Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  When the mist had settled, Cassia lowered her hands and the air returned to normal.

  “What the bloody hell was that?” said Ilsa, her voice an octave higher than normal.

  “I can’t say what the substance was,” said Cassia, “but the disintegrating canister is something he invented when—”

  “Not that! What did you just do?” “It’s on me,” said Aelius, twisting to search his clothes and dabbing himself with a handkerchief. “Do you see it on me? Is it doing anything?”

  “Oh, stars!” said a voice from across the garden. Ilsa looked up. A head had appeared above the bushes; just black curls and protective goggles. Then it vanished again, and a boy emerged, dashing across the lawn towards them.

  “It’s a shielding spell,” said Cassia. “It’s basic corporeal magic.”

  “Basic… corporeal…”

  Aelius stopped his nervous dance and raised his eyebrows at Cassia. “You didn’t mention that you’re a Sorcerer, Cassia dear?”

  Cassia laced her fingers primly. “Well, it didn’t come up.”

  “Is everyone alright?” said the boy, bounding onto the terrace with a gait that wouldn’t be out of place on a golden retriever. He bent double to catch his breath, hands on his knees, but when he caught sight of Ilsa, he straightened again, and his face broke into a wide smile. “Stars! You’re her!”

  “Ilsa, this is Fyfe Whitleaf, another lieutenant,” said Cassia. “Fyfe, this is Ilsa Ravenswood.”

  Fyfe was young to be something as important-sounding as a lieutenant; a year or two younger than Ilsa perhaps but very tall, and slender. He had medium brown skin and unruly hair; though he had tried to tame it with oil, the black curls were falling freely around his sharp features. Now that his goggles rested around his neck, his dark brown eyes sparkled with warmth. He smiled with his whole face, and Ilsa smiled back.

  “Fyfe,” said Cassia, looking nervously at the spattering of moisture on the terrace. It smelled faintly of rhubarb. “Dare I ask?”

  Fyfe scrubbed at his hair nervously. “It’s, ah, a compound designed to bring about a spell of short-term memory loss. I thought loading it into some sort of projectile would make it useful for subduing skirmishes, that sort of thing.” He looked back at the plume of smoke. Two wolves had appeared with buckets of water and were eying whatever was back there warily. “But apparently I need to work on the cannon.”

  “And, it seems, your formula,” said Aelius, dabbing the last of the mist from his face. Fyfe opened his mouth. Closed it again. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work, lad.”

  “Oh, it works. Not as I would hope, yet, but…”

  Aelius’s expression darkened. “What do you mean not as you would hope?”

  Fyfe took a watch from his pocket and frowned at it. “Nothing serious. Just don’t start anything important after eleven and be lying down at noon.” He turned to Ilsa, his sunshine smile lighting up his face, and went on before Aelius had a chance to respond. “It’s so good to finally meet you, Ilsa! Have they introduced you to Hester already?”

  “Briefly,” said Ilsa, folding her arms. “I din’t get much chance to get to know her. What with her being ’bout as pleasant as sewer rats fighting over a cat carcass.”

  Fyfe’s face fell. A ringing silence sounded among them. Ilsa knew she had spoken too freely before Cassia ever cleared her throat. “Ilsa, Hester is Fyfe’s sister,” she said.

  Ilsa’s stomach dropped. She felt the blood drain from her head in a dizzying rush. “Sister?”

  Cassia hadn’t mentioned any other relatives. And Hester and Fyfe didn’t look at all related.

  “Half-sister,” said Fyfe flatly. “I’m not a Ravenswood. Hester and I shared a mother.”

  “Oh.” Ilsa bit her tongue, for all the good it would do now. She tried to stammer an apology but Cassia hastily cut in.

  “Fyfe is the lieutenant responsible for” – she looked to him and frowned – “bio… magical… chemistry?” said Cassia.

  “Blowing things up?” offered Aelius.

  “Innovation, I suppose.” He turned to Ilsa. “Hester only made me a lieutenant because I begged to be one. She had to invent a role which required my, ah, unique strengths.”

  “Well that was… sweet of her,” Ilsa said, hoping to make up for the last thing she said about Hester and fooling no one.

  Aelius caught Fyfe’s eye and chuckled. “Be careful of using language like that around the woman herself, Ilsa my darling,” he said. “Accuse Hester Ravenswood of sweetness and I guarantee she’ll show you how sweet she can be. Now let us find Oren and a pot of strong coffee.”

  He led the way back into the house. Ilsa followed behind, falling into step with Fyfe. An awkward silence stretched between them until Ilsa found the nerve to speak.

  “I’m sorry ’bout what I said. It was awful of me.”

  Fyfe shook his head and managed a smile. “I know what she’s like. It’s as Aelius said, she never minded about being liked even before she was injured and now… she’ll be back to the old cynical Hester in no time. But she does have a kind side,” he added hastily. “In her own way. She just doesn’t show it to everyone.”

  Ilsa knew what it was to hide parts of oneself. Hester must have had her reasons. “Is she a good alpha most of the time?”

  “Well, of course, she wasn’t—” Whatever he had been about to say, he cut off abruptly. He chewed his lip and threw a glance at Cassia and Aelius who had gone on ahead. “She’s an awfully good alpha, yes. Sometimes I look at her and I wonder what makes a person able to do a job like that. Is it something they have or something they forge themselves? If one could isolate it, what would it boil down to? I know human beings don’t work like machines or chemical formulas, but I can’t help but wonder.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “And Hester was never even meant to be alpha. She was just the only one left when…”

  “When my parents died,” said Ilsa when Fyfe trailed off. That must have been what Hester meant when she called herself a last resort.

  They caught up with Cassia and Aelius at a door with a plaque reading Meeting Room. As Aelius opened the door, Cassia paused, stiffening, and her gaze tracked across the entrance hall. Ilsa turned.

  It took her a moment to recognise him in the light. The storm blue of his eyes was deeper. He wasn’t as pale as she’d thought. But she recognised the perilous look in his eye and the tight set of his jaw. As he came closer, so did his air of roiling irritation.

  “Ilsa, this is Eliot Quillon,” said Cassia coolly.

  Eliot spared her half a glance, quickly masking any surprise that Ilsa hadn’t told Cassia they’d met.

  “Charmed,” he clipped, before he rounded on Cassia. That was gratitude, thought Ilsa, and she readied a contemptuous glare in case he looked again. “When I suggested you have a mercenary fetch her, Cadell Fowler is not who I had in mind.” He made to swan past them into the meeting room, then apparently remembered a further gripe. “And by the way, what time of day do you call this?”

  “Before noon,” said Aelius, regarding Eliot contemptuously. “I doubt you recognise it.”

  Eliot adjusted his sleeve in an impressively dismissive manner. “I don’t see the point in being awake just to be reminded that I’m not needed for anything, ever, until further notice,” he said tonelessly, before sweeping past. Through the door, Ilsa watched him pull out a chair at the end of a long oval table and sink gracefully into it, as the servants laying out a tea service scattered like pigeons fleeing a cat.

  Cassia shot Ilsa an apologetic look and ushered them into the room.

  “It ain’t that early, is it?” whispered Ilsa, leaning close to Fyfe.

  Fyfe checked his watch. “It’s just gone eight.”

  “But on the other side of the portal… it’s late, right?”

  Fyfe nodded enthusiastically. “It’s eight o’clock in the evening. A remarkable quirk in the fabric between worlds.”

  “Right. So if I want to know what time I got to
be back in the Otherworld, I just got to—”

  “Back, my darling?” said Aelius. Everyone’s gaze had snapped to her. That tiny frown between Cassia’s brows had returned.

  “For the show tomorrow,” Ilsa explained. “Today’s Sunday so the theatre’s closed, but this time tomorrow I’m expected on stage.”

  “That’s quite impossible,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Another man had joined them, and he closed the door with a resonating wooden click.

  Ilsa turned to Cassia warily. “There’s more of you?” “Ilsa, this is Oren Tarenvale,” sighed Cassia.

  Oren carefully unhooked his eyeglasses from around his ears, folded them into his breast pocket and inclined his head at Ilsa. His mousy hair was greying at the temples, and exceptionally neat, like his tweed suit and starched white collar. He smiled tightly, but his eyes were kind, and his face was benevolent and mild, not that it did anything to favour Ilsa’s first impression. She glared at him.

  “And that makes everyone, at last,” said Aelius. “As my pressing need for a spot of breakfast has provided us a deadline, let’s be seated.”

  Cassia took the chair to the right of the head, Aelius beside her, Fyfe beside him. Oren drew out the chair opposite Aelius and motioned for Ilsa to sit.

  “This seat usually belongs to” – he indicated Eliot, in exile at the far end of the table. The boy was running a finger around the lip of his teacup. He didn’t appear to be listening. “Today, it can be yours.”

  He took a seat on Ilsa’s left. The head of the table – Hester’s place, she assumed – remained empty, but so did the place to Ilsa’s right. Aelius had said this was everyone, but that couldn’t be. Someone else was missing.

  “Now.” Oren had a notebook tucked under his arm, which he placed on the table, then he folded his hands and rested them on top in a precise and delicate motion. Ilsa couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard Fyfe sigh. Aelius’s eyes went heavenward. “Before we start divulging all the sensitive details of our current situation to a girl from the Otherworld who is most likely a Changeling, who may or may not resemble the person we’re looking for, and who could easily, in fact, be part of a deceit of some kind, don’t you think we should at least attempt to establish her identity? We hired an outsider, after all – do we even have any way of verifying that Captain Fowler found her where he said he did?”

  “You could ask me,” Ilsa said through gritted teeth. “Or you could go take a look. P’raps my friend’s dead body still marks the spot, depending what them other London constables are getting up to right ’bout now.” Perhaps they were ogling Martha like a curiosity. Perhaps they were poking at her with pens, or having their dogs sniff at her clothing. Perhaps the newspapers were there. They would print that she was a common thief. Tears stung Ilsa’s eyes, but she clenched her fists and held them back.

  Aelius chuckled. “There’s an idea, lad. Would this Other-worlder’s body the captain spoke of be proof enough for you?”

  “Actually,” said Oren, lacing his fingers. He turned to Ilsa. “I was hoping you could tell us where you have been all these years. I went to find Ilsa Ravenswood myself, when she was about a year and a half old, and I was told she had died of smallpox some months previously.”

  “By Miss Mitcham,” said Ilsa quietly. “Lord Walcott’s old housekeeper.”

  Oren turned to Cassia, a question in his eyes. But the Sorcerer gave a small shrug as if to say she would tell him after.

  “Precisely. And now it appears I was lied to,” he said. “Do you have any idea why?”

  The truth was on her tongue, but her breath wouldn’t force it out. What right did they have to let those things happen and then interrogate her about it? “Because she ain’t a good woman,” she managed.

  “She had the certificate of death to prove it,” said Oren.

  Ilsa turned on him. “I s’pose it was the St Genevieve Orphanage by the time you got there, weren’t it?”

  “That’s right. She said she had been left the house in Walcott’s will and had considered it her God-given duty to use it to help the less fortunate.”

  “And she had a bit of paper what proved a baby girl had died in a house full of cold, hungry babies. I don’t s’pect you’d understand, but it weren’t all that uncommon, sir.”

  Oren nodded pensively. He didn’t appear moved by the grim realities of Ilsa’s childhood.

  “There is a way you could prove your identity,” he said. “When I smuggled Ilsa Ravenswood to the Otherworld seventeen years ago, she had with her a toy. Can you tell us what it was?”

  Yesterday, Ilsa might not have been able to answer. She did not treasure any memories from her early childhood, and the more time passed, the happier she was to see them fade. But one had snagged since coming through the portal, first when the captain told her what the Changelings called their militia, and repeatedly since.

  “It was a wolf,” she said. She could see it in her mind’s eye now. She had loved it once. She had never realised it was a clue. “A wooden wolf what rattled.”

  Oren’s face was unreadable. “And do you have it?” Ilsa shook her head. “Why not?”

  “I ran away from the orphanage,” Ilsa said. She kept her voice even. “I escaped as a bird. I taught myself to shift enough that I could control it, but I din’t know how to carry a thing with me, like I can sometimes do now, if I stick it in my clothes.” Oren continued to study her, his expression inscrutable, and Ilsa felt her frustration rise. “If you don’t believe me, you can go look for yourself. It’s under a floorboard in the attic. I stashed it there, thinking I’d go back, only I never did.”

  “You were there,” said Cassia. She was shaking her head. “When Oren was speaking to this woman… you were right there in the house?”

  Ilsa nodded stiffly. “’Til I was nine.”

  “And what about when you left the orphanage?” asked Fyfe. Ilsa glanced up, and he gave her an encouraging nod.

  “I lived on the streets for a while,” she said into her lap. “I’d do magic tricks for change, like making myself disappear. Things I could do with my talents. Then a stage magician saw me at it one day. He was looking for an assistant. He’d wanted a young woman, I reckon, but he could tell I was doing something special. Something he needed.”

  It had taken months for Ilsa and Blume to build the tentative trust that led to his confession: that he may have been talented and charismatic once, before the drink, but he wasn’t the secret of his own success. He had had a wife, a woman with peculiar talents different to Ilsa’s. He never told Ilsa what she could do; he had kept his wife’s secrets even after his drinking and gambling drove her away. But Ilsa knew her stage persona had been a mystic, and she had worn a scarf around her forehead when she performed. Whatever type of magic she had, it showed unnaturally on her face when she used it.

  Blume had imbibed his heart with liquor rather than feel it break when his wife had run away. How much further would he sink if Ilsa didn’t show up the following evening? If she squandered his final chance to salvage his career? If only she had known Captain Fowler would find her again, she never would have chased him when she should have been completing the finale. Then perhaps Blume would have had a second chance. Instead, she’d doomed him.

  “Mr Blume paid his landlady to put me up in her flat for a few years,” she went on. “When I was fifteen I moved into a boarding house. We’ve been performing at the Isolde nearly two years now. The Great Balthazar, the show’s called. ’Course, now that you’ve taken me prisoner, he’ll probably be fired.”

  She glanced at Eliot, wanting to catch his eye. He had made her think she was free to leave. His eyes were on his teacup, but the corner of his mouth twitched up into a sardonic smile. Ilsa balled her fists under the table.

  “You are far from a prisoner here,” said Oren, shaking his head.

  “You told me I can’t leave, din’t you?”

  Aelius chuckled. “Oren only meant if you want to live, Ils
a my darling. There are plenty more acolytes where they came from.”

  “And why? Why’d them Oracles try to kill me?”

  Oren cleared his throat. “Because of something that may have happened four days ago. The Docklands – the Oracles’ quarter – doesn’t have a ruler as such, but the most senior among them is an appointed Oracle of exceptional power: the Seer. It’s a sort of religious appointment, and in fact carries no authority. They are entirely at the mercy of the people and their wishes. Every Seer has an apprentice, who is to take their place should the Seer be found unsuitable. This apprentice, the Oracles tell us, has been kidnapped.”

  Ilsa remembered something Captain Fowler had said: They were provoked.

  “Are you telling me that you… kidnapped someone?”

  “Not us, exactly,” said Aelius carefully. He toyed with the wolf head of his cane. “Our alpha.”

  “Hester?” said Ilsa sceptically. The woman recovering from a life-changing injury, who refused her duties and took to bed at eight in the morning, did not strike her as a likely suspect.

  “Hester was our alpha once.” Cassia’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Her reappointment was an emergency measure.”

  “Our true leader is Gedeon Ravenswood,” said Aelius. “The Prince of Camden. Your brother.”

  8

  Her brother.

  In Ilsa’s endless imaginings, there were some versions of her story in which she had a sibling. They were invariably the worst versions; the ones in which her parents picked another over her. She’d done her best not to dwell on the possibility of a sibling, and so, she was unprepared for the news.

  Unprepared for a lightness to come over her. It was like Aelius had told her something she already knew; like something missing had been put back. A brother fit the empty space inside her.