The Magic Council (The Herezoth Trilogy)

by Grefer, Victoria

  Treel said softly, “You’re a cheat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The spy spoke with greater confidence. “You’re a cheat,” he accused. “Cast some kind of spell.”

  “I have to voice a spell. Did my lips move?”

  Treel admitted they had not.

  “So…?”

  “My uncle’s getting old, but he’s not senile, nothing close to it. He lives in Yangerton, in the outskirts near the fortunetelling shops, in a cottage off a dirt path. People call his street Mudhole Road. It rains a lot there. I’d go on foot, because the path’s too narrow for any kind of carriage, and if you’d keep how we met to yourself, I’d appreciate it. Jorne doesn’t need to know I’ve been arrested.”

  “That’s his name? Jorne? Look, I won’t tell him. The woman who raised me’s like a mother. If I’d been arrested, I’d never want her to hear of it.”

  “There you go again. Won’t you quit it?”

  “Quit what?” demanded Vane.

  “Putting yourself in my place. You’re nothing like me, and I don’t need your pity.”

  Vane said, “I don’t pity you. I think you’re a fool. Why would you insult me? I could still defend you before the king.”

  “You won’t.”

  “But I could.”

  “Vane?” came a woman’s voice. “Vane, are you in here?”

  The queen rapped lightly on the door. Realizing who had arrived, the sorcerer scrambled up and rebound Treel with three syllables, using a weaker binding spell than the other, one that used twine instead of magic energy. Then he backed up to the door, his gaze locked with Treel’s frustrated, despondent eyes, to admit Rexson’s wife.

  “What’s going on? Who is this?”

  “This,” said the sorcerer, “is our spy.”

  “The spy?” the queen repeated. Treel, still seated, was staring at his foot. Vane could tell that a lifetime of training for public appearances was all that prevented Gracia from snarling like a hound.

  “He told Dorane how to get to your sons,” Vane specified. “Under coercion. He’s no magic himself.”

  The queen marched up to the kitchen worker. The folds of her sapphire-hued gown slid and crashed like the sea upon a jetty; she bent near Treel and snapped his face up, her hand smothering his chin. Then Gracia spit in his face. She slapped his cheek hard enough to leave a handprint on his skin, but Treel’s only reaction was to blink. The queen released him and dusted off her skirt.

  “There are two guards outside,” she instructed a dumbstruck Vane. “Kindly call them in. They’ll escort this vermin to a proper cage.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Of Guidance and Geese

  For some reason, Crale Bendit’s kitchen always made Arbora feel uncomfortable. It was smaller than hers, and older, as ancient as the rest of the remote, rundown cottage Crale called home in one of Yangerton’s poorer neighborhoods. It looked, in fact, just as time-beaten and tired as old Crale himself. Age had grooved the wooden walls, the rug was threadbare, and the stove of a fashion popular in the last century. The landscapes on the walls displayed faded tints, and the shelves that supported six porcelain bowls showed signs of rot. Yes, the room was old, but its decrepitude was not what bothered Arbora. The spotlessness of it all—every cup gleaming, the paintings without a speck of dust on them, the floor dirt-free beneath the rug’s holes and the rug itself freshly laundered—that was what gave her discomfort. She could not help but compare the state of Crale’s living space with the piles of used dishes and dusty surfaces of her own.

  The octogenarian was bald and lacked facial hair, but his back was unbent and his skin, though wrinkled, free from liver spots. He had two canvases set on an easel; both depicted a lily-bordered bend in the Podra River. The first was a sketch, rough but complete, which he used to guide him as he meticulously filled the second. His paints set before him, his brush in hand, he was absorbed in his work but addressed his guest.

  “You failed the ones who look to you for guidance.”

  Crale ran his brush across the canvas, and a streak of river foam appeared at a boulder’s base. Arbora was pacing the length of the room.

  “I did no such thing. They didn’t come to me.”

  “You didn’t intervene, didn’t understand their intent.”

  “How could I?”

  “Do you know them not at all? You failed them, Arbora. Perhaps I failed you.”

  “Don’t you say that!”

  “Why not admit the truth? I failed you. I couldn’t teach you sorcery. I haven’t the talent, but I tried to teach you about people: how to motivate them, how to use their personalities and quirks to foresee their actions, and reactions. You know Dorane has an inferiority complex that gives him bluster, Ursa that streak of selfishness, sometimes cruelty. If they were present when the king revealed telekinesis….”

  “I didn’t think of the two of them. I was too shocked, too disappointed to learn Rexson a traitor to us all. To himself, even. The poor fool!”

  “Rexson may or may not be a fool, be pitiable. I’ve never met the man. I have met your young officers, and you should have taken action to bar them causing disaster.”

  “That’s easy to say now. Easy to see in hindsight.”

  “Anyone can see in hindsight. Acting beforehand to prevent a crisis, that’s what’s difficult. That’s what necessary. You’re in great danger now, and your being here has spread it to me. You’ve placed all Herezoth in peril.”

  Arbora snapped her back straight, for she knew Crale’s accusations were valid. She had refrained from involving him before this point for his own protection, and felt as guilty as she ever had for coming to him now, but she needed his advice. She resented him chastising rather than guiding her, and she rebuked, “The king’s placed Herezoth in peril. The king, understand? If he’d allow the magic community the voice it needs….”

  “The voice it wants,” corrected Crale. He was in no way impressed by Arbora’s show of ferocity, and added more foam to his canvas. “The voice you want for it, Arbora. Desires and necessities, they’re not the same. The magicked have a voice, my dear. Zacry Porteg publishes his essays, and doesn’t the king give you audience? Doesn’t he hear your requests?”

  “He hears nothing I say. Oh, he lets me speak, but for all the good it does….”

  Crale put down his brush. “Listen, Arbora, I know how you are. I’ve known you since you were born in the cabin alongside mine. You gave me an honorary post in your group, though I myself have no power to speak of beyond igniting small fires. I speak in that capacity, on behalf of the Fist. You’ll destroy all you’ve worked to achieve.”

  “Destroy it? I’m striving to salvage….”

  “You’re immovable when you decide to do something. You’ve decided to support those two clowns, and if you don’t abandon them, your entire organization will be pulled up by the roots. You yourself will share Dorane’s fate, and Ursa’s.”

  “They might hear you, Crale. They’re only in the next room.”

  Her mentor said, “I imagine they’re listening at the door. Let them hear. They’re barbarians.”

  Ursa traipsed into the kitchen. “You ain’t as cultured as you think you are, old man.”

  “Ursa!” Arbora yelled. Dorane followed Ursa in, tried to guide her back out. She threw him off, and he shrugged apologetically at Arbora.

  Crale responded, “Perhaps I’m not. But I do know how to speak.”

  “An’ I don’t?”

  “Ursa, enough,” said the Enchanted Fist’s foundress.

  “I know how to speak correctly,” Crale clarified.

  Ursa retorted, “A parrot can speak correctly. You sayin’ you ain’t smarter than a parrot?”

  “In the name of the Giver!” Arbora cried. “He’s your elder. Show some respect.”

  Ursa said, “I’ll respect the old geezer when he respects me.”

  Crale shook his head, more from disappointment than from anger. “I wish you had a parrot�
��s intelligence, Ursa, or at least its instincts. When a bird feels threatened it flies off. It doesn’t provoke its enemy by stealing its young.”

  “Go fly up a tree.”

  “Forgive me, but this is my nest you’ve invaded.”

  “I’ll invade it all right. I’ll bring in termites to eat the walls, and rats. King snakes….”

  “I know little about snakes, but a king’s here sure enough.”

  “What’s that?”

  Ursa jerked her head to the stove, near the corner. A male voice had spoken, but not Crale’s, and certainly not Dorane’s. He was standing at her shoulder.

  Yes, Ursa saw, the king was there. Rexson, hang him, with that guardsman who was always hovering around him, and Zacry Porteg to boot. The sorcerer must have transported them.

  Arbora distanced herself from her mentor. Dorane gripped Ursa’s shoulder, his touch strong, not fearful. He meant to strengthen her. As if she needed his strength! The redhead grinned at Crale, who laid his painting on the table.

  “Frightened, old man?”

  “You’re the one who should be frightened,” he advised. And Ursa could not deny his claim, at least not to herself. The power the king exuded was enough to unsettle even her.

  “You imbeciles, you thought I wouldn’t track you down? Zalski had twice your power and fifty times your brains.”

  Ursa had spent hours with Dorane conjecturing about Zalski’s death; the man’s intellectual curiosity was too strong for him to keep quiet, and he asked, “Was it you? Were you the one to…?”

  The king’s response was a violent, dismissive wave of the hand, one to send a porcelain serving bowl that was perched on a shelf above Dorane crashing down. It flipped end over end. No one thought to stop it, and Dorane was too surprised to move; the container just missed landing on his head like some kind of unusual hat and struck his shoulder instead, hard enough to crack in two before it shattered against the floor. Ursa jumped aside as the bowl exploded. Dorane dropped to one knee at the force of the blow he took.

  Meanwhile, Zacry restrained the king—restrained him, that is, until Ursa pushed her way past Crale, who offered no resistance, to fling three cups of paint at Rexson’s party. At the same time, Arbora sent a yellow ball of energy at Zacry Porteg. The spell was one she had unearthed the day before in preparation for the worst.

  “Contfabla!”

  It was a muting spell, and it exploded against a body-sized shield the color of a green olive that Zacry just had time to conjure. Arbora’s magic coated the barrier with a contrasting, electric hue before all traces of both sorcerers’ incantations disappeared with a sizzle.

  Ursa’s paints, however, remained. Streaks of white and a majestic gray stained the front of the stove, splashed the guardsman’s arm, and also—all four members of the Enchanted Fist saw with varying degrees of surprise or disgust—outlined a human arm that had previously been invisible.

  “Desfazair,” Dorane cried, his eyes fixed on the self-supporting limb. A person popped into view, not Zalski’s skinny, doe-eyed nephew as he anticipated, but a woman in a faded house frock with chestnut curls tied behind a bandana. The fabric stretched across her forehead, he was sure to hide a ruby. She stood paralyzed by some strong emotion.

  “Kora, go,” the king directed, but Kora ignored him. Arbora moved her lips in silent repetition of the woman’s name, but otherwise felt too weak even to bat an eyelid. Dorane was first to act, chanting an incantation Arbora did not recognize, sending a jet of ice toward Zacry that forked as it neared his chest to wrap around him. Zacry stood as shocked as his sister for a moment, but the king, without hesitation, used his telekinesis to throw Crale’s painting into the frosty jets’ path, and when the frozen arms met they could not join. They hit the landscape instead, icing it over. Zacry ignited the canvas, in an attempt to interrupt whatever spell his foe had cast.

  He proved successful. His flames spread back toward Dorane, up both segments of the ice that hung in midair. The frozen material turned into a heavy black gas as it melted, which in combination with the fumes from the smoking canvas filled the kitchen, making sight difficult and breath painful.

  “Don’t,” Arbora whimpered. “Not his painting.” But the canvas was already half-consumed, the burning paint letting off a noxious odor. Only Rexson’s steady hand kept the flaming art from lighting the floor, which was wooden. Zacry cast a spell to knock Dorane unconscious, one that should have functioned instantaneously, with no visible jet or ball of energy, but Dorane erected a burnt yellow shield to block its effect.

  Ursa, meanwhile, had not been idle. She had flung a window open to see a gaggle of geese flying in formation overhead. A possibility struck her, and she directed the leader to change course and head for Crale’s home. She could only command the one animal, but as she hoped, the others followed. Gratton, preoccupied with the ice and flames and smoke, saw her through the thick air from the corner of his eye and tackled her. She kicked him in the shoulder to scramble loose, and the lead goose set upon the guardsman, while the other birds squawked and squealed and created a genuine havoc.

  By now, enough time had passed for Kora to come to her senses. She cast Estatua on the fowl now using its beak to slice into Gratton’s cheek, and the animal became something like a sculpture. Gratton, who had fallen back to the floor, launched himself at Ursa again, to grab her by the legs, but missed. Kora brought her down for him by yelling “Kaiga,” a tripping spell she had used many a time with the Crimson League.

  Rexson’s arm was tiring, and in the center of the room, the flaming painting began to shake. Dorane used a spell to launch Crale’s stove in the king’s direction. While Crale watched the destruction of his home from the corner, Zacry voiced an incantation to vanish the metal projectile, and Arbora, recovered from her stupor, cast a variation of Estatua that froze not just one living body but all those present at once.

  All of them, that is, but Kora. She had seen Arbora’s lips move through the film in the air. The crack of the flames, the cries of the geese, Ursa’s curses as she fell to the ground, all had drowned the woman’s words, and Kora had responded out of an instinct still honed from her months in the resistance: she had crossed her arms before her chest in a kind of ‘X.’ A crimson shell appeared around her, protecting her from Arbora’s magic.

  Kora vanished the landscape before it hit the floor and set the kitchen aflame. Then she dropped her arms in horror, and her shell dissolved as quickly as it had appeared. “What have you done?” she demanded.

  “They’ll be fine. It’s just like that spell you cast on the goose.”

  “I’ve seen a spell like that kill.”

  “Would I kill my own officers? You’re Kora Porteg, no?”

  There was no use claiming otherwise, not when the king had yelled her name. “Kora Cason,” she corrected. “I’m married.”

  “The mother of…. five, is it?”

  Kora’s face blanched in the fog. “How do you know that?”

  “All Herezoth knows that. My God, woman, do you have any clue what a mire you left behind you? There are crazies everywhere who claim the king fathered your brood. It’s ridiculous, I know, but far from impossible, you being what you are. So they say it. They say it to stoke fears that your sorcerer children, illegitimate heirs to the throne….”

  “…would forcefully take an inheritance that isn’t theirs.”

  “That’s the general thought in those quarters, yes.”

  Kora’s knees began to shake, but she bolstered herself against the wall. She felt faint, whether from the fumes or from disgust at Arbora’s revelation, she didn’t know. Either way, she protested, “People don’t say that.”

  “Don’t they? I’ve heard it myself. I hear it all the time, especially from the rural population up north. Except Fontferry,” Arbora qualified. “Fontferry claims you as its own, but the rest of Herezoth…. Why are you here? Haven’t you interfered enough in our affairs? Don’t you realize I could drag you outside, and it
would be the end of you?”

  “You blackmail the king, and say I’ve interfered in Herezoth’s politics? Don’t you threaten me. I know your type. You have words and more words, but when it comes time to act…. Did you act to restore the king’s children to him? Did you act to free August from the Palace, if you’re so offended by her staying there?”

  “I entered negotiations with the king on her behalf.”

  Kora laughed. “Negotiations? You know who actually was a captive in that building? My brother. Zalski held him, a boy not much older than Rexson’s sons are now, and I didn’t negotiate. I got him out of there. Negotiations, you say. Words…. Tell me, your little group, has it achieved a single objective in all these years?” Arbora smoldered. Kora could see the blush in her cheeks through the smoke. “You’ve accomplished nothing, haven’t you? Admit it. You won’t make public I was here.”

  “I won’t, you’re right about that, you….”

  “What? What am I?”

  Arbora took a deep breath. “A sorceress. You’re a sorceress, curse you. And your children, they’ll have powers. They should be raised by someone who can teach them to use magic, even if that someone’s as misguided as you are.”

  “What is your problem with me?”

  “You had the chance to shape history. To stand in defense of magic, and instead you spat in its face. You did more than that, you slit its throat.”

  Kora coughed in disbelief. “This is about…?”

  “About Zalski, yes.”

  Kora marched up to Arbora, kicking a statuesque goose over as she went. “You think you know me? You think that because you do magic, you have a right to judge my life?” Her fellow sorceress was too stunned to respond; she actually backed up against the far wall as Kora advanced, nearly tripping on Gratton’s frozen form. “You’ve heard about me, have you? Got all the gossip? Well, I didn’t put this in my letter to the papers: did you hear that the first time Zalski’s guards ran across me after that ruby plastered itself on my face, they tried their damnedest to kill me, for no cause whatsoever? It was after Zalski learned I could cast a spell he considered letting me live. Offered to let me live, in fact. Kind of him, no?”