The Great Game (Royal Sorceress)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “Adultery is hardly unknown,” Sir Benjamin said.

  “There is a considerable difference between something that can be overlooked and something that is so blatantly public that it cannot be ignored,” Gwen said, fighting to keep her voice under control. “You seem to expect that every wife will accept her husband fathering children with other women. Take my word for it; they will not take it calmly.”

  She allowed her gaze to move around the table, gauging reactions. Lord Brockton was looking thoughtful; clearly, he thought the idea was worth developing. Doctor Norwell seemed to agree with him, which was a pity. Gwen would have preferred him to be supporting her. Others, however, seemed to recognise Gwen’s point. Women might have no political rights, but that wouldn’t stop them from making their husband’s life a misery if he acted too badly.

  “Perhaps we could work on the project with unmarried magicians,” Sir Benjamin said, perhaps suspecting that he’d overplayed his hand. “Or maybe we could just bury the details of who fathered who in the files.”

  “That worked out so well for Master Jackson,” Gwen said. She held up a hand. “Your proposal is worthy of further study.”

  And hopefully it can be studied to death, she added, in the privacy of her own mind.

  The discussion moved on to the next few items on the agenda. Several people had reported seeing large, yet intelligent animals in Liverpool, suggesting the presence of Weres. Gwen rather doubted it – they could have come forward and joined the Royal Sorcerers Corps – but it had to be investigated. A pair of combat magicians were detailed to Liverpool to see what they could find out. At least there had been no reports that suggested that the Weres had gone feral. When they did, they were always the most dangerous of animals.

  “The members of the Worshipful Order of Ancient Wisdom are threatening to sue us,” Norton said, when she asked if there was any other business. “Apparently, we broke up a perfectly harmless meeting.”

  We, Gwen thought, sourly. She liked that.

  “Not a good sign,” Lord Brockton observed. “How many of them are well-connected?”

  Gwen didn’t bother to hide her anger this time. “They were on the verge of murdering a young girl for nothing,” she snapped. “I don’t know why they believed that murder would grant them powers beyond imagination, but all it would have done is left them with a dead body. We – I – had to stop them.”

  “Quite right,” Lord Brockton said. “But the manner you chose to stop them caused embarrassment.”

  “How much more embarrassment would it have caused them,” Gwen demanded, “if they had killed the girl and then got caught?”

  She looked around the room. “Our job is not just to use magic for the defence of the realm,” she reminded them. “We are also meant to protect the realm from magic, real or faked. And as for those... fools who thought they could murder a girl and get away with it, they had to be stopped too. And that is part of our job.”

  On that note, the meeting ended.

  Chapter Six

  Master Thomas would have joined the senior magicians for a drink after the committee meeting, Gwen knew. It was a chance to talk with them on a more informal basis – and relax, after getting his way in the meeting. But it wasn’t an option open to her. Even if she hadn’t been female, she was still much younger and less experienced than the men she was supposed to lead. And besides, she preferred to spend time alone rather than with other people. After spending much of her life in isolation, she had become used to it.

  Back in her office, she looked down at the endless pile of letters and documents awaiting her signature. Master Thomas had had a secretary to help with his mail, but the poor man had disappeared during the Swing and Gwen hadn’t wanted to find a replacement. Lord Mycroft had offered the service of one of his confidential clerks – the men who handled top secret papers buried in the government’s vaults – but Gwen had learned the hard way to make sure that she read everything she signed. Giving that much power to someone else, when she had too many enemies, struck her as dangerous.

  Most of the letters, thankfully, were simple enough. A handful were rather more complex, touching on legal matters; one of them addressed the pros and cons of using Talkers to interrogate suspects in prison. Gwen read it with some interest, noted the conclusion and then signed it with a flourish. It might be more convenient to have Talkers do the interrogations, but she couldn’t think of anything more likely to cause a massive backlash against magicians in general. No one liked the idea of having their thoughts read.

  We need to find more Sensitives, she thought, once she’d put the letter in the box for delivery. They’d be better with interrogations, without intruding on someone’s privacy.

  She contemplated it for a long moment, before putting the thought aside and turning to the next set of letters. They were reassuring missives written to the parents of young magicians, assuring them that their children would be perfectly safe at the Royal College. Two of them had been written specifically for a pair of mothers Gwen knew by reputation, who’d written to demand that their sons were not to have anything to do with low-born magicians. They were going to be disappointed, Gwen knew; there were no social barriers in the classroom. Besides, she happened to know that at least one of the sons went out drinking and wenching every night.

  The next box contained letters sent to her personally. Several of them came from charities, including two that she’d already politely declined to publicly support; she put them aside for later consideration, when she had time to deal with them. A number questioned her competence as Royal Sorceress; she picked them up with her magic and tossed them into the fire. Two claimed to have found new forms of magic and she read them carefully, before putting them in the box to go to Doctor Norwell. The letters could be hoaxes – they’d certainly had hoaxes before – but they would have to be investigated. Everyone had thought that Healers were a myth until Jack had found one.

  She gritted her teeth in irritation as she opened the penultimate letter. It was from another regular correspondent, who never seemed to notice that Gwen didn’t write back to her. The elderly woman found the thought of her granddaughter wearing trousers – and working in the hospital – to be horrifying and insisted that Gwen do something about it. How, the letter demanded, could the young girl expect to find a proper husband if she had a reputation for walking around without a chaperone?

  “Idiot,” Gwen muttered. Even if she’d been inclined to help, she didn’t run the hospitals and she didn’t have any legal authority over non-magicians. Besides, it was the place of the girl’s father to object and he didn’t seem to have any concerns – although, with a mother-in-law like that, he might just be allowing his daughter to go to the hospital to annoy her grandmother.

  The final letter was from her mother, inviting her to attend yet another fancy dress ball and hinting that a number of eligible young men would also be attending. She’d never quite given up on the thought that Gwen would marry, one day; she didn’t seem to realise that it was unlikely that anyone would want her. What sort of man wanted a woman who was more powerful than himself? Gwen was, as far as she knew, unique. There were no other Master Magicians known to exist.

  She sighed and pushed the letter towards the fire. Lady Mary would just have to do without a second wedding, at least for a decade or two; she could wait until her grandchildren were old enough to marry.

  There was a knock on the door. Gwen reached out with her magic and opened it.

  “Begging your pardon, milady,” Sergeant Brandish said, “but there are two miscreants here to see you.”

  Gwen pursed her lips together in annoyance. She’d forgotten that she had to deal with students who had become a bit too unruly. At least Sergeant Brandish – who’d been recommended by the Duke of India – could keep them under control while she found the notes she’d been sent by their tutors. They were buried somewhere under the hundreds of other notes she was expected to read.

  I probably should ge
t a clerk, she thought, sourly.

  One of the miscreants was in big trouble – or should be in big trouble. The other wasn’t a student at all. Gwen scowled down at the note - there was no way to avoid the fact that she was about to lecture a man twice her age on behaving himself – and then looked up at the Sergeant.

  “Send in the first one, please,” she said.

  Jonathon Dulcimer was handsome – and, judging by the way he swaggered into Gwen’s office, knew it. He had black hair, cropped close to his skull like almost every other magician including Gwen herself, and a smile that suggested that he didn’t really think he was in trouble. And he had a pedigree that would have convinced Gwen’s mother to point her at him... if she hadn’t been magical herself. Someone like Dulcimer would be horrified at the thought of having a wife who was more powerful than himself.

  He reached for the chair on the other side of Gwen’s desk, without bothering to ask permission. Gwen used her own magic to hold it in place, then glared at him until he stepped backwards, although he still held the air of irritating self-confidence. Did he really think that she would tolerate any disrespect? He was lucky he wasn’t dealing with Master Thomas.

  “Your tutors inform me that you have been molesting the maids,” Gwen said, with an icy sharpness that should have warned him that he was in deep trouble. “I have no less than five complaints from different maids about your conduct. Do you have anything you wish to say for yourself?”

  Dulcimer blinked in surprise, perhaps expecting nothing more than a droll lecture – if that. “I did nothing that they didn’t want me to do,” he said, quickly. “And I paid...”

  Gwen cut him off. “You used your talent to pinch one of the maids,” she said, unable to hide her scowl. Pinching a girl without touching her was an old Mover trick. It had been tried on Gwen, back when she’d been Master Thomas’s apprentice. But she could retaliate. The maids had no such protection. If Dulcimer had had the sense to pinch them when there was another Mover around, they wouldn’t even have known who to blame. “She had to be Healed.”

  She pressed on before Dulcimer could say a word. “And you tried to lure two other maids into your bed,” she continued. “When they refused, you tried to molest them. Did you think that would go unnoticed?”

  But it might have done, if the maids had been too terrified to speak. Or, if Dulcimer had used his brain, he might have realised that some of the maids were happy to share their charms with the student magicians, as long as they got paid. Gwen disapproved, but apparently nothing could be done to stop it. She’d seriously considered simply removing all the maids, before realising that they were necessary. Perhaps she should just hire older women instead.

  She could expel Dulcimer – and part of her wanted to do just that. But they needed Movers... and expelling one for nothing more serious than playing with a maid would give the committee more ammunition to use against her. None of them would take the maid’s objections seriously, not when they’d been deeply involved in running the farms. For all she knew, they might even encourage the maids to sleep with the students.

  “They’re just maids,” Dulcimer objected. “Everyone knows...”

  “Shut up,” Gwen hissed, pushing Charm into her words. His mouth snapped shut with an audible click; he stared at her in mute horror. He hadn’t really believed that she had power, she realised; it just hadn’t made its way through his mind. “You will go tell the Sergeant that I am thoroughly displeased with your conduct and that he is to take immediate correctional measures.”

  She held his eyes, silently daring him to look away. “And you will not touch any of the maids, ever again,” she added, lacing her words with more subtle Charm. Perhaps his mind was strong enough to break the compulsion, but if she was lucky, he’d never even question why he was staying away from the women. Lord Blackburn, whatever else could be said about the traitor, had given her a solid grounding in Charm – and in how the human mind could be quite inventive in concocting justifications for accepting it.

  “Yes, Milady,” he said.

  “Go,” Gwen ordered. “And send in the other miscreant.”

  She watched him leave, looking rather less self-confident than he had when he’d entered the room. Part of her felt like a bully, remembering all the tutors she’d scared off before Master Thomas had invited her to become his apprentice; part of her thought that Dulcimer thoroughly deserved it, just as he deserved the thrashing the Sergeant would give him. Maybe there was a good man in there somewhere. Maybe.

  There must be something about power that makes it so easy to abuse, she thought, tiredly.

  The door opened again, revealing an older man. Sam Davis was, according to the file, around thirty years old – but he looked at least forty. The file had stated that he’d been a Mover in the British Army in India and had fought bravely, before turning to drink in the aftermath of the Sikh War. And now he was in deep trouble for public drunkenness – and for threatening to destroy a pub when the owner refused to serve him more beer. If he’d carried out his threat, Gwen knew, nothing could have saved him. He would have been hanged after a short trial to determine his guilt.

  He limped as he inched forward, the legacy of a wound suffered in India. Gwen discarded the thought of making him stand to attention and used her magic to push the chair towards him, allowing him to sit down. Up close, it was clear that he hadn’t bothered to wash for a few days – or weeks; indeed, the policemen who’d found him had reported that he’d been sleeping rough. And to think that he had enough money in his RSC pension to pay for a flat, even in London. But he spent it all on drink.

  “You need to clean up your act,” she said, softly. Master Thomas would have yelled at him, but Master Thomas had been much older than the crippled Mover. Gwen felt absurdly like she was telling off her father. “Public drunkenness isn’t good for the soul.”

  “As if they care about my soul,” Davis said. He was middle-class; in his prime, he’d been a more powerful Mover than Cannock, who’d taught Gwen how to use her talent. But once he’d been crippled, the Corps hadn’t bothered to find him another position. “I am nothing to them.”

  Gwen knew how he felt. If a male Master Magician were to be discovered, she could easily see the Royal Committee trying to ease her out of her position. Davis should have been offered more of a pension; hell, they could have put him in the farms and he would probably have been happy. Instead, they’d just left him to rot.

  And that wouldn’t be her problem, if he hadn’t been a magician.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “There are Healers now. You could go to them and get Healed...”

  “And then go back to the war?” Davis demanded. “You think I want to fight again? I can find other employment in London and...”

  He stopped, abruptly. “But you’re just a chit of a girl,” he added. “You wouldn’t want to know about that, would you?”

  “Probably not,” Gwen said. A Mover could find work anywhere, even if he didn’t want to work for the Royal Sorcerers Corps. And if he cleaned up his act, she wasn’t going to destroy his career by denying him permission to work outside the Corps. “One moment.”

  There were just too few Healers to heal everyone who might need treatment. Gwen had prioritised magicians who were injured in the line of duty, then insisted that everyone who could pay a reasonable fee had to pay. It never failed to irritate her how many aristocrats, men and women who had enough money to buy houses in the centre of London, tried to avoid paying to be Healed. Didn’t they realise that, six months ago, there were some wounds and diseases that were literally beyond all help? Or, for that matter, that a wound that might be an inconvenience to an aristocrat could be disastrous to someone without enough money to fall back on when they lost their job.

  She wrote out the slip quickly, then passed it to Davis. “That slip will get you a session with a Healer,” she said, simply. “Your leg can be healed, then you can take up employment with whomever you want. I won’t stand in your way
.”

  Davis stared at her, as if he didn’t quite believe his good fortune. “But... but I’m a drunk.”

  “You can ask the Healer to do something about that too,” Gwen said, although she had her doubts. Years ago, an aristocrat had ordered a Charmer to ensure that his son never touched opium again. The young man had committed suicide shortly afterwards, for no apparent reason. Doctor Norwell had speculated that the opium had filled a need in the young man’s mind, one that had never found something else to replace the drug.

  “Thank you,” Davis said, still staring at her. “But...”

  He stood up and bowed to her, then limped towards the door, one hand clutching the slip of paper as if it promised salvation – which, in a way, it did. Gwen sighed, shook her head as the door closed behind him, then turned back to her papers. Moments later, there was yet another knock on the door. Wearily, she pulled it open.

  “Sir James,” she said, in some surprise. “What can I do for you?”

  Sir James gave her a brilliant smile. “Merlin has been given orders to be on alert when the French visit the Palace,” he said. “We’re assembling here tomorrow morning. I was wondering if you wanted to run the gauntlet with us.”

  Gwen eyed him, thoughtfully. The gauntlet was the final testing ground for combat magicians, men who had been taught to work as a team. Maybe they couldn’t be Masters, but Merlin had years of experience in combining their abilities for best results. And yet they had little experience in fighting Masters. Sooner or later, there was going to be another Master Magician who wasn’t loyal to the British Crown.

  “You want to try and catch me,” she said. She needed the experience too – and besides, she wanted to work off some frustration. It wasn’t as if she had another Master to pit herself against either. “It might be a good idea.”