“What are you talking about? Why would you even think about that?” I demanded as my father clutched my cheeks between his weathered palms. “Please, just explain this to me.”
“Cassandra, Mother is asking for you.” I turned to find Owen standing behind us, frowning. There was no disapproval in his expression, only conflict. He didn’t want to interrupt this moment with my father. However, from the way he kept glancing over his shoulder, toward the house, it was clear that he didn’t want to disappoint his parents, either. “Smith, I believe Mother mentioned giving you the rest of the afternoon off. She said you haven’t been feeling well.”
“What is he talking about?” I asked.
“It’s nothing,” Papa assured me. “Just a little tired is all, from getting the grounds ready for winter.”
“Owen, could you please give us a moment?”
“Mr. Owen,” my father reminded me in a tone that was more habit than anything else.
“It’s all right, Smith. She’s allowed,” Owen said blithely. Suddenly, my father’s posture straightened. He jumped to his feet and stepped away from me. The distance between the two of us grew to an impassable gulf. Owen’s words had served as yet another reminder that I was separate from my father, from my family.
“I don’t want you to worry about us,” my father told me. “I want you to make the most of this. You’ve always been meant for more than I could give you.”
“Papa, no.”
“I’m not saying this because I want you gone. I love you more than anything in the world, which is why I’m telling you to do whatever you can to make Mrs. Winter happy. You go to that school, and you learn as much as you can. You make a life for yourself out in the Guardian world. You forget you ever came from the Warren.” He tapped a finger over my heart. “They’re never going to change what’s in here.”
Papa nodded to me, a little bow that seemed unnatural and wrong. “Be a good girl. Make us proud. I’ll give your mother and sister your love.”
“Papa.” I stood and tried to follow as he strode out of the garden, but Owen caught me around the arms and dragged me back.
“Don’t. It was hard enough for him to walk away from you. Let the man do it with a little dignity.”
I wilted, closing in on myself until Owen gently dropped my weight onto the bench. He sat beside me, keeping his arm around my shoulders. “Are you all right?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I know I call you ‘horrible’ on a regular basis, but sometimes, you can accidentally be a very good friend.”
“Nonsense, I just didn’t want you swooning and smacking your head on the bench.” He cleared his throat and moved toward the house, but seemed to stop himself. “Well, I heard that you are making great strides as Mother’s show pony. She said you were ‘an unqualified success’ at the social. You even managed to get Gavin ‘This Milquetoast is Too Spicy’ McCray to take notice. Congratulations.”
He held out an envelope addressed to me in the messy loops I recognized from the card with Gavin’s “flowers.” Grinning, I reached out to snatch it from him, but a smirking Owen held it out of my reach. “Secret love letters exchanged with a man you are not related to by marriage or blood? Explain yourself, young lady.”
“All I did was show some kindness to his sister and he sent me a ‘thank you’ present. It’s hardly a betrothal. Besides, your mother knows about the correspondence and fully supports it.”
“You made a friend of the Ghost?” he exclaimed. “You really did have a busy afternoon.”
“Don’t call her that.” I scowled as I kicked him lightly in the shin. He yelped and bent slightly. I grabbed the envelope out of his hand. “Alicia’s very kind, and funny. And smart. I would be lucky to have her as a friend.”
Brandywine House Sigil
Owen frowned at me while he rubbed his sore shin. “I’m sure she is, it’s just that she’s always so shy. And with her pallor, it’s like watching a wraith moving through a crowd, sipping tea. It’s unnerving.”
“Ivy said she’d always been unwell. I thought you Guardians had Healers for sickly dispositions.”
He frowned, shaking his head. “She’s an unusual case in that she has survived as long as she has. Reverb patients rarely make it past their twelfth birthdays. I imagine it’s only the wealth and resources of the McCrays that have sustained her so far.”
“That poor girl.”
“Indeed. She could use a friend like you.”
“A friend like me?”
“Someone who will understand what it’s like to be unusual, to be weak.”
“But I’m not weak anymore,” I reminded him, making him grin at me.
“No, you’re not, and with any luck, one day Alicia won’t be, either.”
I smiled, nudging him with my elbow. “That’s very sentimental of you.”
“Nonsense. I just want her do-gooder brother to stop moping about the school, being all broody and noble about the sacrifices he makes to care for his sister.”
“There’s the Owen I know and… I don’t like very much to be honest.”
The heretofore unknown flinty tone in my voice made Owen smile for some perverse reason. “I don’t remember you being this prissy before.”
Despite myself, I snickered. “It’s the gowns. They’ve crushed the humor right out of me. No wonder all your Guild women are so cranky.”
“Just wait until you have to wear the full ladies’ get-up, you’ll be positively insane with rage.”
“You really are just horrible, aren’t you?”
“And proud of it,” he said, beaming and yanking on one of my curls. I growled and kicked him in the shin. He gasped in mock offense and yanked a different curl.
“Children.” Mrs. Winter’s voice floated, smooth and cool, over the expanse of lawn. “If you are quite finished, dinner will be served in an hour.”
The pair of us straightened immediately, hands behind our backs, stifling our chuckles as we tried to appear the image of proper Guardian innocence. “Yes, ma’am.”
“We’ll be right in, Mother,” Owen assured her. Mrs. Winter nodded, though there was a small worrisome line creasing her brows. The moment she disappeared back into the house, we burst out laughing, with Owen knocking my ankle with his boot and me bumping his hip with the cumbersome bustle on my gown. But rather than letting me stumble, he kept his hand at my elbow, keeping me upright as we struggled our way to the door like two squabbling children.
In the jostle, I glanced up at a bedroom window on the second floor. And I saw Mary, staring down at us with contempt so bright and hot, that I was surprised the window glass didn’t melt. I stopped in my tracks, my laughter dying on my lips as I tried to find some way to tell Mary that I was sorry, that we were only letting off steam from a stressful day, that Owen didn’t think of me that way. Owen was my friend, just a friend, someone who was helping me find my way in this confusing new life I was living.
Owen stopped when he realized I wasn’t following him into the house. He turned, a concerned expression crinkling his mouth. “Cassandra?”
“I’m just waiting for Phillip,” I said, smiling absently as I held out my hand for my familiar. The little bird chirped brightly, swooping up from the bench to take his rightful place on my finger.
I glanced up. Mary shut the curtains with a snap, shutting out the pointless apologies I couldn’t even make from this distance.
14
Deadly Serious
Back at school, more and more pages of the Mother Book were translating themselves. It seemed that asking the Mother Book to come out of “hiding” had opened a channel of communication between us. Information on potions to recuperate after a long illness, a spell to clean water that has been fouled, and oddly, the most effective method of banishing a malevolent spirit into the beyond. I wrote letters, charmed only to be read by a member of the Winter household, detailing what I’d learned for Mrs. Winter. It seemed the best way to report my Translations to… whomever was supposed to supervis
e me, who wasn’t Mr. Crenshaw.
Calepernia McCray’s journal had no information to offer about Revenants. She did state that were some things that she learned from the book that she never shared with others, that there was some knowledge that was too dangerous to share, or too frightening. I believed it was reasonable to list walking corpses under “too dangerous” and “too frightening.”
I spent hours in the library looking for any information on revenants, but the card codex produced nothing on revenants, the walking dead, necromancy, or the Grimstelles. Apparently, gently bred young ladies did not need to learn about animating the living dead.
Miss Morton couldn’t have been more pleased, both with my long hours in her library and my throwing myself in Translating. She pushed me to spend every spare moment with the book, even when the late nights left me tired and listless in class. She said it was important, to the magical community that I learned as much as I could from the book. After all, there hadn’t been a Translator in more than one hundred forty years.
Drummond House Sigil
As tired as I was, the more time I spent with the book, the better my classroom performance. My spells accomplished what they were supposed to, levitating objects at will, instead of at random. I stopped blowing up geodes in crystallography. I caught on to the ritual dances, though I still wasn’t as light on my feet as Alicia, when she was well enough to join in class. Ivy’s theory was that because I wasn’t trying to force it, my magic was cooperating more. Suddenly, magic was more than a game, a challenge to see what I was capable of. I could help people, children like Alicia who were born with compromised systems. Maybe I could help her find a cure for her reverb if I kept studying.
More and more of my classmates were being friendly to me, despite being on Callista’s dreaded “black list” of students that she’d cut socially. After a heartfelt apology to Blanche Ironwood, she helped me with my grip on the arrows, so I hit the target instead of my belomancy classmates. Charlotte Rasmurti, who was president of her class, joined Ivy, Alicia and me at our dining hall table one morning for breakfast. And before we knew it, the table was full for every meal. Jeanette Drummond, a lovely girl with quicksilver eyes and hair so dark it seemed to absorb the light around her, invited me and Ivy to an after-curfew gathering in her room, where about a dozen girls ate sweets and talked about their families, classes, the latest newspaper serial causing a scandal – normal girl things. Alicia joined us, but she fell asleep just a few minutes after the first toffee was unwrapped. Ivy and I tended to linger at the outside of the group, hearing much and saying little, but it felt wonderful to be included. Charlotte’s group and Jeanette’s group were both different than Callista’s. There was no agenda, no back-biting. We didn’t have to safeguard every word we said, though I did anyway for obvious reasons. We didn’t have to worry about the girls’ alliances shifting, just because we didn’t do every little thing just as we were asked.
I walked down the hall to my classes and I was greeted merrily by familiar faces and some girls I couldn’t even name. I was accepted. I was part of a crowd, instead of standing out. I felt at ease.
For the first time since I’d arrived at Miss Castwell’s, I truly thought I had a chance of making a home there.
So of course, the moment I dropped my guard, I was almost immediately attacked.
I was sitting in the garden, enjoying what was sure to be the last of the tolerably cool late November days before winter dug its cold claws in. The weak morning sunlight filtered through the bare tree limbs. I shivered into my green wool coat, grateful for the thick blanket that cushioned me from the cold ground. The fresh air and isolation from the other girls was just what I needed to clear my mind. Just being near so many plants made me feel better.
Ivy was busy with a remedial poppet-making class, and Alicia considered sitting outside in the cold to be a patently stupid way to spend an afternoon. Even Phillip had elected to stay inside on his nice warm perch, eating seeds and laughing at his silly mistress in some silent bird manner.
I was sitting on a blanket under an ancient birch tree on the back lawn, that the students called the Weeping Tree, because it was supposedly where generations of girls went to cry out their broken hearts. My heart was intact, but my brain seemed to be a bit wobbly. The long hours of studying and working with the book were catching up to me.
With final exams approaching in a few weeks, I was spending almost as much time with my potions textbook as I did the Mother Book. Calpernia McCray strongly advised against this, warning that too much time with the Mother Book drained her of her magic and weakened her physically. I told myself that it would only last until finals and the holidays were over, and then I would coast on my good grades through spring – unlike those poor seniors who were facing winter finals and the Spring Interview.
And potion making was still difficult for me, because potion ingredients did not behave like kitchen ingredients. They had to be mixed in a precise, detailed manner under certain phases of the moon with certain tools. I had always been what Mum had called a “pinch of this, dash of that” cook, which meant my potions mark was average – and that was only because the teacher, Miss Guiry, was very kind.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the rough bark of the tree, running over the various formulas in my head. Ground scarab shells mixed with the juice of a floating fig, warmed gently over a driftwood fire for a shrinking draught. Chopped smoking dragon roots combined with minced winter garlic and sea salt for a poultice to treat magical burns. Clippings from a chimera’s claws… Well, they exploded no matter what you mixed them with.
I shuddered. I needed a break, something pleasant to focus on. I drew a piece of elegant stationery from my reticule, creased and limp from being opened so many times. Gavin McCray had taken to writing to me every few days. First in response to the thank you note I’d sent, and then I wrote a thank you in response, and then we got pulled into a sort-of endless thank you note cycle that turned into regular correspondence. He was incredibly intelligent, but single-minded when he was focused on a project. He got incredibly annoyed when the board of directors for McCray Energy insisted that he attend meetings to approve that budget or this hiring. He worried for Alicia and her health. He worried about his mother, who felt she needed to keep up the family’s social commitments, even as she grieved the husband she’d lost only two years before. He was annoyed with his classmates, Owen in particular, who didn’t seem to take schooling as seriously as he did.
“Most of the time, I feel like I control nothing at all. I feel unprepared and old before my time all at once,” he wrote in his latest missive. “I have all of the responsibilities of my father, but am given none of the respect. I’m supposed to be the head of my house. I’m responsible for keeping the family business on track, but am expected to be the respectful student at school. I am father and son and student and employer and I confess the constant rotation of hats leaves me with a headache some days.
And now, while moving through these roles, I find myself wondering, ‘What would Cassandra think of this design for a long-range crayfire engine?’ or ‘What would Cassandra think of this journal article on athame metallurgy?’ I blame Alicia, who brings you up at every possible opportunity. ‘Cassandra prefers herbalism to dance.’ when she’s trying to avoid lessons with her dance master. Or ‘Cassandra never eats soft-boiled eggs.’ at breakfast. Or ‘Cassandra says it’s easier to do your homework with a plate of shortbread.’ I’ve learned more about you from my sister than from five letters from you. You are remarkably elusive with anything resembling personal information. Perhaps I will be better at extracting information from you in person. I received the invitation to the Winters’ annual masquerade ball. I very much look forward to at least one dance with you, where I will attempt to interrogate you about your favorite plants and preferred breakfast foods.”
I’d been trying to compose a response for two days. But sadly, Gavin was right. Most of my letters consisted o
f asking him questions, or repeating the scant details of the origin story Mrs. Winter had given me. I deflected. I obfuscated. I was apparently not as good at hiding it as I thought I was.
How could I answer his questions about my family? About my childhood? About the places I’d been? I didn’t want to pile lies on top of lies. But I couldn’t exactly tell him about my father the gardener or my house in Rabbit’s Warren. I couldn’t tell him anything real.
I sighed, staring out over the lawn as if I could read answers in the flower beds. I heard a strange shuffling behind me. I turned to see Tom, the Ward groundskeeper, ambling toward me, arms outstretched as if he was reaching for help. His face was pale as cheese and his mouth was sagging, like he was on the verge of being ill. I’d seen my own father stumble about like this, just moments from losing his breakfast after a night out at the Warren pub with his friends.
I tried to tamp down my irritation. I was not about to help an inebriated Tom pull off his boots and fall into bed, as was my assigned task when my family dealt with my father.
“Tom? Are you all right?” I asked, standing and backing away from the tree.
But Tom didn’t answer, still shuffling towards me with that slow, determined pace. His eyes were wrong somehow, the usually bright blue irises drawn back to his eyelids, leaving yellowed orbs in their wake.
Could he be ill? I’d heard of fevers that left people with yellowed eyes and delirium. I would feel terrible if I’d mistaken malaria for Tom being hungover. Then again, I didn’t think I wanted him touching me, either way. Want did he want from me? Did he want help? Did he want to hurt me? I glanced toward the school dormitory, but I was too far away to call for help and with the afternoon light, most of the shades were drawn.
There was no expression on his face, just blank, hungry intent. I lost my grip on the Mother Book and my potions text, dropping both to the ground. The thick hedges behind me prevented a retreat. I could dash around him, I supposed. I was wearing sensible walking shoes, but there was no way I could run in these skirts without tripping over them. Then again, Tom didn’t seem to be moving very quickly. A phlegmy wheeze escaped Tom’s slack lips, a death rattle.
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