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.