...And then Daria stepped out of the darkness towards her. “Elaine,” she called. Her dress was torn, leaving her forced to use one of her hands to hold it together or lose whatever remained of her modesty. “Elaine...are you all right?”
Elaine stared at her. “How did you find me?”
“Carefully,” Daria said. She winked at Elaine, who could only stare back at her. “I decided to leave the chaos behind and come after you before they recovered from their shock.”
Elaine fought down the urge to giggle. All of Millicent’s cronies followed her because they had thought – had
known
– that she was an incredibly powerful and well-connected young woman. Better to laugh at her jokes and indulge her sense of humour than to be on the receiving end of her torments, better to watch someone else suffer than suffer themselves. But they would just have seen their leader transfigured against her will, forced into a form that would make being a frog seem comfortable and familiar...and transformed by someone they had believed to be barely strong enough to light a fire. Their world had just turned upside down.
She winced, remembering Bee. “And Bee?”
“I saw a pair of Inquisitors on their way to the club,” Daria said. “I think they’ll take care of him. He may not be very important in himself, but his patron is important enough to command attention even from the skulls. I wonder what they will make of Millicent.”
Elaine shuddered. Inquisitor Dread had terrified her even when she hadn’t been the target of his investigation, only the unwilling victim. What would he say to her if he had to hunt her down for breaking the rules? And yet she hadn’t really broken any of the rules, not when Millicent had done the same to her in the past. But convention, the same convention that gave magicians free reign to wreak havoc as they experimented with their powers, probably didn’t apply when the victim’s family was so powerful.
“I should run,” Elaine said. Millicent would surely tell the Inquisitors what had happened to her – and who had done it. She’d lose a great deal of her reputation – and maybe many of her cronies – but that would be no consolation for Elaine. “But where can I go?”
“Home,” Daria said, firmly. “You need a rest and a chance to eat something. I don’t think they’re going to waste too much time trying to catch you.”
“Not if I go home,” Elaine said, through a sudden wave of dizziness. Magic had a price...and she’d never worked such a complex series of spells before. “It will be the first place they look.”
“If they bother to look at all,” Daria pointed out. “Do you really think that Millicent is going to be honest with them about what happened to her? The entire city would hear about it by the morning...and they’d all be laughing at her. I dread to imagine what her aunt would say to her after she recovers from being a tiny statue.”
“There were hundreds of witnesses,” Elaine said, with some irritation. “They could tell...”
“They won’t want to get caught up in a feud between magicians,” Daria said. “I think they’ll suffer the kind of memory loss that even the most complex of memory charms couldn’t produce. And besides...what are they going to charge you with in the absence of a Grand Sorcerer?”
She reached out and took Elaine’s arm. “Besides, you don’t want to stay here,” she added. “Do you realise how close you came to the Blight?”
Elaine shivered. If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have sensed the wild magic floating through the air, mocking her with its promise of power unleashed by the wizards who had called the Blight into existence. And yet she knew better than to go anywhere near the Blight. Wild magic could inflict changes in a victim that no amount of controlled magic could repair. There were no warning signs warning people to stay out of the Blight. The Golden City’s council felt that anyone stupid enough to go into the most dangerous place in the world, short of the scorched continents that had once played host to the Witch-King’s armies, deserved everything that happened to them.
Centuries ago, a cabal of wizards had experimented with a branch of necromancy that wasn’t – technically – forbidden. Murder offered vast magical power to the necromancer willing to take it; they’d reasoned that trapping a victim in an endless death would offer a bottomless supply of power, even though it wouldn’t have the same charge as a true murder. The Inquisitors had moved to stop the cabal and they’d fought back, unleashing all of their magic in one final cataclysmic burst. They’d contaminated the entire area with wild magic.
And wild magic was difficult, almost impossible, to control. It surged through the Blight like waves crashing over a beach, threatening random transformations – or death – to anyone caught up inside the field. No one lived in the Blight, not even the lowest of the low. With space in the Golden City so limited, the council had offered a vast reward for anyone who cleaned up the wild magic and opened the Blight to habitation again. So far, no one had succeeded.
Spells floated through her mind as Daria pulled her away from the alley and back onto the streets. Wild magic couldn’t be dispersed; it had to go somewhere. There were spells that would tap the wild magic and use it up slowly, but surely – spells that no one knew even existed, perhaps not even the Grand Sorcerer. Elaine had known how many books of secrets were stored in the Great Library long before they’d all been jammed into her skull. One man, even the Grand Sorcerer himself, could not have read them all. And he could never have seen how to take some of the more complex spells apart and reassemble them in a form that might have served to drain the Blight.
Elaine had never been ambitious – but then, she’d known she had neither the talent nor breeding to be ambitious. What if
she
cleared the Blight? The Council had offered thousands of Crowns to the sorcerer who succeeded – and with that sort of money, who knew what she could do? Millicent would certainly never try to hurt her again...
...And yet it would attract attention. The Inquisition would start asking questions until they worked out what had happened, and then they would execute her for being in possession of forbidden knowledge. It didn’t seem fair at all, but they would have no choice. The secrets within her mind whispered that there was a price to pay for greatly expanding one’s power, a price that was most often paid in sanity. There were ways to make oneself more powerful than the Grand Sorcerer, capable of working enough magic to destroy the entire city, but if she tried she would go insane. They claimed that that was what had happened to the Witch-King...
History, the history she’d never been taught in the Peerless School, started to drift through her mind. The first necromancers had been evil; they’d wanted power and hadn’t cared how many thousands they’d had to butcher to gain enough power to turn the world into a living nightmare. They’d had to be stopped – and it had taken six bloody years of fighting in the First Necromantic War to stop them. But that victory had come at a price. The Sorcerer Valiant, a name even the most uneducated knew from legends passed down from the wars, had absorbed the collected knowledge of the necromancers directly, using it to defeat them at the end of the war.
And then he’d become the Witch-King and unleashed a necromantic conflict more horrific than the first. Power had driven him mad. Dark knowledge had fuelled a quest for power that had threatened the fragile peace he’d helped create. And when the conflict finally came, there had been little left of the sorcerer who had saved the world. He’d become the maddened Witch-King.
No one knew that, outside the senior wizards. No one knew that the heroic Valiant and the dreaded Witch-King were one and the same. But Elaine knew...
...And in a moment of insight, she wondered if the spell that had been worked on her, that had jammed all of the Library’s knowledge into her head, was related to the spell that had started the long process of turning Valiant into the Witch-King.
She stopped dead, staring at the stone beneath her feet. It was so hard to focus, but most of her tutors had been very capable at imparting knowledge to young minds and she remembered most of what she’d been taught. Many compulsion and enslavement spells worked by placing irrepressible thoughts into helpless minds, commands that the victim couldn’t even begin to disobey. Could it be possible that placing vast amounts of knowledge into a mind would start corrupting the mind and eventually driving the victim mad? The thought was terrifying. Could
she
become a new Witch-King herself? And yet Valiant had been an incredibly powerful sorcerer even before he’d started to tap the secrets of becoming a necromancer. Elaine had far less power to use as a base for becoming a monster.
Maybe she
should
go to the Inquisition. They would kill her and end whatever threat she posed long before she went mad.
“Come on,” Daria said, encouragingly. Her friend sounded remarkably composed for someone who looked to be on the verge of exposing her breasts to the crowds around them. “We’re nearly there. Or maybe...”
She let go of Elaine’s hand and walked over to one of the roadside stalls. Elaine had never fully trusted the meals one could buy on the streets, even the ones cooked by people who understood the concept of basic hygiene. Daria seemed to eat far more meat than was good for her and never seemed to get ill, while Elaine had learned the hard way not to eat more from the street eateries than she needed to barely satisfy her hunger. Elaine watched as Daria haggled briefly with an older woman standing behind the portable stove and eventually purchased two wrapped parcels of meat. Her mouth started to water as she smelled the cooked chicken and bread inside the packets. Daria opened one, sniffed it quickly, and then passed it to her.
“I had all the toppings on mine,” she said, by way of explanation. Elaine nodded in understanding. Daria seemed capable of drinking spicy sauces that set Elaine’s mouth on fire. “That one should be fairly sedate.”
“I wonder if it’s edible,” Elaine muttered, as she picked up the first piece of chicken. Her stomach growled and she swallowed it without hesitation. It tasted surprisingly good, although there was a faint aftertaste of cooking fat. “What about yours?”
Daria held up a piece of chicken covered in bright red sauce. “I’ve had hotter meals,” she said. Elaine caught a whiff of the sauce and shuddered. How anyone could eat it was beyond her. “Did I tell you that I once dated a guy from Cinnabar? Now
he
knew how to cook the hottest of meals.”
Elaine remembered Bee...and shuddered. “Do you think he’s ever going to want to see me again?”
Daria seemed to understand. “I think that he’s a nice guy,” she said, seriously. “And he seemed to like you. Perhaps he’ll want to go out somewhere a little quieter in the future.”
“If he ever wants to see me again,” Elaine repeated. Just once – just
once
– she would have liked to meet a guy and indulge herself without any fears for the future. “He’ll probably hate me for the rest of time.”
“Maybe he’ll find it exciting,” Daria said, and winked. “There are some guys who just
love
the thought of being enchanted by a woman.”
Elaine flushed. She’d never been part of the inner circles when she’d been a teenager, but she’d heard rumours. Some of them had been so absurd she’d been sure that her peers were trying to trick her into believing their lies. And yet some of the knowledge forced into her head left her wondering if the rumours were actually true. How could anyone get addicted to the sensation of being enchanted against one’s will?
“Then surely he’d want Millicent, not me,” Elaine said, bitterly. Millicent enjoyed men, particularly the men who wanted to form an alliance with Millicent’s family. The gods alone knew if she’d ever seal with a particular man, although some of the higher families pushed their daughters into marriages for dynastic purposes. Whoever ended up unwillingly sealed to Millicent would be entering hell itself. “
She
wouldn’t hesitate to turn him into a frog for looking at her sideways.”
“I don’t know,” Daria said. She patted Elaine on the shoulder as they reached their apartment. “Listen to the voice of experience for a moment. You’ve enjoyed your first taste of male company and there’s no need to ruin it by pressing ahead too fast.” She leered cheerfully at her. “Take it from me – men like doing the chasing, not being chased. The secret is to run away slowly enough to be caught.”
“That makes no sense,” Elaine protested.
“Just you wait until you have more experience,” Daria said, as her leer became a grin. “Like I said, don’t try to move ahead too fast. Men always value what they have to fight for more highly than what they get for free. Maybe on your next date you can kiss him a little, leave the passionate embrace for the third date and...”
Elaine felt herself flush, again. “You’re disgraceful,” she protested. “I can’t do that.”
“You said you couldn’t dance either,” Daria said, not in the least bit offended. “And yet tonight you were dancing as if you’d been dancing for years.”
They reached their apartment, dumped the remains of the paper wrapping in the bin and headed to their rooms. “Get some sleep,” Daria advised. “Tomorrow you can start thinking about what you’re going to wear on your next date.”
Elaine hesitated. “Daria,” she said, slowly, “why did Millicent say that you had a secret?”
“Everyone has secrets,” Daria said. “I have secrets that belong to my folk – I bet you that Millicent has secrets of her own. She probably thinks that the Travellers had other ideas than just making sure that one of their people got a proper education when they left me here.”
Elaine shrugged. “Do you think that the Travellers would take me in?”
“Only if you married one of my brothers,” Daria said. Elaine blinked. Daria had never
mentioned
brothers before, let alone the rest of her family. “Take it from me, you don’t want to do that. They’re dreadfully...traditionalist, set in their ways. And besides, your children would be accepted, but you’d never be fully one of us.”
“I see,” Elaine said. “That doesn’t sound very nice.”
“They’re not very nice people,” Daria admitted. “You know how most people treat Travellers, even ones who are harmless. They’re never convinced that they should be nicer to people because no one is nice to them.”