Excerpt
Homegrown Magic
1YaelThis party is supposed to be for Yael. So claimed the coveted invitations, heavy in their goatskin envelopes, thick paper addressed in malachite ink to the cream of society:
Mr. Baremon Clauneck and Mrs. Menorath Clauneck request the honor of your presence in celebration upon their child’s graduation from Auximia Academy. But it seems to Yael like any other company event. The jeweled suits and gowns. The deals being made around fountains of pale champagne and velvety red wine. The offering altar tucked inside a private chamber off the ballroom—one of half a dozen such altars scattered about Clauneck Manor, this one meant for guests to curry favor with the family’s patron. It’s nothing Yael hasn’t seen at a thousand such dinner parties.
They weren’t even consulted on the cake flavor. (
Hibiscus, for f***’s sake!)
“Let me guess. Animal handling?”
They look up from sniffing the ten-tiered monstrosity of a cake on display and find Alviss Oreborn smirking at them over the lip of a massive silver tankard.
“Come again?”
“Your field of study at Auximia. Animal handling, wasn’t it?”
Oreborn is teasing, clearly. He likes to pretend to be salt of the earth, the way he carries that tankard—albeit engraved with his own family crest—strapped to his belt like a shortsword and stomps around in mud-splattered boots even though there isn’t an unpaved street in the capital. Not south of the Willowthorn, at least. But Oreborn is a major depositor with the Clauneck Company. His silver mines are used to mint half the coinage in the kingdom—mines he hasn’t set foot inside for decades.
“Law,” Yael corrects him, pausing to drain their third glass of champagne, “with a specialty in arcana and transmutation. Father’s putting me in the currency exchange department at the company, apprenticed to Uncle Mikhil.”
“Well now. There’s a fancy job that’ll take you to many foreign shores.”
“I’m not sure it’ll take me any farther than the Hall of Exchange or the Records Library.” Yael grimaces, picturing the airless, echoing library in the bowels of the Clauneck office in the Copper Court.
If one were to gaze down upon Harrow from the back of a great eagle, the kingdom’s capital city of Ashaway would be easy to spot by its black basalt walls, roughly hexagonal; by the deep silver slice of the Willowthorn River, which runs from the mountains of the Northlands down to the west coast, carving right through the capital on its way; and, perhaps most of all, by the triumvirate of shining courts at its very center. The Golden Court at the topmost point, where the queens’ palace sits. The Ivory Court, home to the campus of Auximia, with its white stone towers. And the Copper Court, the main trading square in Ashaway—and thus, in the kingdom—named for its copper-tiled rooftops that blaze like bonfires in the sun. The Clauneck Company office is the tallest of the court’s fiery towers, but the library where records of every deposit, withdrawal, exchange, and investment are kept, accessible only by Clauneck blood, sits well below the earth. Its door is more thickly painted with security wards than the royal toilet.
“When you’ve seen one shore, you’ve seen them all, ey? Anyway, I expect you’ll be occupied by the family business, as well as the business of family making.” Oreborn claps Yael hard on the arm, and they almost fall sideways into the cake stand. “It’s the same for my Denby. See him yonder? Grew up handsome, he did.”
Yael looks across the ballroom at the towering Denby, shaped like a barrel with a beard. At twenty-three years of age, Yael has accepted the probability of staying five feet and a handbreadth tall forever . . . or mostly, they have. They’ve added a few inches this evening by fluffing up their finger-length black hair in defiance of gravity and the gods themselves. “Quite a specimen,” Yael manages.
“Isn’t he? I’ll bring him around in a more, er, intimate setting and reacquaint you two from when you were small,” Oreborn says with a wink. “Well, smaller.” Then he claps Yael again, roaring with laughter as he swaggers off.
Massaging their arm through their dress coat—green silk so thickly embroidered with ferns, buds, and briars, it’s stiff to move in, with a matching vest beneath—Yael watches Oreborn go. The man is a menace, and his son is a bully. They imagine having to talk to Denby, having to dance with Denby. It’d be like a squirrel waltzing with a big, mean tree.
Rather than consider it further, Yael makes their way to the bar counter to reacquaint themself with something stronger than champagne.
It’s only a moment before one of the barkeeps hired for the night notices them and approaches the counter. “Something to drink, sir’ram?” She pulls a glass from thin air in a flourish of magic, without anything like the scent of ozone and iron that accompanies the Claunecks’ own limited spellwork. A natural caster, then, of which there are none to be found in Yael’s family. Truly, magic doesn’t care whether you’re born into a manor house or a hut in the Rookery.
Yael watches, mesmerized by the muscled forearms beneath her rolled shirtsleeves. “
Everything to drink, if you please.” They grin and prop their elbows on the counter, their chin on one fist. “Where do you suggest I start?”
“We’ve a fine Witchwood Absinthe. Folk say you can hear the voices of the dead if you drink enough. Or perhaps a Copperhead. Ever had one?”
Yael flicks their eyes to the barkeep’s cinnamon-colored braids.
Flushing beneath matching freckles, she laughs. “It’s an ale with a shot of whiskey and just a few drops of snake venom.” She leans forward conspiratorially. “Most only feel a little numb in their fingers and toes. There’s a slight chance of paralysis, but that wears off before the liquor does.”
“Sounds like a quick ticket out of a boring party. I’ll take it, if you promise to drag me behind the counter where no one can step on me should things go sideways.”
“I think I can manage that.” With a wink, she turns toward the back bar to collect the necessary bottles and vials.
How times have changed. When Yael and their friends were children, they would creep out of the manor house to beg the stable hands for a few sips of whatever they were drinking; even Yael couldn’t have sweet-talked the barkeeps into serving eleven-year-olds in front of their rich and powerful parents. Though sometimes, Yael could distract one long enough for Margot Greenwillow—a natural caster herself—to send a spectral, shimmering hand floating beneath the bar’s pass-through and steal them a bottle. But those days of running wild around the outskirts of parties are long gone. Their childhood pack has scattered. Some have left Ashaway as fortunes and alliances shifted. Some, Yael’s lost track of altogether. Margot’s family was omnipresent in high society before Yael left the city at thirteen for boarding school in Perpignan—Harrow’s closest neighboring kingdom—and when they returned for college, the Greenwillows were simply gone, the best friend Yael ever had along with them. Impossibly, others are settling down and starting families of their own.
Oreborn was right about that much.
Yael’s parents looked the other way during their teen years at boarding school and during their time at Auximia, spent stumbling between alehouses, drinking and dicing with the children of judges, archmages, and princes. Nights like those were half the point of the kingdom’s premier school for noble and wealthy households. Even the months Yael’s just spent abroad in Locronan after graduation, traveling with peers who couldn’t bear to end the party yet, were begrudgingly permitted. But unlike many of their peers, Yael is no closer to marriage now than when they left for school. Baremon might have overlooked their mediocre grades and blatant disinterest in both law and the family business if they’d put as much effort into finding a suitable match as they had into spending their allowance and slipping beneath their peers’ silken bedsheets. Alas, they had not.
