CHAPTER ONE
When Sy Cassirer received a summons from the King of Gescany, it rarely came in the form of a letter, and never painlessly.
Fortunately, the only pain he felt when David informed him of the letter’s contents was the beginning of a tension headache.
“The king wants to be turned into a bird,” said David, who was better in the mornings and had answered the door. He rolled up the gilded scroll and handed the court page a copper bit. The page, blushing at David’s silk robe – actually Sy’s, on David; and that, barely – accepted the copper and scurried away.
“Will you dress before you open my door?” Sy rolled over and fumbled around the top of his nightstand, pushing aside several pencil stubs and a pile of empty ink cartridges before finding, under his trusted leather gloves, a pouch of tobacco. He drew it open; nearly empty. He fell back against the pillow, squinting against the soft morning light. “In your own clothes, preferably.”
“If you’d let me keep mine here, I would.”
“But then you’d never leave.” He meant it playfully, but it came out acrid as stale coffee. He blew a stray lock of hair off his mouth. “And stop opening my mail.”
“It’s a form letter,” David dismissed, clicking the door shut. “I’ll have received the same thing.”
With a grunt, Sy rose. Where were his rolling papers? He dug under a pile of overdue bills – this one from the grocer, that from the laundress – and pushed aside a stack of books onthe floor. As his morning fog cleared, he plucked the top book from the stack and found the packet marking the page of the spell he’d been studying, one for altering the eye.
“Then you could have waited, couldn’t you?”
“Did you even hear me?” David waved the scroll. “King Edgard wants to be turned into a bird.”
“Scintillating,” Sy murmured, sprinkling the scant tobacco into the paper, careful not to spill a single leaf.
David folded his arms over his chest. “You never listen to me.”
“You never speak sense.”
“He’s inviting every scribe in the kingdom to create a spell to turn him into a…” David unrolled the scroll and squinted. “A phoenix.”
Sy carefully rolled his cigarette. “As I said.”
“How’s this for sense? The prize is enough to pay off the rest of your indenture.”
Watching him, Sy licked the edge of the rolling paper. “Read it aloud.”
David unfurled the scroll again while Sy dug under his pillow for his lighter. The tobacco was stale, but he savored the taste – likely his last until the pay for his next job came through.
As he inhaled, he watched David read, eyes lazily wandering from his mouth to his handsome jaw and finely cut cheeks, to his own emerald green silk robe melting over David’s hipbones. David’s morning briskness was poor company after a late night, but his pelvis was an excellent companion, by sun or by stars.
But as David read, Sy’s attention shifted to his words.
Before he could finish, Sy rose and took the scroll, his cigarette between his lips. Stamped,To the Honorable King’s Wizard.Then, scrawled hastily in a clerk’s hand,Sylas Cassirer. The remainder of the letter was machine-printed. And nonsensical. Yet there was no other way to interpret the arrangement of the words on the page.
“The king wants to be turned into a bird,” he repeated, blowing smoke on the paper.
“He’s finally lost it,” David surmised, plopping back down on the bed. Bending, he reached for the pocket of his trousers on the floor. He pulled a cigarette – hand-rolled by Äbender’s premier tobacconist – out of his solid gold, engraved case. The bold smell of Preulian tobacco overtook Sy’s dull domesticblend. “Keep himlookingyoung, yes, to our eternal glory; but there’s no spell for unscrambling an addled mind.”
True, Gescany’s king was never renowned for his even temperament, and it had not improved with age. Most famously, even almost three quarters of a century later, reflected in the disaster of his forty-fifth birthday party, involving a dancer, a (supposedly) trained owl, untold bottles of Preulian armagnac – and, by the end of the night, three duels, a near declaration of war with the kingdom’s oldest ally, and the dancer’s missing toe found at the bottom of a champagne glass and reattached by a spellscribe. All this Sy had gathered despite the night’s mention being punishable by tongue-tying.
At the thought, Sy rolled his tongue against the roof of his mouth. One of the spells he refused to scribe, despite the price it commanded, or the price it commanded to disobey Edgard.
But Sy had learned his own way around Edgard’s foul temper. As spellscribes, both he and David knew his strange moods better than most. As Edgard’s indenture, called to take care of his most private requests, Sy knew better than anyone.
Asking to be turned into a bird – aphoenix, a creature lifted straight from myth – was a bit much, even for Edgard.
But the prize. Fifty thousand sovereigns. It was enough to entice the most skeptical mind to creativity.
And Sy possessed no skeptical mind. He’d never have made it this far if he had.
