Historical Romantasy

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Spotlight on Unexpected Magic

Unexpected Magic is the first book in the series, Many Kinds of Magic. It is set in the Regency era of another universe—one in which magic is real and has never faded out of the world. And that changes the history of the United Kingdom and the time of the Napoleonic wars in ways both subtle and obvious. For some relevant touch points regarding the historical changes, see the author notes.

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Jasper Thornton was just a child when his mage-gift first surfaced—a powerful gift that delighted his relatives and won him recognition as heir to the Duke of Findlater.

Twenty years on, he is still failing to live up to that early promise, his power still strong, but erratic and unfocused. Now the despair of his family and of the London College of Mages, he has been reduced to running errands for the duke and the Crown.

Cordelia Nettleford is the ordinary daughter of a couple with only sufficient magic to cling onto the fringes of the peerage. Her parents’ hopes and dreams are fully invested in their only son, her younger brother.

Everything changes when Delia wakes up one morning to find that a dragon has hatched out of a hen’s egg and eaten most of the flock. The following explosion of magical manifestations centered on Nettleford Manor includes the birth of a unicorn.  Delia is selected as the unicorn’s maiden.

Sent to bring the unicorn and its maiden to London, Jasper discovers that Delia has one of the rarest gifts of all—and England’s enemies want her and her effect on others.

Falling in love with a lady set aside as the unicorn’s maiden is almost as futile as his unstable mage-gift, but he can’t seem to help himself. He is enchanted by her calm competence, her sense of duty, and her intelligence. He will just have to adore the lady from a distance and do everything he can to protect her.

Until direct danger to Delia sets Jasper’s gift free—and once he has rescued her, he will never allow them to be parted again, whatever the College of Mages and the royal family might say. Or Delia, herself.

 

 

Excerpt from Unexpected Magic

Jasper Thornton, nephew of the Duke of Findlater—and his probable heir if an unreliable magical gift ever amounted to anything—had one of those annoying premonitions that told him nothing. Something was happening. Something that would, at some undisclosed time in the future, have an unknown impact on him.

That was it. No specifics.

Could it be the war with France? On the continent, the battle mage Napoleon continued to conquer territory after territory, and everyone knew he had his eye on Great Britain. There were even rumors that the man was a dragon lord, or that he had a dragon lord in his court—and if that were true, Britain was doomed.

Everyone Jasper knew was desperately hoping it was just French propaganda and would come to nothing, as the rumors several years ago about a Welsh dragon lord had also come to nothing. It was probably untrue. Dragon lords were vanishingly rare, though the Welsh did have a very powerful mage who had taken the name Emrys, after the dragon lord the English called Merlin.

In fact, the only reason there was more than one in the entire world was that they lived for hundreds of years. None of the six currently alive was a European, and the one in Ethiopia, the youngest of the six, had already passed his first century mark.

If it were not for the war, Jasper would visit one of them. Perhaps they had lived long enough to know someone like him, with a powerful gift and no control. But here in Europe, the war dominated everything, although in Findlater’s London mansion, life went on as usual. Jasper had been begging to be allowed to go and fight. Even if his magic was unpredictable and near useless, he could still swing a sword and shoot a gun.

But the duke refused permission, so here Jasper remained, useless gift and all.

He had still been in the nursery when he first worked magic—usually the sign of a strong gift. However, it had never amounted to much. His ability to work a spell changed more frequently than the English weather. His tutors used to complain that he was lazy, undisciplined, just not trying. The duke ordered them to whip him, and that made it worse.

Thank goodness for Mr. Fellowes, the tutor who stayed. The tutor who realized that Jasper was trying as hard as he could to follow magical rules and practices that just didn’t fit his type of magic.

“It is not that Master Thornton does not know the spells, your grace,” Mr. Fellowes had told the duke. “I have observed him closely. His words, his actions, his tone of voice—he does everything precisely as he has been taught, and the results are—at best—unpredictable. Your grace, the young master is strongly thaumadiversus, as those who tested him in childhood discovered. But he has a type of magic that does not work by any rules we have yet discovered. For example, a weather spell for a gentle rain might, in Master Thornton’s hands, give us a day of sunny weather or a thunderstorm, and we can have no idea which.”

The duke had grumbled that such a gift was more like a curse, and Jasper was inclined to agree with him. But Mr. Fellowes was confident there must be patterns and rules to be discovered, even with unexpected magic like Jasper’s. “With further study and practice, my boy,” he had said, “I am hopeful you will learn to control your magic.”

Ten years later, Jasper was still trying.

He could reliably manage to start a fire now. He could levitate long enough to walk over a puddle dry shod, provided it was not too wide. He could cast a truth spell, at least well enough to know whether someone was being honest with him. Though sometimes even that backfired, and the person he was questioning wanted to share their sins all the way back to the cradle.

Still, these were skills most mages acquired in the first year after their magic initially manifested, after which they focused on their particular strengths. Jasper did not appear to have any particular strengths. Or, on different days, for unpredictable periods of time and with frequently undesirable results, he was good at a whole range of different gifts.

Weather working. Invisibility. Levitation. Elemental mastery. Magical beast handling. Scrying. Precognition. Translocation (of objects, sounds, and even himself—though he had given up on shifting living things when pieces of a pigeon he tried to translocate ended up in three different places. He could only be grateful it hadn’t happened the time he translocated himself.) You name it, Jasper could do it. Sometimes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Married love in WIP Wednesday

 

This is an excerpt from Twisted Magic, which I have just sent out to the beta readers. Twisted Magic is book 2 of Many Kinds of Magic, my regency romantasy series, and in this excerpt, the hero and heroine of book 1 are seen discussing the heroine of book 2.

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Delia spent at least part of every day with the magical beasts she had been adopting in the months since her marriage, and it was in the stable block that had been converted to a menagerie that Jasper found her.

He stood for a moment outside of the stall where she was cuddling a kitten that had been born with wings, and so tormented by its brothers and sisters that the farmer’s wife whose cat was its mother had brought it to Delia, “For it’ll need to be hand-raised, my lady, and that I cannot do, what with it being sowing season, and the children being in school each morning, and all.”

That was a dig at the Baradines, for the farmers and their wives had been most indignant at the decree from the manor requiring all children aged between six and twelve to attend three hours of lessons each day. Most of them grumbled about the loss of labor, but none of them dared to openly defy the dragon.

Jasper put his foot down when Delia declared her intention of keeping the kitten in their bed chamber so she could feed it hourly. He deputed the youngest stable-hand to the job, releasing him from all other duties other than keeping the menagerie clean and the animals’ water troughs full.

It had worked wonderfully well. The kitten was healthy and growing, the boy was in heaven, and Delia was considering giving him permanent work as aide to her animal keeper. The poor man was so overworked that last night he failed to latch the cages of the hawk-dogs, and one of them had escaped and wreaked havoc on some of the gardens, digging to hide bones.

Delia had been quite distressed over the extra work that had made for the gardeners, but Jasper had pointed out that they had always intended to give the beasts away once they were old enough, and if they could fly, they were old enough.

“I know you are there,” she said. She always did, though he had been standing still and making no sound. It was the catalyst gift, she had explained. One strand of her power was permanently connected to Jasper, and she had progressed in her control enough that she could follow that one strand to find Jasper wherever he went.

“How is the cat-bird?” he asked.

“Misty is well, thank you,” she replied. The little creature had been sitting purring on her lap, but now stood, stretched, and bounded across the stall to greet Jasper, its wings flapping as it ran.

He bent to scoop it up by a hand around its belly. It had been a mere palmful weeks ago when Delia adopted it, but on a diet of goats’ milk had already grown large enough to hang down both sides of his hand.

Delia had called it Misty for its color—both its fur and the down that covered its wings and the backs of its hind legs were varying shades of gray. He cupped its behind on the palm of one hand, let it lean against his chest, and scratched it behind its ears. It rewarded him with a loud purr.

“At least one of our foundlings shows some gratitude,” he commented.

“Is Persephone sulking again?” Delia asked, sympathetically.

“She is always either sulking or scorning,” Jasper grumbled. “I try hard to sympathize, dear heart. She was, after all, left motherless as a child, neglected by her father and then exiled, and—from what the man who collected her from Shropshire said—alternately ignored and abused by her grandmother. But she has an inflated sense of her own importance and a huge chip on her shoulder.”

“She is not an easy person,” Delia admitted. “I believe she is very unhappy, Jasper. Apart from anything else, it cannot be easy having a traitor for a father. Did her lessons go poorly? I had to leave early, as you know, but she seemed to be working hard.”

Jasper sighed. “Yes and no. She is getting the kinds of result to be expected from a completely untrained and unusual power. She, however, expects perfection, and when her gifts don’t behave exactly as she wishes, she loses her temper. Not with me, I hasten to add. With herself. And then she accuses me of being patronizing when I try to tell her she is doing well.”

The kitten rubbed its head against his hand, clearly indignant he was ignoring it, and he obediently resumed his scratching.

“Our approach to training gifts is not widely accepted,” Delia commented.

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An excerpt for WIP Wednesday – Unexpected Magic, coming soon

This is the opening of the first book in my new series, Many Kinds of Magic. In Unexpected Magic, my heroine’s life is upended all in a day, starting with a miniature massacre in the henhouse.

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On the morning that changed everything, Cordelia Nettleford was woken by a cacophony from the henhouse. The sound of panicked hens squawking blue murder suggested that a fox or a stoat had somehow managed to enter the enclosure, despite the protection charm that should have prevented any such invasion.

Delia groaned, and reached for the clothes at the bottom of her bed. The hens were her special charge—or one of her special charges. No doubt everyone else in the manor was snuggling back down under the blankets, smugly content in the knowledge that it was not their problem.

“And I shall be blamed if this means fewer eggs,” she grumbled, as she dressed any-old-how under the covers, left the bed, wriggled her toes into an extra pair of socks, grabbed a warm wrap, lit her lantern with one of the fire spells that waited on the mantel, and hurried downstairs.

The hens kept up their noise as she pulled on a coat, boots, mittens, and a knitted cap, and let herself out the back door, first grabbing the wooden club that rested in the umbrella stand. Were there fewer hens? It sounded like it. She hoped they had not been massacred. Probably they had not. Probably some of them had taken to the high perches out of the way and were hiding there, pretending to be feathered statues so the fox—or, as it might be, the stoat—did not come after them.

It was so early that dawn had barely touched the edges of the sky above the hills, though a full moon gave sufficient light for her to see beyond the lantern’s reach. Not enough for the other person out this morning to seem more than a darker shape within the shadows under the stable eaves. Delia froze in place, peering into the gloom with no success.

The voice was a relief. “Miss Nettleford? Are you going to check the hens?”

It was Millie Pickard, the stable girl, carrying her own club. She was a workhouse brat, taken on when she was twelve to work in the stable. Delia had been teaching her to read, though not where Delia’s mother could see. In Mama’s view, the daughter of even such an impoverished manor should not associate with stable hands.

Delia, on the other hand, felt the need to do something useful beyond the manifold duties that her mother had abdicated onto her slim shoulders,  duties for which Mama nonetheless still took credit.

Marriage was clearly not going to be an option. She was, after all, twenty-three years of age and those gentlemen who had seen her at local assemblies had long since ceased taking an interest.

By teaching Millie, she was making a difference to one other person, and it was an accomplishment all her own. Not something Mama would claim as her work.

As to why Millie was here with her in the dark, no doubt Millie’s fellows had decided it was her job—an orphan, and a girl at that—to leave the warm rooms in the loft above the stables and find out what the noise was all about.

“Yes. That protection charm was only applied a week ago. It must have something wrong with it.” Delia kept walking to the henhouse, and Millie fell into place beside her.

“It was one of Madam Greensmith’s charms,” the girl objected. “Her charms are famous.”

“The hens are complaining about something,” Delia pointed out. Though as they walked it sounded like fewer and fewer of them, and when they came through the orchard gate only two or three of the eighteen hens that should be there still raced, flapping their wings and squawking, up and down the run, chased by something Delia could not quite make out.

“Not a fox,” she said. It was too small for a fox. Too small for a stoat, too, she thought, but moving so fast it was hard to make out. What is it?

In a dozen more paces she was standing by the run, and the little creature had stopped, mainly because it had caught, and was ripping the throat out of, another hen. “Millie,” she said. “Run and get the carry cage for chicks. I’m going to have to try to catch it.” Clubbing the beast was not an option. Not given what she now recognized.

“Miss Delia,” said Millie, in the heat of the moment forgetting that the correct form of address was Miss Nettleford, “is that what I think it is?”

“It is. It’s a dragon,” said Delia.