4.26: The Chosen Ones

I certainly wasn’t any less angry by the time I’d made it back to my room. I shoved the door open with rather more force than I intended, and Max peered over his bed in concern. “Are you alright?”

“Fine.” There was no point discussing this with Max, he wouldn’t get – except he would, wouldn’t he? For once, Max actually was the person who’d get it. “Did you know what Magistus’ spell does?”

“Magistus? Uh, some kind of emotional control, right?”

“He can calm people down by touching them. Doesn’t even look hard to use.”

“Right. That’s – ” his eyes widened. “Did he do that to you?!”

“Didn’t even ask. Just decided I was too amped up and he should take my feelings away.”

“Oh. Kayden. I’m so sorry that that happened to you. Are you okay?”

“Well I’m certainly not calm now!” I threw myself onto my bed. “I’ll be fine, I just.. what the fuck? I mean, that’s super fucked up, right? It’s not just me?”

“It is, indeed, super fucked up.”

“And from him, of all people? What the fuck? Magistus isn’t like that.”

“Isn’t like what?”

“Isn’t a creep! When we were together, he was always super respectful of my boundaries. I mean, he kissed me on impulse that first time, but apologised the next day, and he never tried to go further with anything than I wanted to. If I didn’t want to do something, it just wasn’t on the table at all, no questions. So… what the fuck? He thinks controlling people’s emotions is fine?”

“Well, using a spell is a bit different to… amorous activities.”

I was too angry to derail and make fun of Max’s old man language. “You’re right, it’s different! It’s worse! I mean, not worse across the board, obviously; there’s some really awful stuff that can come from not respecting intimate boundaries, but if we’re talking like, being a bit handsy versus literally controlling my feelings, one of those is a much bigger violation than the other! And he was never even a little bit handsy! And when I objected to the calming down thing, he still didn’t get it! I don’t think he realises how fucked up that was! I mean, he apologised, but it was more like he’d made a mistake with upsetting consequences than any acknowledgement that he was doing super fucked up shit. It was like he’d… he’d accidentally made me food I was allergic to, or something. ‘Oh, I didn’t think controlling your emotions would upset you, good to know, I won’t do it again.’ But now that I know he can do that, I’m certain I’ve seen him do it to other people, and I don’t think he intends to stop.”

“Do you want retribution?” Max asked.

“… What?”

Face impassive, he repeated himself. “Do you want retribution? Would you feel better to see him suffer consequences for treating you in that way?”

I stared. “Um, no? No, I don’t want you to start some political feud with your girlfriend’s brother. Wait, is she still your girlfriend, now that you know Melissa…? Right, yeah, that’s not important right now.”

“Well. If you change your mind, I’m here.”

“I just want him to understand that doing that to people isn’t okay, no matter how much he thinks it’s for their own good. I don’t think you playing some nasty trick on him would help with that. The staff probably would, though. I should… file a complaint.”

“That’d be something to take to your surveyanto. But… that’s not going to be productive.”

“You think Fiore won’t enact consequences against a fellow legacy mage? Then I could escalate – ”

“It’s not a question of what the Fiore might do. Nobody would do anything. This could escalate to the Council, and very little would come of it. They’re not going to punish him for using his spell.”

“That’s ridiculous. Plenty of people get punished for using their spells.”

“People get punished for starting fights or setting things on fire. Did Magistus hurt you in any way, other than violating your emotions? Did he steal from you? Try to use your calm to push you into a decisions or behaviours against your will?”

“No. Well, I mean, it was pretty uncomfortable, because. Familiar.”

“Hmm… you might get something from that. But if your intent is to push Max into understanding that he shouldn’t be using his spell on anyone without permission, then a reaction specific to you isn’t going to help. It might help less than doing nothing, in fact, because then he’s just going to think that your physical discomfort is why you were upset with him, and when it comes to using the spell in the first place, the law won’t take your side.”

“I wasn’t planning on suing him! But what? You can’t just… just run around using a spell like that on people!”

Max shrugged.

“Seriously? But… what?”

“Spells are important to mages,” Max explained. “Culturally.”

“Wow, I never would have guessed.”

“It’s like… okay. In most societies, there are things that it’s just accepted that some people can do, but others can’t. Kings can do stuff that peasants would be executed for. Something that puts a homeless guy in prison is just youthful hijinks for a rich kid.”

“So Magistus can do whatever he wants because he’s rich?”

“No, he can do whatever he wants because he has a spell. And he can get away with it easier than most mages because he comes from a family of mages. Spells are important. There are a lot of people in mage society who have never had a spell, but the really important jobs, the political jobs and teaching jobs an other actually influential jobs, go to mages. And a lot of our rules and general culture are older than the Pit, so the idea of what a mage is hasn’t actually changed, even though becoming a mage has.”

“What do you mean?”

“A mage isn’t just somebody who can make something cool happen. A mage is somebody who has been chosen. A mage carries a piece of the very soul of humanity itself within them, a piece that chose them and would have killed them, were they found unsuitable. The mere fact that they have a spell is proof positive that they can be entrusted with its use. A mage who uses a spell to cause damage, in terms of theft or manipulation or injury, is committing a crime, but merely using the spell is not considered wrong on its own. Octavia can magically inspect as many people’s possessions as she wants and this is her natural right, if she doesn’t damage them. Similarly, if Magistus isn’t trying to hurt you by calming your emotions, it’s considered natural for him to assume that he can, right up until the moment you told him not to.”

“That is so fucked up.”

“Welcome to mage society.”

“And it makes no sense. Almost everyone who goes into the Pit comes out alive, with a spell, so clearly it’s not that special to be ‘chosen by a piece of humanity’s soul’.”

“Yes, but those people are chosen by their mage families or vetted by the school as applicants before they’re allowed to become initiates. The fact that so many survive is just proof that the vetting processes work, yes? After all, a bunch of ordinary people couldn’t possibly survive in such high numbers.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Of course it’s bullshit. But as I said, the perspective is old and the Pit is new. The Pit’s caused some social problems with that, actually; it used to be one or two spells in a family, but the upper tiers can afford to send several or even all of their family to Refujeyo, while most mage families can only send one heir, upsetting the old dynamics.”

Well, that wouldn’t be a problem once we destroyed the Pit. One thing didn’t sit right about Max’s explanation – if that was how mages justified their elitism, then what about witches? Since the Pit, we were the only ones out there still being ‘chosen by a piece of humanity’s soul’ the old-fashioned way, but before going through the Initiation, there’d been no sense that anyone respected me for being a witch, especially not legacy mages. Reactions had all fallen on a spectrum between interest in the novelty and outright hostility.

But as soon as I thought about it, I had my answer. Mages didn’t respect witches for the same reason that some men griped about how women getting promoted over them must have slept their way to the top, or rich college kids insisted that they’d worked just as hard as their poor peers who probably snuck their way in on some equality program instead of actually working for the position like they did. Pride and insecurity. The old way of getting spells is old-fashioned, and the Pit is much better and makes much better mages with its proper, trained, domesticated spells… because if it wasn’t better, then that would mean they weren’t better, and that was unacceptable.

So mages could just go around using their spells on each other, so long as they weren’t deemed to be causing or attempting any kind of harm or crime? That was really, really unsettling. How many mages out there had spells like Magistus, spells that could do stuff like control emotions? Were there any mind-reading seers? And basically the entire category of contract spells was political dynamite!

“Your family must love your spell,” I remarked.

“Ha. Yes. Octavia was extremely smug about it. People had been pressuring her about the incredibly risky decision to pick me instead of an older heir, and when I presented with the first actually useful Acanthos spell since Quinctus… well.” He turned back to his model.

Wow, wasn’t it great to randomly run into fun little details about mage society that nobody had told me? So fantastic. Loved how it kept fucking happening. Maybe there was a class I could take at school about bullshit rich kid mage culture.

“So now I should, what, just stay out of Magistus’ reach forever?” I asked.

“You made it clear that you didn’t want him using his spell on you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about. He wouldn’t do that against your will. He’s a good guy.”

A ‘good guy’ who was running around controlling people’s emotions like that. Because that was okay to do here, apparently.

“So mages owe each other all kinds of debts all the time, right?” I asked.

“… Yes?”

“So that means your spell is massively powerful? You could be a real political terror with that.”

“My spell makes me a murderer. Some people might consider being a murderer powerful, I suppose.”

“What you did at Duniyasar wasn’t murder, it was saving Kylie’s life.”

“Mmm. Anyway, no, it’s not as useful as you’re probably thinking. It takes some pretty tricky circumstances for me to leverage anything using the spell. Let’s say that di Fiore owes Magistus money. And I want to hurt di Fiore. What, exactly, am I supposed to do with that debt? My spell’s not going to take money out of his bank account and give it to Magistus. If I was in the room with both of them, and Magistus needed some kind of energy or assistance that di Fiore was capable of providing and that my spell could recognise and transfer, and di Fiore believed that the assistance was equal or less than the value of his debt and that providing it would erase some or all of that debt, the spell might be able to facilitate. But in most of those circumstances, Magistus and di Fiore would arrange an exchange on their own, and if they wanted to trade something metaphysical and needed my spell to do it, they’d simply ask me; I wouldn’t be leveraging anything against them. The spell is very useful for a facilitator of debts, which is a very powerful position in its own right, but hardly suitable for a ‘political terror’. Situations like with Lydia, where the spell would be leveraged against someone, would be extremely rare and extremely risky.”

“Risky? But you can use your spell on whoever – ”

“But I can’t go around robbing and cheating whoever I want. If I use it to force someone to repay a debt they didn’t intend to, I’d very likely be accused of trickery, coercing them into believing they owed a debt that they didn’t and then leveraging my spell to rob them. For the times where a debt is concrete and acknowledged and I couldn’t be accused of that kind of coercion, there already exist other methods to recover such debts and my spell’s not all that useful on a regular basis. When Sekura Refujeyo eventually gets around to trying me over Lydia’s death, the likely response to my obvious legal defense – that the casting could not possibly have worked unless Lydia believed the debt was owed and the price was just, so there is no victim, merely an agreement of repayment – is that they will accuse me of tricking her in such a manner. I suppose we’ll wait and see, though.”

“You still haven’t heard anything from them about all that?”

“No.”

“Is that weird?”

“I don’t know. There’s not a wealth of public information on how long a case like this should take. Anyway, it wasn’t all that long ago. Your case took longer than this.”

“Yeah, but that was nemaganti courts. I thought mages would be faster.”

Max shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d say that Sekura Refujeyo are probably stalling for as long as they can.”

“Stalling? Why?”

“Kylie has a powerful and important spell. Of course they want her to stay here, and she’s not in danger of graduating any time soon. When this case starts, it’s going to bring up a whole lot of knotty issues about spell ownership and contract viability that Refujeyo and Fionnrath fundamentally disagree on. Refujeyo will win, but why not start with the strongest position possible? The longer Kylie is here, the more chances for more things to tie her here – you, for instance, are already a factor that Fionnrath didn’t expect. Their mage has a human familiar, who is also contractually tied to the school. I don’t think Refujeyo are waiting for anything in particular, but time is unlikely to weaken Kylie’s ties here and might strengthen them, so why not wait as long as possible?”

“I… guess… that makes sense?”

“Or maybe nobody’s stalling and criminal proceedings just usually take forever. I wouldn’t know. You sure you don’t want me to give your ex-boyfriend a sharp primer on manners?”

“Yes. I’m sure.” Days like this made me glad my spell didn’t do anything. (Well, I was usually glad my spell didn’t do anything, since if it woke up then the conflict between my magic and Kylie’s would probably kill me, but you know what I mean.) I watched Max work on his elaborate model a bit more. “When did you get into models, anyway?”

“Some things are easier to represent in 3D than 2D,” he said without looking up from his work. “I’ve been building 3D maps for awhile, I just usually do it in the lab. Better tools and shielding, and more space.”

“So why not this one?”

“Alania thinks I’m spending too much time on ‘pointless niche history projects’, studying the runes in Duniyasar. She says that the modern runic language dominated for a reason. After the whole Labyrinth of Dreams thing, I don’t want to have to invent some innocent reason for focusing on this and hope she’ll believe me, so it’s easier to just not do it in the lab any more. Also I really don’t want to have to explain to her that the reason I’m developing this power sink is because I accidentally invented something that could turn a mage mark into a bomb powerful enough to crack stone.”

“Or your arm bones.”

“That was one time, Kayden.”

“Well, you never let me forget my stupid injuries. Consider this revenge.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got a spare arm, anyway. One that isn’t contaminated with magic.”

“I just want to point out that I haven’t broken any bones for ages, and you’re currently building something to catch fire on purpose. You’re never allowed to call me reckless again.”

I watched Max work a bit longer. If we managed to stop the Child from being born – when we managed, failure was not an option – then the mage families would have a difficult time. They’d been dependent on buying spells from the Pit for so long; those who’d come to prominence after the Pit’s construction had nothing to fall back on, and even those older than the Pit had given up their family spells long ago, and who was to say that the freed spells would come back to them? We were going to tear down so many families as a side effect of this. The Acanthos’. The Madjas. The Cottinglys.

Thinking back on Magistus using his spell like he did, I didn’t really feel too bad about doing that.