Duelling Magicks - A Kat Short Story
A short story set after Kat Book 1, but before Kat Book 2
Dedicated to Becky Boyer, with many thanks
If there was any prospect in the world more horrifying than a shopping trip, it had to be a shopping trip with my stepmother. And if there was anything worse than shopping with Stepmama, it was shopping with her and both of my older sisters for my oldest sister’s upcoming wedding--also known as Stepmama’s New Obsession.
My oldest sister might be the closest thing to a mother that I had ever known, but even for Elissa, I could only go so far. I would have stepped between her and a rampaging highwayman in a heartbeat, but when it came to spending hours upon hours in a millinery shop while Stepmama insisted on testing every fabric and Elissa speared me with Looks of Guilt every time I let out a sigh...well, enough was enough.
Luckily, I had a plan.
Unluckily, my sisters knew me well.
“Hmm,” said Angeline. “She doesn’t look ill.”
“I am!” I said, and forced myself to lie still on my bed. Both of my sisters were leaning over me, one on each side, to study me from every angle. It made me feel like a caged animal. “Miserably ill. Just feel my skin!”
“I’d rather not,” said Angeline. “I don’t know what you used to prepare yourself for us, but you’re positively dripping.”
“Oh, Kat,” Elissa said. “You didn’t actually use the beef drippings Mrs. Watson was saving for our supper, did you?”
“No!” I said indignantly. “Of course I didn’t.”
I’d used a combination of butter and water, actually. But it didn’t seem to be doing me much good.
I scowled as I took in the skepticism on both of their faces: Angeline with one dark eyebrow raised in sardonic disdain, and Elissa with her pale, angelic face furrowed in a mixture of distress and exasperation. Now was one of those moments when I desperately wished I could have begun my proper magic lessons with the Order of the Guardians by now, to learn how to use the magic I’d been born with to safeguard good Society. Unfortunately, the initiation process was taking longer than I’d expected. I still didn’t know a single magic-working that would give me a good fever just when I needed it most.
Society, in the form of myself, would just have to go unprotected for now.
“Fine,” I said. “Tell Stepmama I’m not ill after all, if you want. But you know perfectly well that it’s a waste of time dragging me along on today’s shopping expedition. It’s not as if I’ll actually be helpful.”
“There’s an understatement,” muttered Angeline.
Elissa said, “But darling, how will we know which fabrics suit you? You know you need a new gown for the wedding.”
“I know.” I rolled my eyes. Stepmama was determined to make this the finest and most splendid ceremony our village had ever seen. It was a good thing that Elissa’s fiancé was so besotted, he was happily paying all the bills. “I’ll wear whatever gown Stepmama chooses, I won’t complain, and I’ll do anything she asks for the next month, I promise. But please, please, please don’t make me shop with her!”
“Well…” Elissa worried at her bottom lip.
“Oh, let her,” said Angeline. “You know she’d only be in the way. And even if Stepmama does choose a hideous gown for her, it’ll pay her out perfectly for being such a coward.”
I snorted. “I’m not the one who’s a coward. Who still hasn’t had the courage to ask Frederick Carlyle what his intentions are?”
Color mounted on Angeline’s cheeks. “Frederick--I mean, Mr. Carlyle--is Papa’s student. That’s all there is to it. I’m not--I wouldn’t--”
“You summoned him here with a true-love spell,” I said, “and he knows it, now. You two will have to discuss the matter at some point.”
“I’m sure he--I mean, I don’t want--I mean…”
It was pure, undiluted pleasure to see my superbly confident older sister tangling herself up on her own tongue, for once. Even Elissa couldn’t manage to hide a smile at the sight.
“I wouldn’t worry, Kat,” she said. “I’m sure Angeline has had plenty of conversations with Mr. Carlyle on the subject. All those long, long walks around the churchyard…”
Angeline divided her glare between us. “Those were perfectly proper,” she said to Elissa. “Even you couldn’t complain! We were in full view of the house the entire time.”
“Mmm,” I said. “What about that time I found the two of you sharing a private pot of tea in the parlor?”
“What?!” Elissa’s mouth dropped open. She looked genuinely scandalized, and I felt a twinge of guilt. I might actually have gone too far, this time.
“It was only a pot of tea!” Angeline said. “Kat, you wretch--”
“It really was,” I assured Elissa hastily. “It was perfectly proper. They were sitting on separate couches, and the door was at least three inches open.”
“Oh.” Elissa’s shoulders relaxed. “You should have mentioned that part first. But Angeline, you must have a care for your reputation. No matter how harmless your actions, if any gossip should begin in the neighborhood--”
“Giiiirls!” Stepmama’s voice sounded below, and I breathed a sigh of relief at the interruption. If Elissa had had enough time to deliver one of her endless lectures on propriety, I knew exactly whom Angeline would have blamed for it.
Normally, Stepmama wouldn’t have dreamed of being so common as to shout for us, but Stepmama had limits, too, and climbing up the ladder to my attic room was one of them. She claimed the hopeless disorder in my bedroom gave her palpitations. So she stood below the trapdoor and caroled, “Are you ready yet?”
“Very,” Angeline called back. There was a snap in her voice like an arctic chill. “Come along, Elissa. We’ll leave Kat to enjoy her day alone. All alone.”
“If you’re really certain…” Elissa began.
“Oh, I am,” I said, and pushed myself up to a sitting position, reaching for a flannel as they left. I was so busy wiping off the greasy butter-and-water mixture from my face, I barely even noticed Angeline muttering something under her breath on her way out.
I didn’t realize anything was wrong until I tried to swing my legs off the bed.
They didn’t move. At first I thought I was imagining things. Then I braced myself on the mattress, pulled with all my might…and fell flat on my back as my legs remained firmly planted on the bed. They might have been painted there, for all that they budged.
I gritted my teeth. Every so often, it was truly annoying to have a practicing witch as an older sister.
“Just wait until I have my revenge,” I muttered.
My words fell uselessly into the empty air, with no one there to hear me. Elissa and Stepmama were already well out of hearing range, and it was useless to expect my brother Charles to come if I called. If he hadn’t already seized upon Stepmama’s absence to lunge to the local pub, he would be sleeping in the room he shared with poor Frederick Carlyle. Charles slept like a log…one that snored very loudly. Not at all surprisingly, Frederick generally escaped their room as early as possible every morning. That meant that he, too, would be too far away to hear any cries of mine by now.
Luckily, I didn’t need anyone to rescue me. I could do that for myself, no matter what Angeline thought.
I closed my eyes and focused. Now that I was paying attention, I could smell the unmistakable scent of lilacs hanging in the room--Angeline’s signature scent, which accompanied all her spells.
We’d all inherited Mama’s scandalous talent for witchcraft, and my older sister was a mistress of the art. But I was something better: I was a Guardian.
I summoned power up through my immobile legs, through my chest, and into my head until the pressure filled me to bursting. I let it out:
“NO!”
The spell shattered. My body went limp, suddenly empty of magical power…but my legs swung neatly to the floor. I grinned smugly as I stood up and brushed down my gown.
Take that, Angeline.
She might have expected me to spend all morning trapped here like a limpet clinging helplessly to my mattress, but she had been wrong. And what else had she said? “We’ll leave Kat to enjoy her day alone. All alone.”
Just for that, I knew exactly what I was going to do with my freedom. Elissa and I had given Angeline plenty of time to sort things out with Frederick Carlyle, and she had wasted it all on long, flirting walks and rambling conversations all about their childhoods and their favorite plays and everything else except the only question that mattered: was he going to marry her or not?
It was time for me to find out.
The scent of lilac clung to me as I climbed down the ladder from my attic, an irritating reminder of Angeline’s attempt. Honestly, she should have known better by now than to imagine that any of her spells could stop me. What had she been thinking? It was all part and parcel of how little my sisters respected me, even after all that we’d been through this summer.
I was grinding my teeth when my brother’s door opened, only inches from my nose.
“Hello, Charles.” Not heading to the pub, then, after all. Charles’s buttery blond hair stuck out in multiple directions, he was wearing a ridiculous crimson dressing gown he’d mysteriously acquired in Oxford, and he looked like a bear startled out of hibernation.
Yawning thunderously, he walked straight past me without a word or even a nod of acknowledgement.
Honestly. I sighed pointedly and brushed past him to hurry down the stairs.
At this hour, Frederick Carlyle would just be finishing his morning study session with Papa. If I timed it right, I would arrive just as he was losing all his wits in the battle against Papa’s latest Latin treatise, leaving him vulnerable to a surprise attack. Normally, I would consider that taking unfair advantage…but Frederick Carlyle, like Angeline, was dangerously intelligent. If I wanted to ferret out his secrets, I’d have to take every advantage I could get.
The door to Papa’s study was closed, but I could hear the murmur of voices in the familiar Latin cadence--and then laughter, from both men. Good God. If Frederick Carlyle was actually cracking jokes in Latin with Papa now, he really had learned a great deal over the past few months.
But then, so had I. I knocked on the door and opened it with my most innocent, I’m-only-a-sweet-young-girl look on my face.
“I beg your pardon, Papa,” I began, “but if you wouldn’t mind…”
I trailed off. There was no point talking, after all, when no one was listening.
“Quomodo ‘amorem’ declinas?” Papa asked Frederick Carlyle, his eyes crinkled with amusement.
“Amor, amoris, amori, amorem, amore,” Frederick Carlyle replied--apparently hilariously, from the way they both chortled over it.
For all the notice they’d taken of me, I might as well have been invisible. I gritted my teeth. Of course I expected this kind of behavior from Charles. But from Papa? And Frederick?
I cleared my throat loudly and slapped my hand against the door. “In case you didn’t hear me the first time…” I began.
Frederick blinked and turned around. Finally!
He frowned and looked straight past me. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was looking through me. “I thought the door was closed,” he said.
Papa looked around, blinking. “Hmm,” he said. “Perhaps the wind has blown it open.”
I rolled my eyes. A less windy day I had never known, but that was typical of Papa. As far as he was aware, it could have been thunderstorming outside, while he sat happily buried in his study.
I, however, was not so unaware of my surroundings. And I’d finally made an important realization: there was a reason that the scent of lilac still clung to my clothes.
Angeline hadn’t underestimated me after all. I’d broken one of her spells upstairs…but a second, hidden one had remained. Apparently, it rendered me both invisible and inaudible. No wonder she’d predicted that I would spend the afternoon alone.
I was reluctantly impressed…but I knew exactly what to do. I stepped back into the hallway, out of sight of the door. I closed my eyes and drew up the power through my body, focusing hard on the spell that hid me and my voice. Now that I knew it was there, I could feel it hovering around me like a cloak, invisible but impenetrable. I fixed on it with all my might and whispered: “NO!”
The spell burst like blossoms exploding around me. Ha. Angeline might have had her joke, but it hadn’t lasted long. I stepped back into the doorway.
“Kat!” Papa smiled at me from his armchair. “I didn’t hear you coming, my dear.”
Frederick looked from me to the open door with raised eyebrows and a curious half-smile. “I’m not sure whether I did or not.”
Yes, Frederick Carlyle really was dangerously clever. I only smiled and bobbed a quick curtsey to Papa. “I beg your pardon, Papa, but I need to steal Mr. Carlyle away for a little while.”
“Really?” Papa frowned and looked to the clock in the corner. “It can’t be time for more food yet, can it? I’m certain I only just ate breakfast. And if Frederick is to have a full morning’s tutoring--”
“It has to do with Stepmama’s shopping trip,” I said. “You know how many preparations there are still to be done for the wedding. So many practical chores to be accomplished. So many…”
Success. Papa’s eyes were already glazing over. “I see,” he said. “Yes, yes, my dear. Quite. I understand perfectly. Frederick, you don’t mind helping out, do you? I’ll just…er…that is, I’m sure this Sunday’s sermon must be somewhere in this pile of papers…”
“Don’t worry, Papa,” I said. “We’ll take care of everything without you.”
Frederick Carlyle followed me out of the room without a word of complaint. It was only after he’d closed the door to the study that he shook his head at me. “You are a wretched scamp, Kat. Your stepmother left the house half an hour ago, didn’t she? How did you wriggle your way out of accompanying her?”
“Through sheer brilliance,” I informed him. “And a combination of butter and water. But that’s not the point!”
“No?” His lips twitched. “I’m rather curious about the butter and water, actually.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “This is our chance.”
“It is?” His gaze kept returning to my cheek, in the most disconcerting fashion. It was only when I reached up to rub it, wondering if some of the butter-and-water solution had remained, that he finally looked away, putting one hand up to his mouth to stifle a cough.
I didn’t feel any dampness on my cheek, so it must have been my own imagination. I shrugged aside the whole issue and moved back to what really mattered: “Stepmama and Elissa will be out of the house for hours. It’s the perfect time for you to finally pay back your debt.”
“I beg your pardon?” His gaze slid back to my cheek, as if magnetically compelled, then fixed on my eyes, much more comfortably. “Which debt was this? I haven’t been gambling in my sleep, have I?”
“No,” I said. “That would be Charles. I’m talking about the lesson you promised me. Remember? Back at Grantham Abbey? You promised you would teach me to shoot.” It was the perfect excuse to get him talking and acquire a useful skill at the same time.
Frederick Carlyle’s eyes widened. He began to laugh. “I’m sorry, Kat,” he said, “but your sisters would shoot me if I did that. You know that I’m right.”
Argh! If I’d been just a few years younger, I would have stomped my foot with frustration. “I won’t tell them,” I promised.
“They’ll find out anyway.”
That was undeniably true. I scowled. Even when my sisters weren’t here, they still managed to ruin my fun. I said, more out of frustration than real hope, “You did promise.”
“And I will,” he said, “when you’re older. But in the meantime, how about a compromise?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What sort of compromise?”
A wicked grin spread across Frederick Carlyle’s face. “I happen to know where your brother has hidden a billiards table.”
Billiards? I let out a sigh of pure awe at the very idea. Elissa would swoon if she knew I was playing billiards like a gentleman. Stepmama would have a Spasm. And Angeline…
Angeline would burn with envy.
“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
But I couldn’t let myself forget my mission. Even as we walked through the creaking house to the abandoned spare room, the one with all the leaks in the roof--and, apparently, the secret billiards table which I’d never even guessed at--I was turning around different possible approaches in my head.
Elissa would counsel subtlety and tact, I was certain. Angeline…well, for once, Angeline was too afraid of the possible answer to ask any questions at all.
I wasn’t afraid, though. And no matter what Angeline thought, I was strong enough to break all her spells and do things that frightened even her. So I said, as we walked into the spare room, “There’s just one thing I have to ask you before we start.”
“Mmm?” Frederick was looking around the spare room with a speculative glint in his eye. Sunlight shone through the windows, casting light across the dust-covered trunks and broken furniture. “This room isn’t too bad in daylight, you know. If someone hammered up the leaks in the roof…” Frowning, he held out his arms as if to measure the room’s dimensions. I couldn’t imagine any more tedious distraction.
“It’s a matter of family honor,” I said, and crossed my arms.
“I beg your pardon.” Frederick stopped examining the room and looked back at me. “In that case, you have my full attention.”
“Good,” I said. Suddenly, though, the words felt too big and important to come out of my mouth. Did I really want to ask them? What if the answer was ‘no’? After all those long walks he and Angeline had taken…after her very first spell, cast to summon her true love…after all their flirting, and all the utterly atypical sighing and blushing my practical older sister had done…
What if he said no, after all?
I thought of Angeline, and I raised my chin. I had to ask the question, no matter what…because if he said no, I would simply have to murder him.
“Well?” Frederick Carlyle asked. “What is it that you need to ask me, Kat?”
I looked him in the eye. “Are you going to marry my sister?”
He let out a crack of laughter. “Is that all? From your expression, I thought it must be something fatal—or at the very least, some prank of yours gone wrong. I assumed you must have maneuvered me out of my lesson to help you sort it all out before your sisters could discover it.”
I glared at him. In his own way, he could be every bit as maddening as Angeline herself. “There is no prank,” I said, through gritted teeth. “There’s only that question. So, what is your answer?”
“Well, of course I’m going to marry her,” Frederick Carlyle said. “She summoned me with her true-love spell, didn’t she? Now she’s stuck with me, like it or not.” He flashed me a grin. “Just don’t tell her that, if you please. I plan to put it more romantically when I propose.”
I slumped with relief--and a fair bit of triumph. Even the faint smell of lilacs that still lingered from the last spell only added to my pleasure, as I imagined Angeline’s reaction to the news. “When are you going to propose? If you need me to help--”
“Thank you, Kat, but I’ll manage it on my own,” he said breezily. “But not until my twenty-first birthday, unfortunately. If I do it before then, it won’t be legal. We’ve had enough confusion already--I don’t want to take any more chances along the way.”
“That sounds fine to me,” I said. My shoulders felt a thousand times lighter--especially as I pictured the look on Angeline’s face when she found out that I’d known well ahead of time exactly what would happen and when her proposal would arrive. Should I let her in on the secret when she came home today? Or should I wait a little longer, to torture her?
Frederick Carlyle spoke before I could make up my mind. “Now then,” he said. He swept away a dark cloth to reveal a massive, green billiards table that had been pushed to the side of the room and hidden behind crates. It was a shocking sign of equally-well-hidden depths to my brother Charles to realize he’d actually gone to the unheard-of-for-him trouble of getting it in there in the first place.
My future brother-in-law grinned at me as he picked up a billiard cue. “Well, Kat?” he asked. “Are you ready to learn the single skill every gentleman most needs to survive the most tedious of houseparties?”
“I certainly am,” I said.
And my grin didn’t fade until well over an hour later, when I was on my way back to my own room…and caught sight of my faint reflection in a window.
Oh, Lord. I hurried into Angeline and Elissa’s room. The mirror on their dressing-table confirmed my worst suspicions.
I hadn’t caught all of Angeline’s spells after all.
The faint scent of lilacs taunted me--my older sister, as always a step ahead.
I stuck my tongue out at my own reflection with its single bright green cheek. No wonder Frederick hadn’t been able to stop glancing at it. Papa, no doubt, hadn’t even noticed. But all the same…
That did it.
If nothing else, I had made up my mind. I would definitely let Angeline wait to find out her own good news by herself.
But I’d still gotten out of the shopping trip and learned a forbidden skill. So all in all, green cheek or not, today still measured as a definite success.
And tomorrow…
I grinned evilly at my green-cheeked reflection.
…Tomorrow it would be Angeline’s turn. I would make very certain of it.
-END-
About Kat Book 2 | Read Chapter One of Kat Book 2 | About Kat Book 1