Inheritance by Simon Brown Page B

intentions. She knew the magister had let her off easily this time, but another outburst could see her brought before the maleficum, and that could result in her dismissal from the Theurgia of Stars. And where would she be then? The theurgia gave her a place to sleep at night, fed her twice a day, trained her for a lucrative career, and paid her a modest stipend that allowed her to buy the occasional beer and go out with her friends every few days.
    She took a swig of her drink and promised to do better. She would work harder at study, work harder at trying to comprehend the conflicting paradigms nesting within the Theurgia. She must not lose her position. The theurgia was home… and more. She never regretted the time and effort spent actually learning as opposed to simply memorizing. She yearned to discover new ways of doing things, to find links between the magic of the different theurgia. But the magic guilds were increasingly stratified and stultified, increasingly separated from each other.
    She dribbled some of the beer from her mug onto the ground and concentrated. The puddle divided into droplets that started moving around one another. She saw a tuft of grass growing out of a crack in the tavern’s wall, pulled out some of its shoots, and carefully placed them vertically in the droplets. They whirled around like skinny dancers. She muttered a few words and the tips of the shoots changed color.
    Jenrosa laughed at the absurd spectacle.
No
, she told herself,
not absurd
. No one else could perform magic so easily from different disciplines and make it work together, and only as a student within the theurgia would she have the opportunity to learn all that she wanted.
    And, she reminded herself again, she had no other home. She had been six when the magicker with his entourage of students and guards had come to her village. She had been outside the house she shared with four siblings and a mother who cared more about getting her next flagon of wine than looking after her children, when she had noticed the procession of strangers. She was feeding scraps to the pig—her family’s only asset—when she saw the man who led the way was wearing the stiff-collared tunic of a magicker. As Jenrosa watched, he made his way through the village, looking neither right nor left, but walking with determined precision as if he was following someone else’s footsteps. When he finally came abreast of Jenrosa he stopped and turned to stare at her with eyes as blue as the sky.
    “What is your name?” he asked gently.
    Jenrosa was not used to being spoken to by adults, and she hesitated. The magicker smiled at her and made a sign in the air. A white mist seemed to follow his finger, forming a sign that raised goosebumps on her skin. Without knowing how or why she did it, she copied the sign, and the mist disappeared. The magicker was watching her keenly now, and came closer. He bent over and drew a second sign, this time on the ground. There was no mist or magic this time, except that again she was compelled to copy him. As soon as she had finished it, a small whirl of air formed above them, spraying dust into her eyes. She blinked the dust away and saw that both signs had gone. The magicker pulled a bracelet off his wrist and said something in a language she did not understand. The bracelet seemed to melt and reform before her eyes, taking on the shape of a silvery snake. She touched it and the snake immediately reformed into the bracelet. The members of the magicker’s entourage started talking excitedly among themselves. One of them came forward and handed the magicker a simple wooden drinking bowl, poured water into it from a flask, and stepped back. The magicker made a sign again, tracing it in the water. Before Jenrosa’s eyes, the water seemed to change, become greener and deeper somehow. She thought she saw fish swimming in it, and other creatures she did not recognize; it seemed to her she was looking down into an ocean from