"Don't anger a ward-witch, they'll draw a line in the dirt," some scoff derisively. "Don't anger a ward-witch," others mutter furtively. "They'll draw a line 'round your neck."
In some ways, they're even more regulated to being seen as mere tools than other disciplines of magic: shield this, ward that, connect X to Y to Z. In some circles they're even considered outright mundane, the magical equivalent of a blue-collar tradesperson. Nothing exotic and glamourous, just necessary even as the number of them waned over the years, over the decades.
Pela's happy to let those preconceptions work for her, smiling dutifully when expected. Born in a sunny southern colony, this is only the second time she's ever been to Somerset, but any excitement and indulgence she might have for the opportunity to see it again is blunted by the reason that she's here. Recalled by the State as part of an "asset review program", things were changing. Pela knows that she was likely to be reassigned somewhere far from her homeland, perhaps even here in Somerset.
She's not alone, arriving with a contingent of other magic users also from Eajorynn, although she's the only ward-witch among them. Their group is guided in for processing while the necessary administration is handled, and Pela takes the opportunity to look around while waiting her turn.
Once, not so very long ago, there would have been a strict order to this sort of thing. Assignments would have been called up according to some strictly enforced schedule, never with more than two dozen magicians or hedge- or ward-witches or any such Talented folk permitted to mill about this particular wood panelled antechamber. 'Permitted'—both in the sense that at one time it would have generally been understood to be an insult as well as a waste of valuable time to keep a Talented individual loitering for long, and in the one where it's is largely frowned upon to put a full company of magic users in one room. It makes the politicians itchy.
Perhaps this regimented shuffling about—dividing up rosters, the handling of orders, the curt reviews and businesslike commissionings—would have still held true when Pela had last found herself in the circuitous rooms of Drayton Hall, the formal headquarters of Their Majesty's Royal Magicians. Today however, there is no such trace of that strict administrative management.
What there is in abundance is quite a bit of talk, the volume of the antechamber being more or less in the range of cacophonous as various knots of men and women in their green uniforms have come to stuff the vestibule full to bursting. Here are pale faced junior officers, largely young children looking for all the world like pretend dolls made up in clothes better suited to their adult peers; there is a contingent of young men gone ruggedly tan and wind chapped, almost certainly dumped here from off some fleet of ships anxiously tugging at their anchors somewhere in the harbor; there is even a pair of senior Fellows, a woman so old she makes the wrinkled man at her elbow seem young, over from the College; and nearly everywhere there are hellos and news and, vitally, gossip being exchanged, interrupted only by the occasional opening and closing of the door at the end of the hall where a harried clerk might appear and so labor to usher along the next handful of magicians to whatever dates may as wait them in the adjacent room.
This holds true throughout the hall save for in one place. Above the center of the long bench which stretches along the interior wall in a single continuous line from one side of the chamber to the other is a niche. Inside this niche is white marble bust of a woman with a fine patrician. And below this niche, flanked on either side by empty seats made outrageously conspicuous by the fact that there is hardly standing room left in the vestibule, sits a man in a black coat to whom no one is speaking at all.
He has one leg crossed over the other at the knee. The metal tipped end of the cane laid over both juts menacingly outward.
It was true that Pela's first experience with Drayton Hall had been much different, but she preferred this. Not specifically because she disliked the regimented formality but because in such a boisterous surrounding, people paid less attention to her. There were other louder, flashier, Talented in the room, hoping to catch the stray eye of someone who would take interest in them. Many of her fellow Eajorynnea had been ecstatic to receive these summons, to be given the idea that they may be taken away from the sleepy southern islands and assigned somewhere with more prestige. Pela was not one of them. She had been happy in her infrequent callings-upon, to maintain her existing wards and sigils as needed, and otherwise be free of obligation.
The crowd shuffled again as the harried clerk came back and read the names for another set of individuals, although it hardly seemed to lessen the press of bodies in the antechamber. In effort to stay out of the way at least until her name is called, Pela sidled up against the wall until her path is interrupted by the seated man with the pointed cane, and the ways it's positioned means she can't get past without shoving into the crowd.
He isn't wearing the same sort of nervous, anticipatory energy that the rest of the room's occupants is, nor does he immediately strike her as someone unfamiliar with the proceedings. No, he radiates an extremely I belong here mien.
"If you were hoping for a quiet spot of contemplation here, sorré, I'm afraid you've picked the wrong day for it," she addressed him with rueful and hopefully disarming courtesy. The unfamiliar word was a respectful mode of address native to the southern colonies, and the same accent tinged her speech.
Well, if she can't get past... she'll just sit in the empty seat next to him like it's nothing at all.
If the abrupt tilt of his attention in her direction is any indication, the man sitting in the niche bust's shadow hadn't expected to be addressed—not by the crowding Somerset magicians in their starched uniforms, or the College Fellows, and certainly not by some young woman in the colors of the colony outposts. For a briefly flashing instant, the surprise plays clearly out in his sagging face. He looks almost boyish there: a lad with sloppily combed curls in a rumpled shirt stuffed into a very black coat as if that might pass him off as respectable.
Then she sits. And, like a cracked door closing to erase the slit of a view into the adjacent room, that surprise disappears from off of his face. In it's place, the handle of the cane in the shape of a snarling dog has flicked round. Its muzzle sets between her ribs as a barricade to preserve the inches remaining between her hip and his. Surely she of all people must recognize a ward: Keep your damned distance.
His ward practically singes the air, makes her own power stir against the inside of her fingertips below the skin, but she only offers him a sunny smile. "I suppose it could be easily missed," she replies with light laugh, and the sound vibrates up the shaft of the cane from her ribcage to his hand.
She neither leans closer nor pulls away, like the pointed jab — both the physical and spoken one — isn't something to be rebuffed by just yet. Acknowledging the threat, but not being reactive to it.
"And yet," she says after a moment. "There are other, far less sonorous places here at the Hall you could enjoy the quiet of, if you really wanted to. So: here to observe of your own volition, or been ordered? My condolences, either way."
The snarling end of the cane remains at it is, apparently perfectly comfortable laid there against her ribs in order to preserve that separation of the few inches between them on the bench. It doesn't waver; his wrist remains locked where it's turned—a habitual precaution against proximity, apparently, and one which seems to have little bearing on the impolitely arch tenor of his reply:
"Your condolences?" It's a little biting, as if he might laugh and the sound would be the unpleasant kind of humor. The eye he turns on her is very dark, shaded so thoroughly by the heavy edge of his brow and the tilt of his head away from the windows across the vestibule and the dreary weather outside of them so as to appear nearly black.
"My, whatever outpost you crawled out of must be very far removed from the civilized world if that's how you feel about it."
(Is, strictly speaking, no answer at all to her question.)
"Aldeph and yes, we are terribly uncivilized down there," Pela answers the non-question with mock severity, as if being tasked to relay some tragic revelation. "We live in huts made of mud and sticks, letting our goats eat off the kitchen table. We only bathe once a month, and we don't use currency but trade in seashells and cormorant feathers. At night we huddle around the fires and bang rocks together for music. Truly, I am not fit for proper Kalvadan society. I suppose you'll just have to send me back, shamed like a spurned housewarming gift."
Pela holds the serious expression through the clerk returning once again through the door, calling more names but still not hers, before she breaks into a grin with a soft laugh.
"Those are the things you mainlanders really think of the south, aren't they? I'm only having a bit of fun. I don't know what's put the adminstrators so far behind pace, but I don't think it is supposed to backed up like this with so many of us here. It makes me wonder what's going on."
She looks back at the knot of people filling the room. "Peace, sorré. I only sat because no one else had, no other reason. That is a lovely ward you're using, by the way. Who cast it, might I ask?"
That is the question. For that limn of the arcane certainly doesn't belong to the man sitting beside her; he's as cold and emptied of magic as a stone. —No, more than that, for the various rocks and trees and most stationary life of the world is often given to absorbing some latent murmur of magic. No, the man sat on the bench beside Pela is like the hole in a bucket through which magic passes through. And thus, rare that it must be for an object to be enchanted so, that modified ward must come from the stick with the silver snarling dog-faced handle itself.
(It is not a witch's ward, not really. More a magic of repulsion, cleverly laced into the metal and wood, and gently humming there where it's laid across her ribs. If he were to twist his hand, or jam it closer, perhaps the enchantment would nip discouragingly out as surely as if that cast dog's mouth had bitten.)
In answer to this question, the man smiles. It's not a particularly pleasant expression: all teeth, and a certain cold heat in the dark cast of his eyes which suggests he disapproves of its general trajectory.
"The administrators are behind," he says. "Because little girls and boys with their enfeebled Talents keep crawling from out of colonies like yours begging to be taught proper magic, and the College can't keep up with them. Some imbecile in the House proposed slaying two birds with one stone, and now Drayton's been saddled with sorting both the apprenticeships and you lot to satisfy the House's audit. But you're right. They're being shockingly incompetent with this whole horse trading business. Maybe when you go in, you can use your seashells to demonstrate some cleaner way of doing things."
So that's a no to her question, then.
Only after, impulsively, does he ad (far more conversationally, as if he's forgotten to that he's been insulting her)— "Who knows. Maybe they're starting a new war."
Best she give him no reason to bite back at her, for the time being. Academically, Pela might have been interested to know how her own warding would naturally protect her in such an instance, but in a crowded room with people already on edge, she could foresee it being a spark to dry tinder. It was a good thing that she didn't feel pressed to rise so easily to the acerbic bait this stranger kept handing her.
"If I see any enfeebled boys and girls," she returned. "I shall be sure to tell them of your deep disapproval. Coming here was not my first choice either, but it wasn't... let's say, it wasn't phrased as a request."
Her sunny demeanor finally dims a little when he mentions the possibility of a war. It was a thought that had crossed her mind on the sail to Somerset as well, despite there being no real evidence yet of it. But to recall so many outlying magicfolk when seemingly nothing else had precipitated it? It wasn't completely implausible.
"Well," she says finally, looking back at the throng of waiting bodies in the room. "That would be disagreeable news, if it were true."
And here, at last, some spark gleams in the man's black eye. It's as if that dimming of her disposition had by some arcane transitive quality passed that slaked enthusiasm into him instead, as if he is pleased to have taken a chip out of her.
"Don't say that too loudly here, girl. Someone will overhear and call you a treasonous dissenter." The stick remains exactly where it is, but the man leans over by a half degree as if to relay a secret to her in confidence despite the assembly in the hall about them: "They still hang people for that charge, you know."
"It would be a frightening rope indeed which could noose any ward-witch," Pela says impishly. "But since your attitude seems predisposed to the worst of everyone and everything, I don't think I need to be concerned about that being the cause without evidence of it."
The clerk returns and "Cintri, Pela!" is among the calle out. Thus named, she slides back a few inches in order to clear his cane tip, the fabric of her shirt still minutely concaved where he'd had it pressed.
"Thank you for the diverting company. Perhaps we'll run into one another again."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
WE'RE WINGING IT HERE WE GO
"Don't anger a ward-witch, they'll draw a line in the dirt," some scoff derisively. "Don't anger a ward-witch," others mutter furtively. "They'll draw a line 'round your neck."
In some ways, they're even more regulated to being seen as mere tools than other disciplines of magic: shield this, ward that, connect X to Y to Z. In some circles they're even considered outright mundane, the magical equivalent of a blue-collar tradesperson. Nothing exotic and glamourous, just necessary even as the number of them waned over the years, over the decades.
Pela's happy to let those preconceptions work for her, smiling dutifully when expected. Born in a sunny southern colony, this is only the second time she's ever been to Somerset, but any excitement and indulgence she might have for the opportunity to see it again is blunted by the reason that she's here. Recalled by the State as part of an "asset review program", things were changing. Pela knows that she was likely to be reassigned somewhere far from her homeland, perhaps even here in Somerset.
She's not alone, arriving with a contingent of other magic users also from Eajorynn, although she's the only ward-witch among them. Their group is guided in for processing while the necessary administration is handled, and Pela takes the opportunity to look around while waiting her turn.
hell yeah ✨
Perhaps this regimented shuffling about—dividing up rosters, the handling of orders, the curt reviews and businesslike commissionings—would have still held true when Pela had last found herself in the circuitous rooms of Drayton Hall, the formal headquarters of Their Majesty's Royal Magicians. Today however, there is no such trace of that strict administrative management.
What there is in abundance is quite a bit of talk, the volume of the antechamber being more or less in the range of cacophonous as various knots of men and women in their green uniforms have come to stuff the vestibule full to bursting. Here are pale faced junior officers, largely young children looking for all the world like pretend dolls made up in clothes better suited to their adult peers; there is a contingent of young men gone ruggedly tan and wind chapped, almost certainly dumped here from off some fleet of ships anxiously tugging at their anchors somewhere in the harbor; there is even a pair of senior Fellows, a woman so old she makes the wrinkled man at her elbow seem young, over from the College; and nearly everywhere there are hellos and news and, vitally, gossip being exchanged, interrupted only by the occasional opening and closing of the door at the end of the hall where a harried clerk might appear and so labor to usher along the next handful of magicians to whatever dates may as wait them in the adjacent room.
This holds true throughout the hall save for in one place. Above the center of the long bench which stretches along the interior wall in a single continuous line from one side of the chamber to the other is a niche. Inside this niche is white marble bust of a woman with a fine patrician. And below this niche, flanked on either side by empty seats made outrageously conspicuous by the fact that there is hardly standing room left in the vestibule, sits a man in a black coat to whom no one is speaking at all.
He has one leg crossed over the other at the knee. The metal tipped end of the cane laid over both juts menacingly outward.
no subject
The crowd shuffled again as the harried clerk came back and read the names for another set of individuals, although it hardly seemed to lessen the press of bodies in the antechamber. In effort to stay out of the way at least until her name is called, Pela sidled up against the wall until her path is interrupted by the seated man with the pointed cane, and the ways it's positioned means she can't get past without shoving into the crowd.
He isn't wearing the same sort of nervous, anticipatory energy that the rest of the room's occupants is, nor does he immediately strike her as someone unfamiliar with the proceedings. No, he radiates an extremely I belong here mien.
"If you were hoping for a quiet spot of contemplation here, sorré, I'm afraid you've picked the wrong day for it," she addressed him with rueful and hopefully disarming courtesy. The unfamiliar word was a respectful mode of address native to the southern colonies, and the same accent tinged her speech.
Well, if she can't get past... she'll just sit in the empty seat next to him like it's nothing at all.
no subject
Then she sits. And, like a cracked door closing to erase the slit of a view into the adjacent room, that surprise disappears from off of his face. In it's place, the handle of the cane in the shape of a snarling dog has flicked round. Its muzzle sets between her ribs as a barricade to preserve the inches remaining between her hip and his. Surely she of all people must recognize a ward: Keep your damned distance.
"I hadn't noticed."
no subject
She neither leans closer nor pulls away, like the pointed jab — both the physical and spoken one — isn't something to be rebuffed by just yet. Acknowledging the threat, but not being reactive to it.
"And yet," she says after a moment. "There are other, far less sonorous places here at the Hall you could enjoy the quiet of, if you really wanted to. So: here to observe of your own volition, or been ordered? My condolences, either way."
no subject
"Your condolences?" It's a little biting, as if he might laugh and the sound would be the unpleasant kind of humor. The eye he turns on her is very dark, shaded so thoroughly by the heavy edge of his brow and the tilt of his head away from the windows across the vestibule and the dreary weather outside of them so as to appear nearly black.
"My, whatever outpost you crawled out of must be very far removed from the civilized world if that's how you feel about it."
(Is, strictly speaking, no answer at all to her question.)
no subject
Pela holds the serious expression through the clerk returning once again through the door, calling more names but still not hers, before she breaks into a grin with a soft laugh.
"Those are the things you mainlanders really think of the south, aren't they? I'm only having a bit of fun. I don't know what's put the adminstrators so far behind pace, but I don't think it is supposed to backed up like this with so many of us here. It makes me wonder what's going on."
She looks back at the knot of people filling the room. "Peace, sorré. I only sat because no one else had, no other reason. That is a lovely ward you're using, by the way. Who cast it, might I ask?"
no subject
(It is not a witch's ward, not really. More a magic of repulsion, cleverly laced into the metal and wood, and gently humming there where it's laid across her ribs. If he were to twist his hand, or jam it closer, perhaps the enchantment would nip discouragingly out as surely as if that cast dog's mouth had bitten.)
In answer to this question, the man smiles. It's not a particularly pleasant expression: all teeth, and a certain cold heat in the dark cast of his eyes which suggests he disapproves of its general trajectory.
"The administrators are behind," he says. "Because little girls and boys with their enfeebled Talents keep crawling from out of colonies like yours begging to be taught proper magic, and the College can't keep up with them. Some imbecile in the House proposed slaying two birds with one stone, and now Drayton's been saddled with sorting both the apprenticeships and you lot to satisfy the House's audit. But you're right. They're being shockingly incompetent with this whole horse trading business. Maybe when you go in, you can use your seashells to demonstrate some cleaner way of doing things."
So that's a no to her question, then.
Only after, impulsively, does he ad (far more conversationally, as if he's forgotten to that he's been insulting her)— "Who knows. Maybe they're starting a new war."
Wouldn't that be nice.
no subject
"If I see any enfeebled boys and girls," she returned. "I shall be sure to tell them of your deep disapproval. Coming here was not my first choice either, but it wasn't... let's say, it wasn't phrased as a request."
Her sunny demeanor finally dims a little when he mentions the possibility of a war. It was a thought that had crossed her mind on the sail to Somerset as well, despite there being no real evidence yet of it. But to recall so many outlying magicfolk when seemingly nothing else had precipitated it? It wasn't completely implausible.
"Well," she says finally, looking back at the throng of waiting bodies in the room. "That would be disagreeable news, if it were true."
no subject
"Don't say that too loudly here, girl. Someone will overhear and call you a treasonous dissenter." The stick remains exactly where it is, but the man leans over by a half degree as if to relay a secret to her in confidence despite the assembly in the hall about them: "They still hang people for that charge, you know."
no subject
The clerk returns and "Cintri, Pela!" is among the calle out. Thus named, she slides back a few inches in order to clear his cane tip, the fabric of her shirt still minutely concaved where he'd had it pressed.
"Thank you for the diverting company. Perhaps we'll run into one another again."