Chapter Text
It was strange to be back at Stoneybridge. Pali could not say that she missed marking essays, as such, but it was part of the warp and weft of the great pattern of university life and she had become aware, over the past year, of missing that life with a sharp pang that surprised her.
"You should go back and visit," Jullanar had said, although Pali had not said anything aloud, feeling obscurely that it would be discourteous —a betrayal, even?— to express regret for leaving a way of life, a friend, to the old friend and way of life she'd rejoined.
Fitzroy had not been present for that discussion, but the next day when the long, broad, straight highway they were travelling came to a sudden fork, he beamed at Pali.
"Alinor!" he said. "Stoneybridge in fact, if I'm not mistaken. Care to call on your old colleagues, Domina?"
Pali considered it. Thought about descending on high table with the Red Company in tow.
Then Jullanar said, "Of course we should go. Fitzroy and Kip and I can find somewhere to be after Fitzroy figures out how to fix his blunder."
Pali lowered her brow. "You don't want to do that before we leave?" she said.
Fitzroy was quiet a moment too long, the way he became now when once he would have clashed back against her, argument for argument.
Then he replied, as though she'd merely asked a technical question about a magical working, "I don't want to work on this by the side of the road, no. If the solution I have in mind works out the way I intend, I'll want it to be... well, in a location with shops and carriages."
"And you're sure..."
"You're still holding the letter, Pali," Jullanar said.
"Is this portal stable? Or if not, how long will it be open?" Fitzroy's bureaucrat asked.
"Thank you for reminding me, my dearest. In fact, we should go now. Any objections to Morrowlea? No? Splendid. Then on the count of three..."
Elena Vane professed herself delighted to see Pali again, with an intensity that went beyond cordiality and into pleading. She had just sprained her wrist on a hike, two days before the entire cohort of undergraduates were expecting their end-of-term essays back, and had an enormous bundle of them left to mark, and the early warning signs of a sick headache. Would Pali, could Pali possibly...?
Domina Vane had already marked most of her own students' essays, in fact, and had returned them so that her students could reflect upon her comments as they prepared for their examinations. The few she had left to complete had been late submissions.
Unfortunately one of her colleagues ("Who replaced you, Pali, so you're certainly familiar with the subject!") had not been so punctilious, and had not yet started his marking when he had been struck down with an acute attack of illness and then sent down to recuperate. Elena had been the inheritor of his marking pile.
It would be as good a distraction as any from worrying, Pali decided. She fingered the letter she had been carrying.
"Perfect," Fitzroy said, on learning of the latest task Pali had taken upon herself. "You can mark, Jullanar can edit, and I will make my investigations. We will each be at our workings. And what about you, Kip, dearest? I'm sure one of Domina Black's former colleagues could arrange a tour of Stoneybridge for you."
But Cliopher smiled self-effacingly in that maddening way and said he'd found there was a postal depot nearby that he wanted to visit, or something administrative like that. He seemed strangely excited about what in Pali's experience was not exactly a wonder of Alinor, or even a particularly prompt and reliable means of communication.
Pali had expected to have to call in some favours to find spare rooms at this time in the term, or to take rooms at the nearby inn. But by the time she returned from visiting her friend Elena in her rooms, it seemed that the faculty was very excited that a distinguished guest lecturer whose name no one had remembered to ask (but who rumour had as some kind of Imperial relative) would be giving a guest lecture in three days' time, on the subject of applied mythology and vulcanology; and her friends were already exploring the rooms Fitzroy been offered for himself and his companions. These included two bedrooms, a common room with desks and table, and — "Look, Pali! Serendipitous, wouldn't you say?" — what Pali was certain none of her former colleagues could have guessed had once been, and could still function as, a shielded magical workroom.
She settled down to marking. She had sixteen Late Astandalan History essays before her, all of them one way or another related to the pre-Fall reign of Artorin Damara.
For the rest of the day she worked steadily through the pile, with Jullanar (in a large, soft chair, with upholstered with floral tapestry) quietly taking notes on her own work, while in the magical workroom next door, that same Artorin Damara fed small slips of paper into his Bag, fished them out again, made irritating little "hmm?" and "a-ha" noises, tranced, and occasionally swore.
The stack of handwritten papers had been a tidy bundle when she'd brought them back from Elena's darkened room: perhaps seven pounds and as thick as the length of her thumb in their tight oilskin wrapping.
On her borrowed desk, they had since sprawled into several messy heaps, taking up considerably more space; and before she could start marking she had needed to fetch paperweights and clips to gather them back together and ensure that each essay had all of, and only, its own pages.
Cliopher, before leaving for his expedition to the postal depot, put his head around the door and looked at her at this stage with an expression she could not read, then offered to help her sort them. She made a polite refusal. If he felt the need to show himself her equal even here, in her subject... well, she did not have time to let herself become angry. The sorting soothed her. It was the daily work of her subject, to bring order to a scattered pile of facts.
She had no real cause to complain about her progress, considering the task. Each essay was between twenty and twenty-five pages in length, and demanded serious attention, however... undergraduate she might have found some of the arguments or conclusions drawn.
Some students wrote with a crabbed hand, or didn't dip their pen often enough. Others dipped too enthusiastically and had been too impatient to blot or wait for the ink to dry.
At least one essay seemed to have been written drunk, or drugged, or while the writer was hung over. Most of the others showed the effects of insufficient sleep on those who had not trained their bodies and minds to endure it.
The worst of the essays made her glad it was she and not Elena who was reading them: she knew Elena's sick headaches did not come from reading, but still incoherent arguments and tortuous letters could not have helped.
There were also those who were simply very wrong in their interpretations or even their facts. Those were easily dealt with, at least. Pali wrote her comments with brisk satisfaction.
The hardest to mark, in Pali's experience, were those that were written well, argued logically, supported by careful research, but deeply flawed in some way: they had misunderstood a key fact, or had been led astray by bad sources, or their thesis was impossible from the start.
The quotation upon which one very bright student had founded her argument was missing a crucial "not". That one struck a spark of familiarity: Pali could see, with her memory's eye, the Alinorel first edition of the collection of letters the student used as her source. She flipped to the last page: yes, that was the book. She'd written herself to the publisher years ago, and it had been corrected in the next edition. But students could not always afford new books. If she'd been Pali's student, Pali would have caught that error in the earliest draft, but clearly her successor had missed it.
Another one made use of a quotation so muddled that Pali, after a long moment of thought, realised the student must have read from a sentence beginning on one page, then concluding three pages later, not noticing that two pages of his text had been stuck together.
Some just seemed painfully young to Pali. They wrote of Astandalas before the Fall as though of an unimaginably distant past, a culture they could not possibly comprehend, although it had surely happened in their own lifespans... hadn't it? An uneasy thought, even for someone not usually given pining after her lost youth. The most frustrating essay of this sort was by a student whose otherwise fairly good argument about late Astandalan material culture was fatally marred by her inability to account for the extent to which magic had been a commonplace, reliable, part of life in that era. Pali was travelling, and could not sit the student down and address every misconception she had one by one. That was what tutorials were for, and she muttered darkly about whoever had tutored this young scholar.
Still, she made sufficient progress that by late afternoon she felt safe enough adjourning for a brisk walk. She invited Fitzroy and Jullanar and, grudgingly, Cliopher to accompany her, but Jullanar had set aside that time to go through her notes with Fitzroy on his latest draft, and he wanted Cliopher with him to scribe for him, being emperor having apparently done irreparable damage to Fitzroy's handwriting.
As she set out, Fitzroy handed her one of the little notes from his Bag. It said "All will be well," in Sardeet's handwriting. Pali nodded and walked briskly away, tightly pressing her lips together.
A ramble in the cool, late autumn air revived her spirits enough that she didn't need to snap at anyone on her return to marking; although she was relieved to learn Jullanar had prevailed upon Fitzroy not to accept the Chancellor's invitation to high table, and he had instead arranged for a light meal in their rooms.
By the time Jullanar and Fitzroy had paused their editorial argument for the night and Pali was forced to set aside her marking and join the other three currently capable of sitting at the dinner table for dinner, she had reduced the pile of sixteen unmarked essays to a far less formidable six, which she was happy enough to leave for the morrow. She excused herself afterwards for an early night. She did not feel like idle chatter.
She slept well, tired from the long day of travel and marking. The bed had been prepared with a warming pan and had thick, Alinorel-style blankets. It did not, of course, have Jullanar in it, but she was in another bed, close enough to smile at Pali and say a sleepy goodnight.
They had been sharing bedrolls on the road lately. It was comforting, and Pali missed her friend's soft, welcoming warmth despite the thick blankets; but Jullanar hadn't made to push their beds together, and Pali didn't suggest it. They were in Chare.
Fitzroy didn't have another note for her at breakfast, but when he told her all was well with their confined companions, he smiled mischievously, which while infuriating when one was concerned about a beloved sister tangled up in some magical bungle, was also usually a hopeful sign.
He spent less time in the workroom that morning, and more time dropping in on Pali and Jullanar to watch them work and also sporadically making notes for his lecture that night.
"Give it up, we all know you're best extempore," Jullanar says.
"You might even say I'm better... winging it," he replied. Pali threw a pencil at him.
With these distractions, it took Pali longer than before to get through the remaining one hundred and fifty pages of marking and discover that she had not yet reached the bottom of the pile.