The Grandmaster's Tale

Boscha would expect Daphne to deal with most of these, I thought. I’d known some high-ranking people who’d become so invested in every little detail they couldn’t see the forest for the trees, but Boscha wasn’t one of them. He did know how to delegate. He was so good at it that he didn’t have to do very much at all, as long as his staff did their job. Why are they here?

I looked closer. The records were quite detailed, but …

The parchment tingled with magic as I touched it. I swore under my breath. A palimpsest. I should have known. My family had used them frequently, when it wanted to send messages they didn’t want to be read by unfriendly eyes. Someone had written a message in charmed ink on the parchment, waited for it to fade, then written a second message over the first. Clever … and quite impossible to detect, if you weren’t the intended recipient. I wouldn’t be able to read the message, even if I guessed it was there, without Boscha’s help. Or at least some of his blood. They were so complex to produce that hardly anyone outside the magical families knew they existed, let alone used them.

I rested my hand against the parchment and watched as the writing shifted to reveal the hidden message. My eyes narrowed. Lord Pollux had been writing to Boscha—that was no surprise—and his message, even concealed, was so vague Walter’s father had left himself with far more than just plausible deniability. He dodged around the subject, listing objectives without ever mentioning what those objectives were … I suspected I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend anything if I hadn’t been raised by House Barca. I knew enough of the background to guess at some of the meaning, then infer others …

Lord Pollux knows Boscha is building an army, I thought, coldly. And he’s not the only one.

My blood ran cold as I started to put the pieces together. Boscha had recruited students from the most powerful magical families, the ones who believed—firmly—in Supremacist ideology. Boscha had promised the students rewards and … I shuddered, recalling what Walter had told Geraldine. There were seven board members, five of whom were either Supremacists themselves or inclined to go along with them. If their youngsters became a magical army, who could stop them taking control of the nexus points and declaring a Supremacist Empire? The old emperors were gone. I couldn’t see any of the mundane kings standing in their way. They’d be crushed like bugs.

Or turned into bugs and then crushed, I thought. I knew some of my relatives thought their magic gave them the right to rule. There’d be little resistance, if the Supremacists managed to take control of the nexus points. Why bother, when they’d be getting what they wanted? It won’t end well.

I put the parchment back on the desk—the hidden writing would fade, the moment I let go—and searched the rest of the office as thoroughly as I could without revealing any trace of my presence. I knew all the tricks—all the ways to hide something, from simple misdirection to concealment spells—but it still took me some time to find the hidden compartment under the throne and peek inside. I had to give Boscha credit. It was a neat place to hide stuff because no one would want to look there. The papers inside were very revealing, although most were so vague that—individually—they were almost useless. Collectively, they let me put the pieces together to reveal Boscha’s plan.

Grief, I thought, as I put everything back into place. Time was pressing. If he manages to build an army, a proper army, he might just get away with it.

My mind raced as I returned to the door, looked around the room to ensure everything was still in place, then stepped out. The papers had made it clear Boscha had invited the board, no matter what he’d told us. I guessed he wanted to show off his army … hell, he’d used Alan’s near-death as an excuse to get his followers out of the shadows and into the corridors. There weren’t that many of them yet, relatively speaking, but it didn’t matter. Thirty trained combat sorcerers were enough to dominate any magical household or vaporise a mundane army with a wave of their hands. And given time, Boscha could train more. Why not? He had the entire school at his disposal.