The streets grew narrower as she ascended. The buildings in turn grew larger and more eclectic. Signs began appearing proclaiming different agencies or affiliations with the Uni, shops became more clearly catering toward scholars, and cafes filled with eclectically dressed students and faculty alike sat down to their fill of both bread and debate amongst their peers.
At some point the roads narrowed again and carts were no longer permitted. Lizzie passed through a wrought iron gate that looked like it might have been last closed a century ago.
The grounds of the university gave her the chills. This place was full of potential whether it be squandered, encouraged, or exploited, and yet there was no sense of urgency amongst the hushed streets. Here, chance after chance was available to the attendees and it was such a contrast to her home, to the way people fought for anything they could bring home to put on the table or contribute to the household, where there was no room, no time for potential, not when there were bills to pay and mouths to feed. There was no time for lingering to dwell upon deeper thoughts, there was always something that needed doing whether for work or family or the community.
The university here felt claustrophobic in its sense of calm. There was a detachment from reality, from each other really, she thought. Was it a needed sacrifice to be able to free up time and energy for thought on such superfluous subjects as philosophy, or mathematical theory, or even thaumaturgy. Every last student here had some potential for magick as well, some shred of power that marked them as the higher echelons of society, whether it was the society from Valport or if they had come here to study from other beacons of magedom around the world. At least those who were the desired guests, someone still had to sweep the streets and take out the garbage. And make deliveries.
When she got further into the maze of the campus and was well and truly lost, she finally let herself stop the kindest looking student who walked past and ask for directions to Wesley Hall. To her chagrin, the student admitted not knowing where it was. To her further embarrassment, the student then stopped three more of their peers on their journey past until one was able to point her in the correct location. Lizzie refused to ask again when she lost her trail again. Knowing she had to be close to her target now, she wasted three quarters of an hour walking up and down the streets and peering at the ornate lettered signs adorning each University building that she passed.
Wesley Hall. She had found it.
The inside of the building was more mazelike than the streets outside. Lizzie stepped hesitantly through the carpeted entry hall, waiting for someone inside to burst out and tell her to get out of there, that she didn’t belong and was not allowed. She would get in, make her delivery and get out and all without drawing too much attention.
The haunting roar of the crowd from the execution that morning followed her into the building. It was a reminder, the threat of looking beyond her station, magick or no. Even being in the building, even on the campus grounds, hell even in the quarters, was enough to flag her as suspicious activity. It wouldn’t matter if it was for work, could that even make things worse, she wondered.
The building was surprisingly quiet. It was the early afternoon, she would have thought a building at the heart of the Hill would have been bustling as well. Her eyes began to stray from the floor in front of her feet upwards. The hall was dim, paneled in dark wood with shelves and overstuffed furniture crowding along the length of it sporadically. It felt lived in, a contrast she thought to the austere clean stonework of the exterior. The only light sources around her came from soft but steady wall sconces. In the wards they relied on gas for light but this wasn’t the same and must have been some magick she didn’t know of. She wondered if the streetlamps she always passed during the day shone with the same steady light at night. The occasional dull shaft of sunlight cut through a glazed panel in doors to her left, lighting streaks across the hall in harsh slashes.
Inside the rooms, the ones whose windows she could see through, were rooms the size of her family’s apartment. These were furnished in all manner of ways, and cluttered with all manner of things, but most included a desk and chairs and Lizzie realized this was a building of offices. There were small plaques outside each office bearing the name of the inhabitant. None that she’d seen so far matched that of her order slip. She pressed on further into the building, and then up a carved wooden staircase at the far end of the hall that was lit from above but a stained glass skylight. Of course, the scholars wouldn’t want too much light to get into their work spaces. It might let them see the real world outside their school.
With growing annoyance creeping to surpass her unease, she stepped onto the upper floor with the intention to speed up her search. She stopped on the more luxurious carpeting. The new corridor stretched out, a mirror to the one below. But while that level was dark, this one was flooded with the straw yellow light from the sun, piercing the peaked skylight that ran the length of the hall. The day’s warmth had not gone unnoticed here, the level was unreasonably hot. Curiosity pulling her forward once again, Lizzie could see that several of the panes in the skylight were propped open to allow an insufficient breeze to snake its way along the building as well.
These office doors looked more up kept. None of the glazed panels that she saw were transparent, all had a roughened surface to reduce them to merely translucent. Instead of a name plaque mounted on the wall outside each door, gilded lettered painted on the door itself declared who their occupants would be. Still none matched her instructions in her letter. That was just her luck. When she found the door she sought, at the end of the building back facing the street she blew a lock of now-sweaty hair out of her eye in a grimace of frustration.
This office door was double, and centered along the hall. Its gilded letters proclaimed DEAN on one door, and on the other, ALEXANDRA HART. Lizzie’s stomach sank. She shifted from foot to foot trying to decide how to proceed, before she cursed herself under her breath for being a coward and raising her fist to knock on the door instead.
The door opened on its own accord before her fist made contact. Lizzie jerked her hand back just in time as a young man around her age barreled out into the hallway. He was dressed in student robes and what personal clothes of his she could see were foppish in appearance. He gave her a glance as he passed, his eyes wide, his skin ashy with fear. Then he was gone, off down the hallway at a soft run.
Lizzie turned back to the office to see a clean, if cluttered room, a large desk centered near the far end of it, and a woman seated at the desk, partially silhouetted by the large windows behind her, overlooking the street. The woman was staring at Lizzie with an unreadable face. Lizzie figured she had to have been as surprised as she herself was, but the mage woman had a better chance of concealing it. And a head start.
“You may as well come in,” the woman said.
As Lizzie did so, the blinding light from the window resolved into merely a painfully eye-watering glare. She could get a better look around the room then. The walls to either side of her were lined with bookshelves, some of which contained books, some of which contained boxes or jars or display glasses or any other selection of strange knick-knacks. The evicted books, and a good half again the number, were piled around the edges of the room instead. The piles looked neat, there must have been some system of organization, but Lizzie couldn’t discern what it might be.
A plush rug occupied most of the visible floor space of the office. Two worn leather chairs sat on Lizzie’s side of the behemoth desk, and there was the woman again, an older woman, sitting as still as Lizzie could tell, one hand tapping a pen against a stack of papers and with her hair fashionably coiffed into a sculpted top knot nestled in pinned curls. It was a contrast to the austere black velvet the dress the woman wore, or possibly it was navy with the light as poorly in Lizzie’s favor as it was.
“I trust you have some business here.” The woman spoke again at Lizzie’s continued silence.
The situation and the room she was in and the woman - the Dean of the university’s magick studies program for crying out loud - she was standing in front of hit her again all at once then.
Oh shit, she thought, feeling queasy. She felt worse when she realized she’d said it aloud. She hurried on trying to bury her misstep with more professional words.
“I have your order, ma’am.” Lizzie unslung the basket from her back and then held it awkwardly, not wanting to set it down on the Dean’s plush carpet.
The Dean was still giving her an appraising look. Nobs didn’t stare, that was beneath them.
“And which order is this one?” She asked after another moment’s pause.
“Your delivery from Greta’s Herbry down in the Second Ward.” Lizzie had pulled the order paperwork out as well and was flipping through it for the correct forms.
The Dean’s brow furrowed.
“May I see the paperwork for the order? Please.” Lizzie handed the forms over as she found them and retreated. The Dean pulled out a pair of spectacles and shook them open.
“Ah,” she said after a long moment. Then she flipped to the itemized order list and narrowed her eyes. “I assume you’ll need me to sign for these.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lizzie said through a dry mouth. “And I need to record logs of your controlled ingredient seals. If you please.”
The Dean slid open a drawer to her left and produced an old and worn wood box. She waved a hand over it and the box began to click, more and more rapidly, and then it popped open with a finality of metal gears. She produced a heavy wax seal in an emerald green and set it on the edge of her desk.
Lizzie would have to approach her more closely to read it. She still held her basked in front of her. “Where would you like your parcels, ma’am?”
With a last look at the order list, the Dean let out a sigh and pulled her glasses from her nose. “Could I trouble you to deliver them to my townhouse for me.”
“I…”
“I would of course make sure you were compensated for your extra journey.”
It wasn’t the extra leg that bothered Lizzie in this case so much as the legality behind the chain of custody of the herbs she held.
“Some of these herbs, ma’am, must be left with the recipient due to their potent nature.” She hoped that was reasoning the Dean could get behind. Surely a university bureaucracy would appreciate red tape.
“And what would have happened had I not been here?”
“I would have had to try again tomorrow or the following day before rendering the order unable to be fulfilled.”
“Mmm. And that’s for the snakeroot and the hemlock? The herbs you cannot deliver elsewhere?” The Dean changed back to the topic prior, but didn’t seem to push the logistics, though.
“And the jequirity, ma’am.” Lizzie couldn’t help herself to finish off the list.
“Lords preserve us,” The Dean said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “No, I’m not mad at you girl, stop flinching when I speak.” She took up a fountain pen and signed the order slip from Lizzie’s shop, passing the paperwork back over the desk. On a fresh and wholly blank sheet of paper she first folded then scrawled a measly two lines of text, blotted and passed that over the table as well.
“I’ll take the plants you’ve named. Please deliver the rest to this address. And here’s for your troubles.” Seemingly from nowhere, the Dean plucked two yellow coins and set them on top of the address.
Lizzie felt almost numb as she set the three small parcels on the edge of the desk and traded them for the address and the coins. She didn’t want her face to give her trepidation away for carrying that much money on her but she couldn’t stop her hand from shaking just a little. How much was the gold worth to the Dean that she could give it away so spur of the moment on an inconvenience she hadn’t been expecting. It didn’t seem to matter the slightest to her, but for Lizzie it was six months wages, at the very least. This was the sort of coinage that went straight into their vault at the herbry when a nob customer - and only a nob would use that sort of denomination - paid in bulk for things.
“Thank ye’ ma’am,” she said, the words sounding tinny and distant in her ears. "I’ll go straightaway."
