~~~
There was a lot of hugging going on. Felicia, it turned out, was a hugger, so it was probably a good thing that Xanthe was going on the coach with her since the yellow looked ready to slug Felicia if she tried it.
‘Now, I will be back on Indigoday, darlings,’ Felicia said as she finally released her rib-crushing hold on Krystal. ‘I’ll stop in at the hall to check up on things and tell you any news.’
‘Great. And you’ve got my letter for Sister Norretta Greyscale?’ Krystal asked.
‘Safe and sound.’
‘She’ll be officiating at the ceremony and she often speaks to any family of new novices who attend, so delivering it shouldn’t be a problem.’
Felicia smiled. ‘Darling, after all you’ve done for me these past months, it would never be a problem.’
‘Thanks.’ Krystal looked around at Jesse and Xanthe. ‘And you two have a good midwinter.’
‘We will,’ the two girls chorused.
‘You’ll check on my plants,’ Jesse added.
‘We’ll be checking all the plants,’ Charlotte said, grinning.
‘They won’t need much for the next month, but make sure they don’t dry out entirely.’
‘You already explained that. Twice.’
Jesse gave a timid grin. ‘I know, but…’
‘Yes,’ Krystal said, ‘we know. They’re your babies and you’ll do horrible things to us if we kill any of them. It’s okay. I’m the same with my books.’
‘She is,’ Trudy agreed. ‘Now, get going or it’ll be midnight before you get to Appleyard.’
‘You know,’ Krystal said as they watched the self-propelled carriage drive smoothly out of the school’s yard, ‘that thing has a very modern suspension system and a very good motion spell driving it. They’ll be there faster than the train.’
‘Yes, but it’ll be dark before they get there, and if Jesse had really got into making sure her plants were okay, they would still be waiting to leave at midnight.’
‘Huh, yeah, probably. Okay, so what do we do now? We’re supposed to be resting.’
Trudy grinned. ‘Celestina left a couple of bottles of wine in our room. They were spares from the ball we didn’t go to. She said no one would care much if I spent another couple of nights here since you’ll be in the room anyway. What do you say, Charley? Want to rest in our room for a couple of hours?’
Charlotte grinned. ‘You had me at “bottles of wine.”’
Epilogue: Midwinter Night
Concord City, Concordance, 28th Day of Midwinter, 999.
The midwinter festival ran from the last Royalday of the year to the first Royalday of the next and, historically, its purpose was to cheer everyone up before the weather got really bad. In olden days, when much of the ‘industry’ of Draconia had been agricultural, there was generally little to do through the core of winter. The month of Midwinter was spent battening things down for Snowfall, and Snowfall was spent in front of the fire as much as was possible, so everyone could afford to take a week to rest and eat, and gather up whatever happiness they could to keep them going through the coldest month.
In modern times, things were a little different. Once, even the servants of powerful dragons would get much of the festival free of duty, especially on Midwinter Night, the night when the year changed. Then even the highest-born dragons would find their own food in the kitchen and everyone held themselves to their fires until dawn. As the middle classes had risen in stature, so the old ways had broken down: many indigos, believing that being served by lesser dragons was part of being rich, demanded that their staff remain on duty through the festival, and factories no longer kept to the agricultural calendar. The existence of the Weather Bureau had changed the agricultural calendar anyway.
Perhaps oddly, Greystone district was something of a bastion of the old ways. The slaughterhouses and tanneries found they could close their doors for the week with little going through them, and the grey dragons who lived there prided themselves on the decorations they could afford to put up in and on their homes. As Krystal walked through the streets with Trudy, she saw wreaths of wintergreen with its bright purple berries prominently mounted on most of the doors. Candles burned in the windows or, in the better-off houses, magical lights showed even though it was not yet dark. This year, the Black family would have magical lights in the window for the first time: as a guest in the house, Krystal had deemed it a necessity that she provide such an addition to the decorations and she was quite well-versed in light corpus magic.
‘I was a bit sorry to be leaving Charley on her own,’ Trudy said as they walked down grey streets which were, in truth, cheered little by the seasonal colour.
‘I wouldn’t be,’ Krystal replied. ‘Flis is going to be there tonight and, as far as I could work out, all the way through to next term.’
‘Oh?’
‘Apparently, her father is going the whole hog on the divorce. He’s giving up all he owes to his marriage. The house is in both names, so that’s going up for sale, and Anders Darkmoon means to move to Umbral Crown to work for his son. Since Lidia Goldring is now a nun, she has renounced her worldly possessions too. Before she took the cloth, she arranged to have all her wealth put into a couple of trusts for her children. So, Flis is homeless, but she’s got the money to carry on at the school. Her father isn’t best pleased with her, apparently, but nothing he says will change her mind.’
‘She is stubborn.’
‘She is, and the result of that is that she’s basically moving into the school until she can get herself some sort of apartment to live in permanently. Dean Scintilla Rainshadow was inclined to make the change of arrangements easy, considering that Flis helped save the school and all.’
Trudy giggled. ‘I’d imagine that did predispose the school in general to help where they could. Hey, where was the dean when we were fighting possessed schoolgirls?’
‘Apparently, she developed a severe headache and had to leave the hall about half an hour before Charity and her gang arrived.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Apparently. When she was telling Charlotte and me about it, she did look rather embarrassed. But I’d be embarrassed if something like that happened while I was lying in the dark complaining my head hurt.’
‘Huh, yeah.’ Trudy glanced up and pointed to a sign bolted to the wall of a house. ‘And here we are on Draymaster Street.’
Krystal lifted her head and sniffed as she took in the sign. Here the acrid tang of the tanneries and the ugly, coppery smell of the slaughterhouses was somewhat displaced by another scent which was just a little more pleasing. ‘There’s a brewery around here?’
Trudy grinned at her. ‘Far end of the street. The next street north is Brewmaster Street, but how–’
‘A dray is a wagon often used to carry barrels, and I can smell hops in the air. That’s how I knew.’
‘And there I was going to surprise you by telling you that the ale tonight was locally brewed.’
Krystal returned the grin. ‘If you tell me, I promise to act surprised.’
‘It won’t be the same now,’ Trudy said, pouting. ‘I’ll let someone else tell you and you can act surprised for them.’
Number sixteen Draymaster Street was another grey terraced house, three storeys high with a door painted black, upon which hung a festive wreath, just like on all the other doors on the street. There was a thick white candle burning in the window on the ground floor; the superstition was that the light chased away the shades which walked the streets on Midwinter Night. Krystal knew that it was just a superstition: if some ghost decided to walk into your house, no simple flame was going to keep it out. Then again, few of those ghosts were even capable of interfering with the living world, never mind inclined to do so. Still, the light gave comfort and the street looked brighter for it, and that was what counted.
Trudy let them in through the black door, and they stepped into a hallway with a door to the family room on the right, a do
or to the kitchen at the far end, and stairs to the upper floors on the left. The house was not especially big, but it was plenty big enough for the family who lived there now.
‘Mam, Dad, I’m back!’ Trudy called out and, a second or so later, the kitchen door opened and two dragons emerged from it.
Neither were old, though Krystal figured they both had to be close to four hundred to have the five children they had, or had had. Prudence Black was an attractive woman, blonde like her daughter and with the same sort of grey-blue eyes. She was shorter than her daughter by a good four inches, so Trudy’s height seemed to have come from her father, if very little else had. Maurice Sands was a handsome man, and easily six or seven inches taller than his wife, with sandy-blonde hair cut short and deep-blue eyes. He looked strong: he was wearing what was probably his smartest white shirt for the occasion of having a guest and the sleeves fitted very tightly over his biceps. If Trudy’s brother George had been stronger than Maurice, then George had been a big dragon.
‘Welcome to our home, Krystal Ward, on this eve of Midwinter Night,’ Prudence said, smiling in just the same way that Trudy did when she was really pleased.
‘Thank you, Prudence Black,’ Krystal replied, ‘but my name is Krys where you and your family are concerned.’
‘Then welcome, Krys,’ Maurice said. ‘You’ll call us Prudence and Maurice then. My wife hates it when someone shortens her name and there are no good ways to make mine less of a mouthful. You’ll take a mug of ale with us?’
Krystal grinned, maybe because Trudy was muttering things about breweries beside her. ‘I will, Maurice, but I said I’d light your window and I’d rather I had a clear head for working magic. I’ll get to that before I drink.’
Maurice gave a nod and then lifted his head, raising his voice to call out, ‘Mikey? Come and greet our guest. She’s going to light the window for us.’
Trudy opened the door to the living room as the sound of thunder rolled down the stairs. ‘Come on, you can get yourself ready while Mikey tries to break his neck on the stairs.’
The family room was warm and cosy, if not exactly large or well furnished. There was one armchair with a tall back which, Krystal was sure, was there for Maurice, and there were two mismatched sofas which were more like loveseats. The furniture was arranged around a fairly large fireplace with firerock burning in it. Traditionally, wood was burned on Midwinter Night, but that tradition had given way to practicality: the alchemically produced firerock burned cleaner and did not result in the loss of entire forests to fuel the city’s fires. The window at the front of the room was maybe a yard wide and two high, and Krystal was busy calculating the area she needed to cover when the thundering noise on the stairs resolved itself into a dragon.
Michael Black was young, fourteen years old, but Trudy had said he had come into his dracoform that year and he certainly looked like a young man edging into adulthood. He was a little shorter than Trudy, but he still had some growth in him so there was some chance he would end up taller than Krystal. His body was, similarly, trying to grow up: his arms and legs had muscle on them, but he tended to the gangly overall. His chest was filling out, but hardly as broad as his father’s. He had his father’s sandy-blonde hair which he wore long, down to his shoulders, but his eyes and features came more from his mother and so he looked like Trudy’s brother rather than Maurice’s son. He rushed into the room, came to a sudden stop, and tried his absolute best to look cool and calm about his abrupt entrance.
‘Hello,’ Krystal said, ‘I’m Krys, and you must be Michael. Trudy’s mentioned you a number of times.’
Michael’s cool evaporated no matter how hard he might try to hold onto it. ‘She did? Uh, I’m Mikey. Michael! I’m Michael. You’re going to work some magic, Krys?’
‘Mikey used to love it when I’d do spells,’ Trudy said. ‘Of course, I wasn’t nearly as good as you are and I’m his big sister, so the glamour has worn off.’
Michael did his utmost to regain his calm exterior. ‘It’s kind of interesting. You know? Interesting.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Trudy was smirking and Krystal decided it was time to put the young man out of his misery.
‘I’m going to put a moderately basic light spell on the window frame,’ Krystal said. ‘I learned to do light corpus magic so I could read when the lights were turned out in the orphanage, but I admit I’ve not tried something quite like this before.’ And then she hammed up her performance as though she were on a stage working for paying customers.
Raising her hands, Krystal began to inscribe complex patterns in the air before her. Nonsense syllables spilled from her lips. She took the casting slow and steady, forming the glyphs in her mind and shaping the magic with them, even as she gabbled on. The patterns she made with her fingers were based on the symbols for the spell, but she was betting that Trudy knew they were entirely unnecessary and just for show. With the pattern of the spell in place and the energy drawn into it, Krystal spread her fingers and leaned forward, pretending to push the magic out onto the window. White light shone from the wood of the frame for a second, but then it began to change. Pulses of reds, blues, greens, and all the other colours of the rainbow began to shimmer through the magical light, and they kept changing, slipping smoothly from shade to shade, as Krystal stepped back and smiled at the results of her work.
‘Oh, wow,’ Michael said, his eyes wide. ‘No one else on the street has lights that change like that.’
‘That, son, is because it would cost a small fortune to get a magus to come here and cast the spell,’ Maurice said.
Krystal looked around at him. ‘What a sham! It’s barely more difficult to add in the control needed to do it than to make a simple light.’
‘Says the girl who got top marks in both magical theory and her elective,’ Trudy said.
‘It’s true, and you know it, Trudy Black. Don’t make me get the book out to show you the thaumolytic factors.’
‘No! Anything but the thaumolytic factors tables!’ Trudy clenched her hands before her as though pleading, though her face was trying hard not to grin. ‘Beat me, flog me, but don’t make me look at–’
‘Celestina’s right,’ Krystal interrupted. ‘You do need acting lessons.’
‘You obviously don’t. What was all that gibberish you were spouting?’ Trudy looked around at her parents. ‘I know she can summon up a light in her head.’
‘Well, yes, but that’s boring. Now, ale was mentioned…’
~~~
By six thirty, it was dark outside and the drapes were drawn across the lights in the window. They ate around a table in the kitchen, chatting about random things such as how Trudy’s older siblings were doing and what Michael planned to do when he was of age. Michael stayed fairly silent through most of it, choosing to push as much of the tasty beef joint Prudence had cooked into his mouth as possible while stealing glances at Krystal whenever he got the chance.
With the meal over, dishes were piled in the sink to be washed once the celebration of the new year was done, and everyone retired to the living room with mugs of ale. Later there would be snacks, and Krystal had brought a bottle of wine along to be shared between them at some point. It was important to pace oneself through Midwinter Night, because the tradition was to stay awake all through the dark hours. Even if the superstition about lights in the windows did nothing, it was true that the bridge between Draconia and Necrodracona grew stronger at that time and spirits could pass over safely from the land of the dead, so long as they returned before dawn. Sometimes, those spirits could influence the dreams of the living, so the living did not sleep on Midwinter Night.
That meant a long day and those who could would often prepare themselves with a nap during the afternoon before. Krystal had more or less managed to get a little sleep, though Trudy’s arrival to collect her had turned the nap into something else, but she was fairly confident she would get through the night. In the northern hemisphere, which Concord City was, it was the shortest nigh
t of the year, though the city was not too far from the equator and the difference was only two hours from the opposite extreme in the summer. The sun would be up again at around five thirty, and then it would be deemed safe to go to bed. Until then, there was conversation, ale which was barely alcoholic, and snacks to keep everyone going.
Michael seemed to find Krystal fascinating. With little else she felt was suitable to wear, she had put on a clean uniform, which had turned out to be not an entirely smart move. The skirts were a little short, especially when perched on a loveseat beside Trudy, while Michael had elected to sit on the floor, his bottom on a cushion and his back against the other loveseat. It was that or sitting beside his mother, which was probably a painful option for a teenage boy. Still, Krystal was careful about how she moved.
Trudy had decided to wear the pink dress Felicia had given her, and she found her brother’s fixation terribly amusing as far as Krystal could tell. However, it did not stop her talking up Krystal’s virtues.
‘Oh, I lucked out getting Krys as a roommate,’ Trudy said. ‘I mean, even before the exams proved it, it was pretty obvious that she’s one of the smartest girls in the year, maybe the school. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if she ends up teaching there.’
‘I don’t think,’ Krystal began and then stopped, pursing her lips. ‘Actually, that wouldn’t be a terrible idea, I guess. I’d need to learn to teach. I don’t want to end up like Theodore Marin. I mean, I’m sure I could be worse, but I’d prefer to be better.’
‘You’ve done perfectly well helping me. And Charley and Xan. And Flis and Jesse.’
‘Helping is not the same as teaching. Anyway, it’s a career option. I’m honestly not entirely sure what else I’ll do once I’m finished at the school.’
‘For someone as well-mannered as yourself,’ Prudence said, ‘there’s many an option. Tutoring the children of young dragons out in Eastlook, for example. You’ve got a good education too, so you’d make a fine governess.’
Misfit Magic (Misfits Book 1) Page 23