“Which is why the threat is as effective as the Spell itself, I guess,” Rudi pointed out. “But that’s not what we came here for.” He poked Brice in the ribs with an elbow.

“Oh! Aye,” said Brice. “We brought you copies of the notes from the lectures in the materials class that you missed. We each took a section, so it wasn’t a lot of work, really.” All three of them reached inside their tunics and pulled out a folded packet of reused parchment. When she opened Rudi’s, the scraped page was covered in carefully written notes in a very precise hand in ink. Brice’s section was a lot smaller than the other two, and a bit oddly spelled. The other two were identical except for the handwriting and the fact that they were correctly spelled and much longer. She beamed at them, and they turned suddenly bashful. “This is exactly what I need!” she exclaimed. “I was going to ask to borrow someone’s notes so I could copy them—thank you so much for doing the copying for me!”

“Oh, well,” Brice said, blushing. “It’s the least we can do for you getting rid of Dudley for us.”

“What I don’t understand was why he was in the Blues in the first place,” Rudi said, as she tucked all three sets of notes into the front of her own tunic. “He didn’t want to be there. He cheated all the time. And his father’s rich, so it’s not as if he isn’t going to inherit a fortune.”

“From what I saw, it was his father who wanted him there,” Abi observed. “Really, really wanted him there.”

“Too skinflint to hire tutors I guess,” said Brice, dismissively, and the conversation moved on to other things.

But as the conversation flowed around her, she kept coming back to that question. Why had the elder Remp wanted his son in the Artificers so very badly?

4

With the Royals, her sibs, and her three new Artificer friends, Abi felt perfectly contented. None of her other fellow students had warmed up to Abi, but it wasn’t as if she needed to feel that she was the most popular person in the class. Emmit, Brice, and Rudi were not unlike her: serious, not inclined to pranking or gossip, and genuinely interested in what they were all doing. “Dull,” Perry called them, teasing her, but she didn’t find them dull at all.

They generally worked together on the extra problems their teachers set to be done when lessons were over in an empty classroom or the dining hall. Today it was the dining hall.

“Well,” Rudi said ruefully, as they checked the solutions they had gotten to a geometry problem, and they saw they had each gotten a different answer, “we’ll never be brilliant.”