The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic: Book 1 by Michael Dalton Page A

the broken left was too great, and the automaton circuits did not have finely enough tuned balance for it. He went over again with a crash.
    He knew he could have called for help. But the humiliation of it would be too great.
    Wilhelm unbuckled the left leg and cast it aside, then tried to stand again. Now he was able to get to his feet. But how to move? He could not hop on his one mechanical leg, but he might be able to limp forward if he could find something to support himself with. This was not the first time something like this had happened to him, and he had taken to keeping walking sticks in certain rooms in case he needed them. But again, his concern for appearances in this room had kept him from doing it here.
    He dropped down to his knees again, and half-crawled, half-dragged himself to the nearest chair. Once he pulled himself up, he found he was able to move forward by leaning heavily on the chair and pushing back with his one good leg. Bit by bit, he made it to the side door of the audience room. He had to sit down to push the door open, but that done, he made it out into the hall.
    One of his private sitting rooms was a few doors down at the point where the hall turned to the right. If he could make it there, he could sit and wait until a servant passed, and have them fetch the chief artificer without undue embarrassment.
    Filling with triumphant satisfaction at his impending victory over this annoyance, Wilhelm maneuvered down the hallway to the sitting room. But just as he reached it—disaster.
    A chambermaid hurrying down the hall with a bucket of dirty wash-water came around the corner and crashed into him, tripping over the chair. Both of them fell to the floor, with the bucket of filthy water unending all over Wilhelm’s court robes.
    “Damn you!” he bellowed as the startled girl realized what she had done and tried to clean up. “Get out of here, or I’ll have you flogged and given the guards!”
    Crying in terror, she jumped to her feet and fled down the hall.
    “And get the chief artificer at once!”
    Wilhelm tore off his sodden robes and crawled through the door into the sitting room.

17.
    Johannes sat at his desk going over the University’s fall social events with Sigrid. Walther had asked that the girls’ coming out be integrated into it somehow if possible, since he had no residence in the city and insufficient funds to rent a large enough home for such an event. Walther had taught at the University with Johannes years ago when they were younger, and still contributed research to the School of Artificers, so it was not an unreasonable request.
    For a mage, the process of seeking a mate was both social and magical. Strictly speaking, the characteristics of one’s flow determined the match, but in practice it was not quite so simple. Most mages were not willing to leave such an important decision to pure chance.
    Whether or not it was possible to influence a potential match was a hotly debated point in magely academia. It was mostly accepted that there could not possibly be only one match for each mage in all the world, or mages would marry at far lower rates than they actually did. So that had to mean there must be a range of possible options somehow. The dispute was whether this range was fixed or could be affected by deliberate actions or desires. The problems inherent in studying something so sensitive and private made research in this area all the more difficult. Thus, as with most such gaps in scientific knowledge, rumor and guesswork filled in the rest.
    One generally accepted feeling was that, given a potential range of matches, it was incumbent on mages who wanted to find tolerable mates to carefully control the process of finding them, lest they randomly match with the first compatible mage they came across. Conversely, those mages who felt their prospects of marrying well were low (for whatever reasons) sought to throw open the process as widely as possible. Thus, there was a