I was nervous. More nervous than I had ever been before. The black dress hid most of my tremors of fear, but I had clenched my hands to keep them from shaking.
The private ceremony at the temple a week before was really just a ritual breakfast. There was a small short ceremony where I signed my name to the Roster of Masters and the others sealed it with their magic.
After, everyone got drunk at the usual breakfast and wandered off at some point. The word anti-climactic was probably not strong enough.
But the ceremony I was preparing for now? That was the real deal. The one where the people of S’Kir were introduced to their new temple mistress. Where I had to sit on the council and hear complaints and make judgments with the others.
Being new, I wouldn’t be charged with hearings on my own for a few years yet. I was required to sit when the council was impaneled.
“You’re still shaking,” Mistress Maurielle said, grabbing my hands.
“I’m being announced as a master. It’s not what I wanted. It’s not what I dreamed. Teaching was always enough for me.”
Mistress Sora put a hand on my shoulder. “You will be fine. It’s because you are a teacher that the people will be overjoyed to find you here.”
“There are only three cases we will hear today, ceremonially,” Mistress Ophelia said from her seat. “We’ll be there less than an hour.”
I shook my head. “And then I get to go to the training garden and have Master Dorian beat the shit out of me again.”
Lunella chuckled. “It’s not Dorian this time. It’s the five of us.”
“We are all unique,” Mistress Maurielle said. “And if you watch each of us, you will slowly find your own unique brand of magic.”
Lunella straightened my stole one more time. “The only person I have ever seen with magic as intricately woven as a female’s is Master Dorian. I fully believe his first teacher was a woman, be it mother or wife or sister.”
Drawing a sharp breath, I jerked toward her. “Wait. So the bending I saw in Master Dorian’s magic—”
Mistress Sona nodded. “Is not the way men wield power at all. He is unique.”
I chuckled. “That’s why the other men have trouble fighting him. They can’t work magic like he can.”
Ophelia nodded. “It’s why they don’t like fighting us.”
Lunella laughed. “They can’t figure out our knots and bends and loops when we use it. Every woman is shown how magic works by not less than three other women.”
“The Triium…”
My teaching was already handy in sorting myth from fact. The Triium was a mid-schooling history lesson, about three female magic wielders who had taught Mistress Eiorenne—one of the oldest, most beloved temple masters. She had died centuries ago in a terrible rock fall from the southern Spine.
Before her, females were never as strong as males. The simple, brute force males used to wield more powerful magic wasn’t possible for a woman.
The Triium, a set of three women whose names were lost to time—or maybe never even known—had each defeated the temple masters on their own to reach Eiorenne, the daughter of Master Wilkes.
They took Eiorenne to the Southern Sea to show her how they had learned to wield magic and she found her own, different way to do it.
To return to the temple, she had to defeat each of the fourteen masters there, including her own father.
She did. Easily. And the fifteenth seat of the council was created.
Lunella waggled her eyebrows. “Did you think they stopped with just Eiorenne? Oh, no. They taught every woman they could how to wield their power. And of all of the men who watched and tried to mimic what we could do, only Dorian was able to learn it.”
Ophelia nodded sagely. “And now, we own half the council. As it should be.”
“As it should,” the others chorused.
These women were powerful and were nothing to be trifled with, and they were willing to teach me to be just like them.
Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I started to want that. I began to want to learn, to be more than a teacher. More than just the na?ve friend who had no clue about the giant spy network that her friends were part of.
More than just a simple magician who entertained with a dancing flame in her palm.
More than the girl who walked into that cave.
More than the woman who took the robes.
More.
Sona smiled at me. “I think she gets it.”
*
Strings and strands of magic hung from Carolee’s hand.
“Balance,” Mistress Ophelia said. “For every strong man, there must be a strong woman.”
It was fascinating to watch Mistress Carolee control her magic. She used it so differently from Master Dorian and completely different from every other male I’d seen so far.
There was subtlety in her weavings, a play with the strings that Vitus and Master Argo had never shown me. They were right about the blunt force.
“Men are straight lines.” Lunella drew a line on the ground. “They are linear. Not more than one string of magic, not more than one line of thought, not more than one goal at a time.”
Mistress Sona took the stick from Lunella and carved the line into five pieces. “Yes, it is true that men make plans. Complex ones that can see five, ten, twenty steps ahead. In no way are we saying that men are incapable of complex thought. But in the execution of the plan, they are linear.”
“Women,” Mistress Maurielle said, taking the stick, “think in clusters. Act in clusters.”
She drew bubbles in the dirt as she slowly turned in a circle. “We don’t just think ahead. We think to the side and to the past. We keep tabs on all of those things as well.”
“In most cases,” Mistress Sona took the stick again, “the way we think about things connects the thoughts too, and we are surrounded by our thoughts.”
There was a full cloud around Mistress Maurielle.
“That is where your strength comes from,” Lunella said. She traveled around, pointing at the cloud that surrounded her fellow temple masters. “This ability to surround yourself and think—and work—non-linearly.”
I stared, amazed, at the ground around Mistress Maurielle. There was a cloud drawn in the ground that went all the way around her. Hearing these other women talk about how I thought, how I always had more than just one idea in my mind was… comforting.
As I watched, Mistress Maurielle brought strings of magic around the edges of the cloud, outlining it. She brought more, and there were diaphanous clouds of power between the strings as they rose from the ground.
The magic spun and looped lazily around her, creating almost a fog of colors and powers.
It was entrancing.
And then she nailed me right in the chest with it.
My feet left the ground, and I sailed through the air, backward. The wall I was going to hit would hurt my back all over again.
Time seemed to stop mid-flight.
They had just shown me how they used the magic. They had shown me a cloud around them.
If I could do the same thing with the magic behind me, pillow it out, I wouldn’t hit the wall and might actually be able to stick my landing.
The magic was there on instinct, and I pulled two threads apart. The power floated between them and pushed on it.
It didn’t have time to pillow as much as I had wanted, but it was enough to keep me from slamming my entire spine against the brick.
I felt the bricks, but the hit was soft. I slipped down to gravel and managed to stand up and step away from the wall.
“Well.” Mistress Sona folded her arms, satisfied.
“Well done,” Mistress Ophelia said, not looking up.
Something about all this bothered me. “Are all women who have power taught in Triium?”
“If they are strong,” Lunella said.
“And if they are dedicated to the temple.” Mistress Sona added.
“I’m not strong, though.”
“You are a temple master now,” Mistress Carolee said. “You are also the Breaker of the Spine. You need to know.”
I walked over to a bench and sat down. “That doesn’t make sense.”
The five women in the garden exchanged looks.
“Think about it,” I offered. “I’m not strong, but I’ve been tutored by males and women who were trained by males. I never thought to approach magic differently.”