The War and the Fox

by Tim Susman

  “War brings out extremes,” Lowell said. “Courage and resourcefulness. When you’re desperate…you discover things you didn’t know.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, “of course that applies to Cott destroying the Road—and Kip, I’m so sorry, I know you and he were friends of a sort—but I don’t see that it applies to Kip getting a dead sorcerer’s raven.”

  Lowell raised his eyebrows. “The raven was desperate. How often does a sorcerer die in the presence of another sorcerer who doesn’t have a raven?” In the silence as Emily thought about that, he said, “I really don’t know; military sorcerers don’t often have ravens. Do you know?”

  “I’ve never heard of it before.” Emily put out her hand to Ash, and without Kip willing it, Ash jumped over to her. Emily ran her fingers over the raven’s feathers, which Ash seemed to enjoy. “But she’s lovely. Lighter than I would have thought. Can you feel this?”

  “No. I mean, I might if I concentrated on it, but so far I’ve only seen through her eyes and spoken through her. She has her own personality, although she’s being very restrained around me,” Kip said. “I think she’s as unsettled as I am by this whole thing.”

  “I should imagine.” Emily held her hand out again and Ash jumped back to Kip’s shoulder. “Shall we go fetch the others?”

  With the window open and evening approaching, the courtroom was not at all a bad place to meet, so Kip sent Ash to have Malcolm and Alice walk over. With the permission of Emily and Lowell, he unbuttoned the shirt of his uniform to let it hang open, which was a great relief. “After all,” Emily said, “you’ve fur and we don’t, so I imagine that this warm room is even warmer for you.”

  Captain Lowell did not look approving of the casualness of the open shirt, but at least nodded in agreement with Emily. “They don’t make uniforms for Calatians,” Kip said. “My tail hangs over the waist of the pants, which is awkward, and the material is very warm.”

  “How do you wear pants normally?” Lowell asked.

  “We have trousers with a notch for the tail and a loop and hook fastener over it. Regular trousers are easy enough for a seamstress to modify for us. But these uniforms…” He spread his paws. “You get used to it.”

  “Easier to get used to it than to fight for properly tailored pants?” Captain Lowell asked with an even smile.

  Kip flicked his ears. “For a day, I can bear it. For the Calatian units in this army, I would fight for it.”

  “A noble distinction.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, “well, that’s Kip, as I expect you’ve come to know. It doesn’t at all surprise me that he was risking his life to get Calatians out of London.”

  “It would have been a sight easier with you there to help.” Kip again tried to hide his pleased embarrassment. “But I know you’re doing important work as well.”

  “I do miss you all terribly,” Emily said. “Especially with that dreadful Master Plainfield. Good Lord, every time I think he can’t possibly have a worse story to tell, he comes up with one. I want to tell you all about them but I would hate for you to have them in your memory the way that I do, so I will refrain.”

  Captain Lowell didn’t want to talk about his Gibraltar mission, so Kip told a little more about the rescue mission, unable to keep from mentioning the refugees and how he hoped they would find some resolution soon. He was just winding up that little speech when Malcolm and Alice arrived.

  “Ash tried to bring us to the window,” Malcolm said, hurrying to Emily for a hug, “and we had to explain to a guard in the street that we are allowed to be inside here. Are we warded?”

  “Ah,” Lowell said, “probably not anymore.”

  “No need to worry, I’ll take care of it.” Malcolm raised his hands, wreathed in flickers of orange, and spoke a few syllables. “There we are. Safe from unwanted attentions.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said. “Now, my story isn’t as exciting as yours, but I think it’s still very promising.”

  We’d laid enough false clues about going to Prussia that I’m fairly certain Victor and his delegation went there first, but Abigail wondered to me privately whether it might not be wiser to have visited Prussia than the Netherlands. “They have a true navy,” she said, “and though they were allied with Britain against Napoleon, well, so was everyone. They are an old power and could likely be persuaded to weaken Britain if it would mean they might hold on to their standing a few years longer. They haven’t many colonies overseas, so pushing for colonies to become independent can only help them.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this, but I did take messages between her and John, and John reinforced the importance of going to the Netherlands. They’re a very recent monarchy, established in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars after years of being a kind of republic ruled by a few merchants, which is awfully confusing. Some of them are still getting used to being a monarchy. The King, for example, is William the First, but his father was William the Fifth, so before the monarchy he was William the Sixth, and one or two people still call him that. They’ve a brand new royal seal and sashes of office and all kinds of regalia that sometimes look like things that people told them a monarchy should have but didn’t tell them why.

  But the Dutch are fairly sensible, so they figure out a use for most everything, except the sashes of office. The nice thing about it being a recent monarchy is that the King received us himself the day we arrived and told us that he looked forward to hearing our proposal of state. He put his foreign minister at Abigail’s disposal, and when we asked whether I could talk to his sorcerers, he brought a translocational master from the College to give me a tour. This master was very polite, too. “A woman sorcerer!” he said. “I shall have to tell my wife!” But after that he didn’t say anything more about it.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, though. The King received us in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, a huge building that looks like the French Louvre, but topped in the center with a great bell tower. Inside it looks like a very rich person’s manor house, rather like Peacefield but with more velvet all around and with older paintings, I should think. The main difference is that the French and Spanish palaces were either stuffy or drafty, and the Dutch palace was very airy. Our quarters got chilly at night, but with fires laid in they were perfectly comfortable.

  To tell you more about our meeting with the King, I have to go over a little bit of the history I was told to prepare for it. The Netherlands and Britain have had an interesting relationship over the last century. In the late 1600s, of course, King William the Third—that’s the great-grandfather of the current king, if you’re counting, but he wasn’t king of the Netherlands, he was our king, but he was still the Third—anyway, he was Dutch but married Queen Mary, and they overthrew King James because he was Catholic, so the two countries were tied rather closely together, only then there were a great number of wars and the Dutch paid for most of them, so by about a hundred years ago they couldn’t afford it anymore and had to stop being so involved in war.

  Now, the Glorious Revolution, where William the Third came and ruled England, that’s something we learned about in history, right, Kip? That’s the last war England lost to a country that didn’t have calyxes.

  After the Revolution, there were Calatians in Amsterdam for a good fifty years. But there weren’t very many, and as I understand it, when England stopped sending them over, right around the time the Dutch stopped paying for wars, the few that were there either didn’t have mates, or had children who wouldn’t have mates. The sorcerers told me that the last Calatian in Amsterdam died in 1732; at any rate, none of them has ever seen one except on a visit to London.

  I know, it’s very sad. I hate the thought of it.

  I’m getting ahead of myself again because of the sorcerers and all. William the First welcomed us in a royal audience and gave this speech himself about how much he had once loved Britain but how they had gotten too large to be accountable to anyone, and he was glad of the chance to see British people breaking a
way to make their own way in the world. It was a good speech; he’s a better speaker than either the French or Spanish king, and we were very hopeful.

  So Abigail went to talk to the ministers of state, who all seem to be bankers of one sort or another, and I went to talk to the Dutch sorcerers at the Athæneum Maleficis Artibus, which is their college of sorcery. They don’t have a military branch of sorcery anymore, because they don’t fight wars, so they put a lot of money into their school. It’s very fancy, almost as nice as the palace. They’re very close to a large public market and of course there’s water all around. Kip, I don’t know how you would take the smell, but there were flowers blooming all over and it was only when I was near the water that I noticed that the canals don’t smell all that lovely.

  Inside the school, though, it’s quite fine. Mister van Demeer, the headmaster, showed me the grounds and took me around to all the offices. They have plenty of students and apprentices, and he confessed to me that he had never thought of women as students, though he knew of witches. I was about to get rather short with him—you may well imagine—when he went on to say that he would begin to ask the young men if any women in their family also showed talent. We don’t know that an affinity for magic runs in the family, but as well start there as anywhere.

  I was rather taken aback. After being ignored in Spain and courted in France, here were some people taking me seriously. So I told him that was a marvelous idea and gave him a few ideas about how to approach female candidates. You know, not touching them while interviewing, not asking if they plan to give up sorcery to take up knitting, asking them the same questions as the male candidates, and so on. I think that may have amused him but perhaps it will help if he actually does go through with it.

  The school is close to the palace, so I stayed in our quarters in the palace, but they invited me to stay in one of the vacant offices that a master would have, and I was sorely tempted. There’s a true bedroom, an office, a receiving room, and a classroom, and each master has the same suite of rooms. The better rooms are the ones on higher floors that have better views, and the older masters take those. I understand King’s College is similar, Kip? Oh, the newer towers and the buildings at Prince George’s that were destroyed, yes, of course.

  I visited with the Athæneum two more days and talked to many of the masters there, in groups and individually, and they were all very curious about how my education had been—not as a woman, but as an American, or British subject, I suppose, as it was the same thing at the time. That’s where I heard the story about the Calatians. None of them even know what the calyx ritual is anymore. I think back in the 1600s, they were still figuring it out, and nobody really thought to write it down.

  Of course I didn’t tell them anything about that, but I traded lessons with them, so I learned a lot about how they teach history and how they teach magic gathering. I also learned that they teach their apprentices how to suppress the light on their hands. They think that British sorcerers wait so they can keep a better eye on how their apprentices are using magic.

  No, I didn’t learn the technique, but it seems it’s a matter of focus. They would have taught it to me if we had the time. Anyway, the third day we were there we got called back to the court and King William said that although the Dutch haven’t much, they do have a fleet of merchant vessels and they have a number of banks, and if we wanted to borrow money from them they would be prepared to loan us enough to fund some mercenaries.

  That was exciting. I ferried Abigail back and forth several times and brought back our financial secretary, and then this morning we heard the news that the Road had been destroyed and that it was a Calatian sorcerer who’d done it. So of course I blurted out that I know you, and then they all wanted to talk to me. I went back to the Athæneum and told them about it, and they asked me to get more information, so even though we’re still negotiating, I came back here to talk to you and get the story.

  “That news traveled fast,” Kip said.

  “There were many people in New York and Bristol who saw the Road vanish. There are spies all over and so everyone knows about it now. But they don’t know the whole story,” she concluded, lifting her head with a smile.

  “I’d like to know Master Colonel Jackson’s trick of projecting an image.” Kip sighed. “Even if it meant I had to relive that moment for a third time.”

  “I am sorry for bringing it up.” Emily leaned on the wood of her chair. “But you understand. I thought you’d undone a Great Feat.”

  “I understand, and I don’t hold it against you,” he said. “Especially if you make friends with the Dutch sorcerers.”

  “You can’t come back with me, can you? They’d be delighted to meet you.”

  Kip looked to Captain Lowell. The soldier spread his hands. “Who can say what is in Master Colonel Jackson’s mind? You may ask, I suppose.”

  “May I come along if Kip goes?” Alice asked.

  “I don’t see why not.” Emily smiled. “They’re interested in one Calatian sorcerer; why not two?”

  “Alice saved us in Savannah,” Kip said.

  This got Emily’s attention. “How? Mind you, I’m not surprised.”

  “We saw you right after,” Alice said. “Oh, of course, and then we went right to New Cambridge.”

  So they had to tell her the whole Savannah adventure, and this they all did in their own pieces, from Kip’s account of getting captured to Alice talking about taking apart the ship and summoning her first air elemental to Malcolm’s warding which kept them safe to Captain Lowell running around to all the American officers for help after Kip sent him back to the base.

  “It’s brilliant, all of you. I hate to think of what might have happened if you weren’t quite so clever and capable, but of course you are. And you.” Emily hugged Alice. “You keep showing them that we women can cast a spell as well or better than anyone.”

  “I will.” Alice’s tail wagged. “I think about that Abigail Adams line you told me quite a bit. ‘Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.’ I try to go after every new opportunity with ardor and also diligence.”

  “Abigail would be proud.” Emily smiled and turned to Kip. “And what happened with Peachtree?”

  “We captured the ships, but not until they had already sent most of the Calatians away. We haven’t found them.”

  “So your parents are still prisoners?” Emily put a hand on Kip’s paw.

  He saw on Captain Lowell’s face that he’d forgotten that, but didn’t pursue it. “I hope they’re being treated well. I think I can be sure that they’re still alive.”

  “We’re certain that most of the Calatian prisoners are still alive,” Lowell said. “And there were discussions about retrieving them. I think I know where they are.”

  That mission would never be undertaken, Kip knew, and to dispel the anger that thought stirred in him he diverted the conversation to Alice, to talk more about the sorcery she’d been teaching herself over the course of the war. That replaced his anger with pride and love, and a good deal of hope for their future.

  16

  The Fate of the Calatians

  Emily stayed with them for a little longer, and then Kip took Alice and Captain Lowell back to the Trade House for dinner so that she and Malcolm could have some time alone. But she promised to return the following day to see if Kip had procured permission to come to Amsterdam, with the repeated reminder that it might be very important in securing the assistance of some of the Dutch sorcerers.

  That night, finally free of the uniform, Kip lay in his bed staring at the cracks in the plaster ceiling. He’d slept for ten hours the previous night out of exhaustion, but tonight sleep would not come, no matter whether he kept his eyes open or shut. He kept seeing the Calatians packed into the basement of the White Tower, crowding the deck of the barge and later the frigate, flailing in the ocean. He thought about his parents in a stone cell in the fortress of Gibraltar. He s
aw the sorcerer, Master Hadlock, bursting into flame and disappearing into a cloud of ash. And he saw Cott’s face, cherry red and twisted into a frenzy, and then lying with his eyes open staring at the sky.

  Was that how he too might end? Had he become too careless about using his power to kill, even though he wasn’t supposed to? He had tried to respect the conventions of war as much as he could and still he’d killed a half-dozen enemy sorcerers. But they’d tried to kill him as well, and those around him. If this war went on, would he find himself face to face with a fleet of ironclads, with no recourse but to use augmented power to destroy them? And would that power in turn consume him as it had Cott? His former mentor had tried to avoid killing and war had twisted him to its ends anyway; was it possible that there was no safe path, that war corrupted everything it touched all in the name of a noble goal?

  On top of that, he was no longer certain that he was using this power toward a goal he believed in. The Americans had promised to treat Calatians better than did the British Empire, and maybe after the war this would be the case, but nobody seemed particularly motivated to help them now; not Master Colonel Jackson, not John Quincy Adams, none of them.

  But maybe they were right. Maybe in wartime, the top priority should be to win the war, because if they lost, there would be no better treatment for Calatians, and likely all those involved would lose their lives as traitors.

  If Kip wanted to approach Jackson the next day with a request to visit the Dutch sorcerers for help, it would be an opportunity for him to suggest a course of action for the Calatian refugees. Where would there be room for all of them in a place that was secure? The British plan of keeping their prisoners in Gibraltar, an unlikely spot, would have worked well had one of the soldiers on the boat not made the mistake of dropping the name in front of the prisoners.