Mage Heart. Jane Routley
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I remember my mother sitting by the kitchen fire one winter evening sewing it up, but it most definitely belonged to the innkeeper's daughter, Sonia.
I discovered to my delight that I could make that ball dance above my head, out of the reach of even the bigger children, simply by willing it so. I was four at the time. I must have made it float more than once, for I seem to have many memories of rushing up and down the dim wooden balconies of the inn, surrounded by a pack of screaming, laughing children, all leaping and trying to bat at the ball above my head.
But I remember clearly one time when I came around a corner and rushed past a tall, grey man who was leaning on the balcony rail. As we passed, he reached out and plucked the ball out of the air. It lay lifeless in his hand as he asked in the sudden silence,
"Who did this?" The man's face was huge as he bent toward us and it had that forbidding look on it that often came before punishment. Most of my companions fled, but Sonia stayed beside me, wide-eyed and clutching her little brother by the hand. I realize now that he must have cast a spell on them. His eyes were very compelling; although they did not hold my gaze the way they held Sonia's and Mouse's. My resistance to Michael's spell must have been one of the many tests I passed that day. He would have taken it as a measure of my innate power.
I didn't run away, my usual and wise response when a stranger at the inn tried to handle me. I was too fascinated. Suddenly I could hear his voice speaking to me in my head and, to my fear and delight, could answer in the same way. I can't remember what he asked me, but while he questioned me, he took my face between his hands and, though I flinched and wriggled, looked deep into my eyes, tilting my face to and fro and up and down.
The examination was cut short when Old Hallie the innkeeper came hurrying up the stairs. I remember the man turning as if in slow motion and as he spoke with the innkeeper, the innkeeper's anxious expression changed to one of awe.
Later I belonged to Michael. He had persuaded my mother with a sum of money to let him take me away to be educated near Mangalore. Sometimes I used to wonder how my mother could have done it, could have sold me to a stranger. Michael told me by way of explanation that my mother, who was only a serving woman at the inn, had more children than she knew what to do with. He implied that one child more or less meant nothing to her. I suppose one could not expect a woman who had been so imprudent in the getting of her children to be any more careful in their disposal. I remember very little about her myself and would be hard put ever to find that inn again. My life before leaving it is like some well remembered dream. Reality started with Michael.
Sometimes when I had failed in some way and he was very angry with me, he would tell me that it had been a great waste of good money. I think he regretted it more often than he said. He had chosen me to be his foster daughter because he wanted to explore the theory that women were capable of advanced magery. That was why he had been so taken with me that day at the inn. It took exceptional natural ability to be able to levitate a ball without the aid of spells.
He wrote his doctoral thesis on my education. He pointed out in this thesis that natural ability was not everything. From the very beginning he suspected that I would have problems in temperament that would always flaw my magic. He found me flighty, unwilling to concentrate, slapdash, frivolous; he saw an irresponsibility in me that had been there at the start and that he feared I would never be able to change. The thesis remained inconclusive on that point. He pointed out that all girls could not be judged by the study of one example. I don't remember if he ever told this to anyone, but I think he feared privately that I might just be the child of my husbandless mother with her large brood of children.
For twelve years of my life, I lived as his daughter in a small village outside Mangalore, the capital of the Duchy and later the Archbishopric of Moria. For ten hours a day, seven days a week, I studied all the magic he could teach me. Mages from all over the Peninsula, and sometimes even farther, visited us to put me through my paces. If I failed to measure up, Michael would drill me even harder. I suppose I was a sort of dancing bear. Certainly like a dancing bear, I had no real function in the scheme of things.
Then when I was sixteen that life ended. When I was sixteen, the new Morian Church of the Burning Light took over the throne in the Revolution of Souls. The Burning Light intended to bring forward the Day of Melding by creating the City of Tanza on earth. A series of bishops rose to and fell from the throne as the country went through paroxysms of purging. All morally dubious persons were persecuted. Whores were whipped through the streets and driven from the towns. Other criminals were executed or maimed.
Outrageously, mages were treated no better. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," intoned the Burning Light priests. Within two years there were no healers or non-clerical mages left in Moria. Many of Michael's friends had been chained in witch manacles and burned at the stake before he decided to leave the country.
Michael believed that the Church wanted a monopoly on magical power and could not suffer a group of freethinkers like mages to exercise it outside their control. He blamed Smazor's Run as well. Smazor's freedom had, after all, been the result of a mistake by mages, and the bitter resentment many Morians still felt over this mistake found its voice in the Church's current outlawing of all nonclerical magic and the subsequent persecution of its practitioners.
But Michael also said, "It's been so long since those fools have seen a necromancer that they've come to believe that they can do without mages."
So Michael and I fled Moria. We traveled on foot for over a month and came by a roundabout route to the neighboring state of Gallia, a rich and powerful country whose dynamic young ruler, Duke Leon Sahr, was known to be a friend of mages. Michael was by now a famous educator, so it was easy for him to join the Gallian College of Magic, the Alma Mater of magery on the Peninsula. He settled easily into college life. I did not.
There were other women in the college it is true, the wives and daughters of the few staff who had families and the cleaners and serving women. There was even a college of healers affiliated with it, who used the college's classrooms. The wives and daughters of the staff should have been the natural companions to the foster daughter of one of the masters. But like most normal women, they were interested in children or cookery or sewing; they knew no Aramayan or Ancient Soprian and cared nothing for magic. Being with them made me feel odd-skinny and clumsy. My wispy hair was always coming out from under my cap, and I was small-breasted, built more like a boy than a girl. I was stupid at all the things that mattered to them. I did my best to avoid them. And as for the healers ... Michael told me never to trust healers. "They're hard women," he said. "Arrogant and competitive, jealous of a mage's power."
I was the only woman anywhere studying advanced magic, and all my years of special teaching from Michael put me far ahead of most of the other students. When I was almost seventeen, I sat my final exams three years early and passed ahead of students even ten years my senior. Michael was both gratified and worried. He would not let my results be publicly displayed. As he explained to me, it was not wise for a woman to humiliate the male students by outstripping them too obviously. It would only anger them and lead to trouble. There was no need to be too proud of my results. They were merely the result of all those years of special teaching. I wasn't troubled by this. These were the kinds of considerations that had always concerned Michael. For myself was bored by the classes and happy when Michael decided that I should return to private study and to helping him with research. Life continued in Gallia in much the same way as it had in Mangalore. If I was restless, it was no more than I had ever been.
Until suddenly Michael had a heart attack and within two days was dead.
I was in limbo. The college staff, most of them old men like the Dean, were supportive, but embarrassed by the weeping of a young girl. They quickly left me to my own devices. I was completely at a loss. For almost thirteen years Michael had filled my days with lessons and research. I did not know what my own devices were.
I was very lonely. I did not have the knack of making friends. I'd never really talked to anyone except Michael. I was not good at trusting people, being suspicious of their motives in the case of young men and uncomfortable in the company of women.
Night after night I would sit in the dingy college dining room at the high table, for I sat with the staff and their families,