Faris Nallaneen, two years short of inheriting her duchy, which is currently ruled by her uncle as regent, is shipped off to a finishing school in England where she is to be buried in academia so that her uncle may machinate and maneuver back home until such time as an attempt may be made on the true heir's life, ensuring his continued position of power.

Sounds run-of-the-mill?

Let's look at it again. Faris, two years short of the age of majority when she may inherit her fictional dukedom of Galazon, is sent south to a school in England whose graduates (if they remain all three years) are known as Witches of Greenlaw by virtue of the fact that they "pick up" magic while they are there, since it isn't exactly offered as a major.

A little more interesting?

How about the fact that Faris doesn't even make it through all three years by virtue of a mistimed magical battle (even though no one is taught magic per se), leaves for France one step ahead of assassins, learns in Paris that she is the heir not only to her northern dukedom but also to the Northern Guardian's position, a position that has gone unfilled for two generations and is beginning to tear a rift if the world's protective bubble, a rift that cannot be reversed by the guardians of the East, South or West?

I thought that might grab you.

The delight I found while reading Caroline Stevermer's A College of Magicks was several-fold. Firstly, her writing style is so easy to read that you can whip off entire chapters without realizing it. Secondly, here plotting is so smoothly integrated with the basic storyline that you don't realise something was Important until chapters later. Thirdly, her sense of humour is marvelously addictive. If I tried to describe it, I'd end up saying something along the lines of Jane Austen crossed with Connie Willis with a dash of Elizabeth Peters, but it would still not be right.

The action takes place in Edwardian England. There's drama, there's adventure, there's swashbuckling. There's diplomacy (although the protagonist can hardly be described as diplomatic most of the time!). There's railway pursuits across Europe. There's the standard set-up of heiress-locked-away-by-evil-regent, but it's overturned by the heroine's refusal to stick to accepted behaviour. There's banter, lots of banter. The dialogue is perfect. The characters are real people who read three-volume novels, are addicted to pastry and shopping, who fall short of ideals by virtue of stubbornness or tunnel vision. But the magic - ah, the magic.

In the first year of the three-year program, the only mandatory class is the instruction in magic lecture each morning, taught by the Dean. The course is called "The Structure of the World", and it's the only course in magic offered - but it is theory only. There is no practice of magic allowed on the grounds. Basically the world is constructed as follows:

In theory, there was the world, the lowest, most mundane sphere in the model. Divided into overlapping hemispheres, north, south, east, and west, the world was theoretically protected by four wardens, whose theoretical wardships enfolded one another. The warden of the south watched over her dominion almost unhindered by the wardens of the east and west. Most powerful, but most remote, ruling the ocean-guarded south, she never impinged on the warden of the north. The warden of the east was visited only by the wardens of south and north. He never touched the wardency of the west. Of the wardens of the north and west, the Dean did not speak. […] For the rest of the model, the Dean explained, the world lay at the heart of nested celestial spheres. The highest degree of magic in the world was lower by far than the lowest of that in the next sphere of the model. But nothing linked the spheres. There was no passage from one to the next in life. Within the precincts of the world, the wardens held the mundane sphere in balance. Without the wardens, the mundane sphere would distort. Once disfigured, it would upset the balance of the other spheres.

Try as she would, Faris could not keep from thinking of the spheres as soap bubbles, floating one within another. She gathered that if there were no wardens to rectify the balance, the entire model would vanish, to go wherever soap bubbles go, just about as suddenly. (35-6)

It's an interesting theory, and one which is not uncommon. It is also a view that Faris has difficulty resigning herself to when she learns that she is heir to the vacant wardency of the north, when all she wants is to be the duchess of a tiny European duchy. Again, the concept of balance is brought up; she is the rightful heir to both, and taking the post of warden will restore balance so that her beloved Galazon will survive; but all she wants is to rule the beloved land she grew up in and cares fiercely for. The decision is a difficult one, for Faris as a character is willful, determined, and very, very stubborn.

Her will is what serves her, for the acts of magic that are performed in this magical system are sheer acts of will. When Faris is homesick during winter, she stares out a window and imagines herself back north, where it would be snowing… and slowly, the drizzle turns to white snow, unheard of in the area, although Faris does not know that. Jane, one of Faris' companions, disarms a bomb delivered to their hotel suite in Paris by willing it into a hat - a hat which she wears for three-quarters of the book until her focus is stretched too thin during the climax of the novel and the hat explodes back in her room. Faris' magical abilities, mostly exhibited during moments of great stress, are vague, but involve her wardency of the north. Closing the rift created by the prior warden of the north when she tried to "create something wholly good. A vain endeavour, perhaps, yet not as deplorable as the alternative. Still, her efforts destroyed here and tore a rift between this world and the next", the warden of the west informs her. The fact implied, of course, is that nothing purely good or purely evil can exist, a theory also held by many.

A world view that depends on four people maintaining a balance in a sphere - balance between good and evil as well as a four-way balance - is similar to the view held within many magical circles that all the elements must be in balance in order for power to exist. One may call on one element or another for aid, but overall, all four (or five, or six, or however many your magical system calls for) must be present in some form or another.

What happens if that rift is not closed? The warden of the west, who is literally losing substance as he, along with the other two wardens, pours his will and his very being into holding the rest of the world in check against the imbalance, explains it thusly:

[…] If this world mingles with the next, what befalls? From the point of the rift outward, the balance of the world distorts. From the rest of the world toward the rift, what magic we have worked so hard to balance drifts into the rift and away. As the magic departs, the balance alters, and the ordinary chaos and unpleasantness of the world outdoes itself. When the rift is wide enough, when disorder encompasses all, what life is left will slip away. In its place will be order at last. But it will be the order of emptiness. All magic, all growth, all life will be gone. And the next world will receive it, like a blow to the balance it struggles to achieve. And so outward. (144)

Perhaps Faris' concept of soap bubbles within soap bubbles isn't so far off. With everything contained in a closed system, balance may be maintained. But with a disturbance at the center of the system, with the sudden release of what is contained within the innermost sphere, the shock wave of release would literally travel outwards like a ring effect, smashing through each layer as it travels further away from the point of impact. Unlike the rings created when one drops a stone into a pond, this shock wave would be more violent as each sphere is breached.

The climax of the novel (which takes place during a masked ball of all things!) is of course when Faris tracks the point of the rift down. It turns out to be in a ruined, flooded, smashed section of the palace in the neighbouring duchy, whose ruler is on only barely civil terms with her own. The rift pulls historical and seasonal time awry, and the very environment acts oddly in an intangible fashion. Only when Faris imposes her will upon the immediate area around the rift does it stabilize enough to be closed. Closing it takes all of Faris' will, and many, many other sacrifices which I won't give away. Once the rift is closed, the difference is immediately observable: the other wardens are freed of their unnatural balancing act, things return to normal in the duchy and the palace, and the sphere - and thusly the world system - is as it should be, with all four wardens of all four directions balancing the magical system once more.

The beauty of this magical system is that it is at once the main plot and the sub-plot. Stevermer does an excellent job of marrying her characters' personalities and quirks to the swashbuckling action of the red herrings they encounter (and those she presents to the reader!). The magical system is the motivator, not the raison d'ętre of the piece. As such, it functions extremely well, and makes the reading experience all the more enjoyable.

Caroline Stevermer's A College Of Magics is available in paperback from Starscape. She has also co-authored Sorcery and Cecelia with Patricia C. Wrede, another delightful romp through an alternate history set in the Regency era. Her newest novel, The King Comes Home, is due out this fall.

(c) A. Murphy-Hiscock. Originally published in Montreal's Magickal Circle September 2000