Page 14 of A Door in the Dark

The trio exchanged glances before obeying. They undid support straps and slid out of their seats, clearing away from the massive instrument. All of them exited in silence. Ren watched the way the oldest musician kept glancing back, and guessed the seventeen-string belonged to them.

Until now.

Theo Brood ran his pale fingers down the polished wood. Ren knew his ancestors had made a name for themselves through warfare. During the Expansion Age hundreds of magic-barons set out in search of priceless underground veins. The Broods just happened to be aboard one of the four ships that landed on the shores of what would one day become Kathor. It was pure luck that they—and the other founding families—discovered the most valuable vein of magic in the world.

All the families played their part. As the others extracted the magic and built the actual city, the Broods bloodied the noses of anyone bold enough to knock at their door. Theo’s grandfather notoriously doubled Kathor’s territory in his lifetime, though his methods for dismantling the northern farming tribes earned him a war tribunal. Later his father would design the canal system that displaced thousands of people from their homes. Theo had clearly inherited the same talent for claiming things that did not belong to him.

“A favorite song?” he called, turning around. “Anyone?”

Ren’s jaw tightened. She didn’t know what Theo was planning, but she sensed it would be far more obnoxious than the rest of the party had already been. A few boys were shouting for him to play “Beatrice’s Ballad.” Theo laughed with good humor, but a princeling like him would never stoop so low for his grand act. He let the moment breathe, happy to tease the crowd.

“ ‘The Winter Retreat’!” someone called.

He seized on that. “A perfect song before the break. Come! Let’s listen!”

The crowd watched as Theo rolled back his sleeves. The seventeen-string stood nearly as tall as him, and twice as wide. A bit larger than a traditional piano. He set his flattened palms against the wood and magic surged to life. There was a drunken cheer as the other students felt the first wave hit them. Ren was the only one sober enough to take note of how it formed.

She’d always been good at sensing magic. It was a matter of familiarity and pattern. If you repeated a spell enough times in an archive room, you could memorize the shape of it in the air. The senses of a gifted wizard started to adapt to those patterns. And no one on the balcony had logged more practice hours than Ren. Theo was using a memory spell. It had a nuance she didn’t recognize—and could not study further—as he layered a second spell over the first.

Tethering magic? She could barely trace the connection as he drew a line between the instrument and the building. Then a third and final layer. At first she thought it was a simple levitation spell, but the traces had a telling curve to them.…

“He combined it with orbiting magic,” Ren whispered.

She sucked in a breath as she realized what he intended to do. The music came first. Theo turned a smile back on his expectant crowd, motioning with his hands like a conductor. There were a few gasps as the instrument began playing itself. Ren saw it now. A memory spell—adjusted for an object rather than a person. It recalled its own movements from the last time it had played “The Winter Retreat.” Such a clever and beautiful and useless spell.

But that was only the beginning. As it reached the chorus, the seventeen-string floated into the air. Up first, over the railing, and then out into the night. Ren tore her gaze from the magic just long enough to look at the musicians, still standing at the back of the crowd, matching expressions of horror written on their faces.

She turned back. Theo was leading the crowd in song now. He sang off-key, changing the lyrics as he liked, and Ren felt her disgust growing with each passing second. The instrument continued floating away until the drop would no longer be a few stories. It had passed the small, well-manicured lawn in the back. Now its path carried it beyond the edge of the Heights.

If the instrument fell, it would plummet down to the city below.

Ren watched the seventeen-string follow an expected path. She guessed that it would orbit around until it touched back down where Theo had first started the spell. Clever magic.

Except…

She retraced the fissures in the air. Magic always left a trail. Her mental hands found the thread she was looking for. As the booming chorus grew louder, she traced the connection and finally saw his mistake. Theo had not tethered the seventeen-string to the actual building. He’d missed his mark by a matter of inches. That bond would have held. It would have worked. His aim had been clumsy and drunken, though. The actual thread attached instead to a metal frame that was purely for aesthetic purposes. And the frame was already starting to bend.

Ren’s eyes swung back out to the instrument. The farther it traveled, the stronger the pull. Logic and mathematics dictated what would happen next. She reached for Timmons. Her friend was clapping in rhythm with everyone else. “Get down!”

Her cry was the only warning. There was a massive snap of metal as the frame behind them finally gave way. The glass on either side shattered against an invisible punch of force. Screams echoed. Most of the crowd ducked just as the metallic frame ripped free of the building entirely. It came snarling overhead. Theo watched with drowning eyes as his magic failed. The frame missed him by less than a breath. And the seventeen-string fell. Everyone stumbled to the edge of the balcony to watch. Ren’s mind raced through possible spells.

Levitation? No, too much momentum.

A blast of force? No, that would create a wider radius of potential damage.

By the time she thought of the third spell—a featherweight reversal charm—the seventeen-string had vanished into the clouds. Ren’s entire body went still. She imagined the Lower Quarter. The streets she’d walked through just that morning. Would the instrument land on Peckering’s workshop? A building like the one her mother lived in? Dropping an apple from this height could smash someone’s skull. An instrument the size of a seventeen-string…

They were too far up to hear a crash, but Ren stood there at the railing, quietly praying no one would be killed. She was desperate to go down and find out what kind of damage had been done. She expected the same of everyone else. A mad rush to the doors. Instead Theo Brood turned back to those gathered in silence. He shrugged those gilded shoulders and raised his glass for a toast.

It was the first time Ren had ever wanted to murder another person.

“To picking a better song next year!”

And the rest of the crowd shouted the same.

9

Morning light whispered across Balmerick’s campus.

---