by S. W. Clarke
Mishka waved a hand. “You’ll rot your brain with that junk.”
As they spoke, my mind wandered back to one thing. I hadn’t expected this—that at every moment I would be waiting for the sound of it.
I was listening for the horn. As though my life began and ended with that noise.
When the horn was silent, my life could go on. When it was not, everything changed.
Circe leaned closer. “Turns out one former Shadow’s End professor has caused quite the stir in Edinburgh.”
My attention sharpened on her. “Who?”
Circe’s eyes flicked to me. “Callum Rathmore. Who else?”
“What did he do?” Eva asked.
“Disowned himself from his family,” Circe said. “Which really means he’s rejected his father. Apparently Professor Rathmore’s not a Rathmore anymore.”
Now the whole table was intrigued. And me? My stomach was trying to squeeze its contents back up my esophagus.
“But why?” Elijah said. “He would have been set for life.”
Circe jogged her eyebrows. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Rejecting the Rathmore fortune, the honorary seat on the Mages’ Council. It’s a delicious disgrace.”
My hand went into my skirt pocket, felt the folded page from Jane Eyre. I knew the lines Rathmore had highlighted carried as much weight with him as they did with me.
I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die. I will be myself.
I had always suspected we were alike. That feeling only deepened.
And I wondered now where he was, and when I would ever see him again.
“Hello, Evanora,” a voice said from behind us. When I lifted my head, Torsten stood there like a beautiful, sad statue.
It was time to play the wingwoman.
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning, Aidan stabbed the open book. “It’s indecipherable.”
Around us, the library had that lovely morning emptiness I could only appreciate twelve minutes after I’d arrived. I knew now, after many mornings spent this way, for certain: twelve minutes into our sessions was exactly how long it took me to properly wake up.
And after the Summer’s End Feast, having to distract Torsten when he’d approached Eva later that night, and then how late she and I had stayed up talking about relationships…
I lowered my mug of tea. “But you deciphered the parts about the key and the rod.”
“Well, with Eva’s help.” He gestured at the page. “But this. This part doesn’t make any sense. Any of it.”
“Read me the line.”
He cleared his throat, formal and annoyed. “‘The chain cannot move. It cannot see. And as the summer solstice nears, the world becomes light.’”
“The prophet said this?”
“See what I mean?” He threw off his glasses. “Indecipherable.”
“It’s a riddle.”
“And I hate riddles,” he said.
“Really? I thought you’d love them.”
“I like knowing things, Clementine. You know this about me. And that’s exactly why I hate riddles—they keep me up at night.”
“So until you figure this riddle out, you won’t be sleeping.”
“Exactly.” He folded his arms. “So we need to figure out what it means before we leave this library.”
I tapped a finger on the table as we sat in contemplative silence. “I don’t know. I have to let it incubate.”
“Incubate?”
“You know, swirl around in my head a while as I do other things.”
His jaw shifted. “That’s the opposite of what I asked for.”
“Well, the riddle makes one thing clear.”
“And what’s that?”
“We’ve got time.”
“And what makes you think that?”
I lifted a chocolate chip cookie. It was still warm, still soft—just perfect. “The prophet mentions the summer solstice. That’s my best guess for when we can retrieve the chain. June, right?”
“Huh.” He tilted his head. “I was so fixated on figuring out where it was, I hadn’t even thought about that.”
I bit into the cookie. “That’s why you have me to point out the easy parts. But Aidan, why a riddle at all?”
He sat back, gazing at me. “As opposed to how the prophet simply told us where the rod was?”
“Right.”
“The rod had been hidden in the labyrinth. You don’t think that was a riddle in its own right?”
Touche. God knew figuring out where that damned rod was had been the greatest riddle of my life. “All right, then. So two riddles—but my question still stands. Why?”
“The pieces shouldn’t be easy for just anyone to find,” Aidan said. “If they were, the weapon would have been reassembled at once.”
True. And yet… “The wisps had the key. Without the key, I wouldn’t have been able to find the rod. And the wisps would only give the key to another fire witch.”
Aidan’s eyes narrowed. “And a fire witch only comes along once in a great while.”
“Exactly.” I finished the cookie. “So whoever hid the pieces designed these riddles not to keep the weapon inaccessible to the world, but to make it difficult for the fire witch with the key to assemble the other pieces. Hidden in difficult-to-reach places, only retrievable during the witching hour. Because a fire witch with the Backbiter could simply choose to take over the world herself, right?”
We gazed at one another.
“But I wouldn’t,” I said. “Just so we’re clear, I wouldn’t take over the world.”
Aidan didn’t speak at first. Then, behind him, the clock tolled eight.
“I have to go.” I started gathering my things. “But we’ve covered ground.”
He watched me with obvious disappointment. “What do you have at eight? Not class.”
“Guardian training. Supposed to meet Fi and Loki at the stables.”
Aidan sat silent, his cup of tea gone cold in front of him. I could tell the riddle was plaguing him.
I tapped my knuckles on the table. “What do you say we duel at nights? I know a good spot where we won’t be bothered.”
He glanced up. “Are you saying that for me, or for you? You know you’re the one who loved to duel.”
“You got me. But your everflame is my only excuse to bring out the weapon. Well, aside from petting it like Gollum with the ring.”
He snorted. “That makes it so appealing.”
“So tonight at ten?”
“That’s late, Cole…”
I pulled my satchel over my shoulder. “We both know you won’t be sleeping—the riddle’s still unsolved. I’ll see you at ten.”
When I came out of the library, I stopped, staring up at the spot in Umbra’s great tree where I knew the horn sat nestled.
Waiting. Waiting.
A life like this could make a compulsive out of me.
Fi nodded at Loki, who sat with his tail wrapped around his feet as he sat atop a fencepost. “Has he ever ridden Noir?”
I ran a hand down the horse’s neck; he stood uncommonly docile and quiet beside me in the paddock. “Not yet. I don’t even know how the horse or the cat would react.”
“Not well,” Loki groused. “Not well at all.”
“We’ll find out today, won’t we?” Fi said. “You’ll need to bring Loki with you on missions. Umbra’s told us your familiar will be a great asset.”
Loki flicked his tail. “Is it my stunningly silken fur?”
I smiled, swung up onto Noir’s back. “Must be.” Then, to Fi, “He’s wondering what he’ll be needed for.”
“A witch’s familiar can scent magic.” She raised her eyebrows at Loki. “And I’ve heard black magic smells particularly pungent.”
Loki’s green eyes shifted to me. “Smells like shit.”
I tilted my head. “Does it? You never told me that.”
“Why would I want to talk about what smells of shit? I don’t hea
r you talking about litter boxes.”
Fi folded her arms. “Your familiar sounds…”
“Like he’s talking back to me?” I said down to her.
“I wasn’t going to put it that way.”
“Please, put it that way. He was like this even when I thought he was just a regular cat.”
Fi’s austere expression opened up in a new way. “I always forget. You grew up as a human, didn’t you?”
“For nineteen naive years.”
She let out the softest sigh. “If only my greatest worry was nuclear war and not the Shade. How blissful that would be.”
“Yeah, it was total bliss.” I rubbed the horse’s withers as he shifted under me. “Noir is getting antsy. Loki, you coming aboard or what?”
Loki didn’t move. “I’d prefer to run ahead.”
“You’ll never keep up. Now get on.”
“Fine. But there’s no way I’m sinking my claws into that animal unless you want another episode of leaping fences and emergency dismounts.”
I patted my cloak. “Do it, then.”
With the simplest leap like water through air, Loki landed in a perch on my shoulder. He remained there, pressed to the side of my head and securing his hold.
“Is that where you’re going to sit?” I asked.
“There isn’t exactly a sidecar on this ride.”
“Fair enough.” I glanced down at Fi. “We’re all boarded.”
“Start around the paddock at a walk, and when you’re ready, up the gait—a trot, and even a canter if you feel up to it today. Go at your pace.”
Loki swayed at first as we set into a walk, passing around the fence line. Noir kept trying to stop to rip at patches of succulent grass, and every time I had to redirect him. Each time, Loki and I leaned forward in an awkward distribution of weight.
But after our first pass around the paddock, he’d settled into the horse’s gait. We migrated into the larger ring to start trotting, the jerkiest one of all.
“Oh gods,” Loki said when we hadn’t gone twenty feet. “I’m going to be sick. And not hairball sick. Legit sick.”
“We won’t be trotting when we’re out there.”
“Then why are we doing so now?”
“Good point. You want to canter, then?”
“I want to get off, but I’ll take cantering over this hell.”
So we cantered. And that was, surprisingly, the easiest gait for us to synchronize in. And soon enough Loki sat firm, staring out, as much a part of this unit as Noir and I had become.
When we’d finished and I brought Noir back to the stables, Fi hung over the door as I wiped him down. “You and your familiar have a kinship,” she observed. “It was obvious when you were on the horse.”
“She sees how well I tolerate you,” Loki said from the rafters, peering up into a sparrow’s nest.
I ran a brush down Noir’s dusty legs. “Funny enough, our relationship didn’t even change after I learned he could talk two years ago.”
“What was it like, being a human?” Fi asked.
I moved the brush over Noir’s back. “It was a lot like it is being a witch. Except I had to use a lighter to make things burn.”
She laughed—the first time I’d heard her do so. “But you weren’t a fire witch then. You weren’t any different than other people. Don’t you miss that?”
“Not one bit. I was always different, just in other ways. Worse ways.”
Lonelier ways. I had more—and better—friends as a fire witch than I’d ever had as a human.
I only missed one thing. My family.
“Different?” Fi asked.
“Oh, you know.” I straightened, exchanging the brush for a hoof pick. “I was moody. Hard to know. Why are you so interested, anyway?”
She examined her hands. “I’ve spent my whole life hearing stories of the Shade. My parents raised me in fear of her—and now that I’m a guardian, I understand why.”
“She’s as bad as your parents’ stories?” I lifted one of Noir’s back hooves.
“Worse. From what I hear, the guardians outside the academy aren’t having much more luck than we are. Sometimes this thing we do feels hopeless. And yet I’m the leader here—I have to be the one with the most hope.”
Eva’s parents were guardians, but they didn’t seem to lack hope. Maybe they were better at hiding it.
“How many guardians are there?” I asked. “Outside the academy.”
“Hard to say exactly. Maybe a thousand across the world? We aren’t exactly organized like the formalists.”
A thousand. Just a thousand.
I was almost afraid to ask my next question.
When I straightened, I gripped the pick like a weapon. “And how large is the Shade’s army?”
“That’s an impossible question,” Loki said from above us.
“We can’t see the whole of it to know,” Fi said with a lowered voice, as though we were being observed. “To answer that question, we would have to descend into Hell itself. That’s a move we can’t make.”
Can’t see. Can’t move.
In a flash, the answer to a different question came to me.
I set the pick on the rack. “Fi, thank you. I have to go.”
Chapter Fourteen
I’d planned to find Aidan. But the moment I stepped out of the stables, I found myself face to face with Maeve Umbra.
The old wizard always wore the same face: unreadable, maybe noble or maybe a little arrogant, the finest hint of a smile.
She would have been a terrific poker player.
“Hello, Clementine.” She nodded me toward the path leading around the outskirts of the grounds. “Do you have a moment?”
It wasn’t a question. When the headmistress asked you if you had a moment, you did. Not that she would tell me anything useful.
“Of course.”
We fell into a walk along the path, her staff tapping over the grass. “I heard from Fi about the events of your first rescue.”
My stomach tightened. “You heard we failed?”
“I wouldn’t call it a failure.”
“Oh?” I glanced at her. “What would you call us losing that girl forever, then?”
She returned my glance, held it. “I would call it a tragedy. But my understanding from her is that you rode boldly.”
“Failure, tragedy—whatever you want to call it, my ‘bold’ riding didn’t stop anything.”
In that moment, she looked at me with almost aching empathy. Her hand went up as though to touch my shoulder, but retreated back to her side. We went on walking. “You punish yourself too easily. It will be your undoing, if you allow it.”
I didn’t want to think about my undoing. Not right now. “Is this what you wanted to talk about?”
“No, it isn’t. Aidan told me about the incident that occurred a few days ago in London.”
“With the leyline.”
“Yes. The leyline. I don’t expect you know what any of that was about, do you?”
“Do you?”
“I might do, actually. You know, Clementine, that when a magical disturbance occurs in the world, I can feel it. It’s how I know where to send the guardians.”
“I remember.”
“So you will not be surprised to know I felt the disturbance along the leyline at Mr. North’s parents’ home outside London.”
I turned to her as we walked. “Was it the Shade?”
“Oh, no. She grows in power each day, but as far as I know she still cannot traverse the world outside the witching hour.” Her lips drew together. “But nonetheless, I do believe a mage infused the leyline with the power you encountered.”
“When Aidan and I went through the veil…”
“You ended up elsewhere,” Umbra finished as we came alongside the meadow. “He told me.”
“And you think the two events were connected.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Oh yes, I very well do. Unless Aidan has somehow been to the plac
e he described, and he assured me he had not.”
So someone had wanted us to end up there. In the middle of Siberia.
“Why?” I asked. “It was a barren place.”
Her eyes gleamed as she gazed out over the meadow. “Unlike here. I do so love the grounds in August—the lush and bloom of this place never grows old.”
I tried to catch her eye. “Right. Do you have any idea who it was who sent us there?”
“A powerful mage indeed.” She gave a flourish of the hand as though to indicate such power. “To infuse a leyline with your magic requires intense concentration. And to redirect the course of your travel, the both of you? Even more difficult.”
“They must have been watching us. Waiting for us.”
“Perhaps so. Though there are other ways besides a simple stakeout up a tree.” She tapped her staff against a trunk as we passed. “I know certain fae are fond of that.”
I tucked away that detail for later. “What ways?”
“You once asked me about Lucian the prince. Do you know what a demon is capable of?”
Lucian the prince. I hadn’t thought about him in months. But his image was still burned into my night—that one night in the spring of my first year when I’d ended up outside the gates of Hell.
Was she implying that he was the one who’d infused the leyline?
“You told me Lucian the prince serves the Shade,” I said. “Her army can’t leave Hell except at night.”
“Ah, perhaps so for the foot soldiers. But the Shade has grown her tendrils into the world above—into people in the world above. And in the magical world, Clementine, a demon is no underworld-dweller.”
This was more than Umbra had ever shared with me. Maybe because I was a guardian now. Maybe because I’d earned some portion of her trust.
“You think it was this demon prince,” I said. “You think he was the one who touched the leyline.”
“Perhaps. You see, once a demon has touched you, he has your scent for the rest of time. There is no place you can go without his knowledge, even this academy. If he wants to find you, he will.”
Had Lucian the prince touched me that night?
I squeezed my eyes shut past the chill in my spine. I couldn’t remember. I only remembered the sight of him. His voice.