weight of books. As if bewitched, Egert could not tear his eyes away from the glimmering gold spines of the books. On the very top lay a small volume, sealed with a silver clasp and a small, lusterless lock; for some time Egert stared at it, dazed, and then he twitched as if he had been shocked and raised his eyes.
Toria was standing directly in front of him. He could see every small line on her face, though it was as beautiful as before. The high collar of her black dress covered her neck, her hair was collected in a simple, one might even say careless, upsweep, and only one wayward tress, which had somehow managed to escape, fell on her pure, ivory forehead.
Egert wished the flagstones of the floor would open up and swallow him, hide him from her aloof, only slightly strained gaze. The first time he had met Toria, in Kavarren, she had looked calm and perhaps a bit detached; their second encounter, which had resulted in his duel with the student, had twisted her about in a whirlwind of despair, grief, and loss. The third time they had met—Egert flinched at the memory—she had cast her eyes at him, and he had read there only loathing and cold disgust devoid of malice.
Glorious Heaven! He was the very embodiment of cowardice: the thing he was most frightened of on this earth was to once again meet with her face-to-face!
Toria did not lower her eyes, and no matter how much he wanted to, he could not turn away. He watched as the tense aloofness in her eyes changed into cold amazement, and two vertical lines appeared on her forehead; then Toria nudged the trolley forward a bit and looked at Egert questioningly. He stood as still as a pillar, unable to tear himself from the spot where he was standing. She sighed, and the corner of her mouth twitched in exactly the same way as the dean’s did: it was as if she was slightly annoyed by Egert’s lack of comprehension. Only then did he realize that he had blocked the path of the trolley. He leapt to the side, pressing his back up against the wall. The nape of his neck squeezed against cold stone as he pressed his entire sweaty, shaking body against it. Toria simply walked by, and as she did, he smelled her scent, the intense scent of freshly cut grass.
The sound of the trolley had long since disappeared in the depths of the corridors, but he still stood there, pressing his back against the wall and staring in the direction it had gone.
She entered her father’s study, silently closing the door behind her. The dean was sitting behind his enormous writing desk; three candles in a tall candelabrum woefully dropped globules of wax onto the dark, pitted surface of the desk. His goose quill scratched softly. Dozens of bookmarks, lovingly prepared by Toria, hung their colored tassels out of the multitude of books.
Toria stood silently behind him as he wrote.
This not entirely decorous habit had been preserved in Toria from her earliest years: to sneak up on her father while he was absorbed in his work and, peering over his shoulder, to watch in fascination as the black tip of his quill danced across a clean sheet of paper. Her mother had scolded her for this habit: snooping was unladylike, and more important, she was disturbing her father’s work. Her father, on the other hand, only chuckled at her when he caught her behind him. It was how she had learned to read, peering over his shoulder.
At the moment, the dean was working on his labor of love: annotation to the latest chapter from his history of mages. Toria understood that he was writing an annotation because she saw two slanting crosses at the head of the page, but the meaning of what he was writing was not immediately clear to her. For a while she merely watched with a certain amount of detached admiration as his pen danced its way across the page; finally, however, the black lines of the letters formed themselves into words for her to read:
… idle speculation. It appears, however, that the less power a mage is allotted, the more avidly he strives to supplement this lack with superficial effects. The author of these lines was once acquainted with an old witch who levied a strange tax upon an entire village: they were required to gather the hearts of all the rats in the village, without exception, and give them to her. Undoubtedly, the old woman would say she had complicated and mysterious reasons for this incredibly strange requirement. It appears to this author, however, that the slaughtered rats served only one true purpose: to cause the hearts of the peasants to tremble with fear at the very mention of the sorceress who ruled over them. History is full of examples like this, some far more serious, and it is not only uneducated peasants who have been mystified by various kinds of cheap tricks, such as the one just mentioned. Recall what Balthazar Est wrote in his Meager Notations, which, by the way, were far from meager: “If black, evil-looking clouds hover over the dwelling of a mage day and night; if the windows of his laboratory glow with a bloodred light; if one meets a chained dragon, uncared for and thus all the more malodorous, in his antechamber instead of servants; and if finally the one who comes to meet you has glowing eyes and carries a ponderous staff in his hand, then you can be quite sure that standing before you is an insignificant dabbler who is ashamed of his own weakness. The most worthless of all the mages I have known never crawled out from under his robe, which was covered in runes. I believe he even slept in it. The most powerful and terrible of my brethren, whose name I am even reluctant to write, preferred to wear spacious, well-worn shirts—”