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Everything looked fairly normal—or as normal as possible, in a place like Whitehall. “I had my robes issued when I arrived last year.”
    Lin nodded, then opened her trunk. “She said she would bring me something,” she said, flatly. “She won’t report it to Master Tor, will she?”
    “I don’t think so,” Emily said. “But she will probably remind you about it, ever so often. She won’t let you make the same mistake again.”
    She glanced at her watch, then walked out of the bedroom and down to the common room. Unsurprisingly, it was empty. Most of her fellow students, she suspected, would have stayed up half the night chatting away and would try to sleep in as much as possible. They were in for an unpleasant surprise if they kept trying to sleep in when term properly started, she knew; Lady Barb had told her that the beds automatically evicted anyone who was still asleep when the first bell rang for class.
    One wall held a set of parchment sheets. The first told her that the Night Stompers, a Ken team with seventeen years of history, was holding tryouts later in the afternoon. All were welcome, apparently. Emily glanced over a handful of other parchments, which repeated the same message for different teams, until she found something different. The list of banned hexes and jinxes was surprisingly short, although there was a blanket prohibition on anything that was either lethal or would do serious injury.
    She rolled her eyes as she took in the short list of banned spells. One of them caused a person’s clothes to fall off—she could just imagine the chaos that could cause in the dining hall—while another caused instant diarrhea. She hadn’t wanted to know that was even possible . The others were just as bad; one, a small love charm, could be abused easily, if the caster was completely unscrupulous. At the bottom, there was a short note that if anyone attempted to use them, at least without the victim’s permission, they would be lucky if facing the Warden was all that happened.
    Shaking her head, Emily walked through the common room, out of the living quarters and down the corridor towards where the Head of Year was commonly housed. If Master Tor was anything like Mistress Irene, he would have an office near the dining hall, where he could eat and work at the same time. She hesitated outside Mistress Irene’s office, then walked onwards until she saw Master Tor’s name on a door. It was glowing faintly, informing her that he was inside. There were dark rumors about what happened to anyone who tried to break into a tutor’s office while they were absent.
    She tapped the door and waited. A moment later, it swung open, allowing her to enter the room.
    Master Tor’s office was large, larger than the Grandmaster’s office. All four walls were covered with bookshelves, groaning under the weight of thousands of texts, each one large enough to be difficult for a single person to carry. Two desks were covered with pieces of parchment and paper, while a third was almost completely empty, apart from a tiny textbook and a mug of kava. Apart from the chair Master Tor was sitting in, behind the third desk, there was nowhere for anyone else to sit.
    “Lady Emily,” Master Tor said. The look of vague dislike on his face was still there. “What can I do for you?”
    Emily bit down on her temper. Shouting at him wouldn’t help.
    “I applied to share a room with Alassa and Imaiqah,” she said. It was fairly certain that he would know Alassa—and probably Imaiqah as well. “All three of us made the same request. I would like to know why we did not wind up sharing a room.”
    “Because I changed the room assignments,” Master Tor said. There was something flat, utterly emotionless, in his tone. “As, I believe, Madame Razz was kind enough to explain to you last night.”
    Emily felt her temper flare, forcing her to focus her mind to damp it down. There was something about his attitude that made her want to