Dal Drezony frowned for a moment, then relaxed. “Come in, come in. You know how dangerous that was, don’t you?”
“Yes. No one saw me. I didn’t go close enough. Just to a nearby hill where I could get a good look. I don’t know why. I felt like I needed to, is all.”
“It’s normal to still feel a tie to the place. Maybe one day, you’ll be able to go back in safety. Attitudes might be different in the future.”
Solène let out a sad laugh that she did not have to feign. “In a place like Bastelle? It takes centuries for them to change their outlooks.”
“I suppose so.”
“I wanted to come and apologise for not letting you know I was going. It was a last-minute thing. I was already on the road before I realised what I was doing.”
“I would have appreciated it,” dal Drezony said. “But that can’t be helped now. All sorts of things have happened while you were gone. I was beginning to think you might have been caught up in them.”
Solène gave her as curious a look as she could muster. “Really? What?”
Dal Drezony studied her for a moment. “It seems Commander Leverre had something of a crisis of conscience and refused the Prince Bishop’s orders. There was a fight between him and some other members of the Order. He didn’t survive.”
Solène let her mouth drop open. “I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a principled man.”
“He was. Rough around the edges, but he knew right from wrong. The Order will feel his loss badly. His replacement is far from ideal.” She let out a long, tired sigh. “As I said, things have been … difficult here over the past few days. If there’s nothing else?”
“Actually, there is,” Solène said. “I had to use some magic on the road. A highwayman. It nearly killed me.”
Dal Drezony nodded slowly.
Fearing she had raised dal Drezony’s suspicions, Solène continued quickly, drawing on her experiences when travelling with Gill and dal Sason. “His name was Captain Fernand. Have you heard of him?”
Dal Drezony frowned. “Should I have?”
Solène let out a nervous laugh. “He seemed to think he was famous. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is I still can’t control my magic. I didn’t mean to kill him. It was horrible. I feel like I have access to so much raw power, but no way to restrict its flow. Whenever I use it, it’s like opening a flood barrier. All or nothing.”
“That’s what always worried me, but the Prince Bishop wasn’t interested in my concerns. Your affinity to the Fount is so strong, the levels of control you need are far beyond anything we’ve had to develop here. The things we can teach you simply aren’t strong enough.”
“What am I going to do?”
“We’ll work together on it. Until we have this problem solved, I’m not going to allow the Prince Bishop to use you for anything else.”
“About the Prince Bishop. Is he going to be angry with me for disappearing like that?”
“He’s been so busy, I suspect he’s barely noticed. But your story is a good one,” dal Drezony said with a knowing look. “If we stick to that, everything should be all right.”
Solène squirmed in her seat, but dal Drezony went on.
“I’m sure you must be tired from your journey. Eat, rest, and we’ll start first thing in the morning.”
CHAPTER 15
The archive beneath the cathedral had become something of a sanctuary for Amaury. There was a time when he had been able to find peace staring out of his office window into the tranquil garden beneath, but that had quickly become a tool to spy on aristocratic misbehaviour. Now the ancient library was his preferred place to find peace. The king’s behaviour had so incensed him that Amaury had decided to give himself some extra time in the archive, as both a treat and an opportunity to clear his head and consider his plans.
His long disappearances undoubtedly added to his ephemeral mystery, and by corollary, to the fear he could elicit. If people didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, that might mean he was watching them, that he knew what they were doing.
It was only down in that cool, dry cavern of a room that he felt at ease. Truly alone, with no one watching him. Not only was he away from prying, plotting eyes, he was surrounded by a wealth of knowledge. Gleaning that knowledge could be tedious, however. His comprehension of old Imperial was ever-improving, but to complicate matters, the old mages often wrote in codes. His basic magical skill helped a little there, but it was no more than a droplet of oil on a rusty gear. One book could take him days, sometimes weeks, to decipher.
He had hoped Solène would be able to speed things up in that regard, but she seemed to have disappeared. He knew dal Drezony was deliberately keeping her away from him, and probably all the more so after what he had forced dal Drezony to do to Barnot. There could be no doubt in dal Drezony’s mind now that everybody was a means to an end for the Prince Bishop.
With the Cup so close to being in his grasp, Amaury was determined to find out anything he could about how best to use it. Dal Drezony was trying to protect Solène for a reason—magic could be incredibly dangerous for the user. After all his efforts to get the Cup, the last thing he wanted was to kill himself the first time he tried using it.
He had discovered the Cup through reading about the first mage, Amatus, so that was where he now turned his attention once more.
He had long thought of himself as similar to Amatus. They both sought to bring refined, controlled magic into a world that knew little of it. There were lessons to be learned from a man who had achieved so much; and irony in the fact that if Amaury was successful, both men would have created their legacy by using the same ancient little object.
It was rare to find a book devoted to Amatus. He disappeared from the historical record late in the reign of the first emperor, before the College of Mages had grown large enough to devote armies of scribes to coding and recording everything of importance. Even the book Amaury held had likely been created decades or centuries after the first mage had disappeared, and likely was only a slightly less polished version of the myth than those which followed it.
Every story of Amatus spent a great deal of time talking about his humble origins and how his natural intelligence set him apart from others, but Amaury wasn’t interested in any of that. At some point in his youth, Amatus set off to learn more of the world. When he returned, he could wield incredible magical power. He used his abilities to help build an empire that consisted of all the nations around the Middle Sea. Despite that, he had never taken power for himself. At first Amaury had struggled to understand that, but now realised that Amatus, like Amaury himself, must have chosen to exercise his power from the shadows.
Amatus’s travels were what interested Amaury—the period during which he had encountered the Cup. Where had Amatus found it? How had he learned to use it? That was the knowledge Amaury hungered for. He’d never found more than tantalising hints.
He skimmed through the pages, pausing every so often to decipher a few lines to gauge where he was in the story. He started to grow frustrated. It seemed the writer was interested only in the years Amatus spent scratching in the dirt in the fishing village that would later become half of the great Imperial capital of Vellin-Ilora. He flipped pages with increasing speed and diminishing patience until a word caught his eye.
Mira.