Chapter Eleven

“I’m going to cast a spell,” Elaine said. “I want you to cancel it.”

Johan nodded. Elaine had taught him several cancelling spells, each one more complex than the last, and he was looking forward to trying them. If his magic couldn’t be cancelled as easily as a normal magician’s magic, he might be in some trouble when it came to actually using his gift. As it was, he seemed almost ridiculously powerful. But would that be any good if he couldn’t be an effective magician?

Elaine waved her wand in the air, creating a glowing ball of light that cast an eerie radiance over the compartment. Johan watched her precision with some envy; he hadn’t dared try the light spell again after the first result, but Elaine was clearly a skilled and practiced magician – and probably very powerful. She would have to be to serve on the Privy Council, he knew, either in magical or political terms. His father had once noted that the whole system was designed to ensure that sorcerers who might try to unseat the Grand Sorceress were given a stake in the system.

“I meant to ask,” he said. “Why do you use a wand?”

“I need it for precise spellwork,” Elaine said, a hint of embarrassment in her tone. “And much of my spellwork depends on precision.”

Johan frowned. “And would you be helpless if you lost your wand?”

Elaine shook her head. “I’d just have problems casting the more complex spells,” she admitted. “But then, as anything can be used as a wand as long as there is no iron in it, I can always use something as a replacement.”

She smirked. “Magicians who talk about the wands all the time are clearly overcompensating for something,” she added, then nodded towards the glowing ball of light. “Cancel it.”

Johan had to smirk too, remembering Jamal’s boasts – and then he cast the spell. The ball of light blinked out ... and Elaine stumbled backwards, staggering slightly. Johan stared in alarm, wondering what had happened ... and trying to decide what to do. Surely, he told himself, he couldn’t have hurt her. Could he?

“Sorry,” Elaine mumbled. “That was a bit of a shock.”

“I didn’t mean to do anything,” Johan said, frantically. Panic threatened to bubble up inside his mind, overpowering common sense. Elaine’s condition reminded him all too strongly of how he’d felt after his first unwanted transfiguration. “What did I do?”

Elaine pulled herself together with an effort. “Your spell was, as always, too powerful,” she said. “You not only cancelled my light spell, you also cancelled most of the protections I cast on myself.”

Johan stared at her. He was the first to admit that he knew little about such spells – Charity had never taught him anything about them – but surely they couldn’t be that easy to defeat.

“They can’t be,” Elaine said. “Under normal circumstances, you would have to break them down or overpower them ... which, I suppose, is what you did. But a normal cancelling spell shouldn’t have done anything to my protections. I wrote countermeasures into them just to ensure that no one could do that.”

Johan nodded, unsure what to think. Protections would be useless, he assumed, if a simple cancelling spell could destroy them. So would the wards his father controlled, the ones that protected the house. Breaking them down, according to his father, would require both power and skill. But if his spell could just burn through them ...

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. He liked Elaine. She was the first person he’d met who had never talked down to him. “I don’t know what I did.”

“I’m not sure either,” Elaine admitted. She knelt down, composing herself, then looked up at Johan. “How are you feeling? Any tiredness?”

“No,” Johan said. He felt as if he could go on for hours. “Is that normal?”

“... No,” Elaine said. She stood up right, frowning. “The level of power you use even in a single spell should have exhausted you. You’re very new to magic, yet you seem to have vast reserves of power. I’m not quite sure what that will do to you.”

She smiled, rather wanly. Johan realised, with a flash of bitter guilt, that having her protections stripped away had hurt, even if she seemed normal now. He hadn’t meant to hurt her ... he considered, briefly, abandoning magic altogether, before dismissing the thought. This was his one chance to prove himself in a world that sneered at those without magic. He couldn’t abandon it, no matter the danger.

“I want to try something else,” Elaine said. She picked up the notepad and wrote down the details of another spell, then passed it to Johan. “How does that sound?”

Johan glanced at it. “It looks simple enough,” he said, slowly. “What does it do?”

“Levitates objects,” Elaine said. She walked over to the workbench and removed the cauldron, placing it and its useless contents on the floor. The books floated up into the air and headed out of the room, presumably to somewhere where the other librarians would pick them up and return them to the shelves. “I want you to try to make the table float into the air.”

She walked back to stand behind Johan as he stared at it. The workbench was heavy, made of solid wood; it seemed impossible for a single man to lift, even with magic. But he’d seen Jamal levitating heavier things – and Johan himself, more than once. Maybe if he tried ...

He said the words, his tongue stumbling slightly over the longer ones, and made the gestures. The workbench shivered, then launched itself into the air and smashed against the ceiling with terrifying force. It shattered, sending pieces of wood flying everywhere; Elaine raised her wand and hastily cast a protective ward in front of them. Johan watched in horror as the remains of the table glanced off the ward and crashed down on the floor. Splinters, sawdust and even pieces of stone drifted through the air, slowly settling down.

Johan looked up. The ceiling was cracked and broken, tiny lines radiating outwards from where the table had struck the stone. A sudden horrified image of doing that to a person ran through his mind; they’d be smashed into a bloody pulp, rendered utterly unidentifiable. If Jamal had been able to put him in danger with lighter spells, the gods only knew what Johan could do now.

“I ...” His voice sounded shaky, even to himself. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“You shouldn’t have been able to do that,” Elaine commented. She took the notepad, ripped out the page she’d written on and stuffed the paper into her robes. “You see, that spell was a fake. A normal magician could cast it all day and the workbench wouldn’t even have moved a millimetre. But you made it work.”

Johan scowled. “I thought it was illegal to write down fake spells,” he said. “Or isn’t that a rule that applies to Privy Councillors?”

Elaine didn’t seem to take his jibe personally. “That law has never been honoured,” she answered, instead. “Every sorcerer who comes up with his own spells does something to them to make it difficult for others to work out how to cast them. Quite a few fledging magicians have run into trouble trying to cast such altered spells, particularly ones designed to rebound on the caster if the spell isn’t fixed first. But this ...”

She tapped her pocket meaningfully. “A real magician would have known that it wasn’t a real spell,” she explained. “He would probably have reported me to the Inquisition. But you ... you managed to cast it.”

Johan felt himself torn between indignation and exhilaration. On one hand, he was insulted at the trick she’d played; on the other hand, he knew more about his abilities now than he’d known before she’d given him the fake spell.

“Thank you, I suppose,” he said, grudgingly. “What do we do now?”

“I think you’re going to have to work on control,” Elaine said, “which isn’t going to be simple because your magic is different from everyone else’s magic. Most of the exercises I was taught aren’t likely to be helpful for you. What do you actually feel when you cast a spell?”

Johan frowned, trying to put his feelings into words. “It ... it just happens,” he said, softly. “I cast the spell ... and it works.”

Elaine’s frown matched his. “You don’t feel any effort?” She asked. “No strain. No sense of actually having to work?”

“No,” Johan said. “It just happens.”

“Strange,” Elaine said.

Johan could understand. Jamal had pretended that his magic came to him effortlessly, but Johan had seen him staggering home after a particularly gruelling session at the Peerless School, so drained that he’d almost forgotten to be unpleasant to his powerless brother. His younger siblings had cast their first spells ... and then collapsed into sleep, unable to even keep their eyes open a moment longer. For Johan to do it so effortlessly ...

A thought struck him. “Could I have been doing magic all along without noticing?”

“I don’t see how,” Elaine said, after a moment’s thought. “There are some magicians who wind up so badly wounded that all of their magic is diverted to heal them, leaving none for them to use to cast spells, but they were still magicians. You were never a magician until suddenly you were.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why then?”

“I don’t know,” Johan said. “If all I wanted was to be free of Jamal’s spell, wouldn’t it have happened a great deal earlier?”

“Precisely what I was wondering, particularly given the damage to your body caused by repeated transfigurations,” Elaine said. “If you had something in you that lashed out, why did it wait so long to work?”

She reached out and squeezed his hand. “What else did he do to you?”

Johan didn’t really want to talk about it, even to her. And he wasn’t really sure that he wanted the mystery solved either.

“I need to know,” Elaine said. Johan gave her a sharp glance. Had she read his mind? He’d heard that there were magicians who could do that, although he’d never met one. Jamal certainly couldn’t, or he would have used the ability to torment Johan all the more. “It will be painful, but it has to be discussed.”

“Once, then,” Johan said, feeling the age-old bitterness welling up inside him. Was he never to be free of Jamal’s torments? “He turned me into frogs, snakes, rats and all kinds of objects. He cast compulsion charms on me and forced me to steal food from the pantry or humiliate myself in front of the maids. He hung me upside down with levitation charms and floated me up and over the city.”

Elaine blanched. Johan could practically read her mind. The other charms, as unpleasant as they were, could be countered, but if Jamal had lost control of the levitation charm Johan would have plunged to certain death.

“If you had magic, such experiences should have brought it out of you,” Elaine said. There was a low note of pure anger in her tone. “But floating you into the air ... that could have been really dangerous. Your magic might have disrupted his, sending you plunging down towards the ground. Didn’t your father have anything to say about it?”

Johan shook his head. “I used to think that he would tell Jamal off after I got my magic,” he said. “And then ... and then he didn’t seem to care.”

“It isn’t uncommon to use pressure to try to get magic to develop early,” Elaine said. “But doing it like that ... your success could have killed you.”

She shook her head. “And as to why you developed magic now ... we’ll just have to keep working on it.”

Johan nodded, reluctantly. In truth, he didn’t really want to question the miracle.

“I think,” Elaine started, and then stopped. “Wait a moment ...”

She cocked her head, clearly listening to a message from the library’s wards. “That’s interesting,” she said, after a moment. “Your sister is here, asking for you.”

“Charity,” Johan said. “Why ...?”

“The more pertinent question is how she knew to come here,” Elaine commented. “Vane is speaking to her now, but she’s being quite insistent. Do you want to see her?”

Johan hesitated. “I don’t know,” he admitted. His father had political power ... did he have enough to force his way into the Great Library against the wishes of the Head Librarian? Or could he bring pressure to bear on Elaine? “What would happen if I said no?”

“Vane would tell her to go away,” Elaine said. “There’s no pressure to talk to her if you don’t want to talk to her.”

“You have sisters?” Johan asked.

“No,” Elaine said. “Just powers of observation.”

Johan scowled down at his hands. Charity was almost tolerable ... and he wanted to show off a little, to gloat to the family that had mistreated him for so long. But at the same time he wasn’t sure he wanted to see any of them again. He didn’t have to be part of the family, not when he could cut all ties and vanish. They couldn’t keep him prisoner now.

“I don’t know,” Elaine said, into the silence. “But I do think that we need to find out just what they know.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Johan decided. “Can you ask her to join us here?”

“She can meet us in one of the study rooms,” Elaine said, standing up and walking towards the door. “I don’t want her to see this room.”

Johan followed her through another series of winding corridors – the Great Library was a maze, designed to make it harder for intruders to find the books they wanted – and into a small room designed for students. There was a table, a handful of chairs and a bookshelf with a handful of well-known reference textbooks chained to the shelf. Johan grinned as he realised that the users would be able to put them on the table, but not take them out of the room.

“People keep trying to take them out of the room and it’s too much hassle to spell them to remain here,” Elaine said, when she saw him looking at the books. “I can stop people taking them out of the library, but not moving them from room to room. And we still have problems with students hiding books behind the shelves or charming them to be impossible to find without the right counter-charm.”

“Particularly before exams,” Johan guessed. “Can’t you do something to stop them?”

“We try,” Elaine said. “Anything unique can be charmed to remain in one place, but newer books are often harder to protect ...”

She looked up as the door opened again. “And here is your sister,” she said. “Do you want me to stay here?”

Johan found himself torn. Part of him wanted Elaine to stay, part of him wanted to talk to Charity in private ... if there was such a thing in the Great Library. It was one of the most heavily warded buildings in the Golden City. In the end, he shook his head. Elaine nodded in agreement and walked past Charity, out into the corridor. The young girl who had shown Charity into the room smiled brightly at Johan and then followed Elaine, leaving Charity and Johan alone.

Charity looked ... worried, Johan realised. She’d been sweating over her exams, but this was worse ... worse than she’d been when she’d feared that her last boyfriend wouldn’t be good enough for her father. Johan felt a cold shiver running through his body; what, he wondered, had scared her so badly. And how much did she know?

“Johan,” she said. Surprisingly, she enveloped him in a hug. “I’ve been so worried. And it was all my fault!”

“I don’t see how,” Johan said. “What happened to you?”

“Jamal’s been arrested,” Charity said. She sounded too shocked for it to be a joke. “The Inquisitors came and took him away!”

“And not before time,” Johan said, unable to hide his amusement. His brother had worked hard to kill all sibling loyalty he might have otherwise felt. “I’m sure father is really annoyed about it.”

“He is,” Charity said. “And he was worried about you too.”

“I doubt it,” Johan muttered. His father had never expressed any worry about Johan personally, only the family name. If a dark wizard had captured him, his father would have been more concerned about the threat to the powerful members of the family. As if there was any threat. Away from his family, Johan would have been just another mundane. “How long is Jamal going to remain in jail?”

“No, don’t tell me,” he added. “Father’s going to go to the Grand Sorceress, spin some sob story about Jamal having been overworked and convince her to let him go free, no doubt with an apology for wasting his time. Who cares about some mundanes when Jamal is the one at risk?”

“He’s your brother,” Charity pointed out. “And this could really upset the family’s position ...”

Johan fought down the urge to sneer, despite his growing anger. “And why should I care?”

“The family gave you a life,” Charity said. “You owe father respect, if nothing else, and you should not undermine his position.”

“How can you take his side?” Johan demanded. “You know what he did to me, what Jamal did to me ... you rat, you ...”

Charity shrank. She shrank so rapidly that her clothes fell down around her, hitting the ground where she’d been. Johan stumbled back in shock, staring at where his sister had been standing. A moment later, a rat nosed its way out from under the robes and stared up at him.

He found his voice, somehow. “Charity?”