The Grandmaster's Tale

Whitehall had never felt so welcoming, I reflected, even though I wasn’t really safe. Boscha controlled the wards … I hoped, prayed, he hadn’t been watching me as I left the school myself. Would he have worked out where I’d gone? Or … my thoughts spun in circles, trying to come up with a plan. Should I go to the White Council? Right now, I doubted the councillors could agree on anything, even something as important as putting out a fire threatening to burn them to death. Or my family … the thought of crawling back to House Barca, even to warn them, was abhorrent. They’d laugh in my face. Probably.

My feet carried me back to the staff quarters, then stopped. I needed to find allies and quickly. And that meant … I hurried down the corridor and knocked, loudly, on Mistress Constance’s door. The Alchemy tutor was tough—and had good reason to distrust Boscha. Her door swung open a moment later, her wards pointedly crackling around me. Mistress Constance had hundreds of suitors, all convinced she’d marry them if they asked nicely. So far, she’d rejected them all. I suspected I knew why.

Mistress Constance emerged from her bedroom, her dark hair hanging loose and spilling over a white nightgown. She eyed me in a manner that would have intimidated me, if I hadn’t seen too many horrors in my life. A sorceress’s rooms are her own private kingdom, and she is quite within her rights to do whatever she likes to you, if you intrude without her permission and a very good reason. But she had to know I wouldn’t knock on her door without good cause. Tutors learn to value their private time. They get so little of it.

“This had better be important,” she snapped. “I have the fifth years in the morning.”

“I found out what our grandmaster was doing,” I said, after casting a series of privacy wards. The look she gave me suggested I’d better explain quickly or I’d be spending the rest of my life croaking on a lily pad, if she didn’t chop me up and use me for ingredients instead. “He’s building an army.”

She stared as I ran through the full story, then swallowed. “He’s mad!”

“Perhaps.” I wasn’t so sure. Boscha wouldn’t have embarked on such a scheme unless he was reasonably sure it would succeed. Or at least let him back off and swear blind he’d been up to nothing. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing.”

“We had an odd little chat, Pepper and I and him,” Mistress Constance mused. “It was one of those odd little conversations, one of those discussions where you dance around the topic endlessly, trying to tease out what someone thinks about something without ever revealing your own thoughts and feelings. It was … he was talking about magical supremacists, asking what I thought of the concept. I dismissed it.”

I looked up. “You did?”

“It’s easy to say we’re better than the mundanes,” she said. “But the idea magicians who can trace their families back countless years are superior to newborns is absurd. I’ve been a teacher for years, and I have seen no inherent difference, nothing that proves newborns cannot catch up with students who were born and raised in a magical household and were taught much of what they needed to know before they came into their magic. You should have seen it, too.”

I nodded. If it had been up to me, newborns would have been given a year of preparatory schooling before they started classes with students who’d had that training before they went to school. It would have kept them from being left behind, confirming the prejudices against newborn magicians. Boscha had always refused to even consider the possibility. With what I knew now, I suspected he hadn’t wanted to risk giving the newborns a level playing field.

“Yes,” I said, curtly. “What’s his endgame?”

My mind churned. If Boscha was acting alone … he couldn’t be. It would just take one idiot like Walter to say the wrong thing to his parents, and all hell would break loose. Boscha might have tried to get them to swear oaths or sign contracts to keep their mouths shut, but his students had been born and raised in a community where asking someone to swear an oath was a huge red flag. And if Boscha had tried to test Mistress Constance, to see if she might be open to his ideas …

“He’s not the only Supremacist,” I mused. The Supremacists were strongest amongst the magical families, the ones with the background to buy into their claims. I knew there were a few in House Barca, damn them. “If he’s working for the others … what then?”