Ten Apprentices Read online

  “There’s magic in it,” she said. “But—”

  “Even your father could do better?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you?” I asked. “Could you do better?”

  “Yes!” she said, holding herself a little taller. Not that it made much difference.

  “Show me,” I demanded.

  She stared around the street. There were broken cobblestones aplenty, but any one of them could ruin a circle if it wasn’t quite the right shape. She was right to look to something else.

  She finally picked up a tiny thorn that I had not seen. Using its sharp edge, she cut a circle onto her hand.

  A perfect circle.

  I marveled at it.

  Not that it was better than the circles I could make myself. But at her age—I could not have done it. A part of me was jealous of her gift. Another part of me was purely caught by the beauty of what she had done. Once you have begun with magic, there are times when you are not yourself anymore, times when the magic becomes you. This was one of those times.

  Her hand was dripping blood, which only added to the beauty, somehow. She did not seem to be in pain at all. But she was not using the magic to heal herself. She was holding it in.

  I admired that in her, as well.

  I knew how important control was to the magic. Her father, for example, did not have it. He could not save up magic anymore than he could save up his coin, or his—well, his other powers.

  “Are you sure he is your father?” I asked her suddenly.

  She laughed, once. Then sobered. “Yes,” she said.

  She pointed to her eyes, the same color and shape of his. I had never stared long at his, never bothered with them, but now that she pointed them, I could see them clearly in my mind. They were the same color blue, but in her face they were deep and endless, like a pool that has no bottom.

  I nodded at last.

  “You’ll teach me, then, Maestro Bello?” she said. She danced on her tiptoes. She had no coordination. That was also sadly like her father, who was a man who could step on a woman’s feet three times in two steps, and often did.

  She fell over.

  I reached down and gave her a hand to help her to her feet.

  She seemed surprised by the gesture. I was no less.

  “I will consider it,” I said, though I knew I was taking back my earlier agreement. It was caprice, but she might as well get used to how I truly was now.

  “I will come back, then,” she said.

  I was surprised she didn’t press me.

  “Tomorrow?” she asked.

  It had been what I was thinking, so I had to change it. “In one week,” I said. “And I have given no promise that I will teach you magic. Only that you may work in my house, at whatever tasks I set you.”

  “I will come,” she said.

  “In the afternoon,” I added. “I sleep late.”

  She nodded.

  I walked away from her. When I got to the door, I looked at the circle again. And was surprised that she had been so disappointed in it. It would not be obviously wrong to many.

  She was still waiting in the street, watching me, when I went back inside.

  I earned a thousand gold coins for easing an aging, wealthy uncle out of this world and into the next, and another thousand for making a girl look old enough and beautiful enough for marriage.

  But I thought only of Liliana.

  I was irritated that I had told her to come in a week. I could have said a day and saved myself much torture. But it was her fault, of course. Hers and her father’s.

  The day came at last, and I woke early. Which was guaranteed to make me testier than usual. And then I found myself saving my magic and drinking my tea cool instead of piping hot, because I wanted to show off for her when she arrived. As if a girl her age could compete with a man thirty years her senior, even if she was a prodigy.

  There was a knock at the door.

  I did not go to answer it.

  I waited until it came again.

  When I opened the door, I was looking at the knees of a man dressed in livery. Horrible colors, if you must know. Green and blue should never be put together like that. Not dark blue and that particular shade of peacock green.

  “What?” I said.

  He handed a note to me.

  I opened it, expecting to find a request for me to provide magic at some ridiculous ball for the nobility. I could vent myself on the messenger, then. That would distract me for a few moments until she came.

  But the note was from Liliana. It said, simply:

  I am sorry I cannot come.

  Sincerely,

  Liliana.

  She wrote a note like this to me? When it was she who came to me to beg me to teach her? How dared she!

  I would punish her. I busied myself thinking of ways to hurt her. Her hair, for example. If it was pulled out strand by strand, with no respite. That might be good enough. Or if she were to have boils on her fingers and on the inside of her nose. I had a boil on the inside of my nose once, as a child. Terrible thing. My father had not bothered to use his magic to cure it. He had left me to suffer.

  “She is very ill, sir,” said the messenger, calling me back to myself.

  “She has a disease?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” said the messenger.

  “What, then?”

  “Ill, sir,” was all he would say.

  Finally, I realized he meant it was her father. He could not say such a thing aloud, for it was her father’s livery he wore. It took some courage for him even to hint at it. He had never met me, and must know that I had an uncertain temper. What if I reported him to his master?

  “Thank you,” I said. “You may go.”

  My anger dissipated as I considered the thought that she was nothing to her father. A girl with little beauty and less in the way of wiles. What was ahead of her in life? She had her magic. That was all. And her father did not seem to see even that.

  But what could I do for her?

  I earned more money.

  Stirred up a civil war.

  Caused a woman to miscarry her firstborn son.

  Ate far too many fried mushrooms.

  Made a man go mad.

  Three days later, she came again.

  She looked pale, and she wore the same not-quite pauper clothes, to disguise herself. Every place I could see her skin, it was bruised.

  “How old are you?” I asked her brusquely.

  “Does it matter to the magic?” she asked.

  It didn’t. “Don’t speak back to me. If I ask a question, you answer it. If I tell you to do something, you do it. You asked me to teach you, did you not? And now you will tell me what is or is not important for me to know?”

  One shoulder shrugged, and there was a small gasp of pain. She held herself very still, and slowly relaxed. “I am thirteen,” she said.

  And I had thought her seven. It said how much I knew about children, did it not?

  Well, thirteen. Old enough for her father to think of marrying her off, certainly. With a little money to sweeten the arrangement with a wealthy lecher.

  She had come to me as an escape.

  I found I could not turn her away.

  “Come in,” I said.

  She went past the imperfect circle and saw the one around my chair. She could not help herself. She walked around it, then put out a hand to touch it—I thought to draw from it.

  I used the magic to push her back roughly.

  She sprawled on my floor, staring up at me in bewilderment. “I wouldn’t take it,” she said. As if she was above such a thing.

  A starving man may think he is above stealing bread, but if so, he is simply not starving enough yet. In my experience.

  She stepped away from the circle.

  I stepped into it.

  Ah, that felt better.

  “So, tell me what you wish to know about magic,” I said when I looked up again. “Since that
is what you’ve come for.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to tell me?” she asked. “If you are the teacher?”

  I shook my head. “That would be work for me. This way, it’s work for you.”

  She thought for a moment. “Are there limits to what magic can do?” She held herself stiffly, but stared down at the edge of a bruise peeking out of her shirt. There was anger on her face, and hurt.

  “Are you asking if you can kill your father with magic?” I said bluntly. “Because it’s going to be tiresome if you don’t come out and ask directly.”

  She glanced up at me, startled. “I don’t want to kill him,” she said.

  I was sure it was a lie until I looked into her softening, dark eyes. “You love him,” I said. I couldn’t believe it.

  I had seen the same expression in my wife’s face, for the first few years, before it died. It had frightened me, because of the burden it placed on me.

  I wondered if Liliana’s father had ever even noticed that look in her eyes.

  “He is my father,” she said.

  “He is petty and cruel and he treats you like an old boot.” Not so different from the way my father treated me, actually. And I never felt any loyalty. Why should she?

  “He is my father,” she insisted.

  “And so you think it is virtuous for you to continue to love him, no matter what?” I said. I had no interest in people who thought that life was a game for the kindest. That was what they taught under the dome, for those who must be taught never to think of magic of their own.

  “It is not a matter of choice,” she said crisply. “I love him, even if I do not want to.”

  “You love the idea of a father, then,” I said. “The idea of a man who will protect you and care for you and do what is best for you, regardless of his own needs.”

  “I love that,” she said. “But I love him, too.”

  “He has good qualities, then?”

  “Some,” she said.

  “Such as?”

  “He laughs at my jokes,” she said. There was a pause as she tried to think of another. She couldn’t.

  “Your jokes must be bad,” I said, remembering his sour personality.

  “Terrible.”

  I had to work not to laugh at her, and hated that her father and I might share even that one thing.

  “Let us go back to magic,” I said.

  “Limitations,” she reminded me.

  “Ah yes. Magic cannot be used for happiness. Not for your own or anyone else. If you try to use magic for that, it simply slips away, as if it had never been born in a circle in this world.” I had learned that even before I left my father.

  She looked as devastated as I had been then.

  “Go on. Ask more,” I said, not wanting to feel with her.

  She asked, lackluster, if a pentagon had any power. I told her that was for another teacher, not for me. I had the magic of pi, not phi.

  She asked where magic came from.

  I told her it came from the sun.

  “Do you really know that?”

  “The sun is a circle,” I said easily. I would not admit to ignorance on the point. Not to her. Not yet.

  She asked how much I charged for magic. If it ever pained me. If I could ever retire and use magic no more. When the magic would end. If females had less magic than males. How a battle between magic worked. If I had ever taught anyone before. If I loved my father.

  “No,” I said proudly. “Never.”

  She went away then, said it was nearly dusk and her father would be expecting her.

  When she was gone, I was glad of my quiet again. I had never enjoyed resting so much. Yet I dreamed of her.

  She came again the next day, though we had not talked of how often her lessons would be.

  I told her to wait another week.

  Liliana came back exactly seven days later. This time she asked me to show her my workroom. “I want to see how you make new circles.”

  I showed her five in a row.

  Then I told her it was her turn to make one.

  Hers was even stronger than the first she had done on her arm. It was nearly as strong as any of mine. But rather than offering praise, I pointed out what she should have done better. Making the circle out of the material she wanted to use the magic on, if she could. Making the circle large enough for her to fit inside it, so that she could control the magic better.

  “Next week again?” she asked, when we were finished. She was dripping sweat by then, and I wiped at her face with a cloth I kept for myself.

  I did not want her sweat all over my floor. There was nothing else to it than that. I did not like to make more work for myself, and I had little time to spare at the moment. Or energy, for that matter.

  There were rumors that there were plots against the prince. I had no love for the prince myself, but I was being paid to find out who was behind them, because he had plots of his own.

  “I told you I would work for you,” said Liliana. “I can scrub your floors. I can cook food for you. I will be a messenger for you, if you wish it.”

  “Next week,” I said firmly.

  It was another month before I allowed her to come more than once a week. And suddenly, it seemed she was coming every day. She became invaluable to me before I knew it. I did not have her work my magic directly. Not often, anyway. But it helped to have someone who could set things up for me, who was better socially with others. I did not have to steel myself to keep my tongue in my mouth. Despite her first day of honesty with me, she could bat her eyes and tell a pretty lie as well as any other noble.

  And she came back to me and told me stories that made me laugh with their darkness.

  “My father laughs, but not as loud and generously as you,” she told me one day. She looked surprised. “You give out bits of magic when you laugh.”

  “I am nothing like your father,” I said, all humor gone.

  She left soon afterwards, but came back the next day.

  I do not know when she stole my father’s precious circle, precisely. I noticed something was wrong the day she did not come back. The messenger came to tell me that she was “ill” again, and I thought at first that the feeling of emptiness inside me came from missing her presence. I chided myself that I had become so used to her in so short a time. I told myself that I should keep her from coming so often, so that I could stand on my own again. I did not want to become dependent on her magic—or on anything else.

  But as the day went on, I felt cold. Despite the fact that it was summer, and the most beautiful I had seen in many years. From my doorway, I could see the fields in the distant, green and beautiful, their own kind of magic, even if there was no mathematical perfection in them.

  I ate dinner that night, and it felt sour in my stomach.

  Then I began to search the house.

  It was not until I had looked all through the front room that I realized what I was doing.

  Then I went straight to the workroom. She had been spending more time there than anywhere else. Despite her offers to be my slave, to do all my menial tasks for me, she had done very little of any work but magical.

  I opened the chest, rummaged through it, and found the evidence of the theft. But by then, I could feel that it was gone.

  It was strange.

  I was angry with her, but I did not quite believe it.

  It made no sense to me.

  My father’s circle had magic, to be sure. But she had more magic of her own than was in the circle. Had she done it purely to anger me? To demonstrate to me that she had passed me in her knowledge of mathematics? Or was there some revenge in it?

  I could not think what I had done to hurt her. I had been sharp with her at times, I knew, but her father could be no better with her and she loved him still—

  Her father, who was hungry for magic, and other power.

  Her father, who flattered the prince to his face and worked manipulations behind his back.

  Her fath
er who would see the beauty of such a circle, and never notice the weaknesses.

  She had taken the circle for him.

  He was the one behind the schemes to depose the prince.

  From the beginning, she had come to help him.

  She had warned me. She told me she loved her father, despite all. She had been honest with me from the first. I had not listened.

  I could kill him.

  I could kill her.

  But I thought of the messenger who had come to tell me she was “ill” again. She had brought her father his prize, and how had he rewarded her?

  As he always had.

  I could think of no more punishment than the one he had already given her. And if she loved him still, after this—let her.

  I waited a day. And told myself I only pitied her.

  I waited another day. And thought of my own father, his face over mine, as my cheek stung from his power.

  The next day, there was a new prince in the land.

  The day after that, there was another knock on my door.

  Liliana, dressed in a pretty gown of gold and green, perfect for the daughter of a prince, stood before me, head held high.

  “You were right when you said you were no beggar. You are a thief instead,” I told her bitterly.

  “I love him,” she said. “I never lied to you about that.”

  No, I had lied to myself. But that did not make me wish to forgive her.

  “Go to the dome. Make your excuses and your confessions there. I care nothing for either,” I said, with a wave of the hand. I turned, as if to leave.

  “Please,” she said. “I want to learn more.” She grasped for my shoulder.

  The effrontery!

  I turned back and sneered at her. “And you think I will teach you, so that you can return to him and betray me once more?”

  She bowed her head. “He has no use for me any longer,” she said. “He has magicians all around him.”

  I knew of them, and knew of their worth. And hers.

  As I had always thought, her father was a fool.

  But Liliana?

  “You love him still?” I asked.