The Hexologists (The Hexologists, #1)

by Josiah Bancroft

Isolde Wilby gazed at the royal secretary with all the warmth of a hypnotist.

She was almost entirely insensible to pleasantries, especially the parentheses of polite conversation, preferring to let the drumroll of her heels convey her hellos and her coattails say her goodbyes.

We know who suffers when heaven squabbles—the vulnerable. Someone up on high only has to whisper the word ‘unrest’ and the prisons fill up, the workhouses shake out, the missions bar their doors, and the orphanages repopulate. And when the dust settles, perhaps there’ll be a new face printed on the gallet bill or a fresh set of bullies on the bench, but the only thing of real consequence that will have changed is the number of bones in the potter’s field. Revolution may chasten the rich, but uncertainty torments the poor.”

The analogy most often used to explain magic to the children of Berbiton was that it was like a mountain spring—a thing that burst from the earth, emerging from mysterious depths but producing a reliable flow.