Page 63 of A Tower of Half-Truths
He stared at her blankly, mouth agape, as if he couldn’t find the words. Then, a flush of scarlet crept up his neck.
“Oh, that,” he said, gazing downward. “I wasn’t thinking at the time. Well, Iwasthinking, but about the reaction you would receive from one of my colleagues, should I have passed you along to, gods forbid, someone like Nezima.”
Mavery replied with a slight nod. She could only imagine how Nezima would react to a prospective assistant showing up without so much as a transcript.
“At least, that’s the way I saw it,” Alain continued. “But as for just now, I honestly hadn’t a clue. And if that’s how I came across to mystudents, well…” For a moment, he trailed off with that blank look on his face again. “Well, that explains quite a lot.”
Mavery sighed. “Look, if there’s one thing I remember from my studies, it’s practicing these runes for hours on end, until my hand turned numb and I was bored senseless.”
“I understand it’s tedious, but memorizing the alphabet is the first step toward learning Etherean. That’s been the pedagogical standard for decades.”
“But, despite all that writing and memorizing, I can’t remember a single rune. Isn’t that proof that the ‘standard’ is, if not useless, then at least flawed?”
His eyes widened, and he placed his hand to his chest as though she’d just stabbed him in the heart.
“What if you started by teaching me a very basic incantation?” she asked.
“But even the ‘basics’ can be dangerous without sufficient training.”
“Then why not place some wards? I saw Nezima’s assistants do that before her class yesterday.”
He flinched, nearly dropping his notebook. “You…you attended one ofherclasses? Er, what did you think?”
“It all went over my head—but don’t change the subject.” She wagged a finger at him. “What I’m suggesting is, maybe if your students saw a little success with Etherean early on, that would keep them motivated through the more tedious lessons.” She glanced at the primer. “At the very least, it might help those lessons stick.”
Alain looked at the notebook he was holding. For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. He broke the silence with a deep sigh.
“Though I hesitate to abandon my tried-and-true lesson plans,” he said, “I suppose it’s worth a shot.”
He placed his notebook on the tea table, then walked to the closest corner of the room and recited an incantation. Mavery shivered as the nearby walls glowed with the violet aura of a soundproofing ward. She’d expected a protective ward, but she supposed this spell was designed to keep the Ether itself from listening in, so to speak. Alain moved to the opposite side of the room and repeated the incantation. This time, the chill of Ether was weaker than before.
As he continued his preparations, Mavery examined his notebook. The spine was cracked, the pages’ outer edges were curled and yellowed, some of the writing was smeared with tea stains. The oldest entries were from the Autumn 1033 term—almost eight years ago.
“These are your lecture notes?” she asked, though she had no doubt the handwriting—and the tea stains—were his.
“Yes, I’ve used that same notebook since my first year of teaching.”
“As an assistant?”
“No, as a professor.”
She furrowed her brow as she mentally rechecked her math. After he placed the final ward, he stood in front of her and held out his hand. She passed back the lecture notes.
“Then you became a professor at—”
“Twenty-six.” He averted his eyes as he paged through the book. “Technically speaking, I was onlyappointedat twenty-six. I began teaching on my twenty-seventh birthday.”
“But to become a professor, you have to be a wizard first.”
He closed the book with a sigh. “Yes, I earned my rank a few months prior to my appointment.”
She gawked at him. She’d known he was young for a wizard, but she never would have guessed that he’d held his rank foreight years.
As if he’d read her mind, he threw her an exasperated look. “Let’s just say I was assistant to a wizard with impossibly high expectations and little tolerance for failure, which gave me amplemotivation to extricate myself from that relationship.
“I graduated from the University at twenty-three, worked under Seringoth for two and a half years, earned my rank at twenty-six, and—thanks to an auspiciously timed opening at the University of Leyport—became a professor that same year.” He raised his hands with an air of finality. “There, that ought to cover it.”
“You wereArchmage Seringoth’sassistant?”
