by Callie Bates
So, with a sigh, I fix the mask on my face and go out. A faint tremble runs through the floorboards. I shorten my stride instinctively, but keep walking. The tremor is only nearby Mount Angelos, talking to itself. It hasn’t erupted in centuries, and it’s hard to believe the stories that it once leveled all of Ida and smothered people in cloying ash so thick even sorcerers couldn’t save them all.
A servant shakes his head as I pass out the front door. “The gods aren’t happy.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Who can blame them?”
Outside, the nighttime streets of Ida are aglow. I’m too restless to trouble with a coach. Though it’s going on eleven, the aristocratic quarter of Vileia is a riot of carriages and sedan chairs and pedestrians like me, all going to or from the opera or dinner parties or lovers’ assignations, all laughing and gossiping and shouting cheerful insults. The vibrancy of it electrifies me. It’s not like the cold, staid cities in Eren and Caeris, which are asleep by this hour, or even Aexione, which sets its clock to the emperor’s routine. There is nowhere else quite like Ida.
Aunt Cyra, who remained in Aexione, wanted me to bring a chaperone—“one of the footmen, at least, so no one leaves you to die in a ditch if Augustus Saranon’s people find you.”
I pointed out that I would be in disguise: a mask that leaves only my mouth and chin exposed, along with the slits for my eyes.
She was unimpressed. “A gray-eyed raven? No one will ever guess. Even Augustus isn’t that dense…No wonder you’re wearing that black suit like Brother Death.”
“And here I thought I looked rather dashing.”
“Of course you do, darling, but you hardly need me to tell you that, do you?”
But maybe she was right about the footman. The anonymity of the crowd comforts me on the one hand—and makes me uneasy on the other. If I wear a mask to Bardas’s party, who’s to say Augustus and his cohorts won’t, too? I tell myself I’m granting Augustus and Phaedra too much power—and prescience.
I move downhill to the cul-de-sac where the Deos Deorum towers over the sluggish black Channel, its walls palatial. The emperor couldn’t have given his wife’s cousin a larger house if he tried. I pass through the open gallery, following a party of young girls in low-cut gowns and flimsy masks—where are their chaperones?—into a cavernous courtyard. In its midst, a fountain spews not water, but champagne. People cluster around it, laughing as they fill glasses.
Jahan, Madiya whispers.
Be quiet, I think.
I push inside to a grand atrium. It’s brightly lit by a massive chandelier hanging from the vaulted glass ceiling, so high it’s difficult to imagine how the servants light the myriad candles. The colonnades are lost to shadow; stairs wind up to a second-floor ballroom. Partygoers cluster along the mezzanine, looking down over us on the floor.
I glance at the people around me, all busily filling space. For the first time in days, no one recognizes me. No one flinches away or whispers behind their hands. I’m simply another Idaean in the crowd.
A tightness unravels in my shoulders. This is the Paladis where I belong—not at Aexione, with its endless rules and intrigues, but in the unruly, vibrant city. This is the world I called home, before duty and Leontius dragged me back to the court. I claim a flute of effervescent wine from a tray and make for the stairs. Bardas is bound to be here somewhere, at least. Perhaps I can find Pantoleon before Argyros’s speech begins.
And maybe someone will carry rumors about Ida’s sorcerers. Or about a black-haired eighteen-year-old boy with a sullen mouth who’s run away from military school. I may have lost my opportunity to save Lathiel, but I can at least try to find Rayka.
The ballroom is hot and packed. Not everyone wears a mask. I come in behind two men talking in hushed tones about Eren and the steward of the land.
“It’s what we need,” one is murmuring, just loud enough that I can hear. “Sorcery. To change things.”
I startle. It’s still strange to hear them speaking of sorcery aloud. Something really has changed in the six months I was gone.
“Have you met a sorcerer?” His companion lowers his voice. “What’s to stop them being just another kind of tyrant?”
They both glance back at me, as if sensing my attention. Clearly I’m too eager for these rumors to eavesdrop successfully. I slip away from them, making a tour of the ballroom’s perimeter, and decline offers to dance from three ladies and one gentleman. So far—unsurprisingly—this doesn’t seem like the den of infamy the court makes it out to be, though perhaps other rooms hide the courtesans and the drugs and the shady deals. The doors stand open to a balcony overlooking the Channel, carrying a cool breeze and the faint scent of marsh. When I step out, I find some couples trysting among the potted plants, and a cluster of fellows talking politics.
“…the right of the people to determine our laws,” one of the political fellows is saying. “Not to be bound by arcane conventions. Not to make alterations only at the emperor’s whim! What gives Alakaseus Saranon the right to determine our laws, anyway? Does he have a university degree? No!”
They all laugh. I sip my drink and drift closer, unable to suppress a smile. I know that voice.
“When you write your next essay, make sure to mention it,” one of the others says. “Maybe he’ll pen a response.”
“What could his defense possibly be?” the first speaker says. “That it’s the will of the gods that he rules, so a knowledge of law is unnecessary?”
“I’d leave him be on law if he had better sense on foreign policy,” another fellow says. “Starting a war against Eren? No one’s ever heard of the place.”
“They send us timber,” someone else points out. “And lead.”
“But have they ever exported any ideas?”
More laughter.
“It’s the magic,” Pantoleon says with contempt. “The emperor wants the world to know he can squash even the grandest displays of sorcery.”
Someone else pipes up, “I heard Jahan Korakides is back, and he’s come to make peace!”
One of the others snorts. “Korakides is representing the Ereni queen now. His loyalties shift faster than the tide. He doesn’t seem to believe in anything but himself. It’s not as if the powers that be will listen to him. I wouldn’t trust him to do anything but make trouble.”
I wait for Pantoleon to defend me. He doesn’t. Instead his shoulders rise in a shrug.
I take a step back; two, three. None of them have noticed me.
I should be inured to such criticism. But instead anger pulses, hot, into my head. I want to stride forward and defend myself—but of course I can’t do that.
I do believe in something more than myself. I do. Pantoleon knows it. After I started at the university, I dragged Finn down from court to attend lectures with me; he was my only friend in all Paladis at first. Then we met Pantoleon in Argyros’s lecture hall, and the three of us decided we were going to start our own revolution. We were going to tell the truth about sorcery and change the face of Ida. We penned pamphlets, cut our hair, loosened our cravats, pushed up our sleeves.
But then we turned nineteen. I might have gotten out of my military duty with Aunt Cyra’s help, but Finn’s father refused to let his son evade service—and I refused to let Finn endure the military alone. So we left Pantoleon. We trained. We went to Chozat. And then the Getai swarmed out of the woods, materializing seemingly from nowhere, and I used my illicit magic to save Leontius’s life. I had to whisper so much persuasion to make everyone look the other way. I learned how to lie better, then, than I ever had in my life—even to Leontius, who so desperately wanted a friend.
When we came back, it wasn’t to Ida but to Aexione and the court. I worked persuasion on everyone, from the emperor to the stableboys, to make them look the other way about the Getai. I saw Pantoleon only a handful of times. It was as if I had e
rased the boy I had been. I went to Eren and Caeris to find him again—to find myself again—but it killed Finn, and it might very well kill Elanna, too, if the world has its way, and all the Caerisians and Ereni I struggled alongside.
And now I’m back here, trying to assume the role that doesn’t fit me anymore, struggling to button myself back into this shrunken, false version of me, and I can’t breathe.
I’m back in the mansion; I’ve stumbled into a room adjacent to the ballroom. I take a fresh glass of wine and drink it down as a bell begins to sound. As one, the people in the room start shuffling toward the door, and I let myself get swept up in the crowd. “What is this?” I ask a woman beside me.
She looks at me as if I’m a complete fool. “The midnight oration.”
Of course. And Argyros is speaking.
In the atrium, we find a crowd already gathered on the mezzanine. The third floor is brightly lit, and Bardas stands at the railing up there, scanning the crowd with a smile.
“…sorcery,” someone whispers near my elbow. It’s one of the girls I followed into the party, flushed behind her flimsy mask.
I’ve been pushed toward the stairs, my view of Bardas partially blocked. I clamber onto the bottom step to get a better view, and startle. I’m standing three steps below a familiar figure with thick, curly black hair and night-dark skin. The university scholars are lined up on the steps, waiting eagerly for Argyros’s speech to begin.
I push up to the step below Pantoleon.
“Hey, stop crowding m—” He sees my mask and stops dead. Then he begins to smile.
I put a finger to my lips. I don’t need his friends sneering at me.
He punches me in the arm, grinning broadly now. “You idiot,” he whispers. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“When did I have the chance? Was I supposed to write you a letter?”
He laughs. “You’ve missed these midnight orations. They’re the latest thing. Instead of shouting to be heard in the city square, our speeches are being hosted by Bardas Triciphes. At midnight, every Enydia.”
“Isn’t the emperor annoyed?”
Again, he laughs. “That’s probably why Bardas is doing it.” Quietly: “You should see the funds he’s donating to us, Jahan. He’s sponsored the printing of thousands of posters and pamphlets, and distributed them around the city, and—”
“Shh!” the other scholars hiss.
On the third floor, Bardas has lifted his hands. “Greetings and salutations, citizens of Ida and the world! Welcome, welcome!” He seems to smile right at me. I smile back. It’s easier to see him now without blood gushing from my nose: His smile is boisterous and welcoming. “You may have heard of tonight’s orator—Lucius Argyros. But in case you’ve been living, I don’t know, in the cisterns—”
The crowd obediently laughs.
Bardas grins. “For decades he’s tirelessly given speeches and written treatises pointing to the iniquities of Idaean society, the absurdities of Aexione, the injustices that continue unchecked, the tyranny of rule by a few over many. He has been imprisoned. Exiled. But tonight, he is venerated. Welcome, Lucius Argyros!”
The man who steps up to the railing is shorter than Bardas, his hair tidy in an old-fashioned queue, his clothes impeccable. He adjusts the spectacles on the end of his nose. He looks far less like a rabble-rousing radical than a lawyer about to deliver an address. And he is a lawyer: a professor of law at the university, where Finn, Pantoleon, and I used to sit through his lectures in utter silence, absorbing his every word. Even now I feel the magnetism of his presence: the way he gazes down from the railing and seems to acknowledge each person in the audience.
I draw in a breath. Absurdly, I feel the same trepidation I used to feel in the lecture hall when I feared he might call on me and my answers would be inadequate. Pantoleon thumps my shoulder. My friend’s face is turned up with a kind of triumph.
“Citizens,” Argyros says. His voice, as always, is somewhat quiet, so the entire atrium seems to be leaning forward, taut with anticipation. “Tonight I want to talk about magic.”
I actually startle. My whole body buckles, ready to bolt. Pantoleon grabs my elbow and keeps me there, locked in beside him.
Argyros’s voice carries through the atrium. “You’ve all heard about the extraordinary events in Eren these last months. Whether or not the stories are true—though I have reason to believe they are—is immaterial. Indeed, these stories serve to remind us of what truly matters.” He scans the crowd, gathering us all into his pause. “They remind us that sorcery was once the provenance of all Idaeans.”
A murmur rustles through the crowd.
It’s not the revelation that shocks me. I’ve known this fact too long. No, I’m shocked that Lucius Argyros is making these statements in a public place. In the Deos Deorum, which the emperor has given to Bardas Triciphes. The witch hunters have eyes everywhere. Bardas must know that; Argyros certainly does. He might print these claims on a piece of paper, but to stand there and proclaim it to the world? How do they know they won’t be seized and arrested?
“It’s true,” Argyros is saying. “You may have forgotten, but the historical annals have not. Magic was the birthright of your ancestors. And what have our emperors, the successors of Paladius the First, done? They have taken away our rights. Just the way they took away our rights to elect the members of our senate and district representatives, our right to vote and our right to full citizenship and all its benefits. They took away our right to practice sorcery just as they took away our government, just as they claimed our gods and our language for their own. And what were the Paladisan emperors three centuries ago, when Ida was a shining beacon of civilization? They were shepherds! Goatherds! Edonis was so poor these men didn’t even own cattle. So they had to come steal someone else’s—and thus became thieves. And conquerors. They conquered us. They claimed Ida as their own, but it’s not. And it never has been.”
I should not be so rapt, I tell myself. I know this story as well as anyone else. Yet I can’t help but listen. I can’t stop myself from nodding, because Argyros is expressing a truth no one else dares to.
And I can’t deny the longing that seizes me.
“You may ask where sorcery enters the picture,” he’s saying. “Let me explain. In those days, three centuries past, sorcerers were common the world over. Some were itinerant; some earned their keep working for kings and queens. Ida was renowned for its theurges, as they termed themselves—men who not only practiced sorcery but also studied the workings of it. They were philosophers as much as magicians, and their school, the Academy, rivaled the University of Ida for attendance. For greatness.
“Were there sorcerers in Edonis? Perhaps, but they were the magicians of goatherds. What did they know of the great magics being worked in Ida? Little enough. But Paladius knew. Paladius’s ambition was large enough to consume the world, and he believed that any similarly ambitious sorcerer would want a position at his court. He invited all the greatest theurges to join him and assist him in conquering Ida. And after that, the world.”
I glance at Pantoleon. This is the history I know. It’s the history the two of us pieced together over long months in the archives, dust in our noses, our spines aching from being bent over books.
“But sorcerers are cantankerous. None of them wanted to ally with Paladius, this vainglorious man from a brutal and unknown country. And what did Paladius do, when word of their refusal reached him?” He looks down into the crowd. “If no sorcerers would join him, he decided that he didn’t need them. He would take Ida without their help, in defiance of their power. And he did.”
“No!” someone in the crowd shouts.
Argyros smiles, rather sadly. “Paladius the First was a great tactician—not only of wars, but of minds. He besieged Ida for three years, and in the end he claimed her. He defeated the greatest mag
icians of the age—Theofanes, Diotima, the inimitable Mantius—not by sorcery, but by murder. After he won, many lesser sorcerers fled, taking refuge in places that should have been safe. Like the Britemnos Isles.”
I freeze.
“But Paladius had a long reach, and even the safe havens fell to him eventually. Some fell through treachery, like Britemnos, where the people were betrayed by the great sorcerer Mantius’s own son, Kyros.”
He pauses for effect, and I look at Pantoleon. My friend stands unmoving, enraptured. It can’t be coincidence that Argyros used the example of Kyros. That he’s exposing my shame. But Pantoleon refuses to acknowledge my stare.
Argyros has continued; I missed some of what he said. “…some sorcerers remained in Ida. These allied against Paladius in secret and plotted to overthrow him. If he were a lesser man, they might have succeeded. They tried to send him mad, but even in his incipient madness, Paladius knew what was going on. He rooted out the sorcerers and killed them. He hung them from scaffolds. He burned them. He drowned them. And then, in punishment for what they did, he set out to systematically eliminate the practice of magic throughout the world. He began the witch hunts, which grew to their heights under his successor, Paladius the Second.”
My jaw is tight. Yes, this is the story we uncovered, Pantoleon and I. The truth we so painstakingly put together.
It’s obvious he must have told Argyros—and not just an abbreviated version, but all of it.
“The emperors created the witch hunters,” Argyros is saying, “but the witch hunters could not erase all magic. They couldn’t remove it from the frozen tundra of the Ismae, or from the Occident. They couldn’t destroy it in the small nations south of Waset, or in Sindh or Tianxia. They tried to spread their reach that far—and they claim that those countries do not practice sorcery. But they do. And now magic is coming back to the lands that belong to the empire of Paladis.” He seems to look directly at me. “The witch hunters are dwindling—they are less than a fifth of what they once were—and magic is surging back to life.”