Lady Aubrey Brandon, daughter of Lord Robert Brandon, Baron of Hawksburg, was bored. She sat on the front step of the manor house, staring down the pathway with all the concentration her seventeen-year-old head could muster. This was, of course, considerable, for beneath this young exterior hid an accomplished wielder of magic.
For more than a year she had travelled with the Royal Life Mage, Revi Bloom, as his apprentice. She had easily mastered her first spell, but now she sat, weary of her studies. It wasn"t that she didn"t find magic interesting, far from it, but the books Master Bloom had given her had long since ceased to be of interest, a victim of her growing awareness of the magic that resided within her.
She looked down at the book beside her, a treatise on the history of magic,
