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“Have you ever imagined it?” asks Faralda, a smile blazing across her sharp face. “What it will be like—”
Mirabelle Ervine, Master Wizard of the College of Winterhold, walks around her. “No.”
She’s crunching calmly across the College courtyard, shuffling through several papers as she walks: maps of Saarthal, missives from Eastmarch and Haafingar, a logbook full of numbers that make the Archmage go gray in the face. She doesn’t look up. Though she doesn’t trust Faralda to stick to subjects appropriate for public conversation, she does trust her fellow mage to catch her if, while her nose is in a ledger, she falls through a trapdoor to the Midden—
“What it will be like,” Faralda says again, obdurate, “to be named Archmage.”
Mirabelle stares at her.
Then, with bland and perfect surprise, she raises her eyebrows and snaps the logbook shut. “You think I’ll be named Archmage.”
“Ha!” Faralda glowers at her. Her firebrand curls are sizzling from their plaits. “You know you will. Everyone knows you will. Better for Savos Aren that we pack him off somewhere warm—Alinor, perhaps, since he seems to like their, what are they calling themselves, accreditation committee—”
“Faralda.”
“—and that you,” Faralda continues, inextinguishable, “put some thought to choosing your Master Wizard.”
“Don’t,” says Mirabelle crisply, “be ridiculous.”
And yet, she concedes, staring at a curl creeping down Faralda’s forehead, she is sometimes ridiculous herself. She wastes a few moments—only a few—to hold a ceremony in her mind. She imagines the glad, glowing faces, blue in the magelight, of the prentices. She imagines Savos clasping the cloak of office around her shoulders, smiling. She imagines Faralda smiling, too, in some far corner—
She clears her throat. Blinks. “You’re right.”
Faralda’s perfect brow creases, crinkling the stray curl. “I—you mean—”
“I’ll go straightaway,” says Mirabelle, straight-faced, “and ask Mistress Nirya.”
Faralda makes a face like a gargoyle. Mirabelle, watching her, laughs for the first time in days.