The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) (7 page)

“Seventeen,” Norton said. If he resented being interrupted, he didn’t show it. “The remainder come from the upper classes or... adoptive families.”

The farms
, Gwen thought, coldly. If there was one detail that had convinced her that the whole program was useless as well as morally disgusting, it was the simple fact that only one in four of the children ever developed magic. No one was quite sure how magic was passed down through the generations, but it was quite common for a magician to have children who didn’t seem to have magic. Or, for that matter, for two non-magicians to produce a magical child. Gwen’s parents had no magic and yet they’d produced a Master Magician.

“Seventeen,” Lord Brockton repeated. He looked over at Gwen and scowled. “And what will they do to the morals of the other magicians?”

Gwen couldn’t hide her irritation. They’d gone over the same issue at every single meeting Gwen had chaired, without even coming up with new arguments. By now, she could have argued their side – and the other side – in her sleep. And it never seemed to go away.

The Royal College and the Sorcerers Corps had started by only recruiting magicians from the upper classes – or the middle classes, if the magician in question was powerful enough to allow them to overlook his origins. Lower class magicians were rounded up and sent to the farms, which – unsurprisingly – encouraged the ones who escaped to stay underground. Many of them had joined Jack’s rebellion when he’d made his desperate bid to overthrow the government, if only in self-defence. They could expect no mercy if they were caught.

In the aftermath of the Swing, the Royal College had agreed to relax the barriers to entry, allowing lower-class magicians to enter formally and train with their social superiors. It hadn’t always gone well.

“I seem to recall,” she said tartly, “that nine out of ten of the last discipline issues that reached my desk concerned upper class students. And it wasn’t a lower class student who had to be expelled for stealing from his classmates.”

“But such matters were not a problem before lower class students joined the Royal College,” Lord Brockton insisted. “The morals of the next generation of magicians are being corrupted.”

Gwen rather doubted it.
She’d
had a hard time during her first few weeks of training- and there had been no lower class students at the time – but then, she’d been the only girl to enter the Royal College. In many ways, she had been very isolated. No one had asked her to go out for a night on the town. It just wasn’t done.

But he was right about one thing. Upper class students picked on the lower class students... and vice versa. And yet it was hard to see what could be done.

She smiled, sweetly. “Would you wish us to stop recruiting Healers?”

Lord Brockton’s face purpled. No one knew why, but all seven of the Healers discovered since the Swing were lower class. The Royal College tested hundreds of potential candidates every month, yet they’d been unsuccessful in finding an aristocratic Healer... In hindsight, Gwen suspected that they would have found Healers earlier if they’d abandoned their reluctance to recruit from the lower classes before the Swing.

And all but one of the Healers were female.

“Healers are a different issue,” he said, finally. “They certainly cannot be trained with the other students.”

Norton cleared his throat. “We shall graduate forty new magicians this year,” he said, defusing the tension in the room. “Most of them are already earmarked for the military, but the police have expressed an interest in additional Movers, should they be available.”

“Tricky,” Sir James pointed out, quietly. “We took losses during the Swing.”

Gwen nodded. The uprising had killed nearly half of the magicians who had been in training at the time, as well as a number of experienced tutors. In some ways, the problems Lord Brockton had complained about had been caused by the Swing; Master Thomas, whatever else he’d done, hadn’t ensured that there were tutors held in reserve. Given time, Gwen was sure that the problems would be overcome, but time seemed to be in short supply.

“The military comes first,” Lord Brockton insisted. “We may be at war with France by the end of the year.”

“True,” Gwen agreed. “On the other hand, we can keep a reserve of magicians in the capital and assign them to support the police.”

Surprisingly, there was no disagreement.

Sir Benjamin MacIver, Head of Changers, coughed for attention. “We must face facts,” he said, dispassionately. “We need more magicians.”

“Hence the decision to recruit from all classes,” Gwen reminded him, tartly. Sir Benjamin was less pointlessly obstructive than Lord Brockton, which made him all the more dangerous to Gwen’s position. “We need to find more magicians as quickly as possible.”

“Indeed we do,” Sir Benjamin said. “And while I share your disdain at the whole farm program, it was successful in providing us with additional magicians. Right now, however, we are dependent upon nature to provide us with new recruits.”

Gwen fought down the flash of rage that threatened to overcome her. Was she going to be fighting the same battle over and over again? Oh, she could see their point – magic had made the British Empire supreme and that supremacy had to be maintained – but it didn’t change the fact that the farms had been grossly immoral. And of questionable value.

“I believe that we can compromise,” Sir Benjamin oozed. “We have considerable funds available to us. It would be quite simple for us to pay women to have children with selected fathers and to supervise their upbringing. Should they have magic, we could take them into the Royal College from a very early age.”

“But such a program would be public,” Doctor Norwell pointed out. “It could hardly
avoid
being public. And then we’d be risking...”

“Very little,” Sir Benjamin stated. “There are plenty of women from the lower classes who sell their children. We would merely be purchasing the ones who... meet our demands.”

Gwen took advantage of the argument to concentrate her mind. She couldn’t show her anger openly or they’d just dismiss her as an emotional women, too emotional to be allowed anywhere near a position of power. Cold logic was required to outmanoeuvre Sir Benjamin, yet cold logic suggested that he was right. Why
not
pay women to have children with the right fathers?

As Royal Sorceress, Gwen had been asked to patronise a number of charities, including one intent on keeping fallen women off the streets. She’d looked into it before committing herself and discovered that the charity had a high failure rate. Puzzled – she would have accepted any offer that took her off the streets, if she’d lived there – Gwen had asked Lucy about it. And Lucy had pointed out that there were two factors that the high and mighty upper class women, who had never worked a day in their lives, had failed to take into account.

The first was economic; prostitutes earned more from prostituting themselves than they did by working in the jobs the charity had offered to them. And the second was pride; no one liked to be talked down to by a handful of condescending women who knew nothing of the reality of life on the streets. Or, for that matter, from churchmen who seemed to believe that they had a right to claim tithes from men and women who had little to spare.

“It seems a workable scheme,” Lord Brockton said. “We could study the possibility and then decide if we wanted to commit ourselves.”

“I suppose we could,” Gwen said, keeping her voice under tight control. “But have you considered the social impact?”

Sir Benjamin stared at her. “The
social
impact?”

Gwen allowed herself a smile, then looked directly at Norwell. “How many of our graduated magicians, the ones who would be expected to
father
those children, have wives and families of their own?”

Doctor Norwell blinked in surprise, but answered the question. “Almost all of them,” he said. “We increase the stipend for magicians who marry and produce children, so they have strong reason to be fruitful and multiply.”

Gwen looked back at Sir Benjamin. “The married magicians will have very unhappy wives if they father children with other women,” she pointed out, mildly. “
Proven
adultery can be used as ground for separation, even divorce. You cannot order a magician to impregnate another woman – and even if you did, his wife would still be furious. I think the results would be disastrous for morale at the very least.”

“Adultery is hardly unknown,” Sir Benjamin said.

“There is a considerable difference between something that can be overlooked and something that is so blatantly public that it cannot be ignored,” Gwen said, fighting to keep her voice under control. “You seem to expect that every wife will accept her husband fathering children with other women. Take my word for it; they will
not
take it calmly.”

She allowed her gaze to move around the table, gauging reactions. Lord Brockton was looking thoughtful; clearly, he thought the idea was worth developing. Doctor Norwell seemed to agree with him, which was a pity. Gwen would have preferred him to be supporting her. Others, however, seemed to recognise Gwen’s point. Women might have no political rights, but that wouldn’t stop them from making their husband’s life a misery if he acted
too
badly.

“Perhaps we could work on the project with unmarried magicians,” Sir Benjamin said, perhaps suspecting that he’d overplayed his hand. “Or maybe we could just bury the details of who fathered who in the files.”

“That worked out
so
well for Master Jackson,” Gwen said. She held up a hand. “Your proposal is worthy of further study.”

And hopefully it can be studied to death
, she added, in the privacy of her own mind.

The discussion moved on to the next few items on the agenda. Several people had reported seeing large, yet intelligent animals in Liverpool, suggesting the presence of Weres. Gwen rather doubted it – they could have come forward and joined the Royal Sorcerers Corps – but it had to be investigated. A pair of combat magicians were detailed to Liverpool to see what they could find out. At least there had been no reports that suggested that the Weres had gone feral. When they did, they were always the most dangerous of animals.

“The members of the Worshipful Order of Ancient Wisdom are threatening to sue us,” Norton said, when she asked if there was any other business. “Apparently, we broke up a perfectly harmless meeting.”

We
, Gwen thought, sourly. She liked that.

“Not a good sign,” Lord Brockton observed. “How many of them are well-connected?”

Gwen didn’t bother to hide her anger this time. “They were on the verge of murdering a young girl for
nothing
,” she snapped. “I don’t know why they believed that murder would grant them powers beyond imagination, but all it would have done is left them with a dead body. We – I – had to stop them.”

“Quite right,” Lord Brockton said. “But the manner you chose to stop them caused embarrassment.”

“How much more embarrassment would it have caused them,” Gwen demanded, “if they had killed the girl and
then
got caught?”

She looked around the room. “Our job is not just to use magic for the defence of the realm,” she reminded them. “We are also meant to protect the realm from magic, real or faked. And as for those... fools who thought they could murder a girl and get away with it, they had to be stopped too. And that is part of our job.”

On that note, the meeting ended.

Chapter Six

M
aster Thomas would have joined the senior magicians for a drink after the committee meeting, Gwen knew. It was a chance to talk with them on a more informal basis – and relax, after getting his way in the meeting. But it wasn’t an option open to her. Even if she hadn’t been female, she was still much younger and less experienced than the men she was supposed to lead. And besides, she preferred to spend time alone rather than with other people. After spending much of her life in isolation, she had become used to it.

Back in her office, she looked down at the endless pile of letters and documents awaiting her signature. Master Thomas had had a secretary to help with his mail, but the poor man had disappeared during the Swing and Gwen hadn’t wanted to find a replacement. Lord Mycroft had offered the service of one of his confidential clerks – the men who handled top secret papers buried in the government’s vaults – but Gwen had learned the hard way to make sure that she read everything she signed. Giving that much power to someone else, when she had too many enemies, struck her as dangerous.

Most of the letters, thankfully, were simple enough. A handful were rather more complex, touching on legal matters; one of them addressed the pros and cons of using Talkers to interrogate suspects in prison. Gwen read it with some interest, noted the conclusion and then signed it with a flourish. It might be more
convenient
to have Talkers do the interrogations, but she couldn’t think of anything more likely to cause a massive backlash against magicians in general. No one liked the idea of having their thoughts read.

We need to find more Sensitives
, she thought, once she’d put the letter in the box for delivery.
They’d be better with interrogations, without intruding on someone’s privacy
.

She contemplated it for a long moment, before putting the thought aside and turning to the next set of letters. They were reassuring missives written to the parents of young magicians, assuring them that their children would be perfectly safe at the Royal College. Two of them had been written specifically for a pair of mothers Gwen knew by reputation, who’d written to demand that their sons were not to have anything to do with low-born magicians. They were going to be disappointed, Gwen knew; there were no social barriers in the classroom. Besides, she happened to know that at least one of the sons went out drinking and wenching every night.

The next box contained letters sent to her personally. Several of them came from charities, including two that she’d already politely declined to publicly support; she put them aside for later consideration, when she had time to deal with them. A number questioned her competence as Royal Sorceress; she picked them up with her magic and tossed them into the fire. Two claimed to have found new forms of magic and she read them carefully, before putting them in the box to go to Doctor Norwell. The letters could be hoaxes – they’d certainly had hoaxes before – but they would have to be investigated. Everyone had thought that Healers were a myth until Jack had found one.