Heart's Magic

by Gail Dayton

  "Not yet. I figure Friday or Saturday's soon enough, especially if we want 'im keepin' quiet about it. I think Sir William wants to present it as a done deal, and I agree. We don't want word gettin' out ahead o' time."

  "So what are we going to do now?" Elinor propped her hands on her hips, losing patience. It was cold out.

  "I suggest we ask Grey to make a request for a small party of Briganti Enforcers," Jax said, "and go have a cup of tea while we wait for them to arrive."

  Elinor barely had time to finish her cup before she saw Norwood and four other men, three of them in black overcoats, top hats, and striped sashes, pushing their way through Covent Garden. The fourth was dressed in a green school master's gown. She tapped Harry's arm and pointed as she drank the last swallow and he went out to flag them down.

  "Sir? Miss." Norwood acknowledged them with a slight, stiff bow. Then he saw Grey and Amanusa. His eyes widened and he greeted them as well. "We are to force entry into a guild hall?" He sounded dubious.

  Harry opened his mouth and Elinor kicked his shin under the tiny table in the enclosed stall. He wasn't council head yet and this was her guild. She stood. "You read the pertinent portion of the charter?"

  "Yes, miss, I did."

  She supposed she shouldn't be surprised by his wariness, given what she'd done in the prison he supervised. "I know that I skirted very close to the edge of a number of rules, Mr. Norwood, including failing to notify you or the tower warder when I paid my visit--though you did give me general permission to treat Mr. Cranshaw. Which is why I am trying to follow proper form this time. I am the magister of the wizard's guild, am I not?"

  "Yes, miss, you are that." He still looked suspicious.

  She pointed at the gothic façade of the hall, quivering with affront. "The butler in that hall closed the door in my face. In my face. It is not to be borne."

  Norwood sighed. His northern accent came to the fore. "No, miss, I'd say not. Come on, then. Let's get your door open." He beckoned to his men and everyone tramped back across the way to the guild hall.

  This time, when the butler opened the door, after an excessively long wait in Elinor's opinion, his expression upon being confronted with a quartet of Briganti alchemists with wands out was most gratifying. A combination of astonishment and offense, with a goodly dose of fear included.

  "Stand aside." Norwood gestured with his wand--a bright, shiny copper one--for the butler to move out of the way.

  He stiffened and straightened to his full, considerable height--a good number of inches taller than Mr. Norwood--and resumed looking down his nose. "This is the wizard's guild hall. No one other than a wizard is permitted to pass inside."

  "Not if the magister of the wizard's guild says we can." Norwood twitched his wand, almost absentmindedly. Elinor didn't think it actually was an absentminded twitch, not given the butler's nervous gulp. The effect had to be calculated.

  "You do know who the wizard's magister is, don't you?" Norwood went on. "Now that both Wizard Cranshaw and Wizard Dodd have lost their challenges?"

  The butler gulped again, visibly wilting. "I had heard something--"

  "So." Norwood flicked his wand up and aimed it at the butler's top waistcoat button. "Are you going to step aside or are we going to make you? While you're considering your answer, you might want to think on whether you honestly want to make an enemy of the new magister. If you haven't burnt that bridge already."

  And a third time the butler gulped. The action seemed to collapse him entirely and he stepped aside. Norwood and one of his men stepped through, wands at the ready as they surveyed the entrance hall for danger.

  Elinor swept in behind them. She was the magister after all. The vast entrance hall was sized to impress with its massive medieval fireplace, but the dust and cobwebs in all the corners diminished the effect. Another strike against the butler.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The tour of the building was something of an anticlimax after all the drama just getting in. There had been some remodeling done after all, but not extensive. Rooms for the bachelor wizards to reside in had been built. The stillroom had been supplied with iron stoves. A glass conservatory larger even than Harry's had been added on.

  A surprising number of wizards resided in the guild hall. All of the wizards in London, in fact, save for Sir William and John Fillmore the schoolmaster, who lived at the Academy. Fillmore was the man in the robe who'd arrived with the Briganti. Nigel Cranshaw had lived in the hall as well, before taking up his chambers in Holborn Tower. Elinor made a note to herself to ask Grey how the search for the missing prisoner was going and perhaps offer her services. Not that she knew how she could help.

  All of the wizards living at the guild hall were bachelors--Fillmore, Phineas Allsup who had been Edgar Dodd's second, old Beddowes, and two others, Jenkins and Moreman, who were strangers to her. It seemed odd that none of them should be married. Had Nigel forbidden his wizards to marry? She made another note to herself to investigate the matter.

  Mostly, Elinor found dirt, disorder, and antagonism. Bachelor gentlemen were not exceptionally fastidious about their surroundings and servants tended to take advantage of that fact, especially if all the servants were male, which they were. Over the years, generations of mostly female wizards had collected things. Plants. Mechanical devices. Furniture. Other things Elinor couldn't begin to guess at. And none of it apparently had ever been thrown out.

  Entire rooms were devoted to collections of ... junk. She found the Black Cauldron--she didn't think it was that cauldron from the Gaelic myths but it had the same name--stuffed into a sideboard in the smoking room. She took possession of it as the new magister, handing it off to one of the Briganti to carry. It was quite heavy. Even the stillroom--a vast and echoing chamber with tall windows opening onto the conservatory and north-facing clerestory lights--had whole sections piled high with everything from other enormous iron cauldrons to ornate birdcages. The piles of clutter created a maze of walls separating the various workplaces of the resident wizards. Jenkins and Moreman apparently worked together. Their space was twice as large as the others. Fillmore's space was twice as small. He had use of the stillroom at the academy.

  None of them wanted her in their workspace. She had acquired an entourage of the resident wizards trailing after her like rats after the piper. In the stillroom, they turned notebooks over and covered their work, glowering furiously at everyone who traipsed through their territory--five alchemists, a conjurer, a sorcerer and her familiar, the magister of their own guild, and all the other wizards.

  They sputtered with rage, stamping along on Elinor's tour, snarling imprecations and insults. She was grateful they didn't go beyond that. Norwood and his Briganti were due the gratitude.

  The inspection ended at the guild hall offices. They proved as dusty and neglected as the rest of the building. The archives covering the previous thousand years or so were threatened by damp. Immediate measures needed to be taken to preserve them. Fortunately, all the current and ongoing records had been removed to the office in the main council building.

  Elinor borrowed Harry's customary posture, propping her hands on her hips while she surveyed the potential ruin of centuries of history, if not wisdom. All the herbals and notebooks had been taken to the council library, so they were safe too. What was left were the records. "The roof has to be fixed."

  "I agree." Harry poked his pen knife into a wooden rib supporting the roof. "Looks like you've got dry rot as well."

  "The guild isn't poor. Why hasn't any of this been done?" She raised an eyebrow at the scowling wizards. "Do you want to see the building fall down around your ears?"

  Most of the men made snarling, grumbling noises. Old Beddowes cried, "None of your business!"

  "I assumed Nigel was taking care of it," Fillmore said from the back of the group, where he leaned against the doorjamb. "He was the magister. It's the magister's job."

  Elinor snorted. "We see what a fine job he's done of it and wh
ere he's ended up." Immediately after she said it, she knew she shouldn't have.

  "He actually wasn't that bad," Fillmore chided gently over the growls of the others. "Up to the last few months, he was a decent magister. It's just--creature comforts and building repair weren't important to him."

  "With the result that everything is on the verge of immediate collapse and will therefore cost twice as much." Elinor sighed and turned to exit the archives. She had to wait for the Briganti to clear a path.

  That was not good. She didn't need to be bringing armed alchemists with her every time she wanted to enter the guild hall. And she wanted places for the female bachelor wizards to live without fearing for their health or virtue. Of course, the Covent Garden area wasn't the best location for that, but with the Royal Theater nearby, a better class of people did frequent the area. She needed to root these wizards out of their entrenched holes.

  The leaks gave her the perfect means to do it. Elinor clapped her hands with glee, the sound echoing in the huge entrance hall. "We shall do it all at once. The roof, the dry rot repair--everything. We can put in modern plumbing. And heating. Fix the drafts. Remodel the residences, make them larger. We could make room for more living quarters if we empty out all the rooms storing things."

  "We don't need more residences," Allsup sneered.

  "Of course you do." Elinor beamed happily at him. "The ladies will need a place to live when they graduate. Everyone will have to move out for the renovations, of course."

  "But--the stillroom!" Jenkins cried, appalled.

  "The conservatory." Moreman was horrified.

  The conservatory was actually the single well-organized and maintained part of the entire guild hall and Elinor told him so. "It won't need to be disturbed. We'll do whatever is necessary to make sure it isn't."

  Moreman was appeased, perhaps even gratified. The conservatory was apparently his pet project. He was one of the younger wizards, in his early 30s, and an obvious dandy with his tousled curls and gold-embroidered waistcoat.

  "We can leave the stillroom for last," she appeased Jenkins in turn. "The guild has funds enough to lease an alternate location if you all still want to work in the same quarters. Or you can find your own workspace. You will have to find your own lodgings. Will three weeks be enough time? Yes? Good."

  The roar of protest followed Elinor out the front door.

  "You look pleased with yourself." Harry fell into step beside her.

  "I am." She grinned at him. She might not have solved all her problems with her recalcitrant guild, but she'd made a start of it.

  She thanked Mr. Norwood and his Briganti for their assistance and they departed. After that, the four magisters collected Pearl at the academy and went to Brown's for a congenial luncheon.

  By Monday, the magicians of the British council were in a froth of speculation. Notices had been sent a week ahead of time to inform them of the meeting of the full council on that day, and inviting their attendance. Those who knew the reason for the meeting, which by Sunday included a stunned Thomas Norwood, kept quiet.

  Gossip ran rampant as to the business to be discussed, especially since the newspapers had been quickly twigged to the meeting. The speculation ranged across everything from the announcement of a new dead zone breakthrough--Harry only wished--to the transformation of the academy into a brothel. Apparently rumors about sorcery's sex magic had escaped.

  Several of the magicians who had come to London for the wizard's guild challenges had gone home again. Most of them seemed to have returned, though a few had refused, complaining loudly that "those London bureaucrats should manage all their business at once." Most of those who hadn't bothered to come earlier, proclaiming that a wizard's challenge was wizard's business, packed themselves up and came to London now. So the Great Hall was again full when the four magisters and Sir William mounted the dais.

  Harry looked over the crowd of men dressed in black, gray, or navy blue, leavened only slightly by the eleven men in green or brown and the lone white dot near the dais that was Pearl Carteret. This meeting was for master magicians only. None of the apprentices or students had been admitted. The few representatives of the International Conclave who were still in town were present, however.

  The mood was one of worried curiosity but Harry knew it could turn in an instant and that concerned him. Norwood had called out all of the Briganti Enforcers, reinforced by all of Grey's I-Branch, in case the meeting blew up. The men would attend anyway, so they brought them in officially. Colonel Simmons was not one of them, was not even in town, having left for Bath or Bristol or somewhere to seek relief from his gout. He was someone else to be encouraged into retirement, Harry thought. Norwood had clustered several of his best men near Pearl, beside the dais.

  Sir William stepped up to the podium and banged the gavel a few times to begin the meeting. The room quieted quickly. Everyone wanted to know what this was about.

  "The world as we have known it has undergone an astonishing number of changes in recent months," Sir William began.

  Good, Harry thought. Build up to the big news.

  "First, there was the discovery of the dead zones and their growth into the menace they have become today. Then, the discovery last summer that sorcery was not dead after all, that it has been returned to us in the person of Amanusa Whitcomb Greyson. We have struggled with the realization that if we are to have the magic of sorcery, we will have to admit women as full members of the council."

  A low rumble of noise rose from the crowd and Sir William gaveled them into silence again. "After the battle at Waterloo Station where women--including a sixteen-year-old girl--showed incredible courage, strength, and magic ability in facing down that terrible foe, I find myself unable to say that women do not deserve to be members of the council. They proved in that moment that they do have the ability to practice magic and that they will not wilt under its demands."

  The rumbling moved across the crowd again but it was subdued. Harry watched and listened, but he couldn't tell if there was anger in it.

  "The changes have been rapid," Sir William said, "and will only become more so as we battle against the dead zones. You will have heard of the machine creatures armored in animal bone that can live outside the zones, though we cannot survive inside them. The enemy adapts. We must adapt or we will become as extinct as the dodo bird. However--" He broke off to survey the room. Harry turned to watch Sir William.

  "I am 68 years old." He leaned wearily on the podium. "I have served as head of the British Magician's Council since I was 34, and I am tired. I also took part in the Waterloo Station battle, fighting side by side with Thomas Norwood, Reginald Loring, and the young Miss Katriona Farquhar. And while I do not and cannot regret that experience, it brought home to me the fact that the fight that lies ahead of us must be led by someone younger and more vigorous than I."

  Interesting, Harry thought. Sir Billy said "someone," not "a man." He knew who they'd chosen. The four of them had called on him last week and told him so. He'd even agreed with their choice. Maybe the old fox was giving a subtle warning to the objectors that things could be worse, raising their fears so that when they learned who the new council head was, they'd be relieved it wasn't Amanusa or Elinor.

  "Therefore," Sir William said into the taut silence, "I am announcing my resignation as head of the Magician's Council of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, effective immediately, and--"

  The crowd burst into an uproar, many leaping to their feet to shout and shake their fists. Sir William banged the gavel again and again. Harry drew his wand, preparing to cast Herr Gathmann's silencing spell. He'd practiced it several times after the German taught it to him before returning to Prussia, but hadn't ever tried it on such a large scale. It was overdoing he worried about more, since he tended to pour in more power than necessary if he was uncertain about a big spell. He didn't want to suffocate anyone.

  Sir William motioned for Harry to wait, while he pounded on the podium a few times
more. The noise began to subside. The fist-shaking stopped but those on their feet remained there, save for a few near the front.

  "And," Sir William shouted, in his magic-enhanced voice. "I will turn my position over to the man selected by the magisters of the four guilds--Henry George Tomlinson."

  That was his cue. Harry stepped forward to take the gavel from Sir William. The retiring chief lifted the seal on its wide ribbon, striped in black, green, red, and white for the four guilds, from his own neck and lowered it over Harry's bent head.

  Harry invoked a voice amplification spell on himself and stepped to the podium. He banged a few times and quiet fell again with gratifying speed. "Thank you, Sir William, for all your years of exemplary service."

  He bowed. Sir William bowed. The ladies on the dais curtsied and Grey bowed. On cue, Norwood stepped forward and shouted, "Huzzah for Sir William!" The echoing huzzahs, led by the Briganti, rattled the windows.

  Harry let the shouting die away naturally. Before the cheering had quite gone, he spoke again. "Now, since I have been chosen head of the Magician's Council--the first alchemist to serve in the post since Sir Mervin Twitchell in 1804--it seems we need a new magister for the alchemist's guild. Given my previous post, I know a bit about the strengths and abilities of our alchemists, so there should be no question when I name Thomas Alwynn Norwood as alchemist's magister."

  He had come prepared. While Norwood mounted the steps of the dais to more cheering, Harry moved to the back where he had set the alchemy guild's symbol of service. Thank God the magisters had stopped carrying it everywhere a century or two ago. The thing was heavy. He lifted the velvet-wrapped package and untied the gold cords to reveal the ancient Reginshammer, supposedly the hammer of the old Daneland blacksmith god, Regin.

  The blunt, heavy hammer head, about the size of both of Harry's fists together, dated from long before the Danes' kingdom in the northern half of England. The magic in it could be felt through the entirety of the Great Hall. Harry had felt it clear in the back, where he'd witnessed his first transfer of power not long after he'd entered the academy. He'd become more closely acquainted with it when the previous magister had passed it to Harry some twelve years later. Gerard Fox was dead now. He'd never been robust. And now, it was Harry's turn to pass the hammer on to Thom Norwood.