by Rosalyn Eves
I had been eight years old, like most Confirmands. I had stood at the nave of our local church, my white dress splashed with color from the stained-glass window behind the altar. Catherine stood beside me, almost bouncing in her eagerness. The previous year, the Circle member who was to cast her Confirmation spell had fallen ill, and by the time he recovered, Mama and Papa had decided it would be easier to hold our Confirmations jointly.
The officiating Circle member had been an older man with a thinning beard. He spoke the charm first over Catherine. At the conclusion, a hush fell over the audience. Catherine screwed up her face—and executed a flawless Lumen light, a basic spell all Luminate could master. She cupped the blue glow in her hands like it was some rare sapphire.
The crowd clapped and cheered, and Catherine turned a radiant smile on them. The Circle officiator, pronouncing a benediction on her, named her Elementalist.
Then it was my turn.
I’d felt nothing of his charm-casting—no nudge, no burning, no fizzing up my spine. Just as I’d felt nothing tonight when Catherine bound her spells.
“Cast a Lumen light,” he’d instructed me when he finished. I remembered thinking his blue eyes were kind, though I was terrified.
I had lifted my hands, inscribing them through the air in a doubled circle, then cupping them before me. For weeks, Papa had drilled me in the proper form and pronunciation of the rite. I concentrated, folding my lips around the words. “Adure! Canta!”
Nothing happened.
My cheeks flaming, I had ventured a quick look behind me. The small chapel brimmed with relatives, family friends, and village well-wishers. Grandmama smiled encouragingly. Mama pressed her eyebrows together and nodded sharply at me. Get on with it.
Catherine whispered, “It is not so hard, Anna. You can do this.”
I tried again. And again. After my fourth failure, Papa had left the pew and come to stand beside me.
“I think she may be Barren,” the Circle officiator whispered to Papa.
I had not understood the word, but the look on Papa’s face frightened me. Later, Grandmama would explain it meant I was empty—not of seed, but of magic. An ugly term for a Luminate whose Confirmation did not take.
“If you will let me examine her,” the officiant had said, “I must note something for our records.”
Papa had nodded, his lips tight. “All right.” He’d set his hand on my shoulder, weighting me down.
Fear had squirmed through my belly. Alongside the fear was something darker, resentful and angry. Why should I be embarrassed before all these people? But the second wave of emotion only frightened me further: it was both familiar and foreign, mine and not mine. It originated inside me but belonged to a shadow part of me I didn’t recognize.
There in the nave of the chapel, as the Circle officiator began the gesture of a new spell, dread clawed at my heart. My shadow self burst free, fighting against the spell. When the officiant’s lips stopped moving, it was as if I’d swallowed a living flame.
“No!” I had shouted, shaking free of Papa’s hand and running down the aisle, toward Mama’s pale face.
The pain had followed me, heat erupting through me. I wanted to reach the doors, believing somehow if I could just get out, I might escape the agony and the fear and the embarrassment of failing at the only important task I’d ever been set.
Just as I’d reached Mama, I stumbled over James. I hadn’t seen him in the aisle—in the blur of heat and pain, I’d only seen the square of sunlight in the open doorway. He was so small then, barely four. Perhaps he’d thought my running a kind of game.
We’d collapsed in a heap on the ground, and the wave of invisible fire swept out of me. I remembered James screaming, and then nothing at all until morning, when I woke in my bed to find my nurse sitting by my side.
Everything had changed afterward. It was a week before I saw either of my parents, and nearly a month before I was allowed near James. Catherine blamed me for spoiling her Confirmation, as the fete afterward had been canceled. Mama, never particularly nurturing, had grown even more distant, taking my disgrace as a personal slight.
“What I should like to know,” Catherine said, pulling me back into the present, “is how Anna came to be at my ball when she was supposed to be in her rooms.”
“Yes, Anna.” My father’s voice was nearly devoid of inflection. “How did that happen?”
Freddy. I shook myself. I must not betray Freddy. If I refused to answer, I would sound suspicious. “I was curious. I hid myself behind one of the plants in the ballroom.”
“Doubtful,” Lord Orwell said. “The spell I cast revealed that a portal had been opened near your hiding place. You could not have cast it. Someone must have helped you. Who?”
“Tell him,” Mama urged.
“No one. I snuck in.”
“It is late, I am tired, and I would like to be in my bed before much longer. If you insist on lying, then I must insist on doing this my way.” Lord Orwell began weaving his fingers in front of my face in an intricate pattern that could only mean one thing.
A truth charm.
I flinched away from him and his flickering fingers. The last time Mama used a truth charm on me, it had lit the draperies on fire and I’d had blackouts for days afterward.
“Wait,” Mama said. “Don’t spell her. Truth charms have…unpredictable effects on Anna.”
“As you wish.”
My relief was momentary.
Lord Orwell grimaced. “Then we must return to the ballroom and reconstruct what happened.”
My father led the way, and I followed behind the others. I looked down the long hallway, empty now of guests and servants, and considered slipping away from everyone and running to my room. A reconstruction could not mean anything good for me.
Though Mama was a weak Coremancer, unable to read my actual thoughts (thanks be to all the Saints that Bind), she often picked up unerringly on my emotions. No sooner had the notion of flight crossed my mind than she pinched my elbow.
“Tell them the truth.” Her voice was sharp, insistent. “This charade is unseemly.”
Catherine, at Mama’s other side, said, “Anna can’t help it. She must be the center of attention. That’s all she’s doing—prolonging her moment when this night should have been mine.”
Sometimes I wished I could fold up all my unladylike qualities—my obstinacy, my temper, my wanting too much, my inability to stay still and quiet—like a handkerchief and stow it in my valise until needed. Mama and I would both be happier if I could fit the shape society prescribed for me.
But that night, the demon in my shadow self prompted me to respond, “At least no one will soon forget your debut, Catherine. If this is indeed my fault, then you have me to thank.”
I thought Catherine would strike me. She brought her hand up as if she would let fly, but Mama’s shocked “Catherine!” recalled her. Her hand dropped.
Once in the ballroom, Lord Orwell stalked across the floor to the spot where I’d hidden. The room looked so different now, forlorn and sad. Colored streamers lay trampled on the floor; flowers hung dull and wilted on their stems. The water illusions had evaporated.
As the strongest Coremancer in the room, Lord Orwell cast the spell, pulling the reconstruction from memories lingering in the air. When he stopped gesturing and murmuring the Latin incantation, the faint silhouette of a girl took shape, crouched on the ground behind a tall plant. The air in the ballroom shimmered, and the illusion candles flickered. I caught the faint briny smell of the illusion beast, like an echo of a real scent. Light sparked in the center of the room, then my crouched figure rose up and shouted. Outside of the cheval glass in Mama’s room, I only ever saw myself in small mirrors and windows, in bits and pieces. It was strange to see all of me from all angles at once, tall and ungainly. The Reconstruction spell followed the illusion me, walking backward through the events of the night.
I waited for the Reconstruction charm to end there, for the
Circle to turn to me with recrimination and accusations. But it didn’t.
My illusion self crept away from the plant and held out her hand.
I put my hands together to stop them from trembling, so Catherine would not see I was afraid. There was no help for it now. I couldn’t hide Freddy’s involvement any longer.
A figure flickered into being beside me, a golden-haired man a few inches taller than I. We stepped backward into a portal.
“That’s Freddy,” Catherine said. “But why would he help you spoil my debut?”
Mama shot a darkling look at me. She knew. I had been fortunate before that she had been so caught up in Catherine’s debut she had not had time to track my errant feelings.
“Where was the portal anchored?” Lord Orwell asked.
I did not want to answer. But the memory of the garden rose up full and fresh in my mind, and Lord Orwell plucked it out of me.
“The herb garden.”
I hung back behind the others, hoping to escape once again, but Papa took my hand and gently but firmly propelled me forward. We tramped across the lawn, past the rose arbor, and into the herb garden. Overhead, the stars shone and the night wind stirred through the branches of the trees. It was, impossibly, still the same night that had found me in the garden with Freddy. That moment was beginning to feel so distant, as if it were something in a story.
The reconstructed spell had continued in our absence, so when we reached the garden, we did not see the pair of us entering the portal. Instead, everyone saw our illusion selves embracing on the bench. The kiss that felt like a promise now looked like betrayal. My inadvertent betrayal of Freddy to the Circle. My betrayal of Mama’s strict training. My betrayal of Catherine, who glared at me with fury-bright eyes.
And something behind the fury I had not thought to see in my sister—hurt.
After the reconstruction, my mother led Catherine, alternately grieving and raging, to her room. The Circle led me—also grieving and raging in the silence of my head—back to my father’s study.
There they proceeded to dissect me, laying bare my motives like the skeleton of some beast. They determined the following: I was in love with Freddy, he had spelled me, and the sight of him in the midst of my sister’s charm had so enraged me that I destroyed her spell. How I destroyed her spell they had not yet determined.
Set in sharp syllables and indifferent pauses, my motives for the night became sordid and unrecognizable. I couldn’t find the texture and feel of the night air, of Freddy’s kiss, in their words. My story became instead something silly and shallow. A one-note piece of gossip for the morning papers, the younger sister consumed by jealousy.
“We would like to study her,” Lord Orwell said to Papa, sipping from a glass of water mixed with the headache powder most Luminate carried. Depending on the scope, spells were frequently exhausting, sometimes painful. “Discover how someone without magic can disrupt spells. As a scholar, you must appreciate that the more we know about magic and its failings, the more powerful we become.”
No.
“What I appreciate in the abstract and in historical records takes on a much different cast when applied to my own flesh,” my father said. It took me a moment to untangle his words and realize what he had meant: no.
One did not lightly refuse the Circle. For treason against the Circle, an entire family could be stripped of their access to the Binding, thereby losing their magic. For lesser offenses, the Circle might limit what spells one was allowed to cast. Families that stood publicly against the Circle often found themselves social pariahs, shunned by the highest orders of Luminate society. Small wonder Mama was so anxious. And angry.
Lord Orwell looked thunderous, his brows pulling together. “It is your duty—”
Lady Berri interrupted him. “It is late, and this discussion might be best saved for another time, when we have rested.” Her eyes caught mine. “I have a feeling, my dear, that you and I are to become much better acquainted.”
Morning came too early, all stabbing lights and throbbing in my skull. Then memory rushed in. By the time my maid, Ginny, came bearing hot cocoa, I had already pulled my favorite walking gown from my wardrobe, a plain green cotton with a black fringe along the wide sleeves and neck. I had to get out. I had to move, or I would perish from too much thinking.
Ginny’s blue eyes widened in dismay. “You’re not going out? I’m sure your mama intends you to stay in today.”
“So you’ve heard?” Gossip traveled particularly swiftly in the servants’ hall. “Did Mama tell you herself I was to stay in my rooms?”
“No.” Ginny smiled a little. “She said nothing to me.” Ginny was half a dozen years older than I, but she was perhaps the closest thing I had to a friend. She mothered me where my own mother did not, and knew well enough I could not bear confinement.
I nodded decisively. “Good. Then we are going walking.”
It had rained in the early hours of the morning after my father’s spell had lapsed. The distinctive petrichor of wet stone and earth and the damp slap of my slippers against pavement eased my restless heart. I was free—for the moment. In the wake of the storm, the clouds tore across the sky. Intermittently, the sun shot through the clouds, illuminating bushes like something out of a medieval manuscript or an Elementalist’s debut.
Ginny and I walked sedately around our neighborhood, and then less sedately in Kensington Gardens, where I could not keep my unruly legs in line. When we reached an empty pathway, I ran, kicking my legs against my skirts and wishing it were not so unseemly for a woman to wear trousers.
When I returned to Ginny, retying the loosened ribbons on my silk bonnet, she shook ginger curls at me, but a smile split her freckled cheeks, so I knew she was not truly upset. Our walk brought us past Rotten Row and toward a wide grassy area where a crowd gathered: businessmen and lawyers on their way into the City, nurses with their young charges, costermongers, dockworkers, and others. I suspected the gentlemen with tailored coats, shining top hats, and gold watch fobs dangling somewhat askew from their waistcoats were Luminate on their way home from a night carousing, though one could never be sure without the telltale soul sign. Behind them, I could see the beautiful and costly ironworks of Cumberland Gate, in Hyde Park.
We had arrived at Speakers’ Corner.
Mama did not approve of Speakers’ Corner. Nor, for that matter, did Ginny, who began to tug at my arm and cluck with distress. Here, anyone with a will and a hearty set of lungs might speak his mind to the world. I wasn’t sure which Mama disapproved of more: the thoughts that were expressed or the company that collected to hear them.
“Don’t be so goosish,” I told her, edging closer. “Where is your sense of adventure?”
“Adventure,” Ginny said tartly, “is often more trouble than it’s worth. As you ought to know!”
I grinned at her, unrepentant. She shook her head, but I did not miss the smile trembling at the corners of her mouth.
Someone was speaking, his red hair raised above the crowd. As I drew nearer, I realized the man was not extraordinarily tall. He stood on a packing crate.
“For too long the Luminate have fattened themselves upon the labor of the working class. It is our work, our sweat, and our blood that make their lives possible.” The words sounded unnaturally loud in my ears, as if the man stood next to me; he spoke through some kind of mechanism, a small cone made of metal that amplified his voice. Beside him, a strange-shaped lump lay concealed under canvas.
I stood transfixed by his voice, a faint burr betraying his Scottish origins.
“When was the last time you saw a lord labor anywhere but in the bedroom?”
Loud, raucous laughter burst from the spectators. “Miss Anna,” Ginny hissed, her cheeks red. “This is most inappropriate.”
My own face was warm, but I did not move. Not yet.
“The Luminate use their money to buy land we cannot afford and magic we cannot practice. Their Circle uses magic to keep us cowed, to br
eak our thoughts of rebellion.” The man swept his gaze across the crowd. “Sixty-five years ago, the Circle quashed a rebellion in France for the Bourbons, then lost the kingdom to the Corsican Tyrant for nearly a decade. And Napoleon won solely because his wealth enabled him to corrupt Luminate spell-casters. On the power of their spells, he styled himself emperor. We stand now on the cusp of our own revolution—but if we hope to win, we must recognize this one truth.”
What revolution? What truth? My pulse quickened, but I could not be sure if it was fear or the faint electric hum that filled my body. The crowd stirred, muttering agreement. The pair of young Luminate lords discreetly turned and stole away. I should do the same. Indeed, only Ginny’s reluctance to cause a scene prevented her from dragging me away. Her fingers tightened on my arm. “Miss Anna!”
I turned back to the speaker.
“We live in a world where Luminate are the only ones with magic. But it was not always so: once, anyone born with a gift wielded magic. Then the Luminate seized control of magic, trapping it with their Binding spell. They have worked hard to erase any memory of a time when magic belonged to everyone, replacing the truth with their fantasy—that Luminate are born to magic, that this birthright qualifies them to rule.”
Something cold and heavy settled in my stomach. I had never heard of a time when anyone other than Luminates had magic, and my own father was a historian. Surely this man was mistaken.
“But Luminate are no more born to magic than you are. It is not bloodlines that determine magical ability, but the Circle. They decide who has access to magic and who does not. They decide what order of magical spells you belong to—and how much magic you are allotted for your spells. And the deciding factor is not whether you have aptitude for magic. The Circle does not care if you have a gift for magic not seen in a generation. They only care that you belong to an old, decaying line, and that you can afford their Confirmation spell. It helps if you spend sufficient time kissing the Circle’s desiccated arses.”
