The Fire Mages

by Pauline M. Ross

  He lifted his head, and his face was full of grief. “And I know you’ll never be able to love me, because of the way I treated you. I was protecting you, I thought. I didn’t want you to suffer like Raylan. Now it’s me who’s suffering. Isn’t that ironic? Proper justice that is.”

  And he laid his head on my shoulder and hugged me tightly. I was too astonished to do or say anything.

  ~~~~~

  The next morning I went back to the address chamber to hear my fate. I hadn’t slept at all, and my eyes were as rough as sand. This time the Drashon sat in the Kellon’s chair, his face impassive as I stood before him. The Kellon sat on one side of him, Bellastria on the other. Drei sat behind them, solemn-faced, his eyes fixed on mine. I couldn’t see Deyria. I was trying not to tremble.

  “Lady Scribe Kyra, do you have anything you wish to add to your previous statements?”

  “Nothing, Highness.”

  A long moment of uncomfortable silence as his eyes drilled into me.

  “Very well. Here is my ruling. On the matter of inciting a drusse to break her contract, I find you not guilty. On the matter of non-payment of taxes, I find there is no case to answer.” The Kellon spluttered slightly from his neighbouring seat, and the Drashon turned to him with raised eyebrows. “If the spellpage in question was fake,” he said mildly, “there is no tax due. If the spellpage was true, tax is payable only by way of the scribe’s licence. There is no mechanism for collecting taxes from unlicensed scribes.”

  The Kellon nodded, although he looked annoyed. The Drashon turned back to me. “On the matter of stealing magically enhanced materials, I find the evidence insufficient to make a determination.”

  My spirits began to lift. This was not so bad after all. The Kellon glared at me, but I didn’t mind.

  “On the question of illegally creating a true spellpage—” The Drashon paused, and something in his face settled into sterner lines. My heart sank. “I find you guilty.”

  A murmur spread throughout the room.

  “Before I determine your punishment, is there anything you wish to say?”

  “Nothing, Highness.” What could I say? He had decided.

  “Hmm. How old are you, Kyra?” He was paternal now, the kindly grandfather again.

  “Twenty, Highness.”

  “So you were only eighteen at the time. I take into account your youth, and the testimony of many people of your previous exemplary behaviour. Nevertheless, the illegal use of magic is a very serious crime, one which cannot be condoned. My ruling therefore is that your licence to create spellpages is revoked. As this is the highest court in the realm, there is no appeal possible, unless some material new evidence comes to light. So ends my ruling.”

  I stood, stunned. The excited buzz rippling round the room was like a distant drone of bees, faded and softer than my own drumming heartbeat. My life was over. Nothing mattered any more. I was too shocked even to be grateful that I had been spared execution.

  Someone led me away, through corridors and halls and ante-chambers, eventually depositing me outside. The sun was dazzlingly bright and hot. It was a glorious summer’s sun, and everything I’d worked for and dreamed of lay in ruins at my feet. I couldn’t even cry.

  “At least you’re still a scribe.” Cal was there, holding my shoulders, gazing into my face.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “He only revoked your licence to work magic. You’re still a contract scribe.”

  “What does it matter? Who wants a contract scribe who can’t scribe spellpages?”

  “Plenty of people. You’re a talented scribe, you can still make a good living. And—” A hesitation. He was so diffident around me just now. “Kyra, nothing needs to change. You can stay here, you know, you don’t have to leave your home. You could be my drusse again. If – if you wanted to, I mean. Or we could – look, I don’t know how you’d feel about... about getting married.” He pulled me close, burying his face in my scarves, his voice no more than a whisper. “I’d really like that.”

  Marriage. That wasn’t what I wanted at all. Tie myself for many years to this unpredictable man, who’d treated me like pond scum for a year, then decided on a whim that he was in love with me? His attitude could change at any moment. No, that idea didn’t appeal.

  That evening, the mages and their various spouses, drusse and relatives all treated me as if I were ill, tiptoeing round me, speaking in hushed voices and offering me the choicest portions from the evening board. They said, “How do you feel, dear?” in sympathetic tones, and then looked pained when I told them exactly how I felt. “We’re only trying to help,” they huffed. As if they could.

  Mani and Lora came to see me, Lora to cry all over me as if I were dying, and Mani bringing a formal offer of employment from his Scribing House.

  “We’re big enough to have specialised scribes for certain types of contracts,” he said rather proudly. “So you’d have as much work as you wanted. Jola – my supervisor – said you could advise on spellpages, too. She knows your reputation. She’d love to have you.”

  My reputation. I didn’t think I had one any more. Still, it was reassuring to know I could still have a career of sorts, and somewhere to live, too, since both brought lists of lodging houses. “Just in case,” Lora said carefully, looking sideways at Cal, but he had decided to be relentlessly cheerful towards my friends and beamed at her genially.

  That night I firmly excluded Cal from my bedroom. “I need to be alone,” I told him, trying to ignore the pain in his eyes. “To think.”

  I didn’t sleep. I sat, knees to my chest, in the window seat. As the hours passed, the crescent moon rose above the reeking chimneys of the town, floated majestically across the sky and sank out of my view. I loved darkmoon, when the moon itself was barely there but the vast bulk of it blotted out a great circle of the night sky. It was like a void, a nothingness that had sucked in millions of stars, a black velvety hole in the sky.

  As I watched, I pondered my future – a future so assured only a short time ago and now in tatters. I couldn’t stay on at the scribery, for there was no provision for learning only the law and not the magical elements. I would never be a law scribe. Cal’s patronage was now at an end, and I had no right to stay on at the mages’ house.

  Nor could I work for Marisa and Elissana any longer, for their Scribing House was too small to support a scribe with no spells licence. I would be a burden to them. They would find someone else, another woman, as they seemed to prefer. Not Lora, she was happily settled with her patron. But perhaps I could recommend Hestanora – she was not at all happy, and it might be a good match on both sides.

  What was I to do with my life? Contract scribing could be lucrative, in time, if I built up a list of clients, but it would never be as profitable as spell scribing. I would always be struggling for money. If I went to the coast, there was money to be made in marine contracts, but I would have to learn a great deal first. Or I could stay with Cal. None of the options appealed much. Only one thing was sure – I was not going to go back to Durmaston, not ever.

  ~~~~~

  The next morning, I was at board trying to eat when a messenger arrived from the Hall. The Gracious Lady Deyria requested my immediate attendance. She had sent a carriage, too, with a driver at the front and two guards on the back, and instructions that they were not to return without me. I had no wish to see her, but I could hardly refuse. Besides, I was curious – what could she possibly want with me?

  She saw me in her private apartments, which had been furnished in the style fashionable fifty years earlier by someone with a lot of money and very little taste. Her face was red and blotchy from crying, and as soon as I walked in she flung her arms around me and burst into tears all over again.

  “Oh Kyra, Kyra, this is so awful!” she wailed. “I can’t believe it! I was so sure... But how are you? You must be feeling terrible. Come and sit down. Look, I had them make some of those little almond cakes you liked so much last time. A
nd I have a pot steeping.”

  I accepted the drink, declined the cakes and sat down on a sofa opposite Deyria. She immediately jumped up and rushed to sit beside me, wiping her eyes with a tiny froth of lace and taking my hand.

  “I daresay I’m the last person you want to see,” she said. What could I say? She was quite right. “It’s all my fault, isn’t it?” she went on. “If I’d never asked you for that stupid fake spellpage, none of this would have happened. And I don’t understand it – you told them it was fake, and I told them it was fake, and they still didn’t believe it.”

  “That’s because there is a spell in effect,” I said, wondering why I was bothering to be civil to her.

  “And how could that happen?” she said. “But Kyra, there’s something I must tell you.” My heart sank like a stone. I was in no mood for a confession. “Lethon and I had a – well, a bit of a falling out last night. No, don’t look like that, I’m not going to bore you with my private life, this is important. I was making a fuss about it all. Well, I was upset, naturally. It isn’t fair, what’s happened to you. You’ve done nothing wrong, and the Drashon should have seen that. Anyone could see it. But Lethon said... he got quite cross with me, actually. He said the Drashon had to punish you, because if he agreed that you were innocent, everyone would look at me and say, well, how did she get spelled, then? She must have done it herself. So the Drashon was protecting me.

  “But I didn’t, Kyra! I never did anything at all, apart from that stupid fake spellpage. No herbs, nothing. I certainly never burned a true spellpage. And I can’t understand it at all, and it isn’t fair, because you did nothing wrong and now you can’t be a law scribe, and I did nothing wrong and I can’t have a baby, and it doesn’t make any sense!”

  She sobbed for some time, too anguished to speak. I held her and rocked her a little, as I used to when she was a child.

  I was ashamed of myself. All this time, I’d thought only of my own problems and how it affected me. Yet my sister was dealing with a tragedy of her own. All her hopes of a child and a happy life with her Kellon were quite dashed. I had no doubt at all that she spoke the truth. I’d never thought her capable of such deception, and her words confirmed it.

  When she was calmer, she said, “I just wanted you to know. I don’t want you to hate me.”

  “Of course I don’t hate you,” I murmured. “I never hated you, and I never for a moment believed you’d lied about this.” Well, that was almost true.

  “That’s all right then,” she said, her head on my shoulder.

  But it wasn’t all right, not in the slightest. Because that left the original problem stark and clear – if my sister had never used a true spellpage, how could she possibly be spelled?

  11: The Garden

  When I got back to the mages’ house, Drei was waiting for me, sitting with his arms folded and legs stretched out on a wooden bench outside the entrance I used. His head rested against the wall, eyes closed, and I swear I made not a sound as I drew near but he sensed me coming somehow and jumped up, bowing a little. I never knew what to make of him, with his secretive little smile, as if he were permanently amused by some private joke. Or maybe it was just me who amused him.

  “Will you walk with me, Kyra?” he said, indicating a path leading off into the garden. “I’d like to talk to you, if I may.”

  It was the last thing I wanted, but perhaps he brought some message from the Kellon. He must have seen my reluctance. “I won’t keep you long, but I do have a proposal to discuss with you.”

  I was intrigued enough to nod and turn to walk alongside him. Besides, he had been kind to me, and I owed him something for that.

  To my relief, he didn’t ask me how I was or talk in hushed tones as if someone had died. Instead, he entertained me to all the gossipy little details of life at the Hall with the Drashon visiting; the kitchen disasters, the agitated servants, the tensions between the Kellon’s advisors and the Drashon’s, the manoeuvring for favour and subtle competitions going on. He talked, too, about the arguments over my trial, what one law scribe thought and how another disagreed with the Drashon, for all the world as if I were just another curious outsider instead of the very hub of the business. But I was grateful to be treated with such normality.

  Then, quite conversationally, he said, “I wouldn’t presume to give you advice, Kyra, but I hope you’ll think carefully about what you do next, and don’t rush into anything. Have you made any decisions yet?”

  “No. I have a few options.”

  “Of course. What about Lord Mage Cal?”

  “What about him?”

  “He seems – fond of you.”

  What could I say to that? It was none of his business what Cal felt for me.

  “I don’t want to pry,” he went on, when I stayed silent, “but I have a proposal for you to consider, which wouldn’t work if you have a commitment to the mage. But if you are free, you can go anywhere.”

  “Where did you have in mind?” I was interested to hear it, despite my suspicion of him.

  “Kingswell,” he said at once. “I have been asked to go and see if I can drag home a not too reluctant suitor for Bellastria. It’s a good opportunity to do some research, and I thought you might like to come with me, to see what we can find out.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, about us, obviously. The Imperial Library might have some relevant texts from ancient times.”

  “About us?”

  “Yes. Aren’t you curious, just a bit?”

  I felt as if I’d opened a book in the middle and was trying to pick up the threads of the story. What could he possibly mean? He saw my bewildered expression and looked at me quizzically.

  “Come on, Kyra, there has to be a reason for it. There’s an explanation somewhere, if we only look in the right place. Oh look! A moon plant!”

  He dashed off the path into a tangle of long grass, ragged herbs unpicked and gone to seed, and brambles. I followed and there in a clearing was the unobtrusive rosette of leaves, with a single thick stem swelling above it. It only reached up to my knees now but before the snows it would tower over my head, open its sweetly scented night blossoms, shrivel and die. A strange plant.

  “See, the flower stalk is growing,” Drei said excitedly, kneeling beside it and touching it reverently. “That means one or other of the little moons will be visible soon.”

  I laughed at him, but he stood up, looking aggrieved. “It's true! You don’t know everything, you know.”

  “And I thought my village was superstitious. It’s just a plant that doesn’t flower very often, Gracious Lord.”

  “I wish you would call me Drei,” he said. “We’re too alike to be formal with each other, Kyra.”

  “We’re not at all alike,” I said, still amused, for I thought he was flirting with me, in his strange way. We walked back to the path, and continued on downhill.

  “Of course we are. You must know that.”

  “You’re the Kellon’s son. I’m a village nobody.”

  He turned to face me fully, his expression full of surprise. “I didn’t mean like that. Don’t tease me, Kyra.” Then suddenly he was puzzled. “Surely you understand... You know we’re alike – the connection between us. Don’t you?”

  I said nothing, confused.

  “Look...” He held his hand up in front of me. “Now yours... There! Can you see it now?”

  I looked at his hand, long and slim, brown, well cared for, a single bejewelled ring. Then my own, plump, white, ink bespattered, the nails cut very short to stop me biting them. I could detect no similarity between them.

  “You really can’t see it?” His tone was almost horrified. “So you don’t know—? Oh! But when I picked you out of the crowd – whatever did you think? That must have been – so weird!”

  I laughed then. “You mean the way you always know exactly where I am? It’s quite unnerving. How do you do that?”

  “It’s hard to believe you can’t see it, whe
n yours is so strong. You must have noticed... Mine is nothing to yours...”

  “My what?”

  “Your aura. It’s like a light inside you, a golden glow. Even if I close my eyes, I know where you are. You really can’t...? That’s amazing. Yours is so bright, I just assumed you would know about it. After you had the renewal with your mage, I could hardly bear to look at you, it was so dazzling. Mine is nothing by comparison. I – you must have thought I was insane. You don’t see anything at all?”

  “Not a golden glow, no. I've never seen anything like that. Only the blue lights.”