Page 76 of Prince of Masks
“You should have just stayed home,” I murmur, and my voice keeps below the hum of our parents on the seats opposite, muttering and whispering about whatever they consider on Father’s phone.
I want a phone.
Oliver sags in the seat. “It’ll be fine with enough tonics. I pushed myself too far, but not so far that I need to waste the day in bed.”
I nod with understanding.
All magic has… limitations.
It is a drain of energy, just as running is. But the drain of pushing one’s magic too far for too long, it is both mental and physical.
It’s calledthe lassitude limit, and it’s different in every witch.
Mr Younge catches a fever that keeps him to bed for days on end.
Dray gets the bleed. I once saw him on a sickbed in the infirmary when I was visiting James, and Dray was bleeding silently from his eyes, nose and ears.
Oliver suffers migraines. If he doesn’t stop then and there, and start treating the migraine, he can lose his sight and ability to stand, and he becomes a crumpled, agonised thing for days.
Serena threw up once, all over the atrium at Bluestone. Every step she tried to take up the stairs to the infirmary, it was a joltthrough her body, and she sicked herself silly, and her face was purple from all the pressure building through her body.
Asta had a seizure in the mess hall. It was bad. Knocked her head on the side of a table, blood everywhere.
The cost of using too much magic is paid for by the body—and the mind, because for a while, the mind is slower, thought is slower.
Most often, the lassitude limit hits the witches at Bluestone, where the practice is overdone for so many classes and now, the preparations for the tests. But since Oliver is clearly in lassitude limit now, beside me, I suspect that he’s been practicing for his second-semester exams at home, and he pushed just that bit too much.
If there is a silver lining to not having magic, then it’s that I don’t suffer the lassitude limit like Oliver does now.
He brings his hand to the bridge of his nose, like he’s about to pinch it—but somehow can’t summon the energy, so just rests his hand over his eyes until the Range Rover reaches the end of the stone paved driveway.
Unlike at Elcott Abbey, there is no centrepiece fountain at the end of the drive. Rather, it’s a round pond circled with damp stones.
My gaze cuts to the koi-fish pond as I step out of the car, and my faint smile tugs at the sight of the swans waddling by.
The black swans are free roaming all over the grounds, and they never fail to lighten my mood.
I linger my smile over them for a beat before I turn and follow my parents to the stone steps and, at the top of them, the double doors.
Before the Range Rover can even draw away to park over at the hedges, the doors open—and suited servants stand stiff, hands at their backs, at the entrance.
The butler waits for us in the foyer, fitted out in the French style, of golds and pastels.
Amelia brought her flair with her into the marriage, into the home she became the mistress of, and if I let myself wonder how much it cost to decorate and refurbish the entirety of Thornbury Park, even I might blanch.
James once said that, if he had the print of my brother, my father, then he would create mountains of gold and buy whatever he wanted, mansions and planes and cars.
That is fine.
Understandable.
But he said it with such ease, with a dismissive flair that told me he didn’t understand. All wealth impacts the economy.
Take my father, for instance. He must abide his own lassitude limit, and so if he was able to produce one bar of gold every second day for a year, and kept the gold hidden—nothing would happen.
But if he meant to use that gold, just to buy more homes, to purchase another jet, to decorate an entire estate in a costly, opulent style, then those actions would have a knock-on effect.
It would impact the economy, the value of currency across the whole world would change…
