God has set me forth the above to be known as the Forbidden Coordinates. Mages, have caution, for to gaze on the fruits of these coordinates within the coil is to walk a dark path and to siphon therefrom is certain and eternal damnation. So says Feryn, All-Knowing.
—The Leonid, Magical Laws, Verse 40 (5 of Tiran)
Just a Drink
ommy paused, plainly thrown by Sciona’s abrupt change in demeanor.T “I thought you were just setting up today.”
“Yes, well, I don’t have a lot of equipment to unpack,” Sciona said.
“What I do have is a lot of ground to cover if I’m going to show up those —” She clenched her teeth, realizing she couldn’t finish the thought in ladylike language.
“Your esteemed colleagues?” Tommy offered.
“See, you’re being a helpful assistant already.” But if Tommy was going to be genuinely useful, she needed him up to speed, so she dragged an extra chair over to one of the desks. “Sit.”
Tommy obeyed, and Sciona hauled a spellograph into a position where he could see the keys as she typed.
“So, here’s, um…” Sciona stopped short of saying, Here’s the first thing you need to know, because Feryn, what was the first thing Tommy needed to know? They would have to cover the basics, obviously, but this wasn’t a grade-school magic class. There was no time to dally over copying pages of out-of-context spell fragments and painstakingly reviewing all the parts of a spellograph. Perhaps it was best to go backwards, start big and work from there.
“To begin, why don’t I tell you about what I’m here to do? You know how the Mage Council is planning to expand the barrier around Tiran?”
“I heard on the radio, ma’am.”
“And you understand why this task is urgent?”
Tommy gave a noncommittal shrug, so Sciona went ahead and explained.
“Obviously, overpopulation has plagued Tiran since before you or I were born.” And within Sciona’s lifetime, apartment complexes had grown taller, living conditions more strained. “I mean, consider how the Kwen Quarter has overflowed in just the last few years with your people’s tendency to multiply like…” Alarmist radio personalities used the word “rats.” Aunt Winny always said “bunnies.” With Tommy’s gray eyes on her, Sciona realized that even the latter didn’t sound particularly kind.
“So, um…” Sciona withdrew from the social dimensions of the project and back into her comfort zone of magical mechanics. “The barrier has two functions: warming and anti-Blight shielding. I don’t know much about the action spells that comprise those two functions—I mean, no one does, given that they date back to the Founding. What I do know is that they take up an incredible amount of energy. Think about it like”—how to explain to a layman?—“I don’t know…a hundred trains’ worth of energy. And magical energy doesn’t just come from nowhere. It has to be sourced from the Otherrealm, so in order to expand Tiran’s barrier, the High Magistry will need to pull an unprecedented amount of energy from the Otherrealm all at once—that will be the hard part—and then sustain that higher-energy barrier indefinitely. Maybe forever. Now, it’s not like the Otherrealm doesn’t contain sufficient energy to power the expansion and the subsequent increased energy demands. We just—oh, wait. I should ask, do you know what the Otherrealm is?”
“Only what the preachers say on the radio and in the square, ma’am.”
“Leonite or Tirasian preachers?”
“Um…” Tommy thought for a moment. “Forgive me, ma’am. I’ve never been totally clear on the difference.”
“Right!” Sciona laughed but when Tommy didn’t smile, she realized he wasn’t joking. He really was that ignorant of basic religious doctrine. “Oh.
Well, Leonites subscribe to the texts Leon himself wrote during his life— the actual Founding Texts. Tirasians lump in everything an increasingly senile Faene the First wrote about Leon’s intentions.”
“So, I take it you’re a Leonite, ma’am?”
“I know it’s unusual for a mage,” she said, “but don’t judge me. I was raised on the wrong side of the tracks.”
“I wouldn’t judge, ma’am. It’s all the same to me.”
“Well, it’s very much not all the same,” she said indignantly before remembering the more important topic at hand. “So—what do the preachers in your neighborhood say about the Otherrealm?”
“That God opened the Otherrealm up to the Founding Mages when he tasked them with building Tiran…” Tommy frowned as though trying to recall more. “They call it the Garden.”
“So, Leonite preachers, then.” Tirasian preachers usually called the Otherrealm the Bounty and referenced God creating it for the mages’ use rather than just opening it. “And that’s all they explain?” Sciona supposed the workings of the world were always dumbed down for the general populace—probably doubly so in the Kwen Quarter.
“Yes, ma’am. But I’ve gathered from the mages’ conversations here that the Otherrealm is not a garden of earthly material…or…not just earthly material, anyway.” He looked tentatively at Sciona. “Mages can pull energy out of it. That’s what powers spells, yes?”
“Exactly!” Thank goodness Tommy seemed a little sharper than the average Kwen. “That process of finding and pulling energy is what we call ‘sourcing.’ When you hear someone say a ‘sourcing spell’ or ‘Hey, Mordra the Tenth is a terrible sourcer,’ that’s what they’re referring to.”
A smile twitched at the corner of Tommy’s mouth—so small Sciona barely noticed before it vanished behind the gray veil of indifference. “I see.”
“Now, sourcing can be difficult and dangerous because the Otherrealm is variable. Not every part of it contains the same concentration of energy.
In that way, it really is like a garden; if you go into a vegetable patch blindfolded and start grabbing for produce, you’re going to end up with a lot of dirt and leaves—maybe some bees—but probably not that much vegetable, right?”
“Right.” Tommy seemed to grasp the metaphor, and Sciona was pleased with herself.
“Mapping is what a mage does so he isn’t walking into the garden blind,” she continued. “It’s the part of a sourcing spell wherein we open a sort of window to the Otherrealm—big or small, depending on the coordinates we choose. Through this window, we can see where the energy is concentrated, where it’s sparse, and where it’s basically nonexistent.
That’s my specialty: manually mapping to tap into an energy source proportional to a given action spell. So”—she plucked a teacup from the box next to her and set it on the desk—“say the goal of my action spell is to push this cup an inch to the right. I’m not looking for a very broad or deep well of energy there. If the goal is to move this building one inch to the right, I’m looking for a lot of energy, and I’ll probably need a series of sourcing spells to get the amount I need. We call that a spellweb—which we’ll get to soon.”
“So, your specialty is finding energy sources of the right size in the Otherrealm,” Tommy said.
“Yeah. Not too difficult to understand, right?”
“No, ma’am. I think I follow.”
“Good. Because now I’m going to show you examples of the three basic types of mapping spell before we get into my weird custom ones.” Sciona pulled the spellograph toward her—a brass Harlan 11, similar to the large- coil Maclan spellographs she had used in Bringham’s laboratories but with the keys closer together, better suiting her small fingers. “Let me just write up an action spell to demonstrate them. We’ll use a pushing spell on, um”— she looked around the desk—“not the cup.” That would break if she accidentally pushed it off the edge. “This book.” She set Mordra the First’s Magical Engines on the desk before the spellograph and started typing.
When she glanced up at Tommy, his gray eyes had gotten a little wider.
People always described the gray of Kwen eyes as lifeless and dull, but wonder had made Tommy’s eyes electric—like clouds backlit with lightning.
“What?” she said, oddly self-conscious in the glow of that bright bank of clouds.
“I just…I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone type that fast, ma’am.”
“You’ve worked on this floor for a while, haven’t you? You’ve seen
other highmages typing.”
“Not like that.”
Sciona smiled. “Well, I started behind most of them. I’ve had to be fast
to catch up.”
He nodded.
“All right, so the spell I’m writing right now is pretty boring.” Knowing Tommy didn’t have a prayer of following the magical symbols as they hit the page, she opted instead to narrate her process. “Right now, I’m directing the action spell to recognize a rectangular object under two Leonic pounds within two Vendric feet of the spellograph,” she said over the click of keys.
“That’s a quick way to rule out everything except the book. And, because we’re being boring, we’re going to name this rectangular, under-two-pound element BOOK.” She punched in the tag. “So, whenever I refer to BOOK for the rest of the spell, the magic will recognize it as this object.” She nodded to Magical Engines.
“So, magic recognizes Tiranish words, ma’am?” Tommy said in confusion. “I thought it was all written in this old runic language?” He gestured to the half page of spellwork he couldn’t read.
“It is,” Sciona said, although she understood his confusion. “The magic will only recognize our object as a ‘book’ because that’s what I decided to call it and I wrote the word into the fabric of the action spell. I could have called it by its title, or TEDIOUS READING, or GAS LAMP, or TOMMY, and the magic would recognize it as such. That’s the fun thing about being a mage. You get to call things by whatever name you want, and, through magic, it becomes true.”
“Hmm,” Tommy grunted with a thoughtful frown but didn’t say anything more.
Sciona didn’t know why she prompted “What?” She was supposed to be the one doing the explaining.
Tommy shook his head. “That’s a lot of power.”
It was such a banal and basically useless observation that Sciona wasn’t sure why she smiled. “Yes, it is. And now,” she said, as her fingers clattered through the end of the composition, “I’m telling the action spell to take any input energy and use it to exert force horizontally along the nearest side of BOOK.”
“You can’t tell it how much force to exert?” Tommy asked.
“Aha! Excellent catch!” Tommy was asking the questions Sciona had when she first started learning magic; that was a good sign. “I can tell the action spell how much force to exert if I’m siphoning the Reserve because, in that case, the siphoning towers will do the hard part for me.”
“The hard part?”
“You know the towers on either side of Leon’s Hall?”
“They’re hard to miss, ma’am.”
“Well, the function of those towers is to hold the energy automatically channeled from the Reserve siphoning zones and release it based on the demands of whatever action spells tap the Reserve. But the use of the Reserve is heavily restricted because the energy in those zones is limited.
With Tiran’s energy demands growing all the time, the Reserve is always at risk of running low. That’s why, during the noon spellograph shift in the siphoning towers, nonessential electricity sometimes goes out in working- class neighborhoods like mine and—well, I assume yours?”
“I live in the Kwen Quarter, so, yes, ma’am.”
“The point of my work—manual siphoning—is to provide alternative energy sources to the finite supply in the Reserve. And with manual siphoning, there isn’t a massive holding tower as a buffer between your action spell and the energy from the Otherrealm, meaning you can’t control the amount of energy you’ll get with a hundred percent certainty.” Sciona was about as good as a manual siphoner could get, and her accuracy rate
was precisely 94 percent—though she was determined to break that ceiling by the time her research was done.
“So, to your earlier question,” she went on, “a mage can always write an energy cap into an action spell, but an action spell is like”—she grasped for a metaphor a janitor would understand—“a water pipe. The handyman who installs a pipe controls where the water goes, but he doesn’t control how much water is going to come through.”
“But he could seal the pipe at a certain point,” Tommy said, “narrow it, install a valve?”
“Yes!” Sciona grinned. “He could, just like I could write a limit on how much energy the action spell is allowed to use to push on the book. But what happens if too much water comes through that pipe with too much
pressure behind it?”
“The pipe will burst, ma’am.”
“There you are. When you write energy usage limits into action spells and then pair them with manual siphoning, you run the risk that the energy input will exceed the limit. That excess energy then has nowhere to go, and you get disasters like—”
“The West Bend bridge collapse.” Tommy’s voice had gone cold in realization.
“Yes.” Sciona looked up in surprise. “You know about that?” The University had tried to keep the magical origins of the explosion a secret for publicity reasons, but it was why Archmage Kamdyn had been pressured into an early retirement.
“I live near the construction site.” Tommy wasn’t looking at Sciona.
“The two men who died were neighbors of mine.”
“I don’t remember anyone dying,” Sciona said, and she had read every report the papers had published, fascinated to learn what had gone wrong.
Tommy gave a shrug that was somehow the saddest thing Sciona had ever seen. “They were only Kwen.”
“Oh…” Sciona realized that the newspapers wouldn’t publicize the deaths of a couple Kwen workers. Not if the University was pressuring them to minimize the incident. That was what they had called it: an
incident, not a tragedy, not criminal negligence by senior mages who should have known better. “Well…” She cleared her throat in discomfort. “That’s why we don’t put hard limits on action spells.”
“Understood, ma’am.”
“Tommy,” she said seriously.
“Ma’am?”
“I would never…I don’t do that kind of sloppy work, you understand? I would never cut corners or be that careless with so much energy.”
Tommy didn’t respond, and Sciona wished she was better at reading
Kwen facial expressions.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“I—” Tommy closed his teeth on whatever he had been about to say, his
jaw tightening.
“What?”
“I don’t think it matters what a Kwen thinks of a mage, ma’am. You’ll do what you do.”
The words cut Sciona deeper than she’d expected. Why? She had already decided not to care what her colleagues thought of her work. Wasn’t that completely backwards? Tommy was right. It shouldn’t matter what a Kwen thought of a mage, but she was biting back before she could think better of it. “You know that’s what people say to women, right?”
“Ma’am?”
“That boys will be boys. That the men and mages of Tiran will do what they do, and the lot of everyone else is to accept it. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Tommy tilted his head, his damnable foreign face as unreadable as ever.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Of course not!” Sciona said in frustration. “I’m here, aren’t I? You’re here. You know, I’m ostensibly Highmage Kamdyn’s replacement. I can do good work where he fell short.” Maybe it was arrogant to suggest that she could surpass the work of a seasoned mage like Kamdyn, but it was true.
“We can do good work where he didn’t. And maybe that’s an explosion that doesn’t happen, a bridge that doesn’t collapse. That matters, doesn’t it?”
Tommy didn’t exactly smile, but a subtle something in his expression seemed to relax. He nodded. “So, Highmage…you were telling me about energy limits on action spells?”
In the ensuing hours, Sciona sped through the fundamentals of magic with Tommy, praying that he kept up. Her ramblings didn’t constitute anything resembling proper lectures, but there wasn’t time to slow down.
When the setting sun washed the laboratory in red, Sciona realized it was probably time for her assistant to go.
“God, I haven’t even started to show you spellwebs yet,” she grumbled.
“But I suppose that’ll have to wait. Finish shelving those last few books and you can go.”
The knock that made Sciona look up was not at her partially open door but at Jerrin Mordra’s across the hall.
“Hey, Mordra Junior!” Tanrel said as he and Renthorn leaned into the legacy mage’s laboratory. “We always buy the new mage a drink on his first day. You’re coming out with us.”
“Oh—all right!” Mordra said from within. “Evnan, could you finish setting up for me? Thanks.” He had joined the other highmages in a moment, smoothing his white robe in giddy nervousness.
Renthorn looked pointedly at Sciona as they passed her laboratory, and the message was clear: she was not a “new mage.” Not the way Mordra was. She was an intruder in this world, and Renthorn wasn’t going to let her forget it.
All the hurt she had managed to bury in work came flooding back. All these years Sciona had strived to reach her true place, a community of intellectuals as deep into magic as she was—if such a thing existed. Well, it did exist. It was just very clear that it was not for her. Crumpling under the feeling, she barely registered Tommy as he came to stand by her.
“It’s late, ma’am,” he said, glancing after the other highmages. “If you have a train to catch, you’ll want to head out also.”
“I’ve already missed my train,” Sciona said. “I’m going to sleep here.”
“Really?”
“What did you think you unpacked that bedroll for?”
“I don’t know. Emergencies, ma’am?”
Sciona shook her head. “Commuting eats up too much of my day. Until I find an apartment closer to campus, I’m going to spend the weeknights here.” Archmage Bringham and Aunt Winny had both fussed incessantly about Sciona sleeping at the office during her years as a junior researcher, but she was a highmage now. No one was going to tell her where she couldn’t sleep.
“All right.” Tommy hesitated. “Then, do you need anything else before I leave you, Highmage Freynan?”
“No, I—” She stopped mid-sentence and looked at Tommy with a smile.
“You called me Highmage.”
“That’s what you are, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s just…” Besides Bringham, Tommy was the only person who had used her title here at the University. “Thank you,” she said, “for all your help today. You have a good night, all right?”
“Yes, Highmage, and you too.” The Kwen went to the door but paused as though conflicted—then turned back.
“Is there something else, Tommy?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am…” The Kwen’s steadily cold stare had broken for the first time, cast down in awkwardness. He examined his knuckles for a moment before pressing them into the doorframe. “Could I buy you a drink?”
The question struck her dumb where she sat, and for a moment, all she could do was stare at the Kwen with her mouth partway open. “I—I…”
“Apologies.” Darkness colored Tommy’s storm cloud gaze. “I’ve insulted you.”
“What—no!” Sciona said out of politeness, but he had, a little bit. A highmage didn’t need the pity of a servant.
“I understand,” Tommy said. “It’s beneath you. I just thought…it seems to me like someone should buy you a drink.”
In spite of herself, Sciona felt a smile turn her lips. Tommy was right.
Someone should buy her a drink, damn it. It just shouldn’t be the janitor.
“It’s not your job to make me feel welcome here.” Or your place, she hadn’t said, but that was how Tommy seemed to take it.
“Understood, Highmage. Forget I said—”
“Tell you what”—Sciona stood—“let’s go to a bar, and I’ll…” She almost suggested that she buy the drinks, then realized that would probably insult him. Women didn’t buy men drinks, no matter their difference in means. She might have paid for a male colleague’s drink out of spite—to emasculate him—but that wasn’t her intention here. “I’ll buy me a drink, and you buy you a drink, and we’ll drink to each other’s promotions side by side. How does that sound?”
Light flickered back into that stoic expression. “Are you serious?”
“You need to stop asking me that. I’m not much of a joker.”
“Understood, ma’am. I just thought you might not want to be seen out with a Kwen.”
“Well, you’re the only person in this place who hasn’t spat in my face today. Why would I want to drink with anyone else?”
The bar nearest the Magicentre was the nicest, but two things occurred to Sciona as she packed her bag: first, that a janitor probably couldn’t afford the drinks they served—she had certainly never seen a Kwen there—and second, that it was certainly where the rest of the highmages would go.
“Is the Dancing Wolf all right?” she asked. It was a Kwen-owned bar where the poorer undergraduates drank on their days off.
“Yes, ma’am…if it’s not beneath you?”
“Beneath me?” Sciona laughed. “I wasn’t born to a line of highmages, Tommy. I get my drinks where everyone else does.”
Before they left the laboratory, Sciona’s hands curled into the white robe she had worked for twenty years to earn. After a moment of consideration, she shed the garment and hung it by the door. Maybe she shouldn’t have.
Other highmages wore their white wherever they went, enjoying the attention and deference people afforded them. But thus far, people didn’t react to Sciona’s robes with the same deference. Mostly, they gawked like she was a circus attraction. And after a frustrating day at work, that was the last thing she wanted.
—
The Dancing Wolf saved on bills by using old glass lanterns instead of tapping the Reserve for electric lighting. The effect was a soft smoky smell and a sense of closeness, despite the long bar and spacious wood floor. On a stool in the corner, a girl with waist-length copper braids played an exotic Kwen instrument—a long-necked harp that sat on her knee as she drew a bow across the strings in a melody as longing as it was lively. Sciona had always liked that about Kwen music: the irrepressible sense of wanting.
Heresy, to be sure, but it touched the cords of her being in a way no Tiranish hymnal ever had.
Amid those half-rapturous, half-mournful notes, the firelit bar bustled with a combination of students and neighborhood regulars, Kwen and Tiranish mingling casually. In her plain green dress, Sciona blended in with the student patrons and settled down at the bar without drawing any stares.
She supposed she’d need her picture in several newspaper stories, research books, and framed portraits at the University before people started to recognize her sans robe. Tommy sat a respectful arm’s length from her, so no one would mistake them for a couple. That would draw stares regardless of the colors Sciona wore; well bred or not, an upstanding woman of the University would never stoop to accept the courtship of a Kwen.
“So,” Tommy said as they waited for the bartender to finish serving the influx of students who had come in before them, “you’re the first woman I’ve ever seen in those white robes.”
“Well, I would be,” Sciona said. “I’m the first female highmage in history.”
“Is that so, ma’am?” A strange smile crossed his face.
“You think that’s funny?”
Before Tommy could answer, a voice said, “Thomil!,” and Sciona turned to find the Kwen bartender waving in their direction. “Look who’s finally found a second to loosen up! And with a very pretty Tiranish—”
“With my boss.” Tommy cut the man off before he could finish the sentence.
“Boss?” The copper-haired bartender looked from Tommy to Sciona.
“Thought you were mopping floors for the mages.”
Tommy answered in words Sciona didn’t understand—Kwen pidgin— and it occurred to her that, though she had spent her whole life alongside the quiet Kwen, she had never really stopped to listen to their language. It was a rough sound, fitting the rough people who scraped out lives beyond the barrier.
Surprise lit the bartender’s face, and he looked at Sciona with new appreciation. “In that case”—he switched back to his clunky Tiranish —“you drink for free, milady.”
“What?” Sciona said, but the man had already moved away to prepare their drinks, taps flaring at his touch to pour beer into fresh glasses. “What did you tell him?”
“The truth,” Tommy said, “that you’re the first female highmage in Tiran. Don’t worry,” he added, registering her anxiety. “He’s not going to make a scene about it.”
The bartender was back in a moment with drinks for Sciona and Tommy.
“Please,” Sciona said. “I can pay for these.”
But the man was shaking his head. “No, no, Meidra. You and all your friends drink for free under this roof.”
“Sorry—what did you just call me?” Sciona asked, but the man had already flitted away again to serve a new wave of customers. “What did he call me?”
“Easy, Highmage,” Tommy said. “It’s a nice word.”
There weren’t any books in the grand library on Kwen languages, so Sciona supposed she would just have to take Tommy’s word for it.
“He’s just honored to serve free drinks to the new highmage everyone’s been talking about.”
“People have been talking?” Sciona had known that the whole University would talk, of course, but hearing the damn janitor reference it so casually made her ill. She took a swig and focused on the burn, willing it to melt some of her nerves. “Do you…” She shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Do you know what they’ve been saying?”
“I’m terrible at keeping up with gossip, ma’am,” Tommy said. “You’d have to ask Raehem.” He nodded to the bartender. “He’s the one who hears everything, but it looks like he’s busy.”
“That’s just as well.” Sciona didn’t need to know the things people were saying behind her back. Having heard what her own peers thought of her, she couldn’t imagine the talk in the bars was any more charitable. Cringing, she took another drink in the hopes that it would wash the image of
Renthorn’s greasy sneer from her mind.
“May I ask you a question, ma’am?”
“Sure.”
“It seems that people haven’t been particularly kind to you in your new job. And it also seems that it wasn’t an easy job to get.”
“You have no idea.”
“So, why do it? There are many well-paying jobs a person can get with a University education, yes? Why work yourself so hard just for…the way the other mages treated you today?”
Sciona didn’t answer until she had downed that first glass. Then she perhaps answered a bit too much and too truthfully.
“It’s a compulsive thing, Tommy. Always has been. My cousin thinks it’s about my parents—or rather, my lack thereof. The fact that I’ve always wanted to do something big, something that would be remembered by thousands of people…Alba thinks that’s because I didn’t grow up with parents to support me. Nobody was going to care what I did just because I did it. I had to make them care.” Sciona frowned at her glass for a moment, her fidgeting index finger tracing a circle through the condensation. “She’s not giving herself enough credit. She and my Aunt Winny have cared for me better than most parents do their real children.”
“But you don’t agree with your cousin?” Tommy asked.
“No. Of course Alba thinks it’s about love because that’s how she and Aunt Winny measure the world. They’re sweet like that.”
“But you?”
“I’m not sweet. The world isn’t about love for me. It’s about power.”
The alcohol had blurred the surrounding bar like a Kaedor mapping spell.
But Sciona automatically sharpened in response to the fog, a sniper homing in on the truth. “I think I’ve just had a problem with magic since the first time I tasted it—the same way some people have a problem with alcohol.”
Tommy nodded, not a trace of judgment in his expression. “I don’t know about your relationship with magic, ma’am, but growing up without parents is no easy thing.” Something in those words was too dark and too
near.
“Your parents?” Sciona asked softly.
“They died when I was young. But I had my older sister.” He took a deep drink. “Like you have your aunt and cousin.”
“It’s good to have someone.”
Tommy gave her a grim smile of agreement before knocking his glass into hers and tossing the rest of it back in an impressive single draught.
“Why magic, do you think?” he asked when Raehem had supplied them both with second—or was it third?—drinks. “Why is that your poison of choice? If you want to achieve something on this mortal plane, why not choose a field of work where women don’t meet as much resistance?
Teaching? Homemaking?”
“There’s no glory in homemaking or teaching—and I’m lousy at those things, anyway.”
“I’m sure that’s not true, ma’am.” He had to say that to be polite.
“But it is. All women’s work entails caring for people, and I’m terrible with people. Magic is the one area where I can shut myself in a room with my books and my thoughts and come out more powerful than I went in. It doesn’t matter how big, or strong, or pretty, or charismatic you are in magic. It doesn’t matter how much people like you. With my fingers on the keys of a spellograph, if I can just think hard enough, I’m the most powerful person in the world. That’s something a woman just isn’t going to get anywhere else.”
Tommy was nodding. “Fair enough, ma’am.”
Drinking with the Kwen was a frankly devastating experience. Sciona had always prided herself on being able to put away a respectable number of drinks for her modest stature. She had to be sure she could outdrink any
of her male peers if it came to a contest. Tommy was on his…well, she had long since lost the ability to count with the empty glasses all sliding over one another, and he still wasn’t slurring.
“I can’t let you walk back alone,” he said at one point when the bar had
mostly emptied.
“It’s fine,” Sciona said.
“It’s not, though, ma’am. People get robbed and worse in these streets this late.”
“This late?” How long had they stayed out? Why had they stayed out?
Why did Sciona’s fingers feel all fuzzy?
“You should always have someone with you.”
“Yeah?” Sciona shot back. “Who’s walkin’ home with you?”
“I’m different. I don’t look like such an easy mark.”
“Did’you listen to nnnothingIsaid ’bout magic?” Sciona demanded, though she was starting to forget precisely what she had said to Tommy— about magic or any subject. “How you look doesn’matter. It’s power.”
Sciona dug into her bag and produced a cylinder. “Power matters!”
“What is that, ma’am?” Tommy asked as she held the cylinder out to him. “Lipstick?”
“No,” she said, then let out a belated snort of laughter. “God! How big
d’you think my mouth is?”
“Okay, so what is it?”
“Ss’a voice-activated conduit I invented in junior academy—or, well, I thought I invented it.” She scowled. “Turns out Highmage Duris was already using spells like it to revamp the city guards’ firearms, but
whatever. I was twelve.”
“Firearms?” Tommy said in alarm.
“Here…” Sciona wasn’t sure when she had pressed the cylinder into Tommy’s hand and wrapped her fingers around his, but his skin was warm on hers, his calluses rough like crisp spellpaper. “I’ll show you how it works.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Highmage.”
“Shushhhh. Look…see…a conduit is a magical object that anchors a pre-written spell.”
“I know what a conduit is. I didn’t realize you could just compose one for yourself and carry it around, unlicensed. Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Only if you’re a lousy composer. No better way to learn about conduits than by handling ’em. And look, it’s all fine. I marked this one in black.
That means it just makes a smoke explosion. The dangerous ones are on my belt.”
“The dangerous ones?” Tommy said with an alarmed glance at her hip, where she kept a pair of cylinders capped with red.
“Trust me,” she insisted, “ ’mm not gonna hurt you.”
“I know, ma’am.” In a smooth movement that left Sciona’s clouded mind spinning, Tommy somehow slipped from her grip and spun around her. “I know,” he said again from her other side as he slid the cylinder back into her bag. “Why don’t you show me all your conduits after I walk you home?”
“If you’re scared of a little smoke, maybe I should walk you home.”
There was an amused smile on Tommy’s face when Sciona managed to bring it into focus. Warm. Perhaps only because he thought she couldn’t see him clearly…or because she was starting to see things that weren’t there.
“Maybe, ma’am.”
“Hey…” Sciona felt her own smile fade. “No more ‘ma’am,’ all right?”
“Sorry?”
“Out of the office, you can just call me Sciona. Or”—she stumbled, suddenly feeling all the heat of the alcohol in her cheeks—“if that’s too familiar for you, Freynan. Lots of people call me Freynan.”
“Agreed.” Tommy nodded. “If, in return, you would stop calling me Tommy.”
Sciona’s brow scrunched up. “What else would I call you? It’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Tommy is the Tiranization of my name. My proper Caldonn name is
Thomil.”
“Domil?”
“No, ma— No. You sort of touch your tongue to the upper teeth where you make a ‘th’ sound, but you don’t breathe through. It’s just a tap.”
“Th…Th…Thomil,” she tried. It was either close enough or an amusing
effort because he smiled.
“That’s it. Thomil Siernes-Caldonn.”
“Two last names?”
“Kwen sons take their mother’s clan name, followed by their father’s.”
“Funny…I also have my mother’s last name.” Sciona took Thomil’s hand—maybe just because she wanted to feel his calluses again. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Thomil Siernes-Caldonn.”
“Nice to meet you, Highmage Sciona Freynan.”
Sciona only vaguely remembered Thomil walking her the few blocks back to the Magicentre and up the darkened stairs to her laboratory. She was unclear on how she ended up on the cot in her office. Trying to figure it out in retrospect, she ran up against two stark impossibilities: First, it was impossible that she had had the balance to make the climb on her own two feet. Second, it was impossible that Thomil had picked her up and managed all those stairs with her in his arms. It was impossible that when her head had fallen against his chest, he had still smelled of sage and fresh water.
