I glared at my interrogator, giving up on subtlety. “This,” I said, “is a deeply personal line of enquiry, Miss Banks. May I ask why you feel so free to pursue it with a stranger?”
Her fair skin flushed in a wave of red that swept up from her neck to cover her cheeks. Still, she stood her ground and held my gaze. “I have to,” she said quietly. “I have no choice, you see. If I can’t prove that what happened to you won’t happen to me, I’ll never be allowed into the Great Library myself.”
My eyes widened. We stared at each other for a moment in silence, as my heartbeat suddenly thrummed through my skin and her words echoed through my head.
“I’ll never be allowed into the Great Library...”
“You...want to study magic?” My voice sounded strangely distant in my ears.
She nodded, her thin face pinched with tension. “I must,” she said. “I’ve always yearned to. And now—now, it’s the only way. For me and for Miss Fennell, both.”
What? I shook my head, remembering that jolly, striding creature I’d met earlier. “Miss Fennell wants to study magic, too? I thought she was famously politically minded.” She’d certainly seemed like a young woman destined to run the nation one day, whether the nation happened to care for the experience or not.
“She is,” said Miss Banks. “And she’ll enter the Boudiccate within the next ten years, I’m certain of it. It’s what she’s always dreamed of, just as I’ve always dreamed of magic. But...” She stopped, and drew a breath. “If she wants to be accepted as a member, she has to marry a magician. Lady Cosgrave told her so. Otherwise, she’ll be like your sister-in-law—never quite accepted into the inner circle.”
“What?” I demanded. The sudden influx of information in that brave, wavering voice was overwhelming. “What does Amy have to do with all of this?”
Miss Banks shrugged unhappily. “We’ve all heard the story. It was Boudicca’s second, magician-husband who stood by her side when she led her great rebellion, and helped her expel Rome from our shores forever. Now, each member of the Boudiccate is expected to form that partnership in her own turn.”
Whereas Amy...Amy was already married to Jonathan, my history-loving brother, who had fought just as hard to escape his magical heritage as I had fought to claim it.
How had I never made that connection before?
Of course my mother had never felt required to warn me of that rule. She would have simply assumed that I would marry a magician, as every other woman in our family had for generations. Knowing my own rebellious pull toward magic, she would have considered it a foregone conclusion.
Still, Amy must have known the rule, too—even discussed it with Lady Cosgrave when she was so pointedly passed over for my mother’s seat on the Boudiccate. I’d never understood why that snub had occurred...but then, she would never have told me or Jonathan that truth, would she? She would have been far too concerned with saving our feelings even as her own were trampled.
My jaw clenched as fury built inside me. “What utter idiocy,” I snarled. “As if there weren’t plenty of magicians ready to defend the Boudiccate, without any marriages being involved in the matter.”
“Nevertheless, it’s still the rule,” said Miss Banks quietly. “And that’s why I have to study magic, you see. It’s the only way that Miss Fennell and I can wed.”
Her words lingered for a moment in the nearly-empty hallway before I made any sense of them. Then my eyebrows rose. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
Well, that wasn’t unheard of either...at least not in ordinary society. It was a truth universally acknowledged that women were the more pragmatic sex; that was why we were expected to run the government, while men attended to the more mystical and imaginative realm of magic. So it was commonly accepted that every once in a while, two ladies with no interest in bearing children might well find a more sensible match in each other than in a gentleman.
And yet...
“Would they allow it?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of a Boudiccate member without a husband.” I’d accepted that all my life as mere hidebound tradition, without ever thinking the matter through—but of course, now that Miss Banks had pointed it out, their mimicry of the great Boudicca’s own pairing was obvious. How had I not solved that mystery myself long ago, to finally understand the reasons behind Amy’s snub?
The answer was damnably simple: Because I wasn’t paying enough attention.
That decision had been made just after my mother’s death, when I’d been beset by grief for her loss and for all those bitter battles that we would never have a chance, anymore, to forgive...but even as I’d wept and raged every night for her cut-short life, I’d spent my days at the Library in a grim blur of unbroken focus, throwing myself into my studies harder than ever before.
Oh, I’d still been outraged for Amy’s sake when I’d heard the news, for all that she’d made light of her disappointment in her letters to me...
But when it really came down to it, one truth had dominated: It wasn’t magic, so I hadn’t been interested enough to pursue the matter any further.
It was an uncomfortable realization to make about myself. More uncomfortable yet was Miss Banks’s steady, expectant stare as it rested on my face. “There never was a lady who cast magic, either,” she said, “until you.”
“Quite.” I swallowed hard.
What had I told myself, only minutes earlier? Time to stop hiding, indeed.
I’d retreated to the safety of my old bedroom in my family house and locked out every visitor so that I would never have to hear what the world might say of my notorious fall.
But clearly, there were other women who had been listening while I’d stayed sheltered with my fingers in my ears.
None of them deserved to be denied their own future for my failures.
A door opened in the corridor behind us. The sound of a tuneless whistle emerged.
I took a deep breath. “I will tell you everything,” I promised Miss Banks in a whispered rush. “And I’ll do it within a se’ennight.” I could put it off no longer. “Will you walk with me in Lord Cosgrave’s knot garden one morning after breakfast? We can talk privately then.”
“Of course.” Her face blazed with such hope, it was painful to look upon.
Had I looked that way, too, when I’d first sensed the doors of the Great Library opening to me?
The whistling behind us broke off. “I say!”
It was my older brother’s voice; I turned to find Jonathan smiling affably, his thick brown hair rumpled as if he’d been pulling at it with his fingers and a dab of dark blue ink smeared against his jaw. “I thought I’d be the last one to supper,” he said. “I’m glad to find you two still here. I had to finish up a rather urgent note I was writing—a bit of an addendum to that article of mine for the Journal of Deniscan Studies. I’ve been reading the proof copies, you see, and they’ve got the footnotes all wrong!”