how likely it is to be successful. You will, as I say, bring me a paper in a month, and another paper in another month, and thus, until I tell you you may stop.”
There was a little silence, during which Sylvi considered that she would have less time to ride her pony, and go out with the huntsfolk and the falconers. But she also recognised that this wasn’t punishment like a slap with a riding-whip was, or nothing but plain porridge for a week. This was much worse. But it was also much better.
“And yes . . . magic does . . . something: makes its mere presence felt somehow. I don’t think it’s a smell either. I don’t know what it is. I would like to know. You may consider that this is the purpose behind your research; I think you are more likely to discover the answer investigating straightforward, practical village magic than what the guilds send to the palace. And no one pays much attention to hedge wizards; I have thought before that I would like someone to pay attention and tell me what they see.”
She had brought her father monthly papers for three years. He had let her off a year ago, but by then she was interested—and the network she had set up for people to bring her stories (people who were first carefully vetted by Ahathin or, lately, one of her guards) was working too well for her to be willing to close it down. She had brought her father three more papers in the last year, and they were all long ones.
She continued to carry them to him herself, and with the third one this year she finally caught him smiling. “ This was as much a set-up as Garren sending me to the Hall in the first place, wasn’t it?” Her father had guessed that one of her brothers had been responsible, and Garren had admitted it—and been assigned three months’ attendance on Nirakla as punishment. She used no magic herself, and was happy to have an extra pair of hands for the summer to bundle and hang, chop and grind herbs for her. “She wanted to know if I wanted to apprentice to her,” Garren had said at a private family supper at the end of his term with her, trying to sound outraged. “She said I chopped really well.”
Sylvi said again to her father, smiling over her latest paper on hedge magic, “Wasn’t it?”
“No. Yes,” said her father, and laughed. He didn’t laugh often enough. “One has various things in the back of one’s mind. Occasionally an opportunity presents itself to bring one forward. Most of these opportunities come to nothing. Once in a very great while one—or two—do come to something.”
Garren had not apprenticed to Nirakla—his father could not spare him so far. But Nirakla had agreed to a half apprenticeship, and the king had allowed his youngest son a certain latitude in terms of creating unnecessary work for his new tutor by knocking people down who were inclined to tease him about his new assignment.
The thing that had stuck in Sylvi’s mind during her long atonement was that the Hall of Magicians was used when someone wanted the truth about something—the truth when it concerned magic or magicians. The guilds sometimes used it; the king, with or without the presence of the council or the senate, sometimes used it. She wondered—she couldn’t help wondering—what effect the Hall itself had had on her experience and its outcome. She had found the possibility that its enigmatic half-sentience had been involved curiously cheering, as if it was an indication that magic was not quite as inimical as she’d thought. As if magic was more often like Ahathin than it was like Fthoom. Although writing her papers always took longer than she expected, because even the most trifling of village magic didn’t like being pinned into paragraphs.
But a shadow had grown over this, as over so much in her life. After her twelfth birthday she had wondered if her little study was one reason Fthoom had been so ready to hate her—but surely a princess studying witch-charms for love philtres and fortune-telling and fly-strike in sheep was pitiable, not dangerous?
Do you have to do something else instead? she asked Ebon. Since they didn’t ground you.
Mmmh, said Ebon. Our dads are so alike, aren’t they? I have to teach a class of littles flying safety.