There was a time when Klaus frequented- no, expected- banquets like this. Not so long ago he’d been hailed as the prodigy of Ecen, the brilliant young scholar of magic making great headway in...well, whatever it was that Klaus published. (He’d been fond of issuing such complicated dissertations on the physics and discrete mathematics of magic that half the time nobody knew what they were applauding.) He’d dined regularly at the homes of nobility, basking in the praise of aristocrats who were dilettantes in the sciences.
He wouldn’t have had to ask for more wine. His glass would have been filled the moment he took a sip.
But that was all in the past. Klaus didn’t like to dwell on the shards of his once-promising academic career. Instead he lifted his cup, deciding that this evening would pass more nicely once he was well and buzzed.
“Wine, my lords?”
Klaus turned towards the servant, and found himself pleasantly surprised. There was no mistaking it. The boy was magical. Shape-shifter, if Klaus had to guess, although elemental magic was not out of the question.
Klaus perked up. “So even the King’s got one, eh?” he said delightedly, looking Mytchel up and down. “You, the gatekeeper...damn, but I wish I were still at Highmont University. The magical to mundane ratio in this city is simply-” Klaus broke off, remembering why he’d lost tenure at Highmont in the first place. He lifted his cup. “Say, chap, do me a solid and make sure this is always full?”
“Something harder...erm, please,” said a woman a few seats away, whose accent was tinged with Northern overtones.
Klaus brightened. “Scratch that, I want what she’s having.”
Filled up on sprouds and radishes, Klaus turned his attention to observing- well, staring not so discretely- at the strangers around the table. As he gazed at the motley assortment, Klaus was briefly reminded of Novina, his first- and to date, only- girlfriend. They’d met at Highmont shortly after he’d graduated- she a second-year medical student, he a newly minted professor. They’d gone to only two dinners together before she ended things on the second.
“Klaus, darling, listen to me,” she’d said, moments before she crushed his young heart. “Stop sticking strangers with butter knives. It’s embarrassing.”
But what were butter knives for, if not to investigate fascinating characters like these?
The strangers sparked with magic. Klaus was used to the presence of magic. He had, after all, spent his life studying the stuff. He lived and breathed magic. He worked every day in labs where elements were being manipulated, the fabric of the world itself warped and reshaped into the will of the mage.
But that was University magic. That was safe, contained, and standardized- as much as magic could get, anyhow.
The magic here was raw, untamed- and infinitely more interesting.
Say, for instance, the green-eyed girl sitting opposite him. She looked nothing like his bespectacled teaching assistant, but there was a sweet, open quality to her face that reminded Klaus disconcertingly of Amy. Klaus’s first hunch was that she was a healer- but no, her magic had a wild touch to it, something exotic. She had to be shape-shifter. Some kind of bird, or a fox, Klaus imagined as he studied her coppery locks.
Klaus realized he was staring.
“Try the sprouts,” he offered by way of explanation.
He blinked owlishly and turned his attention towards the was the lean, bearded man sitting far from the door. Black magic, Klaus thought, eying the stranger warily. Has to be. He’d dabbled enough in Black magic himself to recognize a user when he saw one. Not that Klaus was in any respect capable of wielding black magic- but there had been experiments, collaborations, and unfortunate events that had turned Klaus off the idea of black magic forever.
Then there were the Northerners, who had taken to conversing in their own tongue. Klaus tried vaguely to follow along, but he’d paid too little attention in Northern Dialects 102 and got lost after “shieldmaiden.” Klaus doubted the woman had any magical ability, but the man had some air about him, something he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Klaus strongly doubted that any of them had ever taken Intro to Elemental Theory.
They were fascinating. Klaus wanted to abduct everyone and put them in a lab. Pity kidnapping was against the law.
“Put ‘em all in a cage and document the magical fallout,” he mumbled before realizing he was speaking out loud.
