Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  Alitz nodded, but she didn’t understand. She wasn’t reading Ilsa’s thoughts. “The heat does get to one this time of year,” she said, though her tone was as unsympathetic as ever. “I find an afternoon nap the best remedy.”

  Alitz raised her teacup to take another sip, and Ilsa summoned every drop of her failing strength to launch herself from her chair and swing one dead hand at the cup, which went flying and shattered on the floor. Ilsa landed in a heap on the rug.

  The tea. Someone had poisoned the tea.

  Indignation replaced Alitz’s usual coolness, but only for a second. She was no fool. She turned her scrutiny on Ilsa, and her unfocused gaze finally sharpened.

  “Earth and stars,” she hissed when she saw what Ilsa had understood. She pushed herself to her feet – only to collapse back into the chair. When she tried to speak again, only a jumble of sounds escaped.

  Alitz was old. She would be taken by the poison quicker. Ilsa needed to be the one to summon help.

  The crash of china hadn’t brought anyone running. Ilsa drew breath to scream but the sound died in her weakened throat. The numbness was spreading up her arms. She could still feel her legs, though they trembled like blades of grass whipped by the breeze when she forced herself upright. Could she make it to the hall, where someone might see her? Might wasn’t good enough, and one step sent her crashing to her knees. She tried a bigger form – her trusty leopard who might withstand poison longer than small, human Ilsa – but she couldn’t hold the shape.

  Ilsa half-crawled, half-dragged herself to the console, rage and determination propelling her forward. She hadn’t survived Miss Mitcham, winters on the streets, Oracle assassins and Sorcerer rebels to die drinking tea. To never even see the face of the cowardly bastard who had ended her.

  Alitz tried to speak again; she said something that sounded like what, but Ilsa knew what she was doing; she knew what was on top of the console. She used one of its legs to haul herself into a standing position and balance. There was the vase; the beautiful, probably hugely expensive vase Pyval had tried to compel her to pick up on the Whisperers’ first visit. And above the console was a mirror.

  With one useless hand, Ilsa knocked the vase towards her and scooped it into her arms like a baby. She needed a little distance. She only needed to hold herself up for a moment. Even her lungs were struggling now, and Alitz’s unmistakably frightened visage swam and doubled in the mirror as she raised the vase carefully. She couldn’t drop it; she couldn’t botch the throw. She had one chance to summon help or they would both die here.

  Ilsa put all her weight into her shoulder and threw the vase at the mirror with a pitiful cry. She pitched forward and hit the floor. She didn’t see what she’d accomplished – but she heard it. An immense, ringing crash hailed a shower of glass and pottery all around her.

  All the fight went out of her, replaced by relief, when shouts went up across the house and garden. Feet pounded the floors. The door burst open with a crack of wood and the French windows to the garden shattered as wolves and bears and big cats piled into the room, ready to protect the Zoo once more. At their head was a sleek black monster Ilsa recognised.

  Eliot. He shifted, eyes sweeping the room diligently for the threat, even as he made straight for Ilsa and knelt beside her. He scowled at the shattered glass like it was his enemy, but his touch was gentle as he scooped an arm around Ilsa to lift her out of it. Ilsa tried to gesture at her throat, then at the teapot, but her motions were too sloppy. Panic made them worse.

  “Poison.” It was Aelius, who had transformed from a ragged, battle-worn mountain lion into his elegant self. He was stood above Alitz and the shattered teacup.

  Eliot’s fierce, livid gaze met that of the nearest wolf.

  “Liesel, find Cassia,” he ordered. “The rest of you secure the perimeter. No one leaves.”

  Liesel didn’t move. She looked between Eliot and the pack, her ears flat to her skull. Eliot growled. “I don’t give a damn who you answer to. Do as I say or I’ll make you the first to pay for this.”

  The wolf didn’t dare argue. She dispersed with the rest of the animals but two. One, a bear, became Oren. The other cycled through several increasingly small, increasingly ugly dogs before revealing itself to be Fyfe, who stumbled to Alitz’s side and took her hand seriously. He inspected the tips of her fingers, her mouth, her eyes, felt her palm and pinched the skin between two nails.

  Only a moment had passed before Cassia appeared from thin air, the whole crate of antidotes Ilsa had seen in her lab cradled in her arms. “Fyfe?”

  “It’s a smokeweed draught,” said Fyfe. “Paralysis, numbness. No taste or odour. Do you have the antidote?”

  Cassia was already fumbling with the stopper of a clear bottle of milky liquid. She knelt among the shards of glass and porcelain, shoving Eliot aside, and tugged Ilsa’s limp head onto her lap. Ilsa tried to tell her to give it to Alitz first, which Cassia understood, but she only made a tutting noise and opened Ilsa’s mouth with surprising roughness.

  Ilsa choked on the first dribble of the liquid, but the feeling came back to her throat instantly, and she was able to swallow the second sip. It tasted like sloe berries, bitter and dry, but as Cassia trickled more of the antidote between her lips, the pressure on her lungs eased. A tingling told her the sensation was coming back to her hands too.

  Cassia moved on to Alitz, who evidently had not drunk as much of the poisoned tea as Ilsa, but whose breathing was also laboured. Eliot pulled Ilsa to her feet and supported her to the couch, calling for someone to fetch some iodine for the cuts the broken glass had made. Now that Ilsa thought about it, getting feeling back had brought with it a lot of pain.

  “Who brought the tea?” said Oren.

  “It was out when we got here, like always,” said Ilsa, her voice thick. Someone handed her a glass of water, but Oren plucked it from her fingers.

  “Aelius, you round up the servants, I’ll deal with the guard,” he said, already sweeping towards the door. “We question everybody. Someone who knows about this is still here.”

  “No, they ain’t,” said Ilsa. Oren turned. She gestured with a freshly mobile hand for him to give back the water but he didn’t move.

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “It was Pyval.”

  Every eye was suddenly on her, but Ilsa was looking at Alitz. The Whisperer was testing the effects of the antidote by curling and uncurling her fingers, but her hands fell into her lap at Ilsa’s words.

  “I beg your pardon?” she rasped.

  “Ilsa, why would Pyval hurt Alitz?” said Cassia, shaking her head.

  “P’raps he’s done helping you help Changelings.” Now that Ilsa had her voice back, she couldn’t keep it down.

  Alitz’s mouth fell open. “That is absolutely—”

  “Tell me he was ever happy to come here and teach me,” challenged Ilsa. “Tell me he don’t resent every second he’s in the same room as one of us.”

  Alitz’s lips were a thin line. Her previously rod-straight posture had collapsed with the poison, and she had too much dignity to struggle to right herself. She looked spent, and older than her years. “Pyval has his reservations about my aligning myself with the Zoo, yes.”

  “Because?” pressed Ilsa. She knew she wasn’t wrong. She’d known that kind of hatred before, at the orphanage.

  Alitz hesitated. “He is, unfortunately, a separatist at heart. His prejudices are not reserved for the Changelings, I can assure you, and they have never caused him to do harm. He was not compelled to do this.”

  “He’s with the Fortunatae.”

  “Miss Ravenswood, please!” Alitz snapped. Even half-prone, she had that way about her that made Ilsa feel reprimanded, but she wouldn’t be cowed. “Not everyone who would wish you dead is aligned with that group, or do you forget the world you have become a part of?”

  “What kind of enemy is he, then?” shot Ilsa. “We have tea here every day with our lesson. Pyval knows
it. And the one day we get poisoned, he ain’t here. Gedeon’s gone, p’raps forever. Hester don’t leave her room. The Fortunatae want my family exterminated like rats, right? And I’m the only one left standing. It don’t take a detective to figure it out.”

  Alitz didn’t reply. Now she was the one who wasn’t sure of herself. Ilsa looked to the others, who were in various stages of disbelief and hard understanding. Eliot met her gaze, his expression harsh but not judgemental. He believed her.

  “Professor Dicer,” began Oren in his unnervingly even tone. He handed the glass of water back to Ilsa and poured a second for Alitz. “We will speak to every wolf, servant, and resident of this house to develop a picture of what has happened here, but here is what I expect to find: that a kitchen maid we trust made tea. That a butler we trust delivered it. That wolves who have proven themselves to us have guarded our walls vigilantly, and the only outsider to have been allowed to come and go from the Zoo this afternoon is Pyval Crespo.”

  “We take vetting our people very seriously,” added Aelius, but Ilsa didn’t miss the way his eyes settled on each person in the room when they weren’t looking.

  “I understand that,” said Alitz petulantly, but the fight had gone out of her. She had been betrayed with the rest of them, by someone she had trusted, and there was no denying it.

  “If you ever see him again,” said Oren, “though I doubt you will, tell him he has broken the Principles. Tell him the Zoo will have his life.”

  * * *

  Ilsa trembled slightly as she unfastened her tea-stained dress, and nausea threatened in waves, but otherwise the antidote had done its job; she would live to teach Pyval Crespo to poison her.

  She would start by making him tell her who ordered her family killed.

  Ilsa’s dress had slipped down over her hips and pooled on the floor of the chamber when a sound like the squeak of wheels came towards her down the corridor. Then came a knock.

  “Wait – one minute!” It was probably the maid she’d told not to bother helping her change. She threw a robe around her shoulders, not even fastening it over her chemise, and opened the door.

  “I said I’m alright—”

  But it wasn’t the maid. Eliot was there, the tight set of his jaw the only evidence that he was trying to keep his eyes on hers. Ilsa felt her skin heat everywhere his eyes touched her. When his gaze fell on her arms – bandaged along the length of both to cover a dozen glass cuts – its molten warmth froze over.

  “It ain’t that bad,” said Ilsa, turning away from the door and hastily pushing her arms into the sleeves of her robe. She tied it closed and turned to face him. “The cuts are shallow.”

  Eliot shut the door behind him. The sun had dipped behind the houses and the chamber had been plunged into a low, pink light, the kind that muffled sound and made a voice soft and low.

  “You’re alright?”

  “I’m fine,” Ilsa replied automatically. “Little weak, that’s all.”

  Eliot came close – close enough that Ilsa could feel the warmth of him – and lifted a hand to her cheek. Ilsa held her breath as his thumb grazed her jaw with a featherlight touch. When he withdrew it, it was bloody. “You missed one.”

  He stepped away abruptly, leaving Ilsa bereft, and picked up the iodine and a cloth that lay next to a bowl of warm water gone pink with her blood. He soaked the cloth with some iodine, and came back to her, eyes wary.

  “It will sting,” he warned softly.

  “I’ve survived worse today.”

  Gently, he tilted her chin up with one hand, and carefully cleaned the cut on her cheek with the other. It did sting, but Ilsa had grown used to it over the course of cleaning dozens of scratches. Eliot was waiting for her to wince, but she didn’t, and it took some of the tension out of his shoulders. A grin pulled at one corner of his mouth.

  “Was that your first time being poisoned?”

  Ilsa raised an eyebrow. “Was that your first time making a joke?”

  The grin widened. “It’s possible to build up a tolerance to smokeweed, if you don’t mind a tingling sensation in your hands.” He flexed his fingers, eyes straying to her mouth as he added, “And your lips.”

  “You do that? You take poison on purpose?”

  “The only way I could persuade Gedeon to do it was to join him. He didn’t see it as a threat. He used to say he hadn’t survived the Sage’s massacre to die by poison.”

  Ilsa’s mouth fell open in surprise. She had had just as stubborn a thought when the smokeweed was working on her. She had a sudden, fierce wish to speak to her brother; to tell him the thing they had in common. Eliot studied her expression and must have seen her longing shift elsewhere, for he stepped away, tossing the cloth aside.

  “I didn’t come by to check on you.”

  “Oh.”

  He smiled again, and Ilsa hoped her disappointment hadn’t been too telling. “Not just to check on you. I think I’ve solved our riddle.” He opened the door, and in the hallway, of all things, was the map he had liberated from Fyfe’s lab. He pulled it into the room and stood it before Ilsa.

  “You and this map have got a weird thing going, you know that?”

  Eliot ignored her. “I’ve been getting in my own way trying to work it out,” he said. “The Oracle girl said the shop was on Moorgate, so I started with Moorgate. I’ve been staring at a dozen starsforsaken maps of the street, histories of the area, directories of chemists in a mile radius, trying to work out what the rest of the riddle meant, but nothing fit.”

  “Alright…”

  “I didn’t put the rest of it together. The station, Marin Street, and she said over and over that you didn’t know the city, yes? But you do. This London is the same.”

  “Well, I know that.”

  “But it wasn’t what she meant. She called it a city, but she meant the quarter. The only place you’re not familiar with because it’s entirely different in the Otherworld.”

  Ilsa stared at the map, finally understanding what Eliot was waiting for her to grasp. The transparent overlay was pushed over the top of the frame, but she reached up and brought it down to cover the London of the surface. Her fingers traced along the new lines, nose close to the paper as she read the tiny street names.

  There it was. Marin Street, a long, curved road in the Underground.

  “We just need to work out where—”

  “Shh.” Ilsa was a step ahead now. She didn’t need to work anything out. She just needed to remember. Because Lila had told her exactly where she would find the chemist… if she was in the Otherworld. She lifted the overlay, her fingers hovering over where she would find the Moorgate entrance if the station had existed here. She brought the overlay down, then up again. Moorgate on the surface map and Marin Street in the Underground weren’t that close at all, except at one point where they bent towards each other and almost kissed. Ilsa jabbed a finger at it, success lighting up her face in a grin. “You know what’s here in the Otherworld?”

  “Moorgate station,” said Eliot. “Ilsa.” His voice curled around each syllable like it was the best thing he’d ever said. “I believe you’ve found our chemist.”

  23

  Eliot raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  He had taken the first half-dozen steps of the entrance to the Underground, looked over his shoulder to find Ilsa hesitating at the top, and come back.

  Though she was not simply hesitating. The real reason she clutched the post at the top of the rail was to maintain her balance, and she would never admit it to Eliot, but she feared she would keel forward if she let go.

  Ilsa had been under the streets of London before; everyone had. But the furthest she had ever got was the platform – just once, and she had stayed for all of four seconds. Boarding a train, and disappearing into the tunnels, had been a work still in progress. Whatever was underneath this London, Ilsa was unprepared for it.

  The Psi militia who had approved their passing – cloaks, Eliot had informed her they we
re named, so called for their capes in various shades of pink – eyed her like they might change their mind, and Eliot reassured them with a smile. Ilsa didn’t see that smile head-on, but she doubted it looked very reassuring.

  “It’s just… I don’t like confined spaces,” she murmured.

  “I never would have guessed.” When Ilsa shot him a look, he was watching her with cruel amusement. Was he actually enjoying this? Had he been waiting for the moment Ilsa buckled? “I can do this alone, you know.”

  She scrutinised him. There was a truth that had become so shamefully obvious to Ilsa that she couldn’t deny it any more: she liked Eliot. She liked when he touched her. She liked when he looked at her. She liked trying to work out what he was thinking. And she was cursing the fact that she had had him alone in her room and missed another opportunity to kiss him. She was going mad wondering whether, if she ever got his mouth on hers, he would be as sharp as he looked.

  The worst part was, every time her thoughts went to kissing Eliot, she remembered he was carrying a torch for someone else. There was no Athena at the Zoo – she had checked. Neither Eliot nor anyone else had ever mentioned her, but he kept that damned pocket watch and it had to mean something. It stung her.

  She loathed it.

  But Ilsa’s feelings didn’t stop her being suspicious of Eliot. Now he was offering to seek out this chemist alone, and she didn’t trust it. Was he being kind – unlikely – or did he feel Ilsa closing in on his secrets?

  “No, I—” I don’t know whether to trust you? I think you’re keeping things from me? I need to work out if we’re actually doing what you told me we’re doing? “You’re helping me, remember? I got to come with you.”

  From the look that crossed Eliot’s face, Ilsa thought she might have said any one of her rejected thoughts by mistake. Then he flashed her that smile – the one that was the opposite of reassuring – and she shuddered.

  “The familial resemblance is stunning,” he drawled. “Gedeon thinks everything is about him too.” He angled his head towards the stairs, and then he had vanished down them.