Bookworm II: The Very Ugly Duckling (44 page)

She wouldn’t have had to consent
, Johan recalled, remembering the marriage laws he’d looked up when the first suitor had come looking for Charity’s hand. The suitor had been over twice her age, but that hadn’t stopped their father taking it seriously. Charity had been deeply worried until the offer had finally been rejected.
She could only legally object after she turned twenty-one
...
and if she reached that age, unmarried, few people would want her because they would suspect that there was something wrong with her. If her parents couldn’t marry her off ...

“I won’t,” he said, savagely. “What was he thinking?”

Elaine took the second letter from his hand, unfolded it and read it, quickly. “Is he out of his mind?”

“He must be,” Johan said. “Why ...?”

“He’s desperate,” Dread said, very quietly. “You were important before you did ... your trick to Hawthorne; now, you’re the most valuable and yet dangerous person in the Empire. If someone manages to get control of you, they’d have a good chance to become the next Grand Sorcerer.”

“I am not a tool,” Johan snapped. Bitterness and rage billowed up within him. Darkness seemed to fall over his vision. “I am not ...”

“Careful,” Elaine said. Her voice seemed to come from a far distance. “
Johan
!”

Johan opened his eyes, unsure of when he’d closed them. The room was shaking, the tremors slowly fading away to nothingness. Dread was standing in front of him, one hand raised as if he were about to slap Johan hard. Johan hadn’t realised just how close he had come to losing control completely. He sagged and had to be caught by the Inquisitor before he hit the floor.

“I can’t ... she hates me,” Johan said, desperately. “What have I
done
to her?”

“You’ve done nothing to her,” Elaine said, sharply. “And it speaks well of you that you care enough to be angry.”

Johan stared down at his hands. Part of his body was hinting that it really wouldn’t mind being married to Jayne, the sooner the better. His mind told that part of his body to shut up; Jayne had had her ambitions, ambitions she could no longer realise ... just because he’d taken her out on a date. What had she done to deserve it? As the wife of a Conidian, she would be expected to be nothing more than a brood mare. At the very least, she would have to put off her studies until after she’d had several children.

What is the difference
, he asked himself numbly,
between what Hawthorne planned to do to Elaine and this
?

It would be rape, plain and simple. He couldn’t go through with the wedding.

“He can’t force me into this,” he said. “Can he?”

“I confess that your case is unique,” Dread said. “But if you were prepared to reject the family altogether ...”

“Then I will,” Johan said. “Or ...”

“There may be other problems,” Elaine said. “Your brother has been released.”

Johan stared at her, too stunned by the first letters to be angry at this new piece of news. But then, it really
wasn’t
a shock. He knew Jamal’s skill at getting out of trouble too well to be surprised. If his father was unwilling to forget custom and tradition and promote Charity to be Prime Heir, he had to move the heavens and earth to free Jamal before it was too late. There would be no other candidate for Prime Heir until the younger kids reached eighteen years old.

“Why?” he snarled, finally. “How much did he have to pay?”

“There were oaths made,” Dread said, simply. “Your father pledged his life that Jamal would behave himself.”

“I’d better start looking for suitable clothes to wear for the funeral,” Johan said, grimly. He knew that he would miss his father, but after the two pieces of bad news he found it hard to care if something happened to him. “A purple serge suit, a yellow and black polka-dot tie, green and mauve-striped shirt, gold monogrammed boots and a white bowler hat.”

Elaine snorted, as if she were trying to hide a giggle. Dread merely scowled at the pair of them.

“I’m serious,” Johan said, forcing himself to hold down a giggle himself. “Jamal cannot behave himself – and some idiot has just handed him a sure-fire way to kill his own father!”

“Your father does have excellent incentive to ensure that Johan behaves himself,” Dread observed. “His own life is at stake.”

“Jamal is still Prime Heir,” Johan snapped. Maybe he should have accepted his father’s offer and become Prime Heir himself, even though it would have tied him to the family he wanted to escape. “What’s to stop him breaking the oath and killing my father? What blasted idiot thought that
this
was a good idea?”

“The Privy Council,” Elaine said, tartly. “And wouldn’t there be consequences if your brother killed his father deliberately?”

“I
know
him,” Johan insisted. “Jamal is not even remotely capable of not acting badly.”

“Your father will handle it or die,” Dread said, before Johan could continue. “I assume that you wish to head back to the Golden City?”

“I think so,” Elaine said. She smiled, then pocketed the gold-edged letter. “You’d think there would be a crystal ball here.”

“The Inquisitors who normally come here are expected to recuperate,” Dread pointed out. “If they knew what was going on, they’d feel compelled to do something, even if they were at death’s door. We are not taught how to relax or to give up.”

Johan smiled, remembering the
Grand High Inquisitor
books Charity had been fond of reading. They’d been trash; the hero of the book alternatively catching Dark Wizards with effortless ease or bedding his way through the planet’s population. It was a minor miracle, Johan remembered thinking, that he hadn’t also left thousands of children in his wake. But then, he would probably have known how to prevent his conquests from becoming pregnant.

The thought made his smile grow wider. There had been a note in the back of the book, where the author had claimed that she had known hundreds of Inquisitors
very
intimately and her stories were based firmly in reality. After meeting some Inquisitors for himself – and a Dark Wizard – Johan was fairly sure that she’d made them all up from whole cloth. It was a bigger miracle that the Inquisition hadn’t sued.

“We’ll go down after lunch and catch an Iron Dragon, if they’re running normally now,” Elaine said. “And, once we’re back at the library, we will try to sort out this ghastly mess.”

***

This time, Elaine couldn’t help noticing, Johan was not so fascinated by the Iron Dragon, or the countryside as they headed back to the Golden City. He alternated between rage and frustration – and a bitterness that his relationship with Jayne had been so easily destroyed. Elaine was no expert in relationships, but she understood how the girl had felt – and, no doubt, she had believed that Johan had asked his father to arrange the match. There were girls who would be delighted at the arrangement. Jayne, clearly, wasn’t one of them.

Johan’s father had sent the marriage contracts in a separate envelope. Elaine examined them carefully – she’d had to talk Johan out of destroying them – looking for loopholes. But there was nothing that suggested itself to her; Johan’s father and Jayne’s father had given their approval and both children were too young to legally object. If she’d been more powerful, Elaine suspected, her own Guardian would probably have sold her off to the highest bidder. Or maybe he had tried and the Witch-King had interfered. It would have taken Elaine away from the Great Library, ruining one of his plans.

“They can’t force us into bed together,” Johan said. “Can they?”

“There
are
potions that can do just that,” Elaine commented, still reading the documents. “I don’t think Jayne would miss them trying to use such potions if you were locked in the same room together.”

It was interesting just how few clauses there actually were. Stripped of legalese, Johan’s father had promised to give Jayne’s father a lot of money – and not much else. It was odd to see a daughter sold so blatantly, which made her wonder if she was missing something. Normally, the true nature of the deal would be concealed behind a tissue of nonsense; here, it was blunt and almost shockingly honest. But then, Jayne
was
a younger child. Perhaps they’d just decided that the niceties weren’t important.

Poor girl
, Elaine thought, grimly. She looked over at Johan.
Poor boy
.

“I think there’s only one loophole we can use, short of you severing all ties with your family,” Elaine said. That would have been tricky even before Johan had stripped Hawthorne of his power. Now ... he would need at least one Great House obliged to defend him. “I want to take you on as my apprentice.”

Johan hesitated. “Is that wise?”

“You would need my consent to get married in that case, as long as you were my apprentice,” Elaine said, simply. “I would obviously not grant consent, so you wouldn’t have to honour the marriage contract. Your father might claim that you can’t take on an apprenticeship without his permission, but the Grand Sorceress already gave her consent, which automatically overrides your father’s opinion.”

“And, as you offered me the apprenticeship before the contract was signed,” Johan said, “father can’t claim that you took me on just to help evade the marriage.”

But that was what we are doing
, Elaine thought. Johan was right, though. The apprenticeship had been offered before the marriage contract.

“I will,” Johan said. “Will you take me as your apprentice?”

“I will be a hard taskmaster,” Elaine warned. There were still too many question marks over Johan’s powers – and how they would respond to an apprenticeship oath. But she knew that she dared not let Johan become a pawn in the power struggle she knew was threatening to sweep over the Golden City. “You have been warned.”

“You already have been a hard taskmaster,” Johan grumbled.

Beside him, Dread barked a laugh.

Johan scowled at him, then held out a hand. “Tell me,” he said. “How do we do it?”

“Once you have spoken to Jayne,” Elaine said, firmly. “You need to patch things up or cut them neatly first, or your feelings will interfere with the bond.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Waving Wand was neutral territory, as everyone knew. It was a single bar, in the heart of the city, owned and operated by an incredibly powerful sorcerer who seemed disinclined to take part in the constant struggle for supremacy among the different factions. Instead, he just served drinks and excellent food, and chatted to his customers, while remaining strictly uninvolved in politics. The one time a faction had tried to pressure him was still legendary amongst the city’s population, most of whom liked the idea of a place where the factions could meet without automatic hostility.

Johan stepped into the bar, glancing around in astonishment. It was large, divided up into a number of booths that allowed the inhabitants to have private conversations without being overheard; a stern message warned newcomers that troublesome customers would be transfigured into pigs and fed to better-behaved visitors. That would be murder, Johan knew, as well as cannibalism, but the warning seemed to have been taken to heart. There were plenty of people in the bar, yet there was no fighting. They weren’t even waving their wands at one another.

He caught sight of Jayne, swallowed hard, and walked over to where she was sitting. She looked miserable, wearing her Peerless School robes rather than the library uniform or the dress she’d worn on their first date. Her black hair had been tied into pigtails, making her look younger than she actually was; her face had been scrubbed clean of makeup. Johan had no way of sensing a glamour under normal circumstances, but he was sure she wasn’t using one. She truly was as miserable as she looked.

“Hi,” he said. “I ...”

Jayne raised a hand, as if she were going to slap him, then lowered it slowly. “You
bastard
,” she said. “I ...”

“It wasn’t my decision,” Johan said, quietly. Elaine had told him that Jayne would rant and scream at him, but he was not to lose his temper. She wasn’t to blame for the situation either. “My father ... my father wants to control me.”

“He’s already got his hooks in me,” Jayne snapped, bitterly. “What Potions Master will take me on now?”

Johan scowled. It was rare for a husband – rarer still for a wife – to take on an apprenticeship; the relationship between master and student was very close, often too close for comfort. In theory it wasn’t actually supposed to become sexual, but all the books he’d read had brought up the possibility. It was quite easy for intimacy in one field to drift into another. Even if Johan didn’t object, people would talk ... particularly if Jayne hadn’t given him children.

“I intend to break the contract,” he said, simply. “You will not be forced into marrying me.”

Jayne looked at him, sharply. “My father has already taken money from your father,” she said. “I was ordered ... I was told ...”

“Don’t worry about it,” Johan said. He could guess. Sleeping together before marriage would hardly seal anything, not when it was common among young magicians, but their parents might expect it to bind them closer together. “And you won’t lose your job at the library either.”

Jayne looked up, tears in her eyes. “Are you
sure
?”

“Positive,” Johan said. Elaine had assured him that she didn’t care about whatever pressure Johan’s father could bring to bear. The Great Library was neutral too, at least in theory. It would be hard for Johan’s father to influence Elaine’s staffing decisions. “As long as you don’t resign, the job is yours.”

“My father has been pressing me to resign,” Jayne said. “What will become of us?”

“You will not be blamed,” Johan said, carefully. “I think you can just resume your life.”

But he had a feeling that it wouldn’t be that simple. His father might just keep pressuring Jayne, in the hopes that it would force Johan to concede and go back to the family. It would be cruel, but Johan knew that his father’s determination to make the family wealthy and powerful often pushed him into doing cruel things. But surely they had wealth and power enough already?