Chapter Three
“Persephone, there you are,” said Lady Baradine. “I was looking for you.”
“I was out in the rose garden, my lady,” Sephie explained, trying not to look guilty. There was no way that Lady Baradine could know that Sephie had been meeting her co-conspirator, but showing any sign of guilt would surely get them discovered.
Her hostess chuckled. “So formal! I am your cousin by marriage, Persephone. Please, do call me Delia. And your cousin’s name is Jasper.”
Jasper? Sephie couldn’t possibly call the dragon lord by his first name. She changed the subject. “You were looking for me?”
Lady Baradine’s answer was unexpected. “Yes, indeed. Jasper and I would like you to join us for exercises. Mage exercises, to strengthen your control over your powers. We start at eleven, in the exercise room. Ask any of the servants to show you the way.”
Sephie had never been deemed worthy of formal training. After the test that went wrong, she had overheard what the examiner had said to her father: “The girl has some semblance of a gift, but it is twisted and useless. Send her somewhere she can do no harm.”
Granny had said that perhaps a sorcerer was the wrong person to test her.
She had sent her to a witch for testing, but any spells she tried there had backfired or just failed to work.
Then Granny had tried an enchantress. That was even worse.
Every effort to work on another person’s emotions produced unexpected results.
Her attempts to charm repelled people. When she’d tried to induce calm, she’d started a fight, and the enchantress had to intervene to prevent murder.
Granny had given up. She told Sephie that her only value to the family would be as a breeder, and that if she ever tried to work magic again, Granny would beat it out of her.
After that, Sephie was taught the skills that would presumably make her more attractive to a suitor. Housekeeping skills, music—both piano playing and singing, deportment, the peerage—the current holder of every title, their heir, and their family history—and more.
Years of it, and no word from her father about whom she was to marry.
She’d reached eighteen, hoping to be sent for to make her debut.
By the time she was twenty, she had accepted that she would merely be presented at a church somewhere and married, sight unseen.
Even that would have at least been a change. But it never happened.
Sephie stayed on, unwanted and unloved, even after first Father, and then Granny, died. Then, shortly after her twenty-second birthday, the Welshman had come, and a short time later, a messenger from Lord Baradine.
“I do not have much of a gift,” she told Lady Baradine, who wasn’t going to accept that as a reason for avoiding what Sephie was certain would be an embarrassing interlude.
Or worse. If she could incite people to murder, there was no telling what her twisted gift would make of “exercises” with the dragon lord and lady.
She wondered if she should be more emphatic trying to warn Delia.
“We shall expect you at eleven,” the lady said. “Dress in clothing that allows you to move freely.”
Sephie could see no other alternative. And after all, what else did she have to do?
She had been invited to visit the nursery at any time, but she’d found the occupants disturbing.
Even if they had been normal babies, she didn’t think she would have wanted to spend much time with them.
She had had little to do with babies, and she preferred to keep it that way.
However, these were not normal babies. All three were magical beings born to human mothers but adopted by the Baradines. Mary, the eldest, was a snake from the waist down. Alfred was part calf and part human. And Elizabeth had the body of an owl and a human head.
The Baradines were sterile—it was an inevitable side effect of using powerful magic, as Sephie knew all too well, since her father complained bitterly about the period of abstinence from all magic that her conception had cost him.
For someone as important to the realm as the dragon lord, and for the lady catalyst whose magic was simply part of her being, such abstinence was not possible.
However, Lady Baradine had a warm and maternal heart and had filled her nursery with children no one else wanted.
That Lady Baradine adored her children was obvious, and so did their attendants—each child had their own personal nursemaid. Sephie didn’t know what to think about them. She had never had much to do with either babies or pets. Magical training it would be, then.
When it was nearly eleven o’clock, she found her way to the exercise room by dint of asking one servant after another whenever she got confused by the manor’s bewildering levels and maze of passages.
Lord and Lady Baradine were already there, moving in unison in a way that was not a dance and that had no purpose that Sephie could detect.
“Cousin Persephone,” said Lord Baradine. “Come in and join us. Delia and I are just beginning our day’s training session with some meditative movement. Stand where you can watch me, and do what I do.”
“Jasper learned this from a Chinese mage,” Lady Baradine explained. “It calms the mind and strengthens the ability to direct the magic.”
That was worth doing. Sephie took the place opposite Lord Baradine as directed, and did her best to move as he moved.
It was harder than it sounded. In some ways, Sephie’s previous, boring lessons in physical deportment were helpful.
Her straight carriage met with her cousin’s approval.
But it was a challenge to coordinate arm movements, knee bends, and breathing, and the knee she had hurt a year ago on one of her country rambles wobbled and ached during some of the stances.
Still, by the time Lord Baradine called a halt, she began to feel a hint of why he called it meditative movement and why Lady Baradine said it calmed the mind.
“Persephone,” Lord Baradine said, “Delia and I generally start with the simple exercises and then move on to whatever is our current focus. While you are living here, I shall be your teacher, at least if your gift operates in areas that I understand. Otherwise, I shall find you another teacher. Can you tell me what your gift covers, and where you were in your lessons?”
Gaping was unladylike. The oft-repeated admonition echoed in Sephie’s mind, and she closed her mouth, and then opened it again because a question begged to be asked. “You plan to teach me?”
“Yes, of course,” said the dragon lord, who was the most powerful mage in England, and perhaps in Europe, and who had, in her first twenty-four hours under his roof, been visited by five delegations of Government ministers, the prince regent, the head of the London College of Mages, and their shared uncle, the Duke of Findlater.
He had also left the property twice for meetings, translocating once to London and once to Edinburgh.
And he would be her teacher?
“Your gift, Persephone? And the level you have reached in your lessons?”
“I do not know, Lord Baradine,” Sephie blurted.
He might as well know the worst of it. The College of Mages must have the record somewhere.
Perhaps he already knows, and is just trying to embarrass me.
She jutted her chin and said, “The examiner who tested me when I was fourteen said my gift was twisted and useless, and I should be sent away to live with my Granny and forbidden to use magic.”
Even to her own ears, she sounded combative. Father would have ordered her beaten for that tone of voice, and Granny would have slapped her and sent her to her room to consider her sins. What would the dragon lord do?
He glared and his eyes seemed to dance with flames. If Sephie had not been frozen in shock at her own temerity and his response, she would have cowered.
“Appalling!” he said. “No gift should be left untrained, let alone an unusual one that doesn’t follow the usual rules. You could have hurt yourself or others. What was the name of this incompetent buffoon?”
He was not angry with Sephie, but with the examiner.
“I am sorry,” Sephie told him. “I do not remember. That was eight years ago, Lord Baradine.”
“Call me Jasper,” invited the dragon lord. “Or if you find that too difficult, Cousin Jasper will do. We are family, Cousin Persephone.”
Sephie had a low opinion of family. From her own experience and her observation of others, people were more likely to be hurt by family than anyone else. She kept her thoughts to herself, as usual, and said, obediently, “Cousin Jasper.”
“Never mind the examiner’s name. I daresay I can find it out, and I shall. Who knows how many young mages he has done his best to destroy? As for you, cousin, we shall start at the beginning. Have you had singing lessons, by any chance?”
Does Lord Baradine use singing the way Barberry does? Sephie had never heard of combining magic and music before, but what she knew about magic would fit in a thimble. She nodded. Singing was one of the skills her father believed necessary for a woman.
“Good, then you will have learned to control your breathing, which is an important aspect of learning to control your power. Don’t worry.
I shall test your magic myself, but not for a few days.
Breathing first, and then visualizing. The breathing exercises we do as mages are a little different to those taught to singers, but I am certain you shall pick them up easily. ”
And to Sephie’s surprise, it was true.
*
Taz did not see Miss Thornton for several days, but during that time, she left three notes in the fountain cavity, each reporting the names of visitors to the manor since the last note, and the number of times Lord Baradine had translocated.
Once, he had actually flown, and that time, Lady Baradine had gone with him to London, riding on his back.