Heart's Magic (6 page)

What if she could actually
tie knots in the magic? A square knot or a bowline for instance, or
perhaps a slipknot... The possibilities were endless.

"This is why I hate
wizard's challenges." A spectator in the back of the hall raised
his crackly old-man's voice. His companions tried to hush him, but
he kept going. "They just stand round staring into cups. There's no
explosions. Or even trousers falling down."

Elinor had to bite her lips
to keep from laughing. But he was right. She needed to get on with
it and stop messing about with Cranshaw's magic. She combed the
last of the tangles free and picked up the goblet, holding it high
for a moment to allow the presiding judge--and everyone else--to
see it. Then she downed the potion, drinking it in as few gulps as
possible.

Gah,
it was foul stuff. She couldn't help making choking noises and
had to spit in the goblet, trying to rid herself of the taste.
Rosato handed her a peppermint.

"What is that?" Dodd
pounced, snatching the candy from Elinor's hand.

"It is a peppermint,"
Rosato protested. "It is allowed!"

Cranshaw took it from Dodd,
shaking it in his fist at the dais. "No magical assistance is
allowed to the challenger!" he shouted.

"It is only a peppermint,"
Rosato said, louder this time.

"Fetch the item." Gathmann
gestured at one of the Briganti Enforcers helping with the vote
collection. He handed his slips of paper to another man wearing the
four-color striped Briganti sash and strode down the center aisle
to do as told.

Cranshaw slammed his hand
down on the stone table, as if to crush the helpless candy. He
bumped the goblet holding Elinor's potion--she didn't think by
accident.

The crystal fell to the
floor and shattered into a million pieces, splattering muddy green
potion across the grey flagstones. Elinor cried out, jumping and
stretching in a futile attempt to catch it.

"You did that
deliberately!" Rosato accused over the rising tide of exclamation
and shouting.

"It was an accident."
Cranshaw smirked. "If she is so foolish to place her potion in a
breakable cup--"

"
Silence!
" The roar of Gathmann's voice
and more, the magic in it, brought all discussion, argument, even
random coughing to a halt. Elinor didn't think she could even hear
the sound of rain dripping off the roof.

"You, Briganti--" The
Prussian pointed at the man who'd been sent for the peppermint.
"What have you found?"

The Briganti officer had to
pry the crushed candy from Cranshaw's grip. He turned the pieces
over in his palm. "It's a peppermint, sir," he called back.
"Nothing more." He turned it over to another Briganti walking by
with a sheaf of votes, indicating that he should take it to
Gathmann on his dais.

The Enforcer--Elinor
thought she recognized him from the Waterloo Station battle--folded
his arms and scowled at the four at the table. It was probably good
that he stayed close.

Rosato handed the man a
peppermint. He tried to speak, but Gathmann hadn't let up on his
imposition of silence. Dr. Rosato turned to the dais and gestured
an appeal to speak, but he didn't wait for permission. With
gestures, he asked the Briganti to give the peppermint to Elinor,
pointing at the goblet and making a face and mock spitting to
demonstrate its nasty taste, talking silently away as he waved his
hands.

"And if she is going to die
from it," he was saying, as his voice suddenly returned, "she would
die already. But look, she does not die."

Cranshaw waved his hand at
the dais, requesting permission to speak. Gathmann waved back,
granting it.

"This challenge is
forfeit," the wizard's magister called out. "There is no potion
from the challenger."

"Because he spilled it
deliberately!" Rosato shouted. "He dashed it to the floor because
he was afraid to drink it!"

"Why should I not fear what
that sly creature might have done--?"

Gathmann cut both men off,
imposing silence on them again. There on the dais, half the room
away, Harry got up from his magister's chair and approached the
Prussian alchemist. They exchanged a few words, then Harry drew a
silver flask from his inner coat pocket.

"I thought Nigel Cranshaw
might do something like this," Harry said, "when Miss Tavis decided
to use crystal instead o' metal for her cup to avoid accusations of
alchemic interference. The spell recipe she used makes up a whole
pot full o' potion. So I brought another tot. In case."

He raised the flask higher.
"This is silver. Spelled to be completely magic null. Our judge
'ere can verify that. An' the rest o' you wizards can verify it's
the same potion as was in the glass Nigel broke." Harry handed the
flask to Gathmann.

"Null," the Prussian
pronounced and handed it to Sir William. Gathmann waved the gavel,
erasing his silence spell, and Elinor took a deep breath. The spell
made her feel half-choked.

"It seems the Conclave
president has learned a new trick since last summer," Dr. Rosato
murmured to Elinor. "He could not do this in Paris. It was a very
noisy Conclave assembly."

Elinor shushed him. She did
not want to be silenced again and she wanted to watch the
wizards.

Sir William opened the
flask and sniffed. "It is the same." He gave it to one of the
wizards still watching near the dais.

Allsup took a deep whiff
and coughed at the aroma doubtless made even more pungent by being
closed in the small flask. He scowled at Cranshaw and passed the
flask on. "It is the same potion." The next wizard
agreed.

Apparently, Elinor decided,
they were more angry with Cranshaw for trying to cheat than they
were over her challenge. Honor among wizards and all
that.

One by one, they handed it
down the line until the last wizard, old Beddowes, carefully
screwed the cap back onto the flask so it wouldn't spill while he
tottered the few more steps to the supervising Briganti, where he
handed it over. The Briganti, who was an alchemist and had come to
Harry's house and therefore was someone whose name Elinor should
know, took the old wizard's elbow and walked him back to the chair
someone had found for him.

After the old man was seated
again, the Briganti--
Norwood
--that was his name. Norwood
strode briskly back toward the quartet gathered at the table.
Elinor had been so focused on watching the flask's progress and
trying to recall Norwood's name that Cranshaw's scream of rage
caught her by surprise.

"No!" His denial was bound
into the scream. "No, I will not be subjected to the corruption,
the foulness and evil this female has concocted. She does not
belong here. She is lies and wickedness throughout and has blinded
you all to the truth!"

Elinor straightened from
her flinch as Cranshaw spouted his irrational rant. She threw off
Dr. Rosato's protective hand and reached into her quiver, selecting
the alder wand by feel. She shifted the maple wand to her other
hand. She didn't know what the other wizard might do, but she would
be ready.

"He is mad," Rosato
whispered, staring at Cranshaw.

Norwood came on, ignoring
Cranshaw's raving, bringing the flask with the potion for the mad
wizard to unspell and drink. Norwood took up the pewter goblet with
a little flip of the cup and shook out the last few drops of
Cranshaw's neutralized potion. He thumped it down on Cranshaw's
side of the table and began to unscrew the cap on the
flask.

"No!" Cranshaw shouted.
"No, I won't do it. She is a cheat. A liar. She has--"

"The only cheat I see here
is you," Norwood growled.

"She has bewitched you."
Cranshaw's eyes rolled wide and white as he backed from the table.
"She has bewitched you all!"

Elinor tightened her grip
on her wands, using the maple to taste the magic in the air, hoping
for some warning if Cranshaw broke.

Norwood grimly upended the
flask to pour Elinor's potion into the goblet. Cranshaw's hand
darted into his pocket and came out again to throw--

"Look out!" Elinor
cried.

Cranshaw threw an
alchemist's fireball at point blank range at the goblet, uncaring
that Norwood and Dodd were standing over it, Dr. Rosato only a step
away.

Elinor threw her alder
wand. She couldn't hope to strike the clay pellet with it. Her aim
was terrible. Besides, the fire had already ignited, blowing
forward at the goblet and the men. The magic in the maple wand
seemed to slow down time, allowing her to see the alder hit the
fire magic and shatter.

Alder was wood and wood
burned, which drove the magic inside it even faster. It spread over
the men to protect them from Cranshaw's reckless act. Elinor was
already drawing her next wand. The rowan had been loaded with
protective magic as well.

"Back away," she ordered
the noncombatants.

They hadn't been hurt by
the illegal fire, she saw with the maple's aid. Good. Norwood took
the goblet with him as he moved out of the combat zone, pushing
Dodd and Rosato ahead of him.

Elinor stirred her rowan
wand in the air over the Book, taking up more magic as she skirted
the edge of the table, advancing on Cranshaw. He backed away,
fumbling in his pockets again. How many firebombs did he have? She
was down to five wands and the maple didn't have either aggressive
or protective magic, so really--four. Three. The pine hadn't been
loaded at all.

"Nigel Cranshaw--" She put
magic into her voice to make it carry. "You are not worthy to be
magister of the wizard's guild."

He threw another fireball.
Elinor hurled her rowan wand to meet it, smothering the fire with
her magic this time as the wood crisped to ash, to keep it from
injuring any of the spectators. She drew the cherry wand and traced
a figure eight in the air.

The spectators' shouts of
alarm died down, became whispers laid over murmuring as she walked
forward and Cranshaw scrambled away. He bumped against the railing
containing the crowd and changed his angle of retreat, backing
toward the dais.

He dug a third fireball
from his pocket. Elinor tossed her cherry wand in the air, hurried
forward a few steps and caught it again, pulling it sharply in
toward her. As she hoped, a net of magic woven by her wand
tightened around him.

"You have proven yourself a
coward and a cheat," she proclaimed, "and very probably
insane."

The net kept him from
moving his arms and from walking, but it didn't stop him from
cracking the hollow clay fireball with his thumb. Unlike Harry's
firebombs which had to be ignited independently after they were
opened, these bombs had been spelled to ignite automatically when
cracked. Illegal fireballs made for the use of
non-alchemists.

The fire burst forth,
catching Cranshaw's clothing, hands--everything inside the net with
him.

"No!" Elinor dropped both
wands, scrabbling in her quiver for the ashwood wand.

"
Extinguo!
" burst from half a hundred
voices, Harry's louder than even Gathmann's as they leaped off the
dais and came dashing down the broad central aisle. The fires
burning Cranshaw quenched instantly.

"My bag!" Elinor called to
Amanusa, who had been put in charge of it for the duration of the
challenge.

"And mine!" Rosato was
there beside her.

The magic in the ash wand
sliced through the cherrywood binding, freeing Cranshaw to collapse
on the stone floor. Fortunately, he was unconscious. Elinor knelt,
shoving her hoop-free skirts beneath and behind her so she could
begin tearing his clothing away.

"Here!" Dodd protested.
"What are you doing?"

"Saving his life," Rosato
snapped. "Back away."

"Norwood, keep this area
clear," Harry ordered, pushing his way through the crowd that had
gathered close, leading the way for the two master sorcerers
bearing the wizards' bags.

Pearl Carteret, the newest
sorceress, had Elinor's bag open and the jar of salve she wanted in
hand, ready to pass over. "You're going to have to make up a vat of
this stuff," she said.

"Or people will have to
stop trying to burn us," Elinor agreed. She opened the jar as
Rosato finished stripping Cranshaw's clothing away from his
blackened flesh, leaving him a modicum of modesty. The fire had
burned only along his right side, from shoulder to knee, but it had
burned him severely. Elinor dipped a handful of salve from the
jar.

"I have heard about this--"
Rosato took the jar when Elinor gave it to him. "I had hoped never
to see anyone burned badly enough to watch it at work."

Elinor began with
Cranshaw's hand, the worst of it, burned almost to a claw. Rosato
moved to begin at his ankle. The two sorcerers huddled together for
a moment, then Amanusa touched Cranshaw's mouth, pushing her finger
just inside. Pearl touched a bloody crack in the wizard's skin with
a piece of tissue paper. Amanusa wiped her finger on the paper and
they set it on the stone floor a little ways off for Harry to burn
with a flick of his finger.