‘It was you,’ she breathed. ‘You were the one attacking me. The window, the corridor, the flowers . . . You wanted me to think . . . but it was never Lester.’ Her eyes darted over his face, frantic. ‘You were the one who left the messages calling me a murderer. You were there, in the grove that night. Not just Bea and Cecil, and Lester – you.’ She bent and grabbed handfuls of the vines, tearing at them, but they were thickening and pulling taut.
‘Move your hands,’ shouted Crowley. He clicked a flame onto his fingers, inhaled sharply and breathed fire across the room. Tom’s saplings burned to cinders and Alice lunged at him.
Tom shot to his feet and backed up towards the kitchen as she advanced, fists clenched. ‘I didn’t murder Holly,’ she said, her voice dangerously low. ‘You were the one who gave Holly that draught, not me. Did you tamper with it?’
‘There was nothing wrong with the draught,’ he snapped, his shoulders hunched. ‘It was the Summer Tree – it was already growing and she was just too weak to control it.’
‘Why Reid?’ she flung out. ‘Why are you taking her research? You should be making it public, not stealing it away.’
Tom leaned into the kitchen and snatched a glass, hurling it at her. It smashed at her feet. Then another, and another, until glittering fragments carpeted the ground. Distracted, he glanced around for something else he could use, or for an escape route, and Alice took the opportunity to beat him at his own game. He’d sent tremors through her living quarters, and Reid had taken the brunt of it. Now it was his turn. She sank to her feet and struck the wooden floorboards with her palms, gritting her teeth and willing them to move. The interlocking boards vibrated, their corners lifting and beginning to overlap each other. Cursing, Crowley yelled a muffled protest, but Alice’s attention was fixed on Tom.
The boards below Tom parted like a broken jigsaw and his foot slipped through the gap, throwing him off balance. He clattered onto his back with a winded breath. Reid’s papers were thrown into the air and scattered across the room as they drifted down.
Alice swallowed and held her nerve, pushing a new energy into the boards. The convulsions stopped, and waxen twigs slithered out from the floor. They wound around Tom, holding him still, trussing him up tightly.
Alice leapt up and stood over him, breathless. Her forehead was dusted with sweat. The vines around his wrist tightened, splaying him immobile on the floorboards.
‘If Reid’s project,’ she managed after a moment, ‘was responsible for Crane Park Island, then stealing the evidence only means no one can reverse it. You’re enabling it. And meanwhile, the tree . . .’ She trailed away. ‘The tree grows,’ she intoned blankly. ‘And the power of House Mielikki rises. Is this about power? You don’t want to stop the tree because it’s boosting your legacy?’
She toed the twigs lashing him to the floor. ‘Well guess what – it’s boosting my legacy too.’
A sharp blast of fire heated Alice’s back, and she turned to find a furious Crowley extricating himself from the boards, some of them singed like charcoal. Somehow, he managed to make it look elegant when he pushed his weight onto his arms and climbed free of the hole.
He paused only to dust himself down before striding towards her.
‘A little late,’ she said, raising an eyebrow.
‘You seemed to have it in hand,’ he drawled, walking around their captive to examine him more closely. He went very still, and Alice glanced at him, concerned.
‘You have her mark,’ Crowley said softly, his eyes flashing with menace.
He shot a spray of fire at the vine holding Tom’s wrist in place. It burned rapidly, the embers smouldering on the floor. Crowley seized his freed wrist and yanked it closer. With a bony click, it slipped its socket and Tom gasped in pain as Crowley shoved back his sleeve.
There was a ragged scar on Tom’s forearm. Crowley dug his finger into it, his face twisted in disgust. ‘This is Marianne’s handiwork,’ he said, turning to Alice, twisting the arm towards her. ‘She cuts them with the lancet and takes pride in leaving a nice bold scar behind.’
Crowley glared at Tom. ‘How long have you been a member of the Fellowship?’ he barked.
Tom shook his head, his eyes screwed up.
‘Do you know who she is?’ Crowley demanded, gesturing at Alice.
‘Can’t . . . breathe . . .’ Tom managed. ‘Please . . .’
The vines had curled around his chest, crushing his ribs. Crowley glanced up at Alice, and she nodded.
With his mouth drawn into a line, Crowley pressed his hand against the vines, and fire raced along them like a candlewick. Lines of dark ash criss-crossed Tom as he was liberated.
‘You’re going to tell us everything you know,’ said Crowley, his voice like thunder.
He grabbed Tom’s shirt and yanked him to his feet. He took three steps and slammed the technician against the balcony doors.
‘Just . . . let me . . . catch a breath,’ said Tom.
Crowley’s hands must have relaxed for a fraction of a second, because Tom scrambled for the door handle, and before they had time to react, he’d managed to shove open the door.
Crowley hissed in cold rage and lunged for him, but Tom dived out onto the balcony. Alice raced to stop him escaping but he slammed the door against the hinges and it swung towards her, giving him a second’s advantage, alone on the balcony.
He threw her a quick smile through the glass. Overhead, his nightjar flapped frantically, tugging away and circling him in distress.
But Tom’s face was calm. ‘Alice . . . I’m sorry.’
And then he hauled himself onto the stone safety wall and – without pause – stepped off, into the cool night air.
The thud as he hit the pavement seemed to reverberate up her legs and sent her teetering. Down on the street, someone screamed, and Alice’s stomach lurched. Crowley grabbed her and she latched on to his lapels, squeezing them while he pulled her closer.
‘We have to go, Alice,’ he said urgently. ‘The Runners will be coming.’
The next morning, Alice moved through the university corridors in a trance. Bea had insisted on dragging her downstairs to breakfast, to toast her success in her test, and Alice had been forced to play along.
‘I can’t stomach cold tea and bread,’ muttered Bea, glaring at her plate. ‘This is bloody prison food, darling.’
There was no electricity. Not in the whole of Westminster. The power grid was sound but some of the distribution lines had been so weakened during the Summer Tree’s last growth spurt that they’d finally given out.
‘There’s talk of an enforced blackout at dusk so they can fix it,’ said Bea. ‘The lights and Ditto machines are down, and the rector is refusing to allow matches and uncontrolled fires to be used indoors – which means that tea, coffee and food are now served at the mercy of the faculty from House Ilmarinen, with their so-called “controlled fire”, and at the moment the bastards are refusing. Apparently, they’re here to develop the minds of the next great thinkers, not to boil pans and barbeque food for the entire staff.’
Bea shot a glare at the Dean of Philosophy, who was busy blowtorching a piece of toast with his bare hands, and who appeared to have a piping-hot cup of tea with steam curling off it.
‘On the plus side,’ said Bea with a heaving sigh, ‘the Council are coming under terrific pressure to restore normality. Geraint’s been having kittens, apparently.’ She smiled brightly. ‘And what’s fantastic about it is, it’s deflected some of the attention from our House for a change. Ilmarinen sort out the electrical systems, and they’re being blamed for poor maintenance due to the Council’s budget cuts. Serves them right,’ she said, with another icy glare at the Dean of Philosophy, who raised his cup to her as though in greeting.
She took a sip of her own – cold – tea and baulked at it. ‘I wonder where Tom is,’ she said, peering around the dining hall. ‘Wait until he finds out we can’t even power a kettle and the entire faculty is about to descend into civi
l war.’
Alice said nothing. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Bea that Tom would never be sitting down to breakfast with them ever again – that he had been a liar and a traitor. So instead, she ate in virtual silence.
A scream from the other side of the dining room jolted Alice upright and her eyes raced to search out the source. It was the young student couple she’d once watched over breakfast.
‘Help him!’ the girl screamed. She lunged frantically across the table, scattering cups and plates. She brushed back the long hair from her boyfriend’s face, pleading with him to be okay.
‘What happened?’ bellowed the Dean of Philosophy, jumping to his feet with such force his tea spilled over the table.
‘He – he was carving me an orchid from the wooden coaster,’ she breathed. ‘It was just a splinter, in his thumb. Just a tiny splinter . . . and look what it’s . . .’ She trailed away in panic.
By now, Bea had flung her napkin onto the bench and was marching over to help, but Alice was frozen in stunned dread. It was Holly all over again. The splinter had corrupted the young student, somehow – dug its way into his bloodstream, perhaps. Because as they watched, it grew through his body, branching into his veins, forking through blood vessels like an invasion until every space inside his body was filled with wood and twig. With terrible realization, his skin began to tear, pinpricks of blood appearing on his shirt, and the dining hall echoed with his pained screams.
Alice trembled with guilt and horror – frightened to ask Kuu to end his agony and risk releasing her soul again, but unable to bear the remorse of doing nothing. She took a lurching step towards him, but with a ragged gasp, he fell silent. His head flopped back, and Alice blinked in shock as his nightjar soared away from his lifeless body, a luminous glow pulsing at the end of its broken cord. It ended just as quickly as it had begun, and an awful silence fell over the dining hall, broken only by the soft weeping of the student’s girlfriend.
The rise of House Mielikki? Was this really what Tom had wanted? A legacy so strong and uncontrollable that it could tear you apart just as much as its talisman, the Summer Tree, had torn apart Crane Park Island? Alice shuddered. Was the price of wielding such power too high?
Alice sat on her bed, Reid’s folder opened flat and its contents spread out over the blankets. In a bid to block the morning’s scenes from her mind, she had chosen to spend the afternoon numbing her thoughts with paperwork and a detached search for answers about Crane Park Island. She had separated Reid’s research into two camps. The first: everything relating to her work for the Magellan Institute; the second: a miscellaneous pile of newspaper clippings. But it had soon become clear that there was not even the slightest reference to anything related to Crane Park Island. Had Reid been delusional with panic? Why had Tom – and therefore Marianne – wanted these notes?
Alice’s fingers sifted through the pile again. Reid’s research for the Magellan Institute centred around proving the soul consisted of three different parts: the itse, henki and luonto. Each had a different function: henki gave life to the body; itse gave one a sense of self and conscience; and luonto brought good fortune and, according to Magellan, bound the three parts together.
Alice’s eyes darted over the notes again. Reid had scribbled frantic details across several pages, explaining that the henki was the life-giving spirit delivered by the nightjar at birth – an injection of life, like a blast from a defibrillator, bringing a pulsing heartbeat, rushing flow of blood, heaving lungs and the crackling spark of neurons. And at the moment of death, the henki finally escaped to be collected by the Lintuvahti – the reigning Lord of Death. Alice swallowed thickly. The long-haired student’s nightjar – the pulsing glow trailing at the end of the cord – had that been parts of his soul?
The other two parts of the soul were quite different. Magellan called the luonto the gatekeeper. Reid’s notes claimed that in the moments before death, the luonto was the first part to escape the body, to encourage the nightjar to cut the cord and free its other parts. However, the gatekeeper was not infallible. It could be weakened by trauma, leaving the other parts to slip free before their time. Only once the henki left was the body actually dead.
It was the itse that seemed to have claimed most of Reid’s attention. Itse was your sense of self – your thoughts, beliefs, your personality. After death, it was the part of your soul that travelled to the Land of Death to find its peace. If the luonto was weakened, the itse could depart the body temporarily, following grief, trauma or illness – leaving the person emotionally detached, often in the wake of a loved one’s death; the loss of the itse was often mistaken for depression.
Reid’s notes included a citation from a text:
(Kosonen, 1911) Following the loss of his wife, Petri Jääskeläinen descended into a state of vacant melancholy. The desperate Jääskeläinen family contacted a local shaman, who diagnosed him as itsetön, ‘without spirit’. To cure him, the shaman agreed to retrieve Petri’s lost itse: a common practice, in which the shaman would fall into a meditative state and send out his own itse to find and bring back that which was lost . . .
In the margins next to the citation, Reid had scribbled something largely illegible. Alice turned it sideways, trying to decipher the comment . . . Pellervoinen safeguard holds? Her lips pressed together. That link to Pellervoinen again, this time in black and white. She squinted at Reid’s handwriting. Pellervoinen safeguard? She would have to show Crowley.
Alice stared numbly at the pages. This was all there was. Nothing else. Why had Reid not destroyed these notes along with the others – and had the others contained something more illuminating? Reid had already spoken of the three-part soul, and Alice herself had read Magellan’s book, Sielun. But other than her odd scribble, there was nothing particularly new or shocking here, Alice thought, staring hard at the pages. Why had Tom been so desperate to get his hands on it? Had he assumed it would reveal more than this? Had he not realized exactly which notes had survived Reid’s destruction?
Alice sat back. For years the Fellowship’s aim had been the same as the Beaks’: to purge the Rookery of life. Marianne had imagined herself offering the dead as sacrifices to Tuoni. And now, here she was again, connected to something that might succeed. But Marianne had Pellervoinen’s legacy, not Mielikki’s. Like Crowley, she was his heir too. Alice bit her lip, glancing at Reid’s notes. It made her uneasy – this spider web connecting Reid’s work, Marianne and herself.
‘Kuu?’
With a snap of white wings, Kuu burst into the room. Alice held out her hand, and the nightjar’s pin-sharp claws latched on to her fingers. She pecked affectionately at her ears. Alice pulled the bird closer to examine the cord joining them. It draped from Kuu’s leg to Alice’s wrist – luminous, pulsing with energy . . . and completely intact. She studied it with growing relief. Sir John Boleyn had sliced it at Marble Arch, but the reigning Lord of Death had fused it back together, the cord binding her tightly to the bird.
‘You’d never let me down?’ she whispered.
Kuu’s head spun round, and Alice saw herself reflected in her dark, shining eyes. The bird looked affronted and turned her back. Alice let out a short laugh.
‘I do trust you to do your job, Kuu,’ she said.
With a prideful flutter, the nightjar vanished, and Alice’s eyes drifted over to the other pile she’d found in the biscuit-coloured folder: the newspaper clippings. They were old and fragile, some of them yellowed, the print tiny. But they all focused on the same thing: Leda Westergard’s many achievements. There were several articles about her election win, others about her swearing-in ceremony when she’d taken her oath of office and some that spoke of her success in changing the House membership system for the better.
Alice read them several times, but to her uninitiated eye there wasn’t quite enough information to glean exactly what she’d done with the membership arrangements. She wondered if Cecil’s book might provide more insight, and scrambled from the be
d to reach it.
Flipping through the pages, she tossed the book onto the floor in frustration. The chancellor’s section was nothing more than a brief chapter skating over the same details. Westergard had somehow made the membership system fairer and introduced the mentorship scheme that had resulted in Alice being paired with Bea. But the exact details of what she’d done were missing – probably, he’d assumed his readership were already familiar with them. Maybe she could ask him.
Alice sighed shakily and moved to trail her fingers through the clippings. The other one that had stood out was the smallest, tucked away at the back: the chancellor’s obituary.
She had died the same year Alice was born. Alice allowed that to sink in for a moment, her eyes drifting from the signet ring on her finger to the one the chancellor wore. She moved to the window to examine the faded picture better in the light. There was something about the slant of Leda’s mouth, and the shape of her eyes . . .
‘She looks . . . a bit like me,’ Alice said out loud. ‘And I’m sure this is her ring.’ She whipped her hand down and threw the article on the table.
If Leda was her mother, then she had known Crowley’s mother, Helena. The old photograph swam into her memory. Their parents had known each other, and she and Crowley had found each other without them.
Leda, Helena, Reid and Marianne. All four of them linked in a way she didn’t yet fully understand. But so much seemed to come back to Marianne – the woman who worshipped Alice’s father, who had sent Tom to attack her and whose youthful face smiled out of a photograph next to Alice’s possible mother.
But there had been another woman in that photograph. Tilda – the older lady, who’d been involved in her adoption alongside Reid. Alice exhaled shakily. There was so much she wanted to understand.
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