My resolve to ignore them abruptly snapped. Seeing red, I quickly riffled through my magical repertoire, searching for a suitable spell that could be cast at a distance. I hid a smile when I found the perfect thing, then subtly flicked my hand toward their group and muttered the Words under mybreath.
While the magic did its work, I sauntered over to an older mage with my plate of finger food and struck up a conversation. It turned out that he was a weather mage, and as I half-listened to his talk about storms and wind patterns, I looked toward the group of gossips out of the corner of my eye. They were continuing to make snide remarks about me, but unbeknownst to them, something strange was very gradually happening to theirclothing.
“By the Lady,” one of them exclaimed after a while. “Myrna, you must have washed this set of robes one too many times. I can see straight throughthem!”
Myrna, who was an older mage with silver hair, gasped as she looked down at herself. I angled my head a little more toward them and saw that Myrna’s deep blue robes had become very sheer, exposing a bony frame and mismatched underwear. But the otherwoman…
“Stacia!” one of the other women gasped. “You aren’t wearing any underwear atall!”
“What in Recca is going on?” the weather mage asked, craning his neck to look over my shoulder. I turned around fully, and bit back a laugh—everyone else was now gawking at the five women, whose saggy arms and spindly, unshaven legs were on full display for everyone to see. The most amusing were the two who had used illusion to make their faces appear more youthful, while leaving everything else beneath their robes untouched. I guessed they thought they were saving magic, but they wouldn’t make that mistakeagain.
“Why, this is outrageous!” Myrna made a sharp gesture and quickly muttered a spell. The robes immediately returned to normal, though the mages’ expressions did not—all five women were red-faced and in various states of anger and embarrassment. “Who did this?” she demanded loudly. “Come forward atonce!”
But no one said anything, and as the snickers from the other guests continued to grow, the women began to shrink back in embarrassment. I was tempted to meet Myrna’s eyes and give her a big smile, but instead, I looked at Iannis. He was on the far side of the room conversing with a middle-aged woman, but when our eyes met, he gave me a subtlewink.
“Try not to make a habit of it,”he suggested as he turned back to the man he was talking to.“If clothes begin to disappear at every event we attend, we shan’t be invited backagain.”
“Then I will make every effort to make sure that it happens,”Iteased.
I felt his laughter down the mindspeak connection before I severed it, then apologized to the weather mage and gave him my attention again. The rest of the evening wore on, with boring conversation after boring conversation, but the results from my little magical prank were enough to keep a smile on my face. Luckily, most of the mages had a few glasses of wine in them, so it wasn’t exactly difficult to pretend to be interested—some of them were drunk enough that they would have carried on a conversation with a wall withoutnoticing.
Eventually we sat down for a six-course dinner featuring lobster bisque, trout soufflé, roast duck, beef with pineapple sauce, oven-fried buttered mangoes, and marzipan pudding, with different and probably very expensive wines for every course. There would be some dancing afterward, and then Iannis and I would finally be able to make our getaway. Maybe we’d even get a bit of alone time for once. Our sex life had taken a nosedive these past few months, with all the rebuilding efforts plus the wedding planning taking most of our attention and time. Only nine more weeks now—I couldn’t wait for it all to beover.
When the meal finally came to an end, Lady Porgillas tapped her glass with her fork to get everyone’s attention. “Before we begin dancing,” she said, “how about we demonstrate some of our latest achievements? I know there are a few of us here tonight who have recently mastered interesting newspells.”
The crowd reacted enthusiastically to this suggestion, and I buried a groan. This wasn’t the first time I’d been forced to endure a magical “show-and-tell,” and it was always embarrassing because as an apprentice with less than two years of training, I couldn’t very well perform high-level spells. The last thing I needed was people noticing that I was way ahead of the curriculum. So I was always forced to perform some relatively easy spell, and the mages would titter behind their hands at the “cute little apprentice” who was so out of herleague.
“This is stupid,”I grumbled to Iannis as the first mage stood up and conjured a flaming bird that soared around the room, showering us with embers. The room gasped when the embers turned into rubies upon hitting the ground. I picked mine up, and it sat in the palm of my hand for a moment before vanishing. I had no doubt the ruby had been real, but manufacturing coins and gemstones without official leave by the Federation was considered illegal, so of course the mage couldn’t let us keepthem.
“I don’t see any reason why you can’t show off a little bit,”Iannis said, slipping his hand into mine beneath the table.“After all, we are planning to graduate you early as a ‘fast learner.’ If you don’t demonstrate that you are making above-average progress, it will seem suspicious if we tell them a year from now you are allfinished.”
“Really?”I perked right up at that.“Are you sure it’sokay?”
Iannis smiled.“I don’t seethe harm. Fenris is gone anyway—it won’t affect his safety if you show these mages some of youraccomplishments.”
The mention of Fenris sobered us both, and I squeezed his hand.“I wish he was here with us,”I said quietly as we watched another mage perform.“He was supposed to stand with you on our weddingday.”
“The wedding is still over two moons away,”Iannis said.“We may yet hear from him beforethen.”
Yes, but that didn’t mean Fenris would return to Solantha. And I couldn’t blame him. The Federal Director of Security, Garrett Toring, had come dangerously close to figuring out the truth—if I hadn’t convinced him that Fenris was Polar ar’Tollis’s son, rather than Polar in permanent disguise, he would likely still be on his manhunt right now. Maybe I could convince Fenris to come back if I told him about that cover story, but it was hardly safe to talk about such deadly secrets over thephone.
“I’d like to take a turn,” I announced, standing up. Maybe Fenris couldn’t be with us, but his memories and knowledge were right here, in my head, and I would honor him tonight by making full use ofthem.
“Of course, Miss Baine,” Lady Porgillas said, gesturing to the makeshift stage that had been set up. “We all would love to see what Lord Iannis has been teachingyou.”
A murmur rippled through the room, which I ignored as I took the stage. Everybody knew that masters and apprentices weren’t supposed to engage in an amorous relationship, and Iannis and I had smashed that rule into the dust. Judging from that gossip earlier, people were wondering if the apprenticeship was just a pretext. Well, I’d showthem.
“Lord Iannis and I have been practicing weather magic lately,” I announced to the room as I lifted my arms. Several people shifted in their chairs at that, and I gave them a fierce smile as I quietly spoke a complicated spell under my breath. The air in the room stirred to life, a mere breeze at first, but as the magic built, it quickly grew into a raging windstorm. The crowd gasped, ducking down as the chandeliers began to swing wildly. Two curtains were torn down from the windows, and several women shrieked as pins were torn from their hair, their careful coiffures undone by the wild winds. Platters rattled, silverware clattered to the floor, and several wineglasses were toppled, sending rivers of red down the white tablecloths. A veritable tornado had invaded the elegant dining room. It felt amazing, and from the alarmed expressions around me, I was playing right into the cliché of the fierce, dangerousshifter.
Iannis’s eyes widened in warning, and I grinned at him right before snapping my fingers. The storm abruptly stopped, and with another spoken Word and a wave of my hand, the room was put back to normal. The crowd murmured in amazement as the dishes righted themselves, the wine glasses refilled, and the curtains once again hung from their rods, intact and untorn. Not a single hair was out of place on a lady’s head, not one thing in the room broken. Putting the room back together was far more difficult than destroying it, as any trained mage would appreciate, but with Fenris’s knowledge and my own magic, I’d done itflawlessly.
I bowed, and after a split second, the room erupted into applause. Iannis’s eyes were twinkling as I rejoined him at the table, and I kissed him on the cheek before leaning over to meet Lady Porgillas’s shockedface.
“I apologize if I frightened you,” I said, loud enough that my voice carried. “I’m afraid I don’t quite know my own strengthsometimes.”
“Oh, no need to apologize,” the lady said, waving my words away with a delicate hand. “You fixed all the damage, which is quite impressive in and of itself. You are a fine teacher, LordIannis.”
We took our leave shortly after that, thanking Lady Porgillas for a highly interesting evening. As we made our goodbyes, several of the guests gave me anxious or leery looks, and I hid another smile. Word of this incident would quickly spread in their circles, and maybe at the next party the mages would think twice about insulting my magical prowess behind myback.
