Love's Labor's Won Read Online Free Page B

Grandmaster said. “Have you heard of a student called Caleb, of House Waterfall?”
    Emily shook her head. She didn’t pay much attention to students from outside her small circle of friends. House Waterfall was one of the smaller magical families, she recalled, from some of the books she’d been forced to study at Mountaintop, but she didn’t know much else about them.
    “He is — was — a Fourth Year student,” the Grandmaster said. “His proposal involved working with complex spell-structures. Unfortunately, there was an explosion in the spellchamber during the early weeks of Fourth Year and he took the brunt of the blast, after shoving his partner out of the way. He had to spend the rest of the year recuperating at home.”
    “Ouch,” Emily said. Magic could cure most physical injuries, she knew from experience, unless they were immediately fatal. It was odd to have someone recuperating for longer than a couple of weeks. “Why didn’t he recuperate here?”
    “His...experiment accidentally tainted his body with magic,” the Grandmaster said. “It took longer for him to recover than it would have done if he’d merely broken a few bones.”
    He shrugged. “Be that as it may, Caleb has expressed an interest in resuming his project,” he continued. “It holds great promise, I feel, so I have conditionally given my consent.”
    Emily looked down at her pale hands. “Conditionally?”
    “He needs another partner, as the last one moved to assist another project team and barely scraped through the exams,” the Grandmaster said. “I would like you to be his partner.”
    “I see,” Emily said.
    The Grandmaster held up a hand before she could say anything else. “You would have to meet him over the summer and go through his proposal with him,” he warned. “If you rejected the proposal, your only real option would be to redo Third Year from the start, with a partner in the year below you. I have made it clear to him that the final decision will be yours.”
    Emily groaned, inwardly. She wasn’t good at working with anyone, even her closest friends. Teamwork defeated her because it meant relying on somebody else — and her childhood had taught her, time and time again, that no one was truly reliable. But she knew the Grandmaster had gone out on a limb for both of them. The rules, stated at the start of Third Year, were being bent into a pretzel. Working with a stranger would be bad, but repeating Third Year would be worse.
    If only we could avoid doing some of the classes, the ones we already passed , she thought, sourly. But that isn’t allowed.
    “I will be at Cockatrice,” she said, slowly. “He will meet me there?”
    “His family lives in Beneficence,” the Grandmaster assured her. “He will have no trouble crossing the bridge into Zangaria and reaching your lands.”
    Emily braced herself. “I’ll try,” she said. “What happens if we fail? Or if we don’t get along?”
    “You get to redo Third Year,” the Grandmaster said. He gave her a rather sardonic smile. “It wouldn’t be the first time a project team managed to fall out, even when the project was working perfectly. Learning to work with someone else is part of the whole idea.”
    “You said,” Emily muttered.
    The Grandmaster reached into one of his drawers and produced a large sheaf of papers, which he passed to Emily. “This is the proposal he put before the tutors, last year,” he said. “I advise you to take it with you and read it thoroughly once you are in Cockatrice, then get in touch with him to arrange meeting times. Lady Barb will assist with that, if you ask, although she is forbidden from offering any direct help with the proposal or the project itself.”
    “I will,” Emily said.
    “I would add,” the Grandmaster said, “that these proposals are considered confidential. You could get in a great deal of trouble if you showed it to anyone without his permission.”
    Emily swallowed. “Yes,