“As I sit here,” said Orisa, “I know that you are already in my story, although I’m not exactly sure how important you are to my plot. My experiencing self liked that kiss just fine, but now my narrating self has to figure out what it meant.”
“If you want,” I said, “I can come over there and provide more data.”
“No rush.” She leaned back on the bed. “There will be time for that.” She gazed at me through her lashes. “If it happens.”
“But not forever,” said Grace. “So where to, Captain?”
I thought then of Dad, who had lost his way after a hundred and something years. But that was his sad story. Mine was going to be different.
“What was the one with four in the zone?”
“Eshalet,” Grace said. “Six years, one month, and eleven days subjective.”
“No problem.” I grinned at my crew. My family. “Plenty of time.”
The Court Magician
Sarah Pinsker
The boy who will become court magician this time is not a cruel child. Not like the last one, or the one before her. He never stole money from Blind Carel’s cup, or thrashed a smaller child for sweets, or kicked a dog. This boy is a market rat, which sets him apart from the last several, all from highborn or merchant families. This isn’t about lineage, or even talent.
He watches the street magicians every day, with a hunger in his eyes that says he knows he could do what they do. He contemplates the tawdry illusions of the market square with more intensity than most, until he is marked for us by his own curiosity. Even then, even when he wanders booth to booth and corner to corner every day for a month, begging to learn, we don’t take him.
At our behest, the Great Gretta takes him under her tutelage. She demonstrates the first sleight of hand. If he’s disappointed to learn that her tricks aren’t magic at all, he hides it well. When he returns to her the next day, it is clear he has practiced through the night. His eyes are marked by dark circles, his step lags, but he can do the trick she taught him, can do it as smoothly as she can, though admittedly she is not as Great as she once was.
He learns all her tricks, then begins to develop his own. He’s a smart child. Understands intuitively that the trick is not enough. That the illusion is in what is said and what isn’t said, the patter, the posture, the distractions with which he draws the mark’s attention from what he is actually doing. He gives himself a name for the first time, a magician’s name, because he sees how that, too, is part of the act.
When he leaves Gretta to set out on his own, the only space granted to him is near the abattoir, a corner that had long gone unclaimed. Gretta’s crowd follows him despite the stench and screams. Most of his routine is composed of street illusions, but there is one that seems impossible. He calls it the Sleeper’s Lament. It takes me five weeks to figure out what he is doing in the trick; that’s when we are sure he is the one.
“Would you like to learn real magic?” I send a palace guard to ask my question, dressed in her own clothes rather than her livery.
The boy snorts. “There’s no such thing.”
He has unraveled every illusion of every magician in the marketplace. None of them will speak with him because of it. He’s been beaten twice on his way to his newly rented room, and robbed neither time. He’s right to be suspicious.
She leans over and whispers the key to the boy’s own trick in his ear, as I bade her do. As she bends, she lets my old diary fall from her pocket, revealing a glimpse of a trick he has never seen before: the Gilded Hand. He hands it back to her, and she thanks him for its safe return.
By now he’s practiced at hiding his emotions, but I know what’s at war within him. He doesn’t believe my promise of real magic, but the Gilded Hand has already captivated him. He’s already working it out as he pockets the coins that have accumulated in his dusty cap, places the cap upon his head, and follows her out of the marketplace.
“The palace?” he asks as we all near the servants’ gate. “I thought you were from the Guild.”
I whisper to my emissary, and she repeats my words. “The Guild is for magicians who feel the need to compete with each other. The Palace trains magicians who feel compelled to compete against themselves.”
It’s perhaps the truest thing I’ll ever tell him. He sees only the guard.
Alone except for the visits of his new tutor, he masters the complex illusions he is shown. He builds the Gilded Hand in our workshop, from only the glimpse I had let him see, then an entire Gilded Man of his own devising. Still tricks.
“I was promised real magic,” he complains.
“You didn’t believe in it,” his tutor says.
“Show me something that seems like real magic, then.”
When he utters those words, when he proves his hunger again, he is rewarded. His hands are bound in the Unbreakable Knot, and he is left to unbind them. His tutor demonstrates the Breath of Flowers, the Freestanding Bridge. He practices those until he figures out the illusions underpinning them.
“More trickery,” he says. “Is magic only a trick I haven’t figured out yet?”
He has to ask seven times. That is the rule. Only when he has asked for the seventh time. Only then is he told: If he is taught the true word, he has no choice but this path. He will not likely return to the streets, nor make a life in the theaters, entertaining the gentle-born. Does he want this?
Others have walked away at this point. They choose the stage, the street, the accolades they will get for performing tricks that are slightly more than tricks. This young man is hungry. The power is more valuable to him than the money or the fame. He stays.
“There is a word,” his tutor tells him. “A word that you have the control to utter. It makes problems disappear.”
“Problems?”
“The Regent’s problems. There is also a price, which you will pay personally.”
“May I ask what it is?”
“No.”
He pauses, considers. Others have refused at this point. He does not.
What is the difference between a court magician and a street or stage magician? A court magician is a person who makes problems disappear. That is what he is taught.
There is no way to utter the word in practice. I leave it for him on paper, tell him it is his alone to use now. Remind him again there is a cost. He studies the word for long hours, then tears the page into strips and eats them.
On the day he agrees to wield the word, the Regent touches scepter to shoulder, and personally shows him to his new chambers.
“All of this is yours now,” the Regent says. The Regent’s words are careful, but the young court magician doesn’t understand why. His new chambers are nicer than any place he has ever been. Later, when he sees how the Regent lives, he will understand that his own rooms are not opulent by the standards of those born to luxury, but at this moment, as he touches velvet for the first time, and silk; as he lays his head on his first pillow, atop a feather bed; he thinks for a moment that he is lucky.
He is not.
The first time he says the word, he loses a finger. The smallest finger of his left hand. “Loses” because it is there, and then it is not. No blood, no pain. Sleight of hand. His attention had been on the word he was uttering, on the intention behind it, and the problem the Regent had asked him to erase. The problem, as relayed to him: A woman had taken to chanting names from beyond the castle wall, close enough to be heard through the Regent’s window. The Court Magician concentrates only on erasing the chanting from existence, concentrates on silence, on an absence of litany. He closes his eyes and utters the word.