Dextra shifted irritably in her chair. Cordell and his trendy furniture! Apparently being able to sit comfortably was not trendy.
Of the whole group, only Cordell himself looked relaxed. Hayley was too worked up over the Council's new ruling that animal familiars were not permissible witnesses in a dispute, and the little Shih Tzu dog she'd brought with her was reflecting that agitation. Garrett seemed distracted, probably thinking about the pretty young female witch fifteen years his junior who had recently moved here to Ottawa for a better job. Not that anyone was supposed to know that. About the relationship, anyway; the girl's parents were both Fellowship witches from out in the Atlantic provinces, and the local Fellowship had been duly notified of her arrival. Now that was the proper and polite way of things: to announce yourself to the established witches of the area. Judging by the stiffness of Albert's posture, his arthritis was acting up again, but then again, it might just be this so-called furniture that had probably been designed by the Inquisition, or perhaps it was the proximity of strong emotion—Albert liked everything logical and calm.
“The ruling only applies to Ontario,” Cordell said patiently to Hayley. “And it won't last long. Animal familiars are too useful to dismiss out of hand, and in time, the Council will see that. We'll work on it.”
Cordell alone, of the five present, had a seat on the Council, but it wasn't the Council he referred to as the 'we' in that last sentence. Let the Council deal with the day-to-day problems of maintaining peace and safety among several hundred Fellowship witches in Ontario. That was its function, and it did it reasonably well—there had been only a handful of incidents in the last few years requiring some hasty damage control. That left others free to pay attention to other matters. Including genuine threats.
“It's not just their usefulness,” Hayley grumbled. Intelligent and talented as the girl was, Dextra wondered again whether she might not be a little too young and volatile for this group. No, be fair, she reacted so strongly only when animals were involved, a reflection of the direction of her strongest abilities. She was otherwise sensible and pragmatic. “They have rights too, and that ruling basically disregards their status as individuals.”
“We'll do what we can to fix it,” Cordell repeated. “Other business?”
“That Terevan kid,” Dextra said. “We have a problem. Margaret Lyndell's made contact with him, and her grandson, the computer one with next to no magic, is moving into the Terevan house.”
“Oh great,” Albert sighed. “A rogue who's under the protection of the damned Lyndells.”
“Those idiots Liann and Randolph probably triggered the whole thing,” Cordell said, frowning. “They dropped in a month ago to try to convince him to accept a mentor. They gave the Council a report on it after the fact, but by then, they'd already muddied the waters. They couldn't convince a street kid to take a handful of cash, let alone convincing a Terevan to be a team player.”
“Ruth Terevan and her sister-in-law Cecilia wreaked absolute havoc,” Albert said. “No sense of propriety, the pair of them, no sense of when to leave things buried and forgotten. Ruth never married, not that any man'd want to try to keep that one in line, and her brother Seth just watched and smiled and never said a word about their behaviour. Right in the face of order and courtesy and the rule of law, everything the Fellowship was created to enforce.”
Dextra put the sexism of the statement down to the generation gap, and decided to overlook it; Hayley started to protest, but Dextra caught her eye and shook her head, and the younger woman bit her lip. Besides, there was a certain amount of truth in it, although she'd been too young herself to be aware of much of it.
“I suspect he was enjoying it too much,” Cordell said dryly. “Jacob Terevan, the son, has never been any trouble. I'm not, in fact, certain he's aware of our existence, or of anything beyond his plants.”
“He's obviously aware of his wife, if they have a kid,” Garrett pointed out.
“What matters here,” Cordell said, shooting Garrett a dark look for daring to interrupt, “is that Dextra's research suggests this Terevan is going to be a lot more active and potentially a problem.”
“How so?” Hayley asked. “There are no Fellowship witches living in that area, we're mostly in Toronto and Ottawa and Windsor. If he won't join us, it's his loss.”
“It isn't that simple,” Dextra said. “He has access, unsupervised, to the Terevan library, which is by all accounts one of the truly great magical libraries on this continent. The Terevans have always liked books and research, with a few exceptions. But they've always been stubborn and opinionated, unwilling to cooperate with the Fellowship or its predecessors, and no one knows exactly what that library contains. We've already seen indications that he's practising techniques we've never heard of. One of those has made so much of a splash in the local energy fields that it has interfered badly with my skills—more than once, in fact—and working around it is a headache. Even that might not be so bad, except that the direction he's leaning in is becoming clear: he started off doing Tarot readings and such for people...”
“Which you do, too,” Garrett said.
Dextra ignored him. “More recently, he's been taking housecleaning jobs: cleansing old energies, getting rid of liminal presences, things of that sort.”
“He claims to have killed a bogle,” Cordell added. “They're nasty, violent, and powerful, and I fail to see how he could have. However, Dextra confirms it, and it seems to have been with the aid of something he summoned to help him.”
Garrett sat bolt upright, expression indignant. He'd been acknowledged years ago as the Ontario Fellowship's undisputed master when it came to upper-level liminals, and besides, he was still stinging over having lost that troll he’d invested so much into. Dextra didn't find the reaction terribly unexpected.
Hayley's eyes widened. “He can summon something strong enough to kill a bogle? That’s crazy! How could he make something that strong fight? It probably got hurt doing it. And he kept it from just turning on him afterwards?”
“There are things out there that enjoy fighting,” Garrett said. “But if it was easier to encourage it to fight, it would have been harder to keep it from attacking him in turn afterwards. Something less aggressive would be difficult to force into fighting but less dangerous afterwards. Either way, that was just short of suicidal recklessness! What did he summon?”
Dextra spread both hands. “I can't get specifics, which is odd. I'm also finding suggestions that he's negotiating with house-spirits for the old fairy-services—leave out a bowl of milk every night, have good luck, that sort of thing. How on earth he's arranging that with any success, I can't figure out. And he's still very young, not even your age yet, Hayley. If he's doing this now, what's going to happen as he gets older? And what happens to this part of the world if he slips and whatever he's summoning gets free? There are good reasons why the Fellowship has established universal and very tight controls on summoning and binding liminals and elementals.” She inclined her head in Garrett's direction, acknowledgement that he'd added a couple of new protection techniques to the Fellowship repertoire. “The stronger ones are dangerous, unreliable, and unpredictable.”
“What's he telling the people who are paying him to clean their houses?” Garrett asked.
“Truth,” Dextra spat. This was the part that she found personally offensive in the extreme. “Ordinary ungifted humans, being given proof of liminals that he’s bargaining with or chasing off or killing. That goes directly against one of the primary tenets of the Fellowship, and puts us all at risk.”
“Well, what can we do about him?” Albert asked logically. “Clearly the child needs a leash on him before he endangers a huge number of people. Seth must have slipped a gear, leaving him alone with no mature supervision.”
“Which doesn't make any sense,” Cordell said. “Both Seth and his daughter-in-law Rosa are known for their dealings with liminals and elementals of a considerable range, although they've had sense enough to not venture into summoning anything too strong. It seems peculiar to me that they would leave their only child and grandchild with no guardian, no teacher, nothing. He's living there alone with an ungifted human friend or boyfriend—and now with Margaret's grandson, I suppose. The Council is willing to accept that nothing has been detected and that Liann and Randolph came across nothing, but I find it improbable on Seth and Rosa's part.”
“They didn't,” Dextra said flatly. “There's something in that city, something so strong that anything I try just slides over it and liminals either don’t come back or refuse to talk. And I'm certain it's connected somehow with him.”
“All right, so we need to do something,” Garrett said. “I'm sure half the Fellowship is angling to snag him as a student so they can boast about it and use him for their own status, but we don't actually need him to become an active part of the Fellowship, do we? All we really need is to make sure one of us can keep an eye on what he's doing, and keep him on the straight and narrow. Courtesy and cooperation are probably hopeless from a Terevan.”
“So we offer him peace from the rest of the Fellowship, plus, say, access to our libraries and resources, in return for allowing one of us to supervise and act as mentor, to keep him from doing anything dangerous to himself or to others,” Dextra mused. “Along with explaining the reasons behind the primary tenets, which will hopefully be enough to get him to follow them. That has a chance of working, I think. Approaching him now is going to be tricky, however. I think I should go, I think I have a good feel for who he is and how he thinks, after doing so much research on him.”
“I'd come with you, but one is likely to seem less threatening than two,” Cordell said. “Maybe take him out for dinner somewhere nice, I'll cover it. Most people are more amenable with a belly full of good food. And there's no way to tell how much influence this companion of his has, so if you can get him alone, so much the better.”
Dextra nodded. “Dinner sounds good. The girls can watch the shop without me for a couple of days.”
“And we need to get together for a report as soon as you get back,” Albert said.
They fell to discussing details.
* * *
Cordell's solution had been simply to pay for a train ticket plus return the next day, and to put a room in a hotel that included a good restaurant on his credit card. Dextra couldn't find it in her to object, as she gazed out at the view over Lake Ontario, through the dining room's floor-to-ceiling windows. She took a sip of water, and didn't bother to look at her watch. Christian would be here soon, her instincts told her. They were silent, though, as to what would happen then.
Ah, there he is. It was a shame he was so much younger than her and seemed to prefer men to women—he really was fairly attractive, in an androgynous sort of way. Confident as a cat, he followed the maitre d' through the room to Dextra's table. Hard to decide whether the black jeans, dark green suede vest, and unbleached cotton shirt represented an effort to look good, or were simply everyday wear for him. A small cell phone was clipped to his belt, where he could reach it in a hurry. She'd chosen her own simple and casual dress, in varying shades of grey and blue, in hopes of seeming nonthreatening.
She gave him her warmest smile, as the maitre d' said maitre d' things and departed. “Christian?”
He nodded, expression revealing nothing at all except a hint of wariness.
“I'm Dextra. Have a seat. I'm glad you decided to come.”
He took the chair across from hers without hesitation. “It was a hard invitation to turn down.”
“Shall we eat before we talk?”
Now he paused. “I think I'd prefer to talk first.”
Dextra shrugged. So much for Cordell's idea. “All right. A drink, at least?”
“Just a coke would be great. It's kind of warm out there, even with the breeze off the lake.”
A waitress approached, and Dextra sent her to get two glasses of cola.
“I seem to be popular this summer,” Christian said, while they waited.
“Unfortunately, your family appear to have kept you rather isolated,” Dextra said sympathetically. “It's taken this long for everyone to realize you'd been left alone.”
“Oh, I'm still in contact with my family pretty regularly, and the Lyndells are practically family anyway. And I'd hardly say I'm alone.”
The waitress brought the drinks, and Dextra told her they'd order later.
“Alone in the sense of having no witches around on a regular basis,” she said, once they were alone again.
Christian sighed. “Is this another sales pitch on joining the Fellowship? Because if it is, I already said no. I have better things to do with my time and I don’t think we have compatible philosophies.”
Hm, this one was too alert to be fooled for long. “Cards on the table? Yes, I'm part of the Fellowship. I am, however, nothing like the pair who visited you. There are many of us, within the Fellowship, who have nothing to do with the power-struggles and status games. We tend to agree with the basic principles of the Fellowship, that there are situations mundane law is simply not designed to cover, and that order is preferable to anarchy, and that it’s useful to have support in the kinds of crises that mundane authorities wouldn’t be able to comprehend. You could ask Margaret Lyndell about that, she'll confirm it. That there are those of us who feel that way, I mean.”
“And?” Christian said warily.
“Research is valuable, but even more so when it's shared. Four of my friends and I would like to make a bargain with you.”
“Yes?”
“You can have access to five more libraries, admittedly not as good as your family's, all in the general area of Ottawa—we could work out logistics one way or another. And the resources and experience of five witches with talents different from yours—one of them the Fellowship’s leading expert on dealing with liminals, in fact. My skills with divination are useful to many other witches, including our liminal expert when he’s preparing for a major summoning. And you’d have peace from the rest of the Fellowship, they'll leave you alone.”
“At what price?”
“Supervision. Fellowship history suggests that some of what you've been doing is dangerous, not only to you but to innocent bystanders. I do understand how easy it is to get caught up in the thrill of a new discovery, and not always consider the consequences. The Fellowship has also developed some safeguards that aren't found elsewhere.”
“Supervision,” Christian repeated, expressionless. “The right to tell me what I can and cannot research.”
“Guidance within it, at least, for the sake of the safety of all concerned.” He was obviously intelligent, why was he failing to grasp this central point? “There are things that can be summoned which turn on their summoners and can then go on to wreak havoc over quite a large area. There are things that can lead you astray without your ever realizing you're now obeying them. These are directions it's extremely hazardous to delve into. But in other directions, you'd have even more resources to use, and you'd be given recognition for your discoveries and honoured for them.”
“I take precautions,” Christian said quietly. “My family spent so much time teaching me about safety that it's only in the past couple of years I've really been able to start learning other things. And in the past year and some, I've been free to research and test anything I please, with no one's permission. In that year, no one has been harmed. I see no reason why anyone should be in the future.” He crossed his arms on the table, and said, very clearly and deliberately, “I will not join the Fellowship. Not even peripherally. Not for bribes, not for threats. Not now or ever.”
“This isn't a bribe,” Dextra protested. “It's your best chance at freedom and safety combined.”
“No. My best chance at freedom and safety is to have nothing at all to do with the Fellowship. My parents and grandparents were absolutely right about that.” He stood up. “Leave me alone.”
“Christian!”
Without bothering to reply, he walked away.
Damn him! What was so difficult to comprehend about putting himself and a large chunk of southern Ontario in unnecessary danger, purely for the sake of his pride?
Well, they certainly had to do something.
Meanwhile, maybe she could keep this trip from being a total loss. This close, she might have better luck pinpointing the presence that had been evading her searches.
Dextra shifted irritably in her chair. Cordell and his trendy furniture! Apparently being able to sit comfortably was not trendy.
Of the whole group, only Cordell himself looked relaxed. Hayley was too worked up over the Council's new ruling that animal familiars were not permissible witnesses in a dispute, and the little Shih Tzu dog she'd brought with her was reflecting that agitation. Garrett seemed distracted, probably thinking about the pretty young female witch fifteen years his junior who had recently moved here to Ottawa for a better job. Not that anyone was supposed to know that. About the relationship, anyway; the girl's parents were both Fellowship witches from out in the Atlantic provinces, and the local Fellowship had been duly notified of her arrival. Now that was the proper and polite way of things: to announce yourself to the established witches of the area. Judging by the stiffness of Albert's posture, his arthritis was acting up again, but then again, it might just be this so-called furniture that had probably been designed by the Inquisition, or perhaps it was the proximity of strong emotion—Albert liked everything logical and calm.
“The ruling only applies to Ontario,” Cordell said patiently to Hayley. “And it won't last long. Animal familiars are too useful to dismiss out of hand, and in time, the Council will see that. We'll work on it.”
Cordell alone, of the five present, had a seat on the Council, but it wasn't the Council he referred to as the 'we' in that last sentence. Let the Council deal with the day-to-day problems of maintaining peace and safety among several hundred Fellowship witches in Ontario. That was its function, and it did it reasonably well—there had been only a handful of incidents in the last few years requiring some hasty damage control. That left others free to pay attention to other matters. Including genuine threats.
“It's not just their usefulness,” Hayley grumbled. Intelligent and talented as the girl was, Dextra wondered again whether she might not be a little too young and volatile for this group. No, be fair, she reacted so strongly only when animals were involved, a reflection of the direction of her strongest abilities. She was otherwise sensible and pragmatic. “They have rights too, and that ruling basically disregards their status as individuals.”
“We'll do what we can to fix it,” Cordell repeated. “Other business?”
“That Terevan kid,” Dextra said. “We have a problem. Margaret Lyndell's made contact with him, and her grandson, the computer one with next to no magic, is moving into the Terevan house.”
“Oh great,” Albert sighed. “A rogue who's under the protection of the damned Lyndells.”
“Those idiots Liann and Randolph probably triggered the whole thing,” Cordell said, frowning. “They dropped in a month ago to try to convince him to accept a mentor. They gave the Council a report on it after the fact, but by then, they'd already muddied the waters. They couldn't convince a street kid to take a handful of cash, let alone convincing a Terevan to be a team player.”
“Ruth Terevan and her sister-in-law Cecilia wreaked absolute havoc,” Albert said. “No sense of propriety, the pair of them, no sense of when to leave things buried and forgotten. Ruth never married, not that any man'd want to try to keep that one in line, and her brother Seth just watched and smiled and never said a word about their behaviour. Right in the face of order and courtesy and the rule of law, everything the Fellowship was created to enforce.”
Dextra put the sexism of the statement down to the generation gap, and decided to overlook it; Hayley started to protest, but Dextra caught her eye and shook her head, and the younger woman bit her lip. Besides, there was a certain amount of truth in it, although she'd been too young herself to be aware of much of it.
“I suspect he was enjoying it too much,” Cordell said dryly. “Jacob Terevan, the son, has never been any trouble. I'm not, in fact, certain he's aware of our existence, or of anything beyond his plants.”
“He's obviously aware of his wife, if they have a kid,” Garrett pointed out.
“What matters here,” Cordell said, shooting Garrett a dark look for daring to interrupt, “is that Dextra's research suggests this Terevan is going to be a lot more active and potentially a problem.”
“How so?” Hayley asked. “There are no Fellowship witches living in that area, we're mostly in Toronto and Ottawa and Windsor. If he won't join us, it's his loss.”
“It isn't that simple,” Dextra said. “He has access, unsupervised, to the Terevan library, which is by all accounts one of the truly great magical libraries on this continent. The Terevans have always liked books and research, with a few exceptions. But they've always been stubborn and opinionated, unwilling to cooperate with the Fellowship or its predecessors, and no one knows exactly what that library contains. We've already seen indications that he's practising techniques we've never heard of. One of those has made so much of a splash in the local energy fields that it has interfered badly with my skills—more than once, in fact—and working around it is a headache. Even that might not be so bad, except that the direction he's leaning in is becoming clear: he started off doing Tarot readings and such for people...”
“Which you do, too,” Garrett said.
Dextra ignored him. “More recently, he's been taking housecleaning jobs: cleansing old energies, getting rid of liminal presences, things of that sort.”
“He claims to have killed a bogle,” Cordell added. “They're nasty, violent, and powerful, and I fail to see how he could have. However, Dextra confirms it, and it seems to have been with the aid of something he summoned to help him.”
Garrett sat bolt upright, expression indignant. He'd been acknowledged years ago as the Ontario Fellowship's undisputed master when it came to upper-level liminals, and besides, he was still stinging over having lost that troll he’d invested so much into. Dextra didn't find the reaction terribly unexpected.
Hayley's eyes widened. “He can summon something strong enough to kill a bogle? That’s crazy! How could he make something that strong fight? It probably got hurt doing it. And he kept it from just turning on him afterwards?”
“There are things out there that enjoy fighting,” Garrett said. “But if it was easier to encourage it to fight, it would have been harder to keep it from attacking him in turn afterwards. Something less aggressive would be difficult to force into fighting but less dangerous afterwards. Either way, that was just short of suicidal recklessness! What did he summon?”
Dextra spread both hands. “I can't get specifics, which is odd. I'm also finding suggestions that he's negotiating with house-spirits for the old fairy-services—leave out a bowl of milk every night, have good luck, that sort of thing. How on earth he's arranging that with any success, I can't figure out. And he's still very young, not even your age yet, Hayley. If he's doing this now, what's going to happen as he gets older? And what happens to this part of the world if he slips and whatever he's summoning gets free? There are good reasons why the Fellowship has established universal and very tight controls on summoning and binding liminals and elementals.” She inclined her head in Garrett's direction, acknowledgement that he'd added a couple of new protection techniques to the Fellowship repertoire. “The stronger ones are dangerous, unreliable, and unpredictable.”
“What's he telling the people who are paying him to clean their houses?” Garrett asked.
“Truth,” Dextra spat. This was the part that she found personally offensive in the extreme. “Ordinary ungifted humans, being given proof of liminals that he’s bargaining with or chasing off or killing. That goes directly against one of the primary tenets of the Fellowship, and puts us all at risk.”
“Well, what can we do about him?” Albert asked logically. “Clearly the child needs a leash on him before he endangers a huge number of people. Seth must have slipped a gear, leaving him alone with no mature supervision.”
“Which doesn't make any sense,” Cordell said. “Both Seth and his daughter-in-law Rosa are known for their dealings with liminals and elementals of a considerable range, although they've had sense enough to not venture into summoning anything too strong. It seems peculiar to me that they would leave their only child and grandchild with no guardian, no teacher, nothing. He's living there alone with an ungifted human friend or boyfriend—and now with Margaret's grandson, I suppose. The Council is willing to accept that nothing has been detected and that Liann and Randolph came across nothing, but I find it improbable on Seth and Rosa's part.”
“They didn't,” Dextra said flatly. “There's something in that city, something so strong that anything I try just slides over it and liminals either don’t come back or refuse to talk. And I'm certain it's connected somehow with him.”
“All right, so we need to do something,” Garrett said. “I'm sure half the Fellowship is angling to snag him as a student so they can boast about it and use him for their own status, but we don't actually need him to become an active part of the Fellowship, do we? All we really need is to make sure one of us can keep an eye on what he's doing, and keep him on the straight and narrow. Courtesy and cooperation are probably hopeless from a Terevan.”
“So we offer him peace from the rest of the Fellowship, plus, say, access to our libraries and resources, in return for allowing one of us to supervise and act as mentor, to keep him from doing anything dangerous to himself or to others,” Dextra mused. “Along with explaining the reasons behind the primary tenets, which will hopefully be enough to get him to follow them. That has a chance of working, I think. Approaching him now is going to be tricky, however. I think I should go, I think I have a good feel for who he is and how he thinks, after doing so much research on him.”
“I'd come with you, but one is likely to seem less threatening than two,” Cordell said. “Maybe take him out for dinner somewhere nice, I'll cover it. Most people are more amenable with a belly full of good food. And there's no way to tell how much influence this companion of his has, so if you can get him alone, so much the better.”
Dextra nodded. “Dinner sounds good. The girls can watch the shop without me for a couple of days.”
“And we need to get together for a report as soon as you get back,” Albert said.
They fell to discussing details.
* * *
Cordell's solution had been simply to pay for a train ticket plus return the next day, and to put a room in a hotel that included a good restaurant on his credit card. Dextra couldn't find it in her to object, as she gazed out at the view over Lake Ontario, through the dining room's floor-to-ceiling windows. She took a sip of water, and didn't bother to look at her watch. Christian would be here soon, her instincts told her. They were silent, though, as to what would happen then.
Ah, there he is. It was a shame he was so much younger than her and seemed to prefer men to women—he really was fairly attractive, in an androgynous sort of way. Confident as a cat, he followed the maitre d' through the room to Dextra's table. Hard to decide whether the black jeans, dark green suede vest, and unbleached cotton shirt represented an effort to look good, or were simply everyday wear for him. A small cell phone was clipped to his belt, where he could reach it in a hurry. She'd chosen her own simple and casual dress, in varying shades of grey and blue, in hopes of seeming nonthreatening.
She gave him her warmest smile, as the maitre d' said maitre d' things and departed. “Christian?”
He nodded, expression revealing nothing at all except a hint of wariness.
“I'm Dextra. Have a seat. I'm glad you decided to come.”
He took the chair across from hers without hesitation. “It was a hard invitation to turn down.”
“Shall we eat before we talk?”
Now he paused. “I think I'd prefer to talk first.”
Dextra shrugged. So much for Cordell's idea. “All right. A drink, at least?”
“Just a coke would be great. It's kind of warm out there, even with the breeze off the lake.”
A waitress approached, and Dextra sent her to get two glasses of cola.
“I seem to be popular this summer,” Christian said, while they waited.
“Unfortunately, your family appear to have kept you rather isolated,” Dextra said sympathetically. “It's taken this long for everyone to realize you'd been left alone.”
“Oh, I'm still in contact with my family pretty regularly, and the Lyndells are practically family anyway. And I'd hardly say I'm alone.”
The waitress brought the drinks, and Dextra told her they'd order later.
“Alone in the sense of having no witches around on a regular basis,” she said, once they were alone again.
Christian sighed. “Is this another sales pitch on joining the Fellowship? Because if it is, I already said no. I have better things to do with my time and I don’t think we have compatible philosophies.”
Hm, this one was too alert to be fooled for long. “Cards on the table? Yes, I'm part of the Fellowship. I am, however, nothing like the pair who visited you. There are many of us, within the Fellowship, who have nothing to do with the power-struggles and status games. We tend to agree with the basic principles of the Fellowship, that there are situations mundane law is simply not designed to cover, and that order is preferable to anarchy, and that it’s useful to have support in the kinds of crises that mundane authorities wouldn’t be able to comprehend. You could ask Margaret Lyndell about that, she'll confirm it. That there are those of us who feel that way, I mean.”
“And?” Christian said warily.
“Research is valuable, but even more so when it's shared. Four of my friends and I would like to make a bargain with you.”
“Yes?”
“You can have access to five more libraries, admittedly not as good as your family's, all in the general area of Ottawa—we could work out logistics one way or another. And the resources and experience of five witches with talents different from yours—one of them the Fellowship’s leading expert on dealing with liminals, in fact. My skills with divination are useful to many other witches, including our liminal expert when he’s preparing for a major summoning. And you’d have peace from the rest of the Fellowship, they'll leave you alone.”
“At what price?”
“Supervision. Fellowship history suggests that some of what you've been doing is dangerous, not only to you but to innocent bystanders. I do understand how easy it is to get caught up in the thrill of a new discovery, and not always consider the consequences. The Fellowship has also developed some safeguards that aren't found elsewhere.”
“Supervision,” Christian repeated, expressionless. “The right to tell me what I can and cannot research.”
“Guidance within it, at least, for the sake of the safety of all concerned.” He was obviously intelligent, why was he failing to grasp this central point? “There are things that can be summoned which turn on their summoners and can then go on to wreak havoc over quite a large area. There are things that can lead you astray without your ever realizing you're now obeying them. These are directions it's extremely hazardous to delve into. But in other directions, you'd have even more resources to use, and you'd be given recognition for your discoveries and honoured for them.”
“I take precautions,” Christian said quietly. “My family spent so much time teaching me about safety that it's only in the past couple of years I've really been able to start learning other things. And in the past year and some, I've been free to research and test anything I please, with no one's permission. In that year, no one has been harmed. I see no reason why anyone should be in the future.” He crossed his arms on the table, and said, very clearly and deliberately, “I will not join the Fellowship. Not even peripherally. Not for bribes, not for threats. Not now or ever.”
“This isn't a bribe,” Dextra protested. “It's your best chance at freedom and safety combined.”
“No. My best chance at freedom and safety is to have nothing at all to do with the Fellowship. My parents and grandparents were absolutely right about that.” He stood up. “Leave me alone.”
“Christian!”
Without bothering to reply, he walked away.
Damn him! What was so difficult to comprehend about putting himself and a large chunk of southern Ontario in unnecessary danger, purely for the sake of his pride?
Well, they certainly had to do something.
Meanwhile, maybe she could keep this trip from being a total loss. This close, she might have better luck pinpointing the presence that had been evading her searches.
