there was not one, but four little enclosed courtyards. By going from window to window, she quickly determined which one was “hers.” She couldn’t see the conservatory from here, but she already knew it was somewhere on the exterior of the building — the sole exception to the fortified nature of the place.
This part of the Manor was a squat, square tower that formed the center of the cross. The rest of the building looked to be about three stories tall, and the tower rose another story above that.
“This used to be the ladies’ solar,” Sebastian said from behind her. “Father gave it to me when I started learning magic. ‘If there are going to be explosions, I would rather they were above us than below us,’ he said. ‘And if you get the solar, at least you can open the windows and air out the stench without freezing the rest of the building in winter.’ A very practical man, my father. I wish I had known my mother; I think she was a bit more like me.”
She turned to see Sebastian grinning as he lit lanterns quite prosaically with a long, wax-dipped wick, identical to the ones she used at home. “As it happens, he was wrong about the explosions — that’s more in the lines of chymists and alchemists — but right about the stench, at least at first.”
With the lanterns lit, this room was anything but shadowed and mysterious. Between the windows, the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases. And yes, again, all the books were in tin bindings, or at least, they were in metal bindings that she assumed were tin. There were several tables, but only three chairs. Among the shelves of books were shelves of neatly ordered jars and bottles and boxes. There appeared to be several projects in progress on the tables.
And in the very center of the floor was a design that — well, she wasn’t sure what it was, other than that the design was inlaid into the floor itself. She had heard of magic circles; perhaps that was what this was. There were four concentric circles; the two bands formed by the outermost three of these circles enclosed circular processions of letters and signs, but they formed no words that she could understand.
“Here, this is what I wanted to show you,” Sebastian said, and laid his hand down on the table, palm up, and whistled, as if he was calling a dog.
The fire that had been burning beneath an empty stand suddenly jumped up and ran across the table to him and into his outstretched palm. She gave a little scream, and looked wildly for something to put it out.
A moment later, of course, she realized her mistake, and flushed with embarrassment.
“Sorry, I forgot you aren’t used to magic,” Sebastian said with an apologetic expression. “Look, right now, he’s tuning his fire so it’s perfectly harmless to people. This is a basic Fire Elemental, a Salamander.” He held out his hand, and the fire ran up to the tips of his fingers. Squinting, she could see the fire actually enveloped the shape of a little lizard with big, glowing-yellow eyes.
“He’s cute!” she exclaimed in surprise.
“The ones this size are — the ones the size of a cart horse, not so much.” Sebastian put his hand back down on the table, and the Salamander ran back to the fire-pan where it had been curled. “I have him, a Nixie, a Sprite and a Hob. Learning to summon them was part of my education, and they are my special Familiar Spirits. Other magicians will know that they are associated with me just by looking at them. The Nixie is a Water Elemental. Mostly she lives in her bowl over there on the shelf and purifies water for me. The Sprite is an Air Elemental. I think she’s — ” He peered around at the ceiling. “There she is, asleep on that beam.”
Bella followed where he was pointing and could just make out the shimmering form of a little androgynous creature with dragonfly wings; the whole of it was more transparent than glass. “She’s often my messenger to and from the Godmother, among a few other people. The King’s Magician for one, Granny upon rare occasion — she has less to do with the folks I am personally responsible for and more to do with the ones who don’t have a magician to watch over them, so we don’t talk too much, once every three or four months at most. And over there on the hearth, the little fellow that looks like a sleeping garden statue, that’s the Hob.” The Hob did look like a rough- finished statue of a little man. His eyes were tightly shut, and he didn’t move at all, not even to breathe.
“What does he do?” she asked.
“When I need bits of specific metals or minerals or gems for a spell, he gets them for me. He can only bring me what he can hold in his fist, which isn’t much, but that is almost always enough for a spell.” He gestured to a chair beside the hearth and she took it. “A spell is a process, not a thing, you see. Just as when you take flour and water and yeast and put them together the right way, you always get bread, but when you take flour and water and butter and put them together a different way, you always get piecrust, when you put the components together one way, you always summon an Elemental of the right sort. You don’t get a demon, or a horseshoe, or a rose — you get an Elemental. If you make a mistake, you might get nothing, or a much more powerful Elemental than you can handle safely, or a much weaker one than you wanted, but you still get an Elemental if you get anything.”
She considered this for a moment. “All right,” she agreed. “And so this means — ”
“That when I summoned Spirit Elementals for my servants, that’s all I could get. And don’t be overly impressed with ‘Spirit Elemental.’ They aren’t inherently superior, or more intelligent, or ‘purer’ than the others. They’re just creatures from a different Elemental Plane. That’s like a world,” he added, before she could ask what he meant. “And if I start in talking about the Elemental Planes and how they intersect and interact with what we call the ‘real’ world, I will not stop till dawn and it will make your eyes cross.”
She had to laugh at that. “All right, I’ll take your word for it. But how do you know that the ones who are talking to me aren’t someone else’s familiars?” she persisted.
“Remember that I told you that other magicians know when they look at my familiars that they belong to me?” he reminded her. “That’s how. We can see magic, which is a form of energy, like sunlight. That energy looks different for every magician that uses it. When I summon an Elemental, I more or less ‘paint’ it with my colors; all magicians do that. I’ve checked and they aren’t wearing anyone else’s colors.” He leaned back against the bench and crossed his arms. “So. Clear as mud?”
Well, privately she was not as confident that he had seen all of them, but there was no point in arguing with him. “Actually, you describe things very well,” she said instead. “You would make a very good teacher.”
He beamed with pleasure. “Well, thank you. Now that you’re up here, is there anything you want to know? All my books are here, so if there’s something I don’t know, it will be easy enough to look up.”
“Well…yes,” she replied.
And then proceeded to bombard him with questions.
At first he answered her in a manner that was just ever-so-slightly superior — but she was relentless, forcing him to go into more and more detail, until he began to struggle for the right explanations, and begged for mercy.
