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jiubilant · 1 year

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“And no one’s combusted today?” asks the Archmage.

“Not yet.” Mirabelle Ervine, Master Wizard of the College of Winterhold, reshuffles the papers in her hands. “But it’s not yet lunchtime.”

Outside, in the parsimonious light of morning, a piece of the parapet crumbles into the courtyard. Mirabelle starts. Savos Aren, staring with wizardly preoccupation into the air, doesn’t bat an eye.

It’s one of those mornings, Mirabelle thinks, and resolves not to press him until the afternoon. To do otherwise would be unproductive. Of all that she’s set before him already—correspondences with wealthy patrons, dispatches from Mzulft, a stack of books tall enough to totter—he’s only examined the cup of chamomile with any real scrutiny.

“Very good,” he says, stroking his beard with a quivery hand. Yes, Mirabelle thinks, she’s lost him. He’s seen something interesting in the steam. “And you’re reviewing the adepts’ research proposals?”

“Yes, Archmage.”

“Supervising the”—the Archmage pauses for a moment, thinking—“Saarthal matter?”

“Yes, Archmage.” Mirabelle’s face does not move. “Shall we go over the accounts?”

“I’m a bit busy, now.” As if to demonstrate, Savos lifts the topmost volume from the stack and opens it to a random page. The steam obscures his face like fog. “Perhaps you could show them to that Company creature.”

* * *

“Eight gams of God,” says the Company creature, looking shaken.

Mirabelle, brisk and businesslike, reclaims her ledger. “We’ll sort it.”

“There’s a spell for that, I suppose.” The factor’s clerk from far Haafingar—the mage from Shad Astula, she corrects herself with a flash of irritation, repeating in her mind the story they’ve rehearsed—waves his hand with a mystical flourish. “Abraca-double-bookkeeping.”

They’re hurrying to the stairs, elbow-to-elbow, which is how they have most of their conversations—harried and hushed, suspecting company. But the stairwell has no railings, an oversight of far-sighted Shalidor that Mirabelle had never thought dangerous until now. She proffers her hand in wordless apology. The clerk takes it with a smile and picks down the stairs at a more patient pace, all goatish grace, the foot of his cane skipping from step to step.

Mirabelle looks over her shoulder. Then she looks sidelong at him. “Are you settling in?”

She’d asked in Bretic, to be discreet. Her fellow conspirator raises his eyebrows, taking the meaning of her precaution, and answers in a quaint Dellese dialect that would flummox any Thalmor tail. “Settling in?”

“As much as one can.”

“Master Tolfdir took me for a turn about the ramparts.” The clerk’s grin is unscholarly. He has the creased, canny face of a factotum, through no fault of his own. “Quite a view. Now I know how Veloth felt when he first looked on the wastes.”

Mirabelle almost smiles. “Quoth the prophet, bit of a fixer-upper?”

This wins her a rare laugh, swift and uplifting as a williwaw. “When you are Archmage, Mistress—”

“You’ve been speaking to Faralda.”

“—I hope,” says the clerk, “you’ll do something about that bridge—”

“It looks worse than it is.”

“—and the, ah, the walls—”

“Ravila.”

They reach the bottom of the stairs. The clerk, with the mock solemnity of a beau in a ballroom, lifts Mirabelle’s hand over their heads; Mirabelle, straight-faced, twirls like a debutante under his upraised arm.

The strain, she thinks, is making them both absurd. She’s started laughing at sudden silences. Leaping at sudden sounds. The next time Ancano swoops at one or the other of them like some great gallows-bird, dripping pleasantries like gore, she might set his robe alight—

“Mistress Ervine?”

Mirabelle blinks. The clerk, his brow furrowed, is looking down at her with kind concern.

“The accounts will wait,” she says, holding her face carefully still. “And the walls. If you can spare a fortnight, I have more pressing business for you to stick your beak in.”

“Ah.” The clerk’s mouth twitches, amused. “The books?”

* * *

“Three volumes of Colto,” growls Urag, slamming a catalogue the size of a catamaran onto his desk. The resulting thunk shivers the shelves of the Arcaneum’s reference section. “Two of Cinna. The Karthald calfskins. One of gra-Kogg’s original manuscripts, scribed in her own hand—”

“I assume,” says Mirabelle, her voice dry as blotting-sand, “you have a written list.”

“Yes, yes.” Her Master Archivist flips to a creased page in the catalogue, then taps it with a huge finger. “Here. Alabore, copy this out for the Master Wizard.”

As a prentice who’d been sharpening pens hurries over to help, Mirabelle permits her attention to wander. She’s been too busy, in past weeks, to visit the Arcaneum. The air itches with the dry, dusty smell of pounce and parchment. Magelights bob like stars between the shelves. At the trestle-tables, an adept in Alteration blue folds a scrap of foolscap into the shape of a swallow, then murmurs something to it; the paper shivers, shakes out its wings, and flits across the room to peck the cheek of a second-year hunched over her slate.

“Here.” Urag’s voice, like the grumble of a distant rockslide. “All the texts that Orthorn stole.”

He slides a creased sheet across the desk. Mirabelle blinks down at it. The list, even recopied in the prentice’s cramped, economic hand, is longer than she’d expected.

“Thank you.” Ravi will need a pushcart, she doesn’t say. Orthorn had not, per his masters’ progress reports, been a resourceful student—that he’d smuggled this many manuscripts from under Urag’s nose, she thinks with quiet frustration, suggests that his masters had been remiss. She’ll have to speak strongly to Phinis. “They’ll be back in their proper places soon enough.”

“If he hasn’t been using them as doorstops.” Urag drags a weary hand down his face. “Or placemats. Mirabelle.”

Something in his voice makes Mirabelle look up. Urag has been a fixture of the Arcaneum since she was a prentice; his belligerent old face, soft as book-leather when he smiles, is more familiar to her than her father’s. But the careworn lines in it are new.

“I have spent decades”—he puts on his spectacles, then takes them off again, wiping them furiously with the hem of his cloak—“curating this collection.”

Mirabelle knows what’s coming. She nods anyway, quelling an old, tired pang. “We couldn’t boast of a finer library.”

“Yes, we could.” Urag’s voice is flat and heavy as his catalogue. “Half these shelves are empty. I’ve got a shoestring budget, and I can’t transcribe one page of a valuable acquisition”—the spectacles flash, trembling, in the magelight—“before we’ve got to sell it.”

They stare wearily at each other. Behind them, paper rustles as the foolscap bird takes flight.

“I’ll speak to the Archmage,” says Mirabelle, not for the first time.

“I know you will.” Urag, gruffly gentle, covers her hands with his own. “It’s not your fault.”

* * *

“But,” says Phinis, wringing his pallid hands, “it may sometimes come to pass, through no fault of your own, that the spell of fastening fails to take—”

He’s lecturing, for once. This is extraordinary enough that Mirabelle, who’s spoken to the man several times about spending his lecture hours in his office—and his office hours, she thinks drily, in the Midden—stops in the doorway to stare. He and a few first-years, cross-legged on the floor, are sitting around a summoning-circle scribed in chalk. Magelights flicker about their heads. Stretched in the circle is a dead cat, as patchy with age as an old rug, staring sightlessly at Phinis’s knee.

He’d reared that cat from a kitten, Mirabelle thinks. She remembers him in the refectory—younger, slighter, but still with the same nervous stoop—dribbling milk into its mouth with a damp rag. They had been able to afford milk, then. Heavy-bellied ships had bobbed into the harbor with apples, cheeses, tea.

Phinis passes his hand over the cat. Nothing happens.

“There,” he says softly, then glances about the circle. “Now, did I—did I miscast, Ence?”

The prentice he’s called on sits up straighter. “No, Master Gestor.”

“Did I break the circle,” asks Phinis, “or draw it incorrectly?”

The students pause, uncertain. Mirabelle, so as not to spy on a colleague, clears her throat. “Not, I think, a summoner of Master Gestor’s skill.”

The students jump. Phinis twitches, then acknowledges her with a wry smile.

“No,” he agrees. He draws back his hand, and the energy bending the air around it disperses with a sigh. “No. But the spell did not take. And if it does not take,” he adds gravely, gazing at each of his students in turn, “you must find another subject.”

The boy named Ence blinks. “We can’t try again?”

“It is cruel and unusual, unless you are in the direst peril, to try again.” Phinis’s face is calm and set. “We know now that no essence within hearing of our call, be it that of this cat or of any other nearby spirit, will willingly animate these remains.”

He looks tired, Mirabelle thinks. Thin. The bones of his face jut.

“In some ways,” he continues, the light flickering like corpsefire in his eyes, “our art is not unlike the healer’s. The healer labors to prevent the departure of the spirit—the soul, the animus, whatever you prefer—from a failed or failing body.” He sits up straighter. “Mistress Marence will tell you, if she hasn’t already, just what I’m telling you now: that we must learn when to bind the spirit fast, and when—”

Outside, a loose stone skitters down the wall. The students jump again. Mirabelle tenses, too, despite herself.

“Er.” Phinis clears his throat. He reaches, with absent tenderness, to stroke the dead cat’s fur. “When to let it go.”

* * *

Mirabelle takes lunch with her Master Conjurer—and, despite his weak protests, gives him much of her portion.

* * *

A strange feeling compels her to stop, afterwards, in the Hall of the Elements. She has little interest in the thing that the prentices have been calling, in significant whispers, the Eye of Magnus—even a few of her fellow masters, enthused by the find, have taken up that foolishness. She’d spoken sharply to Sergius about it the day before.

But she can’t pass through its glow without feeling a prickle on the back of her neck, as if the thing is watching her. Superstition, she chides herself. A mingling of the artifact’s harmonic energy, humming from it like heat from a convector, with that of the focal wells—any mage, she thinks, would feel that. Like a guilty conscience. She stands in the high archway of the hall and watches the thing turn, slow and peaceful as a passing floe, bathing the chamber in pale, ponderous light.

“You, too?” asks a hushed voice.

Mirabelle starts, striking a spark with her fingertips—but it’s only Faralda, the poker of her face poised to strike, peering over Mirabelle’s shoulder. She raises her eyebrows at the flame, startled and bright, dancing in Mirabelle’s hand.

Mirabelle shakes it out. Her voice cuts sharper than she would have liked. “What?”

Her Master of Destruction nods at the far side of the hall. One of her curls, straggling from its tie, licks Mirabelle’s cheek like a flame. “Look.”

Mirabelle looks.

Then she stills. The chill crawls again down her neck. She had thought, before Faralda came, that she was alone in the hall.

But Ancano, his face bright in the alien light, is standing in the corner.

“Thalmor in our lecture-halls.” A shadow flickers across Faralda’s sharp face. “Place of wisdom and arcane knowledge, my foot—”

“Faralda.”

“He hasn’t moved, you know.” Faralda is obdurate. “Not since I came by this morning.”

Fires will burn cold before Faralda lies. Mirabelle stares at Ancano.

He turns to look at them. The hall shudders as, somewhere outside, a chunk of the crenellated wall crashes into the sea.

#skyrim #college of winterhold #microfic #mirabelle ervine #savos aren #urag gro-shub #phinis gestor #faralda #oc tag #ravi #almost 2k. beware

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