"Ah yes," said the enrolment secretary as she came to the correct entry in the huge, leatherbound book she'd taken down from the shelf behind her. "Thomas Gown, graduated twenty ninety eight." She turned a few pages. "And Lirenna Daliris, graduated the same year. So you got married, did you? Congratulations!"

     "Thanks," said Thomas with a grin.

     "And this is Derrin, your son," said the wizened old woman, peering myopically over the edge of her desk at the young man. "Why, he's lovely! Most of our new recruits are a little older, though. Are you sure he's up to it?"

     “He's sixteen,” said Thomas as they all looked down at the young boy. “He's small because of his shayen blood. Besides, we'll be staying here. We'll be able to keep an eye on him."

     "Oh good," said the secretary, smiling toothlessly. "We're a bit short staffed at the moment. The whole world's crying out for wizards to help repair the war damage and put things back together, and everyone wants to go and be a hero. I assume you'll be taking work here?"

     They glanced at each other and nodded.

     "Oh good." She laughed; a cackling laugh like a barnyard of chickens. "You'll have every wizard in Lexandria trying to draft you into their own departments. You'll be lucky to get any rest at all!"

     Thomas and Lirenna glanced at each other again and grinned nervously.

     "Right then," said the secretary. "Back to the young man. We can start him in the introductory class right away, along with the other new arrivals. Just a mundane education, of course. Natural history, mathematics, history, astronomy, that sort of thing. He won't learn anything to do with magic until he begins his apprenticeship, which won't be until the matrons are satisfied that his body's ready for it."

     "We'd like him to take the testing chair right away, if we could," said Lirenna. "Would that be all right?"

     "Well, it's a little unusual for someone so young, but I suppose he only has to do it once. Gradin Dox is in charge of the chair, he'll take care of that."

     "We can be with him during the test?" asked Lirenna nervously.

     "Of course," replied the secretary with a reassuring smile. "That's no problem at all." She opened another book, smaller and much less important looking than the first, and wrote a few words at the bottom of a page. "Sign here please," she said, turning the book around and offering them the pen.

     Thomas took a moment to examine the pen, which looked as though it had been cut from some kind of goose feather but which had delicate traceries of gold spiralling along its length, each one as perfect and precisely placed as if drawn by a master draughtsman. That was absurd, of course, as quill pens wore out very quickly and it would be foolish to waste that kind of decorative effort on something that could not be expected to last the day. Unless...

     He scanned his eyes across the secretary's desk, looking for a container of some kind containing a couple of dozen new feathers. New quills waiting for the moment when the current pen broke and a new one had to be cut. There was no such store to be found, though, which meant that, unless she had a few hidden away out of sight, she expected this one to last a long time. He tried to bend it between his fingers and found it to be as hard as iron.

     Magically strengthened, he thought in amusement. Where else but in Lexandria University would anyone bother to cast a strength spell on a pen? The secretary's desk also lacked an inkwell, which suggested another interesting possibility. He put the pen to the book, and ink flowed freely from the nib as he signed his name. "Clever," he said admiringly as he raised the pen to his eyes again.

     "That was given to me many years ago by one of the advanced students," said the ancient secretary with a sad smile. "He was making it as an exercise, to prove his ability to his tutor, and when he'd finished with it he gave it to me."

     "He just gave it to you?" said Thomas in astonishment. "The amount of work that has to go into creating any permanently magical artifact, even one as small as this... Months of intensive labour! That's some gift!"

     "Well, we were walking out together at the time," said the secretary with a coy smile. "Believe it or not, I was quite a looker in my younger days."

     "Oh I can well believe it," replied Thomas with a grin.

     The secretary laughed out loud. A hideous sound but delightful at the same time. "Oh you flatterer!" she said when she'd regained control of herself. "I can see how you managed to land such a pretty young lady as this, you silver tongued devil you!"

     Lirenna then signed the book, and the secretary wrote a few notes under the two signatures. "Is that it?" asked the demi shae hopefully.

     "That's it," said the secretary as she carefully put the books back in their places. "All that remains now is to find a place for you to stay. We've got plenty of empty places, I'm sad to say, but it does mean you've got a good choice. Will you want your son to stay with you?"

     "I think so," said Thomas. "At first, anyway. He may want to move into the students' dorms when he begins the first year properly, so he can be closer to his friends, but for the time being I think he'll be better off with us."

     "Of course," agreed the secretary with a sympathetic smile. "So you want a two bedroom place. There are some nice places in the conjuration building. They converted the attic into a set of rooms a couple of hundred years ago, or there are some nice little places squeezed in between the laboratories and the storerooms. Why don't you go over and have a look?"

     Lirenna was aghast, thougb. "You mean, actually live in the teaching buildings themselves? Squeezed into some tiny little broom cupboard with one tiny little window overlooking a brick courtyard? Students running around causing a racket at all times of the day and night and stray magics flying around whenever some clumsy apprentice gets a spell wrong? You expect us to live like that for the next seven or eight years?"

     "I think you're exaggerating it a little, Lenny," said Thomas in an attempt to calm her down. "All the other resident wizards live like that. There simply isn't room in this little valley for the kind of country cottages we're used to. We're here now, and we have to adapt."

     "I don't care!" declared the demi shae defiantly. "I will not spend the next eight years of my life living like the wretched resident of one of your human cities. I'd rather stay with the shae folk."

     "The shae folk might not like having a human living with them," pointed out the secretary, looking at Thomas. "They formed their own community precisely to get away from humans."

     "Well, it won't do any harm to ask them," said Thomas, earning himself a delighted smile from Lirenna and an excited grin from Derrin. "Do they still live in the same place?"

     "The shaewoods, in the north west of the valley," confirmed the secretary. "They start a couple of hundred yards away from here. You'll know when you get to it. A shae will appear and forbid you to go any further."

     "Thanks," said Thomas. "You've been very helpful."

     "My pleasure," replied the secretary with a smile that creased up her wrinkled face and bared her toothless gums, and the Gown family left, making their way towards the building's exit.

     About half the valley was covered with forest of one kind or another, but the shaewoods were different in some indefinable way that spoke to something deep within them, making the Gowns pause about a dozen feet from the first trees. During Thomas’s apprentice days, the students had often dared one another to enter and risk the wrath of the shae folk, but few had been able to bring themselves to violate the sanctity of the trees, and those who had had emerged some time later suffering some humiliating, magically inflicted punishment such as donkeys ears or an uncontrollable compulsion to speak aloud every thought that entered their heads.

     There was a chance that the shae folk might do something like that to them to punish them for violating their space, but Thomas was pinning his hopes on the sense of justice that the fair race was famous for. Once, for instance, during his second apprentice year, a group of fourth year students led by George Canterwell, a famous and prolific troublemaker, had tricked a gullible first year student into entering the shaewoods, telling him that one of his teaching wizards was waiting for him in there. They had waited outside the woods for the boy to receive his punishment, ready to mock and humiliate him, but when he emerged an hour later he was totally normal and happy, although he had no memory of what had happened in the woods. The next morning, though, George Canterwell and his cohorts had woken up to find themselves naked and tied to the railing beside the girl’s dormitories. The shae folk, it seemed, were only interested in punishing troublemakers, not sensible adults who were just making enquiries.