Some would say that she was being overly cautious, but Alys had no intention of learning magic while there was any danger of being seen. She trusted the household staff implicitly, but that was not a reason to take foolish risks. Not when Delnamal was in search of an excuse to condemn her entire family for their relationship to the women who had changed the world. She cracked open her daughter’s door to find Jinnell pacing the room, hands outstretched before her. Her heart thudded against her breastbone, and she could barely draw a full breath as she hastily stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
“Jinnell Rah-Sylnin!” she hissed, though she wanted to scream it. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Jinnell jumped and turned toward her mother’s voice. Her milky white eyes said she could see very little of the physical world—hence not having noticed her mother entering the room—and spoke quite clearly to what she’d been doing. The film cleared as she closed her Mindseye and blinked to restore her worldly vision.
Jinnell raised her chin and met her mother’s eyes with stubborn pride. “You promised we would learn magic together. Yet we have not cracked open Grandmother’s book. I thought I’d see what I could learn on my own.”
Alys suppressed a groan, wanting to shake some sense into her daughter. “If someone other than me had walked in—”
Jinnell rolled her eyes. “No one except you would walk into my bedroom at this time of night. Not without knocking first, at least.”
That was, of course, why Alys had chosen to hold their first magic lesson when the entire household was supposedly asleep. Both she and her daughter were dressed for bed in shapeless—but wonderfully comfortable—white nightdresses, their hair confined to single long braids down their backs.
“That isn’t the point!” Alys snapped.
Jinnell arched an eyebrow. Under other circumstances, Alys might have laughed, for she knew precisely where her daughter had learned that particular expression. “Forgive me, Mama. What is your point precisely?”
What an infuriating, cheeky child!
Alys reined in her temper—temper that was fueled entirely by fear—and took a couple of deep breaths to calm her racing heart. When next she spoke, her voice came out sounding considerably calmer.
“My point, Jinnell, is that unless my mother’s spell had effects of which I am not yet aware, you do not have a penis.” She had the satisfaction of seeing her daughter’s eyes widen with shock and her mouth drop open. “Without one, being caught practicing magic could land you in the Abbey for the rest of your life. When the consequences are so dire, one must take every imaginable precaution, no matter how unnecessary it might seem. If we take only the precautions we think necessary, we will be caught.”
Jinnell looked as if she were going to argue, then thought better of it and sighed. “You’re right, Mama.” She frowned. “Why are you coming into my room without knocking in the middle of the night anyway?”
Alys couldn’t help the little smile that tugged at her lips. It showed how distracted Jinnell had been that it had taken her this long to ask that question. Alys reached into the pocket of her dressing gown and pulled out her mother’s book. “Why, to start learning magic, of course.”
Jinnell grunted and threw up her hands. “Oh! You are impossible.”
“I believe that’s my line. Save it for when you have a child of your own.” Turning her back on her daughter, she withdrew a key from her dressing gown pocket and locked the bedroom door. It was considered highly improper for an unmarried girl to lock her bedroom door—the assumption being that the locked door signified she was doing something she ought not—but Alys’s presence would erase any suggestion of impropriety.
“Let us sit where we can both see the book clearly,” she said when the door was secure, gesturing to the tufted velvet settee at the foot of Jinnell’s bed.
Jinnell hurried to her seat, eyes alight with excitement. For a girl who’d shown little interest in being educated beyond the minimum requirements for a noblewoman, she seemed surprisingly eager for their lessons to begin. And once again, Alys was struck by the sense that she didn’t know her daughter as well as she’d thought. She had never thought Jinnell was stupid, but she had to admit to herself that she’d considered the girl shallow, perhaps even a bit vapid.
“Considering you were worried my visits to the Abbey were a blight on your reputation, you seem surprisingly open to delving into magic,” Alys said as she sat by her daughter’s side.
A touch of color appeared in each of Jinnell’s cheeks, and she fidgeted. “I’ve always been fascinated by magic,” she admitted. “I know it’s not proper, but…well…” She shrugged.
Alys was struck by a startling certainty. “Tonight wasn’t the first time you’d played with Mindsight, was it?”
Jinnell gave her a sheepish grin. “Not exactly,” she said. “I thought that as long as everyone believed I was painfully proper, no one would ever suspect.”
Alys shook her head. If she thought too much about the risks her daughter had been taking for who knew how long, she might run screaming from the room. It was best she try to forget about it and move forward.
Opening her Mindseye, Alys found several motes of Rho and fed three of them into the book. Then she closed her Mindseye once more so she could see the book. She opened it to the first page, which had once held the letter from her mother. That letter was gone, replaced with new text.
Lesson One
Before you can work with magic, you must become proficient at identifying the elements. Open your Mindseye and look around you. Pick an element you do not recognize and touch it to the page. The book will identify it for you. The stronger your magical ability, the more different elements you will be able to see. With your bloodlines, you will be extremely gifted and should have no trouble seeing all of the most common elements available near Aaltah’s Well.
When you have entered forty elements, the book will test you by showing you a picture of each element you have learned. When you can identify them all, the next lesson can begin.
“Forty elements!” Jinnell wailed, reading along with Alys. “It will take forever just to find that many, if we even can!”
Alys blinked and realized she had made an unreasonable assumption when she’d decided to share the magic lessons with Jinnell. She briefly opened her Mindseye once more and glanced around the room. To her Mindseye, the room was like a sea of stars, with an almost countless variety of colors and patterns. She didn’t need to count them to know she saw well more than forty different ones.
“How many different elements can you see in this room?” she asked Jinnell.
Jinnell stuck out her lower lip in what was probably an unconscious pout, then opened her Mindseye and looked around. “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “Maybe about twenty-five?” Her eyes cleared and she met Alys’s gaze. “How many can you see, Mama?”
Alys took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “A lot more than that.”
Jinnell gaped at her. “But, Mama, Corlin tested as Prime level, and as far as I can tell, I can see about as many elements as he can. That puts us both well above average. If you can see a lot more than that…” She huffed out a deep breath, shaking her head. “Papa was only Medial level. I should have known what it meant that Corlin and I both seem to be higher level.”
Alys shrugged. “How could you know? It’s not as if they test women or even acknowledge that our magic has any value. Even if the men of the Academy knew how many elements I could see, they would dismiss my abilities on the grounds that I can see only feminine and neuter elements.”
“Do you see only feminine and neuter elements?”
“Of course I do,” she answered without thinking.
“How do you know? You can’t actually identify most of what you see, right?”
Alys frowned, for Jinnell was correct about that. “Well, seeing as I’m a woman, it’s safe to assume that I see only feminine and neuter elements, but I suppose we’ll find out.” She patted the book.
“Even if you don’t see the masculine elements, I’ll bet you see enough to be labeled an Adept, just like Uncle Tynthanal.”
Alys’s first instinct was to demur. How could she claim to be an Adept when women were not supposed to be assigned any magical ranking whatsoever? But she had sneaked a few glances at magical texts in her day, and she’d seen that to be labeled as an Adept, a man needed to prove he could see one hundred elements or more. One day when she had visited the Well in the depths of the palace, she’d taken the insane risk of opening her Mindseye and had counted how many different elements she could see spilling from the Well. She’d made it to fifty before confusion took over and she couldn’t remember which she’d already counted and which she hadn’t. But even in her confusion, she’d felt quite certain she had counted less than half of the elements she could see. Even if many of those elements were feminine and of questionable power, it wasn’t such a stretch to label herself as Adept.
“Maybe,” Alys finally said, squirming a bit at the prideful admission. “We shall see as I learn to identify the elements. Let us start by identifying those elements that we can both see.”
She opened her Mindseye and looked around the room. “Pick an element, and I’ll let you know if I see it, too. We can skip Rho, naturally.”
“And Aal,” Jinnell agreed, pointing at a cluster of Aal motes.
“Yes. Now pick something else. Something you don’t recognize.”
Jinnell pointed at a purple-pink mote with iridescent hints of silver in it. “Do you see this one?”
Alys nodded. “That’s Oon,” she said.
“Oh. Right. It seems proper you should be able to see your namesake elements.”
“Perhaps, but it’s no sure thing.”
“How about this one?” Jinnell pointed to a medium-blue mote with a broad stripe of red across its center.
“I can see it,” Alys said, “but I don’t know what it is.”
“Let’s find out.” Jinnell drew the mote toward the book, then they both had to close their Mindseye to see the result.
Von. F. Soothing, calming. Essential for pain relief spells and sleep spells.
“Oh,” Alys and Jinnell said together. The book wasn’t just going to tell them the name of the element, but also its gender and use.
“I suppose we’ll have to look at Rho and Aal, after all,” Alys said.
Jinnell let out a small sigh. “See, I told you this was going to take forever.”
Alys shivered, but it was a chill of unease, not cold. They could not move on to the next lesson until they could identify forty elements, and it might take time to find that many that both she and Jinnell could see. It was still possible that Alys was worrying over nothing, that the sense of urgency that drove her to share her mother’s book with Jinnell was all a product of her imagination. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that time was not on their side.
“I think perhaps we need to spend more time on this than we might have thought,” she told her daughter, hoping she was keeping the anxiety out of her voice. “I’m sorry I waited so long to start. From now on, we should do this every night while the rest of the household sleeps.”
Something in her daughter’s eyes told her Jinnell had heard the thread of anxiety despite her attempt to hide it. But Jinnell asked no questions. And in contrast to her usual desultory response to the prospect of studying, she made no protest.
There were few places in Aalwell, indeed in all of Aaltah, that Delnamal hated more than the dungeons. He did not like to think of himself as squeamish, and he certainly didn’t feel sorry for the wretched creatures who found themselves imprisoned there, but the place oppressed him in ways that made little sense, considering he had no fear of ever occupying such a space himself.
The prison was of modern design, and scrupulously clean. Neither the cells nor the corridors was especially dank or damp, and any vermin that crept in were periodically exterminated. On its surface, even the light-starved dungeon cells where the most unfortunate criminals were entombed were not the storybook pits of despair. Prisoners were provided with straw-tick mattresses, their slops were emptied frequently, and though the temperature was always uncomfortably cool, each prisoner had a single thin blanket to wrap up in for warmth.
It wasn’t the physical conditions of captivity in the cells that made the dungeons into a living nightmare. No, the nightmares occurred when the prisoners were dragged out of those cells, and it felt as if the very walls had absorbed decades’ worth of screams and terror and misery.
Delnamal shivered as he made his way down the narrow staircase to the dungeon level by the light of a flickering torch. The Crown was not about to waste costly luminants on the wretches in the prison, and despite the basic cleanliness of the place, the walls were stained with soot and scorch marks, and the air smelled faintly of smoke. Then when he came to the bottom of the stairway and stepped into the cell block, the smell of smoke was immediately drowned out by the sharp bite of body odor. The slops might be frequently cleaned, but the prisoners themselves were not.
Delnamal gritted his teeth against a nearly overpowering desire to turn and flee. Surely no one would blame him if he merely allowed the inquisitor to give him a full report of everything he had learned—along with a clinical listing of the methods he’d used to pry out the information—after it was all over. But he knew without having to be told that his father would expect him to have the balls to at least pay a visit and get an in-person report. Certainly King Aaltyn himself had presided over many an interrogation, considering it part of his duty as king. Even knowing that, Delnamal might have turned back, were he not certain his cowardice would immediately invite comparisons to the courage and strength of his half-brother.
Several guards were gathered in the guardroom directly below the staircase, and the inquisitor was there as well. The men were laughing over some jest, the sound echoing through the stone corridors in a direct mockery of the misery that shrouded the place. All leapt to their feet and bowed when Delnamal entered, the laughter dying as if it had not existed. When they quieted, he could hear the faint sound of someone weeping in the distance—a sound far more suited to the environment than laughter.
“What have you learned?” he asked the inquisitor, without much hope of a satisfactory answer.
The inquisitor eyed him warily, no doubt knowing his news would not be pleasing. “I have thoroughly examined all three prisoners, Your Highness,” he said. “In my professional opinion, they had no knowledge of the spell that was cast, nor have they any idea how it was accomplished or how it might be reversed.”
Delnamal cursed, though it was the answer he’d expected. He’d spoken to the grand magus of the Academy, one of the most magically gifted men he’d ever known, and the man had repeatedly assured him that what the abbess had done was impossible. Regardless of the very obvious evidence that it was, indeed, possible. Expecting three old abigails to know the secrets of the working was unrealistic. And yet he expected it anyway.
“That is not satisfactory,” he told the inquisitor.
A hint of worry shone in the inquisitor’s eyes, but his voice remained calm. “I can examine them further, of course, and I will if that is your wish. But they are all elderly, and two of them are particularly frail. I fear if I push them any harder, their hearts may not be able to withstand the strain.”
Delnamal narrowed his eyes. “Surely you have ways of keeping them alive for questioning.” Delnamal knew little of the inquisitor’s art, but he did know there were magic items that could repair even potentially fatal injuries.
“I can prevent them from dying of their injuries,” the inquisitor agreed. “But I cannot make their bodies young and strong once more, and all three are close to reaching their natural limits.”
It was of no consequence to Delnamal if all three of the women expired. They were traitors anyway, whether they admitted it or not. If Delnamal had his way, the Abbey would be razed to the ground and all the women within slaughtered. It was called the Abbey of the Unwanted for a reason, and while some might miss the women’s services, it would take little time to rebuild the Abbey and start anew.
Not that Delnamal was going to get his way. The king still considered those wretched women his subjects, and he would not condemn them all even if there were strong evidence to link the three arrested abigails to the crime. Which there wasn’t.
“By all rights, their lives should be forfeit,” Delnamal said. “If the rigors of your examination should cause one or more to expire, you have my word that you will not be held responsible. They must be made to confess.” Delnamal held the inquisitor’s gaze, willing the man to understand the full meaning of his words.
The inquisitor’s jaw tightened. He was a hard man, with a hard job, but perhaps even he hesitated to torture old women into confessing to a crime he was convinced they did not commit. But whether those particular abigails were guilty or not, Delnamal was sure that damned Abbey was to blame for the Curse that had stolen his heir. And he would find a way to make them pay no matter how reluctant the king might be to condemn them.
The inquisitor swallowed and dropped his gaze to the floor. “I understand, Your Highness,” he said with a slight bow of his head. “I will offer the prisoners additional inducement to tell the truth.”