Much Ado About Magic - Page 71/109

When she saw me, she struggled to sit up. “How is he?” she demanded, only a trace of her usual starch in her voice.

I hesitated, not sure how to answer. Did she want to be reassured, or did she want the truth? Oh, who was I kidding? This was Gloria. She’d want the truth. “I honestly don’t know. He’s being weird. And stubborn.”

“I wonder where he learned that?” James muttered, and I had to fight not to laugh.

“I think it’s getting to him, but it’s taking a while to sink in,” I said. Even though I hadn’t been invited to do so, and Gloria was someone who took that sort of thing seriously, I sat on the chair across from the sofa. “The big question is, is it true? If it is, who really knew? Right now, Owen doesn’t seem to want to even think about it, but I believe it’s important to get to the bottom of this. What did you know?”

James sat next to Gloria on the sofa and said, “The situation is, as you may imagine, complicated. We didn’t know who he was, but we did know he was a special case because his abilities were unusually strong in someone that age and because of the difficulties he’d already gone through. That can be a recipe for disaster if the child isn’t properly trained.”

“The Council wanted us to train and monitor him,” Gloria continued. “But we were not supposed to become emotionally involved. Doting, overly permissive parents have been the downfall of many a powerful child. In the nonmagical world we had the rights of foster parents, but within the magical world, guardianship rested with the Council, and they could take him away at any time. We had to remain neutral so we could objectively observe his progress.” Her voice cracked. “It was a difficult situation—if we showed signs of loving him too much, we would lose him, and yet we soon came to love him too much to bear the thought of losing him. Our inexperience as parents probably meant we weren’t able to strike quite the right balance, and we erred on the side of duty.”

“We had always wanted children of our own, but we were not blessed in that way,” James said, placing a hand over his wife’s. That simple gesture brought tears to my eyes.

Gloria gave a crooked smile. “And then one day they brought us this little boy. He was so small—he was rather sickly at first. He hadn’t been taken care of very well. He was so quiet, and we later learned his vision was weak. I was expected to treat him as though he was a pupil at a single-student boarding school, and I was his matron. If I ever seemed too attached to him, then I would have been deemed unfit for my job.”

Tears spilled from her eyes, and I was pretty sure my own cheeks had become wet. “That must have been awful for you.”

“It was wonderful and awful, all at the same time.”

“We were very proud of him,” James added.

“It was only much later when we heard the rumors that Mina Morgan had been pregnant and noticed the timing,” Gloria said. “Then we figured it out.”

“Do you think anyone official knew? Someone on the Council, maybe?” I asked.

James shook his head. “I never got that impression. And I was afraid to ask in case no one did know. We didn’t want to be the ones to attach that stigma to Owen.”

“We may have been a little stricter with him after we became suspicious,” Gloria said, sitting up straighter, “but that was for his own good. We wanted to be sure he was nothing like his parents. If something had gone wrong with him and we hadn’t mentioned our suspicions, then we would have felt responsible.”

“So, if you didn’t know, and the Council didn’t know, and Merlin didn’t know, then how did Idris and presumably Ramsay know?” I asked. “Does Ramsay have evidence, or is he merely putting two and two together like you did and making a wild accusation?”

“We’ve known Ivor Ramsay for a very long time,” James said. “He knew we were bringing up Owen, and he knew what we knew about Owen’s background, but he never showed any signs of suspecting that Owen was anything more than a particularly powerful magical child.”

I braced my hands on my knees and leaned forward. “I presume you’ve heard about Ramsay’s announcement about taking over Spellworks?” They both nodded. “We believe he’s been behind it all along, and it’s all part of a plot to either discredit or do away with Merlin so he can eliminate that deterrent and go for absolute power. I think that if we can show that Ramsay knew who Owen was all along, then we can prove that he isn’t the noble, upright guy he’s claiming to be, and that’s the way to get to him. If he knew, then that means he’s been the one hiding that secret from the magical world, and then that brings up the question of why. I was wondering if you have any information on where or how Owen was found in the first place. He said something about a fire station, but that was all he would tell me. He’s reluctant to look into this, and I suppose I can understand that, but we need to figure it out.”