Cold Magics

Cold Magics

Erik Buchanan

www.dragonmoonpress.com

Cold Magics

Copyright © 2010 Erik Buchanan

Cover © 2010 Alex White

Cover Model: Erick Fournier

All rights reserved. Reproduction or utilization of this work in any form, by any means now known or hereinafter invented, including, but not limited to, xerography, photocopying and recording, and in any known storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without permission from the copyright holder.

www.dragonmoonpress.com

www.erikbuchanan.ca

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cold Magics

Erik Buchanan

Acknowledgements

No book is written in a vacuum. It’s too noisy and there’s not enough room in the bag.

More importantly, no book makes it to publication without a lot of help. My thanks to Gwen Gades at Dragon Moon Press for asking how fast I could get it done; to my readers (Katrina, Kim, Kathryn and Sara) for their hard work and great advice; to my editor, Gabrielle Harbowy, for putting up with my typos and helping me craft a much better (and shorter!) book; to Dan Levinson and all the folks at Rapier Wit for the sword-fighting and the friendship; to my family and friends for putting up with a writer; to my little girl whose joy infects my writing and who reminds me daily what it means to be a parent and a child; to everyone who bought Small Magics and asked the same question as Gwen; to Erick Fournier for agreeing to be on the cover, and finally to everyone who has actually read these acknowledgements and now understands why the Academy of Motion Pictures makes the speeches so short.

Dedication

In memory of my grandfather, Roy Friars,

who loved the first one.

Wish you were here to read this one, too.

Dear Thomas,

The summer is drawing to a close and it is with great annoyance that I inform you that the apartment is all yours. Father has sent money south to pay for the place through the winter, as compensation to you for my being stuck here for the foreseeable future.

The raiders are still in Frostmire and I am still chasing them around the duchy. They are good at going to ground where they can’t be found and it is getting very frustrating. We don’t think there are enough of them to overrun the duchy, but they have done some damage and we have seen some groups large enough to be worrisome. We are redoubling our efforts to destroy them—most difficult when one cannot find where they are hiding.

We thought originally that the raiders were northern tribesmen stirring up trouble, but I am beginning to doubt this. They are using some very unusual tactics. So unusual, in fact, that I am discussing with my father the possibility of coming south to ask for reinforcements. He has not yet agreed, but if he does, I hope that we will at least be able to sneak away for an evening at the Broken Quill while I am there.

I hope your studies are going well, though what possesses you to do both law and philosophy at once is still beyond me. Take care of our apartment and do not rent my room to anyone, as I fully intend to take up residence there once this matter is dealt with. Benjamin’s room you may do with as you will, but try not to rent it to anyone I would find offensive enough to have to drown in the fountain.

Regards,

Henry

1

I really need a new coat and some decent boots,
Thomas thought,
before I freeze to death.

A cold wind was blowing in from the sea and through the streets of Hawksmouth, bringing with it the vague threat of snow and a damp that snuck between the layers of Thomas’s clothes and nestled against his skin. He pulled his inadequate coat tighter around his thin frame. Hours on the fencing floor had left him wiry, but hadn’t put any flesh on his bones to keep him warm. Another hour in the street and the chill would burrow into his body and sink into his bones. He shoved his black hair back, out of his grey eyes. He needed to get the unruly mop cut, but that, like the coat, was something he only thought of when he couldn’t do anything about it. Like now, when the shops were closing up.

The sun was starting to sink as Thomas to make his way home down the tree-lined main thoroughfare. The bright reds and golds of early autumn had given way to the greys and browns of empty branches. The leaves still left in the city were lying in the gutters or in the alleys, discarded by trees bracing themselves for the bitter cold of a seaport in winter. The first of the truly cold days was yet to come, but night was coming earlier now, and it was only a matter of time.

Thomas rounded a corner into the maze of streets that made up the student quarter. A gust of wind hit him face-on and left him shivering. Anyone with a hint of wisdom had retreated indoors to a warm fire and good company. Thomas, on the other hand, had let the cold and damp follow him from his apartment to a bookseller in the poor quarter. There, he spent several hours poring over worn, poorly printed volumes and old hand-written journals, looking for magic.

Thomas had only discovered that he could see magic at the beginning of the summer. He had gone home to Elmvale at his father’s request, only to be chased out again by Bishop Malloy, who’d wanted Thomas’s magic for his own. It had come as quite the surprise to Thomas, who hadn’t known that he even had any.

Timothy, a travelling juggler who kept his magic hidden behind his sleights of hand, was the first to have his magic and his life taken by the bishop. Other deaths had followed, and Thomas had fled with his friends, George and Eileen Gobhann, to Hawksmouth, the capital of the country and home of the Royal Academy. There, Thomas recruited his fellow students, learned that he could see the glow of magic on a printed page, and learned how to summon more.

The bishop had come to Hawksmouth, of course, and from there it had been a desperate race to stop the man from trying to take all the world’s magic for himself. Thomas cast his first real spell, then, calling magic from the earth into his body and temporarily giving himself unbelievable power.

Thomas had killed over a dozen men with steel and magic that month
.

He’d found no magic in the old books and journals in the bookseller’s shop; only a pair of parlour plays, poorly bound and printed on cheap paper—ideal entertainment for when the cold drove the students indoors. Thomas bought them, as much to justify his presence in the shop as for any other reason.

The wind gusted again, blowing dirty leaves up from the gutters. Beggars shifted further into their corners and doorways, huddling together for warmth. Thomas walked with quick paces across the city, reaching the market square in the student quarter just in time to see the last stalls closing up, their red-cheeked, shivering owners putting away half-frozen wares. Thomas spotted a pastry seller still open and spent a pair of coppers on a meat pie and a fruit tart for his dinner. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast—his own fault for wandering so far and spending so much time in bookshops. Thomas contemplated a bottle of wine, then left it alone. He was too cold. Besides, without anyone to share it with, there was little point.

It had been a lonely autumn. His roommate Benjamin was dead—killed in the battle of the standing stones. Henry, his other roommate, was still in the North and not likely to return any time soon. By way of apology, Henry had arranged for his father to pay the entirety of their rent for the winter. Thomas appreciated the gesture, but would rather have had Henry’s company.

He still went out, of course. Not to do so would be give him a reputation for oddness that might lead some to wonder what he did with his time. So Thomas went out with the other law students and philosophy students, talking about the nature of reality or the latest doing of the courts, drinking far too much some nights and waking up with a hangover some mornings.

Thomas still dreamed of the dead.

It wasn’t every night, anymore, but the dreams still came. He dreamed of Timothy, and of the man he’d killed—his first—on the night he’d told Timothy’s sister about her brother’s death. He dreamed of Randolf, the bishop’s familiar, and of the soldiers he’d killed with lightning and steel in the bishop’s yard and at the battle of the standing stones.

Some nights Thomas dreamed of pulling the magic from Bishop Malloy, of running the man through with his sword, and of the angry, shocked expression on the bishop’s face when he died.

The memories of the battles had haunted his friends all summer, too. George had killed five men, himself. Eileen, not trained to fight, had still attacked a man who had tried to kill her brother. She’d had her face laid open by the soldier’s boot in the fight, and her nose now had a permanent bump where it had been broken.

Benjamin had died stopping the blow that would have killed her.

After they returned to Elmvale, Eileen demanded Thomas teach her how to use Benjamin’s rapier. Thomas saw her desperate need not to be helpless again and did as she asked. Eileen took after it with a ferocity that had shocked her mother and father. By the time Thomas left two months later, Eileen was becoming quite proficient.

Some nights the three of them had sat by the mill pond, looking at the moon reflected in the water and talking of the events they had survived. Thomas had wished Henry, who had been a soldier since he was fourteen and had led them to victory at the battle of the standing stones, could have been with them, but Henry had stayed in Hawksmouth that summer before his father summoned him north.

Thomas wished any of them could be with him, though especially Eileen.

The thought of her brought a smile to Thomas’s face as he headed for his apartment. Being with her had made it a good summer, once her father had gotten used to the idea of Thomas courting Eileen. Remembering stolen moments with Eileen warmed Thomas even as the cold wind picked up power, threatening to knock the bag off his shoulder.

He reached the courtyard that sat between the two student apartments, and headed for his own. In summer, the balconies were filled with students looking for cool air. Now, they stood empty. The plants and clothes that had hung on them all spring and summer were now inside near the small braziers the students kept in their apartments in their vain attempts to keep warm. He could hear snatches of conversation, laughter, and music as he went up the three flights of stairs to his own dark, empty place.

The room was cold, but not as cold as it had been, nor as draughty. In his search for books on magic, Thomas had come across the memoirs of a master carpenter with a charm for driving a nail into wood without splitting it. The seller would only sell it together with a box of the man’s tools, so Thomas had bought them both. The book turned out to be an excellent primer on carpentry. Thomas read it through, tried some of the projects, and surprised himself by enjoying it. Now, Thomas had a rough set of shelves to put his books on, the drafts in the walls were fixed, and the holes around the windows were plugged. George would have been proud. The other students were envious, and Thomas was certain he could have made a pretty good living repairing apartments. Instead, he had loaned out the book and the tools, and those who had applied both reported remarkably improved living conditions.

He put the plays on the shelves that held his very eclectic library. There were his schoolbooks for this year—he’d sent the older ones back home for Eileen—a half-dozen plays, and a dozen badly-printed treatises that had been thrust on Thomas at one student meeting or another, detailing various injustices in the kingdom. There were other books—philosophy, language, history, mathematics, and biology—that Thomas had picked up just for fun.

Interspersed among the others were the books with magic inside. All were second-hand; most were old and worn. A commonplace book hand-written by a merchant’s wife had a half-dozen charms in it. A pair of treatises—one by a nun, the other by a priest—held a pair of spells disguised as prayers to the High Father. The log of a ship’s captain had the spell against vermin. And there were a half-dozen more, all with tidbits of magic in them.