Of course. I was in a college and colleges had libraries. There must be some kind of record. I knew by now that the power flowing through my veins wasn’t entirely common. Based on the magic I had manifested before, I seemed to have some touch of all four elements. I didn’t feel overwhelmingly stronger in one over another, which would have helped to narrow it down, but it seemed my ability to connect to trees and have visions of the past was rare. Apparently, there were only a few families left on this island who had any real power, and they were amongst the most important in the land. Devyn and Calchas had both been sure of the identity of my bloodline. Surely there was some history book or lineage of magic that would have recorded something about my mother… and any other surviving family?
“It’s worth a look,” I agreed. “While we’re here.”
Callum, his interest already dragged away by the volume in his hand, nodded absently. “Good, good.”
Despite the thousands of books at my disposal, I still hadn’t managed to locate one that gave me the information I needed. It was incredibly frustrating; used to hundreds of instant answers at the touch of a few keystrokes, following the trail of references and misleading titles – not to mention incorrectly shelved books – was unbelievably slow. And distracting. I started with a clear objective: to identify families with magical bloodlines. But these were often the highborn Britons, and the genealogical tangle assumed some previous knowledge of the families, the events and the major battles. My understanding of magic itself was basic, so that was another avenue I got sucked down. Even when I did hit on something it was often obscure. It became apparent that most information about magic and its uses was held by the druids, and it had not been written down in order to protect it or to make it even more annoyingly mysterious. I could find little to nothing about how or why seeing visions was only truly strong in particular bloodlines, or why magic itself randomly manifested in people like Marina.
I lost an entire evening to a pile of books that I found in a small room off the library, awaiting the return of whatever holidaying academic had assembled them. It wasn’t particularly helpful but the study was intriguing, involving a great many tomes on ley lines, as well as histories of the Empire. I even studied a large map on a wall that traced outbreaks of the illness the Britons knew as the Mallacht across a timeline. It appeared that what Devyn said was true, and the instances had spread across the Empire over the last century or so. In the Empire they called it the Maledictio, the curse of the Celts. They blamed the magic of the druids and had hunted them into extinction across Gallia and Iberia. While the number of Maledictio cases were fewer in the absence of druids, the crops still failed and records showed severely declining harvests in the last ten or more years. The last known major outbreak in the central Med was over two decades ago – this was the outbreak that had claimed the life of Devyn’s mother – but occasional dots on the map signified more recent cases in the last decade. These were rare though, and in more remote regions, like the Alps and the Ethiopian mountains.
For all the thousands of books, I had little to go on and was unable to ask either Devyn or Callum for help without revealing what I was up to. I’d had little luck in identifying potential bloodlines, but while success evaded me, it did allow me to get away from the increasingly toxic atmosphere in Callum’s rooms in the evenings.
Whatever good the sword and fight training was doing for Marcus physically, it certainly wasn’t improving relations between him and Devyn, which had gone from frostily indifferent to downright antagonistic. I didn’t understand why; it wasn’t over me, I was pretty sure. Marcus and I were on reasonably good terms, and over dinner I chatted to him about the things I had learned that day, with Callum occasionally correcting my interpretation. Devyn had been subdued since our arrival in Oxford, but tried to be polite, at least in the evenings. But the new bruises that decorated them both every evening testified that training was anything but polite.
The next day we spent the morning down by the river. Callum had suggested that being closer to nature might help. While the results were the same as in the courtyard, it was a relief to have further evidence that, out of the borderlands, the handfast tether between Marcus and me had expanded to more normal distances. At lunch, Callum and I headed back to the college, passing by where the other two trained.
They were both sweating, their shirts discarded in the late autumn sunshine. Not that it mattered to me; it was foolishness to be playing at swords with no clothes on, if you asked me. Yet my eyes were snared by the play of muscles in Devyn’s chest as he disarmed his opponent, and not for the first time if Marcus’s expression was anything to go by.
Devyn nodded in greeting as we passed, pushing his damp curls out of his face as he demonstrated a stance or something to Marcus. Wooden swords, I noticed; that explained the bruises. I didn’t suppose you got
