Sorcerer to the Crown

Your amoral ingenuity in the pursuit of your interest is perfectly shocking,” said Zacharias severely. “Yes, isn’t it?” said Prunella, pleased.

But that was the trouble with children, Sir Stephen reflected. They were confoundedly liable to pattern themselves upon one’s conduct, when one would rather they simply did what they were told.

Why, all the greatest magic comes down to blood," said Mak Genggang. "And who knows blood better than a woman?

Prunella had once thought life in London would be all flirting and balls and dresses, hitting attentive suitors on the shoulder with a fan, and breakfasting late upon bowls of chocolate. She sighed now for her naïveté. Little had she known life in London was in fact all hexes and murder and thaumaturgical politics, and she would always be rising early for some reason or other!

Prunella took to the ballrooms of London in the spirit of ruthless calculation of a general entering a battlefield.

Zacharias’s study bore the marks of his predecessors, whose taste had run decidedly stoicheiotical. They had had a fondness for skulls with burning lights in their eye sockets, crystal balls in which mysterious shapes came and went, and dark velvet window curtains traced with obscure runes.

Are you going? What shall you wear?" "I shall go in what I am standing in," said Mak Genggang. "A witch is always appropriate whatever her attire.

A female may be poor or delicate or a spinster, but it does seem ill-advised of Miss Liddiard to combine all three.

I should advise you not to stop there, but set fire to his house, too, and sell his children to pirates. That is the only way he will learn

He was a typical specimen of the younger son in avid pursuit of mediocrity with which the Theurgist’s teemed:

[A] life passed amid the feuds and rivalries of a girls' school had left Prunella not wholly unprepared for battle.

Her bulk seemed to fill the world, blocking out the horizon and casting a shadow over the magicians huddled on the wall. The enchantment appeared to encompass everything upon her person, for as she grew, so did the fronds of seaweed draped over her, and the pretty amber pendant on her breast expanded till it was itself the height and breadth of a grown man. "Midsommer!" roared Lord Burrow. "Look to your wife!" "He can hardly miss her", remarked Prunella.

Since the decision to become a parent is invariably self-interested, it is my belief that a parent's obligation is to the child, and the child's obligation is to itself.

Shameless, impudent, meddling females, who presumed to set at naught the Society’s prohibition on women’s magic, and duped the common people with their potions and cantrips!

It is a mother's duty to teach her daughters about the uses of blood, particularly a magical daughter.

The woman leant forward, her eyes flashing, a smile both triumphant and tender curving her mouth. "You are *my* daughter," she said. "Can there be any doubt that you will be brilliant -- audacious -- and free?" The vision disappeared. She had been so vital, so overflowing with life and energy, that her going seemed to leave the room dark.

What are acquaintance for, if not to supply the pleasures of gossip?

... it is strange to know you would be cast off by the people who greet you so warmly, if they knew the whole truth about you.

I might go anywhere and do any magic I pleased if I were Peter, not Prunella.

The statement brought up the old anger and confusion, followed by the accustomed guilt, that he should be so ungrateful as to resent the man who had rescued him from bondage. And yet he did resent Sir Stephen, even now.

The caterpillars were a problem, however. Fat, fuzzy and complacent, they sat upon his vegetables in veritable hordes, ignoring him until he addressed one directly. “Good morning, sir,” he said. The caterpillar paused the busy movement of its jaws to reply: “Pleasant weather, this, eh?” It was an ideal summer’s day. The skies stretched out in endless blue overhead, unmarred by a single wisp of cloud; the fresh scent of greenery and earth rose into the nostrils, imparting a lively pleasure in being alive and outdoors. “You seem troubled, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said the caterpillar. Zacharias experienced a brief internal struggle, but decided upon candour.

One might have thought you had never met my aunt Georgiana,” said Rollo, with the steeliness of despair. “She is the one with the false curls and glowing eyes and smoke rising from her jaws. Do not you recollect her?” “She did strike me as possessing unusual force of character,” admitted Damerell.

As Zacharias approached his conveyance, the scope of the undertaking to which he had agreed began to dawn upon him. The chaise that was to bear him and Prunella to Fobdown Purlieu was indeed waiting. It was doubtful whether it was capable of doing anything else. Turrill was a good-humoured man on the whole, whose anxieties about driving the Sorcerer Royal had been eased by Mr. Wythe’s being as pleasant-spoken and openhanded a gentleman as he had ever met (“Even if he is black as coal, I am sure that is none of his fault, and it would be a dull world if God had cut us all from the same pattern”). It was no wonder he felt hardly used upon this occasion, however, and Zacharias was not surprised to be addressed in terms of reproach. “You hadn’t ought to have done it, sir,” said the coachman. “You may turn me into a frog for it, but I must speak my mind, and I say you hadn’t ought to have done it. If I had not given satisfaction, you had only to say the word and I should have hopped to it, not wishing to offend any gentleman of such a liberal disposition as yourself, and not being such a fool as to desire to vex a sorcerer besides. There was no call to go a-magicking the chaise—and where you got the squashes for it out of season, I am sure I don’t know.” “Neither do I,” said Zacharias, bending down to examine what had previously been a wheel, and was now an enormous squash.