By the next morning the snow was almost hip deep, at least on me, and we were well and truly snowed in. We received word that the trains weren't going to be running that day, and that airships had been grounded in Éire, Wales and south west Britannia, and parts of Scotland. But the storm had passed by dawn and any fresh snow that fell was light, fluffy, and didn't accumulate much.

With Master Tremane's help, we had the front walk cleared again in less than fifteen minutes. He showed me an ingenious ways of using force spells to lift and shift large amounts of snow with surprising precision.

"So what you do," he said, his voice muffled by his scarf, "Is gather together the elements for a normal force spell. But rather than simply releasing it as a wave or blast, imagine it taking a shape you can maintain. Envision it forming a big scoop," he cupped one hand as he said it, "Dipping into the snow and lifting it free of the greater mass. If you enhance your senses through the spell, you should be able to tell where the ground is and go right down to it. Like scooping ice cream from the bottom of the container."

He made a scooping motion with his cupped hand to demonstrate. "Then release it where you want to drop the snow, and repeat as needed. Like this."

As he said it, he repeated the scooping gesture, and a blob of snow about three feet across and at least that high separated from the smooth white expanse before us. It lifted up, revealing a section of the stone path that led to the gate, then moved off to the side and dropped unceremoniously in a heap on top of the snow beside where it had been.

I grinned. "That'll save some time and effort instead of shoveling."

Between the two of us, we made quick work of it.

Having seen him put magic to work that way, I should have known not to throw that snowball at him, but I just couldn't help myself. His retaliation came in a steady stream of a dozen or more snowballs at a time left me on the run and Athena doubled over with laughter.

After lunch, I had another impromptu magic lesson with Master Tremane showing me more applications for fine use of force magic. Specifically, for the purpose of building snowmen. First, he gathered up enough snow to make a snowball and tossed it out in front of him. He caught it in an invisible hand of force and gently lowered it to the snow. Then he began to make sweeping and pushing gestures with his hands, using his ongoing force spell to carefully roll the snowball in ever widening circles. With every motion of his hands, more snow was gathered to it, forming into a smooth and nearly perfect sphere as it went.

The end result was a ten foot tall, perfectly formed snowman that had the neighborhood children wide-eyed with awe. I had to stand on his shoulders to put the thing's coal eyes and mouth, and carrot nose on. He refused to do that with magic, insisting it just wouldn't be right, his eyes sparkling with silent laughter. Though we did use a little bit of magic to enlarge the carrot so it didn't look too small as a nose.

I suspected the thing would be there until early summer. It was so densely packed that it'd take forever to melt.

The best part of it though was that we both let our hair down, so to speak. When we were master and apprentice, he always kept a certain emotional distance from me, which was proper. Now, thanks to our long familiarity, he took to playing the role of father effortlessly, and it felt right to me. Apparently, it felt right to him too. Dinner around the table that night was a warm, homey experience that left me feeling - for the first time that I could remember - a certain faint ache that I hadn't had a father growing up.

Evidently, I was going to have one now...and that was okay with me.

Athena, Artemis and I stayed two more days - it took that long for the train tracks to be cleared - and took our leave early on the evening of the fourth day of our visit. Master Tremane - all right, Jonathan - was returning to Dublin as well, so he was going to be taking the train with us.

"Come again soon honey," my mother said, hugging me tightly at the door before handing me my bag and staff. "And you," she said, turning to Athena and hugging her too, “keep taking such good care of her. And make sure she takes good care of you." She bent and ruffled Artemis's ears. "That goes for you too."

The three of us waited outside while she said goodbye to Jonathan - I might have been okay with them together, but really wasn't ready to see them kissing or anything like that - then struck off for the train station with him. We walked side by side in silence for a few minutes, Jonathan on my right, Athena on my left and Artemis ranging out ahead of us, the only sound that of our boots crunching through the snow.

Finally, Jonathan said to me, "You're really okay with me courting your mother?"

I smiled behind my scarf. "Nope. I think it's horrifying and awful."

He looked at me sideways, then snorted a little laugh. "All right, sorry I asked."

"Seriously, I'm okay with it," I said. "I'm glad she's not going to be alone all the time anymore. And the sooner you can talk her into leaving this stupid little town the better."

He nodded a little. "Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind. The last time I was here she told me about the hard time the other members of the Council were giving her, just because I was courting her." He shook his head. "Fools."

"Hollis hasn't told me what happened to make them withdraw from their contact with the world," I said. "Do you know?"

"I know," he said reluctantly. "I just don't like talking about it. It was a bad time for relations between the Order of Druids and the Order of Hermetic Wizardry. There was a matter of the possession of two members of the Druidic Council - that they weren't able to deal with themselves - and it ended badly when they asked the O.H.W. for help."

"Ah," I said, getting a glimpse of the matter. "It was another Wizard doing the possession?"

He looked at me, surprised, then his eyes crinkled at their corners. Even though I couldn't see him smiling behind his scarf, I knew he was. "I forget sometimes how quick your mind is. Not just one, a half-dozen taking turns in shifts. When the O.H.W. caught them, the O.H.W. high council decided they'd refuse to turn the Wizards responsible over to the Druidic Council for justice. That was when things really got bad."

I winced and nodded. "I can see how it would." I could, too. Druids took the matter of justice - some non-Druids said vengeance instead - very seriously. Not handing a group of criminal practitioners over to them could easily have caused the equivalent of a diplomatic incident. When highly trained spellcasters are involved in an incident like that, it can get ugly very quickly. "What happened?"

"A group of Druids tried to take the six wizards by force," Jonathan said quietly, "During their trial, which was being held at Glastonbury Tor. Seventeen people died. Eight Druids and nine Wizards. After that, the Druids pretty much withdrew to Éire and stopped communicating with the outside world. There were some who thought they might close the island altogether, but the High King of Albion demanded they not secede and admit that they had been wrong."

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"Ouch," I said. Albion, the traditional name for Great Briton, encompassed Britannia, Éire, Scotland, Wales and Gaul. The position of High King was a hereditary one, supposedly descended from Arthur Pendragon himself in an unbroken line, but it had been mainly a figurehead position for the last two centuries. In spite of that, the High King (or queen) still wielded a significant amount of political power through popular tradition.

"That was King James the sixth, right?" I asked. "It would've been what, two years before he died?"

Jonathan nodded. "He was already pretty well gone mentally...he was a hundred and seven and not a practitioner of magic, so his mind and body had both been on the decline for a while. He disliked magic as a generality, which is why he never learned to use it. I don't really think he knew what he was doing, he just wanted it out of his face. It worked, but the Druids were so resentful that they stopped talking to anybody outside their own circles. No pun intended."

I sighed, ignoring the pun. "Stupidity."

The brim of his hat bobbed as he nodded. "You can say that again. Mind you, that's a very rough and simplified version of the story. It was a complicated mess."

"What happened to the six Wizards who were involved in the possession?"

"They died during the Druids' attack on the trial at Glastonbury Tor," Jonathan replied. "No great loss. Frankly, it saved us the trouble of finding a suitable punishment for them. I was in the jury and was not looking forward to days of debate over how to handle the situation." He sighed. "Sometimes I think things were easier when the magical communities policed themselves without regard for the legal traditions of whatever country they were in."

I looked at him in surprise.

"No, really," he said. "Three hundred years ago, those six Wizards would have been executed on the spot without a trial, for having violated the free will of another human being. End of story. These days, there was some question as to what to do with them because they hadn't actually killed anybody. Foolishness."

"Why is that foolish?" I asked.

"Do you remember one of the first things I taught you about magic and how it's used?" The corners of his eyes crinkled in a smile again. "Say it with me now, 'Dark magic...'"

"'Corrupts the soul and devours the mind. Its effects are cumulative and invariably end in madness,'" I said with him, seeing his point. "So you're saying that having done what they did, there was little or no chance that they would repent or look for redemption?"

"Actually, I'm saying there was little or no chance that they even could," he said with a sigh. "You didn't see them during the trial. Any time they were given the chance to speak in their own defense, the result was vitriolic and violent ranting about how they were going to kill all of us when they freed themselves. They were already far gone, like rabid animals."

We walked in silence for a while as I digested that. "It's not easy," I said finally, "Being a Wizard. But the difficult part isn't wielding the forces, it's knowing when to and why you should."

I could hear the amusement in his voice, "Congratulations, apprentice. That's the most important lesson you can learn. I thought I hammered it home years ago."

I chuckled softly, my breath fogging the air in front of me even through my scarf. "You did. I think I had to be out in the real world, doing things on my own before it really finished sinking in though."

He nodded. "Which is why apprentices become Journeymen, then Mages, rather than going straight to their Wizard mastery."

I laughed. "Fair enough."

"I hope you never have to face a Wizard who's gone bad, Alys," he said very seriously. "I've faced three in my life, and have scars from all three. But if you do, don't hesitate any more than you would facing any other kind of monster."

"I won't, Master."

He cleared his throat teasingly, and Athena giggled.

"Sorry!" I laughed. "Give me a break, you're asking me to change a habit that's a decade old. It'll take some time."

Artemis came trotting back to us then, tail lashing and ears flattened to her head. <> she said, <>

"Where?" I asked, stopping and looking around.

<> she said unhappily. <>

"What's up?" Jonathan asked.

"Not sure," I said, crouching down and petting Artemis. "She said she caught other scents that didn't belong here, one she couldn't identify and a strange cat too. Something about it really set her on edge."

Athena had walked a few more steps and stopped, her coat open and one hand resting on the butt of her revolver. "Mistress?"

I looked up. "What's wrong, pet?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Something."

Jonathan stepped up beside her, keeping a few feet between them, planting his staff firmly and looking around. "Something you hear? Smell?"

"Feel," Athena said. "Like we're being watched. That weird prickling feeling on the back of your neck?"

He nodded. "I understand." He shifted his staff to his left hand and raised his right above his head. I felt a surge of energy and a sphere of light appeared above his hand, then shot up into the air about thirty feet.

It lit up the snow-covered landscape around us like daylight, dispelling the darkness and giving us a clear view.

I rose, looking around carefully. "I don't see anything."

"Nor I," Jonathan replied.

"I don't either," Athena said, buttoning her coat back up. She sounded frustrated. "Whatever it was, it's gone now."

"Perhaps it realized the folly of stalking two Wizards and two familiars," Jonathan joked. A moment later he released his spell and the light went out. "Come on, we're only a few minutes from the train station."

We bought our tickets and settled into a compartment together, the four of us effectively filling one. The warm, well-lit interior of the train was a welcome relief from the cold night outside.

"What's next for you when you get back to London?" Jonathan asked.

I shook my head, "Whatever Hollis needs me to do. Research, running errands, another of his bizarre jobs..."

Jonathan chuckled. "London does offer a wide variety of problems for a wizard to tackle. It's a good place to get your feet wet. Have you thought about traveling?"

"Once I have more experience under my belt," I replied, "And have passed my Wizard's qualification exams, I'll think about it. The most important thing I've learned from my first real jobs is how much I still have to learn."

Jonathan grinned across the compartment at me. "That's a valuable lesson, especially for a Wizard-to-be. Lots of people never learn that one."

"Ha ha," I smiled back at him. "Anyway, I'd like to go to Vinland and Nippon someday. More immediately, I'd like to visit Bath and Edinburgh at some point. I haven't even gotten out to see Stonehenge or to Avesbury yet."

He smiled. "Hollis has been keeping you busy."

"Very," Athena said dryly. "Mistress was barely getting enough sleep."

Jonathan chuckled. "You have a superb advocate there, Alys."

I nodded. "She's taking good care of me."

"Mistress takes good care of my sister and me," Athena said simply.

"The bond between Wizard and familiar," Jonathan nodded, smiling. "I've never taken a familiar, but watching the three of you together makes me want to."

I was surprised by how easy my relationship with my former teacher was now that I was no longer his student. He had always seemed so stern and aloof to me when I was studying under him that this new side of his personality - a relaxed, warm and caring man who was ready to tease me at the drop of a hat - had come as quite a shock. One I thought I wouldn't have too much trouble getting used to.

The train ride to Dublin passed in a blur of companionable conversation and one rather vicious game of chess on a travel set I had in my bag. Jonathan accompanied us to the airship docks and saw us right to the boarding ramp of our ship.

"I take my leave of you here, young Alys," he said with a smile, then gave me a warm hug, which I returned happily. "Take care of yourself and keep in touch." He stepped back and flashed a quick and rather roguish grin at me. "I'll just keep an eye on your mother for you, shall I?"

I laughed. "That would be greatly appreciated. You take care of yourself too, and I promise I'll be in touch soon."

He then gave Athena a hug, to her obvious surprise. "And you, young Athena, go right on making sure your mistress gets plenty of rest. I'm glad to know you and your sister have her back."

"We always will, sir," she said with a warm smile.

Artemis reared up and planted her forepaws on his chest to lick his cheek, making him laugh and ruffle her ears. "All right you three. Off with you, now. Don't miss your ship." He tugged his scarf back into place and began to walk away, pausing to wave before disappearing back into the airship station.

Athena and I returned his wave, then turned and hurried up the boarding ramp with Artemis at our heels. With our tickets checked, we settled into our cabin. In the morning, we'd be back in London and back to work. But for now, we had one more night of rest.

We took full advantage of it. For once, I was asleep before the ship took off.