The Grandmaster's Tale

I suspected he had a point. Whitehall was a dangerous place to work, if you lacked magic, but the wages were high, and you got your basic needs met, letting you save your money instead of spending it on food, drink and somewhere to sleep. It said something about magical society, I supposed, that while the senior families found magical abuse of mundanes to be contemptible, they rarely bothered to do anything about it. Boscha was unlikely to face any rebukes for not cracking down hard on students who abused the staff. It was much more likely he’d be scolded for cracking down. And yet, he had the power to tell the whiners to get lost. He just had to use it.

No one in their right mind wants their children to learn bad habits, I thought, crossly. They’ll reflect badly on their parents.

“The point, sir, is that we are allowing some of our students to run rampant,” Madame Clover insisted. “And it is going to bite us.”

“It is vitally important we encourage them to develop their powers,” Boscha said, tartly. “That which doesn’t kill them makes them strong.”

“That which doesn’t kill can still inflict a great deal of harm,” Madame Clover countered. “It is only a matter of time, sir, before someone winds up dead!”

“Or broken,” I added. “There’s no point in fighting if you can’t win.”

Boscha glowered at me. I forced myself to look back. I’d met serfs on their plantation fields, working their asses off to grow a tiny crop … serfs who were so battered by their masters that they couldn’t even raise a hand in self-defence or the defence of their wives and daughters. They lived in the mud from birth to death, unable to stand up for themselves. They had legal rights, true, but they couldn’t claim them. Their masters would crush them if they tried. And so they just trudged their way through life.

“They can win,” Boscha said. “If they apply themselves …”

“They keep getting knocked down,” I said. “At some point, after being knocked down repeatedly, you start wondering if you should bother getting up again.”

Boscha didn’t seem impressed. I sighed inwardly. I knew how he felt. It was hard, almost impossible, to understate the gulf between a magician born into an old and powerful family and a magician who was the first in his family. The former knew enough theory to be able to put it into use, when he came into his magic; the latter was learning from scratch, forcing him to scramble to catch up before it was too late. It was like pitting a toddler against a grown man and expecting the toddler to win. Worse, perhaps. It was like migrating to a city-state and discovering, too late, that the rules were different, and your opponents knew how to manipulate them to best advantage.

Heads, I win, I thought, tiredly. Tails, you lose.

“That speaks to a weakness in their character,” he said, finally. “They must develop their character, and their ability to handle the ups and downs of life, before they start tackling the more advanced magics. An untrained magician incapable of doing so becomes a major threat, as you know. You’ve certainly killed enough of them.”

I set my head proudly, and looked in Boscha’s direction. “Seven years ago, I killed a magician who went mad because he was mistreated,” I said. It was true, if one overlooked my brothers being involved and quite a few other details. “He had to die. At that point, he was a maddened creature who couldn’t be redeemed, who posed a danger so great that imprisoning him was not an option. But that doesn’t excuse the way he was treated.”

Boscha looked back at me. “I was treated poorly until I proved myself, too,” he said, flatly. “I turned out all right.”

“And if you were treated poorly and still say that,” I snapped, “it’s proof you didn’t turn out all right.”

Magic spiked. I thought, for a moment, he was going to start a fight. What I’d said had been cutting and unpleasant, the sort of thing he could use to justify cursing me into next week if I didn’t back down and grovel … I gritted my teeth, readying myself. Boscha wasn’t a weakling—he couldn’t have held the wards if he wasn’t amongst the most puissant magicians in the world—but I had a lot of combat experience, particularly at knife-range. I was fairly sure Boscha was nowhere near as skilled. His career before Whitehall was something of a mystery—I knew students who thought Boscha was a homunculus—but he’d never given the impression of having any combat experience. Indeed, the fact he constantly harped on his position was a very strong sign he didn’t feel particularly secure.