First Witch's Tale

He walked us up to his office, then told me to wait in a side room as he interrogated Cemburu. It felt like hours before he summoned me and asked me hundreds of questions about just what had happened and why. It was a painful process and it left me feeling more than a little insulted, although I supposed he didn’t know my word was good. I asked him a handful of questions of my own, but he refused to be drawn on most of them. The precise nature of the thing was one of them. He got very tight-lipped when I asked him what it had been, and chose only to say that it had been incredibly dangerous and I had been very lucky to survive. I had the feeling he thought I knew more than I did about the thing, but I didn’t. He dismissed me, eventually, with congratulations - and a warning to keep my mouth shut.

I did, until now.

I returned to classes. Cemburu rejoined us, two weeks later. Quite what Bernard had said to him was never disclosed, at least not to me, although I had the impression that his possession was deemed sufficient punishment for his foolishness. Cemburu was a changed man. We didn’t become friends, not really, but we did learn to work together when the school faced other threats in the next two years. It was difficult, yet we managed.

Me? I was the first witch in Whitehall, but I was not the last.

Let that be my legacy.

Afterward

At this point, the scroll ends.

It is not clear what happened to Janis after this. What few records we have of Early Whitehall suggests the school was attacked, frequently, until it managed to carve out a niche for itself as part of the newborn Empire. If she followed the same path as her peers - most of whom have left no trace on the historical record - she would have graduated a few years after the events depicted in the scroll, and then gone on to serve the school in some capacity. It is possible she was the first housemother, supervising the new female students, but we have no clue one way or the other. There are references to a female staff member a few years after the scroll who could have been Janis, yet we may never know.

There is some evidence to suggest that there were, at one point, other scrolls. It is unlikely that this is the only scroll Janis ever produced, given that there are hints she graduated school and survived for quite some time afterwards. It is, however, impossible to be sure. Our records are just too garbled. There are faint references to a Janis two hundred years later, but it seems unlikely that is the same person. We are forced to assess the scroll based on what she tells us and little else. It is not an easy task.

The idea that a woman could not study magic, and not match her male counterparts, seems strange and alien to us now. Generations of mixed-sex education have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that women are not inherently inferior to men when it comes to using and developing magic. Many popular spells were developed by female magicians; many female magicians have served as everything from healers to alchemists, enchanters and combat sorcerers. Indeed, given the importance of weaving new magical potential into long-established bloodlines, the idea of ignoring half the candidates because they were born female is just absurd.

And yet, it took longer than one might expect for women to start studying formal magic.

It is difficult to understand why, without a solid grounding in early spellcasting. In mundane terms, the early spells inflicted considerable damage upon their casters. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the raw magic damaged the magician’s body and mind, resulting – eventually - in madness and death. This often resulted in outright sterility, to the point that it was relatively rare for the early magicians to have children. Males got low sperm counts; females, unfortunately, were rendered almost completely sterile. It was not until formal magic was introduced, with the magic toned down to limit the damage as much as possible, that both men and women were able to study magic freely.

It was true, also, that witches tended to be feared. The average villager of those times would tolerate, rather than like, the village witch; it was not unknown, particular in the days of the magical purge, for the witch to be driven out of the village or forced to live at some distance from the town itself. This may seem absurd today, when a lynch mob could be turned into toads with the wave of a witch’s hands, but the spells for human transfiguration had yet to be developed. Indeed, most girls who showed signs of magic were quietly advised to leave the village, pointed towards Whitehall or a distant witch, or simply murdered. The risk of them losing control of their powers was simply too great. Our heroine, assuming she existed at all, was very lucky. Her father would have been quite within his rights to kill her and his community would certainly have expected him to do so.