Page 90 of A Tower of Half-Truths
And, as the name implied, the patrons were predominantly male. Nearly all of them wore the plum robes that marked them as University faculty. Mavery could see no female professors as she surveyed the room. She didn’t know what time classes ended for the day, so she’d left the boarding house at seven o’clock, immediately following the evening meal, though she now worried she’d missed Nezima’s group altogether.
The air was thick with the slightly sweet and leathery aroma of cigar smoke. Mavery crossed the gleaming parquet floor to the equally gleaming bar along the right-hand wall. As she began to signal the bartender, a familiar face from the other end of the bar looked in her direction.
“You’re here!”
Wren rushed over. Mavery raised her eyebrows, too startled to react further, when the younger woman threw her arms around her middle and pulled her in for a hug.
“Oh, I’m so glad you made it!” Wren said. The ale on her breath explained her overt friendliness.
“Er, glad to be here.” Mavery patted Wren’s shoulder before taking a step back. “I take it I’m not too late.”
“No, no, not at all. Everyone comes and goes as they please. Selemin and Anneke arrived not even half an hour ago.”
At least Nezima and Wren wouldn’t be the only familiar faces.
Wren gathered up the four tankards the bartender had just finished pouring. Mavery offered to carry a few; from the way Wren was swaying, half the ale would end up on the floor. That freedone of Wren’s arms, which she immediately hooked around one of Mavery’s. Wren led her to a private room in the back of the pub, where there was no cigar smoke—only lively conversation.
The scholars were split between two tables, with assistants seated at one and professors at the other, and there were far more of the former than the latter. Most of them were still wearing their robes.
Nezima and Selemin sat at the professors’ table. They were joined by two women Mavery didn’t recognize. Before she could get a good look at either of them, Wren steered her to the assistants’ table.
Wren passed around the tankards, then pulled up an empty chair and urged Mavery to take a seat. Upon doing so, Mavery understood the snide comment Nezima had once made about her age. None of the other assistants looked a day over twenty-five.
“Everyone, this is Mavery,” Wren said. “Aventus’s assistant.”
Wren went clockwise around the table, pointing at each of the six women as she rattled off the assistants’ names, wizards, and academic departments. All of it slipped immediately from Mavery’s mind. Only Selemin’s assistant, Anneke, stood out from the rest. With her straw-colored hair and thick spectacles, she looked somewhat familiar.
“I remember you,” Anneke said dryly. “You once called me and my friends ‘weirdos.’ ”
“Oh, right,” Mavery said. “Sorry about that.”
“When you walked in, I wascertainyou were a professor,” said the mousy-haired assistant sitting beside Anneke. “How old are you?”
Anneke elbowed her in the ribs. “Gods, Nellie! Where are your manners?”
The group then returned to what they’d been discussing before: no less than three distinct conversations. Since Mavery had nothing to contribute to any of them, she quietly observed and caught fragments of crosstalk.
“First-years get worse every term.”
“As if sixth-years are any better. Some couldn’t so much as transmutate water into piss.”
“—but the second reviewer said my writing ‘lacked a distinctive authorial voice.’It was a godsdamnedliterature review!”
“Well, one ofmyreviewers recommended a dozen papers that have nothing to do with fabrication magic.”
“—the meeting was on the day I went dress shopping in Durnatel. I told him I couldn’t attend because I was on deadline.”
“But aren’t youalwayson deadline?”
“Exactly! So, I wasn’t lying, was I?”
Mavery’s attention then wandered to the other table, where Selemin’s voice had risen above all the others.
“—pulled the funding for my research trip! He gave me some drivel about budgetary constraints, but Safiya reserved the train tickets a fortnight ago. No, I’ll bet anything he’s still mad about my Marya worshiper joke.”
“The one you made at his Yvernal party?” asked a professor with sleek raven hair. “He wasn’t even in the room at the time.”
Selemin nodded. “One of his sycophants must have told him about it.”
