Duncan considered it. He wouldn’t have blamed Johan, back when everyone had thought him powerless, for being attracted to the Levellers. Now, though, Johan had come into his powers ... and, clearly, had the power to make himself a very important and feared person indeed. Why would he still want to talk with the Levellers? And what might they have talked about?
“I wish I knew,” he said, slowly. “First an apprenticeship with the Head Librarian, now this ...”
Deferens used a word in a language Duncan didn’t recognise. It didn’t sound pleasant.
“The Grand Sorceress is making a power bid,” he snapped. “That’s what’s going on!”
Duncan stared at him. “How do you know?”
“What sort of apprenticeship could he get,” Deferens demanded, “if he works under the Head Librarian?”
He snorted, rudely. “But the Head Librarian is Light Spinner’s closest ally on the Privy Council,” he added. “If Johan swears to obey her, and that is part of the apprenticeship oaths, he will effectively be Light Spinner’s tool. What will happen when some magician decides that he disagrees with her? Your son will be sent to strip him of his magic!”
Duncan blanched. Power was everything to a magician; it was what separated them from the teeming masses of powerless mundanes, all of whom were helpless before a magician. The thought of losing his power was a magician’s worst nightmare. What Johan had done had made the entire community uneasy, even if it had only been a Dark Wizard who had been stripped of his powers. But Hawthorne had never posed such a fundamental threat to the entire social order.
Johan might not want to do what Light Spinner said. But the oaths of apprenticeship would force him to obey.
“Or what if she decides that someone deserves magic?” Deferens asked. “Could your son give it to him?”
“I ...” Duncan broke off, remembering the yearly tests the druid had run. All of them had agreed; Johan had no magic, nor had he any prospect of getting it. By the time Johan had turned seven, Duncan had known that the tests were useless ... which hadn’t stopped him from clinging to the last tiny flickers of hope. “He had no magic.”
Deferens lifted his eyebrows, quizzically.
“Johan had no magic,” Duncan said. “All the tests agreed that he had nothing, not even a spark that could be fanned into a flame. And now he has strange powers and ...”
“And an ability to take magic from someone,” Deferens said. “If he had no magic, yet somehow developed it, what’s to stop someone else doing the same?”
Duncan hesitated. He wanted to argue that it was something in his family’s bloodline that had produced Johan, but he had seen all of the test results. There had been nothing there; even the handful of procedures he’d pushed the druid into running, ignoring the man’s advice, had produced nothing. And yet Johan had developed powers.
“Nothing,” he said, finally. “Nothing at all.”
Deferens stood up and started to pace. “We have to act now,” he said, shortly. “As Patriarch of House Conidian, it is your duty to rein in your wayward son.”
“Johan isn’t listening to me,” Duncan said. “And how can I blame him?”
He’d failed. He’d failed all of his elder children. Jamal had become a bully, Charity had withdrawn into herself ... and Johan, who had suffered the worst, wanted nothing more to do with the family. The family magic prodded at him, reminding him of his failure; somehow, he would have to do better for the younger children. But he wasn’t even sure where to begin.
“Then you need to stop him, now,” Deferens said. “You have to have him killed.”
Duncan’s head snapped up, staring at him. “I can’t ...”
“You must,” Deferens insisted. “What will happen to House Conidian if your son becomes Light Spinner’s most feared enforcer? How will the other Great Houses react to this development? And what would happen if Johan decided to avenge himself on you?”
“No,” Duncan said. But Deferens was right. If the balance of power shifted so badly, the other Great Houses would start looking for someone to blame ... and House Conidian was vulnerable. Everything that Duncan and his father and his grandfather had worked for would be destroyed under the concentrated malice of the older Great Houses. “I can’t kill my son.”
“Some would say that you should have killed him long ago,” Deferens said, quietly. “And they will blame you for that too.”
Duncan shuddered. A Powerless in the family suggested weakness in the blood. When one appeared, they were often killed after it became clear that they would never develop magic – or expelled from the family and, if they were lucky, given to a mundane family to raise. But he had never been able to bear the thought of giving up his son, even though it might have been better for him. And yet ... Johan’s presence, even though it was largely unknown, had damaged the family’s prospects even before he developed his powers.
A Family Patriarch had ultimate authority over his children, at least until they reached the age of maturity. He could arrange marriage contracts, steer their education, even select their friends ... and discipline them if they were naughty. And, if they were too disgraceful for the family to tolerate, he could disown them or even kill them. But it was a dangerous line to cross. It had been bad enough contemplating removing Jamal as Prime Heir. Killing one of his children was worse.
And if you’re wrong, he thought numbly, the magic that binds the family together will turn on you.
“There’s no choice,” Deferens said. “Act now or be forever lost.”
Duncan knew what he had to do. He just didn’t want to do it.
It wouldn’t be criminal, he knew. It wouldn’t break his oath. But it was still a terrifying and appalling thought.
“Damn you,” he muttered.
***
“You need to spend this evening in silent contemplation,” Elaine said, softly.
“I want to contemplate tearing the person who did that into very little pieces,” Johan said. He’d told her and Dread about the stunt someone had pulled with Hawke’s daughter as soon as he got back to the Great Library. Dread had been predictably furious and set out to find the person responsible. “To do that to a kid ...”
“You’re meant to contemplate why you want to be an apprentice,” Elaine said. She didn’t sound offended, merely understanding. “And if you want to back out, you can.”
Johan frowned, giving her a long look. “Are you ... are you having second thoughts?”
“My offer of an apprenticeship was genuine,” Elaine assured him. “But you do understand that you will be binding yourself to me for at least five years? If you want to back out, the time is before you take the oaths.”
“If I can,” Johan said. He wasn’t blind to the risks Elaine was taking. If, for some reason, his magic refused to allow him to uphold his share of the oaths, Elaine would be binding herself to him without him being bound to her. “But I have already made up my mind.”
Elaine smirked. “I will be a very hard taskmaster,” she said. She’d said the same thing every time the subject had been brought up. “And there will be a great deal of hard work.”
She smiled, more openly. “And research into your powers,” she added. “If we could find out a way to duplicate them ...”
Johan shrugged. The druids who had examined Hawthorne had all agreed that he was a mundane; indeed, if they hadn’t known that he’d been a Dark Wizard, they might have assumed that he’d been a victim rather than a victimiser. There was no trace of magic left in his body; Dread had noted that the side-effects of his experiments might well kill him before the former Dark Wizard could face the headsman. Johan was honestly not sure why they hadn’t simply killed him at once.
“If you can,” he said, remembering Hawke’s desperate plea for powers. Elaine had been disturbed by the request; Dread, thankfully, hadn’t stayed around long enough to hear that part of the story. It was hardly criminal to pray for powers – Johan had done it himself, more than once – but
if it were possible ... it would turn society upside down. “But I want to learn more than I want to be studied. And I want to explore.”
Elaine made a face. Johan had already discovered that she didn’t like travelling, let alone roughing it in a primitive cabin, even if they did have magic to help with the hard work. But he had convinced her to agree that they could travel ... maybe next time they’d stay in an inn with proper room service. It would be expensive, but Elaine seemed to have plenty of money, even discounting her salary as a member of the Privy Council. And Johan still had the money his father had given him. He’d checked with the bank and apparently there were no obvious strings attached.
“We can try,” Elaine said. “But not for long.”
Johan smiled. Elaine had been raised in an orphanage, where there had been dozens of kids, and she’d gone to the Peerless School ... and yet she was scared of crowds. Put her at a table with twelve others and she would barely say a word. But Johan, who had been a virtual prisoner inside his home, had no trouble blending into the crowd. He could have happily gone to one of the parties Jamal had taken such pleasure in describing, although he might have skipped the entertainments. Drunken students were bad enough, but when they started to use magic ...
“Of course not,” he assured her. He looked around her room, noting that she’d somehow managed to bring in even more books. Most of them looked to be on apprenticeship oaths; one of them which she was skimming through, discussed applying such oaths to mundanes, who could not normally swear oaths. “Did you write the oath?”
Elaine nodded. “It should be upheld,” she said. She passed him a piece of paper. “But you have to be careful. Your magic is so ... strange.”
Johan nodded. Part of the reason magicians ruled – apart from godlike power – was because they could swear oaths that would be magically-binding. A magician who gave his word, bound up in his magic, would keep it or risk the consequences. And those consequences could be anything from a nasty scar to the loss of their magic or even death. But writing an oath for mundanes ... that was hard. The magic simply didn’t lock onto them properly.
He looked down at the sheet of paper, careful not to even mouth the words as he read them. It was simple enough; he swore himself to be a good, faithful and true apprentice, to listen to his mistress and learn from her to the best of his ability. Elaine’s side of the oath was even simpler; she pledged herself to serve as his tutor and do her best for him, unless he broke his side of the oath.
“It’s almost like a marriage,” he said, in surprise. “Love, honour and obey ...”
“The oaths for apprenticeships are more binding,” Elaine said. “Most married partners are faithful only until they have produced their first children, then they tend to start finding lovers while remaining married in name only.”
Johan shuddered. He knew more than he wanted to know about his father’s affairs – it was astonishing what one could hear if one was quiet – but his imagination couldn’t cope with the idea of his mother doing anything of the sort. She must have done it with his father, at least long enough to produce her brood, yet afterwards ... the very thought was impossible. He pushed it aside, then scowled. His mother had never paid much attention to any of her children.
If I have kids, he told himself, I will treat them better.
“We should take the oaths now,” he said. “Tradition be buggered. We can do it here and now.”
“We need to do it in the Garden of Apprenticeships,” Elaine said. “Or someone will raise a legal challenge.”
Johan rolled his eyes. What sort of person would raise a legal challenge to a simple apprenticeship? But his apprenticeship would hardly be simple. Like it or not, he was sacrificing his family ties, but giving Elaine a great deal of power over him. The slightest irregularity could be used as an excuse to try to pry them apart.
“Fine,” he said. A thought occurred to him and he smiled. “But I refuse to have a stag night.”
Elaine snorted, rudely.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
When she’d been living in the apartment with Daria, Elaine had been woken at dawn by the sound of the temple singers calling the faithful to prayer. In the Great Library, wrapped in spells that muffled all sound within the building, she needed to use a spell to snap herself awake at the appointed time. Coming awake, she swung her legs over and out of bed, then stood up and glanced at the clock. It was just before dawn.
She touched the wards and sent an order – wake Johan, gently – then headed into the bathroom, where she stripped and washed every last inch of her body. The rituals of accepting an apprentice were set in stone; Johan might have been correct that all they really had to do was say the oaths together, but Elaine knew that the rituals existed for reasons that were separate from the legal niceties. They gave their practitioners time to reflect on what they were doing, why they were doing it and if they really wanted to do it. Once she was clean, Elaine used a spell to dry herself and reached for the white robe.
The wards quivered a message to her – Johan was awake and washing too – then fell silent. Elaine nodded to herself, then tied her hair back into a long ponytail. Magic made grooming so much easier, although she remembered a girl from the Peerless School who would take hours to set her hair without magic. She’d been teased regularly until she’d mastered spells to silence her tormentors, but Elaine thought she understood. There was a certain comfort, sometimes, in doing things the mundane way. Besides, magic should be treated with respect, not used as a toy. No one knew better than her just how dangerous magic could be.
Once she was ready, she picked up the wand she’d borrowed and cast a simple light spell into the air, then cancelled it and placed the wand at her belt. She knew that she should practice casting spells without a wand – it had shocked her just how hard it had been to throw that spell at Hawthorne – but there had been no time. There might not be time in the future too, she knew; tutoring Johan while studying his magic was likely to take up much of her time, to the point where she might have to pass most of her duties to Vane permanently. Her deputy probably deserved her title too.
It was a bitter thought. Elaine loved books; they had been her friends and companions since she’d learned to read, taking her places she knew she would never have the nerve to visit in real life. Becoming a librarian had seemed the natural career choice; spending the rest of her life in the Great Library had seemed a worthwhile use of her time. And she’d gratefully accepted the promotion because, if she was being honest with herself, most of the work that involved interacting with customers could be passed on to Vane. But now ...
Maybe I should claim Howarth Hall, she told herself, and smiled. There were so many creditors that it still remained empty, despite the vast number of people who wanted to own a house in the Golden City. Maintaining it would still be beyond her, but perhaps she could rent rooms to visitors and only keep one floor for Johan and herself. But she still didn’t want anything from the young gambler who had largely ignored her and then sold her out. Besides, his creditors might just start pressuring Elaine instead ...
Bracing herself, Elaine strode out of her room and down into Johan’s suite. She tapped once, then opened the door; Johan was standing in front of the mirror, admiring himself. The white robe he’d been given made him look like a druid, although there was no belt of herbs or sickle hanging down to mark his rank. And, of course, the robe was of a different sheen; he couldn’t pass for a druid at close range. But then, falsely claiming to be a magician or a healer was a criminal offence.
“You look good,” she assured him, as he turned to face her. The white robe would be worn once and then placed in storage, at least until Johan’s eldest son decided to take on an apprenticeship. His family didn’t have any robes in storage and probably wouldn’t have let Johan use them if they had. “But you also look tired.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Johan confessed. “Is that normal?”
“I was never an apprentice,” Elaine admitted.
“I have no idea if it is normal or not.”
Johan smoothed down his robes, then sighed. “Do we get something to eat before we go?”
“I’m afraid not,” Elaine said. “Once we swear the oaths, we will go eat at the temple and then come back here.”
“It does sound like a marriage,” Johan remarked. “What else do we do together?”
Elaine flushed, then rubbed her cheek in some annoyance. They would be living together, but as master and apprentice rather than husband and wife. She would give him a room in her suite, maybe even reconfigure parts of the library to grant them more space. Maybe they did need to find a house they could use ... hell, maybe she should swallow her pride and go outside the city. It was cheaper there, with fewer prying eyes.
“We work together,” she said, sternly. She saw him trying to fight back a giggle and rolled her eyes. “And you learn from me. I have a ton of books you have to read before you get a morsel of breakfast.”
Johan scowled, then realised that she was joking. He knew how to read – his tutors had been good, even if they hadn’t been magicians – but she knew that he didn’t share her fascination with books. For her, they had been an escape; for him, they had just been part of the prison walls holding him in. Still, there were quite a few books he ought to read – and not all of them were on magic. His father, for some reason, had never bothered to teach him more than a little etiquette.
Probably thought that his powerless son would forever remain a secret, Elaine thought. And now it’s too late to rebuild his relationship with Johan.
“We should get a great breakfast,” Johan said. He made a show of rubbing his tummy. “What do they serve at the temple?”
“The kind of food they think that all apprentices should be served,” Elaine said, dryly. In truth, she had no idea. There were ritual meals, but they weren’t part of the apprenticeship ceremony. “Are you ready to go?”
Bookworm II: The Very Ugly Duckling Page 36