A Scholar of Magics Read Online Free

Behind the crenellated walls, the spires and towers of the place were peaceful. As they always did in his mind’s eye, the stones of Glasscastle seemed more than simply gray to Lambert. They were a gray stained subtly with other colors: lavender, silver, and violet, as iridescent as a pigeon’s feathers.
    From what Lambert could see at a distance, there was no more activity within the gates of Glasscastle than there was without. It was a sleepy afternoon, but for that constant southwest wind.

    Even as he neared the great gate, Lambert weighed the merits of going out again. He’d had enough of sitting still. Yet his stiff collar bothered him. The boots he’d put on for a formal call were too good to hike in. Despite his light flannels and the crisp breeze, he was sweating. Whatever he did for the rest of the afternoon, a change of clothing was the first order of business.
    In the cool shade of the gatehouse arch, Lambert greeted the Fellow of the university on duty as gatekeeper, signed the visitors book, and crunched out into the sunlight along the pea-gravel path that crossed the green to Holythorn.
    From inside its gates, Lambert could not help but think of Glasscastle as a labyrinth or a maze, walls within walls. Three paths that met at the great gate soon branched into many, as the broad stretch of Midsummer Green yielded to the shadowed passages of the colleges that flanked it. A man could get lost in those passages, Lambert knew. More than once, he’d been lost himself.
    Lambert made his way to Holythorn College. Once indoors, he climbed stairs two at a time, eager to reach what he considered home, the rooms Nicholas Fell had invited him to share six months before.
    Fell, as a Senior Fellow of the college, had three rooms overlooking a garden. The middle room, spacious and comfortable, served as a sitting room. It boasted a deep window seat overlooking the garden, a sound, well-designed fireplace with a Venetian mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and a handsome old clock ticking industriously on the wall. On either side of the sitting room was a bedroom, Fell’s twice the size of the one he’d given Lambert.

    Even though Fell had a study filled with books and other reference materials at the Winterset Archive, his rooms at Holythorn were still lined floor to ceiling with his books. Lambert had never seen so many books in one place in his life as he had the first time he laid eyes on Fell’s sitting room. Later, when he saw the Winterset Archive, his ideas about what constituted a lot of books had been revised upward radically. Nevertheless, he still found Fell’s books a source of abiding wonder and pleasure.
    As Lambert had few possessions of his own, his small bedroom was ample in size. All he really needed was a bed and a wash stand, and there was a wardrobe besides. The sitting room held everything else he considered vital to support life: Fell’s books, a comfortable chair, and a good reading light. Given free run of such things, the living arrangements at Holythorn suited him tolerably well. He liked Fell and he was grateful to him for his generous hospitality. Compared with life on tour or in a rooming house, life at Glasscastle was a revelation. Never before had Lambert known such comfort, privacy, or peace.
    At the moment, however, Lambert found the cosiness of Holythorn, usually so pleasant, stuffy and hot. He needed to be outdoors. He would change his clothes, get back out into that wind, and let good fresh air clear his head and calm him down.
    As Lambert had half expected it would be, the sitting room he shared with Nicholas Fell was empty, as was Fell’s bedroom. The only sign of recent human habitation in the sitting room was one of Fell’s stale cheroots left half smoked and teetering on a scallop shell that did service as an ashtray. That cheroot had been there two days now. Lambert had last seen
Fell at breakfast the day before. Fell had said nothing at