An Unkindness of Magicians

by Kat Howard

  “Look at her.” She yanked her arm out of his hand.

  The casting magician had been at the center of the spell, and the forest was intent on claiming her as its own. A tree, some gnarled, twisting thing, was growing through her—branches emerging in horrible, wet red.

  There was a high-pitched keen, constant, streaming from the woman’s open mouth.

  “She’s still alive,” Ian said, horror in his voice.

  “The magic will keep her that way. It will anchor itself in her. Use her as a vessel and keep her in pain and undying. No one deserves that. If I break the spell, I can help her.” Sydney stepped forward, put her left hand on the woman’s heart, her right hand on the tree.

  “Sydney, no!”

  There was a great, sharp crack, and then silence.

  The magic had been ended.

  • • •

  She breathed in.

  Sydney was, all at once, an entire forest. She was root and leaf, dirt and sky. Green and spring were blood in her veins, air in her lungs.

  She was, between one heartbeat and the next, all of magic. The entire universe worth, rendered into a pinpoint hurricane. It moved through the air, currents and patterns, a sequence suddenly readable. It sang through her bones and reordered the stars. She reached out her hand and touched its heart.

  It ran through her like electricity. She pulled it all into herself. She held it. She became.

  She breathed out.

  Ian staggered against the vacuum left by the vanished magic and looked around the room. The illusion had fallen. The living branches and trees were there, but they were now stone and grey, no longer alive. The only thing moving were flames from where a candelabra had been knocked over, licking at a tablecloth. He upended a pitcher of water, extinguishing them.

  The room was quiet. No roar of wind, no howl of magic. Sydney had not only interrupted the spell, she had stopped it cold.

  Sydney.

  The magic. It hadn’t simply disappeared. It had gone somewhere. He looked to the center of the room, where the spell had started. Where the body of a woman with a tree growing from her heart was also stone, a cold statue.

  Sydney was so still she looked like a statue herself. He wasn’t even sure she was breathing. The air surrounding her shimmered like the haze of heat that rose from asphalt in the desert.

  “How are you not dead?” he asked.

  She turned, and her eyes were as green as the heart of the forest. She saw his expression, and after a pause, her eyes shaded back to grey. “I’m a Shadow. I have some experience in siphoning power.”

  Too much now to think about the fact that she had said out loud what he had suspected, that her presence here was a nearly impossible thing. The awe of that—the potential usefulness of her origins—paled next to tonight’s cascade of wonders. “This power. All of this power. That entire spell.” Ian gestured to the surrounding room, to the stone forest that had so recently been green and growing. “You hold it.”

  Sydney nodded. She stretched out her hands, shaking them loose, and sparks flew from her fingers. She watched them fall through the air, a smile curling the edges of her mouth.

  Fear pooled at the base of his skull. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to run or to kneel at her feet.

  “You hold it.” It shouldn’t have been possible—it would be like drinking an ocean, like wearing a storm. He thought momentarily about casting a measurement spell, curious as to how much magic had actually been in the room, then realized it was possible he’d be dead before he spoke the second word if she misinterpreted his intent.

  There were still flecks of green, floating like fireflies, in her pupils.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, far more casually than he felt.

  “A bit strange. Like there is a river running beneath my skin. I think my heart may have stopped beating for a bit, too.” Her voice sounded detached from her body. “That’s fine, though. I didn’t need it at the time.”

  “Well, if that’s all.” Maybe if he pretended like this was normal, like she hadn’t just become something else right in front of him, things would begin to make sense. He offered her an arm.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to touch you right now.”

  “Why not?”

  She cocked her head to the side, like a bird of prey. “Because I can hear the blood in your veins, and I can taste the flavor of your magic on my tongue, and I could call them both to me in the space between one breath and the next.”

  It took all the control Ian had not to step back, not flee like a fox before hounds. “Yes. Certainly. That makes sense. We’ll hold off on the touching.”

  “Good night, Ian.” Sydney’s voice sounded like the heart of a dark forest, thick and rife with secrets.

  The air shimmered green behind her as she walked through the broken room, through the stone wreckage of the magic it had held, and Ian felt fear drip cold down his spine.

  • • •

  Sydney stood, still in the black dress she had worn to the challenge, in the cold hall of the House of Shadows, holding secrets to herself, feeling them vine around her bones. There was, she realized, a smear of the magician’s blood dried on her hand. One more thing not to think about, not while she was here.

  She had felt the summons as she walked home—like someone had lit a match to the ragged ends of her shadow. She had come immediately, hating every step that brought her here, knowing that waiting would make things worse and make it more difficult to keep things hidden from the House. There was so much she needed to keep hidden from the House.

  About a month after she first got out of Shadows, she had tried to resist the summons back. She was out, she told herself, beyond the great doors. It wasn’t as if Shara could physically bring her back in, not with the spell that bound her to the island. She would wait, return when she was ready.

  Even then she wasn’t quite foolish enough to consider ignoring the summons altogether.

  And so she went about her day. And so, Shadows responded.

  It began like an itch, crawling across her skin. Mild, an annoyance.

  Then the sensation increased: insects—tens, hundreds, thousands of legs. By then Sydney realized what was happening and was determined to resist. If she just waited long enough, it would stop.

  She held out for another half day, until her skin was swollen and bloody, covered in welts from things that she had never even seen, from terrors that had been conjured out of her head. Until she felt like she might claw her own skin from her body for relief.

  Then she went to Shadows.

  Shara had not ended the spell until she had finished talking to Sydney.

  Sydney had never waited to answer a summons since.

  Magic burned like a fever through Sydney’s blood as she stood in front of Shara. She was close, she could tell, to not being able to conceal its effects. It wouldn’t be the worst for Shara to discover she held it, but if the House didn’t know she held the extra power, then it couldn’t order her to use it, couldn’t add its weight to the tithe she owed to pay back a bargain she had never consented to. If the House didn’t learn about it, the magic might be only hers. She had been stronger than the House before—she would be in this as well. She let the fever burn.

  “The House requires an explanation,” Shara said.

  Sweat beaded at Sydney’s temples. Her heart was skipping beats that it found to be unnecessary. She wondered, idly, if the excess of magic she had absorbed would mean that trees would burst forth from her as well, that she might birth a forest spontaneously. She bit the insides of her mouth to keep from breaking out in laughter she had no desire to explain. When Shara gave no further clue, Sydney swallowed the potential consequence and asked: “An explanation of what?”

  “Of your performance and standing in the Turning so far.”

  Nonsense, then. Nothing that mattered. The parroting of information that Shara would have already known, the summons simply an excuse
to remind Sydney that she was not—not yet—free. “Candidate House Beauchamps is currently ranked first in the standings. I am undefeated.”

  “Due to—” Shara said, and smiled, slow and saccharine.

  “Due to the training I received here.” A beat. Magic so hot in her hands Sydney had to restrain herself from glancing down to see if they were blistered. It had been a rather large amount of magic she had taken in. An entire season. Could magic be measured in seasons? Would a winter’s worth feel different—colder, perhaps, and more crystalline—than this heated spring blooming in her?

  Shara’s voice jarred against her thoughts. “And which—”

  “And which I am grateful for.” Sydney considered for a heartbeat, two, reaching out with her magic and stopping Shara’s heart. With Shara dead, she would be free, though free only of Shara, and the question of what would happen to Shadows as a place without its avatar was one she wasn’t ready to answer. Besides, it felt like there were fireflies in her blood, which was perhaps not the most optimal set of circumstances for casting death magic. She could wait.

  “That will be all.” Shara handed her the knife and pen so that the contract could be signed once more. There were still-healing marks on Shara’s hands. Sydney recognized their patterns—a ritual for the extraction of magic. A ritual she herself had been forced to endure on more than one occasion.

  There was no one in Shadows who could force Shara into anything.

  “Are you well?” Sydney asked. “Those look painful.” Not because she cared—because she wanted Shara to know that she had seen.

  “We all make sacrifices,” Shara said. But she pulled her hands away, hiding them.

  There were dark green edges on the piece of shadow Sydney carved off herself. Shara said nothing. Perhaps she didn’t see them.

  Sydney was magic-sick enough to call for a cab when she reached the edge of Central Park. She didn’t trust her feet to carry her home without incident. When they arrived at her building, she tipped the cabbie double the fare and then stripped his memory of her.

  She made it into her apartment, locked the door behind her, and collapsed to the floor, lost in the dream of the forest, wrapped in the thick, green blanket of its magic.

  • • •

  Had the eyes of the Unseen World been turned to the Angel of the Waters that night, instead of to their own magics, then they might have seen a wonder.

  Green and spring burst through the air, all out of season in the current month. Vines wreathed the statue. A small rain rippled across the water, and the scent of spring flowers—of lilacs and peonies and hyacinths—filled the air.

  And then.

  The howling of a storm, wind sending waves across the fountain, birds pulled from their flight as if they had been flung into the column of a tornado. As if there was something hungry, reaching, reaching.

  And then.

  A crack. Spring paused in its progress, then shattered like stone. The winds quiet, the air once more that of early winter.

  Snow fell, delicately, through the darkness.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sydney cracked her eyes open and lifted her head from the floor. Her apartment. Her hallway. A humming beneath her skin. Power, new and green in her blood.

  The light, she thought, was different than it had been when she had come home. The magic, its aftereffects, could have changed her sight. No. Not that. It was only that it was day now. Time had passed. Her head spun as she pushed herself into an upright position, her bones protesting the action. Everything ached—the inside of her skin, the roots of her hair, her blood. Whatever new magic she had, she had paid dearly to acquire it.

  Her nose wrinkled at the stench. A lot of time had passed. She was fouled in her own waste. She pulled her phone from her purse. Three days. Forty-seven increasingly concerned texts from Laurent. She answered the last: Am fine. Will explain later. She whispered two lines of code as she pressed send, activating the spell that would prove that she was the one sending the message and that she was sending it voluntarily.

  She ignored the immediate and frantic signaling of her phone in response. Ignored too the message alerts from Ian, from Verenice.

  Three days. She was not, precisely, fine.

  She could still taste the green of the magic she had absorbed at the back of her throat, underneath the bile and staleness. It tasted like running sap and fresh grass.

  It tasted like freedom.

  The new magic ran through her like a current. She was aware of it in a way she had never been aware of her magic before. Everything was sharper, brighter, electric.

  She peeled off her ruined dress, used it to scrub the worst of the accumulated filth from her body. Then cast a variety of spells at the mess on the floor, tension falling from her shoulders as she moved her hands through the patterns. The other magic was here beneath hers, yes, but it was controlled.

  Hers.

  All that power, and she controlled it. She closed her eyes and stood, letting the spark of it run just beneath her skin, feeling it in her veins and sinews. She stretched, rising to her toes and rolling back through her heels, settling into her skin. The magic stretched too, moving through her body like a tide.

  Glorious.

  For the first time since she’d conceived the beginning pieces of this plan, thirteen years ago, in the cold darkness of her room at Shadows, Sydney believed she would survive to see the end of it. On her way to the shower, she grabbed a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator. She drank it as the water poured over her, washing her clean.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Miles Merlin walked into a room that was harsh and sterile as a laboratory and locked the door behind him. While not the traditionalist that Miranda was in matters of decorating, he did hold close one tradition of the Unseen World: his firm belief that a magician should have a place, isolated and private, in which to do his magic.

  This room—white and chrome and starkly fluorescent—was his version of a wizard’s tower.

  The first thing he did after making sure no one else could come in was to check—as he always checked now—his supply of stored magic. He rested his hand on a pad that recognized his fingerprints and released a lock with a mechanical hiss. There was no magic there; there were no wards to protect access. Using magic carried the risk that one day he wouldn’t be able to open the cabinet.

  With the door open, he could taste the magic he had gathered, burnt metallic at the back of his throat, could feel it hum in his teeth. He counted jars, checked seals. It was all there—glass-contained and silver-bound.

  Here, alone, he allowed his shoulders to relax forward in relief, and then he closed the door, locked it. Enough, for now, now while he still mostly trusted his own power, to have it. There would—he was certain now—come a day when having it wouldn’t be enough. When he would need to use what was there, parcel it out bit by bit. But until that day—he had his supply.

  And he could increase it.

  He cracked all of his knuckles and stretched out his hands, then reached toward a small statue—a miniature version of the Angel of the Waters.

  He’d made the statue after he’d made his most recent bargain with Shadows. He’d wanted a proxy for the larger version. He needed regular access to the spells that had been anchored in the Angel, and it had been easier for him to stand here and guide the flow of magic than to go outside and interact with the actual statue. New York City ignored a lot, but ignoring a man regularly doing magic in Central Park might be a stretch. Plus, he hated being interrupted while he worked.

  He held out his hands, reaching for the magic that flowed through the spells connected to the statue. Reached farther, wiggling his fingers like some fraud of a stage magician. But something—something felt wrong. Merlin broke off the spell, refocused, and started again.

  Then he swore and broke the spell a second time. Something was wrong. The magic that should have been there, just at the ends of his fingertips, wasn’t. There were trickles, yes, but les
s than half—perhaps even less than a third—of what normally flowed through the statue’s hands. This wasn’t his magic misfiring. There was something wrong with the spell that was anchored in the Angel.

  There was something wrong with magic. Not his, specifically. All magic.

  Miles squashed the beginnings of panic that threatened and ran through every spell he could think of that might be useful—for strength, for detection, to discover the works of his enemies, to reveal hidden things. He cast again and again until his temples were damp with sweat and his hands were shaking. Until he could feel the magic running out from his hands and knew if he didn’t pause, recover, he’d have nothing left.

  He grabbed the tiny statue and flung it against the wall, shattering it. The magic wasn’t there, and he had no idea where it had gone.

  He stood, staring at the shattered pieces, forcing himself back to calmness, drawing in slow, deep breaths until he felt the pounding of his heart lessen. Something wet, heavier than sweat, trickled down his face, dripped. Red against the sterile white.

  A knock at the door. “Dad, is everything okay?” Lara.

  He touched his hand to his forehead, where a piece of the statue had cut him open, and muttered the words to close the wound. Huffed out a relieved breath when it healed.

  Opened the door and stepped through it, pulling it half-closed behind him so that Lara couldn’t see the mess. “Fine. I dropped something.”

  “I’m happy to help, if you need anything.” Her eyes, searching over his shoulder.

  “No, I think I’m going to take a break.” He stepped the rest of the way into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him.

  “If you’re sure?” Her whole face a question.

  “I am, yes.”

  He needed to think. If the magic was gone, it had to go somewhere.

  Perhaps the statue itself was malfunctioning. He would go see. Get outside, clear his head. After that, he’d decide what needed to be done.

  • • •

  Lara waited until she was sure her father had left the house. He had never explicitly stated that the locked room at the far end of the hall was private, off-limits, but the fact that it was kept locked implied those things pretty heavily. And she had always wanted to leave her father his secrets.