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Chapter 1: Water and Ice
The goats of the Magicians’ School had eaten all the cabbage again. Two of the prospective students had, without explanation, vanished like dandelion-fluff with the spring breeze. And the ice-house refused to stay cold. Garrett Pell, Second Sorcerer of the Middle Lands, rubbed the spot between his eyes exhaustedly and pondered the desirability of a hermit’s life. In a cave. On a rock spire. Without a ladder.
“You said to tell you,” Jennet said, “about the ice-house. Because we should eat the cheese. Can we eat the cheese?” Short, golden-haired, pretty as an illustrated manuscript, she’d been selling dreams and charms and fortunes that came true more often than not, down in the Dark Quarter of Averene’s capital city, when the Grand Sorcerer had wandered distractedly by and swept her up into his wake.
“Cheese,” Garrett echoed. “Yes. Fine. I’ll be right there.” He had been attempting to catalog the nine scrolls Lorre had unceremoniously dumped on the table, histories of magical herb-lore which Garrett was fairly sure had been stolen from the Royal Library in Kiersk. One of them had a Library seal, which Garrett had pointed out. Lorre had said, shrugging, “Magic belongs with magicians, and they weren’tusingthese,” and Garrett had opened his mouth to explain private property yet again, and had watched his Grand Sorcerer turn into a dragonfly before his eyes.
The breeze, with some sympathy, whirled through the arches of the open window. The window was open because it had no glass as yet, because Lorre had promised to do that and hadn’t.
Garrett exhaled, found a stone to anchor the scrolls—the would-be magicians’ library had many rocks, at least, left over from the raising—and in doing this accidentally knocked his pen off the table, and then swore silently and creatively for several seconds while picking it up. And then made sure that his expression was perfectly composed when he looked back up at his hovering apprentice. “Is Quen around? Because if he’s not busy—”
“He’s clearing out the water,” Jen supplied. Her fellow apprentice, one of the four who hadn’t vanished, had aquatic gifts, to a degree. “Because the ice melted.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me before it got this far—no, never mind.” That wouldn’t help. “How’re your dreams? Are you sleeping well enough?” They emerged from the room that would be the library into the long shaded walk with old-fashioned columns, one of the bits of work the Grand Sorcerer had done himself when raising the half-finished School. Garrett, not for the first time, brushed a hand against the closest column, basked in the resonance of polished curving stone, the sun, the heaviness.
“Better,” Jen agreed. “With your shields on top of mine. It’s helping.”
“Better isn’t perfect. I’ll see what else I can do. Glimpses of the future are confusing enough when they’re not tangled up with dream-logic. There might be something in one of the histories of wild magic.”
“It’s really almost all under control,” Jen said, with an expression that suggested that she thought her Second Sorcerer should not add yet another apple to his metaphorical teetering apple-cart. “Really.”
Sunlight flickered in and out through the columns, across the lapis-lazuli blue of the pool Lorre had made in the central open garden, surrounded by what would eventually be four stone wings. The north and east sides were finished, enough for students and workrooms and the beginnings of the library; the other sides waited, bare, unroofed.
The School, or what would be the School, two months into its construction, stood on a low curving hill outside of the capital city of Averene, near enough to make some of the merchants and farmers and nobility uneasy, far enough to keep most messy magic at a distance. The site glimmered green and misty on spring mornings, beside the river that flowed down through the heart of the wealthiest of the Middle Lands kingdoms. The stone, which Lorre and Garrett had called up together from the bones of the earth, glowed white as pearl, as a beacon.
Lorre had wanted that brightness, that symbol: both the beckoning and the hint of power, as the School kept itself clean and sharp. Garrett, who’d grown up with the tumble of imported indigo-carmine-sapphire silks, the tastes of cinnamon and black pepper, the glow of carved jade statues and the glint of gold-flecked tapestry-weavings that filled his family’s merchant storehouses and caravans and private home, kept wanting to hang a burnt-umber drapery or put an ornamental silver box on a bare shelf.
Something, at least. Anything.
He loved the School, though. He loved it in his soul, his heart, his self. When he and Lorre had stood on the hill, and all the magic in the world had swept up and through them, Lorre’s crackling crescendo of rainbows answered by Garrett’s own slow unfolding earthwork of power, the steady solid presence of rock and heat and mountains and old places of the earth—
Magic left him breathless, quickened, alive. He touched the second column in line, brown fingertips over white stone. He’d given birth to it, after a fashion. He wasn’t Lorre. But no one else could be that, certainly no one alive in this present-day newly-begun sixteenth century. Garrett, entirely human and not made of half-wild magic, did the best he could. He hoped it’d be enough.
As he followed Jennet past the side arch, where a road—also half-finished—would lead down the hill, a lean wry figure detached itself from lounging against the pale curve. “Sorcerer.”
“Unless you’re here to help with the cheese,” Garrett said, “go away. No, wait. Do you know anything about goats?”
“Why would I know anything about goats?” Alexandre de Berri, youngest and prettiest of the King of Averene’s eight grown sons, fell into step beside him. “Why do you need me to know things about goats?”
“I don’t. Need you to. What does your father want?” At his side, Jen made a tiny squeaking sound with regard to this manner of speaking to a prince. Garrett, who’d got to know Alex over the last two months, had no regret.
“I can’t come to see you out of my own personal interest?”
Garrett considered his own grey-streaked brown hair, ink-stained fingers, worn boots, occasional lapses into earth-thick silence, versus the prince’s aristocratic height, velvet coat, smoky amber eyes, amused laugh-lines, ability to make duchesses and mage-apprentices swoon with a glance. “No.”
“What was happening with your cheese?”
“The ice-house melted. Our answer’s still no.”
“Father would like to be on good terms with you. Some donations—money, artisans, materials—we could help raise walls, offer tapestries, gold plate—”
“And we’d owe the King of Averene a favor.”
“We’d never ask for anything that wouldn’t benefit our mutual relationship, of course.”
Garrett stopped walking. “The School and the Court don’t have a relationship.”
Alex stopped too. His hair tumbled to his shoulders, fashionable, bedroom-loose, in dark waves. His eyes, beautiful, were amused and—surprisingly—tired. “Ah, yes. That would be why you and the Grand Sorcerer chose—without asking, might I add—to place your school here. In Averene. With us.”
