“Oh, yes,” he said. “Archmage Orynhel has some truly chilling tales from his early days in the High Magistry. Of course, his was the generation of mages directly following the traitor mage, Sabernyn.”
Sciona tilted her head, not understanding what Highmage Sabernyn had to do with any of this.
“The public knows Sabernyn as the mage who murdered his colleagues,” Bringham said. “That’s how you know him.”
“Right.” Sciona’s brow furrowed as she recalled the details of those murders: mages and their families eviscerated behind the locked doors of their own homes. “Right.”
“Among highmages, he’s just as infamous for the curses he left around the university. When he suspected others of conspiring against him, he—well, for starters, he killed many of them with forbidden magic, but that’s the part of the story everyone knows. He also attached curses to texts, spellographs, and any powerful conduit he could get his hands on. Not many outside the High Magistry know this, but the library fire of 252 was a Sabernyn original.”
“Really?”
Bringham nodded. “A curse he wrote to activate if anyone ever tried to remove his life’s work from circulation. But that’s a highmage for you. His work comes before anything else.” Bringham paused to chuckle as though hoping Sciona might join him—the way she normally would have. When she was quiet, he cleared his throat and continued. “Sabernyn’s curses were never well known outside the High Magistry because he didn’t design them to affect the public—or lesser mages, for that matter. He set them for future generations of highmages to blunder into. Not that I’m accusing you of blundering—just of being young, ambitious, and in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is my fault, Freynan. I should have warned you that this was a possibility.”
“What was a possibility?” Sciona demanded, straining toward that glimmer of hope in Bringham’s hands. Maybe this had all been a misunderstanding. Maybe none of it had to be real. “What do you think happened?”
“Sabernyn and malicious mages who came before him could be skilled in trickery, illusory magics.”
“Illusory magics?” Sciona repeated. “So, you’re saying… there could have been a curse that showed me images in a mapping coil that weren’t really there?”
“Well, since a mapping spell has never produced a lifelike image—violent or otherwise—in the Magistry’s history, I would say yes. What you saw was not really there.”
“Oh…” Sciona breathed out, trying to feel relief. But found that she couldn’t. A barricade of questions blocked her way. If the black-haired woman wasn’t real, where had the image come from? Why had Thomil recognized the field in her first spell?
“Sabernyn, especially, set curses to scare mages out of pursuing deeper magic.”
“But…” Sabernyn had never set foot outside Tiran. He wouldn’t know what Kwen plains looked like in the snow, let alone how to conjure one from nothing. He had never seen the ocean. “How? And why?” she asked, even as another part of her screamed not to question, just accept the lifeline Bringham had thrown her. He was the mentor. Let him tell her that she hadn’t seen what she thought, that everything was fine, that she was the victim in this madness, not the murderer.
“I mean—I thought Sabernyn’s primary motivation was jealousy,” she said. “His crimes were against his rivals and anyone else who impeded his work, right? I haven’t touched his work in my research. Why would he care about future mages delving into spells that had nothing to do with him?”
Bringham shrugged. “Who can fathom the mind of a madman?”
“I can,” Sciona said under her breath. While she couldn’t imagine physically stabbing someone to death, she had thought at times that she would kill for the opportunity to succeed in the Magistry. According to Thomil, she already had killed for that opportunity. Many, many times.
“What did you say?” Bringham leaned in with that softest of concern in his green eyes.
“Nothing,” Sciona murmured. “I just don’t see how this could have been a Sabernyn curse.” He had been a mapping specialist, yes, but also a deeply Tirasian one. Sciona had read his work, and it had been some of the most religiously restricted mapping she had ever seen—no Stravos influences, no fancy modifications at all.
“You may be right,” Bringham said. “It’s hard to know the culprit. Curses can sit dormant for centuries. Your attacker may well have been a mage who lived long before our time or Sabernyn’s.”
“Right…” Except that, as far as Sciona could tell, Andrethen Stravos had been the only mage in history who could produce lifelike images in a mapping coil. How could anyone else have used such imaging in a curse?
“Some of these old mages were skilled in magic the best of us are still struggling to understand. Some dealt more in emotion than in fact, playing on weak souls like… well, I know you’re not weak,” he amended, and Sciona realized what he had been about to say: weak souls like women and Kwen. “From what your colleagues told me, your assistant saw these images, too, and was similarly traumatized. I hear he ran out of your laboratory in distress?”
“Yes.”
“Poor boy,” Bringham sighed. “No one should have to deal with cursework, but least of all one as simple as a Kwen.”
“Thomil’s not simple.” Sciona had no idea why her tongue jumped to defend a man she had slapped in the face not an hour earlier. “He’s not stupid.” Disrespectful, maybe. Mistaken, certainly. Not stupid.
“For a Kwen, no. Of course, not,” Bringham said kindly. “But come on, my dear. He is what he is. And if this curse shook you, with your reasonable mind, imagine the effect it could have on him.”
“That’s not why…” Sciona trailed off. Because how could she even begin to explain Thomil’s rage? All the terrible claims he had made were sitting like knife points in Sciona’s flesh. To repeat them to Bringham here—to give them that weight—would drive the blades into vital organs. And who could say whether she would survive the damage?
“You should pay him a visit and apologize,” Bringham said. “Explain that what he saw was a fabrication, a cruel trick of magic that can befall the best of mages.”
“But—” But it wasn’t.
Sciona wanted to believe Archmage Bringham. She wanted it with every wretched inch of her soul. But the cogs of her traitor mind wouldn’t stop turning, processing the raw information at her disposal. She had tried her mapping spell on two different spellographs—both of which she had used for months without incident, both of which had been manufactured after Highmage Sabernyn’s execution, both of which she had checked for curses following the suspicious explosion in Halaros’s lab.
And granted, not all curses were concealed in spellographs. They could also be placed in the lines of an old spell with invisible ink compounds or subtle tricks of composition. But Sciona hadn’t used anyone else’s spellpapers, nor had she copied anything from Stravos’s work verbatim. The spells had been her own composition, tight and without artifice, like all her work. The language she had borrowed, she had understood in its entirety.