One
As the Moon has many faces, so too do her magicians.
—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, THE CELESTIAL BODIES
The letter arrived in the night.
Tell no one, the page said. Read it quick. He insisted on seeing the paper go up in flames before accepting his coin. I recognized Roland’s hand immediately, could picture the delicate fingers wielding the quill, the proud stacks of signet rings collected from powerful men. The pink hair he brushed away from his eyes as he wrote.
I read the invitation over again, then tossed it into the fire. The paper curled in on itself, writhing and twisting. Flames leapt up, well fed, and I watched them thrash for a long while, turning my thoughts over. The world outside began to stretch: the clapping of hooves, the strike of knives against meat at the butchers. Still I waited. Only when the sun was undeniable did I start packing my things.
* * *
On the choppy water, in the hull of the rocking boat, I remembered him. My stomach had churned with the ship, so I lay belowdecks on a pallet with my hands clasped over my chest. My girlhood returned to me in the dark.
Roland. Friend. Rival. What else was he to me? His name had gathered weight and influence since we’d known each other as children. Before he became lord chancellor, before his name became synonymous with power, Roland once blushed easily, tides of joy and humiliation sweeping across his face with every compliment. He sometimes played rough and bullied the other children in the palace, but he would shut himself away and cry afterward, deeply ashamed.
Every courtier, even then, loved him by accident. He was a dog they’d shelter for the night, but before they knew it, he’d made a home and was rearranging it the way he liked.
He was too wrecked by his emotions to control his magic the way I could. Often scolded for it. And as time passed, as he emerged from his youth more beautiful than anyone had a right to be, he and Prince Hal would sneak out of the palace and into the city, leaving me behind. I was too young, they said when I begged to come. A girl.
Roland would arrive at tutoring the next morning with bags under his eyes, wine still circulating through his blood, and only a scowl for me. But at night, if he couldn’t sleep, I’d help chase away whatever demons kept him turning.
“Bianca?” he would say softly. “I’m feeling too much.”
I’d lay my hand on his cheek and let fatigue drift from my mind to his. Hal would already be there—Roland often slept in his room. I’d curl up beside them as a cat. The three of us would drift off together. Nestled between us both, Roland could finally sleep. Listening to our breathing, sure he was not alone.
I couldn’t help but hold that version of him in my head as I descended from the ship. The noise and smell of the city overwhelmed. Clouds of dirt were kicked up by hooves. I paid a hefty stack of pennies for a seat in a cart going to the palace. As I ordered my trunks packed inside, fishmongers and noblemen stared. Stared at everything that marked me as strange: the bone-white hair peeking beneath my hood, the eyes shifting from dove gray to opalescent depending on the light. They knew what I was. Some may have even heard my name.
I jumped from mind to mind, eased all the fear I could. As I smoothed the jagged edges of their alarm, they smiled, as if they meant to welcome me all along.
Still, whispers followed me from the docks. The driver, licking a dead tooth on his gum, said he was waiting on another before he’d drive us both to the palace, so I had to endure the murmurs, the sidelong glances, even the children pointing their fingers in my direction.
The other magician took his time disembarking the ship.
A Mercury. Silver eyes and hair at first glance, but there were veins of colors threaded throughout, blues and pinks and reds. He had a wry, thin mouth, dark brown skin, a slight build. He wore a common leather doublet and a feathered cap, carrying little with him as he jumped into the cart beside me.
I wondered if he lived in a court or was for hire. Mercuries coded intricate ciphers and invented new languages, tongues meant to be read or spoken by only a select few. They could turn a wheel inside a mind to make it comprehend a language it had never heard before. I’d experienced this only once, years ago at court, when a visiting Mercury simply placed his hand on mine and suddenly, I could understand every word of Carmingian the ambassador spoke. But just as quickly, the ability slipped away, sounds muddled once again.
With a bow of his gleaming head, the Mercury introduced himself as Oliver.
“Bianca.”
He grinned. “Oh, I know.”
Our driver whipped the skinny palfrey hitched to the cart, and we were off down a side street and along the winding river—the Snake. So called not because of its shape, but because once the waters had been so poisonous, anyone who drank from it fell ill. “I’ve not seen more than one magician in my whole life, and now I have two,” our driver said, looking over his shoulder. “I don’t mind magicians myself, since there ain’t much in my head to steal, in case you get the idea to take a look.”
Oliver snorted. The rumored powers of magicians were widespread, often misleading. But in this case, the driver was right. I could pluck a memory from his mind if I so wished to.
Oliver twisted a coin between his fingers as he stared down the thin, crooked alleyways. I imagined any one of them might lead to the inn where I was born.
I turned back to the near-flooded river. When the court was on the move, it would be full of royal barges roving between town houses and the various castles along the banks. Now the king was in residence at Redhall, his favorite palace. The day was clear. The sun glittered on muddy water, on the jewels around my neck and the amber brocade of my gown.
Every so often on the road, there were dead bodies wrapped in cloth and covered in flies. Plague and sickness—a shadow following the king and his court. Not even Roland could stop it. Oliver hid his face in his sleeve whenever we passed a corpse.
The gesture returned me to another time. Roland, fourteen or so, flinching at the corpses when the court was on progress during a sweaty, stifling summer. It seemed like the entire city had fallen ill. He stared out the window of our coach. Just then a cart carrying a pile of bodies passed by. A single gray hand hung limp. Roland shuddered. “What planet rules death?” he asked.
Prospero frowned. “Saturn. But no magician can raise the dead, Roland.”
Roland bit his lip, then jerked his chin toward me. It was a thrill, as always, to be acknowledged by him. “Bianca lied and said she could.”
“No, I didn’t,” I sneered back. I’d said I could calm someone about to die or help them gather their courage as they slipped away. Prospero always said emotions must be guided steadily down a determined path, just as the Moon changed from crescent to full and back again.
“If Bianca could stop death, then every courtier would kneel at her feet and call her saint.”
Roland leaned his cheek against the carriage window. “No, they wouldn’t,” he muttered to me. “You talk to yourself, and you prefer being a cat or a mouse instead of a girl.”
Then I was lurching out of the past, and there was the river again, rushing by.
Oliver, bored of the silence on the road, turned to me. “You were trained here at court,” he said. “By Prospero himself.”
I nodded. Prospero had been King Richard’s court magician and lord chancellor, but above all, my tutor. My father in all but blood. To everyone’s shock, Prospero had taken two apprentices. First Roland, and then, years later, me. Roland had never forgiven me for it.
Oliver’s cadence quickened as he told me he had been invited to court at the age of seven for an audience with Prospero, but the magician had dismissed him after a demonstration. He hadn’t wanted to live in the palace anyway, he assured me, didn’t want to be taken away from his family so young. He had eventually made his fortune off nobles who required ciphered correspondence. “To write to their mistresses,” he added, “or speak ill of the king. I’ve done well to trade in secrets.” Then he turned to me. “Did you know the prince?”
I struggled with my reply. “Yes, I did.”
“Shame he died. They say he went out riding and dropped dead, all alone in the woods. How many years ago was it now? Two years? Three?”
“Three,” I confirmed.
He looked at me strangely, then asked more questions about my upbringing at court. He was particularly curious about Roland.
Well. It had been an age since I had last laid eyes on him. I now knew him in fragments, if at all. Soon after Prince Hal’s death, Roland had returned to Alvion. An accomplished courtier, he wielded charm instead of a sword, though he was masterful with a sword, too.
Then the gossip turned. The entire court was either falling in love with him or recovering from him. The king favored him above all others, even Prospero. Roland chewed the king’s food for him, then would spit it into his mouth to swallow, like a bird for her chick.
And six months ago, the news reached me up north: Prospero dead. Queen Eleanor dead. Roland named lord chancellor.
“Guard your desires around him as best you can,” I warned Oliver. “He’ll use them against you.”
Oliver gripped the sides of the cart as it jolted beneath us. “This tourney to honor the new queen—what do you make of it? I was told it was treason to deny His Majesty a show of my powers.”
“I’m sure it’s Roland’s doing,” I said. “He’d like to know who could replace him. To survey us.”
When we were children, he would host contests. It would be things he excelled at: dancing, or lute, or archery. I always lost. There were only so many times one can stumble. Scrape their knees. Break a bone. That first humiliation—and each one thereafter—was not forgotten at court. And I had not forgotten, either.
“Are you one to hold a grudge?” Oliver asked.
He was perceptive, of course. A Mercury, master of communication. He would have noticed something in my expression, the way I watched the river like its undertow would drag me down into memory.
“No,” I lied unconvincingly.
Magicians could sense danger coming, the churn of a storm days away. We read the sky so well it nearly whispered to us. And the air was already thick and smelled of rain as we slid beneath the portcullis and into the palace courtyard.
Roland didn’t need to threaten me with treason; I wanted to come. I had prayed for it, even. I had spent years waiting for the king’s banners to crest the hill.
Until I decided to make my own way.
Two
Our kind has many names. Planetborn. Sorcerer. Magician. Wizard. These are interchangeable. Witch remains a common taunt. And coined only in recent years—mind-leech.
—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, THE CELESTIAL BODIES
The throne held no king.
In the great hall of the castle, a tapestry hung on the far wall: knights on unicorn calvary, two white-scaled dragons soaring high above. When I first saw this room as a girl, awestruck at the grandeur of the vaulted ceiling and the size of the hearth, I asked Prospero which battle the tapestry depicted.
“One that has not yet come to pass,” he’d said.
Now the hearth was dead. Guards stood at the doors, wearing livery with swans stitched on the breast, one of Roland’s badges. The great families of Alvion gathered together in tight clusters, their wary eyes flickering to me. My name, traded quietly around the room. I was the only magician here, and I wasn’t sure I could endure the stares. The hands blocking cruel mouths, the long, pale necks that craned as they whispered. If only I had changed the color of my hair and eyes before arriving, no one would know what I was.
It was foolish to think I could return unmasked.
Too late now. Somewhere far away, I felt the ripple of his influence. A door had swung open in the palace, and like a rock thrown in a pond, the movement traveled. Roland, Roland, Roland. Lord chancellor of Alvion. If the courtiers were not murmuring his name, they were holding their breath, waiting for who truly ruled them. Even the dogs begging for scraps in the courtyard fell silent. The herald trumpeted, the door shuddered, and our eyes snapped obediently to the far end of the hall. We curtseyed and bowed in a sweep as we heard the first clip of his boots across the floor.
“Lord Chancellor.”
“Your Grace.”
“Good morning, Your Grace.”
I dragged my sweaty palms across my gown, my heart thundering. I dared then—I looked up. Who he was now slid into place before my memories of him. He strode through the wave of bowed heads without a glance for anyone.
Time had not changed him: His cheekbones were just as sharp, his cleft chin as pronounced, his shoulders as broad. His hair and eyes both a rosy pink—Venus’s color. A single pearl dangled from his left ear, and as he cut a wake through the courtiers, it swung back and forth. Sunlight fell on him, as if he too had been plucked from the sea, still shining with salt water.
The Venus King, they called him. He looked the part.
Following closely behind him were two men I didn’t remember well but knew by reputation, both gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber. They dressed and shaved the king, they poured his wine and fed him lies. Tom Guildford, brother to the new queen, had dark curls, thick eyebrows, and was rumored to have several bastard children by his friends’ wives. Then handsome Wyatt Francis, large as a bear and wearing an obscene number of furs and jewels. I’d been told he drank himself unconscious each night. Close behind them were the men of the privy chamber in lesser favor. I was reminded of ants trailing behind sweets.
Roland spun and sat on the king’s throne, lazing with his head lolled on one shoulder. Silently he surveyed us. The crowd bowed again in unison. “The king is ill,” he said, tapping the velvet armrest. I had forgotten the dulcet tone of his voice. “A pity, for we all wished to see His Majesty tonight. But if he rests well now, he will be in full health for the festivities.”
No one seemed particularly concerned with the king’s absence. When Roland flicked his hand, the harp and drums jumped to life. He watched the musicians dully, and as the dancing began, crooked a long finger at one of his councilors. “Martin, come here.”
A nervous man with a pointed beard stepped up to whisper something. As he listened, Roland nodded with a blank face, but I felt a strike of anger inside of him.
I pushed through the courtiers gathering around him, all eager for an audience. The conversation grew nearly as loud as the music, the men now snapping at each other to hush. I turned my back to them and pretended to study the tapestry along the wall, watching Roland in my peripheral vision. He was sighing now, rolling his head around in a theatrical show of agitation.
“—the queen,” he groaned. “I tire of her childishness.”
Martin stuttered. Wrung his hands. “Your Grace, we told Lord Guildford, this afternoon in fact—”
Roland held up a hand. “If she’s able to dance and smile, then she’ll be here to dance and smile for me, and through me, the king. Yes?”
The man called Martin nodded vigorously.
Another twist of frustration, carefully reined in. Roland’s face betrayed nothing. “Do tell me, while—” He paused. The curiosity in his mind had raised its head, a wolf that had smelled a fresh meal. His lips curled into a smile, and he turned from Martin. Slowly, so agonizingly slow, his gaze tracked through the room.
I should have known better. The nature of his magic was simple. He followed my single, shining desire: I wish to avoid Roland’s notice.
So. I was caught. Would he dangle me before his court?
“I didn’t see you there, Mouse,” Roland said softly.
He knew I’d always hated that nickname. It was bestowed upon me by Hal and Roland when they found me following them one night in mouse form. Transformation was still difficult for me then; I sometimes couldn’t change back for hours. They lured me out with cheese from the kitchens, cupped me in their hands, teased me for days afterward. And so it stuck. I’d always been small and poked around places I wasn’t invited.
I closed my eyes to steady myself and muster my courage. Then I spun around, smiled, curtseyed. Fluttered my eyelashes so he’d know how I loathed him.
He beckoned me forward, and I curtseyed again, lowering myself as he sat raised above. Through gritted teeth: “Your Grace.”
He extended his hand. Every inch of it was covered in jewels. Prospero’s sapphire rested on one knuckle, the king’s signet ring on another. He glanced down at the signet, an instruction. I bent to kiss the cold metal, staring up at him through my lashes.
He appraised me carefully. “How long has it been?”
“Four and a half years.” I hated that I knew, almost to the day.
“And have I changed much?”
“Not at all. You’ve always liked that chair.”
His pale eyes narrowed. Then he laughed, too loudly, and withdrew his hand from beneath my lips. I gaped at the sudden absence. The hollow space where his warmth had been. “You have, though. Greatly. I heard your patron was dead. Sir…” He drew idle circles with his forefinger on the armrest as he thought. “Gregory Stanford, wasn’t it?”
“Stafford.”
Copyright © 2026 by Isabel Banta
