“Your father and James’s father, Perry Hoskil, invented the technology to channel and access magic. And they brought it to market, released the notes on their study of uses-spells and glyphs that allowed the users to make magic bend to their will.”
“My dad started this?” I mean, I knew he was one of the driving forces of the Beckstrom Storm Rods, and had found a way to draw magic out from the deep natural cisterns where it pooled. I guess I’d never really thought that he was more than a driving force behind the way to make money off it. I’d never thought of him as an innovator. And certainly never thought of him as the beginning of the common man’s access and awareness of magic beyond superstition, religion, or the things conservative people always wrote off as esoteric nonsense.
“Yes,” Zayvion said, “your dad started this.”
“And the Authority was okay with that?”
Here Zayvion smiled. “That’s one of the things I like about you. You know the right questions to ask. No. The Authority was not okay with what he or his partner, Perry Hoskil, were doing. But there are divisions in the Authority. Lines and boundaries that limit how much high-level magic users can influence and interfere with one another’s experiments and studies.
“Even though it is an ancient field of study, not everything about magic has been discovered, tested, proved. Like space, like the oceans, like the human body, there is still so much we don’t know about it. So much to learn.”
I couldn’t help myself; I smiled. That man had a hunger for knowledge, a respect for it. I’d always gone for the intellectual types. Well, not always. There were those years in college where brawn, not brains, got me in bed, but it hadn’t taken me long to get tired of the pretty-on-the-outside, empty-in-the-head guys like that.
“By the time what Beckstrom and Hoskil were doing was discovered, the damage had been done. Magic was no longer a secret. Magic was now in the hands of the untrained masses.”
“Why didn’t the Authority go public then? They could have established themselves as experienced managers, or at least educators.”
“From what I am told”-he raised an eyebrow, maybe to remind me that he wasn’t around thirty years ago when this all happened-“there were worldwide gatherings of the Authority to discuss a course of action.”
Traffic slowed. Maybe an accident. More likely congestion from merge lanes and exits. The rain drew a veil of evening over the afternoon light.
“The argument to go public,” Zayvion continued, “and reveal the mastery of magic was strongly championed. And so were many other arguments, factions of the Authority taking sides, for and against, including the ancient Order of the Aegis, who adhere to the oldest written laws that magic should never be revealed to the uninitiated. Never. Your father came very close to being Closed when the vote was taken to allow his transgression to stand or to remove him. Magic was very nearly erased from common use.”
That was a lot to take in all at once, but the painkillers and soup were giving me a little of my brain back.
“Oh, come on. People wouldn’t willingly give up magic once they had a chance to use it.”
“I didn’t say willingly. But enough engineered failure in the budding technology would prove magic was a wildly unmanageable, unsafe, and, if the members of the Authority did their jobs correctly, perhaps even an unreal resource.”
“Engineered failure,” I said. “Do you mean deaths?”
“That was one option.”
Holy shit. These people really did play for keeps.
“Instead it was agreed to allow magic, the safest form of it, to be accessible to the common man. There was money to be made off of it, and like you just said, members of the Authority were in the perfect position to educate, train, and manage the change in the world.”
“So it all ended happily ever after.”
He frowned. “When magic is involved, there is never a happily ever after. You know that.”
And the way he said it, chills washed down my skin. He was right. I knew that. Magic could lick the happy out of a lollipop.
“There are still members of the Authority who disagree with the decision to allow magic to go public. Your father’s actions were the crack in the ice, and ever since then the Authority has been fracturing, splitting apart. If some of the factions have their way, there will be a war. The Authority will shatter.”
“And that’s bad, right?”
His lips pressed into a grim, flat line. “You have no idea.”
I dug around in my head a little, expecting a comment or reaction out of my dad, but he was silent as a shadow. If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t think I was possessed. The last time he was this quiet was when Zay and I had been at dinner.
Interesting.
Traffic, which had been crawling, growled back up to freeway speeds. We crossed the Columbia River and within a short while were on the opposite shore in Vancouver, Washington. Zayvion turned east along the river.
“Is it far?” I asked.
“We’re almost there.”
I don’t know what I expected Maeve’s place to be like. Where would secret classes that taught the secret ways of magic be held?
Another fifteen minutes or so and Zayvion slowed and took a road south, toward the river. We crossed the railroad tracks into an abandoned industrial area, and pulled up alongside a long building with identical rows of windows that lined the upper, middle, and ground floors. It sat parallel the length of the train tracks and the river.
I could feel magic radiating like a subtle warmth from the place.
About a half dozen cars were parked along the far chain-link fence that separated this lot from a scrap metal collection site next to it. There were no parking places near the building, which was strange since there was room for several. Instead, big raised boxes and whiskey barrels of plants and flowers took the lion’s share of the parking space, green even in January, filled with sturdy bushes with red and white berries dotting twigs.
“Talk about out-of-the-way,” I said as we parked.
“Used to be right in the middle of everything,” he said. “It was a railroad boardinghouse and inn. Train used to go right through here.”
“It doesn’t anymore?”
He shook his head. “When the Flynns bought the place, they lobbied to have the spur discontinued. No real train business down here, and they didn’t want to risk that kind of attention to the well.” He unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door.
“Well?” I got out of the car. The wind and rain smelled of fir trees and river algae and the dusty grease of the rusting scrap metal next door.
Zayvion tipped his head to one side. “Can’t you feel it?”
I tucked my chin down into my coat collar and calmed my mind. I felt the air, rain that was thankfully a lot lighter, heard the call of crows on the breeze. I paid attention to the ground.
Magic beneath my skin turned and twisted, reaching out for and not quite connecting with the massive pool of magic that radiated a strange heat of its own deep, deep beneath the soil and stone under the inn. I opened my mouth and inhaled. Magic was so concentrated here, I could almost taste it, a faint, fuzzy warmth, like electricity from a thun derstorm, but sweeter, thicker on my tongue.
The well.
The cool metal taste of iron and lead that I always associated with magic, since magic was channeled through conduits of the material, was strangely absent here. Here, in this pocket between two cities, I could almost forget magic was on the grid, controlled, tamed. Here magic roiled in a deep, dreamlike rhythm just below my conscious awareness.
“Wow,” I said.
Zayvion wrapped his arm around my shoulders, a solid warmth that brought me back to my surroundings. Good thing too. I’d stopped walking and was just standing there getting wet.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
