Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  “That man Fowler said Alpha Hester paid him to find me!” She gestured at the door Cassia was hurriedly closing. “That woman don’t even know why I’m here!”

  “Technically, Captain Fowler was hired on Hester’s behalf,” said Cassia, at a volume that alerted Ilsa to the fact she’d been yelling. “I was the one who arranged the contract.”

  Ilsa folded her arms and levelled a glare that dared her to go on.

  “There was a messenger. They said Ilsa Ravenswood was alive in the Otherworld, and that the acolytes would kill her in three days’ time. We didn’t understand it at the time, but if there was a chance… well, thank the stars we acted anyway.”

  “We?”

  “Hester’s other lieutenants and myself. We’ve had to make all the decisions ourselves since the last attack. Since Hester was hurt.”

  The last attack? Was that what Hester had been referring to when she talked about December? How many attacks were there? And by whom?

  Cassia glanced back at the door and beckoned Ilsa back towards the stairs. “It’s only been six weeks, and she lost her ability to shift or walk and—”

  “She can’t shapeshift?” said Ilsa, and Cassia shook her head. Ilsa’s mouth fell open in horror. Her talents had caused her so much pain, but the only thing worse would be to know what it was like and have it taken away.

  “My point is,” said Cassia gently, “that Hester’s not always this way.”

  “Just often,” said an amused voice behind them.

  Ilsa turned to see a young man with rich brown skin, classically handsome features, and a neat moustache. He was leaning against the wall, one wing-tipped shoe crossed over the other, and a cane topped with a gold wolf’s head tucked under his arm. Everything about him – his cream three-piece suit, his gleaming gold cufflinks – was immaculate and spoke of wealth. He had pale brown eyes – weak eyes; a colour like dye faded in the sun – and they regarded Ilsa with a wicked glint from below a straw boater pulled low on his brow. Ilsa wondered at such a proper-seeming gentleman wearing his hat indoors, but perhaps the etiquette was different in the Witherward.

  “Aelius,” said Cassia, sounding relieved. “This is Ilsa. Ilsa, this is Aelius Hoverly, another lieutenant.”

  Aelius inclined his head to her and smiled, revealing impish dimples and perfect white teeth. “The wolves who witnessed your arrival have not oversold you. You are every bit as beautiful as your mother was.”

  Ilsa narrowed her eyes at Aelius and Cassia in turn. “And do them wolves also know why them Oracles tried to kill me?”

  Aelius’s eyebrows shot up and his smile grew wider. “The same fire too, it would seem.” He turned to Cassia. “Shall I take it that Hester won’t be joining us?”

  “Careful, Aelius. That’s Alpha Hester to you and me.” This must have been a joke, because Aelius chuckled. “And thankfully, no. Where are the others?”

  “Oren is taking breakfast. Young Master Whitleaf is, shall we say, heavily occupied down on the lawn—”

  “That’s… concerning,” muttered Cassia.

  “—and the eminent lord of self-pity is no doubt still abed. I sent a servant to aggravate him but we have ample time to take the scenic route down to the meeting room.” He flashed another grin at Ilsa. “So let us show our newcomer around.”

  He gestured with his cane for Ilsa to walk with him, stepping around her purposefully so that he was on her right, and Cassia followed.

  “Ilsa visited the portrait gallery in the night,” Cassia told him. Ilsa might have been mistaken, but she sounded nervous again. “She also spoke with Captain Fowler and… Ilsa, what exactly did he tell you?”

  Pushing her grief aside, Ilsa recounted what the boy had told her in the moonlight. The factions. The Principles. How her parents had died. How they’d thought her dead. But if Cassia had fallen for her lie, Aelius was not so easily fooled. As he listened, his gaze focused in on her until Ilsa felt like every evasion and twist of truth rang like a bell.

  “This Wraith,” he drawled when Ilsa was done. “He has quite the mastery of the facts. Which is especially impressive, given that some of them are highly privileged. Such a pity he’s not a Changeling. I could certainly make use of a fellow like that.”

  Fearing she had stretched her lie past breaking point, Ilsa opted for distraction.

  “What does a lieutenant do ’round here anyway?”

  Aelius wasn’t about to fall for that either, but he smiled knowingly and indulged her. “That entirely depends which lieutenant you ask, Ilsa my darling. Dear Cassia here is our genius treasurer. Oren is envoy to our people.”

  “And what ’bout you?”

  Aelius grinned. “I am a merchant.”

  “What’s being a merchant got to do with leading the Changelings?”

  “I trade in knowledge. I barter for secrets.”

  Cassia cut in. “I think in the Otherworld, you would probably call it intelligence. And I’m not sure merchant is a good analogy, considering Aelius is banned from entering the Trade House.”

  Aelius, grinning wider, didn’t even glance in Cassia’s direction. Ilsa had the feeling he had counted on her to expose him; had baited her with his choice of words. She had known pickpockets like Aelius; boys and girls who wore their past sanctions like badges of honour. Trouble was, she had never known whether to admire them for it or check her pockets.

  “What got you banned?”

  “The unanimous decree of the faction leaders, my darling. In the days before I plied my trade for the Zoo, I did so for the highest bidder. And what better place to harvest secrets than in a fortress of iniquity like the Trade House.” He sighed, as if remembering those days fondly. “For the harvest, the Changeling has the perfect bag of tricks, of course – a different face every day. But for the sale, I needed to be recognised in order to be trusted, and eventually, recognised I was.” He flashed that grin again. “When one plays both sides, one is running down the clock. That is the game we play when we deal in deception. For years I made regular sales to regular customers, heedless to the way alliances were shifting and pacts were being forged. Enemies became friends and got to chit-chatting about their sources. Their sources were, of course, yours truly, and my game was up.

  “Thankfully, no magic can match a Changeling’s for running from the consequences of one’s actions. A Wraith may excel at fleeing the scene of their crime, but they cannot cease to be the culprit altogether. I proved myself hard to identify and thus catch, and they were forced to settle for publicly banning me from a multitude of interesting places, including the Trade House, on pain of several flavours of torture and death, depending which lucky individual caught me.”

  “That’s rough,” said Ilsa, wrinkling her nose.

  Aelius tapped her on the head with his cane; perturbed, Ilsa tried to duck out of reach, but she wasn’t quick enough to stop him. “My sentiments exactly. However, where I saw defeat, your own ingenious mother saw opportunity. Reinvent yourself, she told me. You’ve done it two dozen times a week for a lifetime. Lyander didn’t see the sense in wringing my neck when there were so many more interesting uses for me. So she spun me a line about duty and honour and, I must confess, hooked me with it. I’ve run the Zoo’s, as we like to say, communications ever since. When Lyander was so brutally taken from us with most of her lieutenants in tow, Hester gave me the position I keep now.”

  Ilsa frowned at him. Her mother had been dead seventeen years, and Aelius didn’t look old enough to have reached adolescence by that point. But then, Ilsa had gotten herself banned from plenty of places by the age of twelve, and perhaps Aelius had been equally precocious. Then again…

  “Don’t your face twitch when you change it?” said Ilsa, earning a curious glance from Cassia, but a slow smile from Aelius. “When I change mine, I get all these… little spasms.”

  Aelius shrugged. “An unavoidable fact of your magic, and mine, and that of every Changeling I’ve ever known.”

  “Then how d’
you fool anyone?” She studied his profile, but if he truly wasn’t wearing his own face, like she suspected, there was nothing to give him away. “It’s one thing me looking like I got some mad tic in the Otherworld. I bet here everyone and his mother’s wise to it.”

  “But that’s precisely what makes it so delicious!” said Aelius, bringing them to a halt. Cassia muttered something that sounded like heaven and earth and glanced longingly down the corridor as if plotting an escape. “Animals are all good fun, but changing faces is an art. Have you used a disguise before? Have you needed to pass for someone other than yourself?”

  “All the time.” Ilsa told him about the show; about how she would become The Great Balthazar for the finale.

  “Oh, bravo! And tell me, how do you avoid detection by your enraptured spectators?”

  “The lighting washes me out,” said Ilsa. “We designed it like that on purpose.”

  “Lighting! The very first tool.” Wearing a smile loaded with mischief, Aelius casually jostled the rim of his boater while stepping subtly to the right, out of the shadow and into the sunlight pouring in. And in the split second his hat was displaced and the sun shone on him, Ilsa saw it; the tremor just above his left eye. When he stepped out of the light and let the rim of his hat shadow his face once again, it vanished. If Ilsa scrutinised the spot, she swore she could see the twitches, but only because she knew they were there. “Know your lighting. It’ll go a long way. Your angles too.”

  He turned as if to go back the way they had come, and brushed a thumb along his jaw, drawing attention to the twitch by the right corner of his mouth. Only for a second, before he turned around again and the weakness in his magic was hidden from view. Ilsa was astounded. He had chosen to walk on her right before the conversation had come up. He lived these deceptions; had probably been doing so for so long they were second nature to him. He saw her gaping open-mouthed, and flashed his perfect, false grin again.

  “Misdirection is half the magic, Ilsa my darling.”

  Ilsa smiled. “I know a thing or two about that.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute.”

  They walked on. Cassia and Aelius led her around the first and second floors while Aelius rhapsodised about the architecture and interior design – eighty of the very best builders had raised the Zoo in one hundred and twenty days; the stained-glass dome above the entrance foyer was an addition made sixty years previously; wallpaper in thirty-two custom designs had been commissioned from a famous decorator in a country Ilsa was certain did not exist in the Otherworld – but these weren’t the sort of details she had secretly been hoping for.

  “Begging your pardon, sir.”

  “Aelius, please. I won’t abide sir and I certainly won’t abide Mr Hoverly. That was my father, the less said of him the better.” He winked and flashed his perfect teeth.

  “Aelius, then. My mother.” She paused at the feeling of those words coming from her lips. Her mother. “This is where she grew up, ain’t it?”

  “Not just your mother. Six generations of your family have lived here. The Ravenswoods have held Camden from this house for one hundred and thirty years.”

  Ilsa bit the inside of her cheek as she hesitated over her next question. “What was she like?”

  Aelius’s unstoppable grin softened. Cassia walked on ahead as if to give them some space. “Formidable,” said Aelius reverently. “Don’t misunderstand me, she wasn’t a leader to instil fear. She didn’t need it. Lyander was a woman who knew how to get her way and make her victim think it was their brilliant idea. She was a manipulator.” He paused and glanced at her, as if fearing the word was too sharp. But Ilsa liked it. A manipulator could be kind, but she couldn’t be trodden on. She liked thinking of her mother that way.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “She was a quiet woman. She spoke less than any leader of people I’ve ever known,” he said, and broke into a grin. “And I knew and bartered with them all in my independence. But I remember more of Lyander’s words than anyone’s. She made them count, you see.”

  “And my father? Did you know him, too?”

  “Know him? I inherited my role from him.”

  “He was a spy?”

  Aelius put a hand to his chest in a pantomime impression of offence. “He was a merchant of secrets, my darling. One of the finest I have ever known. He had all the talent in the world and not a care for it. That was why your mother recruited me. Thorne wished only to raise a family and play the devoted husband. And chess. The man was a deviously wicked chess player. He taught your mother and they wiled away many an evening in battles of strategy and wit.”

  They reached the main staircase. Beyond it, the corridor ended in a set of double doors even grander than the ones to Hester’s chambers. Ilsa nodded towards them. “That another bedroom?”

  “That,” he said, fondling his cane and looking to Cassia, “is the largest chamber.”

  Aelius made no move towards it. Cassia did not even look.

  “Well, can I see it?” said Ilsa. “I bet it’s really grand, ain’t it?”

  Ilsa wasn’t oblivious. As Aelius led the way to the room, she could read his reluctance. Cassia was the more unwilling. She hung back in the corridor as the others stepped inside.

  It was, as Ilsa predicted, awfully grand.

  They entered into a sitting room, where tall windows threw morning light over ornate furniture, and danced off the crystal chandelier overhead. An elaborate mantelpiece carved from dark wood dominated one side of the room, and flecks of gold in the Persian rug caught the light and sparkled like jewels. Ilsa was tempted to crouch down and find out if it was real – who was she to say rich people didn’t weave real gold into their rugs, then walk over them like it was nothing?

  Through a door was a study, with shelves of leather-bound, gold-embossed books ranged across one wall and a grand desk before the window – the kind at which a banker might count his fortune – and beyond that the bedchamber. A stately four-poster bed, carved with panels depicting all kinds of animals, filled the centre of the room, and forest green drapes and wallpaper transformed the space into some lush, wild jungle.

  Ilsa inhaled the scent of furniture polish and the fresh gardenias that had been placed in half a dozen spots, and listened to the strange quiet that permeated the chambers. Aelius said nothing as she ran her hands over the fine fabric of the couch and the cool marble of a console; offered no history, pointed out nothing of interest. The rooms felt unlived in – cold from disuse, with a stillness in the air – and yet they were kept like some phantom occupant might have need of them at any moment. A quarter-full decanter of something stood dormant atop a liquor cabinet. The papers on the desk were undisturbed. And a chessboard – the pieces in the disarray of a game half played – rested on a card table by the window. It didn’t take a genius to work it out: her parents had lived here. Had it been kept a shrine all these years?

  If there was anything left of them in the suite, Ilsa didn’t know how to recognise it. It was nothing but a reminder that her chances to know them had run out long ago. She let out a shuddering sigh and swept past Aelius.

  “Where next?”

  Aelius followed swiftly and closed the door behind them, and they made for the stairs.

  As they descended into the grand, marbled entrance hall, a small black fox approached, as if it had been lying in wait for them. As it trotted towards them, it shifted into a young man in a dark suit, wearing a red militia armband around one sleeve. He spared Ilsa and Cassia a fleeting, stone-faced glance before leaning very close to Aelius’s shoulder and speaking into the other man’s ear.

  The exchange lasted all of three seconds, at the end of which Aelius nodded once, and the young man turned back into a fox and dashed away. For all the pretence of secrecy, when he saw Ilsa watching, he grinned like he was taking to the stage.

  “The wolves answer to the commander of the militia,” he said coyly, “but the foxes answer to me.”

  “T
hey spies or something?” asked Ilsa.

  “Spies!” He waved his cane dismissively. He had put it to half a dozen uses since they met, none of which were walking. Ilsa wondered if it was part of his act, a prop for distraction. “What is this preoccupation with spies? Spying is for sneaks and rogues. The foxes are connoisseurs of communication, Ilsa my darling. They sow trust and allyship among their contacts in other factions, and they reap information for the Zoo.”

  “Where I’m from, we call them spies.”

  Cassia didn’t smile at that – Ilsa wondered if she was capable – but the look she shot Aelius was teasing.

  They stepped out into the garden, onto the same terrace Ilsa had crept across the night before. At least, she believed it was the same. There were the hydrangea bushes they had watched the wolves from. There was the pavilion, and the west gate beyond. But the moon-drenched lawn and black shapes that might shift at any moment had given way to a riot of colour and life. She hadn’t noticed how lush the grass was. There had been no bees and butterflies flitting among the flower beds. She hadn’t even noticed the heavy summer scent of thousands of blooms mingling on their air. The events of the night before drifted even further from reality. It felt like a dream.

  Feeling a pull to immerse herself in the summer beauty of the garden, Ilsa made for the steps leading down from the terrace, only for Cassia to grab her by the elbow and Aelius to block her with his cane.

  “It’s best to keep a safe distance,” said Cassia apologetically.

  Before Ilsa could ask what she was being kept a safe distance from, there was a loud hiss, and a plume of thick smoke rose up from behind some shrubbery.

  “Something’s on fire!” said Ilsa.

  “We should be so lucky,” Cassia muttered.

  Something that looked like a cannonball burst from the shrubs and hurtled towards them. Aelius swore and dived one way, Cassia pulled Ilsa in the other, but nobody was fast enough. Ilsa ducked and covered her head, but Cassia threw up her hands like she could ward the thing away. And she could – the air around her set like ice. There was barely any change, but the boundary of whatever she had formed glimmered like the surface of a soap bubble, and when the projectile struck it, it burst softly, like a down pillow. A thin mist exploded from the thing and rained down, coating Aelius even as he tried to dodge it, still cursing. But Cassia and Ilsa stayed dry within the bubble.