Fated

I frowned. ‘What?’

Lyle cleared his throat. ‘Unfortunately it wouldn’t be feasible for you to join the team directly. The Council wouldn’t be able to clear you. But if you accept, I can promise I’ll tell you everything you need to know.’

I turned away from Lyle, looking out over the canal. The rumble of an engine echoed around the brick walls from downstream and a barge came into view, chugging along. It was painted yellow and red. The man at the tiller didn’t give us a glance as he passed. Lyle stayed quiet as the barge went by and disappeared around the bend of the canal. A breeze blew along the pathway, ruffling my hair.

I still didn’t speak. Lyle coughed. A pair of seagulls flew overhead, after the barge, calling with loud, discordant voices: arrrh, arrrh.

‘Alex?’ Lyle asked.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Not interested.’

‘If it’s a question of money …’

‘No, I just don’t like the deal.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it stinks.’

‘Look, you have to be realistic. There’s no way the Council would give you clearance to—’

‘If the Council doesn’t want to give me clearance, you shouldn’t be coming to me in the first place.’ I turned to look at Lyle. ‘What’s your idea? They need the information badly enough that they won’t care about where you’re getting it? I think sooner or later they’d start asking questions, and you’d cut me loose to avoid the flak. I’m not interested in being your fall guy.’

Lyle blew out a breath. ‘Why are you being so irrational about this? I’m giving you a chance to get back into the Council’s favour.’ He glanced around at the concrete and the grey skies. ‘Given the alternative …’

‘Well, since you bring it up, it just so happens that I’m not especially interested in getting back into the Council’s favour.’

‘That’s ridiculous. The Council represents all of the mages in the country.’

‘Yeah, all the mages. That’s the problem.’

‘This is about that business with Drakh, isn’t it?’ Lyle said. He rolled his eyes. ‘Jesus, Alex, it was ten years ago. Get over it.’

‘It doesn’t matter when it was,’ I said tightly. ‘The Council haven’t gotten better. They’ve gotten worse.’

‘We’ve had ten years of peace. That’s your idea of “worse”?’

‘The reason you’ve had peace is because you and the Council let the Dark mages do whatever they want.’ I glared at Lyle. ‘You know what they do to the people in their power. Why don’t you ask them how good a deal they think it is?’

‘We’re not starting another war, Alex. The Council isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the mages that are a part of it, Light or Dark. You’re just going to have to accept that.’

I took a breath and looked out over the canal, listening to the distant cries of the seagulls. When I spoke again my voice was steady. ‘The answer’s no. Find someone else.’

Lyle made a disgusted noise. ‘I should have known.’ He stepped away and gave me a look. ‘You’re living in the past. Grow up.’

I watched Lyle walk off. He didn’t look back. Once he’d disappeared around the corner I turned back to the canal.

So long as magic has existed, there’s been a split between the two paths: the Light mages and the Dark. Sometimes they’ve existed in uneasy truce; sometimes there have been conflicts. The last and greatest was called the Gate Rune War, and it happened forty years before I was born. It was a faction of the Dark mages against almost all of the Light, and the prize to the winner was total dominion over Earth. The Light side won – sort of. They stopped the Dark mages and killed their leaders, but by the time it was over most of the Light battle mages were dead as well. The Light survivors didn’t want to fight any more wars, and the surviving Dark mages were allowed to regroup. Years passed. The old warriors were replaced by a new generation of mages who thought that peace was the natural order of things.

By the time I arrived on the scene, Council policy was ‘live and let live’. Dark mages were tolerated so long as they didn’t go after Light mages, and vice versa. There was a set of rules called the Concord that governed how mages could and couldn’t act towards each other. The Concord didn’t draw any distinction between Light and Dark, and there was a growing feeling that the division between Light and Dark was out-of-date. At the time, I thought it made a lot of sense. My own master, Richard Drakh, was a Dark mage, and I didn’t see why Light and Dark mages couldn’t get along.

I changed my mind after I had my falling-out with Richard, but by then it was too late. That was when I discovered that while the Concord had all sorts of rules for how mages were allowed to treat each other, it didn’t have any rules at all for how they were allowed to treat their apprentices. After I escaped, I went to Lyle and the Council. They didn’t want to know. I was left alone, with an angry Dark mage after me.

Even now if I close my eyes I can still remember that time, the horrible paralysing fear. It’s impossible to understand unless you’ve experienced it – the terror of being hunted by something crueller and stronger than you. I was barely out of my teens, hardly able to look after myself, much less go face to face with someone like Richard. Now I look back on it I can see the Council was really just waiting for Richard to get rid of me and remove the whole embarrassing mess. Instead I survived.

So you can see why I’m not the Council’s favourite person. And why I’ve no desire to get into their good books, either.

I knew that Lyle was gone and wasn’t coming back, but I stayed where I was for another twenty minutes, watching the reflections in the dark water and waiting for the ugly memories to settle. When I was calm again, I