Leena escorted Ash
out of the castle. Lady Charlotte asked her to do it to protect her from
Winston’s few manservants who were loyal enough to try to harm her. Ash
glimpsed one of them and wondered if the wrinkly, sour-faced man had some kind
of magic that he would try to use against her. She couldn’t imagine any other
way he could best her.
“Hmm, they’re all
like that,” Leena said, when she caught Ash watching the man as they crossed
the main courtyard of the castle. “Only the desperate are willing to put up
with the pitiful wages my father offers, and they’re the only ones Lathia
doesn’t terrify.”
Ash didn’t feel any
tingling or stinging in her two stars, but she suspected using her two
birthmarks to detect the presence of magic might be a dangerous kind of
mistake. When she asked if the manservants had any magic, Leena laughed under
her breath.
“If they ever had any, they
foreswore it or stifled it, working for my father. He’s the sort who won’t allow
anyone around him to be more powerful. People say my mother’s family has magic
in their blood, but what fledgling magic she had faded away after she married
him.” She didn’t continue until they had crossed the dancing meadow that lay
between the castle’s outer walls and the first of the pastures for horses and
cattle. “My patron fears that the leach potion still exists, and my father or
perhaps his father obtained a large supply of it, and they erased what magic my
mother had, and I might have had.”
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