The Magic Council (The Herezoth Trilogy)

by Grefer, Victoria

“Yes, I had Esper. That one’s Luce.”

  “They don’t look any different, woman!”

  Carlina took Luce, and Thad and Vane sat on the settee.

  “Any plans for the new year?” Vane asked.

  “We’ll be in Fontferry March through May, it turns out, with Carlina’s parents. Just made arrangements yesterday.”

  “Fontferry? I could transport you, no need to travel all that way by carriage. I wouldn’t mind.”

  “I appreciate the offer. Don’t think the in-laws would be too keen, is the thing, though you’re right, that trip is long. That’s why we’re staying three months. Why, we’ll be gone as great a part of next year as you were this one.” He paused. “Where did you take August, by the way? You’ve never said.”

  Vane looked from Thad’s curious expression to where Carlina, who had heard her husband’s question, waited with bated breath for a response. He and August had passed more time with them since September than he could ever remember spending with friends over a four-month span—except perhaps Francie.

  “I can trust you both?”

  Thad said, “With your life, you know that.”

  Carlina swore, “We’d never tell a soul.”

  “We were in Traigland.”

  Vane told them how he had studied for years with Zacry Porteg; how Kora, like Teena, was a second mother to him; how Amison had nearly killed him when he cast that switching spell to save August and what he thought at the time was their one unborn child; how Zacry had transported him back to Triflag, and he nearly had chosen to stay there.

  “I probably would have,” Thad assured him.

  Soon the girls woke up crying. They were hungry, it seemed, so Thad and Carlina said a quick goodnight as Vane made them promise they would sleep in one of Oakdowns’s numerous bedrooms rather than face the snow. Vane took the twins to their mother to nurse, and by the time the babies had fallen asleep in her arms, he could just hear the chimes of the clock in Ingleton’s market square. August counted twelve aloud.

  “It’s the new year,” she whispered to Vane. “A new beginning. We could use one of those, I think.”

  He kissed her cheek and stroked Esper’s with a finger. “It’s lucky we have one, then.”

  “I can’t believe we have these angels. It doesn’t seem real somehow. I’d swear I was dreaming if I didn’t ache all over.”

  “Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, I was in this room when that clock went off. I was trying to sleep, but I kept worrying about that first appearance at court, kept trying to envision the future. I never once imagined the next time a year ended you would be here with me, let alone that we’d have two daughters. August, there are two of them.”

  “There’s two all right.”

  “How are we going to handle this?”

  “Hand in hand and arm in arm. That’s how Bennie described the Crimson League once. It worked for them, and it’s worked for us this far.

  “Do you know where I was three hundred and sixty-five days ago? I was in my parlor at the Palace, praying, I didn’t know what for. I didn’t know whether to ask for grit or patience, for the strength to stand by you or the strength to just stand by. Finally, I started praying that when and if the time should come to make a definite choice, I’d know what to do. I said that prayer morning and evening each day for the next three months, and when you came by that night in March, when you suggested we elope, I knew we’d reached a crossroads.

  “Well, all that praying made a difference. I looked out at the paths I could take, and they both looked dark. What I saw was that, down one, you at least would be with me, while the other I’d walk alone. That was the difference, and to view it that way made my choice as clear as whether to go out in a coat or a sundress in the middle of January.

  “We’ve been walking arm in arm ever since in the blackness, feeling our way with our free hands. And we’ve stumbled a couple times, and even fallen, but we never once let go. When I thought I would lose you to Amison I just clung to your fingers. I couldn’t do anything more, and you clung back. The Giver be praised, you clung back. Well, at this point I honestly feel like I’m starting to see in the dark. My vision’s adjusting, and if you open your eyes, you’ll find yours is too. We’ve seen Thad and Carlina will be wonderful companions. We’ve seen where we’re meant to be and even why, perhaps: that school. The school’s just a new destination to grope along to, which is fine. We’ve never done anything but grope our way. Val, we’ll do our best for the girls, and that will be enough. If our best is just to keep on tripping together, well, Bennie died so we could keep on like two blind idiots, and man alive, in honor of her that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

  Vane smiled, and said, “I guess we can expect a year of muddy hands and knees. Scrapes and bruises.”

  “From the falls? I guess we can.” August kissed Luce’s head.

  “Two babies,” Vane repeated. “Not a thing about this will be simple.”

  “More complicated than you recovering from that stab wound? Than tracking me to Bennie’s when I needed you so fast?”

  “Well,” said Vane, “when you put it that way....”

  Vane took Esper from her mother and cradled the infant gently in one arm, the arm farther from August, so that he and his wife could interlock their fingers.

  SNEAK PEEK:

  “The King’s Sons”

  Finish the Herezoth trilogy in late 2013!

  PROLOGUE

  Francie Rafe had worked on the king’s Magic Council for ten years now, so the budgets she studied, all for the school the council had founded as its first project, were nothing unfamiliar. If anything, she deemed them mundane. They lay amidst a clutter of dishes, glasses, inkwells mostly empty, and a roll of clean parchment on the only large table she owned. The high summer sun was bright as its warmth filtered through the thin curtains set before the windows.

  Francie had lived alone in one of Podrar’s newer lodging houses for some twenty-odd months. She held no affection for the building, and wished such large and impersonal monstrosities had kept to Yangerton where they belonged. Yangerton, Herezoth’s largest city, needed them to house its vast population, but Francie couldn’t deny Podrar’s numbers had been growing, and quickly. Renting an apartment in a lodging house was cheap, was all Francie could afford after paying for one of her school’s poorer students to study at the Carphead Academy.

  Her long, strawberry blonde hair, which had dulled as she approached thirty years of age, kept from her face thanks to a thick cloth tie that hit the back of her neck each time she lifted her head. She studied the various budgets with large, dark eyes; she had to determine which proposal to support, and thought the one that cut funds from groundskeeping was probably the best. It used the extra coin to pay teachers a larger salary, which Francie liked. The increase wasn’t as much as they deserved, but it was something, and would show the crown and council did not take their work for granted.

  Francie certainly didn’t. She knew how important the Academy was. Many of its students had magic, which wasn’t an easy talent for a child in Herezoth to possess. Francie would know; the sense of touch had always been a problem for her. She was far too sensitive to it. Upon touching an object, any object, she routinely felt overwhelmed by the emotions of the last person to have done the same. She felt what they had felt. Their anger, fear, confidence, or insecurity might well have been her own. Francie loathed the power she could not escape, but it was her qualification for the Magic Council. The king had only appointed empowered individuals, due to the nature of the work and the council’s aim to give a repressed sector of society a voice in his court.

  The school needed more scholarships, that was the real trouble. Luckily, the Magic Council was finding donors: well-to-do merchants from Yangerton, or owners of the flourishing pulp mills north of Podrar. Francie was meeting with a banker in two days; she hoped he might agree to fund a student’s education. People were finally acknowledging the value of educating students with m
agic powers alongside classmates who had no more magic than a wooden beam, after years of….

  Francie jerked her head toward the door. She thought she’d heard something. More precisely, she’d heard someone, a footstep on the wooden floor before the edge of her tattered green rug. She could see no one, though, and her door hadn’t budged.

  “Vane?” she called. Her sorcerer coworker. Only sorcerers could turn invisible. She wasn’t expecting him, and he’d never called on her unannounced, let alone transported himself in. Was somebody with her? Francie tensed for one dreadful, prolonged moment.

  Utter silence. She must be imagining things. She had hardly slept last night, hardly ever slept as much as her body told her she should. There was so much work to do….

  Francie would never know whether the force that struck her hard across the face, like a fist, was actually an invisible, clenched hand or the result of a whispered spell she hadn’t heard. It knocked her sideways, off her chair. When a similar punch slammed into her stomach, pushing the air from her lungs, she banged the back of her head. The worn rug between her and the floor provided little padding. Her mind would have been racing, in a panic, but thinking hurt too much. She groaned, her pounding heart making her chest throb. This wasn’t Vane….

  He had auburn hair like Vane, though. And was definitely a sorcerer. He made himself visible with a word that sounded like nonsense to Francie; she studied him as she scooted away, toward her second-hand sofa and the open bedroom. He towered before her, between her and the front door. He was bearded, and one of the tallest men Francie had ever seen. His nose was pointed, majestic, and to judge by his unlined face, he was not much older than she was. The clothing he wore—a cotton shirt and breeches—was worn, artisanal, and unremarkable. Francie had never set eyes on this man in her life, but he glared at her with enough hatred in his face that they could have been lifelong enemies.

  Through the tremors of fear that shook her, and then of pain as he kicked her in the side, Francie couldn’t reason a motive for this attack. The man was a sorcerer. The king had created the Magic Council to serve the needs of people like him. Why would he assault a councilor?

  Francie couldn’t keep pace with her swift, shallow breaths, each riddled with aches. “Please,” she gasped, “Why are you…? What do you…?”

  He wouldn’t tell her what he wanted. His response was another kick, one with enough momentum to turn her to her stomach. Francie reached a hand to her head; she felt a knot and the sticky wetness of blood before he ripped away the cloth that bound her hair, flipped her back over, and gagged her. He held her down with a knee on her gut and made sure she saw him clutching the fabric for a full thirty seconds before he forced it in her mouth. She knew better than to scream, to alert others. He could slay any neighbors who tried to help her with a simple incantation as they opened the door, assuming they progressed that far. Francie had the entrance bolted.

  The gagging was when she realized what she was facing. She might not know this man, but he knew her. He could easily have silenced her with a spell. Most any sorcerer would have; that would have been faster than a physical gag, and less risky. This man, though, bore a personal grudge against her, whoever he was. She knew by his vile, triumphant smirk what his intention was in using that cloth to subdue her. He would torment her with her own magic.

  With the gag pressing against her swelling face, Francie felt the purity of this man’s hatred like a toxin in her blood. His jealousy numbed her fingers. She hurt too completely to wonder what he might envy about her. Her place on the council? All she knew for certain was the extent of her peril. With those emotions raging he would want to cut her down, to show her she was nothing and meant nothing, her and her piddling magic that was more of a liability than an asset.

  The numbness in Francie’s hand spread up her arm. Her gut convulsed, and the sorcerer, whoever he was, removed her gag so she wouldn’t choke on the contents of her stomach but instead spew them across the rug. The saving gesture was no assurance he would not kill her; he just wanted his way with her first.

  When she finally stopped heaving, the man spoke a second incantation. Francie was no sorceress; she had little knowledge of spells, no concept of his magic’s intent, and she cried out in a panic despite her previous determination not to.

  No sound issued from her. When gagging failed, he’d resorted to a muting spell to keep her quiet. Now he slammed her head against the floor as she struggled in desperation, which worsened her previous injury and almost knocked her unconscious. She resisted no further after that. She had no strength to. He bound her hands behind her back with the cloth he’d removed from her mouth, and a prideful gloating now, in combination with the previous emotions, made her feel feverish as he fell upon her.