Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  “Ask him if he’ll be taking classes at the Academy here.”

  At this, Ferogin rolled his eyes, his reply heavy with boredom. “Yes, but he intends to test through the introductory courses, since the education he’s already received likely covers those topics in better detail.” Jeffrei’s clipped delivery now bespoke an active dislike. “A gold ounce says that the next thing he asks you is where you went to school.”

  This indeed was the next question. “Tell him ...”

  “I’ll tell him you spent five good years learning what you needed to know and that you look forward to attending the Academy.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “He’s a jackass.”

  “You noticed?”

  Jeffrei grinned at him, then answered Ferogin’s question. Ferogin nodded, then spoke directly to Jeffrei. Jeffrei retorted, Ferogin snapped something, and Jeffrei started to say something else—but the older sorcerers broke off their conversation and Contare spoke one sharp word. Jeffrei looked down, and Graegor had the impression of a telepathic apology. Contare spoke again, and Jeffrei stiffly bowed his head to Ferogin with a few words. Ferogin repeated the gesture, but only one of the words.

  From that point, Contare and Lord Pascin remained part of the general talk. Jeffrei contributed nothing except quiet translations for Graegor. Ferogin never said anything directly to Graegor or Jeffrei, nor indeed even looked at them more than once or twice, but it was clear what he thought of the new Telgard sorcerer. Graegor told himself that it didn’t matter what Ferogin thought, but he got to his feet a little too quickly when the five-course meal was finally over. Ferogin said his goodbyes civilly enough, but his eyebrow went up again in a condescendingly amused smile when Graegor spoke Telgardian. Graegor wanted to hit him with a rock.

  “What did he say to you?” Graegor asked Jeffrei once they were outside. The sun had set during dinner, and the cool and dark of night felt good. The pale pink orb of the full moon was starting to climb the eastern sky.

  “Apparently he knows the Telgardian word for ‘jackass’. He said he wasn’t the one who brayed like a donkey because he didn’t know a civilized tongue. Which is hilarious because Mazespaak derives more from Telgardian than from anything else.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “I told him that he shouldn’t speak that way to Telgardia’s Lord Sorcerer. He said I shouldn’t speak that way to him. Lord Contare stopped me before I actually called him a pig.”

  “Jeffrei,” Contare said, and Jeffrei shut his mouth. But Jeffrei’s anger somehow lessened Graegor’s own, and he told himself again that it didn’t matter what the Adelard sorcerer thought of him. It was more pleasant, and more worrisome, to keep wondering about what the Thendal sorceress thought of him.

  The city at last seemed to have slowed down. Fewer people shared the streets with them, and when they reached the Central Quarter, the market stalls and shops had closed up—though the theaters and taverns were well-lit. They dismounted at the Ring of Flags, which looked and sounded ghostly in the dark. “I still have a few items to tend to at the office,” Contare said. “Jeff, is your work finished?”

  “Almost, my lord. I need to finish my stack of the permits so that they can be delivered to Lady Josselin’s office tomorrow.”

  “When do they need them?”

  Jeffrei said solemnly, “My lord, Maga Rose said she is tired of waiting for them, and that my deadline is the ninth bell tomorrow morning, or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “She left that to my imagination, my lord.”

  Contare made a sweep with his arm. “Then by all means, let us hasten. Karl, if you would see to the horses?”

  Lord Henrey and the two assistants were still there when they reached the office, along with a tall Khenroxan maga, grey-haired and dressed in brown, whom Contare greeted affectionately and introduced to Graegor as Lady Fainhe, Sorceress Josselin’s First Minister. She had a question to which Jeffrei had the answer somewhere, and he started flipping through stacks of paper. The two assistants were ferrying ledgers back and forth from a cabinet in the workroom to Lord Henrey’s office, and with everyone around him so industrious, Graegor felt out of place. He remembered his mother suggesting he try bookkeeping, and nearly laughed out loud.

  He went to the doorway of Contare’s office. Contare was already in the middle of a very thick scroll, but he looked up without hesitation. “Come in.”

  “Can I help with anything, sir?”

  “Not yet. Soon, though. First we need to help you learn the local language.”

  “I’d like that, sir.” He could hear Jeffrei speaking Khenroxan with Lady Fainhe. “How many languages does Jeffrei speak?”

  “Fluently? Four—Telgardian, Mazespaak, Khenroxan, and Common Aedseli. He wants to tackle Kroldonnai again, but I don’t think he’ll have room in his class schedule for a while.”

  “The Academy teaches languages?”

  “The Academy started out teaching languages, actually. The courses in magic and everything else came later.”

  Contare found him a primer on basic Mazespaak, and Graegor alternated between studying its pages and thinking about the Thendal sorceress until Jeffrei looked in. “All finished, my lord.”

  “Ah, very good.” Contare turned to Graegor. “I thought you might like to get to know some of the Academy students, so I’ve asked Jeffrei to take you to meet his friends. Unless you’ve already had enough for one day?”

  Graegor closed the book and stood up. “Not yet.”

  Contare smiled and returned to the letter he was writing. “Don’t be out too late.”

  Graegor followed Jeffrei out of the Hall to the courtyard, lit by the moon and by the precisely spaced lampposts. “Just watch,” Jeffrei said. “The first thing Rose will ask me when we walk in is whether or not I finished the permits.”

  “Rose?”

  “Lady Josselin’s clerk. She’s actually very nice. It’s just me she yells at sometimes.”

  “She’s a student at the Academy, too?”

  “Jeh. Top tier.”

  Graegor didn’t answer. He couldn’t really explain. Jeffrei was probably the sort of boy who had never been uncomfortable around girls. But Graegor usually was. And after the Thendal sorceress ... after bonding so suddenly with her ... he didn’t even want to meet other girls.

  But considering Contare’s reaction to what had happened, it was obvious that older sorcerer did want him to meet other girls. In fact, that was probably why this outing had been arranged.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeffrei was saying. “My friends really want to meet you, of course—they’ve heard a lot about you. But they’re not toadies like those Adelards.”

  “But what about—” He broke off. If Jeffrei had managed all day to avoid mentioning the Eternal Flame turning purple, then his friends would probably avoid it too, and therefore it made no sense for Graegor to bring it up himself.

  Jeffrei suddenly stopped, his head cocked toward the open door of a tavern. Graegor could hear many people singing, and Jeffrei joined in for a few lines before continuing along the street. “Sorry,” he grinned. “I like that song.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t even remember its name. Doesn’t matter. Khenroxan music, Khenroxan girls, Khenroxan whiskey—love them all. Ever tried Khenroxan whiskey?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ll change that. Not tonight, since Lord Contare probably wants you conscious tomorrow, but soon.”

  The tavern to which Jeffrei brought him was in a row of other two-story clapboard buildings with only a different shade of paint to show where one ended and the next began. The door they went through was under a sign that showed a picture of a teapot wrapped in a quilted cozy and “Cozy Inn” written in Telgardian beneath it. The ceiling was low, the lamps bright after the outer darkness. Near the bar, a group of young men and women hailed Jeffrei, and he called to them and put up two fingers to signal his order to the tavern kee
per. “Everyone,” he told the dozen eager faces, “this is Lord Contare’s successor, Lord Graegor Torchanes. Lord Contare asked me to introduce him to all of you.”

  “My lord.” The girls curtseyed, the boys bowed, and Graegor felt vibrations against his mind. They all had magic, of course, in all different shades of color.

  “Graegor hasn’t had a chance to learn Mazespaak yet, but I think we all speak Telgardian, don’t we?—Graegor, you probably won’t remember all these names, but, ladies first ...” He gestured forward a tall girl at the front of the group. “This is Maga Rose Baker. She’s also starting her third year at the Academy, and she’s my opposite number in Lady Josselin’s office.”

  “Welcome, my lord,” Rose said with a smile and a curtsey, her Telgardian musically accented with Khenroxan. She had dark brown hair set behind a green scarf wrapped over her forehead, with lovely brown eyes and the fair skin for which her people were known. Her form was slim in her pale green and white dress. “It is an honor to meet you.”

  “The honor is mine, Maga.”

  Jeffrei introduced three more girls, with soft smiles and voices, then the half-dozen boys. There were about ten other patrons of the tavern sitting at various tables, and they watched the whole thing curiously, but apparently they didn’t speak Telgardian and didn’t put together who Graegor must be, for none of them seemed too interested. Jeffrei’s friends pushed together two tables at the back of the tavern, near the cue-ball table that stood empty. Everyone had their beer steins or wine glasses refilled and sat down, and Jeffrei set a red-enameled stein in front of Graegor. “This one belongs to the house,” he said. “You should get one for your own and keep it here like we do.”

  Graegor took what he hoped looked like a hearty quaff from his stein. He was getting good at not wincing—or reacting at all—to beer’s hoppy taste, which to him still felt like a mouthful of soap. Sooner or later he was going to have to admit to people that he didn’t like his homeland’s most famous export. But not today.

  “Will you be attending the Academy with us, m’lord?” a magus named Patrick asked Graegor. He looked Khenroxan, tall and lanky with shaggy brown hair, and he was drinking from a bright green stein.

  “I think so,” Graegor hedged. “Lord Contare said I might.”

  “Lady Fainhe told me that Lady Josselin means to have her successor take classes with us as well,” Rose said.

  “So does Lord Pascin,” Jeffrei said. “Oh, speaking of which, we met the new Adelard sorcerer today.”

  “What’s he like?” several people asked.

  “He is a total, total ...” Jeffrei looked at Rose, who was waiting patiently for him to finish his sentence. “... well, no word has been invented to describe how totally whatever-it-is he is, but he is one. A total, total one.”

  Gossip about other Academy students took over the conversation, and Graegor listened, sipping his beer. After a number of such sips he went off to find the privy, and returned to find that Patrick and Jeffrei, along with another Telgard magus, had racked up the balls on the cue-ball table. They invited him to play, and he said that he didn’t know how. Jeffrei said they would teach him, but Patrick snickered evilly and rubbed his hands together. “Shall we play for silver quarters?”

  “Coppers and nickels, Patrick,” Jeffrei told him, “and he gets a couple of practice games.” He fished a small pouch out of his shirt pocket and tossed it to Graegor. “Lord Contare asked me to give that to you—though I told him you wouldn’t have any trouble finding people to buy you beer.”

  The pouch contained a handful of nickel coins, and Graegor resisted the impulse to count them. He’d spent so much time over the past year being so careful and worried about his money that it seemed very strange, and almost wrong, to just accept it and attach it to his belt. But he did, and looked up to see Patrick chalking the end of his cue stick. “You might as well just give it all to me now,” Patrick said with a wide grin.

  “Ignore him,” Jeffrei said. “Here’s how to play. There are ten red balls, and ten white, and two pockets. If you’re red, you try to sink the red balls by caroming them off white balls. You get points for each shot. The maximum points you can get is ninety-three—that’s where the name of the game comes from: cue-ball ninety-three.”

  “All right.”

  “Did you ever see this played back home?”

  “It was different—the table was square, and there were four pockets and two black balls, and I don’t think it was scored.”

  “That’s the Khenroxan version,” Patrick said. “That’s how I first learned.”

  “I only watched, I never played.”

  “Nothing to it,” Patrick declared, rolling a red ball from the center rackpoint and positioning it in front of one of the pockets. “The only extra rule with us is that you’re honor-bound not to use telekinesis to move the balls.”

  They played two practice games, during which Graegor proved that he had neither innate skill nor innate luck, as he sank a grand total of three balls. Patrick was very good, and when they started playing for money, he took Graegor as his teammate. Some of the other magi came over to watch, and after several games Graegor gratefully relinquished his cue stick to someone else and went up to the bar to refill his stein, which he had somehow emptied. Rose was there, having her wine glass refilled, and she smiled at him. “Is Patrick showing off again?”

  “He’s really good.”

  “If he wasn’t a magus, he could play professionally.”

  “There’s professional cue-ball?” But then he interrupted himself with: “Magi can’t play professionally?”

  “It’s against the rules.”

  “For cue-ball, or for everything?”

  “Everything—cue-ball, weightlifting, chariot racing, all of it.”

  “The ordinaries think we’d be too tempted to cheat,” Patrick himself said as he joined them with his own empty stein. The tavern keeper returned with Rose’s glass and hurried away with the two steins.

  “Ordinaries?”

  “People without magic. The games are far too important to them to take the risk.”

  “Do you like going to the games?” Graegor asked them both.

  Patrick grinned, which took up his entire face, but Rose was shaking her head. “Not when it’s as hot as it was today.”

  The tavern keeper handed Graegor and Patrick their steins, and Graegor gave him enough coins to cover all three drinks. They thanked him, and Rose gestured toward the tables that the others had vacated. They sat opposite Graegor, and he asked them, “Do you both work in Lady Josselin’s office?”

  “I can’t,” Patrick grinned again. “I’m a boy.”

  “Lady Josselin only employs women,” Rose explained.

  “That hardly seems fair.”

  “Exactly,” Rose raised her glass as if to congratulate him. “Lady Josselin does everything she can to encourage unfairness in favor of women, since there’s so much of it in favor of men.”

  “She doesn’t have anything against men, you understand,” Patrick said to Graegor. “She thinks we make great pets.”

  “Patrick!” Rose giggled in horror. “You can’t talk about her like that.”

  “She didn’t hear me.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Rose warned. Then she looked at Graegor. “Actually, you might know. Has Lord Contare mentioned if Lady Josselin is on her way back yet? She’s been gone almost three months.”

  “He said it would be another month or more yet,” Graegor repeated what Contare had said to him one morning at the beach house. “She didn’t even reach the capital with her successor until after Solstice.”

  Rose asked, “Is it a boy or a girl?—Listen to me, I sound like I’m talking about a baby.”

  “Girl,” Graegor reported, and felt a tingle of anticipation at the idea that he was talking about another one like himself, a member of his Circle—someone who, for better or worse, would be a central part of his life.

  Patrick and Rose seemed
to feel that anticipation too, because of course this new sorceress was the Khenroxan sorceress, their sorceress, to whom they would swear allegiance. They all sat silently for a moment, drinking and thinking, until Patrick chortled. “Let’s hope the new one has a milder disposition than the old.”

  “Hear, hear,” Rose agreed, and raised her glass, and Patrick and Graegor clinked it with their steins.

  “Lady Josselin sounds ...” Graegor stopped, not sure exactly how to characterize the blazing personality he knew in song and story, and not wanting to show any disrespect to the actual person.

  “Difficult?” Patrick suggested.

  “She can be hard to work for since she’s such a perfectionist,” Rose explained. “But I’m a perfectionist too, so I do well with her.”

  “Is Jeffrei a perfectionist?” Insights into his new friend would be valuable, especially from people who’d known him for years.

  Patrick burst out laughing, and Rose drawled, “No.” She sipped her wine and looked toward the group around the cue-ball table. There was something in her eyes, something about Jeffrei, that made Graegor wonder. He glanced at Patrick, who nodded, hooked his index fingers together for a moment, then pulled them apart—which Graegor took to mean that Rose and Jeffrei had been a couple once, but weren’t now.

  “Jeffrei said Lord Contare chose him partly because he’s not afraid of sorcerers,” Graegor said.

  Rose nodded without looking back from Jeffrei. “Yes, it was one of Lady Josselin’s reasons for choosing me too.”

  “Are you afraid of sorcerers?” Graegor asked Patrick.

  “Abjectly.”

  “So why aren’t Rose and Jeffrei?”

  Now Rose turned back to her wine with a casual shrug. “Jeff and I know our worth, that’s all. We’re among the most talented magi at the Academy.”

  “And the humblest,” Patrick added.

  “And the smartest,” Graegor grinned.

  “And the best looking ...”

  “Stop it,” Rose muttered, sipping her wine, red-cheeked but smiling. Graegor could easily see why Jeffrei liked her, why Patrick teased her. She was pretty and had a sharp mind, but she wasn’t at all like the girls he’d met at court. He didn’t feel that same edge of panic, of sinking in over his head, at her every word and motion. Why? Was it because Patrick was here too, and they were sitting and drinking instead of standing and sipping? Was it because she was a maga? Or was it the silver threads that bound him to another girl—a girl so wondrous that talking to other girls now was as simple as talking to boys?