The Chain (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #3)(43)

Along another set of shelves, he came across a bright green tome called Spellbreaker Lineages and beside it, to his sardonic amusement, a book entitled The Royal Households. It hadn’t been on his list of titles to pick up, but in flicking through the contents page, it looked as if it might be useful. As far as Alex could tell, it was a detailed history of the royal mages. Intrigued, he added it to his growing stack, figuring it might give him some insight into the beautiful, white-haired woman and the mysterious hybrid of the Head, who was somehow related to that exquisite creature. He wondered hopefully if there might be a passage inside the book that explained how that had come to be.

With a decent haul in his hands, Alex moved back toward one of the small reading areas and set the books out on the sleek, circular table in front of him. Conscious of how exposed he was, out in the open of the empty library, he decided he ought to set up a perimeter around himself, to hide his work from prying eyes. Slowly, he let the twisting tendrils of silver and black coil around his fingers, before sending them out to form a thin, crackling sheet of anti-magic around him. It thrummed quietly in the air as he constructed a rudimentary shield around himself, making sure it wasn’t detectable as he dimmed its glow to an almost imperceptible sheen. It worked like a two-way mirror; he could see out, but nobody could see in—or so he hoped. If anyone came too close to the barrier, he knew they’d be able to sense it, but he hoped he’d be able to dart into the stacks and hide before that happened.

Once he was sure he wasn’t visible to anyone who might catch sight of him on the walkway, he reached out and picked up the biography of Leander Wyvern, desperate to start with the history of the Spellbreaker he felt he almost knew, from reading the words of his final days and learning of his fate. It wasn’t a huge book, but Alex could not quell the excitement he felt for what might be inside. Taking a deep breath, he opened it.

It began with Leander’s heritage and made mention of the six Great Houses of the Spellbreakers, one of which was the House of Wyvern. Reading the other, familiar names, Alex couldn’t help thinking about his own, unknown father, and hoping that somehow he had belonged to one of those Great Houses. Of course, there were hundreds of other Spellbreaker lines, but Alex wanted, secretly, for his father to have been from one of the Great ones, if only to make his own lineage more exciting.

He read through a bit more of Leander’s heritage, but it was information Alex had already learned. As he flipped through page after page, a sinking feeling began to creep through him, that there wasn’t much in the biography he didn’t already know. That was the problem with one-sided history—there was only ever one account, repeated over and over again.

For a moment, Alex thought about giving up and reading something else, but he persevered, scanning each chapter for something new. It was only as he came to the back few pages of the book that the read started to bear fruit, growing a little more colorful as it delved into the personal life of Leander Wyvern. Alex raised an eyebrow as he scanned over a section that remarked upon Leander’s penchant for non-magical women. Apparently, he was known to have a strong affection for these ordinary women, despite it being frowned upon to fraternize with people of non-magical origins.

Alex wasn’t exactly surprised by this bigoted mindset, though it made him think of Helena’s warning comments about others in the villa not being so welcoming of outsiders—perhaps some noble mages still upheld the values of the past, he thought, as the biography said.

It made him smile to think of the heroic Spellbreaker as something of a Casanova, wooing whomever he pleased, regardless of what they were. Intrigued by this new facet to Leander’s character, Alex read on:

Though he never married, it is thought Leander Wyvern had a favored mistress from the non-magical world; however, the rumors have never been confirmed and the woman has never been identified. Whether it was a tale spread simply to mar the man’s reputation, or it was the very real truth of a notorious Lothario, we will never know. What we do know is, he was an eligible Spellbreaker in his time: a man of considerable fortune, a heroic warrior with great skill on the battlefield, the heir to the House of Wyvern, and a tall, powerful, genetically blessed individual. He certainly made the ladies swoon wherever he went, yet remained a bachelor until his death upon the Fields of Sorrow in 1908. No woman ever garnered a proposal from the legendary Spellbreaker—at least not as far as history is concerned. If there was a woman out there who captured the heart of Leander Wyvern, her name died with him.

Alex frowned, re-reading the part about Leander’s love of non-magical women. It brought to mind unspoken thoughts about Alex’s heritage and the anomaly of his own bloodline. He had the power of a Spellbreaker, there was physical evidence of that, but, as far as he knew, his mother wasn’t one and nor were his grandparents. That meant the Spellbreaker abilities had to have come from his father’s side, but Alex didn’t know what had gone on with his father. He knew his father wasn’t around anymore, but what had actually happened to him was something his mother had never mentioned, because as soon as Alex had begun to ask, she had broken down in tears, silencing the subject from Alex’s lips. At least from that, Alex could guess it hadn’t been something good, though he was still in the dark about the specifics.

Confusion itched at the back of Alex’s mind as he dwelt upon his father and the root cause of his powers. With it, memories of the Fields of Sorrow came rushing back, only adding to the mystery. In the accounts of the Fields of Sorrow he had read and heard, it was assured that every single Spellbreaker in existence had been wiped from the face of the earth. It was written in black and white. Every Spellbreaker. The extinction of a race. Yet he was alive and he was a Spellbreaker; he had the anti-magic to prove it.