Heart's Magic (5 page)

Sir William looked at the
others on the platform with him. "Tomlinson can't do it," he
muttered. "He's her magic-master. Carteret--" The Council Head
spoke up, calling on the magister of the conjurer's guild. "Take
over."

Lord Greyson Carteret
flashed a wicked smile. "Certainly." He stepped forward, accepting
the gavel from Sir William.

"I object!" Cranshaw cried
again. "Carteret has worked hand in glove with this female. He has
taken another female as apprentice. Not only that, but he has been
cozened into marrying her. He cannot be an impartial
judge!"

"No?" Carteret, slim and
dangerous as a dagger, let the gavel dangle from his thumb and
forefinger, lifting an eyebrow as he looked down the wide aisle to
Cranshaw. "Shall we have Mrs. Greyson preside?"

Magister Greyson of the
sorcerer's guild was married to a distant relation of Magister
Carteret's, hence the similarity in names. Amanusa Greyson's
emergence from the depths of Transylvania as the first blood
sorceress in two hundred years had brought sorcery's magic back
into the world. It had also done much to convince the male bastion
of Europe's magicians' councils that women should be once more
admitted to their ranks. That was not to say that everyone agreed,
but fewer now objected with the same vehemence as
Cranshaw.

"God forbid!" Cranshaw
blanched at the suggestion. "She has no right to be present.
Sorcery is not a recognized guild. It is spawned by the devil, fed
by blood, worked for evil--"

"Shall we put it to a
vote?" Carteret handed the gavel back to Sir William. "I believe we
have a quorum of our membership present. Vote: Is sorcery still a
school of magic recognized by the British Magician's Council, as it
has been since the beginning of the council's establishment? And as
such, are its members therefore members of the council? Yea or
nay?"

A roar went up from the
gathered crowd, and Sir William had to use his amplified voice to
quiet it. "Secret ballot," he said. "Briganti, collect the votes.
Sergeant-at-arms, count them."

The sergeant-at-arms was
the colonel in charge of the Briganti Enforcement Branch. Simmons
had been opposed to women becoming magicians--but he had fought
alongside them in the terrible battle at Waterloo Station. Elinor
hoped his opinions had softened.

Elinor didn't want to wait
for the counting. She was stuffed full of magic and needed to use
it. She was ready
now.
This delay of Cranshaw's had to be calculated to disturb her
concentration, get her rattled and throw her magic askew. She was
better than that, but--

"What about the challenge?"
Dr. Rosato spoke up, just as Elinor had worked up her nerve to
speak. "We are here for the challenge between Wizard Tavis and
Magister Cranshaw--"

"That female is no wizard!"
Cranshaw shouted.

Rosato ignored him. "This
vote--the counting has no bearing on the challenge. The contenders
are here. The potions are prepared. The challenge should go
on."

"There is no presiding
officer!" Spittle flew from Cranshaw's mouth as he raged. Elinor
slid her eyes to the side to get a look at him and wondered whether
he would collapse from an apoplexy before the challenge ever
started.

"I will preside." A trim
blond man with a massive moustache and an accent like the late
Prince Albert stepped onto the dais.

"You--who are you? What
right do you have?" Cranshaw's rather bulgy eyes looked as if they
might boggle right out of his head.

"I am Georg Gathmann. I am
head of the Magician's Council of the Kingdom of Prussia, and for
this term, president of the Ancient and Noble Conclave of All
Magic, governing all of the councils of Europe and its
colonies."

That shut the man up.
Elinor pushed her smug satisfaction under her
hopefully still-serene expression to join all the other emotions
jumbling around in there. She'd forgotten Gathmann had come to
town. He was also involved in Harry's consultations and he'd
escorted half a dozen candidates for Amanusa's sorcery school from
the German states.

"Surely you cannot say that
I will not be an impartial judge." Gathmann gazed imperiously down
the length of the chamber at the goggling Cranshaw.

"The vote can continue
during the challenge," Sir William pronounced. "Let's get on with
it."

"Who's going to verify the
potions?" someone called from the crowd.

Sir William rolled his eyes.
"Wizards--all of you, up here. You will bloody well
all
verify that the
potions were made by the contender and him or her alone. No more
delays. Let's get this done."

He handed the gavel to
Gathmann, who happened to be an alchemist like Harry, and walked to
the front of the dais where he stepped down to be the first of the
wizards to inspect the potions. The other wizards slowly worked
their way through the crowd to come forward and do the
same.

Sir William took the goblet
from Dodd first. He looked, then sniffed, and nodded as if
satisfied. He turned to Rosato, who handed Elinor's goblet over.
Sir William peered into its murky depths, swirling the liquid
around the clear crystal to coat the sides with a thin greenish
film. He sniffed and his eyebrows rose, but he nodded and handed it
over to the next wizard, creaky old Beddowes.

As she expected from the
minute Sir William called all of Cranshaw's creatures up to verify,
someone tried to object to her potion. Allsup was a hidebound
traditionalist who seemed to object to--well, everything. "This
isn't a regulation potion," he protested. "It isn't in the
book."

"It is," Elinor spoke up for
the first time. "It is in Peyrolle's
Potions and Spells
, with my own
modification." The Peyrolle was an old book, out of fashion with
current thinking, but it had some grand potions in it.

"Did the challenger create
the potion entirely herself?" Gathmann asked.

"I can detect no other hand
in it," Allsup responded reluctantly.

"That is the only
requirement for a challenge," Gathmann stated, looking down the
line of wizards yet to verify. "Contenders can create any spell
they choose, as long as it is their own work, whatever the guild.
Continue."

The last three or four
worked quickly, all agreeing that the two potions were entirely
Elinor's and Cranshaw's own work. At last, Rosato and Dodd held the
goblets again and walked back down the long space toward the
central table where Elinor waited with the man who hated
her.

A wizards' challenge, she'd
been informed, would be a quiet genteel affair, unlike the violent,
explosive, run-and-hide challenges of alchemists. Harry had told
her tales of his days in the academy, when the alchemy boys spent
half their time in plotting to blow each other up. The conjury
students weren't much better, though their challenges tended more
to the prankish, since spirits couldn't move much with any weight
or mass in the material world.

Because wizards--male
ones--were so rare, they'd been out of bounds to the other boys,
protected from the pranks and explosions, for the most part. Elinor
hoped it might make Cranshaw overconfident. He had likely never
truly been challenged by another male. And given that he apparently
believed women some sort of lesser being, possibly not even members
of the same species, she thought she had basis for hope.

The two seconds reached the
center table and exchanged goblets. Rosato tested Cranshaw's potion
with a look, a sniff and a sneer, evidently unimpressed.
"Competent," he damned it.

Dodd did the same with
Elinor's potion, right down to the sneer. "Swill," he dismissed
it.

Rosato's smile was as serene
as Elinor's. "
Si,
it is swill. But very poisonous swill, yes?"

Dodd set Elinor's potion
down on Cranshaw's side of the table as Rosato set Cranshaw's
potion on her side.

"Inspecting of the wands,
please." Rosato held his hand out.

With a sour expression,
Cranshaw took out a pair of wands--ash and alder, Elinor
thought--and handed them to Dodd, who gave them to Rosato, who gave
them a cursory looking-over and handed them back.

Now it was Elinor's turn.
With a sigh and a crossing of her fingers, Elinor drew her fistful
of wands from her quiver and passed them to Rosato for Dodd's
inspection.

Dodd frowned at them, hands
at his sides in belligerent fists. "What's this? Who does she think
she is, a bloody alchemist?"

"Language,
signore,
" Rosato
reprimanded gently. "There is a lady present."

"She's no damned lady,"
Cranshaw snarled. His hands were in fists too. Elinor relaxed hers
forcibly.

"There will be no cursing
during this challenge." Gathmann's voice floated over the crowd,
carrying magic with it to enforce his edict. "What is the
problem?"

"She's got a whole fistful
of wands," Dodd said.

"Only seven," Rosato
corrected. "Hardly a fistful."

"A proper wizard needs no
more than one," Cranshaw shouted. "Two at most."

"Why?" Elinor asked him.
"Why shouldn't a wizard use more than one wand? Why shouldn't we
follow the magic where it leads us?"

"Because it leads to--"
Cranshaw began, but Gathmann's clipped accent cut him
off.

"There is no rule limiting
the number of wands," he said.

"That's for alchemists!"
Allsup protested.

"For any challenge,"
Gathmann informed him. "The wands are allowed."

Elinor let the tension seep
slowly out of her as Dodd inspected each wand minutely, obviously
searching for something to get one or all of them thrown out. He
wouldn't find it. Now that her multitude of wands had been allowed
by the rules, they were in.

She hadn't been at all
certain she would get to keep them, for Cranshaw was entirely
correct. Wizards traditionally used a single wand, taking up a
second only when the first broke. Elinor now thought it pure
laziness, because it was easier to use a wand already tuned to
one's magic. She had worked relentlessly to tune a dozen or so to
her own spells, since her experiment with Harry in alchemy-style
wand work. These were the best of them. And they would pass, even
with the magic she'd borrowed from the Book, because once collected
by her and stored in wands tuned to her, the magic became
hers.

With a sour expression,
Dodd smacked the wands one at a time back into Rosato's hands, as
if he hoped to break, or at least crack them. The cheat. Rosato
gave them back to Elinor, who tucked all but the yew wand back into
her quiver. Finally, the preliminaries were done. Time to
begin.

The moment had arrived. Was
she as good as she thought she was? As good as Harry thought she
was? He thought much more highly of her talent than she did. Was he
right?

She had worked hard
preparing for this contest of magical skill. She was ready. And if
she failed,
Dottore
Rosato was there to flush the worst of the poison from her
system and keep her from actually dying. He would do the same for
Cranshaw, if it came to that.

She stepped up to the
table. As challenger, she would go first. She took her yew wand,
saturated with the best neutralizing magic she could call, and
thrust it into Cranshaw's potion. It was a standard belladonna and
wolfsbane potion, relying on the natural poisons in the plants as
well as the magic pushing the poisons to greater heights. It was,
as Dr. Rosato had said, a competent potion. The natural malevolence
of the plants meant that a little magic could do a great deal with
it. It was something of a lazy man's potion.

It also meant that it
wouldn't take much magic to render it harmless. The plants' poisons
could be untwisted...
so.
Elinor stirred the potion counterclockwise, slowly
releasing the magic from her wand to turn the venomous mixture into
nothing more than a nasty-tasting tea--if not for the poisonous
magic that remained.

There, Cranshaw had been a
little more creative, somehow tying knots in the inimical magic
binding the poisons together. Elinor studied the concoction,
curious as to how he'd done it. She exchanged her yew wand for one
made of maple imported from America, carefully laying the steaming
yew on the stone table top to avoid damaging anything.

Dodd scowled at the wand
exchange, but Cranshaw's smug superiority only got smugger. If that
was a word. He thought he'd won. He hadn't. Elinor just wanted the
maple to see more clearly. The hard wood conveyed her magic sense
smooth as silk.

Cranshaw's magic wasn't
knotted, so much as tangled, Elinor realized. She combed her magic
gently through it, teasing the strands free. The tangles bound the
magic together, combining the belladonna's deadliness with the
wolfsbane's and holding it, even when the chemical composition of
the poisons had been neutralized. The tangles were deadly, but
chaotic.