The Quantum Games (Alchemists Academy #3) Read online

  “I know what she is,” Robert agreed. “Trust me on this, you aren’t the only guy in the school to notice that. The other girls here just aren’t like her.”

  “You, too?” Wirt asked. He hadn’t thought of Robert being interested in anyone at the school before. Maybe he’d just assumed that there would be ladies of the court, or handmaidens, or something.

  Robert smiled tightly. “There’s no need to sound so surprised about it, you know. After all, courting lovely maidens is part of the official ‘being a proper prince’ thing. Even my father can’t complain about that.”

  “But Alana,” Wirt replied.

  Robert sighed. “I’ve had a crush on her since we started school. Of course nothing can come of it. I’m just Priscilla’s rather foolish brother to her.”

  “The bit where you dress up as a fool probably has something to do with that,” Wirt pointed out.

  “But I’ve noticed her. Obviously I’ve noticed her. How could I not? She’s become the most beautiful girl here. Often, the girls try to tone down the way they look, because they think they won’t be taken seriously as potential advisors or powerful figures if they don’t, but Alana is just exquisite.” He paused. “I suppose it’s good that there are so many female practitioners of the magical arts being trained here these days. Female rulers often prefer them. Just look at how close Priscilla is to Alana.”

  They’d talked about that before, back when Robert had been practicing jousting. Wirt looked over at him. “You seem very sure that your sister’s going to end up as ruler of your father’s kingdom.”

  “Oh, even my father has started to accept what an awful king I would be,” Robert said. “Whereas Priscilla might do well as our queen.”

  “And you won’t get anything?”

  “I’ll probably get a duchy or two to look after.” Robert shrugged as he said it, as though inheriting large portions of land were the most normal thing in the world. “Frankly, even that sounds like awfully hard work. I suspect that when I’m busy being a duke, I won’t have nearly enough time for being a jester.”

  “Have you ever thought about maybe giving the jesting up?” Wirt suggested.

  Robert gave him an affronted look. “I’m a prince. I shall jest if I want to. People need to laugh. Though they aren’t taken seriously, jesters play an important part of the social makeup of any kingdom and civilization, as well.”

  “Well, maybe you could try to just… I don’t know, incorporate it into everyday life?” Wirt suggested.

  Robert nodded. “That’s just what I’ve been trying to do. You’d be amazed at how many of the traditional knightly pursuits can be approached from a suitably foolish standpoint if you just try. What worries me is that as a duke, I might not have the time to try.”

  “You could always get an advisor too,” Wirt suggested. He thought about the likely effects of a ruler more interested in jokes than economy theories on his demesne. “In fact, it sounds like it’s very important that you do.”

  “That’s just the kind of thing my father has been saying recently,” Robert said with an expression that suggested he’d been working around to this all along. Wirt wasn’t sure if he could cope with the idea of Robert manipulating a conversation so that it ended up where he wanted it. It suggested that the prince might not be quite as foolish as he pretended to be.

  “Your father’s making you have an advisor like Priscilla?”

  “He says that it doesn’t look like I’ll ever become a sensible knight and ruler on my own, then I’ll just have to have someone do the hard parts for me.”

  Something about the word ‘sensible’ brought one obvious candidate to mind. After all, there was only one person Wirt knew who had volunteered for lessons in magical accountancy. “So when are you going to be asking Spencer?”

  “Spencer?” Robert repeated. He shook his head. “Wirt, you’ve got it completely wrong. I’m asking you.”

  “Me?” Wirt said, barely able to believe it. “You’re really asking me to be your advisor?”

  Robert shrugged. “I did think about asking Spencer, but now with him dating Alana, I’m not sure that’s really ideal. It would make things awkward, and in any case, it would mean that mine and Priscilla’s advisors were an item, which would probably make things hugely awkward if we ever had to go to war.”

  Wirt’s brow furrowed. “Why would you go to war with Priscilla? She’s your sister.”

  “Oh, it’s mostly just family tradition.” Robert shrugged. “It’s always been a very argumentative family, and when you happen to have armies just standing around doing nothing…”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean you have to go to war,” Wirt pointed out. “You could… I don’t know, restrict yourself. Just because it’s tradition doesn’t mean you have to follow it, if it isn’t right.”

  “You see,” Robert said, “you’re giving me good advice already.”

  Wirt shook his head, taking a step back. “Why would you want me for your advisor? I’ve not been here as long as anybody else, I haven’t made it through into the elite class yet, and I don’t know half the things you’re probably meant to know about court etiquette or the kingdoms around us.”

  “Oh, I know all that stuff,” Roland said dismissively. “As for you, you’re brave, smart and you tend to do the right thing. What more is there? Plus, everyone says that you might turn out to be more powerful than people think, so that’s an advantage. Plus there’s the big thing…”

  “Which is?”

  “You’re not with Alana the way Spencer is. Oh, and you’re not Roland. I wouldn’t trust him to advise me on anything. Except how to be more evil, and frankly, I can just copy my father if I want to get good at that.”

  Wirt felt himself starting to redden slightly with embarrassment. “I… I don’t know what to say.”

  Robert raised an eyebrow. “You don’t? I believe ‘yes, thank you Robert, I’ll do it’ would do nicely. After all, you’re as good a choice as anyone else, and you’re one of the few people here who’s actually prepared to be my friend, what with the way things are. So are you going to accept, or should I try to catch up to Roland?”

  Wirt barely had to think about it. Being an advisor to royalty was a big deal in the school, just look at Alana with Priscilla, and it could mean that once he was done there, he had a place in that world carved out for him. As it was, he’d been terrified that he might get to the end of his time at the school and still be left with nowhere he really fit in.

  “I’d love to be your advisor, Robert,” he said. “Thanks, this means a lot to me.”

  “Good,” Robert said, extending a hand. It was a curiously formal gesture, but then, Wirt guessed that it was a very formal kind of relationship they’d just entered into. He took Robert’s hand and the prince nodded. “Great. Now, since you’re my advisor, would you mind helping me move my things into your room?”

  “What?” Wirt asked.

  “I was just thinking that with your transportation skills you could get it done quicker.”

  “I meant, you’re moving into my room?”

  “Well, obviously if you’re going to be advising me, then we should be roommates when I’m here. And you have the space now that Roland has moved out.”

  Wirt shook his head wryly. “I should have known that I’d never get to have that room to myself.”

  Robert shrugged. “It’s part of Father’s arrangement with the school. Obviously, my sister persuaded them to let us take some limited magical classes last term, but I still have all my extra ones about nobility, weapons, courtly poetry and so on. Now, we’ll just be supplementing those with a few extra ones on working together as ruler and advisor, while you’ll have all the ones you need to learn what you should know about a kingdom. It just makes sense that we should be roommates, doesn’t it?”

  Wirt tried to think of a way out of that, but annoyingly, Robert was right. It seemed that he just wasn’t destined to ever have a room there alone. At least the odds were
good that Robert wasn’t going to start talking to evil creatures in boxes, though there was a fair chance that Wirt would have to watch out for attempts at jester slapstick if he couldn’t persuade the prince to leave it alone when they were in their room.

  “All right,” he said. “Please tell me that you at least didn’t bring anything heavy with you this term.”

  “You mean aside from the suit of armor?”

  Chapter 4

  There was a suit of armor. There were also swords, and shields, and a couple of vicious looking morningstars, which Wirt couldn’t help thinking were really inappropriate weapons for someone like Robert who spent his time jesting. Surely, he’d only end up hitting himself in the back of the head with them if he tried to use them? Already, he’d almost brained Wirt with the end of a stepladder he was using to fix some swords on hooks around the room.

  In fact, the whole idea of Robert using weapons seemed almost stupid. Wirt had seen him practicing jousting, taking every opportunity to fall off in comic fashion whenever there were people around to laugh. He’d seen Priscilla taking the lead around Llew the dragon, and Robert hanging back. He’d definitely seen Robert jesting his way around the school, or juggling without even seeming to notice that he was doing it. Was that really the kind of thing that went well with a room full of sharp objects?

  Yet as Wirt helped to transport Robert’s stuff up to their room, he found that his newly acquired roommate and royal charge was a lot more serious than he first appeared. Though that wasn’t exactly difficult to achieve. It wasn’t Spencer’s kind of seriousness, which needed everything to be neat and precise, but there was a look in Robert’s eye as he arranged rows of swords by size and type that suggested this was one area where he didn’t mess around.

  “This is a lot of swords,” Wirt observed after a while, as he put down another armful of the things so that Robert could arrange them. “Hold on, you are not hanging a falchion right above my bed!”

  “Oh, well, I suppose I could move it,” Robert said. “It’s just not as large a room as I’m used to. In fact, when you think about it, most of the places I’ve stayed have had their own armories, so it hasn’t really come up before. Hold this a moment, would you?”

  He passed Wirt a double headed battle axe, which was so heavy Wirt almost dropped it, then started rooting through a trunk until he found a shield emblazoned with a coat of arms. He started to unpack other things from the trunk, starting with an assortment of clothes and working up to things like books, a couple of small coronets and a dartboard, which he hung on the back of the door.

  “Are you even sure that the school will let you have all these weapons?” Wirt asked, faintly hopeful that he was right. After all, their shared room was rapidly turning into the kind of place he wouldn’t want to wander through in the dark. “After all, Ms. Lake confiscated that sword of Priscilla’s, didn’t she?”

  “Oh, she gave it back eventually,” Robert said. “To be honest, when you’re in a school where everyone can do magic, physical weapons aren’t that big a deal. After all, you’re already much more of a weapon than any of these could ever be.”

  Wirt gave the morningstars a pointed look.

  “Can those call fire from thin air?” Robert asked, following Wirt’s gaze. “Can they call up whole lakes of water to drown someone, or transport them high into the air to let them fall? You can already do all those things. Compared to that, the morningstars are… well, they’re not even that useful for jestering. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

  “They’re still potentially dangerous,” Wirt insisted.

  Robert shrugged, taking a couple of knives from a table and juggling them as easily as he’d juggled balls earlier. “The important word there is potentially. We all have the potential for violence, Wirt. We all have dangerous things within us. It’s how we use them that matters.”

  There was a blur of motion as Robert’s arm snapped forward, and one of the knives thudded into the bulls-eye of the dartboard.

  “Control, Wirt. Whether it’s the perfect pratfall or the power to change the world around you, control is everything. It’s why you’re at the academy, isn’t it? Everyone tells me that you have a lot of power, but you don’t know how much. If you don’t even know what you have, then how can you control it?”

  “Like the end of a ladder sticking out behind you,” Wirt said.

  Robert winced. “Perhaps you should leave the jesting based analogies to me and stick to trying to control your powers? You’ll need to, from what I hear about the Quantum Games.”

  Wirt nodded. He had to admit that Robert was a surprise. He’d been expecting some kind of royal idiot, yet it seemed that the other boy had hidden depths.

  “Why do you do it?” Wirt asked.

  Robert looked over at him, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Do what?”

  “Why do you play at being some kind of fool, when it’s obvious that you’re cleverer than that?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with bringing more comedy into the world,” Robert countered.

  “I didn’t say that,” Wirt said. “But with you, it’s… it’s almost like a disguise. That’s it, isn’t it? You play the part of a jester to deliberately disguise what you’re really like.”

  Robert shrugged. “Jesters can say what needs to be said, while princes can’t. Certainly not around my father. There was a writer in your world, Shakespeare. He was forever writing fools, and they always seemed to come out of things so much better than his princes ever did.”

  “So you’re hiding from the responsibility of being a prince?” Wirt asked. “What is it? Are you afraid to become king?”

  Robert laughed that away. “Why would I ever want to be a king when it’s just an endless responsibility? Jesting seems like a much better life than that.”

  “So you really will just let Priscilla rule?”

  Robert nodded. “She’ll be better at it than I would be. She’s actually interested in it, at least with Alana there to keep her on track. I would ruin any kingdom I got my hands on, and I certainly don’t want to turn into a man like my father. If I act the fool, then no one expects much of me. Besides, it’s pretty good fun, I can show up some of the knights for the mindless bullies they are without having to fight them, and I get all the custard I can fall in. Who could ask for more?”

  A day or two ago, and Wirt might have believed that. “Now you’re trying to fool me,” he said. “If you’re that uninterested in anything to do with ruling, why are you here at all?”

  “My father insisted.”

  Wirt shook his head. “If you wanted to, I’m pretty sure you could get out of it. You certainly wouldn’t be doing extra lessons the way your sister is. What is it really, Robert?”

  Robert looked at him for several seconds. Then he smiled. “I guess this means I made a good choice of advisor after all. Well, assuming you don’t get yourself killed. The truth is, Wirt, that I still need to learn enough to support my sister and protect those lands I do end up ruling. I’m going to end up ruling at least a duchy whether I want to or not, so I should learn how to do it well, don’t you think? And I should be in a position to support Priscilla.”

  Wirt looked at Robert, seeing the prince in a new light. It sounded like he had some serious goals in mind for his time at the Alchemists Academy after all. That reminded Wirt a little of the determination Spencer had, except that where Spencer was planning on fitting into his father’s ideas for the family business, Robert definitely had his own plans. He also seemed like he was going to be a lot more fun to be around. Though there was one other thing Wirt thought that they should get out of the way.

  He went over to the nearest of Robert’s swords, a German style messer with a broad cross guard, and lifted it down.

  “Easy there, Wirt,” Robert said, “I keep my swords very sharp, you know. Well, technically, I have a page who does that kind of thing for me, but you know what I mean. You wouldn’t want to slip with it.”

  “I’m not going
to slip with it,” Wirt said. “I was just wondering when you were planning on starting my sword lessons.”

  “I think you have things back to front there, Wirt,” Robert said. “I’m the prince and you’re the advisor. Which means that you advise me. I don’t teach you things.”

  Wirt shot Robert a questioning look. “So you weren’t, for example, quietly asked if you could show me how to defend myself physically?”

  Robert looked away, and then glanced back, grinning. “And again, you’re a lot smarter than I gave you credit for. The thing about being my advisor is genuine, but I have to admit that I was… nudged in your direction, shall we say? Someone thought that it would be good for both of us. How did you know?”

  “It just seemed strange that right now, with the Quantum Games coming up, you should suddenly decide that you needed an advisor. And that, having done so, you should move into a room here when you’ve been happy living at the family castle up until now. There was obviously something else going on.”

  “Very clever,” Robert admitted.

  Wirt could think of one obvious candidate to have set things up. “So Ms. Burns arranged for all this?” he asked. “I know she seems desperate for me to do well.”

  “Would you like to take another guess?” That came from the doorway. It was a woman’s voice, and a very familiar one. Wirt spun round to see Ms. Vivaine Lake standing there. Her dark hair fell loose, spilling almost to her waist and seeming to move as though shifted by some invisible current. Her eyes were the deep green of kelp, while the rest of her thirty-something features were classically, almost severely, beautiful. She wore a dark, floor length dress that seemed to whisper around her as she stepped forward. Wirt hadn’t heard her enter the room, but given the way that she seemed to glide when she walked, that was easy enough to understand.