Minor Works of Meda

1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Fortune save me from the incompetence of men. Even if Kalcedon, in truth, was only half a man.

In the calm waters of the bronze scrying bowl, the world played out in miniature. The warship looked as small as a fish-craft. I knew it wasn’t—knew it was larger than any boat that sailed our isle of Nis-Illous. On deck, two dozen uniformed, weaponed sailors the size of ants performed a frenzied dance of preparation as their ship approached a rock lined bay. When the bird’s eye we watched through dove, my vision plummeted towards one of the deck’s large skein-bows so fast I felt I was falling, so fast my bare toes curled to grip the steady stone floor of the tower’s workshop.

Abruptly, the ship dimmed, as if a cloud blew overhead… or as if the magic had slipped. I stopped writing, my reed pen poised over the page I was recording the vision on. My eyes rose anxiously away from the image and towards the spell above it.

Three of us stood around the scrying bowl. It was a beaten bronze dish, hip-height, as wide across as I was tall. Mistress Eudoria, my employer, was too focused on her own sigil- work to notice the way the spell strained. Eudoria’s crooked fingers swept deftly through the air, focusing her portion of the enchantment and hunting out the conversation we sought.

Kalcedon, Eudoria’s apprentice, was the problem. The half-fae man had a bored expression on his gray face.

His smallest finger had begun to tremble. I watched the subtle movement, noting the smudge of red garden soil he hadn’t washed away before coming inside. The magic wrapped around his fingers shimmered and frayed against his gray skin, threatening to drop the entire working if he didn’t find control again soon.

Eudoria’s spell wasn’t a simple one. It started with the sigil Leferin, cycled through a dozen permutations of Eldrezar ’s phrasing, and only went on from there. I knew it must have hurt to hold it in place for so long, but it was like Kalcedon didn’t even feel the need to try.

The sound of wind buffeted my ears. A woman called an order, voice like thunder. A chorus of sailors replied. But I paid no attention to what anyone in the vision was saying.

“Kalcedon,” I whispered. “Watch yourself.”

His hands jerked in surprise as his eyes flicked my way.

Like dust blown by wind, the image scattered from the bowl. Shimmering spell-work dissipated in the workshop’s stagnant air. With a curse the half-fae witch raked his hands forward, trying to catch the loops of the casting. It was too late. They’d already unraveled.

“By the veil,” Eudoria cursed. I ducked my gaze to the dark water of the bowl, feeling like a school child who’d gotten caught passing notes.

“She distracted me, on purpose. You saw that,” Kalcedon snapped.

More fool me, for thinking Kalcedon wouldn’t blame me for his own mistakes. I glared at him.

“Like you needed help ruining it. The spell was about to drop,” I told him flatly. “I was giving you a chance to save it.”

“Not likely. Snake.” He glared at me, lips twisted in a sneer.

“Enough.” Eudoria’s voice was clear. “Meda. What was the last thing you wrote?”

Anger still pulsing in my veins, I turned away from Kalcedon’s dark gaze and glared, instead, at the journal in my hands.

“A tal-rih, with a green dolphin on the flag. It was a warship from Colynes.”

“We were further than that,” Eudoria said impatiently. “Was that woman Adaya Ozeri? What did she say?”

I shifted my weight to the left, then the right, then left again. The tone of the woman’s voice echoed in my head, but none of the words. I glanced around me, hunting through my memory in the hope that some tangle of half-heard sound would clarify into meaning.

Eudoria’s workshop sprawled at the pinnacle of the squat, flat-topped seer’s tower. It was a busy room, as difficult to look at as it was pleasing. Bits of glass and polished metal covered a quarter of the wall, still flickering with fading sigils–these ones written on the surface, not signed into the air–and bits of moving color. Tall bookshelves with a sliding ladder curled along the rest like a cat’s tail hugging the room’s body. Light glinted from glass hanging off the ceiling beams. Both window sills, shut tight now to keep a breeze from distracting us, were crowded with stacks of books and weighted-down papers, a wooden carving of a cisticola bird, a jar of reed pens, and other sundries. There was a hearth with a tea-pot and a cabinet beside it that hadn’t been organized in a decade.

But right now, everything that really mattered was in the center of the room: the three of us clustered around the dark scry-bowl.

“The magic slipped,” I said quietly.

“I don’t care what else happens in the room. You watch the visions,” Eudoria said. “Or else I have to, and then I can’t focus. Damnation. Let’s go, again. We’re losing time.”

Unlike gray Kalcedon, Eudoria’s skin was a perfectly normal shade of pale brown, her curly hair a shock of silver. Like any witch, age came to her with slow reluctance, fighting against the fae bloodline that granted her magical power. 129 on Eudoria could have been 60 on someone else.

But then, nobody on Nis-Illous was like Kalcedon. We were all respectable shades of brown, beige, or pink (freckled olive, in my instance)–not blue-gray like the Etegen sea on an overcast day. Nobody else, even Eudoria, had ears that sharpened to points, or skin smooth as glazed clay, or a smile that could make you freeze in place like a terrified rabbit.

Or such a prickly, cruel, soul. It was only to be expected of a half-faerie; everyone knew the fae were heartless things. Eudoria and I had the blood, too—that was what it meant, to be a witch—but we were mostly human.

He was still glaring at me, his lips pressed tight and his dark eyes sparking.

‘“I could…” I started to say, as Eudoria shook out her hands, freeing them of cramps and aches and stiffness.

Kalcedon’s eyebrows furrowed, and his mouth edged down. Power rumbled off him like a summer storm. His look dared me not to say a word.

But I’d been waiting for a moment like this for years. At thirty-one, I couldn’t afford to waste any more time than I’d already lost. It had taken me a decade to become Eudoria’s assistant. I wasn’t going to wait another decade to move up.

“I could hold the spell,” I offered. “I know how. And my hands won’t slip.”

Kalcedon snorted in disbelief. I braced myself for Eudoria to say no.

“You don’t know the phrasing,” my mistress said.

“I do,” I insisted. “I’ve watched. I’ve traced it.”

She took a deep, scrutinizing breath.

“Fine. Give Kalcedon the book.”

“What?” Kalcedon’s voice was loud and sharp. “She’s an assistant. ”

A small, high noise escaped me. Without hesitation, I shoved the journal into his gray hands.

“Now, Meda.” Eudoria beckoned with her hand to indicate I needed to move.

I drew a deep breath and lifted my palms in front of me. I knew the complex spell she wanted me to cast; knew it well. Every day for the past three years of my assistantship I had watched Kalcedon fumble over another variation of it. Every night, in my chambers, I’d written the scrolling script of the sigils in my own private notebook and studied the way the magic moved.

I knew the spell, and I knew I could do better. Declutter it. Make it elegant and swift and efficient.

Prove to Eudoria that I was more than an assistant, no matter how weak the power in my veins.

I closed my eyes, and reached out to pluck at Kalcedon’s heat. Grudgingly a coil of magic stretched between us. My fingers hooked into the air, drawing separate phrasings with left hand and right; here a soft limit, there a field for Eudoria’s delicate directions to take hold. I started with Leferin , just like her spell, and at heart I used the same phrasings, but the end result was half the length and much better.

I’d practiced before, of course, but without feeding it any power; I did not have enough to give. It felt different now, like my hands were heavier, weighted with lead. The air resisted me, fighting every movement. I slowed, making sure to draw the phrasings perfectly. A mistake could mean disaster.

Kalcedon’s heat poured steadily through me, standing every nerve at glorious attention, singing songs of power I’d seldom tasted.

“Girl. What are you doing ?” Eudoria snapped.

My eyes opened.

“This one’s better,” I promised. The fingers of my left hand arched and spread, hooked into it at all the pivot-points. With the right I kept casting, putting the final lines in place. The web of shimmering air hung in front of my face. Mine, and beautiful.

I heard the scoff from Kalcedon. I couldn’t spare him any attention; the spell and Eudoria took it all.

“Enough,” Eudoria said shrilly.

The flow of magic halted abruptly. I gasped as my spell started to crumble, and curled my fingers desperately. It drifted apart like ink in water. Pain prickled my skin. With the power gone, cold took hold of me.

“No,” I begged. I turned to look at Kalcedon, but he was staring at the ground instead of at me. He’d wrapped his magic tight as a clenched fist, giving me nothing to pull.

“Get out, Meda,” Eudoria told me quietly.

“Please? It’s more efficient.” My voice sped up, begging her to realize what I’d achieved. “It uses less magic and it will produce a sharper visual. And it cuts out all the parts that were just taking up space. The sixth and eighth of Eldrezar were making it muddy. And since it’s simpler, even Kalcedon won’t have so much trouble trying to hold it in place.”

“You could have killed us all, you fool.”

“No, but–you didn’t even try it–” I was breathing hard. This was wrong. There was a pain in my chest. It was sharp and terrible, like a knife was lodged there. This wasn’t how I had dreamed it. And the magic was gone, that glorious, powerful heat; without it my nerves felt lifeless and dull.

“ Get out ,” she said again.

“I’ll cast the old one, then–” I started.

“This is not the time for unpredictable play. Get out. The next time you start experimenting without permission, I’ll start looking for a new assistant.” She said each word loud and slowly, as if I wouldn’t understand her otherwise. “You have wasted enough of my time.”

The pain in my chest kept stabbing. I wrapped my arms around myself, turned, and fled.

The last thing I saw was the smirk on Kalcedon’s face.