Chapter Six #2
I slid down from my perch and curled around him, pressing one hand against his shoulder blade. Beneath the book, his breath hitched. “Scream, and I’ll put you to sleep, wear your face, and tell your guards nothing at all is the matter.”
“A voyeur, are you?” With his free hand, he set the tome down, blinking up at me with clashing respect and frustration.
“Not in the slightest. I just need this.” I released him and lunged for the book, but Roland snatched it up first, twisting it out of reach.
“This is mine. Seized by me, after Prospero’s arrest. And I’m afraid I have my own research to do tonight.” He smiled dismissively.
He’d always felt too much and too openly, in such warring extremities, and so he didn’t notice when I snuck into his head. Subdued and calm, he held the book out to me. Eager, now, to help, to be useful.
Then he shook himself, eyes clearing, and when he smiled again it was as slowly as a bow being drawn.
“Try that again,” he warned, “and I’ll have you banished from court. Though you’ll just slink in here as a serpent and steal this anyway, won’t you? I’m curious. When you’re a snake, do you feel every little thing along your body?”
“I’m curious. When you’re with the queen, do you feel the executioner’s blade against your neck?”
He tutted. “It would be a terrible waste to behead someone so fair.”
“But your head would look so lovely upon the gates.”
A little curved smile. Amusement dancing in his eyes.
“Roland, if I could only have it for a few moments—”
“I have my own research to do tonight,” he repeated.
He made all the ire inside me press against my skin, hot and insistent. “Yes, you looked deep in your research with the queen.”
“What have I done that so offends you?”
“Another besotted casualty to your ambition.” I scoffed. “I felt her disappointment. Do not give cause for people to love you. You will never love them back. At least, not as much as they wish you to.”
For a moment, he looked stunned. “What of her ambition? Do you not, for a moment, think she’s using me for her own aims?
” He eyed the pearls I often wore, resting just above my bodice.
A gift from Prospero. “Do you know what people say? They say a terrible evil moves within all magicians, and that’s where our magic comes from, not the planets. Is that what you see in me?”
“Of course not.”
“I refused her. I have been refusing for months. It’s rather exhausting.
I’m the only one she trusts, but as I said.
I prefer my head remain on my body.” He waved a hand.
“Believe what you will. ‘A Venusborn’s greatest weapon is the devotion they inspire.’” This seemed to be recited, but I didn’t know the source. “I never said it was returned.”
“Your weapon is blunted, then.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh? How so?”
“Love won’t penetrate as deep if it’s spread so wide and thin. You’ve never understood that, Roland.”
His lips parted. I glanced between us, to the parchment he’d folded away. He intercepted my gaze, shifting his body to block it.
It remained unspoken that he had managed to recall the date and time and location of my birth.
Unspoken that I could also recall his. I would stare at his chart as a child, praying some alignment in his sky might point him to me.
That he would look up, suddenly, and there I would be: a thin, streaky comet, blazing past him, and he’d drop every one of his lovers.
“Wise now, aren’t you, Mouse?” His mouth drew into a thin line. “When did that happen?”
“Not nearly wise enough. What is exaltation?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
My curiosity leapt forward. I couldn’t bear it when Roland knew something I did not.
“That section is new. I read the manuscript in full when Prospero had me translate it into Lionessian and Carmingian.” Prospero never trusted Mercuries with his masterwork.
“I would have noticed that word because I wouldn’t have known its meaning. ”
This piqued his interest. He twirled the quill through his fingers. “Is that true? He only wrote about exaltation recently? It wasn’t here before?”
“Not while I lived at court.”
He tucked the quill behind his ear. Gestured to the book and, with a strained sigh, said, “Fine.”
I flipped to the last section, running the pads of my fingers across the crinkled parchment to smooth it down.
Prospero’s tidy penmanship had slipped into a desperate, crude scrawl.
On one page, he’d sketched Venus crossing from one zodiac sign into another.
“Before Prospero’s death,” Roland explained, leaning over my shoulder, “he was developing the idea of magical exaltation. It consumed him. Utterly. He used a nail to carve symbols all over the walls of his cell in the Archimago Tomb. Did you know that?”
I shook my head, disturbed. I didn’t like to think of Prospero’s months in the Archimago Tomb, the winding pit where condemned traitors waited to die. “What was his theory?”
“Since the ancients first charted the stars, we’ve known the planets move into different positions of strength or weakness. Prospero droned on and on about our home signs.”
I nodded. The Moon at home in Cancer, the sign of my birth.
Magicians born to the brighter planets were affected by daily turns of light in the sky. On a moonlit night, I was wondrous, aglow. I reached for magic and it nestled in my hand. A Sunborn’s power sought high noon. Roland’s magic reveled at dawn and twilight, when Venus was most radiant.
But magicians of the dimmer planets—Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn—gathered energy when their planet tracked through their home signs.
They enjoyed wide swaths of time within them—months or even years of their magic at its most content.
Prospero would bask in a year when Jupiter transited Sagittarius or Pisces, then suffer a year of relative strain when it was somewhere else.
He called those Slouching Years. Joked that he couldn’t get his magic to stand perfectly straight.
Last winter, when his corpse lay on the scaffold, had been the close of a Slouching Year.
“Well, Prospero believed there was further magical potential beyond that,” Roland continued.
“He theorized that when a planet was in a position of arguably even greater strength—exaltation—then the magician’s magic might change.
They might even acquire new abilities.” He tapped the drawing.
“This shows Venus exalted in Pisces. Yet I’ve never felt more powerful when Venus is there.
Never felt my magic stir. So the theory disintegrates. ”