The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) by Christopher Nuttall Page A

said no and made it stick, but Master Thomas had had influence and knowledge no one else could match. Even if Gwen had been born a man, she couldn’t have wielded so much influence. And they would probably still have resented her.
    “The first issue on the agenda, then, is recruitment,” she said, changing the subject. “Mr. Norton?”
    Geoffrey Norton looked up from where he sat at the far end of the table. Like Doctor Norwell, he had no magic of his own and hence no vote on the committee – but he did have influence. Master Thomas had put him in charge of recruitment and personnel; the files stated that Gwen’s old mentor had believed that a magician would be likely to favour his own branch of magic over the others. Six months of wrestling with the senior magicians had convinced Gwen that he’d been right.
    “The next intake of magicians are scheduled to enter the Royal College in two weeks,” he said, calmly. “That’s ninety-two magicians, mainly Blazers and Movers...”
    Lord Brockton interrupted. “How many of them are from the lower classes?”
    “Seventeen,” Norton said. If he resented being interrupted, he didn’t show it. “The remainder come from the upper classes or... adoptive families.”
    The farms , Gwen thought, coldly. If there was one detail that had convinced her that the whole program was useless as well as morally disgusting, it was the simple fact that only one in four of the children ever developed magic. No one was quite sure how magic was passed down through the generations, but it was quite common for a magician to have children who didn’t seem to have magic. Or, for that matter, for two non-magicians to produce a magical child. Gwen’s parents had no magic and yet they’d produced a Master Magician.
    “Seventeen,” Lord Brockton repeated. He looked over at Gwen and scowled. “And what will they do to the morals of the other magicians?”
    Gwen couldn’t hide her irritation. They’d gone over the same issue at every single meeting Gwen had chaired, without even coming up with new arguments. By now, she could have argued their side – and the other side – in her sleep. And it never seemed to go away.
    The Royal College and the Sorcerers Corps had started by only recruiting magicians from the upper classes – or the middle classes, if the magician in question was powerful enough to allow them to overlook his origins. Lower class magicians were rounded up and sent to the farms, which – unsurprisingly – encouraged the ones who escaped to stay underground. Many of them had joined Jack’s rebellion when he’d made his desperate bid to overthrow the government, if only in self-defence. They could expect no mercy if they were caught.
    In the aftermath of the Swing, the Royal College had agreed to relax the barriers to entry, allowing lower-class magicians to enter formally and train with their social superiors. It hadn’t always gone well.
    “I seem to recall,” she said tartly, “that nine out of ten of the last discipline issues that reached my desk concerned upper class students. And it wasn’t a lower class student who had to be expelled for stealing from his classmates.”
    “But such matters were not a problem before lower class students joined the Royal College,” Lord Brockton insisted. “The morals of the next generation of magicians are being corrupted.”
    Gwen rather doubted it. She’d had a hard time during her first few weeks of training- and there had been no lower class students at the time – but then, she’d been the only girl to enter the Royal College. In many ways, she had been very isolated. No one had asked her to go out for a night on the town. It just wasn’t done.
    But he was right about one thing. Upper class students picked on the lower class students... and vice versa. And yet it was hard to see what could be done.
    She smiled, sweetly. “Would you wish us to stop recruiting Healers?”
    Lord Brockton’s face purpled. No one knew