Ink Black Magic

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  A girl in ribboned pigtails leaned forward earnestly. “What about spells, miss? If you follow a spell exactly, isn’t that like following the rules of magic?”

  “Nope,” said Mistress Sharpe. She grinned widely. “You had Home Economics this morning, didn’t you, Moonweaver? With a cake recipe, you know it has been worked out by someone who had an interest in cakes. The chances are, if it’s a good recipe, if you follow the instructions exactly, you will get a half-decent cake. If you mess around with the ingredients and make it up as you go along, you also might get a great cake, or you might get a total bloody disaster. But you would think to yourself, that’s because I didn’t stick to the recipe. Am I right?”

  Moonweaver nodded hesitantly.

  “Right,” said Mistress Sharpe. “With magic, you can follow the instructions of a spell completely to the letter, you can do exactly what the witch or warlock did before you and it can still go wrong. In fact, it will almost certainly go wrong if it works at all. Other people’s spells are almost certainly doomed to failure. Magic resents any attempt to tie it down. Yes, Friefriedsson?”

  Egg hadn’t even realised that his hand was in the air. He lowered it slowly. “Mistress Sharpe, this is our first class with you. You haven’t consulted a register but you seem to know all our names. Are you using magic to do that?”

  Mistress Sharpe smiled a dazzling smile at him. “That’s a fascinating question, Friefriedsson.” She extended her smile to the entire class. “Any other fascinating questions?”

  ***

  Clio was waiting for Egg as he came out of the Lecture Hall. She lay full-length on a park bench, her blonde hair spread out to catch the sunshine. As he approached, she cracked one eye open. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” said Egg, dropping to the concrete and sitting down.

  “I’m thinking of taking up Philosophy of Magic,” she announced.

  “If you’d turned up an hour ago, you could have actually attended the lecture.”

  “Don’t nag,” said Clio, yawning. “I really tried with History of Torture, but the lecturer has these horrible green blotches all over his neck and I was so busy staring that I didn’t take in a word of what he said. Ugh. After ten minutes of that, I just had to come and lie in the sun for a while to make it up to myself. What’s Mistress Sharpe like?”

  “Okay, I guess. A bit intense. She has a one track mind about magical disasters, but at least that should make it easier to predict the exam questions.”

  “Just as long as she doesn’t have green spots,” said Clio. She lifted herself up slightly on one elbow. “You know who she is, don’t you? Who she really is.”

  Egg grinned. “Everyone knows who she is. Kassa Daggersharp, pirate queen, scourge of the seventeen seas. Well, at least eight of them.”

  “Oh,” said Clio, obviously disappointed at not being the one to pass on this juicy bit of gossip. “But do you know the best bit?”

  “You mean how she was at school with the Lady Emperor, or do you mean the time she came back from the dead?”

  “Not that,” said Clio scornfully. “I mean the love story.” She placed her hand against her forehead and swooned back on to the bench. “The horribly tragic, melodramatically romantic and ultimately doomed love affair between Kassa Daggersharp and Aragon Silversword.”

  “Oh,” said Egg. “That.”

  “She was the madcap outlaw pirate queen,” sighed Clio, getting into the story despite his obvious lack of interest. “He was the famous ex-Champion and traitor of the Empire. They were completely and utterly in love with each other. They had grand adventures together — she rescued him from the Lady Emperor, he rescued her from the Underworld. But one day she woke up and he was just gone. Vanished into thin air. She was utterly devastated…”

  “Does everyone do things utterly in this story?”

  “Shut up. Yes. Anyway, Kassa swore off piracy from that day forward, disbanded her crew and dropped out of public sight.”

  “Until she turned up here,” said Egg. “Teaching first years how magic is a bad bad thing.”

  “She should know. She caused plenty of magical disasters in her day.”

  “You do know that all this is recent history, don’t you? I mean, ‘her day’ was only a couple of years ago.”

  “I know,” Clio said defensively. “It just seems like it all should have happened once upon a time. Like fairy tales. All the best heroic epics are told hundreds of years after all the characters are dead.”

  “Why are you so interested in this anyway?” Egg couldn’t help asking. “No one cares about who Mistress Sharpe really is.” Well, yeah, they all told the stories. He’d never heard them told so lovingly, though.

  “I care,” Clio said. “I happen to like tragical romance.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Anyway, Aragon Silversword was my uncle, so it’s a family legend.”

  “Oh,” said Egg. There was a long silence. Clio might be sulking, but it was hard to tell. Her eyes were closed against the sun again. “You know,” he said eventually. “My father is the exiled prince of Axgaard. He was chucked out and disowned for having an affair with one of his father’s Official Wenches.”

  Clio opened her eyes, staring thoughtfully at him. “My mother died when I was a baby. She was descended from the famous playwright Wilt Wagstaff and his leading lady, Lana Lamont. Wagstaff wrote Baytriche for Lana, then she left him because he wrote three plays in a row with no decent female parts for her.”

  “Well,” said Egg, grinning as he saw the competitive gleam in Clio’s eyes. “My mother is descended from the Silver Warlock, who founded the College of Highly Improbable Arts right here in Cluft.”

  “My grandmother is Silvia Silversword, who was cousin to the evil Lady Keela of Teatime and looked exactly like her when they were young, so they swapped places and no one noticed for four years.”

  “When my grandfather died,” said Egg, “my aunt Svenhilda became the first female Jarl of Axgaard. She almost got assassinated for trying to make her subjects shave off their beards and be polite to women, and her husband is made out of clockwork. Also my mother Melinor, before she was the Jarl’s wench and ran away with my dad, was sister to the infamous pirate Black Nell, who married Bigbeard Daggersharp. I think that actually makes Mistress Sharpe my cousin.” He smiled, feeling smug. It wasn’t hard to acquire famous ancestors in Mocklore. The island was small, the population was small and everyone got famous sooner or later.

  Clio’s grey eyes went flinty. “Twelve years ago, my father committed treason against Emperor Timregis and was executed by the Imperial Champion, his own brother.”

  Egg stared at Clio, too shocked to speak at first. “Is that true?”

  “Yep.”

  “You win, then.”

  Clio looked a little sad. “I always do.”

  The door to the Lecture Hall opened and Mistress Sharpe came out, balancing a teetering pile of parchment and papyrus scrolls.

  Clio jumped up from the bench, pasting a cheerful smile on her face. “Mistress Sharpe? I was hoping to have a word about transferring into your class.”

  Mistress Sharpe looked irritated. “If you’d turned up an hour ago, you could have actually attended the lecture.”

  Clio’s smile brightened noticeably. “Sorry about that. Can I join?”

  “All right,” sighed Mistress Sharpe. “As it happens, I’ve had a few cancellations from boys who think my cautious attitude to magic is unnecessary. I expect we’ll be scraping them off the walls of your common room in due time. I’ll add you to the list. Just remember that lecture attendance does actually increase your chances of passing the exam.”

  “Yes, miss.” Clio hesitated. “Also, I had a message to pass on. From my grandmother.”

  Mistress Sharpe transferred her pile of scrolls and papers to her hip. Her large golden eyes looked incredibly tired. “Do I know your grandmother?”

  “No, miss. But she would like to be remembered to you. Her na
me is Silvia Silversword.”

  Mistress Sharpe’s armload exploded. Scrolls and parchment scattered on the concrete, where the wind whipped at them. Mistress Sharpe stared at Clio. “Silvia Silversword?”

  “Yes, miss,” Clio said. Her smile faltered a little under the steely gaze of the professor. “She lives nearby, and she was hoping you could come by for tea some time. She would very much like to meet you.”

  “I bet she would,” Mistress Sharpe said grimly. “That would make Aragon Silversword your—”

  “Uncle, miss. My father’s brother.”

  “I see. Egfried Friefriedsson, if you touch those scrolls, you will die a horrible death.”

  Egg paused in the act of attempting to help Mistress Sharpe with her dropped scrolls and parchments. “Yes, miss.”

  Mistress Sharpe turned back to Clio. “You’re Aragon’s niece.”

  “That’s right, miss.”

  It was fascinating to see these two together, Egg thought. Clio was the type who fluttered her eyelashes and bounced confidently through life, but here was a woman nearly a decade older who was far better at it.

  “Heard from him lately?” Mistress Sharpe asked.

  “Oh, no,” Clio protested, her eyes wide. “Not for years.”

  “That’s something, I suppose.”

  “You must have really loved him,” Clio burst out. “I mean, I’ve read all the ballads. Your story is so romantic.”

  Egg closed his eyes. He didn’t think that Mistress Sharpe saw things the same way at all.

  He was right. Mistress Sharpe stared at Clio as if she were some new kind of invading goblin. She snapped her fingers and the scrolls and parchments reassembled themselves, leaping tidily back into her arms. “I don’t know about romance,” she said. “But next time I see him, I plan to shove a knife between his ribs.” She spun on her heel and walked away.

  “She did love him,” said Clio, sounding satisfied.

  Egg frowned. “She used magic to pick up those books. She said that no one should ever ever ever use magic.”

  “I bet she didn’t say that at all,” said Clio. “I bet she just said that you shouldn’t.”

  ***

  A high, uneven staircase led up to Mistress Sharpe’s room. Like everything else in Cluft, these stairs had been designed by a madman. Each step was a different shape and colour. If you climbed them fast enough, they could cause seizures.

  Mistress Sharpe climbed the steps slowly. Her feet felt heavy. There was something ridiculously exhausting about the first day of semester. She had only given three introductory lectures so far — second year Practical Mythology and third year Creative Dance as well as the first year Philosophy of Magic — but her brain and body felt as if she had spent the last ten hours simultaneously ploughing the earth and learning several foreign languages.

  It was their little faces that did it, she decided — those bloody first years. They got so much younger every year. Mistress Sharpe was only twenty-six, but the beginning of semester made her feel a century older.

  She was five flights up, still climbing the ridiculous stairs. Pink, purple, scarlet, green and yellow flashed in front of her eyes; rectangles, triangles, hexagons. One of the steps, somewhere around the seventh flight, was a perfect sphere. It was single-handedly responsible for 50% of all sprained ankles in the entire Mocklore Empire. When Mistress Sharpe reached it, she stepped over and around it without even looking. Her feet were really hurting now. Maybe it was time to give up her signature black high-heeled leather boots. Time to invest in a pair of flat teacher shoes with sensible padding around the heel.

  But, no. That would be the grown up thing to do and, professor or not, Mistress Sharpe was not yet ready to behave like a grown up. It was bad enough that she had a real job, a regular salary and a trusted position in the community. If her father was alive, he would be disappointed at how respectable she was.

  Mistress Sharpe reached the eighth landing. She let herself into her room, closed the door behind her and leaned on it for a moment. Slowly, she removed the two dozen hair pins and the sturdy wire snood which kept her hair in some semblance of order during the day. Her dark red curls tumbled down around her shoulders, and she was Kassa again.

  “Remind me, Singespitter,” she said aloud. “Why did we pick a tower room for our accommodation?”

  Her roommate did not answer. Sprawled out on Kassa’s bed with his nose in half a dozen serious academic scrolls, he barely even glanced at her over his little horn-rimmed spectacles.

  Kassa knew the answer to her own question. On the far side of the cozy room was a pair of glass doors. She opened them now, and stepped out on to the tiny balcony. The view was spectacular. You could see the sea from here, as well as the misty Middens and the wide spread of the colourful Skullcap mountains.

  A breeze rippled through Kassa’s hair. She unlaced her leather bodice, tossed the garment into the room behind her and inhaled the cool air with pleasure. Her belt followed the bodice, then several layers of skirt. Still clad in her rumpled chemise and three or four petticoats, she sank on to a stool and began working on her boots.

  From up here, you could see the Empire go by. Out to sea, there were several white sails — pleasure yachts, no doubt, enjoying the sunshine. As Kassa watched, several large purple and red sails moved in on the small white ones. Pirates.

  “Don’t you miss it, Singespitter?” Kassa said wistfully. “All the adventures and escapades and heroic deeds?”

  Singespitter snorted. He had settled into academic life marvellously and was halfway through a treatise on the intellectual ramifications of bestial metamorphosis. He was more than happy to leave behind his life as a mercenary and pirate. He lifted a large purple quill with his cloven hoof and scratched a note on one of his scrolls with incredibly precise handwriting.

  “Don’t get ink on my quilt,” Kassa called to him. She wiggled her stripy-socked feet, now free from the heavy leather boots. Finally she could relax.

  Out at sea, the little white sails fled this way and that, frantically trying to escape the dread pirates. Kassa watched, and sighed a few more times. She could almost taste the salt from here.

  Being an ex-pirate was one thing, but being an ex-witch, an ex-outlaw, an ex-heroine of tavern ballads and an ex-captain of her own ship was an awful lot for one woman to bear. What was worse was knowing why she had given it all up — not for morals or honour, or even because she fancied a quiet life for a change. She had done it for a man. A filthy, stinking, slimy member of the opposite gender.

  Kassa managed her most pitiful sigh yet. She had a nasty feeling that giving up her career because of a bloke also qualified her as an ex-feminist. So much for Kassa Daggersharp, scourge of at least seven and a half of the seventeen seas.

  Singespitter baaed lightly, reminding Mistress Sharpe that she had essay questions to plan, a lecture to write for tomorrow and a staff dinner for which she had volunteered to contribute a salad.

  “Shut up,” said Kassa, wiggling her toes and staring out to sea. “I’m allowed at least ten minutes of whiny self-indulgence every evening. Don’t spoil it for me.”

  Chapter 2 — Breakfast of Heroes and Villains

  After the initial shock, Egg quite enjoyed sharing a room with a girl. The wash chamber was full of perfumed towels and colourful hair ribbons, but this was a small price to pay for Clio’s company. The first week of semester passed in a blur of lectures, essay questions, new friends and long lunches.

  Egg hadn’t done any drawing or writing since she moved in. He was too self-conscious to do it while Clio was in the room, and without that regular outlet the ideas were building up in his head until he was about ready to burst.

  Finally, he got up the nerve to pull out his folders while Clio was washing her hair. She did this every other night, taking about an hour to shampoo, condition, curl and a dozen other mysterious things apparently necessary to keep her ponytail bouncy.

  As the flower-scented soapy steam seeped un
der the wash chamber door, Egg began to draw. He had inked three pages of an action sequence before he realised that the soapy smell was stronger now, and Clio was sitting on her bed with a towel around her head, watching him with interest.

  “I, um,” he said, blushing wildly. “Sorry, I didn’t realise you’d finished.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” Clio said with a grin. She stood up, balancing the wet towel as a turban, and came over to peer at his work. “It’s really good. I like the big chap with the muscles. Do you do this often?”

  Egg shrugged, embarrassed, and pointed to the folders. Clio opened one and whistled slowly as she saw the sheafs of parchment. “Wow. All this and I haven’t seen you pick up a quill since I moved in.”

  “I don’t usually show it to people,” Egg muttered. He winced as a droplet of water rolled down from Clio’s towel-wrapped hair and dripped into the folder.

  “Well, you should,” she told him. “You’re really talented. Why aren’t you studying art?”

  “There aren’t any real art subjects on offer,” said Egg. “Only Improbable Arts. I think the Department of Aristocracy offers Botanical Sketching, but it doesn’t appeal. Anyway, it’s just a hobby.”

  “Could you draw a picture of me?” asked Clio. She struck a pose. “I could be a femme fatale.”

  Egg laughed, relaxing a little. “Okay. But I won’t put you into the story. It’s weird to do that with real people.”

  “Forget the femme fatale stuff, then,” said Clio. “Wait till I’m in my ghastly night attire. You can do a portrait for my grandmother. I bet she’d really appreciate it.” She sat on the end of Egg’s bed, bouncing a little. “So now I know all about these heroic drawings and stories of yours, you won’t be embarrassed to work on them in front of me?”