The Last Mage of Oxford

Chapter One —

The fire came before she could stop it.

It always came before she could stop it.

One moment there was nothing — only the soldier’s hand closing around her wrist, only the smell of horse and iron and the particular cruelty of a man who had been marching for three weeks and needed somewhere to put it.

Then the heat moved up through her chest like a word she hadn’t meant to say, and the thatch above the doorway caught, and the ground cracked open along the path between the well and the gate, and the sky — clear and cold and entirely without mercy — split open with a crack of thunder that shook every door in the village off its frame.

The soldier let go of her wrist.

Veyra stood in the center of what she had done and tried to remember how to breathe.

The fire spread to the stable roof before anyone thought to throw water.

The crack in the earth ran eight feet long and stopped just short of the Alderman’s wall, which would have been a mercy if the Alderman hadn’t been standing directly in front of it when it opened.

He wasn’t dead.

She could see him being helped up by his wife.

He wasn’t dead but his face was the color of old ash and he was looking at her the way you look at something you want removed from your life permanently and without discussion.

The soldiers — four of them, English, part of the force moving north toward Scotland — had backed to the far side of the road.

Their horses were screaming.

Two had broken free of their handlers and were already gone.

The one who had touched her was the furthest back.

He was trying to find language for what he had seen and not finding it.

Veyra lowered her hands.

She hadn’t raised them.

She never raised them — that was the thing nobody understood, the thing she had never been able to explain in the years since this had started, since she had been fifteen and furious about something she couldn’t even remember now and had pulled the rain down on a dry August afternoon so precisely and completely that the field behind the cottage had flooded to her ankles.

She hadn’t raised her hands then either. It came from somewhere below decision.

Below thought. It came from the place where she kept the things she was not allowed to feel.

The thatch was still burning.

She looked at the stable roof — old wood, dry as August bone despite the autumn — and thought stop the way she always thought it, which was to say she thought it desperately and without real hope.

The fire considered her.

Subsided to embers.

Did not go out entirely, because nothing she did was ever entirely in either direction.

Her power was not obedient. It was large and emotional and it moved the way water moves, finding its own level regardless of what she wanted.

“Witch,” said someone behind her.

She didn’t turn around.

She knew the voice.

She had known the Alderman’s wife for twenty-three years and she had known, somewhere beneath the place where she kept things, that it would be her voice when it finally happened.

That was the other thing about her power: it wasn’t only fire and storms and cracks in the earth.

Sometimes it was the cold knowledge of what was coming, sitting in her chest like a stone she had swallowed and could not pass.

She picked up her shawl from the ground where it had fallen and she walked toward the gate.

“Veyra.” Her neighbor Mads.

She had known him since she was born — had attended his wife’s deathbed three winters ago, had helped carry the body. His voice was not unkind.

That was somehow worse. “Veyra, you cannot stay here.”

She knew.

She had always known, the way you know a season is ending.

The way you can feel it in the temperature of the mornings before anything has actually changed.

She walked through the gate without answering and stood on the road outside the village, and the wind came off the fields and pulled at her hair, and she had nothing.

A shawl. The dress she was wearing.

The small carved piece of oak her mother had given her the year before she died, which was in her pocket and which she pressed her fingers against now for the particular comfort of its edges.

She had nowhere to go.

This had been the shape of the fear for years — not the fire itself, not the thunder or the cracked earth, but this.

The morning after.

The road with no turning.

She had known the fire would come for her eventually and she had not let herself think past it because there was nothing past it she could see.

The soldier was still in the road twenty feet away. He had found his language.

He was using it to a companion who had arrived while she wasn’t watching — another soldier, older, with the look of someone who had seen several varieties of disaster and developed opinions about how to respond.

She started walking.

North was Scotland and the army and nothing she wanted.

South was the main road and then London and then more nothing.

She walked south because it was the direction away from the soldier’s voice, which was the only criterion she had left.

She had walked perhaps a quarter mile when she heard a footstep behind her.

She stopped.

The footstep stopped.

She turned around.

He was standing in the middle of the road as though he had always been there, which she did not believe for a moment.

He was tall.

Dark-haired, fine-featured, dressed better than anyone had a right to be on this particular road at this particular hour.

He was looking at her with an expression she could not immediately name — not fear, not the ash-pale shock of the Alderman, not the cold assessment of the older soldier. Something more careful than any of those. Something that knew things.

“Veyra,” he said.

Not a question.

“Who are you?” she said.

He had the audacity to look almost apologetic.

“My name is Dorian.” A pause

. “I’ve been looking for you for some time.”

The wind moved between them.

Behind her the road south ran straight and empty and went nowhere she had any particular reason to go.

The carved oak was smooth under her fingers inside her pocket.

“You watched,” she said. “From the tree line.”

Something shifted in his expression — brief, controlled, gone before she could name it. “Yes.”

“And you didn’t help.”

“There was nothing I could do that you weren’t already doing,” he said. “Rather more effectively than I could have managed.”

She stared at him.

He met her gaze with the particular steadiness of a man who had prepared for this conversation and was not going to be moved from it by something as straightforward as her suspicion.

“What do you want?” she said.

“To help you.” He said it simply.

“There is a place — in Oxford. A school, of a kind.

For people whose abilities present the way yours do.” The word abilities landed carefully, chosen deliberately over every other word he could have used.

“You would learn to manage it.

To direct it. To stop it, when you want to stop it.” A pause.

“You do want to stop it.”

It wasn’t a question either.

She looked at him for a long moment.

The stable roof was still smoldering a quarter mile behind her. A man who had never been anything but her neighbor for twenty-three years had told her she could not stay.

The soldier’s hand had been on her wrist and she had cracked the earth open.

“Oxford,” she said.

“Oxford,” he said.

She thought about the road south.

About London, which she had never seen, which was three days’ walk and held nothing for her.

She thought about the carved oak in her pocket and her mother’s voice and the particular exhaustion of a person who has spent her entire life being careful and failed anyway.

“How far is Oxford?” she said.

“Three days,” he said. “Perhaps four. I have a horse.”

She looked at him.

At his careful expression and his good clothes and the way he had said her name — twice now — without ever once asking what it was.

“You know something you’re not telling me,” she said.

The almost-apologetic look returned. “Several things,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

Which was not a promise of honesty.

She noted that. She noted it and picked up her shawl and looked at the empty road and the empty field and the column of smoke still rising from her former life.

“All right,” she said.

She walked toward him.

He turned south and fell into step beside her, and she did not look back, and the wind came off the fields, and the sky was getting dark.

She did not yet know his name was a debt.

She did not yet know that hers was a prophecy.

She did not yet know about the eclipse.

She only knew the road was going somewhere, and somewhere was more than she’d had an hour ago.

Historical Note:

In August 1310, King Edward II of England led his army northward to invade Scotland — the first of his Scottish campaigns. English soldiers were a common and often unwelcome presence on village roads throughout that summer and autumn, requisitioning food, shelter, and supplies as they marched.

The tension between English forces and rural communities was a documented feature of the era. The village Veyra leaves behind is fictional; the soldiers passing through it are not.