It is my final determination that the Kwen female, who dresses improperly, labors outside the home, and engages in all manner of masculine activities unbefitting her supposed sex, does not qualify for a woman’s rights and protections under Tiranish law. We do not afford the cow gentler treatment than the bull, nor do we afford the mare gentler treatment than the stallion. If we begin making exceptions among our human beasts of burden, sloth will take them, and we, the true Tiranish, will know no peace. On this basis, I dismiss the request that the Kwen complainant may claim in the court the same rights and protections as a Tiranish lady.
—Archmage Justice Mandor Therwin (249 of Tiran)
Girl Talk
lba laughed when Sciona laid the pieces of the spellograph before her.A
“They were going to throw this away?”
“They already had. I rescued it.”
“Thank goodness for that!” Alba said as she tied her leather work apron
behind her.
“So, you can fix it?”
“Sure. I mean, some components are a little bent, and it looks like we’re missing a screw or two.”
“Shoot, really?” Sciona had been so sure she’d gotten them all.
“Yeah. Post-325 models like this have six screws securing the base instead of four, but it’s not a problem. They should be easy to replace.”
“That’s a relief,” Sciona said. “I thought you mostly handled clocks, so I wasn’t sure.”
“Yes, but Harlan was a clock company before they moved into spellographs. So, when Mr. Kenning gets a Harlan tech to come by the shop, we’ll usually train on a bunch of their products—watches, spellographs, waffle irons. It’s cheaper to get certified all at once.”
“Oh.” Sciona was sure Alba had explained this part of her job before; it had just fallen out of Sciona’s head, displaced by her own “more important” musings.
“The diagrams obviously live at Kenning’s, but I remember them well enough,” Alba said. “Hang on while I get my kit.”
“Thank you,” Sciona said as Alba re-entered the room with her leather roll of tools. “I know this is a lot to ask after a long day at work.”
“Yeah,” Alba said, “which is why you’re going to wash the dishes.”
“Right.” Sciona had almost forgotten her end of the bargain. Alba and Aunt Winny usually took care of the housework and left her to her studies.
But it wasn’t as though she could properly begin her work until the spellograph was finished anyway, so there was no reason she couldn’t lend her cousin a hand.
“If you even remember how to wash dishes,” Alba teased gently.
That was all Alba ever did—gently tease—about Sciona’s total disinterest in housework. In another household, that attitude would have been actively punished, but not here. Alba and Aunt Winny had always picked up Sciona’s slack in the house while she pursued her every ridiculous aspiration. Sciona had grown up assuming they did this out of faith—an unspoken belief that if they just took care of the house and let Sciona study, great things would come of it. But there was a flaw in that calculation, she realized as she stacked Winny’s chipped plates by the sink.
Alba and Aunt Winny didn’t care for glory the way Sciona did or wealth the way so many others did. It wasn’t faith at all—nor any notion that Sciona’s talent would one day reward them with status. It was love.
“Well, this is nostalgic!” Alba sat before the mess of spellograph components and unrolled her kit of screwdrivers, pliers, and tiny wrenches.
“I’ve been on clock duty for so long; it’s been ages since I worked on a spellograph. This should be fun!”
“I’m glad,” Sciona said, rolling up her sleeves and crossing to the sink.
She had been doing her best not to use magical energy, but there was no way around running the tap with Alba sitting right there. Shutting her eyes against the guilt, Sciona turned on the water just long enough to fill the sink basin. So, the dishes might be a little grubby. It was better than turning the tap on again to rinse each plate separately.
“God, these pieces are in beautiful condition!” Alba marveled. “They should hire me at the University if their techs are too dumb to reassemble this hardware.”
“Yeah.” Sciona submerged the first plate in the warm water. “I think they’re more interested in efficiency than conserving…anything.” Raw material or human lives. How many Kwen had died because someone had wanted to save an hour—or a few minutes, or a few seconds—of work?
Sciona needed to stop thinking about that. Not because it didn’t matter but because picturing it paralyzed her, and she couldn’t afford paralysis.
“Are you okay, Sciona?” Alba asked, glancing up at her cousin’s face.
“Aunt Winny said you haven’t been eating much since the…” The Magistry had called it a “hysterical breakdown” on Sciona’s record. A wonderful way to begin one’s career. “What’s wrong?”
“Well, if you get that spellograph fixed and everything else goes to plan,
you’ll know by Feryn’s Eve.”
“I will?”
“It’s not something I can really explain.” And who would believe her— who could bear to believe her—if she did? After speaking to Bringham, Sciona had decided that there was only one way forward. “You have to see for yourself.”
When the dishes were done, Sciona pulled her highmage’s robe on over
her dress.
“Where are you going?” Alba asked.
“I need to get copies of some keys made.”
“You’re wearing your robes out to get keys made?” Alba said in surprise. Sciona usually avoided wearing her robe unless it was for work.
The stares were too much.
“They’re laboratory keys.” Sciona didn’t mention that they were the keys to every laboratory in the Magistry. “I just want to look official.” Like the head janitor at the Magistry, the local key maker couldn’t very well question a mage in white robes.
Sciona got back from the key maker’s hours later to a very sleepy Alba and a finished spellograph.
“It works, then?” Sciona said, running her fingers over the paper rest, barely marked where Alba had hammered it back into the correct shape. “I could use it tonight?”
“Use it?” Alba yawned. “You said you were getting it fixed for a
colleague.”
“Sure, but I have to test it first.”
“Sciona.” Aunt Winny clicked her tongue from where she sat in the corner, mending one of Alba’s work blouses. “You’re supposed to be resting, not tinkering with magic machines.”
“And anyway,” Alba added, “I thought it was against the law to use a Magistry spellograph outside the designated areas. Won’t it trip some kind of magical alarm and get you in trouble?”
“Only if I activate a spell.” The restriction was the Magistry’s way of protecting the uneducated populace from accidentally activating magic that might hurt them. Of course, it also meant no individual could practice truly powerful original magic outside Magistry facilities. “I won’t be mapping or siphoning. I just want to test that the typing function still works.”
“Right.” Alba rolled up her toolkit. “Well, I’m off to bed, then. If the ’graph malfunctions, don’t wake me. I’ll fix it in the morning.”
Sciona touched her cousin’s arm before she left the kitchen. “Alba…”
“Hmm?”
“I’m glad I’m here.” It was a thought Sciona had never voiced aloud.
But it was something she probably should have told her aunt and cousin every day since she was tiny.
Alba blinked. Aunt Winny’s needle had stilled.
“What are you on about?”
“I’m glad I ended up here,” Sciona repeated, “with the two of you, instead of with my father.”
Until the words were out of her mouth, Sciona didn’t quite understand what had changed in her. There had always been a part of her that wondered what her life could have been if Perramis had wanted her. What would it have been like—what might she have made of herself—with access to the resources of a man like Perramis?
In the space of a day, Archmage Bringham and Cleon Renthorn had killed that nebulous longing she had carried for all these years. Even a kind father like Bringham reached a point where he sat her down and tried to rein her in. Even a brilliant male heir like Cleon Renthorn twisted and chafed beneath the weight of his father’s legacy. Sciona appreciated now that there was nothing for her on that alternate path.
Alba and Aunt Winny had given her something no respectable Tiranish father ever would have: freedom. And because they were simple working women, because they didn’t embody the greatness Sciona was chasing, she had never given them credit for it.
Without knowing when they had started, Sciona found herself blinking back tears. “I don’t think I could have asked for a father in all of Tiran to replace you two. I wanted to say that.”
Aunt Winny, who had never in Sciona’s memory accepted a compliment, shifted in her skirts like a bird fluffing its feathers, plainly pleased but unwilling to acknowledge it. “Ridiculous girl. Off to bed you go —and take your noisy machine with you.”
“Yes, Auntie.” Sciona smiled and reached for the spellograph.
But before she got there, Alba caught her up in a hug—so tight, Sciona’s eyes bugged out a little, and she couldn’t breathe. Just when Sciona thought one of her ribs might crack under the pressure, Alba let her go and placed a kiss on her temple.
“ ’Night, sweetheart, and be good to yourself. Make sure you get some sleep.”
“I will,” Sciona lied, and Alba crossed the room to give Aunt Winny a kiss on the cheek.
When the truth came out, Sciona knew that these two would both prove braver than Bringham and better than Renthorn. They wouldn’t try to silence Sciona for her discoveries. They would understand.
With a smile, Sciona lifted the spellograph from the kitchen table and headed to her room, her arms straightening out under the machine’s weight.
The fact that Thomil had thrown the thing across the room with one hand still made no sense to her. When she had nudged the Harlan 11 into position
atop her writing desk, she pulled a box of matches from a drawer. She hadn’t switched on the magical bulb in her room since finding out about the Otherrealm. Striking a match, she lit the crowd of candles on her desk, cracked the fogged window so the smoke wouldn’t go straight to her brain, and sat before the spellograph.
The machine didn’t really need testing. Alba wasn’t sloppy; she’d have checked basic functions like whether the keys worked. But handwriting would be too slow for the volume of work before Sciona. She had a runic typewriter in her closet, but it had a sticking key, and no typewriter handled like a Magistry-grade spellograph.
Breathing in the cool, sobering air from the window, Sciona experienced a flicker of doubt. Was this the right thing to do? Half the spellwork had already taken form in her head. It was waiting, buzzing, at her fingertips.
But the moment she stamped it on paper, the plan would be in motion, and for Sciona, trying to stop a plan in motion was like trying to stop a train on declining tracks.
She had to pause here and ask herself one last time: Are you really going to do this, Sciona? Is this the mark you want to leave on the world?
Doubt froze her there as the chill air crept in, threatening the candle flames. But she thought of the black-haired girl bleeding out into the ocean.
She thought of the tears standing in Thomil’s eyes when he spoke of the crossing. She thought of Bringham’s paternalistic dismissal all through their last conversation. Ultimately, it was the memory of Renthorn’s tongue in her mouth that drove her resolve home. Her fingers hit the keys, and every
mad thought in her head poured forth.
Feryn damn her.
Feryn damn them all.
It was a scale and complexity of spellwork no mage should have attempted over a single night, but Sciona had little choice. If she didn’t have her plans in place before the meeting of mages, she might have to wait another year for all of the High Magistry to gather in the same place. And this couldn’t wait.
She didn’t realize she had gone to sleep on her work until she woke to Alba’s hand on her shoulder and the imprint of spellograph keys on her cheek.
“God!” She blinked as she took in the light outside the windows. “What
time is it?”
“Past noon, honey.”
“Past noon!” Sciona had lost half the day! “I have to go.” She stumbled from the desk, shuffling spellpapers into her folio as she went.
“Go?” Alba said in worry. “Where?”
Sciona didn’t answer as she hauled out her travel case—the big one with the wheels—and dug through her clothes for less-loved blouses she could use to cushion the spellograph.
“I thought you were taking some time off to relax.”
“Work relaxes me.”
“My goodness, what is all this?” Alba asked as she took in the sheaves of spellwork stacked on the desk, the bed, and the floor around Sciona, the mountain of scrapped pages overflowing from the trash in such volume that the bin itself was nearly buried.
“This”—Sciona scrubbed her hands over her face—“is a very complicated spellweb. The most ambitious I’ve ever attempted in such a short time.”
“You mean…” Alba trailed off in disbelief. “All this is one spellweb?”
She might not know much about magic, but she had seen the amount of paper Sciona’s other projects occupied. Never more than a few-inch-thick stack.
“Yeah.” Sciona smiled sleepily. “Eat shit, Renthorn.”
“What?”
“I mean, he will if I can just get it polished. They all will.”
After Sciona’s night of work, the web was structured but far from finished. Since one couldn’t test magic on this scale, Sciona needed a second set of eyes to be as sure as she could that it would work. And the spellwork itself was only part of her plan. There were other pieces for which Thomil would be essential.
“Sciona, darling,” Alba fussed as Sciona packed the spellograph into her travel case. “I’m glad to see you engaged in your magic again, but I really think you should rest a little longer.”
“Not an option. Not before this spellweb is done.”
“And where are you going?”
“I can’t finish on my own. I need my assistant.”
“You what?” Alba blinked as though sure she must have heard wrong.
“Since when do you need anyone’s help with magic?”
“I don’t know,” Sciona admitted. “Since pretty recently, I guess.”
This was one of the subtler changes that had taken hold over the past two and a half months. Sciona didn’t just tolerate Thomil anymore; he had become part of her process, part of the way she did magic, when, for twenty years, it had been a solitary art.
She tore from the apartment as fast as she could while dragging the spellograph and all her papers in the wheeling case behind her. Catching the first train headed west, she stopped by the Magicentre just long enough to grab a ream of fresh spellpaper from a second-floor storeroom, return Dermek’s keys to his office, and leave a note under the keys in blocky letters no one would identify as a mage’s handwriting:
Send no one to clean the master spellographs on the evening of the twenty-fifth. If things go sideways after that, DO NOT come to work. Keep yourself and all your staff at home. —Meidra
Of course, Dermek could have no idea what things going sideways would look like, but he’d know it when it happened. It would be impossible to miss.
By the time Sciona left the Magicentre, her travel case was so heavy the wheels were creaking in protest. She only got it on the train to the Kwen Quarter with help from two other passengers, and Aunt Winny turned out to be wrong about how dangerous this part of the city was. Sciona—a diminutive Tiranishwoman in a nice dress, slowly struggling down the
street with a large bag—made it all the way to her destination without getting robbed. Some Kwen stared, and at one point, a laborer stopped to help her get the travel case over some uneven cobbles. He laughed at her a bit, but that was the only indignity she suffered.
Lugging her burden up the metal grate stairs to Thomil’s apartment took everything in Sciona’s body, but she managed it, one painful step at a time.
Then, sagging against the case for support, she knocked at Thomil’s door.
This time, Carra was the one who answered the knock. And if Thomil’s expression upon seeing Sciona on the stoop had been cold, Carra’s was
withering.
“Oh,” the teenager said, “it’s you.”
She was better groomed today, her face washed of everything but that puckered crescent scar, her stunning red hair plaited down her back, though she still wore a boy’s trousers and suspenders.
“Hello, Carra.” Sciona tried for a polite tone that didn’t sound condescending—Feryn knew she had loathed the condescension of adults when she was Carra’s age. “May I come in?”
Carra considered Sciona, her frown deepening before she jerked the door the rest of the way open. “Whatever.”
“You’re not going to stab me again?” Sciona smiled, only half joking.
“I haven’t decided yet. Are you gonna be a bitch?”
An involuntary laugh burst out of Sciona. “I’ll try not to be.”
“Great. Then you can come in.”
“Thank you.” The wheels of Sciona’s travel case caught on the threshold, and she realized she simply didn’t have anything left in her arms to lift it over.
Carra watched her struggles with total disgust for a moment before muttering, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!,” and shouldering Sciona aside.
The stringy fourteen-year-old gripped the bag handle with one hand and lifted it into the apartment. She might not be Thomil’s real daughter, but she sure had his strength.
“My uncle is out running errands.” Carra dropped the travel case loudly to the floor. “You can sit or whatever. I don’t care.”
“Thank you,” Sciona said again as the girl stalked from the entrance to the tiny excuse for a kitchen.
Sciona’s immediate impression was that the apartment was barer than it had been on her first visit. She wasn’t sure how that was possible when the two Kwen owned so little, but a tattered suitcase stood in the corner, straining at its fastenings.
“Are you two taking a trip?” Sciona asked.
“Uncle Thomil says it’s not safe for us to stay here now that you’ve got him messed up in your business at the University. So, thanks for that.”
“You two should be safe,” Sciona said, though she knew better than to say trust me. Her judgment had hardly been reliable of late. “As far as the Magistry knows, Thomil’s been fired for unrelated reasons.”
“I know,” Carra said shortly. “It’s still best if we can’t be found at the
address the University has on file.”
“Do you have someplace to go?”
“I’m not telling you where we’re going,” Carra said indignantly.
“I just mean—I wanted to know if you needed any help. I have some money—”
“Not from you,” Carra snapped over the clink of crockery, and Sciona decided it was best to drop the matter. “So, why are you here, exactly? You wanna scream and cry some more about stuff that’s your fault?”
“No.” Sciona couldn’t help keeping an eye on the kitchen area, watching for a knife. “That’s not the plan, anyway.”
Carra didn’t have a knife when she returned. Just a teacup on a cracked saucer.
“Tea.” She set the cup down hard in front of Sciona, glaring. “I didn’t
spit in it.”
Sciona almost laughed again. “No?”
“I’d have done it in front of your face. It’s the Caldonn way.” Carra folded those wiry arms over her chest. “If we’re gonna hurt someone, we do it to their face. We don’t sneak around and lie about it.”
“Like when you were about to literally put a knife in my back?” Sciona asked.
“I would have said, ‘Hey, Highmage,’ and waited for you to turn around so I could put the knife in your face. But you try beating my uncle to the mark at anything.”
“He is fast, isn’t he?” Sciona remembered Renthorn flying backwards onto the library floor and found, to her annoyance, that she couldn’t smile at the memory. Not without a scream welling in her throat.
“He was a hunter before he was a janitor or handyman or anything else,” Carra said. “You have to be fast to be a hunter.”
“Well, thank God for that. His speed has saved my neck twice now.”
“His gifts aren’t of your god,” Carra spat, “and they’re not for you.”
“All right,” Sciona said, not sure why Carra took objection to that particular observation. “I just meant—”
“He got hurt, you know.” There was something raw in Carra’s voice, pain breaking through the hostility. “For protecting your Tiranish honor from that rat man.”
“He told you about that?” Sciona felt shame color her face. God, was there nothing Thomil didn’t share with his fourteen-year-old niece?
“Not like it was a big shock,” Carra said without sympathy. “I guess the one surprising part is that the shit weasel went after an upstanding Tiranishwoman this ti—”
“Wait, you said Thomil got hurt? What happened?”
“The guards obviously beat the hell out of him, you idiot.”
“No! But—I covered for him! I said—”
“That you were firing him for incompetence,” Carra said impatiently.
“You know, that’s more than enough for a city guard to think they get to
teach a Kwen a lesson.”
“Is he all right?”
“You don’t get to ask that!” Carra snarled. “The only reason I didn’t push you down those stairs to your death just now is that I promised Uncle Thomil I wouldn’t. That and I know he’s wanted to punch that greasy rat in
the face for ages.”
“What—Highmage Renthorn?”
“Who else?”
And Sciona abruptly remembered the look on Thomil’s face when she had suggested that the two of them might end up working under the spellweb specialist. Thomil had known something about Renthorn the Third that Sciona hadn’t, something that had made him wary, even back then.
“You’re not drinking the nice tea I made you,” Carra snapped, jerking Sciona from her thoughts. “That’s rude.”
“Right. Sorry.” Sciona lifted the cup and took a conciliatory sip.
Convenience store tea was always rough; rather than dried leaves, it was an alchemical powder that was intended to simulate real leaves but always came with a caustic aftertaste. This particular convenience store tea was also oversteeped and ice cold—possibly from yesterday. “Mmm.” She smiled and set the cup back on its saucer. “Just like I used to make.”
Carra eyed her in cold confusion.
“If a boy classmate told me to make him tea, I’d always do it, but I’d make sure it was good and cold and nasty before I handed it to him. It’s a quick way to let a man know you’re not interested.”
“Don’t try to girl-talk me, mage.”
“Try to what?”
“You think because we’re both girls that I’m supposed to have something in common with you. But we are not the same.”
“Not exactly,” Sciona conceded, “but we both grew up in a man’s world without mothers.”
“We both grew up in a mage’s world. And my mother is dead because of you and your magic boyfriends.”
Sciona bit down on the I didn’t mean to and I didn’t know that rose in her throat.
Your guilt is useless to us, Thomil had said, and he was right. If Perramis walked through the door today to whine that he “didn’t mean to” abandon his wife to illness and his child to poverty, what good would that do Sciona? What good would it do Carra now?
“My father came apart while I was in his arms,” Carra said. “My last memory of him is the skin coming away from his face so I could see the white of his skull.”
Sciona tried not to grimace. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Uncle Thomil tells me about the things my father used to say to me, the nicknames he used to call me, the stupid jokes he used to tell to make me laugh. When I try to remember any of that—when I try to remember what his voice sounded like—I can only hear the way he screamed. Blight took all of him. Even my memories of him. So, don’t talk to me like we’re the
same.”
And God damn it, Sciona was crying.
“Don’t do that!” Carra said in rage. “You don’t get to do that!”
“Do what?”
“Cry like I’m the one who’s done something bad to you.”
“Would you rather I not cry?”
“I’d rather you and all your mage friends shoved your staffs up your asses and died!”
“I’m—” Sciona swallowed, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “I’m not crying to get your sympathy.”
“Aren’t you?” Carra demanded. “That is how Tiranishwomen solve their problems, isn’t it? You just mope and cry, and woe is you, and everyone comes tripping over their dicks to rescue you.”
A laugh burst through Sciona’s tears. “That’s not…” Sure, there was some truth to what Carra was saying, but Sciona resented the stereotype.
“It’s not like women—or Tiranish—have a monopoly on crying.”
“No,” Carra agreed. “You just have a monopoly on the woe is me of it
all.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You think that if a Kwen girl cries over unwanted attention, any mages come running to save her? No. She gets fired or disappeared, along with any Kwen man stupid enough to come to her defense. So, forgive me if I have trouble feeling sorry for you.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me. I promise.”
“Yeah, well, you’re so floppy, and shrimpy, and pathetic, it’s hard not to.”
“Hey, now!” Sciona half laughed through the tears. “I know I’m shrimpy, but I’d remind you that I’m as old as your uncle.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes he’s pathetic too.”
“Like when he wouldn’t let you gut me with a hunting knife?”
“Exactly,” Carra said. “See, we are getting to know each other.”
And Sciona was growing to find the feral child’s bluntness refreshing.
She took a moment to mop up her tears without making any more excuses.
Maybe she was being manipulative. And that wasn’t what she wanted to do.
She wanted to be honest.
“The way I was orphaned…It’s not something I can compare to the crossing. I understand that. But I’m also starting to understand that the culture that had my mother die alone, that left me without a father, is the same culture that orphaned you. The experiences aren’t the same, but they’re all connected.”
Carra was looking at her with the same disapproving frown as always, but for once, she didn’t interject, so Sciona took that as an invitation to go on thinking aloud. “My mother was sickly after I was born and only lived until I was four.”
Then came the interjection she had been anticipating: “You do look like you were born of a sickly woman.”
Sciona let her have the insult and continued. “After she died, my father shoved me off on my mother’s widowed sister. So, he’s still around”—still holding political office and throwing his wealth all over the city—“just not
part of my life.”
“How sad,” Carra said flatly.
“I know you’re being sarcastic, but it is sad. It’s pathetic, frankly, that a whole class of men have gotten away with selling themselves as protectors and saviors when they’ll sacrifice their inferiors—women, Kwen, their own children—the moment it’s convenient for them. Your father…It sounds like he was a true protector. So was your mother. A man like my father shouldn’t get to put himself above them or reap the benefits of their deaths.”
“Mm,” Carra grunted. It was the first response she had given that wasn’t an outright attack, and Sciona was encouraged.
“I don’t need you to feel bad for me, Carra. We don’t need to be friends —or even friendly. I’m…I admit, I’ve been slow on the uptake, but I’m starting to understand how ridiculous it is to demand civility when the world is so disgustingly uncivil. So, I’m not here to ask for your friendship
or your grace.”
“Good.”
“I’m here because I have a plan that I think—I hope—will make things better. When your uncle gets here, I’ll explain it to you both.”
“Didn’t you have a plan last time?” Carra said. “How’d that go, Highmage Genius?”
“That wasn’t a plan, per se,” Sciona protested. “That was a conversation I needed to have with my mentor. This time, I have a real plan.”
“You think that anything you do can make this better?”
“No. Not retroactively. Obviously, we can’t bring back your parents or undo any of the other damage Tiranish magic has already wrought. But I do think we can make things better for the Kwen in the future. And even if we can’t—if I’m just insane—don’t you think it’s worth a try?”
“I don’t know why you’re asking me.” Carra scowled.
“Because I need to ask Thomil’s permission and yours before going ahead.” Sciona thought she knew what she was doing, but ultimately, this parade of horrors had begun with mages imagining they knew what was best for the world, acting and taking without permission. “If I’m going to activate this spellwork I’ve planned, I at least have to ask Thomil if he thinks it’s a good idea.”
—
“That’s a terrible idea,” Thomil said when Sciona had explained her
spellweb.
“What?”
“Told you.” Carra smirked at Sciona.
“Oh, shush, Carra,” Thomil said in exasperation. “Go wash up.”
“But—”
“Wash, child. You’re tracking soot everywhere.”
Thomil and Carra hadn’t relocated to another building in the Kwen Quarter. Instead, as soon as Thomil arrived back at the apartment, they had taken their meager belongings, along with Sciona’s travel case, and snuck into an upscale neighborhood well outside the slums.
One of the people Carra cleaned for was the widow of a former district councilman. What remained of her late husband’s wealth allowed the woman to keep a sizable house—just not quite so extravagant that she employed live-in servants. That was how Carra knew the property would be unattended during the week of Feryn’s Feast, which the widow spent at her son’s home in the hills of the farming district on the far side of the city.
Carra entered down the chimney and let Thomil and Sciona in through the back garden gate out of view of the neighbors.
A week ago, Sciona would have balked at the idea of a pair of Kwen breaking into a respectable Tiranish home—to say nothing of joining them.
Now she just found comfort in the thought that, at least in the short term, no one would think to look for Thomil and his niece in a place like this. It was a beautiful house. Not an archmage’s mansion, by any means, but the sort of home Sciona had always dreamed of buying for Aunt Winny one day— tall windows overlooking a private garden, a kitchen with wide maple countertops, and a sitting room spacious enough to entertain a whole neighborhood of friends. There were so many cupboards that Thomil had to open half a dozen before he found the teacups.
“Why is it a terrible idea?” Sciona demanded when Carra had left them.
Thomil shook his head as he searched the lower cupboards for a kettle.
“Just sit, Highmage. I’ll mm”—he winced as he bent a little too sharply and disturbed some injury in his side—“make some tea, and then we’ll talk about it.”
“No.” Sciona rounded the counter to put a hand on his shoulder. “No, you sit. And we’ll talk now while I make the tea.”
“I’m not crippled, Highmage.” Thomil shrugged the hand off in annoyance. “I carried your silly travel case all the way here, didn’t I?”
“I shouldn’t have let you do that.” Had Sciona’s arms been working, she wouldn’t have.
Thomil looked terrible. The Magistry guards had split his lip and left deep violet bruising along one side of his face. And the general stiffness of his bearing suggested that that wasn’t the worst of it. He moved like someone had tried to stomp his ribs in or— “Oh, stop that, Highmage!” Thomil snapped.
“Stop what?”
“Making those sad green eyes at me.”
“But this is my fault.”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit.” Jaw clenched, Thomil straightened up with the tea kettle. “I did what I did, and I’d do it again.
You’re the one who suffered the worse indignity, and you’re the only reason I’m not dead, so just…go a little easy on yourself.”
“All right, this is the other thing that worries me.” Sciona grabbed the spout of the kettle and pulled it toward her. “You’re being much too nice to me, all things considered. I’m not irreparably damaged either, you know.”
There was a struggle over the kettle. Thomil won, but the fact that he did
not do so instantly was worrying.
“I mean it, Thomil. Sit down.”
“No.”
“Sit, and I’ll stop making the sad eyes. I’ll stop being sympathetic altogether. Deal?”
Thomil considered the proposal for a moment. “Fine.” He pushed the kettle to Sciona and gingerly sat on a kitchen stool.
“Now…” Sciona drew a dipper of water from the bucket Carra had brought so they wouldn’t have to use the tap conduits. “You don’t like my spellweb. Why?”
“Come on, Highmage Freynan,” Thomil said, weariness shadowing his face as deeply as the bruising. “If the mages at the heart of Tiran don’t care about the fate of the Kwen, what in the world makes you think the average people of Tiran will feel any differently?”
“Because the average people are…well…people.”
“And mages aren’t?” Thomil raised an eyebrow.
“No.” Sciona felt that this should be quite obvious. “Mages are detached from reality. They’re obsessive, socially stunted egomaniacs. You know, like me,” she said and was relieved to catch Thomil suppressing a smile. “They’re not a representative sample of the Tiranish population.”
Thomil’s smile was torturously fleeting, as always. “I see what you’re saying. I do. But I’ve known a lot of non-magic Tiranish citizens who could give any mage a run for nastiness. Case in point.” He gestured to his split lip.
“Thomil, I am so sorry about that,” Sciona started before remembering that she had promised to roll back the sympathy.
“It was worth it to punch Highmage Renthorn in the face. Wanted to do that for a long time.”
“Yeah, that’s what Carra said. Why him, specifically?” Sciona asked as she located the case where the councilman’s widow kept the logs for her wood-burning stove and tugged one free.
“I’ve cleaned up after a lot of highmages, most of whom I wouldn’t have pegged for mass murderers. But Renthorn…We all knew there was something a bit wrong with that man. Something no amount of hair product or pressed robes could cover up forever.”
“Wait, when you say you all knew…who’s the ‘all’ in that sentence?”
As far as Sciona was aware, Renthorn’s colleagues and superiors thought well of him, admired him, enjoyed his company. She had thought she was the exception.
“Most Tiranishmen prefer to ignore the Kwen who work for them.
Renthorn rather enjoys tormenting them. Female staff won’t clean his laboratory if they can avoid it.”
“Female staff?” Sciona looked up from the wood-burning stove with a terrible feeling crawling up her spine.
“I’ll put it this way: if I had found you fooling around with some other mage in the library, I might not have been so quick to jump to conclusions.
But the cleaning girls talk. When the whispers got back to Mr. Dermek, he started rearranging the staff, taking pains to keep the girls out of Renthorn’s
path. That’s why you almost never see maids cleaning up on the fourth floor, only men.”
“So, Renthorn habitually…” Sciona swallowed, not wanting to put the vile thought into words. “I wasn’t the first?”
“You may have been the first Tiranish woman, but no,” Thomil said grimly, “certainly not the first.”
“And the women on the cleaning staff? They told you this?”
“Not directly. That’s something Kwen women discuss with each other, not the men, but there are things a man can infer. Also, shortly after Mr.
Dermek removed the female staff from the mapping laboratories, I had my own run-in.”
“Your own?” Sciona said in horror. “What are you saying?”
“It wasn’t too bad,” Thomil said hastily. “Highmage Renthorn asked me where his usual maid had gone. I told him the truth—that she’d left the Magistry to work elsewhere—so he smashed a test beaker over my head and then stabbed me with the broken neck.”
“He stabbed you?” Sciona was on her feet, suddenly wishing very much that she hadn’t let Renthorn get away with a single punch to the face.
“More than once.” Thomil pulled his shirt down to show a collection of
thin white scars.
“God! Thomil—”
“After that, he stood over me and made me pick up the glass with my bare hands. From what I understand, this was much kinder treatment than some of the girls got.”
“I had no idea!” Sciona exclaimed. “You should have told someone!”
Thomil let out a harsh laugh. “Yes, I’m sure Renthorn’s superiors would have dropped everything to protect a few cleaners from a highmage. After all, Kwen well-being is so very important to them.”
“The Magistry’s image is important to them, though,” Sciona protested, scandalized.
“Yes, but it’s far easier to dismiss and discredit a few Kwen than it is to condemn an archmage’s son. Cleon Renthorn banks on that, I think, when he chooses his victims. With you, I don’t know what he was thinking—
maybe that he could use your recent breakdown to claim that you were imagining things?”
“I don’t know that he was thinking much at all,” Sciona said, remembering the animal hunger in his eyes.
But the depressing thing was that Renthorn probably would have gotten away with whatever he wanted, despite his carelessness. Sciona did not have anything like his social standing, and his colleagues already thought she was going insane. A week ago, she would have said that Archmage Bringham would believe her version of events over Renthorn’s and pull for her against the rest of the Magistry. Now she wasn’t so sure. Or rather, she was still sure that Bringham would believe her; she just no longer believed he would support her when it mattered. He would want an ugly truth like that covered and forgotten. God—an awful thought crossed her mind—what if Bringham already knew about Renthorn’s behavior? Why not, given everything else he had quietly decided to ignore?
“Is Renthorn always that sloppy about his extracurriculars?” Sciona asked, wondering if it could possibly date as far back as his time at Trethellyn Hall. “I mean, do you think the other mages know?”
“Of course they know,” Thomil said. “Highmage Tanrel was in Renthorn’s lab while I bled all over the floor. He barely glanced up from his books.”
“They just don’t talk about it,” Sciona murmured. She was coming to understand the hideous pattern that governed the Magistry’s relationship with the Kwen.
We do not speak of it. It is in poor taste.
Having prepared the stove, Sciona struck a match and tossed it into the bed of tinder beneath her logs. Fire flared on the twigs to lap at the greater logs above.
“Well, it doesn’t matter how willing the Magistry is to cover for their wayward son,” Sciona decided. “Renthorn’s already made the mistake that will be the end of his career.”
“What? Crossing you?” Thomil said with a fond smile that warmed something in Sciona she hadn’t realized could still feel warmth.
“No,” she said as fire rose to fill the belly of the stove. “Putting you in my lab. If he didn’t enjoy bullying his inferiors quite so much, we wouldn’t have ended up together, would we?”
Thomil’s smile turned wry. “Well, it remains to be seen whether it was his mistake or ours.”
“I take your point about Renthorn, though,” Sciona said, “and I’m sorry.
It was stupid to ask why he wasn’t stopped.”
“It was,” Thomil agreed, “for the same reason this whole idea is stupid.
Your average Tiranish citizen is not going to care about the fate of Kwen.”
“Well, they can’t care if you don’t give them a chance,” Sciona protested.
“Sciona.” The exhausted note in Thomil’s voice broke her heart. “We had this conversation yesterday. And I wasn’t going to say I told you so—”
“It’s not the same,” Sciona insisted. “Most Tiranish people aren’t like Renthorn.”
“But they don’t need to be like Renthorn for this to go poorly,” Thomil said. “They just need to be like Highmage Tanrel or Archmage Bringham, strongly preferring to look away.”
“Archmage Bringham and Highmage Tanrel have never been publicly confronted. That will make a difference.” At least, that was what Sciona had kept telling herself as she worked through the night on her spellwork. “And again, we’re still talking about highborn mages, men who don’t live in the real world. Kwen have lived side by side with Tiranish in my neighborhood for decades.” Granted, Sciona never interacted much with them, but Winny did. Alba did. “My aunt exchanges holiday gifts with them, same as anyone else.”
“Your aunt sounds like a lovely person, but—”
“There was a boy from my neighborhood,” Sciona said. “One of the baker’s sons. He went off to be a barrier guard last year. When he came back—after seeing what happened to the Kwen at the barrier and being forced to keep it a secret—he couldn’t take it. He took his own life.”
“So, your evidence that regular citizens will take this revelation well is that your sample size of one killed himself?”
“All right, it sounds bad when you put it that way, but consider: he couldn’t talk to anyone about what he’d seen, couldn’t do anything about it.
If everyone in the city knows, everyone will have to come to terms with it.
Together. There will be a mass reckoning.”
“And you think that will go well, do you?”
“Is she still at it?” a voice said, and Carra rounded the corner, drying her long hair with a borrowed towel. “Gods, mage, I tried to tell you he wouldn’t like your idea any better than I did.”
“I’m so sorry, Highmage Freynan,” Thomil said as Carra slid onto one of the barstools by her uncle, and he really sounded it. “I don’t think this is going to work out the way you want it to.”
“So, what am I supposed to do?” Sciona demanded. “Pretend nothing is wrong? Just let things at the Magistry go on as normal while people continue dying on the other side of the barrier?”
“No.” Thomil rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, fingers gripping the short hair there in agitation. “I just—”
“Look, I understand this is probably not the smart thing to do.”
“So, why are you doing it?” Thomil asked.
“Because I have to!” Sciona’s voice turned breathless, pleading. “Do you understand? The reason I’m still alive is that I decided that these feelings—the fear, the sadness, the rage—were all just energy, transmutable to good. But that only works if I do something with that energy. So just doing nothing? That’s not an option. That’s the only non-option.”
Thomil made an exasperated noise. “Then why did you even bother
asking my opinion?”
“That’s what I said,” Carra muttered.
“I…” Sciona faltered—then sobered. “You’re right.” Damn it. They were both right. “I’m being selfish, and arrogant, and…” Painfully, Sciona swallowed her pride and all her instincts. “If you really don’t want me to go ahead with this, then I won’t.”
When Thomil just frowned, Sciona turned to Carra, who shrugged.
“Don’t look at me, mage. If you wanna make a mess of this cursed city, I’m not jumping in to stop you.”
“And you, Thomil?” Sciona asked. “What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know,” Thomil growled in frustration. “I don’t know because I honestly don’t know for sure what will happen—to you, to the Kwen in the city, to any of us. All I know is that living honestly has always ended badly for my people, and I have the feeling it will not end any better for you.”
“But what I’m proposing has never been done before,” Sciona said as Carra rolled her eyes. “The archmages are subject to public scrutiny and judgment. Half the power they wield is political, contingent on public opinion. After the city knows what they’ve done, the Council will be the enemy, not me, and certainly not the Kwen.”
“And why do you think that?” Carra scoffed.
“Because the archmages are butchers and cowards!”
“Butchers who have given the Tiranish homes, warmth, safety, electric lights, fast trains, running water, and a sense of being blessed by their god,”
Thomil said. “That’s a lot to ask a person to give up for something as pesky as the truth.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Sciona’s voice shook. “I do. Firsthand.
But if a selfish, thoughtless egomaniac like me can see sense, why shouldn’t the rest of Tiran?” That actually got a smile out of Carra. “They have parents, and siblings, and children. They know loss. They’ll understand the atrocity of magic.”
“You forget that plenty of Tiranish don’t see Kwen as people,” Thomil said. “By the laws that govern your society, Kwen can’t be raped, can’t be wronged, can’t be murdered. This will just be a reason for the Tiranish to retreat further into that idea—that Kwen are subhuman monsters.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Among the Kwen tribes that predated Tiran, there were a people of the foothills called the Eresvin. Until my great-grandparents’ time, they were said to be the most peaceful of all people in the known world. They farmed mostly and hunted rarely for dislike of killing. By the time I was born, they had turned to cannibalism, hunting not just animals but smaller tribes. They pursued our people a hundred miles past the edge of our former territory when we were too few to turn around and fight them.”
“What? Why?”
“Because good people can turn desperate when the horrors are upon them—especially people whose culture of plenty has left them with no systems to cope with scarcity or cataclysm. Good people will turn monstrous when it’s down to their survival or someone else’s.”
“This isn’t about survival for the Tiranish.”
“Isn’t it?” Thomil asked. “It’s spiritual survival, if nothing else, yes?
The survival of Tiranish faith. Do you think your people will give that up any more easily than a starving man would give up food?”
Sciona paused.
Carra had gone very still, bright gray eyes moving between Thomil and Sciona, a little too interested in who would back down first.
“It’s a bet, then,” Sciona said finally.
“You lost the last one,” Thomil pointed out. “How can you be so sure that you’re right this time?”
“Because I have to be.” Sciona had to believe that there was good in Tiran. If not within the High Magistry, then somewhere. This great city, the pinnacle of human achievement, could not be rotten to its core. Even without God in the equation, there had to be some correlation between essential goodness and the innovation to which she had devoted her life.
“All I can say is…if you’re going to do this, I don’t co-sign it,” Thomil said. “Don’t do it for me—or for Tiran, or for the Kwen. Be selfish. Be
arrogant. Do it for yourself.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because I don’t want to be the reason anyone gets hurt. I don’t want to be the reason you die.”
“This again?” Sciona said, unable to muster any exasperation. She was too touched. “Thomil, I’m not going to die!”
“You belong to an order of mass murderers,” he said, “and you’re about to call them out in front of their followers. It’s not a question this time.
They will kill you.”
Sciona drew in a slow breath. She didn’t say it will be worth it because that would mean conceding that Thomil could be right. Instead, she said,
“This must be done.”
“So, you’re content to let the High Magistry execute you as a traitor?
Like Sabernyn?”
“No,” Sciona said. “That’s actually the second reason I came to see you.” Because despite all the optimism she had tried to sell Thomil, some deep part of her had gone cynical the moment Archmage Bringham had said progress comes first. That part of her had asked for Dermek’s keys. “I have
a fail-safe, in case I’m wrong.”
“A fail-safe?” Thomil repeated.
“Yes, but assuming the worst, I won’t be able to execute it by myself.
I’ll need your help.”
“What would you need our help for?” Carra clearly tried for an indignant tone but couldn’t quite mask her curiosity.
“Thomil’s help,” Sciona clarified firmly, “but don’t worry, Carra. You’ll
love the plan.”
“I will?”
“It’s really violent.”
