Several of the bolder members of the class burst into stifled snickers.
'Now, of course, women are important. Most of you will—eventually—marry, in order to breed strong Mage- sons to serve the City. And of course, your wives will produce daughters as well, since Mages must marry Mageborn daughters in order to keep the bloodline pure. However, we must never forget that women are essentially unimportant to the life of a Mage, unable to participate in or even understand the actual concerns of his life: the practice and study of the Art Magickal.'
Hendassar broke off to glare at Cilarnen again.
'There is a time and a place for everything. And certainly when one should be devoting all of one's energies to the mastery of those concerns which will occupy one's entire future, one should not be occupying one's energy in writing love poetry to Lady Amintia. Such as this example.'
Mage Hendassar reached into his sleeve and withdrew a slender scroll.
Oh, no. Kellen groaned inwardly. He didn't like Cilarnen particularly—he didn't even know him. Lord Volpiril was one of Lycaelon's rivals on the Council just to begin with, and Lycaelon had disliked his son fraternizing with lesser beings—and in Lycaelon's mind, even his fellow Mages were lesser beings—but Kellen didn't like to see anyone publicly humiliated.
Mage Hendassar began to read out the poem, playing it for laughs— which he got. Kellen didn't know a lot about poetry; he guessed it was pretty bad, but still, nobody deserved to be treated this way. If Lord Volpiril didn't want Cilarnen to see Amintia, why hadn't he just told him so, rather than doing something like this to him?
At least Kellen's father had never made him into a public spectacle. He supposed he ought to be grateful for that much. But he knew it wasn't because Lycaelon cared about him in any way. It was because Lycaelon couldn't bear the thought of seeming less than perfect: the perfect Arch-Mage with the perfect—and perfectly obedient— son.
By the time Mage Hendassar had finished reading out the poem, the rest of the class was roaring with laughter, and Kellen was filled with an odd cold anger.
Why were Mages supposed to be so different from ordinary folk? Kellen had spent a lot of time—much more than either Lycaelon or Anigrel suspected—in the poorer quarters of Armethalieh. He'd had to learn to be handy with his fists, to earn his place among the children there, but once he'd won a few street-fights—his size and strength had served him well, there—they'd accepted him as more than a nasty interloping Mage-born brat, and he'd learned a lot about how the 'other folk' lived.
For instance, he knew that at among tradesmen and laborers—and even among a lot of the non-Mage nobles—people were courting and marrying. Yet the Mageborn weren't even supposed to think about such a thing until they had reached Journeyman Undermage rank at least, if not Master Undermage—and that could take another decade of studying.
And where did they find the women they were supposed to marry? If Kellen had stayed where he was supposed to stay and only gone where he was told to go, he knew, he doubted he'd ever even see a woman. As a child, he'd played with children in the parks and made friends with them when he'd been under the care of his 'Nursies,' but all that had changed as soon as he was deemed old enough and Gifted enough to someday become a Student-Apprentice. Then, Lycaelon had done his best to cut Kellen off from all human contact. If Kellen had not continued to sneak out onto the streets—and carefully concealed the fact—and managed to make friends of his own, however fleeting, he'd have grown up completely alone, for he had no friends among what his father would have called 'his own kind.'
As he'd grown older, Kellen's own attitude to the hypocrisy he saw in the Mages that were his father's cronies, as much as the growing rivalry for future place among their sons, had done much to keep him isolated by his own wish, even from those who would have sought to curry favor with the Arch-Mage by cultivating a friendship with his son.
Kellen did not want friendship on those terms, even if Lycaelon would have permitted it. But it did make him wonder where Lycaelon thought his future daughter-in-law was going to come from. He knew that some of his fellow Students had sisters—they must have, from what Mage Hendassar had said, but…
There was no point in thinking about it. It wasn't, after all, a subject that actually interested Kellen very much. And he didn't need another thing to get himself into trouble about.
Eventually Mage Hendassar relented, and restored the class to order, assigning Cilarnen a long punishment essay—due at the beginning of the next class—on the History of the Great Arch-Mages. With a few more blighting remarks on the irrelevancy of females to a Mage's life, he returned to his scheduled lecture.
After that, it was hard for Kellen to keep his mind on the assigned subject, but he was safe at the back of the room, and Mage Hendassar didn't seem to be looking for any more victims today. Kellen let his mind drift back to more familiar questions.
The map of the City, ancient and yellowed, hanging on the wall behind Mage Hendassar caught his eye. Though he'd seen it a thousand times before, today an errant beam of light fell on the legend 'Delfier Gate.'
What was beyond the Delfier Gate? What lands did the Selken Traders sail to? Where were the Out Islands, exactly? Somewhere beyond the mouth of the harbor, but where1.
