The door to the room abruptly banged open, Lisette stomping in like a herd of rampaging elephants. “Alric! We’re raining dragon fire on that shitty—oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you’d started the meeting.”
Baldewin was half out of his chair on instinct. Whenever Lisette lost her temper, it was never a good thing, and he wanted to curtail the problem as much as he could.
Alric turned so he could see her, as his back was to the door. Alarmed, he demanded, “What’s happened?”
Lisette took in the occupants of the room, and her expression firmed up again. “You know what, you need to know this, too. King Rodrigo, Evora, Thiago, forgive my intrusion. Have you spoken about the new clan of mages yet?”
“We were just touching on it,” Rodrigo answered. He sighed gustily. “And nothing good has been said about them yet.”
“I’m about to add to the bad,” she announced, marching to the nearest chair. She didn’t sit in it, clearly too agitated to do so. “This morning, I reviewed with Tori all he knows, as I still haven’t quite grasped what all he was taught. The Taavi, his old clan, have their own specialties, I’m sure. But what came out of the conversation is absolutely appalling. The teaching methods of the Taavi Clan are perfectly reprehensible. Tori explained that they are very exacting with their magic. You have to measure the precise weight and power level of each element and do a formula to double check the power level of the spell before you can enact it.”
Evora’s jaw dropped. “That’s insane. Each element will vary a little; that’s to be expected of natural elements. Doing that kind of math every time for a simple spell? Have they lost their minds?”
“It gets worse,” Lisette informed her, voice like a glacier. “If you can’t do the math correctly, or if there’s something off in your result, you cannot use the spell. So, anyone who is math-challenged, for whatever reason, isn’t allowed to do any magic whatsoever.”
Voice rising, Evora spluttered, “But magic isn’t all math! It’s power and instinct.”
“Doing that takes all of the intuition out of it,” Cameron joined in hotly. “I mean, I’m the first to say, ‘yay math,’ because that’s my engineering brain, but come on! If you do stuff rigidly by formula, you never make any innovations!”
“Tori’s dyscalculic.” The room fell silent. Baldewin lifted his head, his fury matching Lisette’s. “Was he allowed to do magic at all?”
“No,” she denied flatly. “No, they wouldn’t allow him more than basic spells. It’s why he keeps telling us that he knows what to do in theory but has no practice at it. It’s why he left this clan; that and he’s gay. Those two things pushed him out of his home.”
Shit. Tori really should have told him all of this. No, he couldn’t blame his sweet Tori for not saying it before. He was likely terrified of not keeping his place here, the place he’d just earned. He didn’t know enough of the Burkhards yet to realize that they would never hem him in or judge him the way the Taavi obviously had. He didn’t have a full understanding that magic in this clan was completely different from what he was accustomed to.
But Baldewin would make it very, very clear later that he had nothing to fear here.
“Fire and destruction,” Lisette repeated.
“Done,” Baldewin agreed flatly.
Rodrigo groaned and flopped back into his chair. “I was incredibly excited on the flight over here, thinking of an entire clan that we could absorb into our own. And now, I’m not sure I want anything to do with them. I’d like to speak with Tori directly before coming to any decisions.”
“We’ll introduce the two of you,” Alric promised him. There was a tic in the corner of his jaw as he demanded of Baldewin, “Did you know of this insanity?”
“I saw hints of it. I guessed that things weren’t great because of how he flinched. But he hadn’t told me all of that.” Not yet. He might have, given more time. They’d both been a bit giddy, the newness of a relationship turning everything rose-colored. Baldewin hated that reality came crashing down this quickly.
“What the hell is wrong with them?” Evora stood abruptly. “Lisette, I want to talk to him about this.”
Lisette nodded, looking as if she was still grinding her teeth in anger. “I don’t blame you. But let me have some time with him, first. I don’t think he fully understands how odd his clan’s teaching methods are. I want to show him that the rest of the world, at least, isn’t that cruel.”
Evora nodded reluctantly. “Alright.”
For mages, magic was an integral part of the self. Baldewin understood that, and he couldn’t help but ache for the man.
To be denied a part of himself was obscene. It must have been like functioning without a limb, even though it was still attached.
Baldewin had to fight to stay in the room, his instincts demanding he go immediately to Tori. To somehow soothe the damage done.
Lisette had the right idea. Some destruction was called for. Dragon-style.
Baldewin was early for his lunch date. He was not supposed to be meeting Tori in the dining hall for another thirty minutes, but the meeting with Rodrigo had gone better than he’d expected—once they moved past discussions of whether to destroy the Taavi Clan in a fit of outrage.
Of course, he shouldn’t have been too surprised by Rodrigo’s eagerness since the ice dragon was excited by the prospect of finally finding mages for his own clan.
But now, Baldewin feared how Tori was going to take the news that he was officially invited to the fancy state dinner with the two kings.
It was going to be a relatively small affair, only about a dozen people present, but he knew the mage was already nervous around Alric and Cameron. Throw in Rodrigo and his royal cortege, and Tori was likely going to hide in his room and tell Baldewin that he was on his own.
But he had no doubt in his mind that Tori could handle the two kings with ease. From what he’d seen already, everyone who’d met Tori adored him.
Maybe a few dragons adored him a little too much, but that was likely Baldewin’s jealous dragon growling in his ear. Word had spread fast—likely thanks to dynamic duo Ravi and Cassie—that Tori was his gefreogen. No dragon would dare encroach on Baldewin’s mage.
It took a little asking around and too much searching for his dragon’s peace of mind, but he finally located Tori in one of the greenhouses. As he stepped inside, he was hit with the sweet scent of blossoming flowers in the damp, warm air. The first row was filled with hyssop bushes, their tall stalks covered in bright violet flowers. The blooms and leaves were used in a variety of cleansing spells. Next to them were the star-shaped blue flowers of the borage, which were used against fevers and aches.
He continued to the next row, where he found his target moving easily down a row of myrtle, with its feathery white flowers and glossy green leaves, to a collection of bright purple vervain.
Tori was humming a tune that Baldewin didn’t recognize. In front of him was a small cart that held a variety of tools and instruments for his trade. Here and there, he stopped and pruned a bit of dead growth away from a vervain plant with a set of shears or trimmed off some of another plant and placed those bits into a jar to be used in potions and spells.