“But my mother died. Having me. So there must have been something very wrong with me, for her to die, something stronger even than your magic could fix. Or she wouldn’t ...” I stopped and cleared my throat. “Anyway.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.
“Well ...”
“And your father doesn’t blame you.”
“No.” I felt the prickling of tears. “No, Da loves me.”
“I’m afraid I have been rather a disappointment to my own father.” Sylvester sighed.
“You have a father?” It was hard to imagine.
“Oh yes. You’ve seen him, in fact. Or at least a picture of him.”
I stared blankly.
“The king,” he said, moving his hand in a lazy impression of a royal wave.
“Theking?The king is your father?”
“Of a sort. We are all his children, my sisters and I.”
“I ... I didn’t know.”
“It’s not something he advertises.”
The king had fathered all the magic-workers?
“I don’t know what, exactly, is wrong with my magic abilities. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. When they do, they are apparently more powerful than the others’. When they don’t ... Well, the results can be messy, as you saw. He was elated to have succeeded in creating me, at the time, but despite all his best efforts, I haven’t the same control as my sisters, the other magic-workers. Clarissa tried to teach me how to be more like them. She did her best.”
“She was kind to you?”
He thought about this. “It is hard for me to know what is kindness and what is not,” he said. “But I think my father would have discarded me like the other boys if it weren’t for her. I tried to do what she taught me, but my spells either wouldn’t work, or would work far too well.”
“What do you mean, ‘too well?’”
“They were too powerful. Not that that was of any use to me. Flooding a spell with too much magic is almost as useless as giving it too little. It’s like pouring an ocean into a wineskin. It will overflow, go in directions you did not intend. It is a delicate balance, gauging how much power to give to any particular spell, and I don’t seem to have the ...” he waved his hands vaguely. “Finesse.”
“So, she tried to teach you how to control it.”
“At first,” he said. “With little success. And then she came up with a way for me to ... siphon some of that power away, so I could control it better.”
I couldn’t imagine any of Clarissa’s ideas being without their sinister side. “What was it?”
“The House,” he said simply. “The others built their magical houses on top of real structures, as I did, but theirs aren’t so ... chaotic. If I gave too much power to a spell or felt a surge of it coming upon me with no immediate purpose, I could send the excess into the House. Give it more magic. Each time, it expanded to accommodate it. It got a little unmanageable, but it was better than letting the magic run wild.”
“So that’s why the House is ... how it is.”
“Yes.”
He let out his breath in a sigh. His hair fanned out behind him in annoyingly perfect curls.
“I do wonder though,” he said, “what is to become of me if I am unable to fulfill my single purpose.”
“Maybe magic doesn’t have to be your purpose,” I said. “Couldn’t it be something else?”
“No. I was made for one thing and one alone.”
