An Unkindness of Magicians

by Kat Howard

  “Hard to go wrong following a winner,” Grey said.

  “Merlin, you mean?”

  “It’s the oldest House. That kind of history, that’s power and standing. Plus, Miles knows all the secrets, everything that goes on.”

  “I thought your family hated him.”

  “Miranda hates him. Point in his favor, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Laurent laughed.

  They finished the loop and slowed to a walk. “One other thing,” Laurent said. “I’ve been thinking it might be smart to challenge each other now, while things are still low-key.”

  Grey coughed, spitting water on the ground. “What the fuck! Low-key? If you have too many losses, you don’t advance. One of us could knock the other out. Forget it.”

  “It’s forgotten.” Laurent drank from his own water bottle. “This whole thing is so weird.”

  “Weird or not, you better figure it out fast, and stop coming up with crazy shit like that.” Grey slapped his friend on the back and headed for his subway stop. “Fortune’s Wheel keeps turning!”

  Laurent stood in the cooling air, the wind drying his sweat against his skin. Fortune’s Wheel did turn, and it didn’t always leave people on top. Sometimes it rolled right over them. Shaking the stiffness from his limbs, he started for home.

  • • •

  “Anything for me today, Henry?” Sydney asked as she crossed the lobby of her apartment building.

  “Yes, miss.”

  She stopped, raised a brow. She didn’t generally order things for delivery. The pool of people who knew her actual address was two, and she didn’t think Shara would ever use the postal system, so the question was more a habit than something she expected an affirmative answer to.

  “Well, not a thing, miss, so much a person. She said you weren’t expecting her, and so she’d just sit right down and wait.”

  Sydney shifted her weight back on her heels. She was definitely not expecting a visitor. Nothing had triggered her wards, but not every unpleasantry had to be caused by magic. It would be easier to protect Henry if she was closer to him. “She?”

  “That’s right, miss. Right over there.”

  The white-haired woman wore all black, perfectly tailored for her straight-backed frame. Her lipstick was as red as Sydney’s, and while the passage of time had marked itself on her skin, power and beauty went bone-deep beneath it. She rose from the chair, as poised as a queen. “Hello, Sydney. I’m Verenice Tenebrae.”

  Sydney knew the name. And that was why her wards—keyed to magicians who used the magic that came from Shadows—hadn’t gone off.

  “Thanks, Henry. It’s fine.” He nodded his acknowledgment, and Sydney walked closer to the waiting woman. She shaped a minor silence with her left hand as she did, making sure no one would be able to overhear their conversation. “Tenebrae. You’re the other Shadow who got out.”

  “Indeed.” She inclined her head. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I was hoping we could talk.”

  Now that she was closer, the signs of Verenice’s origins were unmistakable. Sydney saw them herself in every mirror: the way Verenice held herself, the lines of her spine and the awareness in her eyes. The magic that ran closer to the surface than it did in those who’d never had to be a channel for others. The ragged edges of her shadow. “There’s a very good bakery, about a block and a half away, if you don’t mind the walk.”

  “I do love pain au chocolat. And you don’t want me in your apartment and you’re too diplomatic to say. I quite understand.”

  Sydney said nothing because it was true. She didn’t want Verenice in her apartment. Shara had told her, when she left, to look for Verenice, had mentioned that the other woman could help her navigate the Unseen World. Sydney trusted few people to begin with, and trusted anyone Shara recommended even less. So she had not gone looking for Verenice, and while she wasn’t surprised to have been sought out, she wasn’t pleased, either.

  She watched Verenice as they walked, but the older woman gave away nothing. It would have been a shock if she had. Shadows was nothing if not thorough in its training.

  After they were seated, Verenice with hot chocolate to accompany her pastry and Sydney with rose and violet macarons, Verenice said, “My debt is paid. Fully. Shadows has no hold on me, and I have no loyalty to that place.” The last word bitter as salt. “I’m here for myself, because I was curious about you, not because Shara asked me to spy.”

  “I’m hardly anyone worth being curious about,” Sydney said.

  “Forty years,” Verenice said, stirring her hot chocolate.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I left Shadows forty years ago. Before you were born, even. No one before me and no one in between walked out of those doors. You and I both know to a nicety what the other endured to be here. False modesty does not become us.” She looked up then, directly at Sydney.

  “Fine. Then tell me how I can satisfy your curiosity.”

  Verenice smiled. “I do like you. So precise. So careful. So much like I was. Though you want more, I think. No, don’t interrupt. I know it makes you uncomfortable that I know what you are, and you’d really rather not be here. You want to deny, to deflect, to try to draw one more layer of ‘don’t see me’ around yourself. I’d be willing to bet that the only reason you haven’t warded this conversation is that you don’t want it to be important.

  “But I have practice in seeing, and I’ll tell you what I think. I think that you’re out of Shadows and working with that handsome young man because Shadows has told you to—to be contracted to someone, if not him specifically—and because Shara and the House will cut little pieces of you away, slowly if you do what you’re told and much faster if you don’t.

  “I also think that you’re doing something else, and not just because you’d be a lot less careful in what you said to me if you had nothing to hide from Shara. Who probably told you to seek me out because she knew it would be the last thing you would do if she did, and she wanted to deny you an ally.”

  A brow raised as question. Sydney kept her face clear of an answer, but it was precisely the sort of thing Shara would do.

  Verenice continued. “I’ll tell you again that I’m not here on her behalf, that I haven’t spoken to her since I paid off my contract, but I don’t expect you to believe me—I wouldn’t, in your position. But I know how you filtered your influence spell during the first challenge—you set it up so that it would affect only the magicians who use the magic from Shadows to pay their cost. I think, perhaps, you were looking for allies.”

  And that was close, very close. Sydney had set up the spell that way, though with the intent of counting enemies rather than of finding allies. She had wanted to see how deep Shadows’ influence was, to have some idea what the size of the fire would be when she lit the match. Apparently, a conflagration was in order. “Any other speculations?”

  “I think you’re using the Turning as a way to move against Shadows, and I want to help you.” Verenice’s hands were flat on the table where Sydney could see them. Not that a magician had to use her hands to cast, but keeping them so obviously visible and unmoving was a sign that no magic was being done.

  And then Sydney did ward the conversation, dipping a finger in her tea and drawing a quick symbol on the surface of the table.

  “Assuming any of what you said is true, why would you want to get involved? Going up against Shadows would be risky. Dangerous even. If you’re out, you’re safe,” Sydney said, stepping hard on the last word. She might not trust Verenice, but she wouldn’t send anyone back into Shara’s clutches.

  The lines of Verenice’s face changed then, and Sydney could see all the time, all the pain that had made them. “I opened the doors of the House when I was thirty-three. It held me under contract for ten years after. And for those ten years, and the thirty beyond them, I have lived in the Unseen World and known what went on in Shadows. Known I couldn’t stop or change it. Not on my own. That’s why.”

 
; Sydney looked around the elegant patisserie, at the cream-and-gilt walls, the staff in the black-and-white uniforms, aprons edged with lace. She breathed in the scents of sugar and butter, cinnamon and chocolate, and thought how very far away they both were from where they had started.

  She looked at Verenice’s shadow again. The rips, the torn places, the ragged edges. So much worse than her own, and the pain of her own, when she allowed herself to acknowledge it, was the constant shriek of skin flayed away, of open wounds. The balm to the pain, to the rage that lay underneath it, was the idea that she could change things. Could end them. Could make sure that no one else was broken and cut into pieces for the ease of other people’s magic.

  She could almost have understood the existence of Shadows if it had been more than that. If using the magic that came out of it had been somehow a boost—if it let people be more powerful magicians. People were greedy and for power in particular. But the magic that came from Shadows didn’t give extra power. It made no one stronger. All it did was make things easier, because the pool of magic was always there, and ensure that those who used it faced no consequences for their magic use because someone else had paid them already.

  Sydney had been one of those someone elses, for the first twenty-five years of her life, and Verenice had, too, for eight years of her life beyond that. She felt herself shake inside. She owed Verenice this choice, even if it made the other woman less safe. There were times when safety didn’t matter. And she didn’t have to trust Verenice to be able to use her.

  “Okay,” Sydney said. “Okay.”

  Verenice nodded. “You let me know when you’ve decided how I can be of use.”

  “There is one thing,” Sydney said. She could start by asking the question Shara had wanted her to. That way there’d be nothing lost if it turned out Verenice wasn’t trustworthy after all. “Who do I most need to worry about?”

  “Miles Merlin.” Verenice didn’t even have to consider her answer. “He’s furious already, because his son won’t use Shadows magic. He hates me because I’m the one who taught Ian that he didn’t have to. And once he learns what you are, where you’re from, he’ll come at you. He’ll be subtle, at the beginning, but don’t mistake that for him being anything less than dangerous. He’ll see any threat to Shadows as a threat to his power, and he won’t like it.”

  “You’re the one who taught Ian?” Sydney said. A flicker of surprise before the realization that it made sense. Someone had to, and the choices were extremely limited. “Is he good?”

  “Very.”

  “One more thing, then,” Sydney said. “Have you heard about any failures of magic?”

  “A little,” Verenice said. “Nothing concrete.”

  “Please let me know if you do. It would, possibly, be a helpful thing to know, if I were actually planning any of the things you wondered about.” Her phrasing was vague enough that she could explain her way out of things if the request did get back to Shara.

  Verenice collected her things, then paused. “Sydney. Thank you.”

  “You may not want to thank me by the end of this,” Sydney said.

  “If the end of this means an end to Shadows, I will.”

  The next day, Sydney sent Verenice flowers. A kind gesture, nothing more.

  Except for what it signaled, something she knew Verenice would understand: that Verenice, too, was findable. And there was the small matter of the spell, woven into the flowers, that would have wilted them on the instant had there been traces of any magic that came from Shadows in Verenice’s house, had she actually been in communication with Shara. And the secondary spell, set so if that magic wasn’t found, they opened exuberantly, in bright profusion, offering unmistakable signs of suspicion.

  Verenice smiled and sent flowers in return. The card read, May our friendship, like these flowers, never wilt. Woven into the writing, a spell of her own. A binding to loyalty, making her unable to cast direct magic against Sydney.

  Sydney held the card in her hand. There were ways—there were always ways—to get around such a binding. Verenice could very easily move against Sydney indirectly, or hurt someone else for leverage. But this, unasked for, was a strong sign that she had meant what she said—that she wasn’t bound to Shara or to Shadows any longer, and that she would work to help Sydney if that help was needed.

  It was a good start.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The bar was casual, out of the way of the financial crowd and not trendy enough for the hipsters. Welcoming, with caramel wood and warm brass and old red brick. The blond woman sitting at the end of the bar in her severely tailored sheath dress looked more polished than the place, but she laughed with the bartender and asked the hostess about her sister’s art exhibit.

  “This really is your regular spot.” Sydney slid onto the stool next to Madison and ordered a dirty martini.

  “I’ve been coming here since law school. Will used to tend bar to help pay for tuition. Then he decided he preferred this kind of bar to the legal kind. He wound up buying this place, what, two years ago?”

  Will nodded as he set down their drinks. “Thinking about expanding the kitchen so we can do more than just bar snacks, too. My husband wants to have fancy sandwiches and some desserts.”

  “It’s a great place. And you make a fantastic martini,” Sydney said.

  “Thanks. Let me know if you get hungry. I’ve got some of that pickled asparagus you like, Mads.”

  “Just send it out now. Maybe in a vat,” Madison said. “You know I can’t resist that stuff.”

  After Will left, she turned back to Sydney. “It’s started. The Turning.”

  “It has. Thanks for passing on your impression of Laurent, by the way. You’re right—he’s a good guy, if a bit naive about the world he lives in.” Rather than following Shara’s directive and going to Verenice for assistance, Sydney had done her own research into members of the Unseen World who might help her make her way through it. Madison had been a Prospero, and had left over the existence of Shadows, both of which factors made her perfect. The fact that Sydney had grown to genuinely like her had been an unexpected bonus.

  “No problem.” Madison smiled her thanks as Will slid a platter with pickled asparagus and a variety of other small snacks over to them. “You should try the stuffed peppers, by the way. I didn’t know Laurent well growing up—he showed up just before I left—but he always struck me as one of the good ones. How’s working together?”

  Sydney sipped her drink. “Fine so far. He’s good at strategy, which I appreciate.”

  “You do love a plan.”

  “The more the merrier.” She had a number of them. “We were the opening challenge.”

  “I heard. House lawyers don’t count as ‘exposure to the mundane world’ for purposes of gossip, and you and your magic are good gossip right now. Did you really make them all dance? Please tell me it was something like the zombie dance from ‘Thriller.’ ” Madison raised her glass in a mock toast.

  Sydney laughed. “Sadly, it was a waltz, as a zombie dance didn’t occur to me when I was planning the spell. I wish it had. Any other good gossip?”

  “Prospero hiring Ian is the other big one. No one can quite believe that he gave up his place in House Merlin, and everyone’s waiting for Miles’ head to explode over Ian working for Prospero rather than trying to establish a House of his own.”

  “Does anyone have any ideas about what’s actually going on there?” Sydney asked.

  “I haven’t heard anything that’s worth taking seriously,” Madison said. “Most of it’s conspiracy theory stuff, about how this is just Merlin outsmarting everyone and making a move to gain control of Prospero. Which, no. If she thought for a second Ian wasn’t loyal, Miranda would eviscerate him. With a spoon.

  “Why—do you know anything?”

  “Maybe. Ian’s not using the magic from Shadows, and I’d put money on that being the reason he’s left his House.”

  “Just for that?” Madison h
eld up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m sitting here with you because I fucking hate that system and won’t be part of it. But we all do have a choice.”

  “Except that House Merlin founded Shadows back in the day and created the spell that makes the transfer of consequences possible. So I imagine Ian’s choice was a bit less of one.”

  Madison nodded her head slowly. “That’s right. And I’ve heard that Merlin still handles their obligation in blood. One of the few older Houses to do so.”

  “Obligation?” Sydney said.

  Madison looked at her empty glass like she could will it to refill. “It’s what the official term for the sacrifices is. Blood obligation means they keep it in the family, rather than procuring an infant by other means.”

  “Don’t look so uncomfortable. I honestly don’t give a fuck what they call it to make themselves feel better, or less culpable. There is no name that makes any of this worse than it is. But I do wonder if Ian knows who his House sent, and that’s why he has a conscience about it. Although even that doesn’t explain the alliance with Miranda, of all people.”

  “There were rumors that it was his mom, actually. That something happened when Lara Merlin was born, something bad, and so instead of giving the baby up, Miles paid his debt with his wife,” Madison said.

  “I would have been too young to notice someone like that being brought in, but that might explain it. Especially if Ian was old enough to remember her but not to understand.”

  “Right. So, changing the subject to something less utterly horrific, gossip also says the two of you left the opening challenge together, quick, fast, and in a hurry.” Madison wriggled her eyebrows. “Are there good details? Please tell me if there are good details.”

  Sydney smiled over the rim of her glass.

  “There are good details, and you’re just not going to tell me. Got it. Anything else?” Madison ate the last piece of pickled asparagus. “I should just buy stock in this stuff.”