"I was eight when the Circle found me."
"Right," he said, and he handed her a biscuit, and she kept from laughing, feeling as she did like a circus animal being handed a herring. But Jemuel was so sensitive. "Eight, which is very late. Very late," he repeated.
"Well, I wasn't available until then. I was shipwrecked with my father."
"He was a wizard?"
"Not a very good one, but yes." Miranda snuggled herself in the blanket Jemuel had given her. She felt comfortable. No way in the world she'd be here long. "He taught me spells, but mostly it was my own ability that I worked on; I made up my own uses for magic. I didn't really know what I was doing. I talked to a few ghosts, of course, and had some unpleasant experiences with dead pets."
"All part of growing up," Jemuel said drily. He lied well for a man. No wizard pupil would be allowed anywhere near living subjects until she'd learned the ground rules; Miranda knew that, now. Father was careless, but he never could say no to her.
"We were returned to the mainland when I was eight and I was snatched up by the Circle."
"Did you ever see your father again?"
"No."
"And how did your training progress?" Jemuel's voice was always soft, like a father, but different. His voice made you want to go to sleep, but it made you talk instead.
"I was a difficult student, I think," Miranda smiled, dunking her biscuit in her mug and nibbling at it. "The Circle wasn't sure if I could be retrained, as they liked to call it, and God knows I fought them every inch of the way."
Jemuel nodded. Miranda tried to ignore his probing eyes. She wanted to stay in his house and drink chocolate and eat biscuits by his fire, and she had no desire to get complicated. "So when you graduated they didn't try to place you?"
Miranda let out an embarrassed laugh. "Oh, I was placed. The village of Senkewin."
"Mmm-hmm..." Jemuel surely had heard of this. Did he know everything?
"I lasted three months."
"And then what?"
"I pleaded with the Circle to put me on special assignment, and that seemed to suit me. I spent some time in the Far Corners, looking for a few unwizards who were practicing magic."
Jemuel closed his eyes. "Unpleasant business."
"I hated it."
"Why?"
Miranda leaned forward and put her arms around her knees. "Jemuel, this is a magical world. I learned to use it on my own before the Circle ever found me."
"Natural talent."
"Right. So what if they hadn't found me?"
"I don't understand the question," Jemuel said, lying well again. The man seemed entertained by her. Clearly.
"Was I a wizard or wasn't I?"
"Before your training?"
Miranda nodded. The chocolate was running out. "Before my training by the Circle."
"The Circle would say no."
"And if I had returned to the mainland and gone to some village and set up shop solving problems, controlling weather, whatever, what would be then?"
Jemuel tilted his head. "I see. You would have been an unwizard."
"Right." Miranda waited for a moment but Jemuel was still silent. Finally she said, "I shut them down, Jemuel."
"And how did that make you feel?"
"When? At what point? When I went into their minds and fried their brains, as I'd been ordered to do? Or when they refused to beg for mercy? Or maybe you mean before that, while I was still trying to gain their trust? Rotten, Jemuel. Rotten to the core."
'This doesn't do you any good," said the wizard, by which he meant he didn't want to discuss it.
"All I'm saying—and then I'll drop it, I promise, because I don't have any assignments right now anyway and I like your company—all I'm saying is, what if we're doing something wrong?"
"Wrong?"
"What if there could be more wizards? What if we're controlling the magic when we should let the magic control itself?"
"Danger," said Jemuel. "That way lies great danger."
But of course, she couldn't ask questions like that anymore, Miranda told herself over and over again as she watched the kind and sheepish village men carry her goods into the hall of Stephen's house. She was a real, honest-to-god village wizard now. Miranda, Wizard of Denwyck. She was part of the establishment. So much for the stars, her ceiling.
From the outside, the house was indeed the wreck that Kenton had warned her about. But the inside! Dust, God, yes, plenty of that, but such a vast collection of things, models physic and spiritual, texts and tomes and treatises on every concern, scattered throughout, laid on chairs idly, stacked haphazardly on shelves and in corners, on the table in the kitchen. (Interesting, Miranda noted, that there were knife-and-fork scrape marks on the kitchen table. She got a good feel for Stephen's habits from that.)
It was when she turned away from unpacking her few things and trying to move some of the collected dust around that she sat down in Stephen's old chair in his library. Then, as she ran her fingers along his desk and began to take in the sheer enormity of his collection of books, she felt the wind stir. As if the wind itself awakened, and feeling her, approached and touched her, and touching her, spoke:
You know our crimes are many, Miranda, don't you?
Open the magic. Unlock the chains.
On Lammas we give the bread.
Miranda had dealt with hauntings before. That was first-year stuff. And it was clear, from the way the spirit watched her as she rose in the morning and went about her business setting up shop, that the resident spirit was not immediately intent on doing any mischief. And by the time the spirit was guiding her hand clearly to this stack and not that, this book and not those, that she knew who her guest was. As if there were ever a doubt. What remained was to find out about him.
From Stephen's journaclass="underline"
November 14
I have of late been struck by a disturbing realization, and it came to me thus: there is, in this village, a man not terribly on in years but nevertheless past his prime. His intelligence is not esteemed among the villagers, but it has been my habit to employ him as something of a handy-man. Dervish is his name.
Some weeks ago I asked Dervish to try to bring the old well back to health, so full of cobwebs and refuse as it is, and this task naturally took the man a goodly amount of time to complete.
1 did not know the well was haunted. Fool, fool! I should have surveyed it, but the decrepit thing had been on my lands for so many years and I had never had cause to suspect it of any impediment other than the annoyance of its physical uselessness.
Dervish came to me where I sat—I have taken of late to spending my early evenings by the pond, where I watch my ducks—and he told me that the well had a spirit trapped in it, that had long ago stopped the well from working, to attract attention, so that perhaps some wizard would come along and free it. Again, I point in contempt at my own prodigality. But what intrigued me was that Dervish had managed to get a handle on the whole situation. He did not solve it—that took my doing, and a simple spell it was. But that evening when I paid Dervish his weekly wage, I saw a look in his eyes that told me that perhaps, with a try or two, he could have accomplished it. Somewhere, back there in the man's childhood, had things been different—and never in this journal would I so flagrantly dispute the Circle in its wisdom—had things been different...