An Unkindness of Magicians
Kat Howard
For my parents, who helped me keep body and soul together while writing this book.
But this rough magic I here abjure . . .
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest
CHAPTER ONE
The young woman cut through the crowded New York sidewalk like a knife. Tall in her red-soled stilettos, black clothing that clung to her like smoke, red-tipped black hair sharp and angular around her face. She looked like the kind of woman people would stop for, stare at, notice.
None of them did.
Stalking down Wall Street, the spire of Trinity Church rising before her, she slid among the suits and tourists like a secret, drawing no eyes, no shouted “hey, babys,” not even the casual jar of a shoulder bumped in a crowd. She could have been a ghost. A shadow.
The sun stark, the sky a harsh blue, cloudless and broken only by the glare of reflections. Late-summer heat stewed salt-sweat and heavy cologne together, mingling them with the sizzle rising from sidewalk food carts. The day bright, almost ordinary.
The woman paused at a corner. Her slate-grey eyes flicked up toward some unmarked window in one of the buildings scraping the sky, as if to be sure someone was watching. Her lips, red as blood, quirked up at the corners, and Sydney stepped off the curb and into traffic.
Neither the cars nor their drivers seemed aware of her presence.
Sydney walked to the center of the intersection and raised her arms like a conductor about to begin a symphony. She stood, unmoving, for one breath. Two. Three. If there had been eyes somewhere above that rushing city that were able to watch, they would have seen her lips moving.
And then.
The cars around her, as one, lifted gracefully into the air.
Sydney held them there, rust-stained taxis and sleek black sedans with tinted windows, courier vans and a tour bus blaring the opening number of the latest Broadway hit. Ten feet above the ground, floating through the intersection like some bizarre migration of birds. A smile stretched, bright and wild, across her face. If the people in the cars could have seen it, they might have called it exhilaration. They might have called it joy.
The people in the cars didn’t see her. No blaring horns, no cursing drivers. No awe—no reaction—from either the people in the now-flying vehicles, or from any of the passersby. Simply flight, where that shouldn’t have been an option.
Sydney directed the cars through the intersection—through the air—with words, with small precise gestures that bent her fingers and hands into severe origami, with no obvious effort.
And then.
Her hands paused. Held like a breath. Two. Three. She lowered her arms to her sides, and as she did, the cars returned to the street as gracefully as they had left it, the flow of traffic uninterrupted. Sydney walked out of the intersection and cut back into the crowd. No heads turned. No one gave her any notice.
She had gone less than half a block when the text alert vibrated through her phone. The job is yours.
? ? ?
The message that began everything arrived in a variety of ways. Email. Text. Type-written formalities on plain, business-weight white. Handwritten letters in bordeaux ink, sealed with wax. Though no matter which medium carried it, in each instance, the words were the same:
Fortune’s Wheel has begun its Turning. When it ceases rotation, all will be made new.
If somehow you were not a magician, not a member of the Unseen World, and you managed to acquire one of these messages, it would look like nothing. A fortune cookie’s paper, a glitch in your email program. Uninteresting and easily discarded.
Miranda Prospero was a magician, and she knew precisely what had just landed on her desk. A surprise, and not a good one.
A precise and elegant woman in her late fifties, Miranda had the sort of face that had been too strong-featured for beauty until she had aged into it. Now, she wore her clothing and makeup like armor, as much of a shield and mask as anything she could have conjured. There to project an image, carefully chosen.
The cool morning light washed over her office where she sat behind an elegantly curved antique rosewood desk. She touched her fingertips to the edge of the paper. She quartered the air above it with her hands, spoke words that smelled harsh and bitter in their echoes. The message looked authentic, and there was magic in place—magic that should be inviolate, locked carefully away from influence—that would prevent such a message from being sent in error. But it was early, very early, for a Turning to be happening again. Normally, there would be at least twenty years between one and the next. Only thirteen years this time, barely more than half a generation.
Well. Thirteen years, five months, one week, and four days. Miranda knew the circumstances of the previous Turning well. They had, in many ways, made her.
A flash of light, and a sigil floated in the air above the paper: the Rota Fortunae. Blindfolded Fortune, turning a wheel.
What was written, then, was true.
The beginning of fear, its tiny barbed threads, lodged themselves in her heart. There were reasons why a Turning might come again so soon. None of them were comfortable.
She was prepared. She had been preparing for every day of those last slightly more than thirteen years. But she had hoped for more time in between. She had done everything she could to make sure that Prospero was a strong House. Well placed. Established and powerful enough that she would have no difficulty finding someone willing to represent it.
She pressed her fingertips to her temples, then rested them on her desk. She knew by now what a Turning involved, the rules and the stakes—she had been through them before—but details were homes for devils, and no more so than here. And so she read:
Any House may contract out their participation. Any such contracted champions will be deemed members of Houses with all attendant rights and responsibilities for the duration of their contract. Once contracted, a champion cannot be substituted. Any House that does not contract out its involvement accepts full consequences to its members, including death and disappearance, and forswears vengeance outside of the sanctioned challenges. The actions of a champion, contracted or otherwise, during the course of a duel are final.