The Sports Captain's Tale полностью

“I’m sorry,” she said, lowering her gaze. “I let you all down.”

“You lasted longer than some,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to deal with her. Every last player I knew was arrogant as hell … and half of them deserved it. The others generally made fools of themselves, if they didn’t piss off their teammates to the point they were kicked off the team. “I never expected Blair to do that.”

I ground my teeth in frustration. Blair wasn’t a bad tactician. He’d done pretty well, first in convincing everyone to gang up on us and then knifing his former allies in the back. I’d come up with pretty good tactics myself, but they hadn’t worked against all three enemy teams. Somewhere, Blair was laughing … if he wasn’t shielding Drusilla against her enemies. I doubted it. Blair wasn’t known for being loyal to anyone. Perhaps I could use it against him.

But I have nothing to offer, I thought. There was no point in making noises about offering players a place on my team if it was worthless. What can I give them?

Mildred took a breath. “Can I trust you?”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Can I trust you to keep a secret?” Mildred didn’t meet my eyes. “I … I have something that might help, but I need you to keep it a secret.”

I hesitated, my mind racing. If there was one thing that had been drummed into my head, as the son of a merchant and a student of magic, it was to be careful what you promised. I found it hard to imagine Mildred telling me something that would make me regret keeping it a secret, but people could surprise you. There was one girl, down in Dragon’s Den, who … I put that thought out of my head. Mildred wasn’t going to ask me anything like that … probably. Sure, there might be stories of girls looking for boys to help them lose their virginities, but most of those stories were made up by teenage boys. They were about as real as Blair’s sense of human decency.

“I will,” I promised, hoping I wasn’t making a terrible mistake. “What is it?”

Mildred waved her hand in the air, casting a pair of privacy wards. Strong wards. I was mildly impressed – and perplexed. If she could do that, she could defend herself against younger assholes … couldn’t she? I knew how to deal with bullies. One good beating and the bully backed off, two and the bully never bullied anyone again. The trick was to give the bastard the first beating.

“I’ve been working on chat parchments,” Mildred said, carefully. “Do you know how they work?”

“I understand the basic theory,” I said, puzzled. Mildred hadn’t invented them. Everyone knew how to make at least a basic chat parchment. “Why is that a secret?”

Mildred hesitated, noticeably. “I was trying to figure out how to improve them,” she said, after a long moment in which I could see her arguing with herself. “There’s a way to cast spells through the chat parchment, to get them through wards and other protections … provided the parchment is already inside the protections. I was working on ways to improve the process, to the point I could … I could channel magic through the parchment from a safe distance. And … I had a working set of spells when you convinced me to join you.”

My eyes narrowed. “You can make it work …?”

I understood, suddenly. Mildred had no friends, no allies … I suspected her family didn’t have any political or magical power. No wonder she was so careful. I could take her technique and tell the world it was mine, daring her to prove otherwise. It might not work, if the right people started asking questions, but how could she rely on it? She couldn’t. She might lose everything if I stole her work and called it mine.

“I see,” I said, carefully. I had no interest in becoming a charmsmaster, or things might have been different, but … I didn’t see her point. “Why do you think we can use it? We’re not allowed to bring parchments onto the field.”

“It doesn’t have to be a parchment,” Mildred told me. “Parchments work because people write messages on them, which are then sent to the reader. The parchments are actually entangled together, so what is written on one appears on the other … but it doesn’t have to be a parchment. I could do it with a tunic.”

“Right,” I said. “This isn’t going to help us …”

I stopped, dead. “You’re saying you can cast spells through the parchment … through whatever we entangle into the spell?”

“Yes,” Mildred said. “It should work.”

“Should?” I raised my eyebrows. “Didn’t you test it?”

Mildred coloured. “I had no one to test it with.”

“We’ll test it now,” I said. I didn’t hesitate. Mildred was a teammate, and you looked out for teammates. “And if it works …”