Free Sons of Liberty by Christopher G. Nuttall Page A

anger she’d made a mistake. And now he has to pay the price.

    She wandered slowly back up to her office, glancing into the empty training rooms as she passed. The training cadre had done a good job of stripping the building of everything necessary to train young magicians, although most of the equipment would be easy to replace. Her lips quirked; no one on the outside would believe it, if they saw the room. It was commonly believed that magicians needed staffs, wands and potions made from fancy ingredients to do their work ...

    A thought struck her and she scowled. Jack, no doubt, had taught the French precisely how to construct their own training facility.

    Not that it would have been that hard, once they stopped thinking of magicians as demons, she thought, coldly. The basic principles of magic aren’t hard to deduce, even without a teacher.

    “ Lady Emily,” Doctor Norwell called, when she walked past his office. It was right next to hers, one of Master Thomas’s arrangements she’d never bothered to change. “There are two of Lord Mycroft’s men, here to see you. They’re waiting in the visitor’s room.”

    Gwen frowned in puzzlement. Lord Mycroft had sent her an immense stack of files to read, but nothing else. She hadn't been expecting to see him until shortly before her departure, still three days away. But something might have come up. Shaking her head, she walked down the corridor and peered into the visitor’s room. Two young men were seated on the sofa, wearing the bland suit and tie of government servants. There was something odd about their faces.

    “ Lady Gwen,” the first man said, rising to his feet. “May I say what a great pleasure it is to meet the Royal Sorceress face to face?”

    Gwen felt her eyes narrow. That was hardly a common form of address. She looked at both men, puzzled. There was definitely something odd about them ...

    Understanding clicked. “Irene?”

    The young man smirked. “Got you that time,” he - she - said. There was a hint of cockney in her voice. “How do we look?”

    “ Raechel,” Gwen said, looking at the other figure. Now she knew who she was looking at, it was easy to see the subtle clues that the person wasn't remotely masculine. “You look ... different.”

    “ I wasn't expecting to fool you for long,” Irene said, as she sat back on the sofa. “But you wouldn't have looked twice at us if you’d met us on the streets.”

    “ Probably not,” Gwen conceded. She knew better than to dismiss civil servants as unimportant, but they were still very much part of the background. “How is Raechel coming along?”

    “I’m right here,” Raechel said.

    “ She is doing better than I expected when playing a female role,” Irene said, ignoring her in favour of Gwen. “She’s still having some problems playing a male role, I’m afraid. That generally takes longer to learn.”

    Gwen nodded. It had taken her time to learn to walk and act like a man, even though too many people knew she was a woman for her to try to pretend otherwise. But then, men did tend to react better to people they thought were other men. The more masculine she looked, the better the reception.

    “ She’s also quite intelligent, if unfocused and untrained,” Irene added. “She definitely has the right attitude for this sort of work, although she might have done better if she’d been raised in a lower-class household. Her tolerance for the simple brutalities of life is alarmingly low.”

    “ Noted,” Gwen said. She would have to sit down with Raechel, once they were on the ship, and talk about her progress. Right now, there were other matters to worry about. “Do you have her covered?”

    Irene nodded. “Officially, Lady Standish is still in a madhouse,” she said. “Russia certainly did a great deal of damage to her mind, I’m afraid. Raechel Slater-Standish will therefore have the distant honour of accompanying Lady Irene Darlington” - she waved a lazy hand