The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📕

his training. He was slow to warm to any human being, but this woman had been kind to him once, a long time ago, and he hadn’t forgotten. For a moment, he felt a pang of sorrow that Mistress Bemare might be subjected to the attentions of the official torturers.

He was beginning to wonder if the cardinal was becoming slightly unhinged. He repressed the thought at once; he knew that Lamir had an unsettling ability to read his mind.

“I’ll personally oversee the interrogation,” said the cardinal. He waved his hand. “And be wary. Very wary. They have wiles, these witches, that you cannot imagine.”

Ariosto bowed and left Lamir’s office to carry out his instructions. Cardinal Lamir watched him leave. He hadn’t missed the flicker of skepticism that had crossed Ariosto’s face. Like everything else in the past few days, it struck him as a bad sign.

When Sibelius had tracked down the Stone Heart at a dealer in rare items in a shabby suburb on the outskirts of Clarel, the cardinal had felt a glow of triumph. The Heart was the final key to his plans. But since then, things had been going wrong. Small things, to be sure, but it was on such details that empires foundered. He had been so certain that witches had been totally suppressed in Clarel: there had been no signs of real witchcraft for more than a century.

If anyone knew the signs, he did.

AMINA WAS WORRYING THAT SHE HAD FORGOTTEN to take the stew off the stove when the officials had come to arrest her. At the best, the fire would die down, and she would merely have a spoiled pot and a lot of smoke. At the worst, it would burn down the kitchen. Or even the Old Palace.

Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it would be a nuisance.

The two men who had arrested her were clearly assassins, though of a lowly rank, so she hadn’t been surprised to be taken to the offices in the cardinal’s palace. But now she sat in the dungeons of the Office for Witchcraft Extermination, her arms and legs clamped to an uncomfortable metal chair. That was a bit surprising. No witch had made it this far for almost a hundred years.

Her protests of bewilderment and outrage, reinforced by a strong persuasion charm, had at first seemed to be working well. But then Milan Ariosto had entered the room where she was being questioned and ordered that she be taken to the dungeons. She remembered him from a long time ago, from before he had been swept up and tipped into one of Cardinal Lamir’s orphanages. She had followed his career with sadness: Ariosto was one of her failures. He didn’t seem to remember her, although he was careful not to meet her eyes.

Once in the dungeons, she was handed over to an interrogator, a thin man with thin lips and even thinner hair. He had emotionlessly and painstakingly explained what the various torture devices did to various parts of the human body, then left her by herself to contemplate her immediate future. A tallow candle in a dish provided illumination. Amina wrinkled her nose. It stank.

She knew that leaving prisoners alone with the tools of torture was a standard process. Often prisoners confessed before the torturers got down to business, out of sheer terror — not that it necessarily prevented them from being tortured.

These tools had all been used on living, breathing people for the sole purpose of causing them pain. The king called it “justice.” This, thought Amina, is why witches don’t trust kings. Or cardinals. Or anyone at all whose idea of justice starts with the pain of another human being.

She was trying not to worry about Oni, because there was no point. Oni, like all the children of witches, knew where the safe houses were. Amina had to trust that Oni would remember what she had been taught and wouldn’t let her fear get the better of her. In normal circumstances that would be comfort enough, but now that the Heart had been released from its bonds, anything might happen.

The Heart had found Pip. She hoped that was a good thing, but she couldn’t be sure. It was bad magic, even if a witch had made it for the best of purposes. In any case, what happened to the Heart was, for now, out of Amina’s hands, and there was no point in worrying about it. She hoped that someone would remember about Georgette. It was crucial she was taken away from King Oswald.

Amina’s role now was to be the respectable royal housekeeper she had appeared to be for her whole life. Since before her great-grandmother’s time, the oldest Bemare daughter had been housekeeper of the Old Palace. That hadn’t changed even when the king of Clarel became a Specter. Once the royal housekeeper had been a position of high status, like the palace itself. Not anymore.

In any case, when the antennae of the state began to quiver with suspicion, innocence or guilt became irrelevant. As far as witchcraft was concerned, being arrested was in itself a proof of guilt. But witches had their own means of dealing with the law. Right now Amina wasn’t frightened for herself, but she was worried. If the torturer followed through on his threats, she would have to use magic.

So much of the teaching of magic was all about not doing it. The more powerful magic was, the less you should use it. Only in the last resort, her mother had told her. And maybe not even then.

She had no doubt that she was being observed from some unseen spyhole, and thought that for the moment she should play along. It was important that she acted as any normal nonwitch person would. She called for help and then, when there was no answer, began to sob noisily. Then she started praying out loud. Then she whimpered for a long time.

After an hour