Rough Magic Page 18

  The first time I’d shopped in the bazaar I’d been overwhelmed by the then strange experience of being surrounded by so many Faerene. Yana had guided me through it, and I’d spent Istvan’s money.

  Now, I still found the bazaar confusing, but I had my own money, I had ensured that Digger did, too, and I had experience in navigating Faerene culture. Notwithstanding the chest of seeds that I held, we weren’t so much shopping as taking in the damage caused by Soma’s fatal crash-landing and the popular mood. Seeds were an investment in the future, and these were for heirloom vegetables, both Elysium and indigenous to Earth. I hadn’t been able to resist. Nor had Digger, who would resume running the family smallholding when he returned to Justice.

  People bustled around us, even those whose bloodshot eyes and pinched mouths betrayed hangovers. The citizens of Civitas were eager to prove the return to what they considered normality.

  “Dorotta’s here,” Digger said.

  I spun around.

  Where people could criticize Istvan or Rory if they took time away from the North American Territory, despite her duties as a magisterial guard reporting to Rory, no one would fault Dorotta for translocating in to pay her respects to Soma’s memory. All the dragons were doing so. Soma had been the head priest for the Ouroboros temple, situated at the western edge of the city.

  Dorotta approached from that direction. “I’m aware I’m early,” she said abruptly. “I paid my respects to Soma.”

  I dusted off my sugar-coated fingers and hugged her.

  She sighed deeply, smoke puffing from her nostrils.

  An elf and a centaur had died instantly in the same accident, crushed by Soma’s great body. Another elf had died three hours later, the flaring magic making it impossible for healers to fix the extensive trauma she’d suffered.

  “A letter from Rory.” Dorotta changed the subject, determinedly. She fished in the satchel strapped to her chest and passed me an envelope; unsealed, because Rory and I trusted our pack member. “Family and pack are well in Justice. The town is relieved to have the rough magic settled.” She looked around. “Although possibly not as jaunty about it as here. Putting on face is more important in Civitas. In Justice we can be honest about how shaken we are.” She looked at the footlong chest beside my boots. “What’s that?”

  “Seeds.”

  “I’m returning to Justice. I’ll take it.” She picked it up daintily with her claw and stowed it in the capacious satchel. “And also for you…” She extracted a large bundle tied with a jaunty red ribbon. “Tineke was going to select it, but she asked Sabinka for advice, and Pavel overheard…”

  I started laughing.

  Dorotta smiled. “Pavel selected your outfit and added a few extras.”

  “Of course he did. Thank you. Please, thank them all.” The bundle that looked small in Dorotta’s claws was large in my arms. I put it on the ground, leaning against my legs, and dug in my backpack. I pulled out my letter for Rory and a second envelope marked, Istvan, and handed both to Dorotta.

  She patted my shoulder gently. “You’ll be home soon.” She peered sideways at Digger. “Hew is helping Jarod look after the smallholding.”

  Digger braced himself. Hew was an elf with ideas, and Jarod an enthusiast. “What are they planning?”

  “They’ve begun building a dovecote.”

  “A what?”

  Dorotta buckled the satchel. “Pigeons. They intend to farm them for eating. Their guano can be used in Lajos’s herb garden. Or possibly in the tannery. They’re still deciding.”

  Digger groaned.

  “I’ll tell Jarod you approve,” Dorotta said wickedly. “Stella had her doubts.” The copper-colored dragon leapt off the dock and upward, translocating with the first flap of her wings.

  Digger stared at the empty patch of sky. “I don’t approve.”

  I picked up my bundle. Shopping was over for the day since I needed to unpack it in my room. “I think they’re all aware you wouldn’t approve. Mike probably doesn’t either. For what it’s worth, I think expanding our duck flock would be better.”

  But underlying the teasing was an important message. At home, life was going forward.

  “Give me the parcel,” Digger said.

  Normally I wouldn’t, and normally he wouldn’t ask. A guard couldn’t be laden with parcels. But nobody had pointed at, questioned aggressively or heckled me. Digger and I were curiosities in Civitas because we were human, but that was all. Whatever blame Harold had feared people would place on me for humanity’s orb tearing down the latticework of magic on Earth seemed to have vanished with its restoration.

  Plus, we were trailed by a werewolf and watched by patrolling police officers. Digger didn’t have to be on guard.

  I handed over the bundle.

  Although I was curious about what Pavel had selected for me to wear to the Fae Council’s open forum tomorrow morning, the bundle mattered less to me than reading Rory’s letter.

  Writing to Istvan had also prompted an idea that I wanted to follow up. Governing House included a library. In returning to our suite, I decided on a minor detour.

  Chapter 14

  Pavel’s choice for my debut as a Fae Council member at the open forum was a fine wool dress with a mid-calf length skirt, high heels and a chunky knit cardigan if the day proved cool. Everything was in Istvan’s color, black. I wore my hair in its customary braid, as per the handwritten instructions on my personal grooming that Pavel had included in the bundle. The haute couture designer would be observing me closely during the broadcast. Looking at my appearance in the mirror of my bedroom at Governing House, I thought he’d approve.

  I looked elegant, but approachable; young, but reliable, without trying to fake greater maturity.

  I picked up my backpack and joined Digger in the sitting room.

  He was dressed in his ordinary shirt, thick wool jacket and heavy trousers, plus boots. “You look good.”

  I grimaced in response.

  “Nervous? Rory and Istvan will be here,” he reassured me.

  They had both promised to portal in for the open forum. However, they were also dealing with serious crises in Vancouver Island and New Orleans. For Istvan, the threat was ice sharks that had formed in the Arctic and swum south, at which time they’d dangerously learned to walk on land. The orc who’d seeded those sharks as a trick for his nephew would get a stern telling off. Not that the poor orc could have guessed that harmless ice constructs the size of his arm would grow as they had. He’d bought the seeds, or charms, in good faith as an amusing birthday present. Then the rough magic happened.

  Unexpected expansion was also threatening New Orleans. Rory had to deal with an anti-mosquito spell that had grown ambitious under an influx of feral magic. Instead of discreetly flapping away mosquitoes, it was swatting full-grown birds out of the air. If it kept growing, it could harm Faerene.

  Depending on how unraveling the charm and spell went, Rory and Istvan mightn’t arrive in Civitas before the forum started.

  “Can you carry my backpack? Pavel will kill me if I ruin his look.”

  Digger nodded.

  Pavel’s rage would be scary, although likely not lethal. Sea nymphs tended to be pacifists. In Pavel’s case he was a pacifist who threw tailor’s chalk.

  My moment of levity faded. “I guess we should go.”

  “You might be wrong,” Digger said. He meant it encouragingly.

  “Here’s hoping.” But I doubted it. The research I’d done yesterday afternoon and into the night with books borrowed from the library had convinced me that the most I could hope for was a delay in my worst imaginings. Which meant that without making a huge production of it, I had to share my fears.

  In an open forum.

  Among Faerene.

  Two seconds after we exited the suite, Osana pounced on us.

  The goblin was as neat as ever in her uniform, but her forehead was wrinkled and her left hand made tiny, grabby motions as if to hurry us—or me�
�along. “Fiona requires all councilors to be in place in twenty minutes.”

  Since “in place” meant the front steps of Governing House, I didn’t find the deadline daunting.

  Osana obviously did. She also didn’t care for the look Pavel had given me. Her gaze dwelt on the cardigan I carried folded over one arm. “I can find you a jacket…”

  “No, thank you.”

  Emerging through the front doors of the building I had a clear view of the setup for the open forum. Fiona was the goblin member of the Fae Council responsible for communication. She’d set up the plaza primarily for filming the broadcast.

  The audience had already arrived and were seated on stools or crouching, arranged by height. However, there were less than I’d expected, and far fewer than had partied here the other night. The nearest third of the plaza was roped off to allow for councilors and film crew.

  While Digger slid away to join Anastasia at the side of the assembled audience, Osana handed off responsibility for me to another goblin. He didn’t bother to introduce himself before hustling me to a chair near where Piros crouched.

  Being dragons, Piros and Adara were the two largest members of the Fae Council. They’d been assigned positions at the foot of the stairs. The rest of us were arranged above them according to our various heights, with platforms put in place for Vadim, Branka and Quossa who were also too large, as griffin, centaur and unicorn respectively, to fit on a single stair tread, no matter the generous proportions of the front steps.

  “Good morning, Amy,” Piros greeted me gravely.

  “Good morning.”

  Quossa approached rapidly. His twitching ears and flicking tail indicated trouble. He shaped sound waves to a whisper. “A djinn is reforming at the world spindle cave site.”

  Piros looked at me and exhaled a slow, smoky sigh. It matched the rollercoaster feeling in my stomach. The other shoe had dropped, and quickly.

  Quossa glanced between us. “You’re not surprised!”

  “Amy spoke with me two days ago.”

  Istvan trusted Piros, so I had, too. But that hadn’t been my primary motivation for sharing my doubts about the restoration of the latticework with Piros. I had belatedly questioned why a competently managed, comparatively small number of people—there were only half a million Faerene on Earth—needed a spymaster. The answer was to define spymaster differently: threat detection, not social control. So I’d brought the potential threat I saw to Piros’s attention.

  He’d begun organizing a response, part of which had entailed pushing forward prospective personal allies, people like the werewolves and Anastasia. He’d also approved drawing Raul, and via him, Jakov, into the circle.

  “It’s still wait and see,” he said to me, now. “I’ll signal you if you should challenge. Harold is briefed.”

  Quossa stamped a hoof. “Challenge?”

  “Calm yourself,” Piros drawled. “I don’t mean challenge in the unicorn sense.”

  Unicorn stallions fought challenges for status.

  Fiona’s minions descended on Quossa and herded him into position across from us, above Adara.

  Adara had been eavesdropping interestedly, as had Vadim.

  Beside me, Radomir leaned back with a smirk. The werewolf councilor was a notable troublemaker.

  Harold’s entrance silenced their incipient questions. The Fae King carried humanity’s orb which gleamed a glossy black on its deep purple cushion. Geat, the Orc Champion, followed with the world spindle on a green cushion. They put their treasures down on a table at the top of the steps, set between two chairs. Harold then remained standing behind the table.

  I surveyed the gathering. I found Daud in the back, and a few seconds later, located Thane working his way through the audience to Digger and Anastasia.

  Judging by their affronted body language, people were complaining about Thane’s late, pushy arrival. He ignored them.

  It seemed that the orb’s guards had been relieved of their duty. Then, again, looking around at the powerful magicians on the Fae Council, anyone who tried to destroy the orb or spindle here would be dealt with harshly.

  A final scan of the audience confirmed that Rory and Istvan had yet to arrive.

  Harold began the open forum with a recap of the crisis. He started with the emergence of the bathumas, the thaumivorous creatures with a three-stage lifecycle that had only re-emerged from their volcanic hatching grounds with the Faerene’s intensive use of magic. “So much was mysterious about the bathumas. Their origins, their lifecycle, and crucially, how to stop these creatures that kill midlevel magic users to feed on them. That we had embarked on the Migration without awareness of Earth’s real magic history was a stunning revelation.”

  He went on to remind everyone how human mages existed when the Migration hadn’t anticipated any for generations, and to outline how Istvan had presented the Fae Council with the quandary of the orb’s existence and how they then had to decide to risk activating it to learn about the bathumas and other, potentially even greater, magical threats.

  “We decided to activate the orb. This was a unanimous decision by the full council, as was the decision to ask Amy, Istvan’s human familiar partner, to be the one to activate the orb. All of the council were present for the activation and heard the information it imparted before a spell recorded in it tore apart the latticework that stabilized Earth’s magic flows. A memory charm recorded the event and will be available to everyone at the end of this forum.”

  “Why not now?” someone shouted from the crowd.

  “Questions at the end,” Fiona’s amplified voice boomed.

  Harold winced at the loud sound. “Thank you. Questions at the end or we’ll be here till nightfall.” It was just before noon, local time. “And as for why not now. You can’t listen to the memory record and the forum. Focus.”

  He focused himself, taking a moment to survey the audience, before recounting Nora’s assessment of the initial damage caused by the rough magic, Yngvar’s plan for restoring the latticework, the expedition to retrieve the world spindle, using it, and then, Yngvar leading the restoration of the latticework.

  Midway through, Rory and Istvan unobtrusively joined Anastasia, Digger and Thane in the audience.

  Although seated, my body rocked forward with the strength of my impulse to go to them. I averted my gaze back to Harold. The film crew would be capturing every moment of my reaction to Harold’s speech, even if it wasn’t shown in the live broadcast.

  Neutral expression. Calm. Attentive, I reminded myself.

  “And so, here we are,” Harold concluded. “I won’t apologize for not briefing you during the crisis. I do want to thank you for heeding the moratorium on magic use and enabling us to endure till the world spindle vanquished the oppugnancies, as Yngvar and Nora predicted.” Harold bowed to the two scientists standing on the opposite side of the Fae Council to where I sat in line with Piros’s head as he crouched at the base of the steps. “Now, questions?”

  One of Fiona’s minions threw a length of rope, knotted at both ends like a dog toy, into the audience. It was fielded by a werewolf—not one I’d been introduced to.

  Everyone quieted, settling back. Whoever held the rope asked a question. Harold then indicated the relevant member of the Fae Council, plus either Yngvar or Nora, to answer it. The rope passed with surprising rapidity from person to person in the audience. Approximately two thirds of the questioners identified as asking the question as a representative for people outside of Civitas. That seemed to be Fiona’s alternative to having people call in their questions via slate.

  What surprised me was how disciplined the audience members were. Humans in a similar forum would take the opportunity to ramble about their personal experience, criticize or complain. Every single Faerene asked a constructive question. If it wasn’t for Piros’s earlier statement to the contrary, I’d have suspected that the questions were scripted.

  The truth was that the Faerene took their obligation to the Migr
ation seriously. Back on Elysium, they’d been screened and selected specifically for their ability to do so.

  Nonetheless, there was the occasional out-there question.

  A centaur asked if the bathumas could be domesticated.

  Nora choked out a baffled counter-question. “Why?”

  “I’m a leatherworker and the way that bathuma leather lasted in the world spindle cave, well, I reckon there’d be a demand for it.”

  “There was a stasis spell,” Nora snapped.

  “Still. I’d be interested in purchasing bathuma hides.” The centaur passed on the red rope to an elf.

  In such ridiculous fashion, the concept of the bathumas in Faerene society shifted from threat and scientific curiosity to possible business opportunity.

  Harold guided the open forum toward its conclusion. He called on Quossa, as the chief scientist, to sum up the current state of affairs.

  “It is delusional to think that we have removed all uncertainty or that we can guarantee the future,” Quossa said. “In fact, the latest data suggests that one of the djinn is reforming. The djinn is a naturally occurring construct identified in the orb. It is a concentration of active, chaotic magic. One is reforming where the world spindle was located in the North American Territory. In itself, it is unlikely to affect any of us. However, if we treat it as an augury, we must consider that these concentrations of chaotic magic did not exist when we planned the Migration or in our time on Earth before the latticework tore. The latticework tests as resilient. Theoretically, it is resilient.”

  Yngvar protested this perceived attack on his brilliance. “We need the latticework. We can’t function under the conditions of rough magic.”

  “I agree that there would be significant hardship and casualties,” Quossa concurred.

  Harold stood. “I have a question for you.” He looked out at the audience, not at Yngvar or Quossa. “What happens if the latticework fails?”