Chapter 57: Miracles and Magic
“Brother Jared,” I began, my voice low, “I have to ask you something. And I need you to be honest with me. Did you… did you always believe she was a witch?”
“What do you mean, ‘always’?” he asked, looking at me as if I’d grown a second head. “I’ve been hearing folk talk about it for weeks, about the Lord Mayor catching a witch. And Bartholomew said this morning there was an execution. Of course I believed it.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” I said, struggling to find the right words. The events of the past hour had left my thoughts a tangled mess; my entire understanding of reality was being rebuilt from the ground up. “I mean… did you always know that witches existed? That magic existed?”
“Of course,” he said, giving me a look of profound confusion, as if I’d just asked him if people needed to breathe. “I saw my first witch burning when I was just a little lad. It wasn’t as spectacular as this one, mind you. She burned quietly.”
“And magic?” I pressed, my heart pounding. This was important. “Have you seen real magic with your own eyes?”
“Of course I have,” he said with a shrug. “The great magicians can call down storms or make the winds howl at their command. Everyone knows that. They're powerful, the true masters of this city. I used to dream that a magician would see something special in me and take me on as an apprentice. But that was just a child’s fancy.” To Jared, my questions were as absurd as asking someone from my old world if they believed in electricity or gravity. Magic, I was beginning to understand, wasn’t a myth here. It was a fundamental, terrifying fact of life.
“Then I don’t understand,” I said, seizing on the contradiction. “If people who can use magic are so respected, why was that girl burned at the stake?”
“That’s different,” he said, and his voice took on the rote, parroted tone of a lesson learned in a grim church hall. “The great magicians are nobles, their power a gift from on high. Witches… witches make pacts with demons. They use foul sorcery. They bring nothing but disaster, so they must all be hunted down and burned.”
“Is that what the Church says?” I asked. A boy like Jared wouldn’t have come up with such a neat, politically convenient distinction on his own. He nodded. Of course. It was the Church’s work. The witch hunts, the burnings… but why did they give the magicians a pass? Weren't they both just people who used magic? Or was there a real difference between "sorcery" and "magic"? I didn’t understand the foundational theories of this world's mysticism. Perhaps there was a genuine academic or theological distinction between the two. But I doubted that was the real reason. If the Church here was anything like the one from my own world’s history, their motives were rarely so pure. So that was the game. It wasn't about good versus evil magic. It was never about that. It was about control. It was about power. The Church couldn't burn what it couldn't fight. They made allies of the powerful and monsters of the weak. I suspected the powerful magicians were either allied with the Church, or simply too strong for the Church to dare challenge. The wizard who had protected the Baron… he had radiated an aura of effortless, untouchable power.
“One more question,” I said. “What is the name of this country?” I had searched Parula’s fragmented memories, but found nothing.
“The Kingdom of Castile, of course,” Jared said, as if it were obvious.
“No, be more specific,” I pressed, remembering the Baron’s grand speech. “What is the ‘Iberian Empire’?” I should have asked when he first mentioned the coins.
“Ah, that…” he said, scratching his head. “I don’t rightly know. It's just something the toffs talk about. But they put it on the public notice boards sometimes. Something about the Empire, and then the names of all the different kingdoms.”
Author's Note
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