Captive Magics

1 - The Meeting

The love of Leander's life was a highly accomplished sorceress, but had he possessed this information he probably would have approached things no differently. Sorcerers were, after all, known for ineptitude and promises of great power that were never delivered upon, and some people didn't even believe they existed. As a consequence, in recent years it had become a popular joke to call someone a sorcerer when they were rich and talentless, and it was widely suspected the office of the Grand Mage existed for the sole purpose of housing idle younger sons of nobility. Leander had even less awareness of magic than he did of the woman he would one day call his soulmate, for never once had it featured in his life. This was, of course, all before the party.

Though only twenty-seven, Leander liked to think he had done enough to distinguish himself in his career that his potted history wouldn't be too short. He could be summarised like so:

Leander Perilloe. Young, handsome, and a moderately charming conversationalist. A man's man and the sort of fellow you could rely on in a sticky spot. Prior to doing his bit for the war effort (discharged) and the civil service (dull), he was privately educated, the longest part of this education being Lembitt's Seminary where he spent his formative years alongside other sons and daughters of the urban middle classes.

There had been a girl of the same age sitting on the girls' side of the classroom at Lembitt's, he vaguely remembered, with a great quantity of reddish hair and two very large, well-lashed deep blue eyes (he remembered them glowering) set amongst her freckles, but anything of note she did was soon forgotten by him. Life moved on and he moved with it, eventually, because the war had been going on for years now and his friends were joining up, leaving the civil service to try his hand at soldiering. War was an epic, a panoply of heroic deeds in the company of brothers-in-arms. The stuff of myth and legend. He could tell he was going to be brilliant at it.

Quite unexpectedly, he found he was really not as much of a soldier as he had predicted, the result of this being that in the middle of the winter party season he was suddenly back in the capital as a free and unencumbered civilian. None of this came up in conversation at social events upon his return. None of it particularly crossed Leander's mind either: he was a sterling denialist.

"Going back, then? When the old injury's healed isself?" Gunny asked around a pipe and a moustache. Gunny was much better suited to the army than Leander and was proudly wearing his captain's reds. They were at a party where Gunny was enjoying telling people of the trauma of war, which was why currently Gunny and Leander were left alone in a corner. Leander resented it. He wanted to be in the middle of the party, both pretending to himself he had never seen war and impressing people with his tales of it. Neither were possible with Gunny there.

"Think that's it for me," Leander said with a whole pile of nonchalance. He was holding a glass of something strong, though he disliked it because the taste burned, and leaning stoically against the dado rail. Gunny made a 'too bad, too bad' noise, shaking his head at it all, and they both looked regretfully at Leander's bandaged right foot. Then Leander looked regretfully at the company.

Early that morning, Leander had woken from a horrible dream which he wished to forget. He had never actually seen the death of Lance Corporal Norbert Smyth but he had seen the body, and been given enough gory detail from Gunny and his other tactless comrades for his sleeping imagination to reconstruct it for him. Gunny had got him the invitation to this party, for which he was insufficiently grateful, and now he was desperately attempting to forget the dream he had woken in a sweat from this morning. He needed a good distraction, and Gunny wasn't cutting it. At some point in the party, however, Leander's wish came true, and they ended up moving into a throng of people. To Leander's left, and to his delight, a blushing posse of young, unattached, elegant ladies were fanning themselves.