“You’re always welcome to join the winning team as well,” Renthorn said.
“That’s very kind of you, Highmage,” she lied, “but no, thank you.”
“Let’s be reasonable—” Tanrel said.
“Is there something unreasonable about my wanting to do my own work correctly?” she snapped before she could stop herself.
“Um…” The building manager looked uncomfortably between Sciona and the four men. “In that case, there should be spare laboratory space you can use in Faene’s Hall, Miss Freynan.”
“Mm,” Sciona grunted, her lips pushed into a pout. “I’m going for a walk.”
“A walk?” Tanrel said as she turned from her colleagues
“Highmage Halaros broke my energy gauge and testing dishes,” she said coolly. “I need to replace them.”
“So, send the Kwen,” Tanrel said. “A highmage doesn’t run errands, and a lady shouldn’t go walking alone.”
“So, I won’t,” she said shortly. “Thomil, come.”
She headed down the steps without a look back at the other highmages, feeling Thomil fall silently into step at her shoulder. The staff and students who had vacated the Main Magistry building parted for her white robe, though her status didn’t keep them from staring with their usual abandon. Apparently, a month was not enough for them to get used to the sight of a woman in highmage’s garb.
“You can always send me for whatever you need, ma’am,” Thomil said once they were out of earshot of the crowd on the steps.
“I don’t care about the energy gauge,” she said. “I wasn’t using it, and testing dishes are never hard to come by.”
“Oh.” Thomil didn’t ask the obvious ‘then, where are we going?’ instead quietly keeping pace a respectful step behind her as she circled the block.
Once they had passed out of sight of the Main Magistry, Sciona turned onto a path that took them deeper into the campus rather than outward to the shops beyond. Class was in session, so the other pedestrians were sparse between the great lichen-touched columns of the Old Campus. Barely anyone was about to gawk at the female highmage in her white robes or her Kwen assistant in his lab coat… barely anyone to overhear a delicate conversation between the two.
“This is bad news,” she said at length. She had been self-conscious about over-sharing with Thomil after that night of embarrassment at the Dancing Wolf. But she felt like she had to give this train of thought voice so it didn’t sit inside her, twisting into something dark and demoralizing.
“What is bad news?” Thomil asked.
“Renthorn was always planning to absorb Tanrel and Mordra the Tenth into his team—basically just use them as two more over-qualified assistants in his plan for the barrier expansion. Now, not only is he getting them onboard early, but he also gets Halaros.”
“But Halaros still has his own work to focus on, doesn’t he?” Thomil said, clearly not seeing the bigger picture. “He mentioned special assignments from Archmage Gamwen?”
“It’s the potential effect of Halaros and Tanrel sharing a workspace that concerns me.”
“Have you seen them work together, ma’am?”
“No, but I’ve read their research. Tanrel is a strong theoretician, but like Mordra the Tenth, he lacks the tactile experience to put much of his theory into practice—although, that’s an unfair comparison,” Sciona amended. “Tanrel is still far out of the Tenth’s league in talent and common sense. Then you have Halaros, who specializes in manual mapping spell composition like Tanrel but came up through hands-on industrial sourcing like Renthorn and I did. In general, I’m not intimidated by Tanrel’s mapping spells, but with Halaros in the room to hold his hand—even if Halaros does have a concussion, and it’s just for a few weeks, I worry…”
Sciona frowned, not quite willing to say Tanrel was capable of mapping composition on par with hers. It was the balance that worried her—a mapping spell nearly as good as hers paired with a spellweb superior to hers. “Together, Renthorn and a Halaros-supported Tanrel could formulate a formidable sourcing plan for the barrier expansion.”
“Would that be so bad?” Thomil said, and Sciona looked at him in total incredulity.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean—this barrier expansion is important to Tiran’s overall well-being. You’ve made that clear many times. Why would you want them to do poorly? For that matter, why not pool your skill with theirs if the end goal is to help your people?”
“I’m sorry,” Sciona said, floored that he would even ask that. “Have you met me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Something in his tone got under her skin, like he thought she was doing something wrong. Not that the opinion of a Kwen should matter, but—
“I’m not any more selfish than my colleagues,” she added. “I’m just playing a more difficult game than they are.”
“A more difficult game?”
“Brilliant men—even moderately intelligent men—in this city get showered with opportunities to succeed. Brilliant women have to fight for those opportunities, and, when we get them, we have to defend them tooth and nail, or they’ll be snatched away. I’m never going to work with Renthorn and the others because this barrier expansion is my project, my chance to make a mark on history, and I’m going to make sure the spellwork has my name on it if it’s the last thing I do.”
Thomil nodded, though he still looked puzzled in a very irritating way.
“What?” Sciona demanded.
“Forgive me, ma’am. It’s the spellwork that is important to you, yes? That it be done well and that it have a positive effect on people’s lives comparable to the spellwork of your male peers?”
“Yes.” Obviously.
“If this is the goal, then does it truly matter whose name goes on the work?”
“Of course it matters!” Sciona rounded on Thomil, but of course, her frustration was unfair. Of course, a Kwen man wouldn’t understand the workings of Tiranish academia. Maybe she was just in a foul mood from days of mind-numbing spellweb calculations, and she shouldn’t be taking it out on her poor, uneducated assistant, who was just doing his best to understand.
She took a breath and tried to explain. “Husbands have been putting their names on their wives’ work in this city for three hundred years. And if it’s not a woman’s husband, it’s her boss, because women are limited to being apprentices and assistants in almost every profession worth doing. No woman ever gets credit for the work she puts in—especially in academia. She never gets the glory. Well, I’m not married, I’m no one’s apprentice, and I’ll be damned if I let a man find some other way to take my glory from me.”
It was by far the most selfish, unwomanly thing Sciona had said aloud all day—so selfish that she never would have said it to Alba or Aunt Winny for fear of that disapproving look. Perhaps she should have stuck to saying ‘credit’ instead of ‘glory.’ Credit was a thing a woman could want out of a sense of justice, which was arguably virtuous. But a woman who wanted glory… that was a woman who had something really wrong with her.