Thalia crossed to the professor’s desk and leaned over it to stare at him. “My father knew nothing of the family he came from. Isn’t it possible he could have come from Traders too? Then I would have Trader blood on both sides.”
“It is not impossible,” Professor Evans admitted. “Merely highly unlikely. As it is highly unlikely you actually Traded.”
“You honestly find it easier to believe that I pulled my hand through a locked cuff than that I Traded?” Thalia kept her voice low and steady. It required effort.
“Honestly? Yes. Looking up at you like this is hurting my neck. Please resume your seat. It’s a question of age, you see. You’re what, eighteen years old, Miss Cutler?”
Thalia sat. “I’m twenty-one.” This was not strictly true, but she had been twenty for three months, which was nearly twenty-one.
“Forgive my error. You are twenty-one years old. Have you ever in your life before experienced anything remotely similar to your difficulty last night?”
This, Thalia had to be honest about. “No.”
“Yet if you were truly a Trader, your experiences with Trading from one form to the other would have begun soon after your menarche. When Trader children begin to mature, that is when their poorly controlled Trades begin. You can imagine how closely their parents watch their progress.”
Thalia nodded, but Professor Evans went on without giving her a chance to speak. “Once a Trader child learns to control the urge to Trade, once they can resist it or change at will, they are given an ordeal to prove their proficiency. There are poems and novels, even plays about these ordeals. Perhaps you’ve seen the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis? It’s better known as The Golden Ass, but delicacy demanded it be renamed when one of the Latin professors here adapted it for the stage. Selections from it are sometimes performed by the graduating classics students.”
Nutall scoffed. “You have a quaint notion of entertainment. Although she has grown up in theaters, you may safely assume that Thalia has never seen a classical play of any kind, Trader, Sylvestri, or Solitaire.”
“Really? What a pity.” Professor Evans turned his attention back to Thalia. “Only if the Trader child succeeds in performing that ordeal, only then are they deemed complete Traders, fully adult, and safe to travel the world freely. By the time a Trader reaches the age of twenty-one, they are long past the kind of experience you described.” Professor Evans paused for breath. “You are much too old to have Traded for the first time.”
Nutall folded his arms and frowned. “What if you’re wrong?”
Professor Evans sat back in his big chair. “Then Miss Cutler is a Trader with no training, no family support of any kind, let alone the usual Trader family financial trusts, and a future I can only call grim. Until they are able to control their Trades, young Traders can be prey to attacks by manticores. Manticores, although rare, still live by feeding off the magic of Traders who cannot control their powers. Should a young Trader survive unscathed by a manticore, know that most Traders have lost their mental acuity by the time they are seventy. Many Traders choose to spend their declining years in their animal form. If I am wrong about you, Miss Cutler, not only do you have my sincerest apology, you have my profound sympathy.”
There was silence while Thalia and Nutall absorbed this information. When Professor Evans spoke again, it was with a bright, false smile. “You have one Trader parent, it seems. You are not a Trader. I have one Trader parent myself, and believe me, you will never meet anyone more Solitaire than I am. Congratulations, Miss Cutler. You are safe. You are in no danger of attracting the attentions of a manticore.”
Thalia frowned. “Then what happened to me last night?”
“I don’t know.” Professor Evans gave his beard a thoughtful tug. “I am a professor of literature. I don’t have a scientific explanation. If you force me to opine, then I think the danger you were in overwhelmed your ordinary perceptions. You experienced something very like a visual hallucination.”
“I wasn’t hallucinating.” Nor was it merely visual, Thalia did not say aloud. There was a limit to how much of her time and energy Professor Evans was worth, and she had reached it.
“Something like a hallucination,” Professor Evans repeated. “The mind is a powerful thing and extreme conditions produce extreme responses, particularly in the weaker sex.”
“Right.” Thalia put her gloves back on, careful with the bruising