by Kat Howard
“Must,” Sydney had said.
“I’m sorry, Sydney, but yes.” Madison had scribbled down a note. “I’ll see what I can do to find out the specifics, but for now you need to go claim your House. You don’t have to live there; just let it know you’re paying attention.”
And so here she was. Sydney laid her hand against the door. Something sharp pierced the pad of her finger, deep enough to draw blood. The scent of smoke and oranges rose in the air, and the door opened.
“Let’s do this thing,” she said, and stepped across the threshold.
On the surface it was nothing like Shadows. There were no dark and cramped spaces, no pockets of coldness that lurked and followed. No sense that a misstep could mean death. No weeping or screams or bloodstains left as warnings. As a place, House Prospero was everything Shadows was not: soaring ceilings, polished blond wood, ornate carpets. The gleam of brass and scent of beeswax. Warmth and quiet. White everywhere, as if dirt would be afraid to land.
She could feel the House’s attention as she walked hallways, up and down stairs, as she opened doors and cupboards. She saw nothing of herself there. Not in the chairs around the kitchen table, the paintings on the walls, the open well-lit spaces that were scented with beautifully arranged flowers, not in the bitter taste of broken magic. This was nothing of how she’d grown up, of what she’d lived.
And yet she was afraid. Afraid to make a sound and disturb the blanket of silence that lay over the House. Afraid to touch anything, to move a chair or a glass and leave it a hair away from precision. Afraid that the slightest mistake would risk the wrath of the House. She’d had more than enough of living like that.
Miranda had checked herself into a hotel. Sydney had made it clear that she had no desire to live in Prospero, that Miranda could certainly remain there and have the place to herself, but Miranda said that wasn’t it. “The House, it’s like another part of me. Or, at least, it was. Living there cut off from magic, not being able to feel the connection, the presence, that’s not something I’m ready for. I don’t know if I ever will be.”
But for Sydney, that awareness, that sense that the House was watching, waiting, was the one place this House did come close to what Shadows had felt like, and that closeness was too much. A brighter mirror, certainly, but a reflection all the same.
And there was one more issue. The magic, all of the magic in the House was, like so much of the magic in the Unseen World, contaminated by its connection to Shadows.
Miranda had explained about the mirrors. Sydney stood in front of one. “Can you hear me?”
Yes.
“I need to change your magic. To give you mine.”
Why?
How to explain morality to a House. She would have laughed if it hadn’t mattered.
Are you unhappy with my service?
“No. No. But—you’re my House now. This magic that I want to give you is who I am.”
Very well.
Will it hurt?
She hadn’t thought about it. “I don’t know.”
A pause. I am ready.
Sydney hoped she was. She set her fingers on the mirror. Felt its surface liquefy around her hands, felt her hands sink in. A sharpness that scraped over her skin, a cold that etched itself into her bones.
The flutter of the beating heart of the House. The wrongness of the magic from Shadows that wrapped around it. She felt nauseated touching it, but unwound and unwound and unwound that magic until it was gone from the House. From her House.
She pulled her hands from the mirror, leaving it shimmering liquid silver.
Took a small knife and the ragged edge of her shadow and peeled a further piece of it away. Shadows were, like finger bones, a concentrated source of a person’s magic, and since she had no plans to live here, this was the fastest way to get the House to acknowledge her magic and build its own around that. She dropped the fragment of shadow into the mirror, then spoke a word that smelled like burnt glass and watched as the mirror’s surface resolidified.
“Are you okay?”
She waited. Silence. Then:
Yes.
The word not the elegant cursive of before, but her own rushed scribble.
“Good,” she said. Then she looked around—at the white, at the polish, at the formality of the House.
She walked back through the hall, down the stairs, and paused, just before the front door. Said, “This isn’t my place. I’m sorry, but I can’t stay here.”
And left.
• • •
House Prospero closed its door behind her, the sound hollow in its emptiness.
It did not want to be empty. Its reason for existence was service of its family, and it had seen that family shrunk into—into this: empty hallways and closed doors, a fine film of dust settling like a veil. No life in it, no voices, no beating hearts.
It was hers, and she had gone.
It was lonely.
The House considered what it knew about the woman who had just left, what it had learned when she had placed her hands gently on its heart. When she had given it a piece of herself. It began reshaping itself in her image.
• • •
Sydney stopped a block from House Prospero. There it was: the familiar, hated feeling of the summons to Shadows itching beneath her skin. The cut edges of her shadow burned.
She had known the summons would come, as it always came. Known the question was when, not if. Knew, too, that there would be the same question through the rest of the Turning, through however long it might be before the House decided that she had earned her freedom.
Through when the House decided.
She was done letting the House of Shadows decide.
She clutched magic in her fists like lightning and stalked through the city like a storm.
On the shore of the reservoir, she lit the required matches. One. Two. Three. The magic just beneath her skin echoed their burning. She stepped into the boat, listening to the boards creak, the waves splash against its sides. Her eyes toward Shadows, looming larger in her field of vision. She focused until it was all she could see.
The boat shuddered against the shore, breaking into pieces. She stepped off. Shadows opened its doors.
Sydney did not walk through. She stood just outside the doors and loosed the magic she’d held tight in her hands. “I challenge the House!”
The House answered.
When it had been time for Sydney to leave Shadows, the testing had been rigorous. She had been required to perform a variety of spells—magics both subtle and complex—under adverse conditions. In cold and rain. Exhausted. Starving. In physical pain and mental anguish.
She had gotten out. She had won free. But she knew her magic, and she knew how close it had been—the moments that had been knife’s-edge balanced, that might have kept her inside.
Today was different. Today she was a hurricane.
Sydney cast magic that was an answer to everything she had ever endured behind these doors. She spoke words that cut through walls like knives and carved symbols of freedom on the foundations. She bent her hands into symbols of loosing and broke chains. She curled her fingers and sent windows shattering, letting light come in, shouting words of brightness until every corner was illuminated.
Until there were no shadows left.
She reached into the lines of magic that tied and wrapped like spiders’ webs, that offered peace and painlessness to magicians willing to send others to suffer. A word scissored through them, echoed by a wind that blew through Central Park like a storm, breaking branches, downing trees, and sending people running for shelter.
The Angel of the Waters rocked on its foundation, the stone lily crashing from its hand.
Sydney stole the sacrifices, the few that remained, transporting them to emergency rooms, fire stations. Places where unwanted children could be safely left.
It wasn’t enough to be free herself. She wanted no one else to ever be trapped again.
Sydne
y crooked her fingers, and the great doors cracked and fell from their hinges.
She walked through.
The air shifted as she crossed the threshold, and it was no longer Shadows trying to pull Sydney and her magic in, but the House desperately trying to stand against her. It twisted itself and changed its shape—moving hallways, throwing up walls, crumbling floors, but she kept walking.
As she walked, she cast magic of her own: freezing the House’s architecture in place, opening its doors, crumbling its foundations. Something rent and something screamed and Sydney raised her hands and the entire building trembled. Locks opened. Bars loosed. Shadows was a hell, and this was a harrowing.
Once more she reached. There, beating, was the heart of the House of Shadows. She took it in her hand.
“Enough!” Shara, trembling. Not with rage, with effort. Even now, her hand worked at her side, trying frantically to tie scraps of magic together, to prevent her House from falling. From dying.
“Enough,” she repeated. “Shadows agrees to release you from your contract.”
“I want to see it burn,” Sydney said. Not only her contract, but Shadows itself.
“That’s unnecessary—the word of the House is binding,” Shara said.
Sydney tightened her grip, and the heart of Shadows skipped a step in its beating.
“Fine.” Shara held up her hand, and the paper appeared in it, Sydney’s name written and written again in shifting darkness that was not ink at the bottom. She snapped her fingers, and it caught fire.
Sydney felt the chains that had bound her to Shadows break and pop and turn to ash as the paper burned. She pulled in a breath, and for the first time in her remembered life, it was fully, solely, hers.
“Are we finished here, you ungrateful brat?” Shara asked.
Sydney bent her fingers into one final piece of magic. The glass bottle that had held her shadow, the knife that had cut it, the pen that wrote, caught fire, burned. “We are.”
When the last flame died out, Sydney turned and walked out of Shadows.
She did not look back.
• • •
Shara stood in the wreckage of the House, her hands coated in ashes. She could feel the House’s crumbling inside her, like her own bones were loosening themselves from her tendons. Shadows was unmaking itself. Slowly now, but if unchecked, it would get worse. Her home was dying, and she would die with it. Because of course, of course, the one piece of magic Sydney had left fully intact was the spell that prevented Shara from leaving. There was a cruelty in her, and Shadows had taught her well how to use it.
Light shone through the rents Sydney had torn in the walls, and the magic—the magic that bound the sacrifices, that made everything—it was unraveling. Slowly now, but it would go faster, and then it would be gone. She stared at her hands, her scars showing in pieces through the ash, and wondered how she would ever get the power to rebuild. House Merlin had made the original spell, but Miles—she laughed, harsh and bitter—she doubted he had even noticed its falling. Even if he had, she knew better than anyone that he didn’t have the power to cast it anew.
The failures of magic would come hard and fast now. The look on Miles’ face—it wouldn’t be worth this, but she looked forward to seeing it. She looked forward to seeing him stand before her and beg. It was important to hold on to the little things.
Shara sat down in the ruins and laughed until the laughter tripped over into weeping.
• • •
When she got home, Sydney stood under the shower until the steam turned lukewarm. She wanted all of Shadows, every scrap of it, washed from her. It wouldn’t be, just as her own shadow would never be whole, but now, today—as the remnants of her spells still ached in her hands—scouring its traces in hot water could be enough.
She turned off the water, stepped onto the bathroom’s heated floor, and wrapped herself in towels.
Then she noticed the scrawl on the mirror, the same version of her handwriting that scrolled across the mirrors of House Prospero.
Grace Valentine is here.
She didn’t know who that was.
In distress.
And that wasn’t creepy at all. “Here as in at my apartment, or here as in House Prospero?”
The House.
Apologies.
Please come. Now.
“Can you let her in before I get there?” Reaching for fresh clothes.
Yes.
• • •
Sydney opened the door to an unrecognizable version of House Prospero.
Gone was the pristine white, the sterile elegance. This was a House that looked like the inside of a forest—dark wood and stained glass, rich green. Trees growing from walls. Everything dark, quiet as a secret, and warm.
“You did this? Why?” she asked.
A quiet chime and words on a mirror.
Lonely. Please stay.
She could understand loneliness. “Okay. Thank you—it’s beautiful, really. We’ll talk about things. I’ll . . . I’ll try to get here more often. Maybe stay once or twice. But right now I need to see Grace.” Whoever that was.
Bathroom. Upstairs. First door.
Sydney hurried past light fixtures that looked like vined roses and up a staircase draped with a worn runner in a pattern like a knot garden. She reached the bathroom. Stopped in the doorway and stared. She hadn’t recognized the name because they’d never been introduced, but she knew the woman. Three years ago she had been brought to Shadows as a sacrifice. It was the only time Sydney had ever seen an adult brought in that way. It had seemed strange, out of place, but she had learned far before then not to ask questions. She’d never seen her again, and assumed that, like most sacrifices, she hadn’t survived.
“Sydney?” Grace was soaking wet and trembling. Spattered with mud and filth, and she smelled like lake water. Two of the nails on her left hand were torn and bleeding. “Thank God.”
“Not that I’m not happy to see you, and believe me, I’m glad you’re out of that fucking place, but why are you here? Sorry, that can wait. Why don’t you go ahead and have a bath—get cleaned up.” She turned on the taps and pointed to a cupboard. “I think there’s probably first aid stuff in there—the House seems to think of everything, and that’s where I’d put it. Do you want something to eat or drink? Soup. I’ll have the House make soup. Do you like minestrone?”
“Sure.”
“Minestrone and wine, please. Maybe some bread, too.”
She could feel the House acknowledge the task, pleased at what it had been given to do.
“Is Miranda here?” Grace asked. Water pooled in her footsteps, then disappeared as the House cleaned it.
“She’s not. But I can ask her to come, if you need her.” Sydney set out towels from a linen closet and grabbed a pair of pajamas as well. The House really did have everything. “There—those should fit.”
“No, it’s not that. I just—I don’t want Grey to find me. Or Miles Merlin, for that matter.”
“Grey—” Sydney began. The scars on Grace’s hands and arms. The file Madison couldn’t talk about. The utterly broken relationship between Miranda and Grey. “So, we have a lot of catching up to do. And part of that catching up is that I think keeping you safe from Grey is probably my job now. But, if you can, maybe you could explain things to me.”
Grace stepped into the bath. “Three years ago Grey Prospero attacked me. He wanted my magic—he was going to cut it out, take my bones.”
“So the scars aren’t from Shadows?” Sydney asked, showing her own, the patterns almost an exact match.
“No, they are. I fought back. Got away. Went to Miranda, who let me hide here, until the disinheritance. She tried to help me, as much as she could, anyway. But Miles—” Her voice broke.
Sydney waited. She had turned herself away from the tub. It was easier sometimes, to tell an ugly thing when you didn’t have to see the face of your audience.
The water shifted, and Grace began again. “
As the head of the Unseen World, Miles signed off on the disinheritance. And he told Miranda he’d take me somewhere safe. He took me to Shadows. To pay a debt, he said. The magic, the binding, it’s fast. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t fight back.”
“None of us can. It’s absolute. You did the only thing you could do, Grace. You survived.”
A sob, then. Sydney reached back, offered a hand. Grace held it while she wept.
Her voice was still edged with tears when she started speaking again. “Thank you. So when I got out today, I cast a spell. To find you. To say thank you. And because, because now I don’t know where to go.”
“You can stay here, if you want. It’s the safest place I can think of—the House can’t let Grey in because of the disinheritance, and I can make sure it keeps Miles out, too,” Sydney said. “You’d be doing me a favor, actually, as the House is a bit lonely, and I’m still not quite used to it. I think it’ll be glad of the company. So I’ll bring some things over for you, and we can go from there. But that’s something we can talk about tomorrow, after you’ve gotten some rest.” Sydney got up.
“Did you always mean to break it?” Grace asked. “Shadows?”
“I mean to bury it,” Sydney said. “And to salt the earth behind me.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sydney shoved her gloved hands in her pockets, bounced lightly on her toes while waiting for the challenge to begin. “Outside. In January. Who does that?”
Laurent looked at her. “Sydney. Please tell me that you actually read the challenge.”
“I got . . . distracted. Besides, it’s not like I was going to refuse it.” She had read it, the day he’d sent it. However, a fairly significant number of things had happened in the interim. She’d had a lot on her mind.
“You are literally the only person I know who would stand here facing potential death and shrug and say that you were distracted by other things.”
Sydney shrugged. “We all have our talents.”
Laurent shook his head. “Well, the who in this case is Eliot Vincent. Candidate House. A year ahead of us in school, and probably another one of Merlin’s allies. He’s really good at physical magic, so my guess is you’re out here so he can use the snow and cold as weapons.”