The Grandmaster's Tale

I could have been happy, I suppose, if I’d stayed a tutor the rest of my life. I’d done well, and I knew it, rising to the tenured post of senior tutor. I had a reputation as a tutor no one crossed, certainly not twice, and I had far fewer problems with the students once they realised that I could still see, even though I was blind. The world might be shades of grey, rather than bright primary colours, but I had no difficulty living a full life. I could have gone into Whitehall and stayed there for the rest of my life, leaving the rest of the world behind. I could have been happy.

But it was not to be.

I had been a tutor for five years when the outside world intruded into my academic paradise, and all hell threatened to break loose.

It wasn’t until it was almost too late that I realised it had been invited.

Chapter 1

It began, although I didn’t realise it at the time, in a staff meeting.

Grandmaster Boscha was not, as I often had cause to reflect upon, a very nice man. He played favourites, promoting his toadies and excusing students he felt might be of use to him, rather than upholding the school’s famed neutrality. He issued detentions that would make a royal torturer blanch, insisting—when challenged, which happened rarely—they built character. He turned a blind eye to rampant bullying, corruption and outright criminality, spending most of his days playing politics while using the school as a personal—and heavily warded—fortress. Worst of all, he held very long and boring staff meetings.

Personally, I thought they were cruel, unusual, and extremely sadistic punishment.

He was, and remains, a difficult person to describe. My brother, whose name I will not write, called him the crookered man, a snide remark that had a great deal of truth in it. Boscha was tall and pale, and yet there was something about the way he held himself that made him look misshapen, as if someone had cast a particularly nasty series of limb-lengthening charms on him and the damage had never truly been repaired. His hair was dark and oily, spilling around his shoulders like liquid night; his eyes were darker still, set within a face that had more than a hint of demihuman ancestry, in that it looked subtly wrong to the human eye. I doubted it was true—Boscha wouldn’t have reached his post if there’d been something nasty, or inhuman, lurking within the family tree—but his appearance set off all kinds of rumours. His angry reaction to questions about his ancestry didn’t put the rumours to rest. They just convinced his students there was a gem of truth buried under the mountain of bovine excrement the aristocratic families produced to cover it. I didn’t care. I had good reason to dislike Boscha without dragging his heritage into it.

And besides, I was hardly able to point fingers at his background without calling attention to mine.

“The world is changing,” Boscha said. “And we must embrace it.”

I tried not to groan as he kept talking, hitting us with an endless series of platitudes that meant—as far as I could tell—very little. He had a plummy aristocratic voice that grated on my nerves, a grim reminder of my dear Uncle Mago, and made me want to cast all sorts of nasty charms on him. Or rip out his tongue. I’d never met anyone who was so fond of the sound of his own voice as Boscha, and I’d grown up as part of House Barca, a family known for their egos. They’re still sneering at House Ashworth for being able to trace its bloodline backonly five thousand years. Personally, I thought the records had been faked years ago, and nothing more than a few hundred years old was reliable, but there was nothing to be gained from arguing. Uncle Mago had thrown a fit when I’d dared ask how reliable our ten-thousand-year-old records actually were.

He should have been a tutor, I thought. The students would eat him alive.

“The old order is gone,” Boscha continued. “It falls to us to consider what shape the new order should take.”

I sighed inwardly, my sense of magical perception sweeping the room. Daphne—Boscha’s assistant—was eying him worshipfully. I wasn’t sure if her admiration was real or feigned, but it didn’t matter. She had a reputation as a backstabbing sneak who could be relied upon to tattle to her boss if someone did something, anything, Boscha could hold against him. Mistress Constance, the Alchemy Mistress, looked as if she was quietly going through potion ingredients in her head, an old tactic to keep one’s mind from wandering too far. Madame Clover, the Healer, looked incredibly impatient … either that, or she wanted to go to the toilet. I didn’t know. Lady Pepper, the Combat Magic Tutor, looked as bored as I felt. Our eyes met—more accurately my sense of perception met her eyes—and we shared the same thought. How long could our boss prattle on before actually saying something worthwhile?