I convinced my father to let me walk the rest of the way home but I suspect I didn’t make it very far because I woke up sometime later in my mother’s private room. She and my father shared a bedroom, but each also kept a separate chamber for their personal use. In my mother’s case, it was for her two passions: medicine and astronomy.
A wall of beautifully framed star charts greeted me when I opened my eyes. I was lying on my side on her silk-covered settee.
From the age of six I’d spent countless hours in this room, sitting anxiously as my parents cast evocations in the hope of strengthening my pathetically weak connection to the six foundations of magic. The process exhausted them and left me so weak I was unable to do more than lie on the settee for hours. By now I knew every inch of every wall and every scratch on every piece of furniture in the room, so I was unsettled to see one of my mother’s silver telescopes lying haphazardly on the floor in the corner. Her writing desk held a large piece of parchment and small bottle of black ink left open, which meant she’d been in the middle of working on a new chart when my father had brought me to her. On the opposite side of the room, cabinets of healing draughts and medical supplies sat wide open, pieces of linen bandaging strewn on the floor. Guess I was in even worse shape than I thought.
Voices carried from outside the door but I couldn’t make them out. My first attempt to get to my feet failed as nausea and the sensation of dozens of rusty iron spikes piercing the inside of my skull forced me back down. One of my ribs screamed in protest. It didn’t feel broken any more, but it still hurt. A Jan’Tep must be strong, I imagined my father saying. An eavesdropper must be stronger, I added.
I clambered down to the floor and crawled on hands and knees until I reached the door and put my ear against it. Normally I wouldn’t have been able to hear through the thick wood, but normally people weren’t yelling quite this much.
“It wasn’t my fault!” Shalla shouted, her voice a half-octave higher than usual. “Kellen’s the one who cheated! He cheated!”
My father’s reply wasn’t shouted at all and yet the deep tones of his voice practically made the walls shake. “And in your pride, you betrayed your brother. Your family. Your blood.”
“But—”
Whatever she was about to say next ended in a strangled cry.
“Ke’heops!” my mother said, her voice pleading rather than commanding.
“The one is a liar and the other a traitor to her family,” my father said. “Is our blood so weak? So flawed? The House of Ra seeks our downfall, and how can I present myself as candidate for prince of our clan when my own progeny shows the seed of our line to be so foul?”
“She is a child! She doesn’t know what she—”
“A child? She sparks one of her bands every other week. Her power grows daily. What manner of mage will she become, when her spells are tempered not with humility and conscience but instead amplified by arrogance and pride?”
There was a long pause in the argument while the sound of my father’s pacing rumbled along the floorboards of the house. “I could counter-band her,” he said. “Permanently. I have the metals waiting in my study. I know the sigils. I needn’t even ask the council.”
“Husband! You cannot!”
“Father, no! Please!”
His footsteps stopped. “I am the head of this house. It is my right and my responsibility both to protect this family and to protect the clan from the threat of another rogue mage. I will bind her forever if I must. Do not doubt it.”
My mind suddenly filled with visions of Shalla being held down by the force of my father’s will as he pushed banding needles into her forearms, coloured inks of copper and silver insinuating themselves under the skin, the counter-sigils binding the magic inside her forever. I rose to my feet and reached for the doorknob.
“You say things you do not mean to,” my mother said. Her voice held a stiff tone she used only rarely, like a steel bar fresh from the forge. Even my father knew not to test that strength.
“I’m sorry, Father,” Shalla whimpered. I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding in and stepped back from the door. I knew my father loved Shalla fiercely, and yet now he seemed to be contemplating the unthinkable.
“Go to your room,” he said. His voice had lost its imperious edge, replaced by a weary resignation. “I will take time to consider the appropriate course of action.”
Several minutes passed before I heard my mother speak again, this time her tone softer, gentler. “Shalla is not like your mother, Ke’heops, nor was she to blame for what she did. Seren’tia was sick, she was—”
“She was shadowblack,” he said.
The world became silent and still, shut down by the word my father had just uttered. Shadowblack?
There are seven fundamental sources of magical force, but Jan’Tep mages are banded with only six: iron, ember, silk, sand, blood and breath. No mage is ever banded with the seventh, because shadow is the magic of emptiness, of the void, of the demonic. Our ancient enemies, the Mahdek, drew upon shadow for their spells. That’s why the Mahdek are long dead.
My grandmother had died when Shalla and I were still small children. I knew she’d lost her mind—something that can’t be allowed for a mage with her power—but could she really have been shadowblack?
No wonder our father was concerned about Shalla’s behaviour.
“Nice family you got there.”
I spun around and lost my balance, tripping over my own feet and stumbling forward. If Ferius hadn’t caught me I probably would’ve tumbled out the open window beside her.
“Reckon you can fly now, kid?”
Looking up at her I was again struck by the unruly curls of copper-coloured hair that tumbled across her features. They might have suited a lady of the high court had they not seen more sun than a broad-brimmed frontier hat could hold at bay. Her black leather waistcoat was scuffed, and her linen shirt had long ago traded its original colour for a thousand miles worth of dust. But it was the smile—curled up on one side as if she was holding back the best joke in the world—that really set Ferius Parfax at odds with the refined elegance of my mother’s study.
“How did you get in here without me hearing you?” I asked.
She steadied me and gave me a little wink. “Who can say? Maybe it was magic.”
“I didn’t know Daroman could—”
Ferius sniggered. “You Jan’Tep. So reliant on your little spells that you can’t imagine getting through the day without them. You were distracted, kid, that’s all. I’ve been tapping on that window for the past five minutes, but you were so focused on listening to your parents through that big old door that you were oblivious to what was happening right behind you. A roof snake looking for a midnight snack would’ve made a meal of you by now.”
“I nearly died from having my own sister hit me with a sword spell,” I said, irritated. “I’m not exactly at my best. What time is it anyway?”
She shrugged. “I don’t pay much attention to clocks, but I’d guess I left you here around four hours ago.”
“I’ve been unconscious for four hours?”
“Probably longer than that, seeing as how I had to spend forever explaining to your mom how I revived you.” Ferius shook her head. “And the woman calls herself a healer? Anyway, your dad had a bunch of questions, your sister had a bunch of excuses—but no one offered me anything to drink. So I left and spent the next couple of hours discovering that nothing remotely resembling a saloon stays open after midnight in this hick little town of yours. Thought I may as well come back and check on you.”
It struck me as a little odd that a Daroman cartographer—not that I believed that’s what she really was—would go to the trouble. Maybe she was hoping to get paid for saving my life.
I walked carefully back to the door to see if I could hear any more of what was happening on the other side. My parents were still arguing, though not loud enough for me to make out anything but the occasional word like “weakness” and “flaw” and, of course, my name.
Shame and exhaustion drove me back to sit down on the settee. Ferius took a seat next to me and reached into the pocket of her waistcoat to pull out a short, stubby smoking reed. “I don’t think I like your family, kid.”
Despite the fact that I’d be a corpse right now if it weren’t for her, it irked me that this woman thought she could come into my family’s house and pass judgment on us. “I suppose your family is so much better?”
“Well, my family’s all dead,” she said, lighting the reed with a match and taking a puff from it. “So they’re not nearly as noisy.”
A quiet knock at the door startled me. Abydos, our steward, entered the room with a tray. The aroma of freshly baked bread and poppy-seed cheese filled the room and tugged at me, helped along by the sharply sweet scent of mulled pomegranate juice. When Abydos caught sight of Ferius he stiffened. “I see you’ve returned, Lady Ferius.”
“I’m no lady, but yeah, I’m back.”
Abydos set the tray down on the table in front of me. “I wasn’t sure when you last ate, Master Kellen.” His eyes flicked from me to Ferius and back again.
“Oh, relax, Aby,” she said, laughing. “You look as if you’re trying to decide whether I’m here to kill the kid or seduce him.”
“And which is it?” he asked.
“Abydos!” I said, my voice rising. “This woman is a guest in our house. You will—”
“Don’t worry about it, Aby,” Ferius interrupted, casting me an angry sideways glance. “Neither murder nor seduction’s in the cards today.”
“Well then, that’s all to the good. I’ll leave you to …” The steward gave a quick nod to me, then left.
I was voraciously hungry and halfway through the bread and cheese when I saw the curious expression on Ferius’s face as she looked towards the door. “What is it?” I asked. “Abydos didn’t mean to be rude. He’s just protective of me.”
“He looks a lot like your father,” she commented.
“Oh, that. He’s my father’s brother,” I explained, taking another bite of bread before washing it down with some pomegranate juice.
“You mean he’s your uncle.”
“I … technically, yes.”
“And you talk to your uncle like a servant?”
“He’s Sha’Tep,” I said, though I was fairly sure she knew that already. The look in her eyes made me feel small. “He’s well treated, you know. Some Sha’Tep work in the mines or are sent to serve other households. Most of them live in the slums at the edge of town. Abydos lives here, with us. My father treats him like family.”
Ferius took a puff from her smoking reed. “That’s decent of you.”
She’d said it as if it was a joke but I felt guilty anyway, so I changed the subject. “Were you really just pretending to have a weapon before?”
“Weapon?”
I pointed to her waistcoat. “When Ra’meth was—”
“Oh, that.” Ferius reached a hand into her waistcoat and pulled out a small stack of rectangular paper-thin boards, each one about the size of one of her hands. Gambling is forbidden among the Jan’Tep so it took me a moment to realise what she was holding.
“Playing cards?” I asked, dumbfounded. “You threatened the leader of my clan’s council of mages with nothing but a deck of cards?”
Her face took on a theatrically offended expression. “‘Nothing but a deck of cards’? I’ll have you know that I’m deadly with these things.”
I watched as she laid them out on the table in front of us. Now that I had a better chance to see them I found myself entranced by the cards’ bright colours and beautiful, elaborate paintings. Even the ones bearing nothing but numbers and symbols were elegantly composed and stirred up stories of deadly battles and courtly intrigue in my mind.
Ferius split the cards into four stacks, each decorated with a different symbol. She picked up the first stack and fanned it out in front of me, pointing first to a card with an elaborately drawn number nine surrounded by shields. “This is a numbered card.” Then she pointed to one showing an illustration of an oddly dressed man bearing a crown seated on a golden throne decorated with chalices. “This is a face card.” She closed the fan and put the four stacks back together. “There are four suits, each with ten numbered cards and three face cards.”
“What’s that one?” I asked, pointing to a card that didn’t seem to be part of any of the suits. Instead it showed a woman carrying fire in one hand and ice in the other.
“We call those discordances,” Ferius replied, quickly removing it from the deck and stuffing it back into her waistcoat. “Those cards are a little too dangerous to mess with for now.”
Before I could ask how a card could be dangerous, Ferius launched into an explanation of the basic mechanics of the deck and described some of the games that could be played with them. She rattled off names: Country Twist, Royal Courts, Desert Solitaire, Six-Card Standoff … they went on and on. Each game had its own rules and strategies. I was utterly confounded by the complexity of it all. It had never occurred to me that there was more than one game that people played with cards.
I stared in awe as Ferius shuffled the deck, her hands moving smoothly and confidently as the cards flipped around her fingers. It was like watching a master mage performing a dazzling series of somatic shapes one after the other.
It was like magic.
“So,” Ferius said, grinning at my expression, “want me to show you a few spells?”