Dangerous Women

by Unknown

  Author’s Note:

  Constance was obviously a courageous woman, but was she also a dangerous one? The events following Frederick’s birth give us our answer. Heinrich’s generous peace terms had been bait for a trap. He’d shown his hand during his Christmas coronation by having the bodies of Tancred and his son dragged from their royal tombs. Four days later, he claimed to discover a plot against him and ordered that Sybilla, her children, and the leading Sicilian lords be arrested and taken to Germany. Sybilla and her daughters eventually escaped, but her five-year-old son died soon after being sent to a monastery, said to have been blinded and castrated before his death. Heinrich’s heavy-handed rule provoked a genuine rebellion in 1197, and there is some evidence that Constance was involved in the conspiracy. Heinrich certainly thought so, for he forced her to watch as he executed the ringleader by having a red-hot crown nailed to his head. But in September 1197, Heinrich died unexpectedly at Messina. Constance at once took control of the government, surrounded herself with Sicilian advisers, and expelled all the Germans. But she would survive Heinrich by barely a year, in which she worked feverishly to protect her son. She had him crowned and then formed an alliance with the new Pope, Innocent III, naming him as Frederick’s guardian before her death in November 1198 at age forty-four. Frederick would prove to be one of the most brilliant, controversial, and remarkable rulers of the Middle Ages—King of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor, even King of Jerusalem. And Constance? Dante placed her in Paradise.

  Lev Grossman

  A novelist and journalist, Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time and coauthor of the TIME.com blog TechLand. His quirky 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians was a phenomenal international sensation, and landed on the New York Times Best Seller list as well as being named a New Yorker Best Book of 2009, and its sequel, The Magician King, published in 2011, has enjoyed similar acclaim. Grossman’s other books include the novels Warp and Codex. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a website at levgrossman.com.

  Here he takes us to an ancient, venerable school for wizards, one haunted by a thousand age-old traditions as well as spirits of a different kind, to show us that even the most innocent of pranks can end up having dangerous and even deadly consequences.

  THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR

  You could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. It wasn’t that innocent. It was just that Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he had to be punished for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at the very least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer, and that counted for something. A lot really.

  You couldn’t call it innocent. But you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway, is there really any such thing as an innocent prank?

  Plum was president of the League—unelected but undisputed—and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, probably, though since the college had been around for something like four hundred years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been, at some point in the past, another League or at any rate something along the same lines, which you could count as a historical precedent. You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in fact she’d gotten the idea from a P. G. Wodehouse story.

  They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as they could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. Plum was lying full length on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered limply around the room on couches and chairs, like confetti from a successful but rather exhausting party that was thankfully now all but over.

  Plum made the room go silent—it was a little spell that ate sound in about a ten-yard radius—and all the attention immediately focused on her. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.

  “Let’s put it to a vote,” she said solemnly. “All those in favor of pranking Wharton, say aye.”

  The ayes came back in a range of tones from righteous zeal to ironic detachment to sleepy acquiescence. This business of clandestine after-hours scheming could certainly take a whack at your sleep schedule, Plum had to admit. It was a little unfair on the others, because Plum was a quick study who went through homework like a hot knife through butter, and she knew it wasn’t that easy for all of them. From her vantage point on the floor, with her eyes closed, her long brown hair splayed out in a fan on the carpet, which had once been soft and woolly but which had been trodden down into a shiny, hard-packed grey, the vote sounded more or less unanimous.

  Anyway, there was fairly evidently a plurality in the room. She dispensed with a show of nays.

  “It’s maddening,” Emma said in the silence that followed, by way of spiking the football. “Absolutely maddening.”

  That was an exaggeration, but the room let it go. It’s not like Wharton’s crime was a matter of life and death. But a stop would be put to it. This the League swore.

  Darcy sat on the couch opposite the long mirror with the scarred white frame that leaned against one wall. She toyed with her reflection—with both of her long, elegant hands she was working a spell that stretched it and then squished it, stretched, then squished. The technicalities were beyond Plum, but then, mirror-magic was Darcy’s specialty. It was a bit show-offy of her, but you couldn’t blame her. Darcy didn’t have a lot of opportunities to use it.

  The facts of the Wharton case were as follows. At Brakebills, most serving duties at dinner were carried out by First Years, who then ate separately afterwards. But, by tradition, one favored Fourth Year was chosen every year to serve as wine steward, in charge of pairings and pourings and whatnot. Wharton had had this honor bestowed upon him, and not for no reason. He did know a lot about wine, or at any rate he seemed to be able to remember the names of a whole lot of different regions and appellations and whatever else. (In fact, another Fourth Year with the unintentionally hilarious name of Claire Bear had been tipped for wine steward this year. Wharton showed her up, coolly and publicly, by distinguishing between a Gigondas and a Vacqueyras in a blind tasting.)

  But in the judgment of the League, Wharton had sinned against the honor of his office, sinned most grievously, by systematically short-pouring the wine, especially for the Fifth Years, who were allowed two glasses with dinner. Seriously, these were like three-quarter pours. Everybody agreed. For such a crime, there could be no forgiveness.

  “What do you suppose he does with it all?” Emma said.

  “Does with what?”

  “The extra wine. He must be saving it. I bet he ends up with an extra bottle every night.”

  There were eight girls in the League, of whom six were present, and Emma was the youngest and the only Second Year, but she wasn’t cowed by her elders. In fact, she was, in Plum’s opinion, even a bit too keen on the League and her role in same. She could have made just a little show of being intimidated once in a while. Plum was just saying.

  “I dunno,” Plum said. “I guess he drinks it.”

  “He couldn’t get through a bottle a night,” Darcy said. She had a big poofy 1970s Afro; it even had an Afro pick sticking out of it.

  “He and his boyfriend, then. What’s his name. It’s Greek.”

  “Epifanio.” Darcy and Chelsea said it together.

  Chelsea lay on the couch at the opposite end from Darcy, her honey-blond head on the armrest, knees drawn up, lazily trying to mess up Darcy’s mirror tricks. Darcy’s spells were marvels of intricacy and precision, but it was much easier to screw up somebody else’s spell than it was to cast one yourself. That was one of the many small unfairnesses of magic.

  Darcy frowned and concentrated harder, pushing back. The interference caused an audible buzz, and, under the stress, Darcy’s reflection in the mirror twisted and spiraled
in on itself in weird ways.

  “Stop,” she said. “You’re going to break it.”

  “He’s probably got some set spell running that eats it up,” Emma said. “Has to feed it wine once a day. Like a virility thing.”

  “Of course that’s where your mind would go,” Plum said.

  “Well,” Emma said, flushing mauve—gotcha!—“you know. He’s so buff.”

  Chelsea saw her moment and caused Darcy’s reflection to collapse in on itself, creepily, like it had gotten sucked into a black hole, and then vanish altogether. In the mirror it looked like she wasn’t even there—her end of the couch was empty, though the cushion was slightly depressed.

  “Ha,” said Chelsea.

  “Buff does not mean virile.”

  That was Lucy, an intensely earnest, philosophical Fifth Year; her tone betrayed a touch of what might have been the bitterness of personal experience. Plump and wan and Korean, Lucy floated cross-legged in one of the room’s irregular upper corners. Her dark straight hair was loose and so long that it hung down past her bum.

  “I bet he gives it to the ghost,” Lucy went on.

  “There is no ghost,” Darcy said.

  Somebody was always saying that Brakebills had a ghost. It was like Plum saying there was a League: you could never prove it either way.

  “Come to that,” said Chelsea, who had consolidated her victory over Darcy in the mirror game by plopping her feet in Darcy’s lap, “what does ‘virile’ mean?”

  “Means he’s got spunk in his junk,” Darcy said.

  “Girls, please,” Plum said, by way of getting things back on track. “Neither Wharton’s spunk nor his junk are germane here. The question is, what to do about the missing wine? Who’s got a plan?”

  “You’ve got a plan,” Darcy and Chelsea said at the same time, again. The two of them were like stage twins.

  “I do have plan.”

  “Plum has a plan,” intoned tiny, cheery Holly from the one good armchair.

  Plum always had a plan; she couldn’t help it. Her brain seemed to secrete them naturally. Plum’s plan was to take advantage of what she perceived to be Wharton’s Achilles’ heel, which was his pencils. He didn’t use the school-issued ones, which as far as Plum was concerned were entirely functional and sufficient unto the day: deep Brakebills blue in color, with “Brakebills” in gold letters down the side. But Wharton didn’t like them—he said they were too fat, he didn’t like their “hand-feel,” and the lead was soft and mushy. Wharton brought his own from home instead.

  In truth, Wharton’s pencils were remarkable pencils: olive green in color and made from some oily, aromatic wood that released a waxy aroma reminiscent of distant exotic rain forest trees. God knows where he got them from. The erasers were bound in rings of a dull grey brushed steel that looked too industrial and high-carbon for the task of merely containing the erasers, which were, instead of the usual fleshy pink, a light-devouring black. Wharton kept his pencils in a flat silver case, which also contained (in its own crushed-velvet nest) a sharp little knife that he used to keep them sharpened to wicked points.

  Moreover, whatever life Wharton had led before becoming a magician-in-training at Brakebills, it must have included academic decathlon or debating or something, because he had a whole arsenal of spinning-pencil tricks of the kind that people commonly used to intimidate rival mathletes. He performed them constantly and unconsciously and seemingly involuntarily. It was annoying, even over and above the wine thing.

  Plum planned to steal the pencils and hold them for ransom, the ransom being an explanation of what the hell Wharton did with all that wine, along with a pledge to stop doing same. By 11:30 p.m. that night, the League was yawning, and Darcy and Chelsea had restored Darcy’s reflection and then begun wrangling with it all over again, but Plum’s plan had been fully explained, fleshed out, approved, improved, and then made needlessly complex. Cruel, curly little barbs had been added to it, and all roles had been assigned.

  It was rough justice, but someone had to enforce order at Brakebills, and if the faculty didn’t, then the League’s many hands were forced. The faculty might turn a blind eye, if it chose, but the League’s many eyes were sharp and unblinking.

  Darcy’s image in the mirror shivered and blurred.

  “Stop it!” Darcy said, really annoyed now. “I told you—”

  She had told her, and now it did. The mirror broke: there was a loud sharp tick, and a white star appeared in the glass in the lower right-hand corner, with thin cracks branching out from it, as if some tiny invisible projectile had struck it there. Plum thought of Tennyson: The mirror cracked from side to side …

  “Oh, shit!” Chelsea said. Her hands flew to her mouth. “I hope that wasn’t, like, super expensive.”

  The instant it happened, the mirror’s face went dark, and it stopped reflecting anything in the room at all. It must not have been a real mirror at all but a magical device designed to behave like one. At first Plum thought it had gone completely black, but then she saw that there were soft shadowy shapes there: a sofa and chairs. The mirror, or whatever it was, was showing them the same room they were in, but empty, and in darkness. Was it the past? The future? There was something uncanny about it—it was as if someone had been there moments ago and had only just left, turning out the lights on their way out.

  Plum got up at 8:00 the next morning, late by her standards, but instead of rejuvenating her brain, the extra sleep had just made it all muzzy. She’d counted on feeling all sparkly with excitement and anticipation at the prospect of the impending prank, but instead she just drifted vaguely into the shower and then out of it and into her clothes and downstairs in the direction of her first class. Her mind, she had often noticed, was a lens that alternated between states of lethally sharp focus and useless, strengthless blurriness, apparently without her having any say in the matter. Her mind had a mind of its own. This morning it was in its strengthless blur mode.

  As a Fifth Year who’d finished all her required coursework, Plum was taking all seminars that semester, and her first class was a small colloquium on period magic, fifteenth-century German, to be specific—lots of elemental stuff and weird divination techniques and Johannes Hartlieb. Tiny Holly sat opposite her across the table, and such was Plum’s strengthless, blurry state that Holly had touched her sharp little nose meaningfully, twice, before Plum remembered that that was the signal that Stages One and Two of the plan had already been completed successfully. She snapped into focused mode.

  Stage One: “Crude but Effective.” A few hours earlier Chelsea’s boyfriend would have smuggled her into the Boys’ Tower under pretense of a predawn snog, not out of character for either of them. Nature having taken its course, Chelsea would have torn herself from the arms of her beloved and gone and stood outside of Wharton’s door, her back pressed against it, smoothed back her honeyed locks from her forehead in an automatic gesture, rolled her eyes back into her head, and entered his room in a wispy, silvery, astral state. She tossed his room for the pencil case, found it, and grasped it with both of her barely substantial hands. She couldn’t get the pencil case out of the room that way, but she didn’t have to. All she had to do was lift it up against the window.

  Wharton himself might or might not have observed this, depending on whether or not he was asleep in his blameless couch, but it mattered not. Let him see.

  Once Chelsea got the case over by the window, earnest Lucy would have line of sight from a window in an empty lecture hall opposite Wharton’s room, which meant she could teleport the pencil case in that direction, from inside Wharton’s room to midair outside it. Three feet was about as far as she could jump it, but that was plenty.

  The pencil case would then fall forty feet to where keen Emma waited shivering in the bushes in the cold February predawn to catch it in a blanket. No magic required.

  Effective? Undeniably. Needlessly complex? Perhaps. But needless complexity was the signature of the League. That was how the Le
ague rolled.

  All this accomplished, it was on to Stage Two: “Breakfast of Champions.” Wharton would descend late, having spent the morning searching his room frantically for his pencils and not finding them. Through a fog of anxiety, he would barely notice that his morning oatmeal had been plunked down in front of him not by some anonymous First Year but by tiny Holly in guise of same. The first mouthful would not sit right with him. He would stop and examine his morning oatmeal more closely.

  It would be garnished, not with the usual generous pinch of brown sugar, but with a light dusting of aromatic, olive-green pencil shavings. Compliments of the League.

  As the day wore on, Plum got into the spirit of the prank. She knew she would. It was mostly just her mornings that were bad.

  Her schedule ground forward, ingesting the day in gulps like an anaconda swallowing a wildebeest. Accelerated Advanced Kinetics; Quantum Gramarye; Joined-Hands Tandem Magicks; Cellular-Level Plant Manipulation. All good clean American fun. Plum’s course load would have been daunting for a doctoral candidate, possibly several doctoral candidates, but Plum had arrived at Brakebills with a head full of more magical theory and practice than most people left with. She wasn’t one of these standing starters, the cold openers, who reeled through their first year with aching hands and eyes full of stars. Plum had come prepared.