Page 2 of The Court of Venus

Prospero frowned. “Saturn. But no magician can raise the dead, Roland.”

Roland bit his lip, then jerked his chin toward me. It was a thrill, as always, to be acknowledged by him. “Bianca lied and said she could.”

“No, I didn’t,” I sneered back. I’d said I could calm someone about to die or help them gather their courage as they slipped away. Prospero always said emotions must be guided steadily down a determined path, just as the Moon changed from crescent to full and back again.

“If Bianca could stop death, then every courtier would kneel at her feet and call her saint.”

Roland leaned his cheek against the carriage window. “No, they wouldn’t,” he muttered to me. “You talk to yourself, and you prefer being a cat or a mouse instead of a girl.”

Then I was lurching out of the past, and there was the river again, rushing by.

Oliver, bored of the silence on the road, turned to me. “You were trained here at court,” he said. “By Prospero himself.”

I nodded. Prospero had been King Richard’s court magician and lord chancellor, but above all, my tutor. My father in all but blood. To everyone’s shock, Prospero had taken two apprentices. First Roland, and then, years later, me. Roland had never forgiven me for it.

Oliver’s cadence quickened as he told me he had been invited to court at the age of seven for an audience with Prospero, but the magician had dismissed him after a demonstration. He hadn’t wanted to live in the palace anyway, he assured me, didn’t want to be taken away from his family so young. He had eventually made his fortune off nobles who required ciphered correspondence. “To write to their mistresses,” he added, “or speak ill of the king. I’ve done well to trade in secrets.” Then he turned to me. “Did you know the prince?”

I struggled with my reply. “Yes, I did.”

“Shame he died. They say he went out riding and dropped dead, all alone in the woods. How many years ago was it now? Two years? Three?”

“Three,” I confirmed.

He looked at me strangely, then asked more questions about my upbringing at court. He was particularly curious about Roland.

Well. It had been an age since I had last laid eyes on him. I now knew him in fragments, if at all. Soon after Prince Hal’s death, Roland had returned to Alvion. An accomplished courtier, he wielded charm instead of a sword, though he was masterful with a sword, too.

Then the gossip turned. The entire court was either falling in love with him or recovering from him. The king favored him above all others, even Prospero. Roland chewed the king’s food for him, then would spit it into his mouth to swallow, like a bird for her chick.

And six months ago, the news reached me up north: Prospero dead. Queen Eleanor dead. Roland named lord chancellor.

“Guard your desires around him as best you can,” I warned Oliver. “He’ll use them against you.”

Oliver gripped the sides of the cart as it jolted beneath us. “This tourney to honor the new queen—what do you make of it? I was told it was treason to deny His Majesty a show of my powers.”

“I’m sure it’s Roland’s doing,” I said. “He’d like to know who could replace him. To survey us.”

When we were children, he would host contests. It would be things he excelled at: dancing, or lute, or archery. I always lost. There were only so many times one can stumble. Scrape their knees. Break a bone. That first humiliation—and each one thereafter—was not forgotten at court. And I had not forgotten, either.

“Are you one to hold a grudge?” Oliver asked.

He was perceptive, of course. A Mercury, master of communication. He would have noticed something in my expression, the way I watched the river like its undertow would drag me down into memory.

“No,” I lied unconvincingly.

Magicians could sense danger coming, the churn of a storm days away. We read the sky so well it nearly whispered to us. And the air was already thick and smelled of rain as we slid beneath the portcullis and into the palace courtyard.

Roland didn’t need to threaten me with treason; I wanted to come. I had prayed for it, even. I had spent years waiting for the king’s banners to crest the hill.

Until I decided to make my own way.

Two

Our kind has many names. Planetborn. Sorcerer. Magician. Wizard. These are interchangeable. Witch remains a common taunt. And coined only in recent years—mind-leech.

—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, THE CELESTIAL BODIES

The throne held no king.