Voice of Command (The Spoken Mage Book 2) Read online

  Was it possible Jasper had found some unexpectedly lucrative job for the summer? It would have to be unimaginably lucrative for him to have hired these healers to come all the way out here for Clemmy.

  “Did Jasper hire you?” I asked, and both my parents brightened at the suggestion.

  “Lady Beatrice is one of the most senior mages in the healing discipline,” said Reese, with a sour look at me. “Her services are hardly available for hire.”

  “Really, Reese.” Beatrice shook her head at him before turning back to us. “Suffice it to say that it seems your family has some powerful friends.” Her eyes crinkled with amusement. “And that there are some within my discipline who thought a quiet, relaxing trip like this was just the sort of thing I needed to keep me from over-extending myself elsewhere. Be at peace that I have not come with any request for coin.”

  My father frowned first at her, then at me, but her words had sparked a sudden realization in me, and it must have been visible on my face. He bowed and murmured his thanks and appreciation, accepting her presence without further argument.

  Her use of the word friends had been the clue. While I was hardly the most popular person at the Academy—or at the University or at the palace, or anywhere else I had been for that matter—I had managed to make a small handful of friends.

  And one of them was Finnian. Son of Duke Dashiell of Callinos who just happened to be the Head of the Healers. Finnian must have somehow convinced his father to send Beatrice to heal Clemmy.

  Part of me wanted to reject the offer as being far too generous, but the rest of me tamped down on that instinct. After everything I had endured—and all through no fault of my own—was it really too much to expect something back from the mages who had held all the power and wealth in Ardann for as long as anyone could remember?

  Not that I wasn’t grateful to Finnian. I would thank him profusely as soon as I saw him again. But in the meantime, I would let Beatrice heal Clemmy.

  But even as my parents joyously closed up the store, ready to take Beatrice and Reese back to our home, a niggling doubt in the back of my mind made me shift uncomfortably. If there was one lesson I had learned in my year at the Academy, it was that I had far too little understanding of the subtle dynamics of power between the upper levels of mages. The royals and the four great mage families—Callinos, Devoras, Stantorn, and Ellington—created the laws, and the rest of us merely danced to their tune.

  Even the minor mage families had little say by comparison. Not when only members of one of the great families ever possessed the necessary strength and skill to win a position as head of a discipline. And such positions came with more than just a lifetime rank of duke or duchess—or general in the case of the Armed Forces and Royal Guard. The ten heads made up the Mage Council, the body of powerful mages who assisted the king in governing Ardann.

  I trusted Finnian—at least I thought I did—but did I really understand him? What price might be expected from me later if I accepted this unearned favor now?

  But I thrust the thought aside. If there was a price, I would have to find a way to pay it. My sister was more than worth it. And every year longer that she had to wait for a healing might be her last. All it would take was one particularly bad illness to sweep through Kingslee.

  I would choose life for Clemmy now and let the future look after itself.

  Chapter 2

  When we stepped out of the store, the crowd had dwindled, although several interested onlookers still lingered. The mages ignored them, moving toward their carriage, but a young woman pushed forward to accost them, her face frantic.

  She held something bundled in her arms, and when she reached them, she thrust it out, revealing a tiny baby. I frowned. I recognized her and knew she had given birth only days ago. She should be home resting.

  “Please!” she cried, tears in her eyes. “You are healers, yes? Please help me!”

  Beatrice faltered, her eyes going from the woman to the baby and back. “Is there a prob—”

  Reese cut her off, stepping between them. “If you wish to see a healer, the healing clinics in the capital are open to all. We are here on important business and cannot be disturbed.”

  I stepped forward to join them, speaking before I had thought it through, as always.

  “Can’t you see how young this baby is? Much too young for the trek into the capital, especially if she’s ill. And no one in Kingslee has enough spare coin for the healing clinics anyway.” I turned to the woman. “What’s wrong with her, Sara?”

  Sara turned to me, pulling her baby back to cradle her against her chest. “She’s burning up, and we can’t get her temperature down. She’s almost stopped feeding completely, and I’m so worried…” A sob slipped out. “She was born such a tiny thing to begin with.”

  Sara turned to look at Beatrice, still shielded behind Reese. “She’s my first, and I don’t know what to do. Please help her!”

  Reese gave a long-suffering sigh. “Try seeping a tea from basil and ginger.”

  I put my hands on my hips and glared at him. “She’s a newborn. How is she supposed to drink tea?”

  He glared straight back at me. “She can suck it off someone’s finger.”

  Beatrice shook her head and spoke softly. “You know that will not be enough, Reese. Not for such a small baby.” She stepped around the young man. “Here, let me see her.” She held out her arms for the baby.

  Reese grabbed at her, trying to pull her back, and spoke quickly in a low undertone. “Beatrice, no. You can’t help everybody—you know that.” He gave her a significant look. “Or you should by now. That’s why they sent you back from the front lines. Plus we don’t know how complicated the healing with this sister is going to be. You’ll exhaust yourself.”

  Beatrice shook off his restraining hand. “I will hardly need to write a new composition for a fever. I do have some stores, you know. So it won’t exhaust me in the least.”

  Reese gave her a dark look. “Not now, perhaps. But later, when you have to replenish it…”

  But she wasn’t listening and had already received the baby into her arms. He turned to glare at me, instead, but I turned my back on him, giving my attention to Beatrice.

  She sighed and clucked to herself, carefully examining the newborn with confident hands.

  “A simple fever,” she announced after a few moments. “The signs are clear. I don’t even need to use a diagnosis composition to confirm.” She looked at Reese, as if expecting him to be pleased with this news, but his sour expression didn’t change.

  “Great,” he said. “Then there’s no need for you to involve yourself in a simple case of fever.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped, sounding out of temper for the first time since her arrival. “The case may be simple, but in a child this young, it will still be deadly.”

  Sara gasped and reached out trembling hands to scoop up her baby, as if responding to some irrepressible motherly instinct. But Beatrice held firm to the child, refusing to relinquish her back to the villager.

  “Elena, if you wouldn’t mind?” she asked, calm returned to her voice.

  I stepped forward, eager to help.

  “In the carriage you’ll find a small leather case. Inside you’ll find a number of colored pouches. Please open the red pouch and retrieve a composition for the treatment of fever.” She paused. “You can read, can you not?”

  I nodded, and several of the interested villagers drew back, muttering to themselves. They knew my status had changed, but old habits still gripped them, and the thought of a Kingslee resident able to read violated all our most important laws.

  The crowd had grown somewhat, word no doubt spreading that a healing might be about to occur. But for all their curiosity, fear also lingered in the air, and none of them had pressed too close.

  Reese stepped forward, his face flushed. “I’ll fetch it, Beatrice. We don’t even know her.”

  “Will you, Reese?” Beatrice regarded h
im coolly. “Very well. But not because I don’t trust her.”

  She turned to me. “He knows something of my system and will be able to put his hand on the right one faster.”

  I nodded, trying not to let my disappointment show. I would have liked the chance to get a look at her healing case. As Reese disappeared into the carriage, I regarded Beatrice with curiosity.

  “You’re clearly a senior healer,” I said. “What family are you from?” It had to be one of the four great families.

  She smiled at me. “I’m a Stantorn.”

  My eyes widened in surprise before I could force my face into a neutral expression. The Stantorns had set themselves against me from the beginning, and I had never seen one show compassion or care—particularly for someone commonborn.

  Her smile didn’t fade at my reaction. “I am something of a black sheep in my family, I’m afraid. Thus why they feel the need to hem me around with minders, such as my young cousin.”

  Now Reese being a Stantorn I could well believe.

  The young healer reappeared, a curl of parchment held lightly between his fingers, reluctance in every line of his body.

  “I’ve never seen it looking so empty,” he said, his focus on Beatrice.

  She merely shrugged, but I saw something almost like discomfort flit across her face.

  Without stopping to think through the wisdom of it, I snatched the parchment from Reese, unfurling it and quickly reading the words. I recognized it. It wasn’t a composition I had memorized, but I had read it before in my beginner level healing studies.

  I looked up at Beatrice as Reese pulled it back from me with an outraged cry, launching into an angry speech that I ignored.

  “I could do it. Under your supervision.”

  “What?” Reese stared at me, his speech bitten off mid-word.

  A spark of interest lit in Beatrice’s eyes. “I heard you’ve showed some interest in our discipline.”

  I nodded. “I studied it last year.”

  “But you were only a first year.” Reese regarded me with narrowed eyes. “Discipline studies don’t start until second year.”

  I just shrugged. I didn’t feel the need to explain my reasoning to him. In fact, I had never explained it to anyone. But I would turn eighteen in the spring. And once I turned eighteen, I would be forced to leave the Academy.

  One in our family must enlist with the Armed Forces between their eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays, and my brother had already turned twenty. My family rarely talked of it, but we’d always known that between my brilliant brother, my weak younger sister, and me, there was only one candidate to fulfill our family’s conscription requirement. And my position at the Academy was precarious. All last year there had been those—particularly Stantorns—who had advocated I was too dangerous to be allowed to live. So as soon as I turned eighteen, I was enlisting. Once it was done, Clemmy was free. Even if I ended up executed.

  If I had been the youngest, I would have taken my chances. I could only imagine Lorcan would put up a fight if the Reds came to drag one of his trainees away to be conscripted into the Armed Forces. But the Reds only came to drag away the youngest child. The older ones were under no obligation to enlist, unless they chose to take on that burden for their family. Which meant no one would come to drag me away.

  My eighteenth year would pass, I would turn nineteen, and any future enlistment of mine would be considered separate from my family’s responsibilities. By the time I made it to the front lines as an Academy graduate, it would be too late for my service to help my family. And then, on Clemmy’s eighteenth birthday, as the youngest in the family, the Reds would turn up for her.

  No, it wasn’t even worth considering.

  So, with all that in mind, studying healing as soon as possible had seemed like an excellent idea. I couldn’t imagine a more helpful discipline if I ended up serving a three-year term on the front lines.

  “I could heal the baby, and then you wouldn’t need to use up your composition,” I said to Beatrice. Sara’s child might not be Clemmy, but I itched to use my dormant power to help someone.

  And just the idea of composing again sent excitement coursing through me. I hadn’t realized just how much I missed feeling the rush of controlled power, of speaking and feeling my words bend reality to my will.

  It was a risk, of course, composing outside the Academy and in front of two Stantorns. But if I did it with Beatrice’s permission, and under her supervision, how could her family turn around and complain?

  “I would love to see a verbal composition,” she said softly, her focus now wholly on me. “It seems like a fairy story, but I am assured the rumors are true.”

  She didn’t pose it as a question, but I could hear the query all the same. I was used to this reaction. I was the first Spoken Mage in history—at least as far as anyone knew. Power could not be accessed by spoken words, let alone shaped and controlled. Only written words unleashed power. And only those born to mage families had the inherited ability to control that flow. Anyone else who tried unleashed an explosion of uncontrolled power that had been known to level entire villages. There was a reason none of the common folk were allowed to read or write. Writing was unimaginably dangerous, and everyone knew that reading led to writing.

  On top of this, only the strongest and most skilled of mages—always from one of the great families—had the ability to compose a controlled working with a single phrase. Compositions of a single word were the stuff of legends. Everyone else had to use binding words to hold and contain the power until they had composed all the necessary parameters.

  So when I—a commonborn girl with no known mage ancestry, unable to read or write—had composed a working with a single spoken word, I had turned the mage world upside down. And that world, in turn, had upended my life.

  Necessity had forced the verbal composition out of me, and it had taken me many long months of training—and a second near disaster—for me to even unlock how I had achieved it.

  The mages had taught me to read in that time, but I was still forbidden from writing. At least after my single attempt had exploded a chunk of the Academy. In some ways I was still very much a commonborn—writing remained out of my reach, too dangerous for me to attempt again.

  So no matter how trustworthy the sources, every new mage I encountered seemed to harbor a seed of doubt. As if only the evidence of their own eyes could truly convince them.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Reese muttered, as if to confirm my thoughts.

  “Well, how fortunate that here is your opportunity,” said Beatrice. “If you’re sure you can manage it, Elena.” She looked down at the baby in her arms with her first hint of doubt.

  I swallowed. Did I really want to experiment on a fragile newborn? But I recognized the composition, and it really was a simple one, well within my capabilities. I had worked more complicated healings before.

  I nodded. “I can do it. But I’ll need your composition. Just to refresh my memory of the words. You can have it back afterward.” Until someone tore the parchment, her composition would remain intact. And if she was as skilled as I suspected, she may well have included a binding in her composition that allowed it to be accessed only by her. I would have to watch for any wording I didn’t recognize and be sure to leave it out of my own working.

  Beatrice nodded, and Reese handed over the scrap with exaggerated reluctance.

  I took several moments to read it through, not wanting to risk getting anything wrong. But I couldn’t see anything outside of the standard composition for the reduction of fever.

  I took a deep breath and spoke the words slowly and clearly. It didn’t work unless I first called up a mental image of the written words—the reason my ability had remained hidden, even from me, for so long. But it was easy to do with the parchment before me. Usually I tried to practice without a written prompt, since I couldn’t rely on always having one to hand and couldn’t produce them for myself. It made this working ev
en more simple than I had expected.

  “End binding,” I said, reaching the final words. I flicked my fingers toward the baby in Beatrice’s arms as I had seen healers do before when directing their healings. Power expanded out from my fingers, flowing in the direction I pointed. Normally I would have included more specific instructions as to the subject, but I hadn’t wanted to risk changing Beatrice’s words, and she had crafted the composition to work on any subject.

  The power settled over the baby like a mist, recognizing her raised temperature and instantly working to lower it. The tiny girl stirred, opened her eyes, and then began to scream.

  I stepped back in alarm. What had I done?

  “Excellent! Well done, Elena!” Beatrice examined the baby again before passing her back to the anxiously waiting Sara. “Her fever is gone.”

  She quietly explained to the young mother what steps she should take to rehydrate and recuperate the baby while I sucked in several deep breaths of relief. The baby continued to cry, her tiny mouth searching blindly for her mother’s chest.

  Sara thanked Beatrice and me with wide eyes before hurrying away toward her home. As the crowd parted before her, I noticed how many uneasy looks were being directed at me. I bit my lip. I should have suggested we move back inside before I attempted the healing. All the work I had done in the last weeks to appear normal and non-threatening had clearly just been undone.

  The villagers—my old neighbors—viewed me as a threatening curiosity. Although I should be used to it by now since many of the mages who I lived and studied the rest of the year with felt much the same way. I was an oddity who belonged neither with mages nor with common folk. And the more time I spent back in Kingslee, the more I realized that any hope of fitting in among the commonborn had passed. If I wanted to find a place for myself, it would have to be among the mages.