Sorcerer to the Crown (Sorcerer Royal, #1)

by Zen Cho

If the attention of so many gentlemen should make you nervous, simply pretend to yourself that they are so many heads of cabbages. That always assists me on such occasions.”

“He might as well seek to persuade us that a pig can fly—or a woman do magic!” The friend observed that so could pigs fly, if one could be troubled to make them. “Oh certainly!” replied the first. “And one could teach a woman to do magic, I suppose, but what earthly good would a flying pig or a magical female be to anyone?”

In truth magic had always had a slightly un-English character, being unpredictable, heedless of tradition and profligate with its gifts to high and low. Save in the grand old thaumaturgical families—the Burrows, the Edgeworths, the Midsomers and their ilk—magic-making was now really only deemed a desirable profession for younger sons.

“But a Sorcerer Royal cannot duel his brother-thaumaturges. It is not at all the thing.”

“Your visit would be as good as a tonic for the young ladies’ constitutions. The inmates of every good girls’ school are perpetually on the brink of expiring from boredom, and you would stir them up nicely. Women find you so frightening, and so romantic.”

“Our kingdom is afflicted by a group of old women who profess to practise magic,” Sultan Ahmad began. “Aunts and grandmothers, whom we have tolerated out of respect for their great age, and because we believed they did no harm with their chantments.”

If she were a man she might be a thaumaturge, and employ her magical abilities to good purpose. Since she was a female of gentle birth, however, she could not, in propriety, employ her magical talent to any purpose. If she could not marry, her best hope of establishing herself lay in teaching other females afflicted with magical ability how best to avoid using it.

All the girls had grown up in the thaumaturgical world, and understood its hierarchies. Any man could be a magician; any gentleman a thaumaturge; any scholar an unnatural philosopher. But only a magician that commanded the loyalty of a familiar could claim the title of sorcerer.

“I think you did very well, all things considered. It is a difficult thing to know how to deal with females when one has no experience of the creatures,” said Sir Stephen.

But that was the trouble with children, Sir Stephen reflected. They were confoundedly liable to pattern themselves upon one’s conduct, when one would rather they simply did what they were told.

There must once have been a time when he was not harried on every side by the whims and starts of importunate females, reflected Zacharias wistfully, but that halcyon period seemed very far away.

There was, of course, the Fairy King’s rout, which was held every rising of the blood-red moon in the Eastern Reaches of the Draconic Provinces.

Of course

“A witch is always appropriate whatever her attire.

Preach

“I know where it is, but that is hardly to the point. It would be shockingly brazen of me to go alone to a party full of foreign gentlemen,” said Mak Genggang.

This feels out of character

The effect had been achieved by mortal art alone. The Society, being composed in large part of gentlemen fond of their food, had chosen to focus its magical enhancements upon the refreshments.