The Twelfth Enchantment

By K.L. Noone

Prequel to The Magician

Garrett Pell, Second Sorcerer of the Middle Lands, is just trying to build a school. Unfortunately, he’s also got missing mage-students, disobedient goats, and a Grand Sorcerer who likes to disappear. Not to mention the distracting presence of the attractive local prince, who keeps mysteriously turning up right when Garrett could use a hand.

Prince Alexandre de Berri knows perfectly well that he’s the youngest and least talented of his brothers. But his father, the king, wants to be on good terms with the magicians, and Alex is good at making friends -- so he’s been ordered to do exactly that. But what began as a royal command turns into very real feelings, and all Alex wants is to solve Garrett’s problems.

Alex’s father isn’t happy. Garrett’s school still needs help. And Alex and Garrett will need to make a choice. But, together, they just might be magic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Jul 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685502126

K.L. Noone

K.L. Noone loves fantasy, romance, cats, far too sweet coffee, and happy endings! She is also the author of Port in a Storm and its upcoming sequel, available from Less Than Three Press, and numerous short romances with Ellora’s Cave and Circlet Press; her fantasy fiction has appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies. With her Professor Hat on, she teaches college students about Shakespeare and superhero comics, and has published academic articles and essays on Neil Gaiman’s adaptations of Beowulf, Welsh mythology in modern fantasy, and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

Book preview

Chapter 1: Water and Ice

The goats of the Magicians’ School had eaten all the cabbage again. Two of the prospective students had, without explanation, vanished like dandelion-fluff with the spring breeze. And the ice-house refused to stay cold. Garrett Pell, Second Sorcerer of the Middle Lands, rubbed the spot between his eyes exhaustedly and pondered the desirability of a hermit’s life. In a cave. On a rock spire. Without a ladder.

You said to tell you, Jennet said, about the ice-house. Because we should eat the cheese. Can we eat the cheese? Short, golden-haired, pretty as an illustrated manuscript, she’d been selling dreams and charms and fortunes that came true more often than not, down in the Dark Quarter of Averene’s capital city, when the Grand Sorcerer had wandered distractedly by and swept her up into his wake.

Cheese, Garrett echoed. Yes. Fine. I’ll be right there. He had been attempting to catalog the nine scrolls Lorre had unceremoniously dumped on the table, histories of magical herb-lore which Garrett was fairly sure had been stolen from the Royal Library in Kiersk. One of them had a Library seal, which Garrett had pointed out. Lorre had said, shrugging, "Magic belongs with magicians, and they weren’t using these," and Garrett had opened his mouth to explain private property yet again, and had watched his Grand Sorcerer turn into a dragonfly before his eyes.

The breeze, with some sympathy, whirled through the arches of the open window. The window was open because it had no glass as yet, because Lorre had promised to do that and hadn’t.

Garrett exhaled, found a stone to anchor the scrolls—the would-be magicians’ library had many rocks, at least, left over from the raising—and in doing this accidentally knocked his pen off the table, and then swore silently and creatively for several seconds while picking it up. And then made sure that his expression was perfectly composed when he looked back up at his hovering apprentice. Is Quen around? Because if he’s not busy—

He’s clearing out the water, Jen supplied. Her fellow apprentice, one of the four who hadn’t vanished, had aquatic gifts, to a degree. Because the ice melted.

Why didn’t anyone tell me before it got this far—no, never mind. That wouldn’t help. How’re your dreams? Are you sleeping well enough? They emerged from the room that would be the library into the long shaded walk with old-fashioned columns, one of the bits of work the Grand Sorcerer had done himself when raising the half-finished School. Garrett, not for the first time, brushed a hand against the closest column, basked in the resonance of polished curving stone, the sun, the heaviness.

Better, Jen agreed. With your shields on top of mine. It’s helping.

Better isn’t perfect. I’ll see what else I can do. Glimpses of the future are confusing enough when they’re not tangled up with dream-logic. There might be something in one of the histories of wild magic.

It’s really almost all under control, Jen said, with an expression that suggested that she thought her Second Sorcerer should not add yet another apple to his metaphorical teetering apple-cart. Really.

Sunlight flickered in and out through the columns, across the lapis-lazuli blue of the pool Lorre had made in the central open garden, surrounded by what would eventually be four stone wings. The north and east sides were finished, enough for students and workrooms and the beginnings of the library; the other sides waited, bare, unroofed.

The School, or what would be the School, two months into its construction, stood on a low curving hill outside of the capital city of Averene, near enough to make some of the merchants and farmers and nobility uneasy, far enough to keep most messy magic at a distance. The site glimmered green and misty on spring mornings, beside the river that flowed down through the heart of the wealthiest of the Middle Lands kingdoms. The stone, which Lorre and Garrett had called up together from the bones of the earth, glowed white as pearl, as a beacon.

Lorre had wanted that brightness, that symbol: both the beckoning and the hint of power, as the School kept itself clean and sharp. Garrett, who’d grown up with the tumble of imported indigo-carmine-sapphire silks, the tastes of cinnamon and black pepper, the glow of carved jade statues and the glint of gold-flecked tapestry-weavings that filled his family’s merchant storehouses and caravans and private home, kept wanting to hang a burnt-umber drapery or put an ornamental silver box on a bare shelf.

Something, at least. Anything.

He loved the School, though. He loved it in his soul, his heart, his self. When he and Lorre had stood on the hill,