Now that my own magic is more advanced than his, he doesn’t try it so often. His voice doesn’t have the same raw power that mine does, but he’s quick, and what he lacks in ability he makes up for in gruesome creativity. I don’t want to test him.
“Well,” he says at last, and sweeps me a little bow. “Be sure to stick to the well-lit roads, Chantrix.”
* * *
Although it isn’t far, by the time I arrive at the hospital gates, I’m sweating and out of breath. My magic reserves must be even lower than I thought after the Performing, and exhaustion makes my vision blur at the edges. But I promised to come, and my goddess is watching.
Saint Izelea’s is located in an abandoned town house given to the nuns by Elene after its previous occupants fled to the countryside. Like Elene, these nuns, versed in healing arts, are pledged to Odetta, and I think she feels a certain affinity toward them even if she believes the hospitals harbor rebels. This quarter was once the height of fashion, but now many grand homes stand empty, overrun by rats and weeds.
In the first years after Elene took the throne, the Performings happened on her whim. Her hatred of the noble folk is legendary even now, but in those years, she did nothing to hold it back. If a piece of news displeased her, she would have nobles dragged into the performance hall in the mages’ wing for a private concert. As a child, I had watched the guards march entire families through the palace gardens from my studio window. Sometimes they emerged alive, though shaken and staggering. Other times I would only see them again when a wagon came to collect their corpses.
I’ve never dared to ask Elene about it, but Lacerde told me the story behind her hatred for the nobles. When she was a young mage, brimming with potential, she’d fallen in love with a young viscount. The nobleman’s family was out of favor and barred from the court, the result of a distant relative’s treason. The old queen would not allow his family to rise again, frustrating all of the viscount’s ambitions.
Elene was one of the most gifted students the academy had ever produced. She wanted more than a life of service to the crown.
Together, they plotted to overthrow the old queen. The viscount would rally the support of the upper class. Queen Celeste was thought weak, and her tax policies and expensive wars with Solidad were roundly despised. She did not know how to navigate the growing cultural divide between common folk and the nobles in their estates. Elene would sway the mages, offering them the chance to join the court as equals to the nobles.
But the old queen forgave the nobleman’s family. Free once more to pursue roles in government and take his place at the court, the viscount abandoned Elene. He married another: a woman of his own rank. And when Elene refused to just disappear, to put aside months of planning and the promise of a new life, he lured her to his father’s estate and locked her in a tower.
Too afraid to ever let her out again, lest she end his life with a song or expose his treason to Queen Celeste, he set fire to the tower. If Elene had died, everyone might have thought it was an accident. A tragic, terrible accident, befalling a promising student. And they would have ached for the viscount, a young man nurturing an impossible love in secret, hoping to hide Elene from his father and his betrothed. The tower was old, with a wooden roof and rotting beams. People would have believed it.
But Elene had lived to ruin him.
After so many years at the palace with Elene, I know her well. She might have forgiven the viscount for abandoning their love, but she could never have forgiven his betrayal of her ambition.
Elene likes to say that when she murdered the old queen in cold blood, mounted the viscount’s charred corpse on a pike in the city square, and took the throne, she’d been restoring control to where it rightfully belonged. After all, the divine quartet had given magic to us mages, not the noble folk.
And surely, if the goddesses had meant for the nobles to rule, Elene would purr, they would have given them more than the delusion of power.
I have faith in the divine quartet and know that we are all instruments of their will, but even I have a hard time believing the goddesses wanted Bordea to become what it is.
I stumble through the overgrown courtyard to the hospital’s door. The nuns are too busy with their patients to maintain the garden’s former splendor, so weeds grow through the cobblestones, and the fountain is cracked, water pumping directly onto the walkway to create a muddy swamp. A film of algae grows over the front steps. I edge carefully through the garden on tiptoe, trying to keep myself as dry as possible.
When I knock, Sister Elizabeta answers almost immediately. Her face, usually pink and jubilant, is drawn with worry.
“Thank the divine,” she says, taking me by the hands and ushering me inside. “We think one of the patients has a tumor. Our chantrix isn’t up to it.”
Tumors require a special kind of finesse. Often, the singer must compose a new spellsong for each occurrence, and even then, it is not uncommon for the patient to die anyway. Cancers of the blood or bone marrow have no cure, even with magic.
I know the hospital’s chantrix from our days together at the academy. Mercedes has never been particularly strong or skilled. In fact, she was almost given a “lesser” classification at our exams, and her healing abilities are mediocre at best. Any form of cancer is way beyond her skills.
I peel off my cap and hang it on the peg beside the door. Sister Elizabeta slings a white hospital robe over my shoulders and places the order’s ceremonial white coronet over my hair. I don’t have to wear the habit when I’m here—Mercedes never does—but it makes me feel closer to the goddesses, like I am part of something greater.
At the palace, we all compete for Elene’s favor. Ren isn’t the only mage who resents my position. All the other corporeal singers hate me for being chosen as principal. They think I am too young and unproven, and they despise me for the strength of my magical gift.
It hasn’t always been like this. When I was young, all the novices helped one another. We played, took lessons, and ate together. But I watched them grow from carefree children into honed weapons under Elene’s instruction.
I haven’t been close to another mage since Elene sent Marie to work in the countryside as a lesser cultivator at the royal agricultural estates. Marie was the nearest I’ve ever come to having a lover, and even our time together was sometimes marred by jealousy. For a time, our relationship was everything to me. We would steal moments alone, concealed by library stacks, our hands and mouths turned explorers. But then we would walk to our classes and examinations and have to face the widening chasm that our exam results slowly carved between us.
When the academy had taken me in, I was too young to keep any contact with my friends at the city home. My only friend outside the mages’ school was Remi. But her mother was a countess, and close to the old queen, so her family was one of the first to flee from their apartments in the eastern wing.
Sometimes I still climb up and sit in the palace gallery that overlooks the grand ballroom, where we spent so many hours together. It’s always empty now, and covered in dust, but I remember the press of Remi’s shoulder on mine, the warmth of her thigh when we would sit there together with fingers entwined, looking down at all the fine ladies. Our friendship was so uncomplicated.
No one ever holds my hand now. No one would dream of it, save maybe Lacerde. And if she knew what I’d become, Remi would probably be disgusted with herself for touching me. At least I can be sure she didn’t see me at the Performing, for she’s still years too young to sit in the Opera Hall.