Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  Ilsa held her breath. Looked from the corner where Ferrien had disappeared to the other wolf, Georgiana, stalking south with her back to their hiding place. She cast about her for another unseen guardsperson, but there were none. It seemed he was telling the truth; her way to freedom was clear.

  But did she want it? Was it right?

  “After me, then,” said the boy, and quick as lightning he was gone, replaced by a raven as black as his panther form. He soared softly across the lawn, dipped over the wall, and vanished into the park while Georgiana at the west gate still faced away.

  Ilsa got to her feet, then took to the sky. She pushed herself high then let gravity and the tilt of her wings send her swooping across the lawn and over the garden wall. She followed the raven as he swooped low over the park and landed in a copse of trees some distance from the house, where he leaned against an oak tree and waited for her. Ilsa transformed in the air and dropped to earth beside him, landing gracefully on her feet. She swung around, ears pricked, waiting to catch the movement of a wolf bounding towards them or the rustle of heavy paws crunching foliage.

  There was nothing, but as Ilsa studied the scene, something else slowly dawned on her.

  She had thought this place was different through the portal, and she’d been right.

  “There ain’t no zoo here.”

  Ilsa knew this corner of Regent’s Park well. It was the site of the zoological gardens. She had sneaked in more times than she could count, as either a bird or a mouse, before shifting somewhere private and joining the patrons. Most of her more extravagant transformations – all of which relied on studying an animal in the flesh: the way it moved, its curves and edges – had been made possible by its inventory. It was dismaying to discover that what was such a wondrous place in the Otherworld was nothing but a big, white mansion in this one.

  “Oh, there’s a zoo,” said the boy. “You’re looking at it. The seat of Camden, some would say. Not quite what you’re used to in the Otherworld, but rest assured, though there are fewer bars there are just as many animals.”

  The Zoo. Of course; that’s what Captain Fowler had called it.

  The boy pushed off the tree and started strolling back towards the house. “Now if this experiment of yours is over, I think I’ll take tea. Alone. Oh, and don’t escape in that direction if you still fear being seen. Make a straight line towards—”

  “What are they keeping out?”

  He stopped mid-stride and turned to face her. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said the wolves weren’t here to keep me in. So what are they guarding this place from?”

  It must have been a stupid question. He studied her a moment as if to gauge if she was serious.

  “You know nothing of London,” he said ponderously. “Do you?”

  Ilsa folded her arms. “I know everything ’bout London. I’ve lived here my whole life.”

  He shook his head, the downturn of his mouth at once miserable and mocking. “Not in this London. For a start, it’s not one city. It’s six.”

  “Six?”

  “Six peoples. Six factions. Six territories.”

  Ilsa swallowed. London is not what it was meant to be, Captain Fowler had said. He had failed to mention that acolytes, wolves, and whatever army he belonged to were only half the soldiers staking their claim to a part of it.

  “Do you see those lanterns?” He pointed to a spot at the west edge of the park. It was so far away, and the shapes of trees and houses knitted together in similar shades of grey, but sure enough, half a dozen specks of light burned on; some stationary, others clearly held aloft by hand. “That’s a guard point. It marks the boundary of Camden and the Heart, the Sorcerers’ quarter.”

  “Sorcerers.” Ilsa was struck with notions of enchanted castles and magical bargains. “Could a Sorcerer… move too quick to see, or step through a wall?”

  “Stars, no,” he said. He was warming to his role now. Ilsa feared it was her bewilderment that entertained him. Before she could utter the question of what a Sorcerer could do, he turned and pointed past the house. “But a Wraith could. The faction of the North. They can pass through solid objects if they choose to. Walls, yes. Locked doors. Hence their name. Not to mention their formidable strength and heightened senses.”

  So that was how Captain Fowler had appeared from the brick when she was hiding in the fish market. He was a Wraith.

  The boy turned ninety degrees again. “Venture east and you will soon reach a guard point to Whitechapel, the territory of the Whisperers. Mind readers. Thought benders. Don’t let their lack of physical magic fool you, they are as dangerous as any of us. A Whisperer can make their victim forget their loved ones, their values, their self-preservation. Can make them crave violence, sex, death even. They can wipe a mind clean and refill it with whatever, and whomever, they choose.

  “Follow the Thames east and you will reach the Docklands, as I’m sure you know, expert that you are.” He smiled wryly. “There you will find the Oracles. I understand you don’t need me to warn you about them.

  “And then there are the Psi. You can imagine the debates we enjoy this side of the portal. Which magic is most formidable? Which is mightiest in combat? Well, I favour the Psi. Their magic is psychokinesis. The ability to influence the physical with their mind.” He laughed humourlessly. “One will stop believing in the superiority of Wraith strength or Whisperer manipulation when one has seen a person decapitated by the blade of someone who hasn’t lifted a finger.”

  Ilsa balled her hands into fists to stop them from shaking. “And you’ve seen such a thing?”

  He smiled. Perhaps it was the moonlight, but that smile was a vicious thing, unguarded and yet deceitful, like a fake smile painted on a wooden puppet. “Twice.”

  “And where do they live? The Psi.”

  “Let’s just say we’re surrounded by enemies on every side. That is what our soldiers are protecting the Zoo from: this city.” He gestured around them again, somewhat wildly. Ilsa could tell he was reaching the crescendo. “It was founded on discontent and tribalism and it broke along those fault lines as it was always destined to do. Welcome to London, the city that orphaned you.” His breath left him in a rush. He ran a hand through his already bedraggled hair as he added, quieter: “You were better off where you came from.”

  In the sudden hush that fell, he wandered away a little, almost as if he’d forgotten she was there. But Ilsa didn’t mind. She too, needed to breathe. Her thoughts were tumbling too quickly over one another, like a barrel bouncing over stones as it rolled down a hill; if it didn’t slow, it would break apart.

  “So they really are dead, then?” she said, doing her best to sound collected. “My parents.”

  His eyes were black in the moonlight as he turned to her, but they seemed to grow darker still as it dawned on him. “You didn’t know.”

  Ilsa opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She thought she had known. She had been an orphan all her life, and though she hadn’t rested without knowing where her magic came from, she had long accepted the truth that it meant being without a family. But the confirmation hollowed her out and whistled through her like an icy draft down empty corridors.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know nothing. Not who they were, or ’bout this place. Or magic.”

  The boy looked skyward and let out a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan. “Heaven, earth, and all the damned constellations,” he said under his breath. “Well, now you do.”

  If that was what passed for sympathy, Ilsa would take it. A kind word or a gentle hand on her arm would bring on hateful tears. Tears of what, she wasn’t sure. Bewilderment, grief, injustice; they all bled together and left her numb.

  “You knew them? My—” parents. My mother and father. She couldn’t make the words come a second time; they sounded too foreign. No one had ever been hers, and no one was hers still. Her mother and father were dead.

  “Of course I didn’t…” he began snip
pily, clearly struggling to adjust to Ilsa’s absolute ignorance. His hands found refuge in his pockets once more, defensive. “I was an infant when they passed. My… my father was a lieutenant to the alpha, as I am now. Or was. I’m not sure any more.”

  “Your father – he ever talk about them?”

  His unforgiving gaze snapped to hers. She had said something wrong. The wrongness of it flashed across the boy’s face, torment so bleak Ilsa wished she could unsee it, and yet so brief she wasn’t sure she had. He stared at her like she were a ghost, mouth open like he might speak, but he didn’t.

  “How’d they die, then?” She moved closer. She needed him to understand how important this was. “Tell me that at least.”

  “They won’t like that you’re talking to me,” he said, almost to himself.

  “Who?”

  “The other lieutenants. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you these things.”

  “Please.” Ilsa hated to beg, but the word was out before she could stop herself. None of it was as she’d thought. She had imagined all sorts of scenarios leading to her being left at the orphanage, and most had involved her parents’ horror at what they had birthed. Now that she was back in the world she had come from – a world full of magic – she knew this couldn’t have been the case. She thought she would feel relieved, validated, but though her parents were truly dead, she understood less than ever why she’d been orphaned.

  “I deserve to know why I was left at an orphanage.”

  He straightened, unable to hide his surprise. “You weren’t left at an orphanage.”

  “I – I was abandoned,” Ilsa said stubbornly.

  The boy was shaking his head slowly. “You were hidden in the Otherworld to protect you. The day you were born was the day your parents were murdered.”

  Ilsa drew a sharp breath and wondered how it could hurt so much to hear of something she did not remember happening to people she had not known. “How?”

  He ran a hand through his already dishevelled hair and looked about like someone – one of the lieutenants, perhaps – was about to catch them. Ilsa was compelled to look too, but there was nothing around them but an expanse of moonlit park. They were too far from the house to draw attention.

  “Your mother thought she could tilt the needle towards peace. Before your birth, she gathered the faction leaders and proposed the Principles. They’re… rules of engagement. Break the Principles against another faction and their leader can retaliate as they see fit. Follow them, and you have the best chance of a peaceful life.”

  Rules of engagement. Just like on a battlefield.

  “Each faction leader can govern their quarter as they choose, but they agree to enforce the Principles. And they did. The faction leaders signed and it was done.” He laughed pitifully. “Should have been done. But there were dissenters. A small band of propagandists and enough hate-filled citizens to listen to them and be convinced that the Principles curtailed their freedom. The guard points, for example.” He nodded at the pinprick lanterns at the west edge of the park. “The Principles say we must pass from one quarter to the next by way of the guard, and the propagandists said their leaders were trying to limit their movements. But there was no movement before the Principles. Approaching a border was like stepping into a warzone.

  “The Principles said no one could use their magic beyond their own quarter. The propagandists said it was your mother’s conspiracy to disarm the citizens of the other factions.

  “The Principles said in writing that the faction leaders recognised Camden as the territory of the Changelings. And the propagandists said it was just the beginning; that if we were allowed a place in the city, we would grow our territory and our numbers until every other faction fell to us.”

  “That don’t make no sense,” said Ilsa, shaking her head. “Why’d they think it was some conspiracy? You said all the faction leaders agreed to them.”

  “Stars, that didn’t matter! It was never about the Principles. When London was settled, we didn’t yet exist. The last magic, they call us. Two thousand years younger than the Wraiths. One hundred thousand younger than the Sorcerers. The legitimate peoples of London could not tolerate each other, let alone us, but we were here anyway, and we were lost. Morgan Ravenswood united the Changelings, and then she won Camden for us with teeth and claws. With blood. Her family have been paid in kind ever since. Your parents were killed for the crimes of your ancestor and the desire to be better than her. They were…” he faltered, shook his head. His gaze found hers, tentatively, then shifted away again, finding a spot in the grass to address instead. “They were run into hiding. But they were found. The way I understand it, they had had a plan to hide you in the Otherworld since they learned you were coming. It was supposed to be temporary. Just until the unrest settled a little; a handful of years at most. You were supposed to be cared for there.”

  Cared for. “They din’t leave me in an orphanage?”

  “I don’t know the details, of course. Like I said, I’m too young to remember any of this first-hand. But they had a friend in the Otherworld whom they trusted. Another Changeling. Lord Walcott, I believe his name was. He had agreed to make you his ward until it was safe for you to return.”

  “A lord?” Ilsa let out a miserable laugh, earning her a wary sideways glance. This life she had somehow lost; it was worse than simply cared for, which would have been enough. It was cared for by some wealthy Changeling lord, who would have fed her well and kept her in clean clothes and a warm bed; who would have told her what a Changeling was, and that she had had a mother and father who wanted her. The laugh that might have been a sob came again. “Where is he, then? This Walcott.”

  “Dead.” He delivered the word as gently as he had the truth of her parents. “Smallpox. When you were still an infant. Not long after, Ilsa Ravenswood died of it too.”

  “I – beg pardon?”

  Ilsa recognised the way he was watching her, like a spectator trying to work out the trick before the final flourish, and she knew before he spoke that he didn’t have the answers. “My words exactly when we learned you were alive. No one had been in close contact with Walcott. I imagine they didn’t want to draw attention to him, and to you. He would signal us that all was well, and then the signals stopped coming. When someone was sent to investigate, they were told you were both dead.”

  A noxious fear Ilsa didn’t want to name crept into her belly. “By who?”

  “Walcott’s beneficiary. She was his housekeeper, I believe. He left her everything, including guardianship of you.” God granted me this house, child, and He’ll have thanks for His grace, whatever He asks of me. “She said she had nursed the baby herself until the end and was holding her when she died,” he added slowly, purposefully. “I remember that specifically.”

  I will cure you of that demon inside you, as He wishes.

  “What was her name?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said again. But he didn’t need to know, because Ilsa did. She understood what had been done to send her life down the path it had taken.

  The boy was watching her expectantly. “Do you know of her?” he prompted when Ilsa didn’t speak. “Do you know why she said that?”

  Yes, she wanted to say, but she knew the rest of the words wouldn’t come. She knew she couldn’t think on it right now, not with everything else she had learned. Magic, warfare, her parents’ slaughter. It was too much.

  “P’raps Ilsa Ravenswood is dead,” she said instead, testing the way it felt and whether she could believe it. She wrapped her arms around her waist tightly. “P’raps I ain’t her.”

  The boy shot her a probing look, black shadow and stark light throwing the crease of his brow into stark relief. “Come with me,” he said. “That is, if you would risk stepping back into the house and being a captive once more.”

  Then he was a raven again, climbing high beyond the tops of the oak trees where he circled, waiting for her.

  Ilsa looked around her at
the silent expanse of Regent’s Park. Where would she go, if not with him? This was where the answers she sought could be found. So she shifted and soared to join the raven; the first Changeling she had ever known, she realised with a pang.

  They crept back across the wisteria-blanketed wall and swooped low over the lawn, then slipped in through an open window on the first floor and walked through the cavernous hallways in silence. He still hesitated at every doorway, listened before every turn. Ilsa realised in the dizzying torrent of questions answered, the mystery of this boy she had found lurking in the darkness had fallen to the wayside. She studied the sharp lines of his profile as he guided her through the house. He was too strange to be classically handsome; the set of his brow too solemn, the cut of his jaw and cheekbones too brutal. And yet…

  He stopped abruptly, snapping her out of her reverie.

  “I’ll be made to pay when they find out we spoke, and I would have been hung, drawn, and quartered if you had flown out of here and disappeared again,” he said, hands in his pockets, something of that riling superiority back in his features. Ilsa wondered if he’d caught her looking.

  “You was never going to let me leave.”

  “You were never going to try. You say perhaps you’re not Ilsa Ravenswood.” He tilted his chin in the direction of something over Ilsa’s shoulder, and she turned around. It was the portrait of Alpha Lyander and Thorne Nyberg. They were back on the spot where they had met. “I saw you looking at them. You knew who they were.”

  He was right. Without understanding why, she had recognised them instantly. It was their eyes; the shape of his and the colour of hers. Puzzle pieces that only fit together when Ilsa was added.