The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic: Book 1 (16 page)

If he was going to leave Ariel and Astrid, as he knew he had to, he should at least leave them something to remember him by.

The sapphires nagged at his brain for some reason. They could not wear them, true, at least not when they wanted to have their magic, but perhaps they might still want to keep them, to think of him.

He was not sure what else to do. The symmetry of the two stones, for two girls, seemed too appropriate. And the blue flash he had seen in his head with the strength spell, the more he thought about it, seemed to be the same shade.

He rose from the bed and found the pouch with the two stones. When he came out of his room, Walther was dressed and reading something in the front sitting room.

“I have some things to do. Enjoy the dinner.”

“Are you sure? I do not think Johannes was expecting you to attend, but I am sure he would not mind.”

“No, it’s all right. I can leave you to your magely conversation. I need to take care of a few things.”

♦ ♦

Erich very deliberately did not wear his rapier, though it was more appropriate for carrying in the city than the war knife. He also wore his cloak up over his head to conceal his face as best he could. The sun was sinking, but there was perhaps an hour of daylight left.

A few coppers distributed to the neighborhood urchins directed Erich to a jeweler’s shop near the cathedral. The door was barred, and he saw a pair of stout, well-armed men inside.

He rapped on the window, and one of the men came to the door and opened the viewport.

“Yes?”

“I have a commission for your master.”

The man looked him over, then went to the back. He returned a minute later with an old dwarf.

“What is it you need?” the dwarf asked.

“I need a pair of gold rings fashioned. I have stones I need you to set.”

“Show me.”

Erich held up the sapphires. The dwarf peered out the viewport, then nodded to his guards. They stepped back and opened the door.

Erich entered the shop and followed the dwarf to his workbench. There was a chair in front, and he sat as the dwarf did, pushing the stones toward him.

The dwarf picked up one, then the other, peering through them much as he had seen Walther do.

“These are fine stones.”

“Yes.”

“What is it you need?”

“One ring for each.”

He turned the sapphires over in his fingers. “These should be easy to set, unless you want other stones mounted with them.”

“No.”

“I will create a base and bezel around them. That’s the best for cabochons such as these. But I need to know what size to make them.”

This brought Erich up short. He had no idea what to tell the dwarf. He thought of Ariel’s hand on his that night. The girls were not slim . . . but their hands were long and small-boned.

“I think about the size of my little finger.”

The dwarf examined his hand, then drew some copper rings out of a drawer. After a few tries, he found one that fit.

“So how much?” Erich asked.

“Twenty crowns for the two.”

Erich withdrew the gold bracelet he had found in the ogres’ chest.

“What will you give me for this?”

The dwarf picked it up and tossed it in his hand. “Perhaps an even trade.”

“That makes it worth more than twenty crowns, I assume. There is quite a bit more gold in that bracelet than you will need for the rings.”

The dwarf laughed. “There is a saying in my trade. The gold is free; you pay for the labor. What I pay you for this, I must recoup by selling it, plus some profit, or there is little point.”

“A profit on the rings, a profit on the bracelet.”

“And you make a profit on that sword, I will assume.”

Erich could see he was getting no further with this dwarf.

“All right. An even trade. How long? I need these quickly.”

“We will make it three days.” The dwarf cackled. “What I earn on that bracelet, we will apply toward rushing the job.”

♦ ♦

Giancarlo and his band had arrived in Weilburg the previous afternoon, and had immediately regained Erich’s trail. Several people—a woman at an inn and a smith—confirmed seeing the man with the jeweled rapier no less than a week earlier, and one confirmed his name.

But frustratingly, he was no longer there, and no one seemed quite sure where he had gone.

As his men silently drank their ale in a tavern near the town square, Giancarlo fumed. Erich had not seemed to be hiding his identity, which suggested to Giancarlo that he had no idea he was being pursued. That meant they could be on the verge of catching him—just as long as he could learn where he went.

The one lead Giancarlo had was a man named Walther the artificer. The smith had told him Erich had taken service with him. But Walther had left as well.

Giancarlo was sure Erich had left with Walther, wherever he was going. That much seemed clear. But while quite a few people he asked knew Walther had left, none of them knew his destination.

He was about to order another round of ale—they were going nowhere that day, it seemed—when he saw a young man in a green velvet doublet approaching nervously.

“What you need, young sir?”

“I am told you have been asking about Walther the artificer.”

Giancarlo perked up.

“I have. Do you know of him? Join me here.” He motioned to the chair beside him. The boy sat down.

“What is your name?”

“Hans, sir.”

“What do you know of Walther?”

“I wish to marry his daughters,” he said sadly.

Giancarlo smiled.

“And they have left, have they? With their father?”

“Yes.”

“Are they pretty? Do they like you?”

“They are so beautiful. But I am not sure they care about me.”

Giancarlo patted him on the shoulder.

“Love is a game, my young friend. You must not concede so easily. Now tell me, do you know where they have gone?”

“Yes. They have gone off to Köln to seek husbands. Walther is a mage, and his daughters can only marry other mages.”

Giancarlo’s affected mood wilted.

“Köln? Did you say Köln?”

“Yes.”

“And how did they go?”

“I don’t know. I assume the west road, along the river.”

Giancarlo’s head swam. That was exactly how they had come. How on earth had they missed him? They had seen no man traveling with two beautiful girls.

“Was there a man with them? A man carrying a jeweled rapier?”

Hans looked up. “Oh, yes. He went with them, as their guide, I assume.”

Giancarlo cursed internally. However they had managed it, the two groups had passed each other on the road. It had been that close.

He stood, calling to his men.

“To your feet! We are leaving at once!”

Hans watched in confusion as the men stormed out of the tavern, wondering what it was he had said to provoke such a reaction.

24.

Astrid picked at her dinner, listening to her father and Johannes going on about university gossip and reminiscing about things that had happened before she was born.

“Do you remember Albert Vogel, the one with the red hair?” Johannes asked.

“The one who taught animal summoning? Whatever happened to him?”

“Louis, the Count of Isenburg-Büdingen, hired him as his court mage about three or four years after you left. From what I heard, it did not go well. The count’s daughter, Anna, was to be married, and the count wanted him to conjure a flock of peacocks at the wedding feast. Somehow or another, he got the conjuration wrong, and summoned a huge flock of ravens, which proceeded to attack the guests and tear apart the dinner.”

Walther roared in laughter. “Lovely! I am sure that went over well. Albert liked his drink, as I recall. I suppose he was drunk when he attempted it.”

“I heard the same,” Johannes said. “He spent a while in the count’s dungeon after that, I believe.”

Franz laughed, perhaps a bit too earnestly to Astrid’s ears.

“That reminds me of the automaton cat you built once, Father,” Ariel said.

Walther snorted. “We will not speak of that one.”

“What happened?” Franz asked.

“It had difficulty distinguishing between mice and mere shadows under the furniture,” Ariel replied. “It smashed itself to bits crashing into the walls over and over.”

“I have refined my technique since then,” Walther replied. “The most recent rat-catcher has worked out quite well. I have learned to focus on functions and not attempt to mimic the natural world.”

Astrid was not prepared to agree with that. The spider-thing Father had built recently had an annoying tendency to attack her feet. Still, it did catch the rats and mice much better than his earlier inventions.

Franz turned to her. “Ariel, there is a museum of automata here at the university. Perhaps you and Astrid would like to go see it?”

She smiled thinly at him. “
I’m
Astrid.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He looked over at her sister. “Would you like to see it?”

“Things might explode,” Astrid said. “Ariel is good at that.”

Ariel smirked at her, while Franz looked lost.

“Only Erich seems to make automata explode,” Ariel said.

Johannes spoke up. “Are you referring to the man you arrived with?”

“Yes,” Walther said. “A fine swordsman. We would not have made it here otherwise.”

“He killed two ogres singlehandedly,” Ariel said.

“But he’s not a mage?” Johannes asked.

“No,” Walther replied. “The girls are referring to an unfortunate incident that occurred before we left. I am still not sure what happened.”

Astrid went back to poking at the remains of her dinner. She wished Erich had come with them, but he had disappeared before they were dressed. Father said he had things to do and Johannes had not exactly invited him anyway.

She knew what Johannes was up to. It was painfully obvious he hoped Franz would match with them. Franz seemed intelligent enough, but after less than an hour, she was already bored with him. She was sure she did not want to marry him.

Erich did not gape at her and Ariel the way Franz kept doing. Even poor Hans Bergdahl was not this bad. How could she respect a husband who looked at her like that?

Or thought the things he did. She had seen it in Shadow’s mind after she had lunged at Franz. He had been envisioning them naked, and worse.

She prayed they would not match. Going to his bed was sure to be the torment she had imagined.

After dinner, Astrid and Ariel stood apart from the others as Johannes showed Walther around his library and Franz stood around looking unsure of himself.

‘What do you think of Franz?” Astrid asked softly.

“I think Johannes means for us to match with him.”

“Yes, it would appear so. What do you think of that?”

“I think I should be terribly bored. I don't want a life here in the university.”

Astrid nodded. “Neither do I.”

“Maybe there will be interesting mages at the equinox ball.”

“Perhaps. I hope so.”

♦ ♦

Erich returned to the apartments to find Walther and the girls still at dinner. He had eaten a simple meal at a tavern outside the university gate, keeping his face hidden as best he could.

There was a bottle of wine in the front room of the apartments. He poured himself a glass and sat down. Shadow came out of the girls’ bedroom and sat on the floor at his feet. He scratched her head, and she gazed up at him with her yellow eyes for a moment before laying down to doze.

He wasn't certain when the others would return. Across the room, he noticed a bookcase with about a dozen books and got up to see what might be there. Most were on scholarly subjects he neither understood nor cared to, but one was entitled
An Introduction to Magery
. He pulled it from the bookcase and went to his bed to read it. Shadow followed him, and jumped up on the bed with him.

The title was accurate enough. Much of the book was a tedious introduction to spellcasting, the first few chapters of which essentially repeated what Ariel had explained to him by the fire that night. He was about to cast it aside when he flipped past a chapter entitled “On Marriage and Family.”

He stopped, found the beginning of the chapter, and began to read.

As Walther and the girls had explained to him, the characteristics of one’s flow determined much in life. But this book laid out the actual mechanics of it.

Mages married mages for a specific reason, and it wasn’t anything Erich had really considered.

It was about lovemaking.

“The act of love,” the book explained, “is a conjoining of both body and flow. In non-mages, this matters little because disruptions of the flow have few obvious effects. In mages, however, conjoining with an incompatible flow can be disastrous.”

Such close proximity to a flow opposed to one’s own, it went on, damaged a mage’s ability to control the larger Flow. One such episode might mean only temporary damage, but repeated conjoinings would rapidly render both mages incapable of controlling the Flow.

Essentially, you married one compatible person, and lay with him or her—and no one else, ever—or you lost your talent.

Erich was stunned. All along he had been thinking in the back of his mind that this was some quaint custom mages used to keep themselves separate from the rest of the world, notwithstanding what Walther had told him. He had never imagined that for mages, the Sixth Commandment had real teeth.

And it meant the little fantasy he had been nurturing in the back of his mind—just to amuse himself, really—about somehow, some way, being the girls’ match and marrying them both, had truly been in vain. He could see now there was no way it could happen, not unless they were willing to give up their talents for him. And he knew that was impossible, not that he even wanted them to.

Still, a tiny little bit of something died inside him at that moment.

There was more. Marriage for mages was more than reciting some vows before a priest, and many of them did not even bother with that part. There was a spell involved, one that formally bound their respective flows. But it would only work if they were compatible, and to get to that point, compatibility had to be tested.