4.34: The Voice

He was about my age, maybe a bit younger. His red hair clashed horribly with his pink robes, and even more horribly with the bright blue stripe of Malas’ healing magic across his neck. It looked like somebody had cut his throat recently.

He looked very small compared to the two guards that flanked him. His eyes were on his tablet, reading. After a minute, he looked up and flashed a series of hand signs to the Grand Master. I don’t know any sign language, so I had no idea what he said.

“Yes,” the Grand Master said. “Both of them.”

“Hey,” I said, “I made the threat. Kylie didn’t do anything wrong.”

“She is the leader of your little coven, is she not?” Lord Solus said. “And this is a coven project, yes? You expect us to believe that she isn’t the ringleader?”

“We don’t have a leader,” Kylie said.

“Kylie organises most of the meetings,” I said, “but this whole thing is my plan, my idea. She wasn’t involved at all.”

Lord Solus narrowed his eyes. “I don’t for one moment – ”

“No, he’s right,” one of the other Masters said. “He made the threat. We’ve got nothing against her. Do you really want to go digging around, alienate the other two witch students and piss off Arum by harrassing his apprentice, not to mention how it’s going to look to the initiate witches who haven’t decided to stay yet, in the hopes of digging up dirt on Fionnrath’s prophet over some random teenaged high spirits?”

“Not to mention,” Alania said, sounding a lot calmer than she had a few minutes ago, “the entire reason we are here is because of this point of contention with Fionnrath. How do you think it will look to them? Their prophet disappears mysteriously, shows up here of all places, the teacher they send her is killed by one of our students, and then we finally relent and send her home under a geas? Is that really something we want to deal with right now?”

Another Master nodded. “If you’re trying to make a point, Lord Solus, one conviction will work just as well as two. There’s no need to ensorcel the prophet as well.”

Fiore cleared his throat. “If you put Kayden under a geas and make him go to Fionnrath – ”

“Then they might think he’s a spy or something, whatever,” the Master said. “Fionnrath’s not going to care about the familiar.”

The Grand Master nodded. “Just the boy, then, Voice, if you please.”

The Voice signed another question.

“Try both names. At least one of them will stick.”

The Voice approached. I would’ve stepped back, if both Kylie and Fiore weren’t gripping my nervously, inadvertantly holding me in place.

The Voice opened his mouth and I saw, with shock, that his mage mark was on his tongue, bright white lines on a sea of red. It was everything I could do not to start laughing hysterically. Of everything going on, all I could think was, ‘oh, wow, that must have really hurt’.

“Kayden Mark James,” the Voice said, his voice rough and cracked with disuse, “don’t tell or talk to anybody about the nature of curses.”

I could feel the magic take hold. I don’t think most people would be able to, I dont’ think it was the kind of spell you were supposed to feel. But I felt it push through Kylie’s magic and settle into my brain and spine, while the Voice kept talking. “Kelsie Marie James, don’t tell or talk to anybody about the nature of curses.”

And then I did laugh, because I’d been stressing so much about the limbo of whether people around me knew I was trans or not, which was suddenly struck me as such a stupid, pointless, trivial thing to worry about, and hey, if Kylie hadn’t known, she’d sure be figuring it out soon, and what a way to find out, huh? In the middle of this! Of whatever the fuck all of this was supposed to be! Huh? Huh??

I was doing fine.

Fiore’s grip on my shoulder tightened. It was starting to hurt.

“If you’re all quite done with this kangaroo court,” he said tightly, “I believe that my student would be better off anywhere but here.”

“Of course,” the Grand Master said, waving magnanimously. “Neither he nor you were ever summoned. Kylie, however, we need to speak with.”

Kylie let me go. I grabbed her arm, and managed to stop laughing. “If she’s staying, I’m staying,” I said.

“Kayden,” Fiore said, “we really should go.”

“Anything they want to say to her – ”

“Kayden,” Kylie said sharply. “I’m fine. Go.”

I let Fiore lead me away.

I don’t know how long it took us to get back to his office. The journey seemed far shorter than it should have been, but with the portal tunnels in Refujeyo, who could tell? Fiore dumped Socks into my arms for the journey and I was too occupied keeping her content to pay all that much attention. He didn’t take his hand off my shoulder until we were in his office, where he firmly pushed me into a chair before pressing a small bottle of orange juice into my hands.

“Well,” he said, “that was incredibly awkward.”

I blinked at the orange juice.

“You never drink the hot drinks I make you,” he explained, opening a second little bottle for himself, “and you should drink something.”

“What… happened?” I asked, opening the juice. I spilled a little on Socks. Oh, my hands were trembling.

“Well, if I recall correctly, what happened is that you openly threatened to violate the conditions of your contract in a stupid, toothless way – which they could have expelled you for, by the way – directly to the faces of the entire High Council of Skolala Refujeyo, in the middle of an official meeting, refused the right to trial I tried to open for you and accepted summary judgement in order to protect your friends, and set yourself up to be made an example of so that you and your friends wouldn’t make any stupid decisions that would entirely destroy all of your futures, by way of penalty via a geas.” He sipped his orange juice. “Also Miratova and Solus appear to be having some kind of pissing contest, which is going to end badly for somebody. It’s times like this I’m glad I never made it into the High Council.”

“So my punishment is just that I can’t talk about – ” my throat locked up. For a moment I panicked, unable to breathe, but quickly found that I could breathe just fine when I stopped trying to talk. I glared at my juice.

“Yes. I suggest you don’t try.”

“Why not?”

“The same reason you shouldn’t struggle against a noose, my boy. The compulsion you’re under operates partly on its own rules and partly on your conception of them. If you fight the restrictions, they will tighten; if you try to find loopholes, they will close. I’m sure you’ve already made the genius deduction of trying some method of communication that doesn’t involve talking; maybe you can write about the nature of curses. If you do that, it might work the first time, maybe even the second. And then it won’t. It will be something you’ll never be able to write about again. And because spells don’t quite use the same logic as humans, there might be restrictions that might not completely make sense to you. If you try to fight the geas, you might find yourself unable to say or write certain words. Unable to talk about topics even tangential to curses. There is a reason that the Voice isn’t used to preemptively prevent any kind of criminal behaviour – well, a reason beyond the fact that it would immediately start a rebellion. This kind of geas is dangerous. People who cooperate with the conditions of their geas can go through life barely noticing it, but people who fight can permanently cripple themselves by tightening their restrictions until they can barely act.”

“I… I didn’t think they’d do that.”

“You didn’t? Didn’t you wonder why that little detail about curses wasn’t already common knowledge? It’s been centuries, you’d think somebody would have told the commonfolk.”

“It’s not even that important!” I snapped. “Why is it worth protecting? I mean, yeah, obviously it’s important to me, but to mage society as a whole, there’s no reason they couldn’t just be like, ‘okay, some – ’” My throat locked up again. Dammit.

“You’re really going to have to get into the habit of being a lot more careful with what you try to say,” Fiore noted.

“It’s not… I just… shut up!”

He sighed. “You’re fine, Kayden. They were just making a point. Plenty of people get through life just fine under a geas or two.”

“Making a point?”

“If they weren’t trying to make a point, they would have expelled you,” he pointed out. “Very flimsy, unjust motivation for expulsion, but they’re using just as flimsy justification to get rid of Kylie. This is to warn you and your friends away from, well, what you threatened to do.”

“Why?! Why is it even that big of a deal?!”

“Why do the mages want to keep the nature of curses a secret? Why put so much effort into hiding something that’s not all that difficult for anyone who knows even basic magical theory to figure out? Why encode silence into contract, why use magic to prevent you from going public? Why not simply take a small PR hit and allow this to become common knowledge among commonfolk, and reap the benefits of what that knowledge would bring? After all, people are far more likely to choose to send their children here if, instead of being told by regretful doctors ‘sorry, your baby is cursed,’ they are told ‘congratulations, your baby is a mage’. Is that what you want to ask?”

I nodded.

“Well, I’m no political theorist. But I would hazard a guess that the big reason that silence on this is in the contract… is that silence on this is in the contract.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Refujeyo is an old organisation. There are matters that were politically expedient in the past that no longer are, and we take tradition perhaps a bit too seriously. It is in the nature of mages to do so; past practice defines how magic works, after all. Skolala Refujeyo was created during a time of… well. When this place was put together, it was a haven for magekind. A refuge from the kinds of things that our commonfolk oppressors thought that we were. A time to establish new paradigms and new identities, and being part of the in group, being a sensible, powerful mage instead of a corrupt, dangerous witch… it was important, at the time. There are many such things encoded into our society, and at some point, they are there simply because they always were there. It’s not a matter of ‘wouldn’t it be just as easy to remove this rule’, so much as ‘is this rule causing enough trouble that it’s worth the dangerous labour of changing the contract for’? The status quo is paramount because it is the status quo, and it’s the suggestion of change that must justify itself.” He sipped his orange juice. “Also, it’s proven extremely useful, over the years.”

“Useful? How?”

“In the same manner that it was today. When somebody wants to cause trouble for Refujeyo in some minor way, and they don’t have any serious plans to cause real damage, they always go for one of these unimportant side rules. It’s handy for any organisation to have a few secrets floating around that don’t actually matter for things like this. When you threatened the Council today, you put them in danger of a minor inconvenience and a PR problem. And the price for that was giving them the opportunity to ruin your entire life and those of all of your witch friends, had they wanted to. They decided to nip this in the bud with a light slap on the wrist instead, but it’s so much easier to deal with such things when it’s over something like the nature of curses, don’t you think, rather than let the issue go unresolved until people are forced to threaten far more damaging things?”

“You think it’s left in so the Council has some kind of… trap for uncooperative people?”

“No, I think it’s left in because altering a longstanding contract is a major pain in the arse and nobody’s going to alter it without good reason. I think it has the side effect of also being a good trap for uncooperative people. You’re not the first person to make this threat and get a geas over it, and you won’t be the last. And it has the additional bonus, of course, of sometimes getting people to reveal more than they strictly intend to.”

There was a gleam in Fiore’s eye. I couldn’t help but flinch back a little. “What do you mean?”

“Well. By the nature of threatening to tell everyone that curses are spells, you necessarily reveal to everybody in the room that you know that curses are spells.”

I shrugged. “I know what everyone here knows.”

“And by threatening to reveal to the world that the people in Refujeyo are magically influenced not to spread this information, you necessarily reveal to everybody in the room that you know that the people in Refujeyo are magically influenced not to spread this information. And that, Kayden, is a very interesting thing to know about.”

Oh.

Fiore leaned forward. “So. How did you learn that interesting little fact?”