Burned by Magic (The Baine Chronicles #1)(44)

“Just peachy. Though I wish I’d eaten more before we got here. Whatever’s under those covered trays smells divine.”

“I’m sure we can help ourselves to the leftovers once we’re finished.” Fenris’s mental voice was tinged with a smile. “In the meantime, stay where you are. Company is about to arrive.”

Sure enough, the mages began to file in one by one. Iannis stood by the entrance to greet them, and while he wasn’t exactly the warm, welcoming host, he also wasn’t incredibly cold either. I listened with half an ear as Fenris briefly gave me a rundown on each of the mages, including their name and position. Unfortunately the room was too well-lit for me to get a good look at any of them from a distance – my panther vision worked best in the dark – so I couldn’t tell whether or not any of them had green eyes.

I thought you’d already concluded that you couldn’t determine which one was your father by eye color alone, a snide voice in my head reminded me.

Yeah, okay, maybe. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t still look, just in case my father did happen to be among these men. There was a remote possibility that the mage who sired me resided in Solantha, after all.

Once all the guests were present and seated – approximately three hundred of them, both male and female – the staff started serving dinner. I tried to ignore the delicious smells of chicken cordon bleu, meat pies, roasted suckling pig, and other forms of deliciousness, and instead tuned into what these pompous bastards in their fancy robes were saying to each other.

“… Illusion is quite spectacular… I even think some of these trees are real…”

“I hear Lord Iannis is considering one of us to fill the Mage Commander’s open position…”

“This roast duckling is just perfection. I need to instruct my chef to get the recipe from Lord Iannis’s kitchen…”

“… does he often use beasts as decorations for his parties?”

I fought the urge to sigh, knowing it would draw attention. I was hearing absolutely nothing of interest. Lowering my head onto my paws I closed my eyes and prepared to take a catnap. By Magorah, but this was a colossal waste of time –

“I heard there was a bombing incident in Catharas.”

My eyes popped open at the sound of a man’s voice, and I looked down to see two relatively young mages sitting directly beneath my tree branch, sipping from glasses of wine and discussing bombings as casually as one might talk about the weather. Catharas was a city north of Solantha. While technically it straddled the border between state lines, it was still too close to home for me.

“Yes, well that’s not very surprising,” the other mage, a female, tittered. “The Resistance has been getting more reckless and crude in their attempts. It was a magic shop they bombed, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right.” The first mage took another sip from his glass of white. “From what I understand, quite a few humans died.”

The female mage sniffed. “Well, that can’t bode well for them. The Resistance might be gaining popularity right now, but if they keep getting their sympathizers caught up in the crossfire, they may soon lose public support.”

“True. If they go on like that, perhaps there will be no need to fight off the Resistance, and its base will simply dissipate.”

Their conversation turned toward more mundane topics, and I tuned them out, mulling their words in my head. I couldn’t deny the truth of them, and anger grew inside me at the idea that the Resistance was being careless enough to cause civilian casualties with their strikes. Could it be that Rylan had anything to do with these barbaric acts? I hoped not, but I resolved to have a talk with him about it the next time I saw him.



I kept my ears open the rest of the night for any more news regarding either the Resistance or the silver murders, but I didn’t hear anything else of interest. Nearly two hours had passed since that last conversation, and my stomach was rumbling in earnest now. If I didn’t get something to eat soon, I was going to crash the serving tables for leftovers, those mages be damned.

“Lord Iannis.” A nasal voice interrupted my train of thought, and my ears swiveled in its direction. “I can’t help but notice that you have yet to make a decision regarding the hybrid Sunaya Baine’s sentence.”

All other conversation in the room seemed to grind to a halt. I turned my head to locate the source of the voice, and saw that it was a bald mage with a handlebar mustache dressed in deep yellow robes. He was seated near the Chief Mage, clearly impossible for him to ignore.

“Yes, I have seen her wandering around the palace quite a bit,” an older mage with a silver beard commented. “Does she not have too much freedom, for a prisoner?”

“I heard that she tried to break out the other night and nearly killed someone,” another mage interjected. “Would that have happened if she were properly confined?”

“Forget confined,” a rotund mage with carrot-red hair and a ruddy complexion chimed in. “She should be executed! Hybrids like her are a danger to society!”

I stiffened as the rest of the mages also began to clamor, tossing politeness to the wind to make their objections about my existence known to the Chief Mage. Who the hell did these pompous *s think they were? My claws dug into the branch, shredding the tree bark, and wood shavings fell to the ground. The longer Iannis sat there and said nothing, the angrier I got. Was he going to cave to the peer pressure and let these bastards have their way?