A Little Knowledge

by Emma Newman

  Cathy sagged, the rant over, and went to rest against the back of the sofa. Sobered, Will looked at her, at how tired she looked, how the rage seemed to crash through her like a tornado he saw tear through a cornfield in America, leaving her disheveled in its wake. “You know I can’t bear a lady to be hurt,” he said quietly, approaching her. “When I saw what your father had done to you, I wanted to take you away then and there, put you somewhere safe.”

  She watched him get closer, arms wrapped around herself. “But you didn’t. You put Society first. You cared more about what my father would say to your father.”

  He stopped. “I moved the date of the marriage. I didn’t just forget about it!”

  “My point is,” she said quietly, “you stayed within the rules. The rules that suit men. My father could have beaten me to death between that night and our marriage date, for all you knew.”

  “This is all academic now,” he said, irritated.

  “Well, it isn’t for Wilhelmina. This is her life. And her safety. And her right to live without fear. All I did was put her first. That’s why he can’t stand it, and why it frightens you. It’s breaking the rule you all defend the most: that men are more valuable than women.”

  Will closed the distance between them, drawn by the nobility in her eyes. No one else could make him want to shout with rage and hold them close in the same moment. She enraged him, and yet he couldn’t help but admire her. She was bold and fearless in a way he could never be. He wrapped his arms around her. “You drive me insane,” he whispered in her ear. “You are so infuriating and so…” He gave up trying to find the words and kissed her instead. He wanted to claim her, possess her and take her fire into himself. That passion of hers just needed to be redirected, as Eleanor had said.

  She didn’t respond at first, then slowly her head tilted and she reciprocated the kiss, sliding her arms out from between them so he could press his hips against her. He felt her arms circle him, her hands slide across his back as she closed the embrace.

  “No, wait a minute,” she whispered after reclaiming her lips. “We need to sort this out.”

  “I’ll work it out, leave it to me,” he whispered between tiny kisses on her cheek, then down her neck.

  “No, Will, we need to change the law.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, weaving his fingers into her hair to hold her closer as he nuzzled her neck. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, I promise. It’s late.” There was no way the law could be changed without the Patroons destroying him. It was too ridiculous to contemplate. He’d have a few words with Digitalis, frighten him into committing to treating his wife better. He’d obey, knowing the Duke was watching over his wife, and she would be safe and Cathy would calm down again.

  “But—”

  He kissed the words away. “I want you,” he said, letting her see the lust in his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about anything, I just want to be with you.”

  Twisted in his grip, the elegant braiding of her hair finally gave way and it tumbled around her face. He could see her battling to stay rooted in their argument but also how she wanted him, so he redoubled his efforts, pressing her against the sofa as—

  A piercing scream filled the house, making both of them jump and break apart. His first thought was of Sophia, but she would be asleep in the mundane nursery wing.

  “Elizabeth!” Cathy said, and headed for the door.

  Will grabbed a sword from its mount on the wall and dashed after Cathy, who was already opening the door. “No, Cathy!” he shouted, and pulled her back, moving her behind him as he drew his sword. He could see Carter running ahead as the scream died away and melted into crying.

  It was coming from the main entrance hall. All over the house there was the sound of staff rushing to help. He could hear Morgan shouting at them to stay back.

  “Miss Papaver?” he heard Carter say and then gasp. By the time Will emerged into the hall himself, Elizabeth was clinging to Carter, sobbing.

  Will followed Carter’s horrified eyes to a large glass case standing in the middle of the tiled floor. Its edges were contained in an elaborately decorated gilded frame, and there was a pool of blue silk around it that looked like it had slipped off the case. But it was what was inside that made him stop and hold a hand back to keep Cathy in the hallway.

  “No, stay there,” he said quietly. “Carter, take Miss Papaver to her room. Morgan, take her some sweet tea and a hot water bottle.”

  Carter picked up Elizabeth, who was hysterical, and carried her up the stairs as Morgan hurried off, ashen.

  “What is it?” Cathy said, but he had no words, so he just held up his palm again, wanting her to stay back.

  Will approached the case, letting the sword drop to the floor, forcing himself to look at the woman inside the case. She was standing, rigid as a mannequin and posed as if someone had just leapt out from around a corner in front of her and yelled Boo!, her hands both held level with her shoulders, mouth agape. The dress was a dark blue and in a style that was familiar but he couldn’t place it. Her face was hidden by the glare of sprite light against the glass.

  As he got closer and the reflected light shifted, he could make out her face and he stopped, a chill running through him. It was Dame Iris, but not as he remembered her when she’d last visited. Instead of her beautiful, youthful face, she had that of an ancient corpse, desiccated and grey-skinned, with hollow cheeks and straw-like hair. But her eyes still looked moist in their sockets, and as he stared, they moved to look at him.

  He yelled and jumped back, every hair on his body standing on end. Cathy rushed in, saw the case, and stopped as if Dolled by a Charm.

  “Cathy,” he said, rushing over to her, hoping to turn her away before she saw the Dame’s face, but it was too late. All of the colour drained from Cathy’s lips as the Dame fixed her dreadful stare on her.

  Then the Dame’s eyes dimmed somehow, glazing and losing their power, and her body crumbled to dust, as if time ran differently inside of the case. Only then did Will notice the fleur-de-lis motif running through the gilded decorations.

  Cathy started shaking violently. He wrapped an arm around her and turned her away from the case, as she seemed incapable of doing it herself. “Oh my God,” she whispered, again and again. “Oh my God.”

  “Come on,” he said, steering her back down the hallway, desperate to get her away from it as much as himself. He was shivering too, he realised, and remembered the brandy in his study. “It’s over, you’re all right, come on.”

  “It’s not over,” she stammered. “Don’t you see? It was a warning. She disappointed him, so Lord Iris did that to her. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

  He nodded, squeezing her tighter against him. “He won’t do that to you.”

  She said nothing, but he could tell he was doing little to comfort her. What could he say to soften the impact of such a horrific demonstration of power?

  He sat her on the sofa in his study, lit the fire himself, and poured her a brandy. She took the glass when he offered it to her but just held it, as if the notion of actually drinking the brandy was beyond her. She was in shock. He covered her with a blanket that had been left draped over another chair and downed his drink, pouring another with a shaking hand. Did Sir Iris know that his wife was dead? Yes, he must, just as he had known when Cathy was being attacked.

  And Cathy was right; it was a warning. The last time Dame Iris had been in their house she’d come with a potion that Cathy had smashed, and she had been outmanoeuvred. This was the final warning, after several reminders of what Iris had wanted from them since their wedding. Whether Cathy wanted it or not, they had to conceive a child soon, otherwise the same would be done to her, and he simply couldn’t bear the thought of it. He would secure the appropriate Charms from Tate when he picked up the choker. With the Poppy magic broken and their patron satisfied, he could keep her safe.

  Would Sir Iris be distressed by the death of his wife, or the fact that he’d been
unable to protect her, despite being Patroon? Will found it hard to imagine the old hawk being moved to tears, even now.

  Then Will realised that a queen had been removed from the board. He had another one, waiting. What had been a grotesque warning for Cathy could actually be an opportunity for him.

  “Don’t worry, my love,” he said softly, bending down to kiss her hair. “I’ll do everything in my power to keep you safe.”

  16

  As excited as he was to have discovered another of the first Lord Iron’s forges on the edge of Bath, and to confirm the theory that the seven lumps on the slab of iron mapped out the locations of six others, Sam couldn’t put everything else off forever.

  Eleanor had told him he needed a project, something grand to fulfil him. One idea was starting to form, still too nebulous to put into action, but one he had been brewing at the back of his mind following the night he had met Max and Robert Amesbury at the old forge.

  Sam wanted to protect people from the Fae. When he lifted the curse from that man and saw the overwhelming relief and gratitude in his eyes, Sam felt happier than he had in a long time. It was the same when he’d broken the curse on Cathy’s old teacher, and it felt right on a deep level, like it was what he was made to do. He had all sorts of fanciful notions about expanding the number of buildings protected from their magic, perhaps even setting up protective barriers around public spaces. What he really wanted to do was find a way to give a place the same quality that he had: the ability to break their magic. The buildings he owned that worked as a block didn’t go far enough; they could only stop the Fae entering or magic finding someone inside, and besides, people still had to go out.

  He’d tasked Des with hunting through Amir’s files, looking for anything that might have been passed on to him from the other Lord Irons, but nothing had turned up yet. So he’d gone back to his other legacy, the one left by his wife.

  Every moment he hadn’t been occupied since, his mind had replayed the speech he’d made to the Elemental Court. Though the details were fading, the sense of shame was not. He’d stood in front of those people with the mindset of a man with no career prospects who lived in a terraced house and fretted over whether he should buy a brand-new computer game or wait for it to be cheaper secondhand. His life had changed and he had just as much right to stand up in that room and make his case to those people, and he’d wasted it.

  Leanne would have been appalled.

  Sam had decided that if anything was going to change, it wasn’t enough for him to sort out Amir’s legacy; he had to push the rest of the Elemental Court to start taking responsibility for their actions too. He’d prepared everything using a laptop he’d disconnected from the internet and kept with him at all times. Sam knew he was taking a risk, but if he made an example of one of them, surely the rest would fall into line.

  He moved onto his main computer and opened his email client to look at the draft letter he’d saved the night before.

  Copper,

  The last time I saw you, in Manchester, it was pretty clear you and I have different ideas about how a cost-benefit analysis works. You said “the benefits far outweigh the costs” when expanding upon your thoughts about how you and the rest of the Elemental Court make the world a better place.

  Look, we’re both busy people, so I’m not going to dress this up. You were talking utter shit. Your activities do not make the world a better place for the thousands of people directly affected by your mining activities.

  You have dozens of companies and hundreds of mines, so let’s get specific. Attached to this email is evidence that the people who work in your largest Zambian copper mine are paid less than they need to survive, and are given poor-quality safety equipment or in some cases, none at all. Accidents are common. There have been several deaths as a result.

  You’ll also see several reports that your PR monkeys have managed to keep hidden from the press, detailing how gross negligence has led to no fewer than seven major environmental incidents over the past three years. Your mine, that you own and are ultimately responsible for, has polluted rivers and groundwater supplies and resulted in the poisoning of several thousand people with copper sulphate and manganese. Your company has failed to compensate the victims who are continuing to suffer the effects of this. The reports also feature grim reading about the sulphur dioxide air pollution in the area surrounding the nearby refinery and smelter, owned by your company.

  If you don’t replace the current management of the mine, lift its pollution control and health and safety practices to those of the highest world standards and then compensate the people whose lives your activities have damaged or destroyed, then I will release this information and the original evidence to the press. And I will make sure your name is tied to this. No hiding behind subsidiary companies and parent companies and all that crap. You will be held responsible in the eyes of the world press.

  You have twenty-four hours to demonstrate a commitment to improving the conditions for the people who work in and live near your mine before I go public with this.

  Lord Iron

  Sam read it through, decided that he’d made himself clear and didn’t just sound like an arsehole, and clicked ‘send.’

  Leaning back, Sam wondered what Copper would make of his demand. “Bring it on,” he thought. He imagined Leanne smiling at him.

  A ping indicated new email. That was quick.

  How I run my operation is no business of yours. I suggest you focus on your own affairs. If you threaten me again, I’ll take it to the rest of the court.

  Copper

  He was about to reply when there was the sound of a helicopter coming in to land. Shit! Mazzi! He’d forgotten about her offer to help him understand what it meant to be one of the Court.

  Des knocked and entered. “Sir, Lady Nickel is arriving. There wasn’t anything in the diary.”

  “That’s my fault. I’ll be going out with her and I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’ll call you when I know what I’m doing.”

  “I’ll carry on with the file search then. Have a good trip, sir.”

  Once Des had left, Sam switched off the laptop and locked it in the safe, then went out to greet Mazzi. Instead of her usual sharp suit, she was wearing jeans and a thick padded jacket with stout walking boots.

  “Where are we going?” Sam asked.

  “Forest of Dean,” she replied. “Get changed into something warm and easy to climb in. You need to wear boots. I’ll wait for you. Okay?”

  Within the hour they were flying over England, Mazzi more introspective than usual. He was happy to look down at the dull green fields and the naked trees, thinking through his plans. He still wasn’t sure if he trusted her, even though he couldn’t deny that he found her company strangely reassuring. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she was so comfortable in her own skin and at ease with her power. Would he ever be like that?

  They landed in the grounds of a private house a mile or so from the edge of the forest, where a car was waiting for them. Once they were ensconced in the back of the Mercedes and the glass dividing them from the driver was closed, Mazzi turned to him.

  “I’ve thought a lot about the last time I saw you,” she said. “I wasn’t truthful with you. I’m going to put that right.”

  Sam folded his arms. “Okay. Which bit?”

  She shifted, as if uncomfortable. “The Fae, Sam. Listen, Amir never said anything about Sorcerers or Fae for most of the time I knew him, and we were very close. A couple of years ago he told me about them. He said he’d had dealings with the Fae in the past—unpleasant ones—and that he’d made a few pieces for Sorcerers.”

  “And you didn’t believe him.”

  “Well, no, not at first! Come on! Of course I didn’t. I thought he was going senile. The Court was already worried about him. He was supposed to name a successor—we do that as far in advance as possible—so everyone can get to know him or her. He kept being evasive. He told me, in private, that he thought th
e Fae-touched were trying to infiltrate his business. He was paranoid, I suppose, because things kept going wrong with the hopefuls. Then he realised it was him. Not the Fae or Sorcerers or anything like that. Him. He was somehow poisoning them.”

  Sam nodded. “I met one of them and I heard about a few others. It’s why he chose me—at least, that’s what he said. Because I hadn’t been poisoned or contaminated or something.”

  She nodded. “Amir was very well respected in the Court and a very powerful man outside of it. But then he started asking the others weird questions. Especially Copper. Asking if they’d noticed the same thing. If they’d had dealings with the Fae or the Sorcerers.”

  “Copper must have!”

  Mazzi shook her head. “He hadn’t. Not directly. No one else had. People started to turn against him. A group of them came to me. Copper, Silver, Lead, a couple of others. They said they thought Iron was losing it and made it clear that if I believed him, I’d be frozen out of some critical deals. I went to Amir and laid it out for him and he agreed that regardless of what he really knew, it was clear the Court couldn’t handle anything out of the ordinary. So he stopped talking about it. And then he picked you.”

  “And then I stood up there in front of everyone and started spouting the same shit that he did.”

  She smiled. “More or less. If I’d supported you in front of the others, it wouldn’t have gone well for me. And I didn’t want to tell you that they thought Amir was crazy, not after you started saying the same things.”

  “So do you think Amir was crazy?”

  She shook her head. “No. He wouldn’t make anything like that up. And it fit with a few things I’d been wondering about. That’s why we’re here. I want to share something with you that makes me think there’s more to us than the others think. I hope it will make you realise you’re closer to being one of us than not.”