by Jasmine Walt
“But it happened last month, didn’t it?” He was one of the children who had come to Iannis’s attention. “You set a boy’s pants on fire on the playground, didn’t you?”
Briar’s eyes flashed. “He deserved it,” he insisted, his cheeks coloring. “He was hurting my friend because he wouldn’t give up half his sandwich.”
“What a total jerk,” I said, and Briar blinked, confused at my empathy. “I bet he never bothered you again, did he?”
“Nope.” The little boy lifted his chin proudly, and then his shoulders slumped. “But all the other kids are afraid of me now. They won’t go near me.”
I nodded solemnly. “That’s the trouble with our society,” I told him. “Since magic is forbidden, everybody’s afraid of it. And I can’t blame them—you might have only set that boy’s pants on fire, but you could have easily set the playground on fire too. And you hurt your mother today,” I said, gesturing to her. She was nursing her hand as she watched us, but she dropped it instantly as Briar’s gaze turned back to her.
“It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “He’s done this before.”
“It’s not nothing,” I said, and she flinched. “As he gets older, his powers are only going to grow stronger. A small burn today could turn into your house going up in flames tomorrow. He needs to be trained, or he needs to have his magic taken away.”
“Trained?” Her eyebrows went up, and for the first time, a hopeful look entered her eyes. “You mean he can be taught to control it?”
“If we can find a mage willing to sponsor him, he could be trained as one in his own right.” I turned back to Briar just in time to catch the excitement in his eyes. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
He nodded eagerly, then his face fell again. “I would like to learn how to use magic,” he said, “but I don’t want to leave my mother.” He glanced guiltily at her. “If I have to do the magic wipe instead, I guess I will.”
“Oh, Briar.” She placed a hand on his small shoulder, her expression softening. “I would never take your magic from you if there was a way for you to keep it without hurting people. Do you really think there’s someone who can help him?” she asked, her voice going a little high. “I don’t want you putting false hopes in my boy’s head, but if there’s any way….”
“I can’t make any promises, but I’ve been intending to start a program to help train new mages like your son,” I told her. “If I can convince the Mages Guild, your son would be one of the first to participate.”
The mother looked like she wanted throw her arms around me in gratitude, but she settled for squeezing her son so tightly that he began to protest. Now that the two were calmer, I finished the interview, asking detailed questions about the boy’s past. How long had he been exhibiting magical traits and what sort of ‘accidents’ had happened? I took copious notes, then set the paper aside in a file that I would later present to Iannis and the Council.
Once the interview was done, I sent the mother and son home, promising I would contact them in a few days. I then went through the rest of the interviews, with mixed reactions. One of the parents was adamant that he wanted his daughter to have nothing to do with magic, and eagerly offered her up for the magic wipe once I assured him that it would be done by a qualified expert and no harm would come to his child. The girl readily agreed, but I was conflicted about the decision. How could a ten-year-old, so strongly influenced by her father, make such a choice? The magic wipe wouldn’t just take away her magic—it would also shorten her lifespan to that of a normal human. Did a parent really have the right to take such a gift away from their child?
But there was nothing I could do about that, so I signed off on it, then made arrangements for them to come back to have the procedure done. Going through the rest of the children, I discovered that another parent was more like Mrs. Mencham, but far more doubtful, and the parents of the last two children were undecided. Good. It troubled me that a parent would make such a momentous decision about their child’s future so quickly.
“Do you really think that you’ll be able to find mage families willing to help these children?” Rylan asked skeptically as we walked into a Rowanville school the next day. “They’re such snobs, the lot of them. I can’t imagine any of them will want to sully their hands with a human child. And if I’m right, aren’t you just raising false hopes?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. They certainly hadn’t been willing to train me, though that might have been because I was half-shifter. “But Iannis encouraged me to find another way, and if he thinks it’s possible, it’s worth a try. Not all of them are as snobby as you’d think, and if it was done as a favor to Iannis, I think we’ll find some willing.”
It was ten-thirty in the morning, recess time, and after meeting with the principal, we went to the empty classroom that was set aside for us to use for the testing. One by one, the children were brought in, many of them with their parents, but some without. I tried to put them at ease, but they were all quiet and tense, and I couldn’t blame them. Children who had never once exhibited magic had been found to be magical in the past—none of them could be truly confident.
A girl with short, glossy sable hair wearing a pale blue dress and shiny black shoes entered next. Her face was pale and pinched, and the expression on her mother’s face was cold and haughty. A shiver went down my spine as I looked at her—she didn’t look like the type who’d take well to the news that her daughter was a mage.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said, herding her daughter into the chair in front of me. “I have things to do.”
“We’ll be quick,” I promised, deciding to ignore her rude behavior. Her daughter was clearly terrified, and a confrontation wouldn’t help things. “What is your name?” I asked the child, gentling my voice.
“Tinari Schaun,” she said in a small voice. She bit her lip and looked down, unwilling to meet my gaze.
“Nice to meet you, Tinari. My name is Sunaya.” I smiled at her, then asked the same question I’d asked all the other children. “Have you ever used magic in the past, Tinari?”
“What an asinine question!” her mother snapped. “My daughter is incapable of such a thing, and your tests will show that.”
“I wasn’t asking you,” I said, my voice hard. Rylan angled his body toward the mother a little, his hand drifting closer to the sword. The woman stepped back, her cheeks coloring. “I was talking to your daughter.”
“N-no,” Tinari stammered, and I could smell the lie a mile off.
“All right.” I placed my hands atop her head and spoke the Word aloud, already knowing what I would find. The pulse of magic inside this little girl was strong, nearly ready to come to the surface. If she hadn’t had a real episode yet, she would have one soon.
I removed my hands, then looked her in the eye. “Tinari Shaun, you do have magic. How long have you known?”
“No,” the mother shrieked, her eyes wild. To my astonishment, she pulled a kitchen knife from her purse, then lunged at her daughter. “I won’t have it!”
In a flash, Rylan had the woman up against the wall, her wrist pinned straight up over her head so that she couldn’t get any leverage with the knife. I grabbed the child and gathered her up in my arms as a teacher rushed into the room.
“What is the meaning of this?” the teacher cried. “I won’t have any violence on these premises!”
“She’s an abomination,” the mother howled, struggling as Rylan restrained her. The kitchen knife clattered to the floor, and the teacher flinched. Tinari let out a sob, curling her face into my shirt, and I held her tightly. “And so are you,” Mrs. Shaun snarled at me, her eyes flashing with a zealous light. “Father Calmias told us of your wicked ways! He has shown us the light, and we will not go back now that we know the truth!”
We cancelled the rest of the interviews for that day, then took the girl home with us to the Palace. Her mother spent the night in a cell at the Enforcer’s Guild, and Tinari slept in my
bed with me that night, too frightened and sad to be left alone with anyone else. Careful questions elicited the information that her father was also adamantly opposed to magic and mages, and she was afraid to go home.
“It’s terrible, what’s happened here,” I said quietly to Iannis the next morning over breakfast. We ate in my sitting room for a change—Tinari was still asleep in my bed, and I didn’t want to stray far in case she woke up. “That a mother would go so far as to want to kill her own daughter.”
“An unfortunate side effect of religious fanaticism,” Iannis said over his cup of tea. His violet eyes were sad. “Father Calmias has managed to fan the flames even higher since his imprisonment. Something really must be done about him. But never mind that. What have you and the apprentices discovered?”
“Aside from Tinari, we’ve found fifteen magically talented children in total,” I told him. I’d had the apprentices finish up at the school I’d left, as well as the other ones. “I interviewed all of them last night. Three of them want training, two of them have such feeble magic that it’s not worth dealing with, and ten want nothing to do with their powers at all.” That fact made me sad, because I’d sensed a lot of potential in one of them in particular. But it wasn’t my place to force them. “I’d planned to recommend wiping those ten, leaving the two alone, and placing the final three with families who are willing to train them. But now I’m wondering if a biased parent and a young, impressionable child should be allowed to decide on such an important matter so soon.” I bit my lip as I thought back to my own ten-year old self. “At that age, I probably would have agreed to be wiped if I’d thought it would help me fit in with the Baine Clan. But now that I’m older and I don’t care about that, I can see that it would have been a horrible mistake. What if the child goes through with this, and then regrets it for the rest of her life?”
“That would be terrible,” Iannis said, his expression turning thoughtful as he regarded me. “I’m very glad the tests missed you,” he said with feeling.
I nodded. “I am too, in the end. But the only reason I survived so long without causing trouble was because of the spell Ballos put on me, and the charms and training Roanas gave me later on to help control my outbursts.” I bit my lip. “But if we wait until the children are older and they decide they don’t want their magic, there’s an increased risk that the wipe will damage them mentally. And if they’re allowed to remain unchecked in the meantime, they could cause harm.”
Iannis raised an eyebrow. “It sounds like you are convincing yourself of what you already know must be done.”
I let out a gusty sigh. “Yeah. But it really pisses me off that it has to be this way.” I took a sip of my cooling coffee, focusing on the bittersweet flavor of the beans and sugar. “I guess if they don’t want to be trained, there’s no alternative.”
“No, there isn’t,” Iannis agreed solemnly, reaching over the table to grasp my hand. “Sometimes, Sunaya, there is no perfect solution. One of the hardest things about being a leader is having to choose between the lesser of two evils.”
I gnashed my teeth at that. I didn’t want to choose between the lesser of two evils! “Just why did they miss me?” I demanded, frustration simmering in my voice. “Why was I passed over, when so many others were not? And if Ballos was strong enough to bind my magic, why didn’t he just wipe it altogether?”
Iannis put down his cup. “He probably would have wiped it if he could,” he said to my surprise. “Being a half-shifter protected you. Shifters all have some magic too, in order to be able to change form—that is also what makes their lifespans longer than humans’. To attempt to wipe a shifter infant’s magic would make him or her unable to shift, drastically shorten their lives, and very possibly kill them.”
“Oh.” I let out a surprised breath. I hadn’t really considered how being a shifter would affect the magic wipe. Did that mean the mages couldn’t have wiped me at all? Or did it just mean that they would have killed me straight off? Ballos probably wouldn’t have cared about the risk of wiping me if not for fear of inciting my mother’s wrath, so I wondered if the mages would have tried to wipe me anyway.
“Anyway,” Iannis went on, “binding is very difficult at such a young age, as the brain must be allowed to grow and develop. If the binding is too tight, it leads to lethal complications—too loose and it could fail. Ballos had to make the binding elastic enough to accommodate your growth, which is why your magic sometimes escaped.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, and I truly meant it. “But none of this is helpful for our current dilemma. What about the children who do want to become mages? Are we going to be able to find mages willing to train them? If we can’t resolve that, then we may as well wipe the lot of them.” I pushed my coffee cup away in disgust. What was the point in all this work I was doing, if in the end, these kids still didn’t have a choice?
“Of course we will find mages to foster them,” Iannis said with a reassuring smile. “I’ve discussed the matter with Cirin already, while you’ve been out. We are setting up a program with incentives for the mage community, presenting it as a scientific experiment. In fact, he has already signed on two volunteers.”
“He has?” My mouth dropped open, and I shook my head. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised. You’re always one step ahead of me.” Relief coursed through me as the heavy weight on my chest melted away, and I snatched up his hand so I could press a kiss against his knuckles.
Iannis chuckled. “I’m always eager to please, when it comes to you.” His hand curved along my cheek, his thumb stroking gently across my skin. “I wouldn’t leave such an important matter to fate or chance.”
“Right.” I swallowed against the sudden lump in my throat, pushing away the rising emotion so I could focus. “What about the children whose parents want the magic wipe? Is there anything we can do to safely postpone the decision until they’re old enough to truly consider all the pros and cons? What if we could bind them, the way Ballos did to me?”
“Hmm.” Iannis tapped his chin, his brows drawing together in thought. “That would be an interesting challenge. It would mean effectively isolating the magic for another decade, not allowing it to emerge at all, and yet do no harm to its possessor. We could not allow magic to leak out, the way yours did, not with the way the human community is still so afraid of it. Unfortunately, there is no standard spell for what you are suggesting.”
“But you know many non-standard spells, don’t you?” I coaxed, my veins humming with eagerness. Iannis had that glint in his eyes, the one he always got right before he rolled up his sleeves to tackle an interesting problem.
“There are two different procedures I have learned during my travels that could possibly be combined to that effect,” Iannis admitted, and I grinned. There was likely no other mage in Solantha willing or able to attempt such a complicated spell, especially not for ungrateful and half-rebellious humans. But Iannis had proven with Fenris that he was willing to try unusual solutions, and I was thrilled that he would do this for me, when he was so busy with his other duties.
“Before I think on this further, I will have to check your results,” Iannis warned as I popped a piece of bacon into my mouth. “And go over your proposal with the Council as well. I am very pleased with how quickly you’ve worked. I’m certain that between the two of us, we can create a successful program for managing new magic users.”
“If we do, then all of this will have been worth it for that alone.” I smiled, content for the first time in a while. I was finally tackling this issue, which had made my life hell for so long. Even if I had to deal with scornful looks and death threats for the rest of my life, if I could change the tide for people like me, born with mage talents through no fault of our own, it was a price worth paying.
7
“I’m going to miss the hell out of you,” I told Fenris, squeezing him tight. We stood outside the side entrance to the Palace, waiting for the carriage that would take him to the air
port.
“I’m going to miss you too.” Fenris hugged me back, then stepped away as the carriage came around. “Don’t worry about me when you’re gone. I will be fine, and I will take good care of our friend here.” He slapped Rylan on the shoulder.
Rylan huffed a little, but he smiled. Since Rylan couldn’t come with me to Garai, we were leaving him in Fenris’s care. Fenris would be able to restore his illusion if it failed for any reason—though Rylan didn’t know that—and the protection would be mutual, though I would not have offended Fenris by suggesting so. Rylan would be more useful with him, rather than twiddling his thumbs at the Palace while I was gone.
“We’ll make sure to check in on Elania regularly, and on the children, as you requested, once we return,” Rylan promised. “I know how important these children are to you.”
“Thanks.” I smiled, relieved to know someone would be here to make sure things didn’t go to hell while I was absent. I wasn’t worried about the children who thought they’d been personally “wiped” by the Chief Mage. Upon reaching their majority, they would learn that they still had to make a decision regarding their magic. Iannis had successfully managed to bind it in such a way that wiping would still be safely possible, though it had taken him a bit of time to figure it out. I hoped this would become the new standard for dealing with gifted children across the whole nation someday, and not just in Solantha.
“Around six hundred years ago.” The look in Iannis’s eyes grew distant. “My career started in Manuc, the country of my birth, but it didn’t take me very long to realize that I was not of much use there. I traveled extensively before I eventually ended up as the Chief Mage here.”
“Really?” I frowned. “I can’t imagine that a mage of your talent and power would be useless anywhere.”
Iannis smiled. “Perhaps, but things are very different in Manuc. There is a much higher concentration of strong mages on the island, largely because of the Tua blood mixed into our heritage. Many of the oldest living mages in the world reside in Manuc, and they are vastly more powerful than I. I’m afraid that amongst my own people, I am not very special, Sunaya.”