Free Study in Slaughter (Schooled in Magic) by Christopher Nuttall

snorted at the age-old complaint. “Am I allowed to swear off marriage forever?”
    Lady Barb snorted too. “You’re a baroness,” she said. “Having children to carry on the family line is one of your obligations now. And you would have to marry before you could get pregnant.”
    Emily shook her head in tired disbelief. If King Randor hadn’t sprung it on her as a surprise...she might well have turned it down. But he’d timed it perfectly and now she was trapped in a gilded cage, a prison that was no less a prison just because most of the bars were invisible. And anyone who’d been born in Zangaria would be delighted to uphold the obligations, if they became a baroness in exchange.
    “If you want my advice,” Lady Barb said, “write to him. Maybe you can build up a friendship again. But he may not be able to reply immediately in any case.”
    “True,” Emily agreed. “Can we talk about something else?”
    “You did start it,” Lady Barb pointed out. “What else can we talk about?”
    Emily considered, briefly, asking about Master Tor, before deciding that was her problem to solve. Instead, she reached into her pocket and found a handful of notes she’d scribbled down during her return to Alexis.
    “Void gave me an old spellbook,” she said, as she smoothed out the sheets of paper. “And I was slowly deciphering parts of the book. I came across some old spells I was planning to try out.”
    “I hope you deciphered everything,” Lady Barb said smoothly, although there was an undercurrent of concern in her voice. “Some of the older sorcerers had a nasty habit of deliberately mixing up the details, just to annoy their successors.”
    Emily nodded, ruefully. One large passage in the book, when she’d finally managed to decipher it, had turned out to be a recipe for beef soup. As far as she had been able to tell, there was nothing particularly magical about it at all. A second passage read like an extract from a badly-written pornographic novel. But she was slowly making progress on deciphering the rest of it.
    “I think so,” she said. “One of them involves bilocation, being in two places at once.”
    “That’s an old spell,” Lady Barb said. “Most sorcerers won’t risk using it, though. If they happened to move too far apart, they wouldn’t be able to reintegrate themselves and they would become two separate entities. Or they might fade away. I’d advise you not to try it. Even if you succeeded in using it, it could cause permanent damage to your mind.”
    “Oh,” Emily said, a little deflated. She’d hoped, despite herself, that the book’s secrets would be unique. “I meant to ask. Why doesn’t healing include dealing with damage to a person’s mind?”
    Lady Barb gave her a sharp look, as if she had expected her to be able to figure it out for herself. “Mental instability is associated, in general, with a particular kind of magician,” she said, sardonically. “I believe you killed one of them, once.”
    “Necromancers,” Emily said, flatly. “But surely not everyone who has a mental problem becomes a necromancer...?”
    “Any sort of mental problem carries a huge stigma,” Lady Barb explained. Her tone suggested it should have been obvious. “If someone in the family was insane, the entire family would be held accountable for his actions—even if magic wasn’t involved. When it is...well, suffice it to say that smart magicians, no matter how unstable, go out of their way to appear stable. Those that aren’t are often treated as pariahs by everyone else.”
    “So there’s no attempt to cure them,” Emily said, flatly. “And they’re allowed to sink further into madness.”
    “Trying to work with an unstable magician is very dangerous,” Lady Barb said. She looked up into Emily’s eyes. “Something you ought to bear in mind.”
    Emily cleared her throat, carefully. “I will,” she said. “Another spell was teleportation. I was hoping that you could help me to