Bound Magic by Jenny Schwartz

Author:Jenny Schwartz [Schwartz, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

“Ready?” Nils’s aquamarine hair was tied back in a sleek ponytail. He was lean and seemed ageless; the expression in his eyes much older than his lithe way of moving. He wore a dark brown leather vest over a linen shirt and dark woolen trousers tucked into his boots.

“Nice room.” He surveyed the family room and strolled to a window, looking out at the empty garden. “All magistrate halls should have one.”

I put the slate aside, more than ready to be up and moving. I’d brought my leather coat down from my room and now I shrugged it on. Outside looked windy with a promise of rain. “Don’t they? Aren’t magistrates married or whatever? Where do their families live?”

“Magistrates’ children tend to be grown and living independently. A magistrate and his or her partner share a suite in the hall. Their family home is somewhere else.”

I bit back the question of whether Istvan had chosen a home site somewhere else. That was a question to ask him, or not to ask at all. If I wanted privacy, I needed to give it, too. “Lead on, Macduff.” I’d studied Macbeth in high school.

Nils frowned quizzically. One of the chasms that would have to be bridged between the Faerene and humanity was our pop culture references. Not that Shakespeare was precisely pop culture.

We exited through a gate in the wall of the garden and started down stone stairs. A winding path nearby offered an alternative, more meandering route down to the town.

The view from the windows of my room had shown me some of the progress that had been made in just a couple of days. By human standards, it was astounding.

“Can you tell me what everything is?” I asked Nils.

He pointed. “The all-faiths temple will go up there. Beyond it is the town hall. Turn around. No, to the west. The new building is the customs office.” He turned me back around so that we headed south at the next corner. We could have cut across vacant land, but instead, we stuck to the roads. “Remind me when we get back and I’ll call up a town map on the slate for you.”

I tripped over fresh air out of plain shock. “There’s a map already?”

He grinned even as his hand shot out to steady me. “This is a planned city. Earth is the seventh Migration. We have a standard layout for new towns. People know what they can claim and what they have to invest to hold that claim. All those wooden houses and commercial buildings that have gone up are pre-fabricated. Those of us who weren’t involved in defending and sealing the Rift concentrated on producing settlement items. Prefabs enable people to achieve the building element of finalizing their claim on a plot of town land.”

I studied the scene with newly informed eyes. “So the timber buildings are prefabs?”

“The majority are. Non-timber construction indicates special skills or magic. That brick warehouse over there is Peggy’s family’s. They built it, having hired a messenger dragon to carry in building supplies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.