I expected to see the group head out the doors and into the forest, picking their way to the nearest clearing or heading down to the town. Instead, they headed upstairs, into a large chamber. I had no idea what it had been used for, originally, but now it was a training room for students studying various defensive magics. The students lined up and bowed in unison as someone emerged from the far door and nodded to them. For a moment, I didn’t recognise him. Wearing a training outfit, Boscha looked like a different man.
My blood ran cold. What the hell is he doing?
My eyes darted from student to student. There were seventeen students, all from the upper years … all high-born. Most were from magical families of long standing, although a couple were from families that were aristocratic in both the magical and mundane communities. They were all boys … I cursed, silently, as I confirmed there were no newborn magicians, aristo or commoner, in the group. I could barely move. What was Boscha doing?
“You know what to do,” Boscha said. He sounded crisp, direct … so unlike the grandmaster I knew and loathed that I was tempted to hit him with a spell to check his identity. I didn’t dare move. I’d never thought of Boscha as particularly talented, but it was growing alarmingly clear I’d underestimated him. “Begin.”
The students did as they were told, running through a series of magical combat exercises that put the ones my family had offered to shame. I watched, feeling my heart sink further with every passing second, as they cast spells on each other, ranging from simple offensive spells to others that were tricky, almost forbidden. I’d wondered where Walter had learnt the spell he’d used on Alan … I knew now. Boscha walked from student to student, offering advice to some and a mild rebuke to others, praising the deserving in a manner that would have impressed me if it hadn’t been so … slanted. They weren’t being praised for doing well. They were being praised for living up to their bloodlines.
He’s a Supremacist, I thought, numbly. I wasn’t sure why I was surprised. The idea that magicians were just better than commoners had been around for a long time, that magic instantly elevated the poorest and lowliest amongst us to a nobility none of the mundane aristocracy could hope to match. I might have been more taken with it myself, if I hadn’t been so aware of how my brothers and I had been treated. Boscha is a Supremacist and he’s teaching them to be Supremacists too.
I swallowed, hard. Boscha was pushing at an open door. Walter and his cronies—and the rest of the group—were already convinced of their own superiority. I knew how they treated the mundane servants—and newborn magicians, even though they had magic too. It was easy to be cruel, if one believed the cruelty was amply justified … I wondered, suddenly, if Boscha had given Walter instructions on what excuse to use, if they were caught by the other tutors. Or … I cursed inwardly. It was easy to manipulate simple minds. All you had to do was pretend to be their friend, and excuse their misdeeds, and they’d love you.
And they know he’s not a weakling either, I mused, as I watched the lesson go on. There’s no sense he’s giving them what they want because he’s afraid of them.
My head spun. Boscha wasn’t just teaching them how to fight. He was teaching them to work as a team, to think their way through tactical obstacles … he was building an army! My blood ran cold as I inched back, careful not to do anything that might risk discovery. I wasn’t afraid of the students … no, that wasn’t true. Not any longer. Fifteen magicians with combat training, even incomplete, could give me a very hard time. And Boscha himself …
In these times, fifteen magicians would make a formidable force, I thought. I kept moving, back down the stairs and into the tunnel. And who’s to say there aren’t more?
The thought nagged at my mind. There were two thousand students in Whitehall. A third of them, more or less, had bloodlines that stretched back at least three or four generations, perhaps more if you overlooked certain … irregularities … in the records that might suggest a combination of forgery and wishful thinking. Even if Boscha restricted himself to the older students, and I suspected he would, he might still be able to put together a formidable force … enough to do real damage out in the world. The Empire was gone. The Allied Lands were constantly on the verge of falling apart. And if Boscha took power …
I shuddered. I didn’t want to think about it.
Whitehall had never felt so welcoming, I reflected, even though I wasn’t really safe. Boscha controlled the wards … I hoped, prayed, he hadn’t been watching me as I left the school myself. Would he have worked out where I’d gone? Or … my thoughts spun in circles, trying to come up with a plan. Should I go to the White Council? Right now, I doubted the councillors could agree on anything, even something as important as putting out a fire threatening to burn them to death. Or my family … the thought of crawling back to House Barca, even to warn them, was abhorrent. They’d laugh in my face. Probably.
My feet carried me back to the staff quarters, then stopped. I needed to find allies and quickly. And that meant … I hurried down the corridor and knocked, loudly, on Mistress Constance’s door. The Alchemy tutor was tough—and had good reason to distrust Boscha. Her door swung open a moment later, her wards pointedly crackling around me. Mistress Constance had hundreds of suitors, all convinced she’d marry them if they asked nicely. So far, she’d rejected them all. I suspected I knew why.
Mistress Constance emerged from her bedroom, her dark hair hanging loose and spilling over a white nightgown. She eyed me in a manner that would have intimidated me, if I hadn’t seen too many horrors in my life. A sorceress’s rooms are her own private kingdom, and she is quite within her rights to do whatever she likes to you, if you intrude without her permission and a very good reason. But she had to know I wouldn’t knock on her door without good cause. Tutors learn to value their private time. They get so little of it.
“This had better be important,” she snapped. “I have the fifth years in the morning.”
“I found out what our grandmaster was doing,” I said, after casting a series of privacy wards. The look she gave me suggested I’d better explain quickly or I’d be spending the rest of my life croaking on a lily pad, if she didn’t chop me up and use me for ingredients instead. “He’s building an army.”
She stared as I ran through the full story, then swallowed. “He’s mad!”
“Perhaps.” I wasn’t so sure. Boscha wouldn’t have embarked on such a scheme unless he was reasonably sure it would succeed. Or at least let him back off and swear blind he’d been up to nothing. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing.”
“We had an odd little chat, Pepper and I and him,” Mistress Constance mused. “It was one of those odd little conversations, one of those discussions where you dance around the topic endlessly, trying to tease out what someone thinks about something without ever revealing your own thoughts and feelings. It was … he was talking about magical supremacists, asking what I thought of the concept. I dismissed it.”
I looked up. “You did?”
“It’s easy to say we’re better than the mundanes,” she said. “But the idea magicians who can trace their families back countless years are superior to newborns is absurd. I’ve been a teacher for years, and I have seen no inherent difference, nothing that proves newborns cannot catch up with students who were born and raised in a magical household and were taught much of what they needed to know before they came into their magic. You should have seen it, too.”