Sandry stared at the man, honestly shocked. What did he think magic was, if not a kind of thread? He spoke as though she'd spent the last four years minding a spinning wheel or a tapestry frame, not cudgeling her brain with lessons in arts, sciences, and the theories of how and why mages could get magic to work.
"Captain," the duke said coolly, "if your mages are coming, we must not remain underfoot." He got up. "You will keep me apprised of all developments?"
The captain was studying Jamar's head. He glanced at the duke, startled at the interruption, and hurriedly bowed. "Of course, your grace."
Sandry hesitated. She would like to see Provosts Mages—whom Pasco had called "harrier-mages." They would be academic mages, taught at places like the university in Lightsbridge, their ways different from those of craft-mages like Sandry and her friends. While she had been taught academic methods and had learned about different specialties in academic magic, she had never seen a Provost's Mage at work.
The duke offered Sandry his arm. She had a choice, she realized—she could stay, or she could get her uncle back to Duke's Citadel. Her uncle came first, so she took the offered arm, Perhaps she could get him to introduce her to some Provosts Mages before she went home to Winding Circle.
Sandry and the duke made their way out of the building in silence. Two of the guards stationed before the door escorted them to their horses and their own soldiers. Sandry kept a wary eye on the press of human beings that folded away from them, but there were no weapons in the fingers that brushed the duke's tunic or arm and there was only respect in the whispers of "Gods bless your grace."
Their approach was so quiet that they surprised one of the Duke's Guard telling some Provost's Guards, " — took an
* * *
The moment they clattered into the inner courtyard of Duke's Citadel, the seneschal, Baron Erdogun fer Baigh, walked briskly out of the duke's residence and down the steps. He was a whippet-lean man with light brown skin and brown eyes set under a cliff of forehead. Above that he was as bald as an egg; what little black hair remained on the sides of his head was cropped painfully short. He was fussy, precise, and arrogant, but he was devoted to Vedris, which countered his flaws as far as Sandry was concerned.
"Your grace, I had begun to worry if some accident had befallen you," he said, bowing. He hovered as Vedris dismounted, but like Sandry, he had learned not to help.
"We would have sent word of an accident, Erdo," replied the duke. "There was a problem, of course. Jamar Rokat was murdered this morning."
"Good riddance to bad rubbish," the baron said crisply. He fell in half a step behind the duke as Vedris began to climb the residence steps.
"I need to return to the fishing village this afternoon," Sandry told Oama and Kwaben. "Meet me here at three?"
They bowed to her from the saddle and took the reins of her mare. Sandry ran to catch up with the duke and Baron Erdogun. The baron was saying, " — and your plans; for the remainder of the morning?"
The duke sighed. "I believe I will lie down until lunch."
Two weeks before, when he was allowed to leave his quarters and go downstairs, they had set up a couch for him in one of the parlors opening into the entrance hall. It said a good deal for how tired he was that he simply walked into the ground floor parlor and shut the door.
Erdogun turned on Sandry, his hands on his hips. "He just happened to stop by a murder?" he asked tardy.
"There was nothing I could do about that," Sandry informed him. "You know how he is."
Erdogun sighed and rubbed his bald crown. "The mail's arrived," he said. It wasn't his nature to apologize for being sharp, as Sandry had already found. "I honestly don't know what to tell Lord Frantsen anymore."
Sandry didn't like the duke's ambitious oldest son. They had met in the past, and since the duke's heart at tack the tone of Frantsen's letters had grown arrogant—as if he had already inherited. "Tell him and that grasping wife of his that Uncle cut them from his will."
The parlor door opened. "Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind," the duke said quietly. The door closed again.
"Wonderful," Erdogun muttered and stalked down the hall to the large workroom from which he oversaw affairs at Duke's Citadel.
Sandry followed him wearily. She missed her old life, before she had found herself watching the health of a man who didn't want to be fussed over and dealing with a hundred retainers, each more prickly than the last.
She thought dreamily of Discipline cottage at Winding Circle. By this time her teacher Lark would be at her loom, at work on her newest creation. She even envied Pasco, by now he must be sauntering through the marketplace with his friends, without a care in the world.
* * *
"Pasco!" The padded end of a baton thumped the side of his head firmly enough to make him stagger. "Scorch it all, boy, pay attention! Knowing the baton might save your silly skull in a dark alley one day!" Exasperated with her youngest child, Zahra Acalon pushed a lock of dark, wavy hair out of her face. She was a tall woman in her late thirties, handsome rather than pretty, with strong black brows, dark eyes, and a wide, decided mouth. Sweat glued her cotton shirt to her back. Impatiently she twitched the cloth away from her chest, flapping it slightly to cool her skin. "If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times—,"
"Daydreams will be my death," he said along with her. "Sorry, Mama."
"Pasco got thu-umped, Pasco got thu-umped," sang his cousin Rehana wickedly. Five of the residents of House Acalon who were Pasco's age or a little older had gathered in the courtyard. There his mother Zahra taught them the Provost's Guards' traditional weapons—staff, baton, weighted chain—and hand-to-hand combat.
"I'll thump you, Reha," Pasco muttered out of the side of his mouth.
A baton tapped him under the chin. "Learn to keep from being thumped yourself, before you deal out knocks of your own," his mother advised. "And the rest of you, you aren't doing so well that you can torment him."
Fast as a snake, she whirled and swung overhand at Reha. The girl blocked her strike with her baton, almost as quick as Zahra herself. With her attention on that descending baton, Reha did not see Zahra reach out with a booted leg and hook the girl's feet from under her. Down Reha went, still remembering to keep her own baton between her and any attack from overhead.
"Well enough," Zahra said with approval. "But look at the weapon just long enough to tell its direction. Your main attention should have been on my chest. My body's movement there would have warned you of my kick."
"Fat chance," muttered Reha.
Zahra grinned evilly at her. "Perhaps not." She swept their small group with her eyes. "The point of all this is to make sure you come home from your watch alive. To do that you have to
* * *
The duke emerged from his parlor, looking better, and joined Sandry and Baron Erdogun for lunch. After that, they all applied themselves to the affairs of Duke's Citadel and the realm. In the weeks after the duke's heart attack, when he had rested all afternoon, Erdogun and Sandry fell into the habit of meeting in a nearby study to deal with the work that built up. In the quiet afternoon hours, Sandry took the household accounts over from Erdogun, with his blessing. It gave her something useful to do and gave him less work
Once the duke grew well enough for Healer Comfrey to agree that a little business would not tax him, he joined Sandry and Erdogun for an hour, then two, then three. When it was judged that he was strong enough to leave the second floor and go downstairs, they set up a workroom there. The baron labored over heaps of documents while the duke read reports and Sandry attended to the running of a large castle. Often the duke and Erdogun discussed matters involving Emelan and met with various officials. Many times they asked Sandry's opinion. They explained it as wanting the views of a mage or another noble, but Sandry wondered if the duke wanted to see how her mind worked. She couldn't imagine why he might want her ideas on the proper scale of punishments for theft, but she respected as well as loved him and answered him as seriously as she could.
The afternoon that followed Jamar Rokat's murder sped by. All too soon it was time for Sandry to meet Pasco at the fishing village. Oama and Kwaben awaited her with her mare, Russet, when she emerged from the residence. Riding through the city in mid-afternoon was a slower matter than at dawn. There were horses and wagons to be got around, stray animals, and all kinds of people. The talk on every corner seemed to be about the merchant's very messy death.
She had meant to be early for the fishers' return, but to her surprise most of the boats were home and in the process of unloading their contents. Each crew had brought in as much fish as their boats might carry. The entire village had turned out to help load baskets of fish into carts that would take them to the city for sale.
Pasco Acalon stood on the beach, his jaw hanging open.
Sandry drew rein beside him. "Now do you believe you have magic?" she asked.
He started with surprise—he had not heard her ride up—and bowed hastily. "Lady, my mother has never heard of dancing mages. She was once a captain of the Provost's Guard. If she never heard of a thing, then how can it exist? This, this was just luck, pure and simple. It had to turn sometime. Whatever drove the fish off—,"
A burly man in fisherman's clothes strode toward them, a grin on his dark face. He grabbed Pasco's hands and folded them around a leather pouch. "Well, lad, you did the trick." He looked at the boats, shaking his head. "This day's work puts food on our plates through Death's Night, once it's smoked. And Gran says the charm holds till the next full moon—enough to make up what we've lost this year." He thumped Pasco on the shoulder, bowed quickly to Sandry, then strode back toward the workers.
The boy poured the contents of the bag into his palm and gasped. "Five silver crescents!" he cried. "Master Netmender, you said only one crescent!"
"It's bad luck to underpay a mage," the fisherman called back over his shoulder. "Just don't get greedy next year! Hi, Osa, be careful with that basket!"
"Mage?" whispered Pasco.
"Power or none, it don't matter, lady," Pasco said gloomily. "You don't know my family, begging your pardon. If I was a harrier-mage, that would please them no end—but even if there is such a thing as dancing magic, it's still dancing, get it? The moon'll drop plumb out of the sky afore my family lets me dance for my supper."