He grinned. ‘What did you really do with them?’
‘Nothing. They submitted to my withdrawal of the alikat without a murmur, and left.’
Jay’s brows went up. ‘Odd.’
‘Very. Shall we take these poor little soldiers home?’
‘Lead on.’
‘Uh, no. You lead on.’
Jay gave me a tiny salute. ‘You are the boss.’
‘Fine.’ I cast a quick look around to get my bearings, and set off.
‘That’s the wrong way,’ Jay helpfully observed.
I stopped. ‘Remember why they assigned you to me?’
‘I just… didn’t think you could really be that bad.’ Jay picked a direction almost the opposite of the one I had been wandering in, and marched off.
‘I’d love to take offence,’ I said as I fell in behind him. ‘But the truth is, I couldn’t find my way out of a bucket.’
‘Noted.’ Jay sounded perfectly composed. Not a quiver of mirth could I detect.
‘Are you laughing at me?’
‘Never.’
‘You are.’
His shoulders began to shake, which prompted a dissatisfied mrow from his alikat. ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
I caught up with Jay, and expressed my disapproval with a disdainful toss of my cerulean curls. ‘I have other talents.’
‘I am sure you do.’
‘Aren’t you going to ask what they are?’
‘I’ve been told what they are. Vast knowledge of magickal history. Specialised knowledge of ancient spells, beasts and artefacts. No insignificant skill with charms.’
‘Great hair.’
‘Great hair.’
I smiled, mollified. ‘What are your talents?’
‘I,’ said Jay, ‘can find my way out of a bucket.’
‘I am speechless with admiration.’
‘And the South Moors Troll Enclave. There’s the door.’
Burdened as we’d hoped to be by a pair of frightened (and possibly injured) animals, we had judged it best to eschew flight this time and travel by car. At least, this was the official motive. I prefer cars anyway, for two reasons. One: it is unnecessary to manage the thorny problem of finding one’s way to somewhere while maintaining an invisibility or deflection glamour, all without falling off one’s choice of steed (chairs are popular). And two: call it vanity, but I hate what the high winds do to my hair. Cars, of course, have heating and sat nav and roofs overhead, which is delightful of them. They also have traffic jams, but I consider that a price worth paying for comfort.
Since Jay would be driving, he had insisted we use his car. I’d half expected it to be some kind of zippy, sporty thing with too few seats and overly glossy paintwork, but instead he drove a shabby-looking Ford Something in a respectable shade of dark red. It displayed the kinds of scratches and minor dents suggestive of a car that is well-used but not quite so well-loved. We carefully loaded our (thankfully uninjured) alis into a pair of cat carriers, settled them in the back, and headed for Home.
When I say “Home”, I mean headquarters. The Society for Magickal Heritage is officially called The Society for the Preservation and Protection of Magickal Heritage, or SPPMH for short. But while lengthy and convoluted acronyms might work beautifully for, say, the RSPCA, we summarily rejected the garbling and spitting involved and opted for the serene simplicity of merely: The Society. And the Society is housed in a gorgeous country mansion which is, considering its size, surprisingly hard to find.
We like it that way. The house has no official name; that’s why we just call it “Home”. Like the Hidden University, it isn’t marked on any map. It has no website, and no sat nav will direct you to it. This, as you may imagine, has frequently caused me no little difficulty. I was two days late for my first day of work.
The house dates from the mid seventeenth century. It was once owned by one of the more prominent magickal families among the nobility of England and Ireland, so they say, though reports vary as to which family it was. Officially, it was knocked down after the Second World War, like so many of our country houses; this piece of misdirection, combined with a liberal application of deterrent charms, keeps us largely secure from the outside world. It drowses, quietly hidden, somewhere near the border of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, ringed by peaceful hills, and as wholly unspoilt as a building that’s Home to two hundred people can possibly be.
Not being directionally impaired, Jay got us there within a couple of hours. I felt so many things upon approaching that beautiful house, as I always do. Admiration for its rambling stonework, its fanciful little towers, its long windows, parapets and soaring archways. Fondness, for the place I’ve called home for more than a decade. Pride, for the work we do; we’ve saved and restored countless books and artefacts; rescued many species of magickal creatures from the disaster of extinction; tracked down and extracted magickal Treasures and Curiosities without number, sometimes from situations of considerable danger. What kind of work could be more important than that?
This array of warm feelings suffered an early check. As we drove slowly up the spacious driveway, I noticed that Zareen had turned the flanking rows of stately, centuries-old oak trees upside down. Again.
‘Is it too soon to revoke her Curiosity privileges?’ I sighed, wincing at the exposed roots sagging helplessly in the air.
‘It appears to be too late,’ said Jay.
‘It’s never too late.’
‘You’ll have to talk to Milady. She—’
A great, groaning creaking sound interrupted whatever Jay was about to add, as the tree nearest to us flipped right-side-up again. Dislodged earth rained down upon the car like a shower of hail, and I was thankful anew that we had not come swooping in upon a pair of inconveniently open-topped chairs.
‘Definitely talk to Milady,’ growled Jay, narrowly avoiding a falling clot of earth of alarming size with a neat swerve of the wheels.
It was good to be Home.
Jay was only recruited by the Society a couple of weeks ago, and it shows.
We parked, retrieved our alikats and made for the house. I was aiming for a side door that would take us straight into the Magickal Creatures wing, but as we approached, the little green-painted portal faded into the stonework and disappeared.
I stepped back.
‘Uh,’ said Jay, blinking and pointing at where the door had been. ‘Is… it supposed to do that?’
‘No, but all attempts to dissuade it have failed. I think Milady’s given up. Take a step back, Jay.’
‘What?’
I don’t know whether it was the vanishing door that did it or the inverted trees beforehand, but Jay definitely wasn’t at his sharpest. I grabbed him and pulled, just as an elegant spiral staircase made from solid wrought iron descended from above, slamming into the ground a little too close to where Jay had been standing moments before.
3
Jay stared at the staircase in consternation.
‘Thanks,’ he said faintly.
I made a flourishing gesture of invitation, indicating the proffered stairs with a sweep of my free arm. ‘After you.’
‘Uh. Why don’t you go first?’
‘Don’t worry, the House won’t hurt you.’
Jay gave me the are-you-crazy stare. ‘I’ve narrowly missed having my car crushed by a ball of earth the size of four of my heads, almost been flattened by a flying set of stairs, and all of this has happened in the last ten minutes of my life.’
‘All right. I’ll go first.’ I picked up my discarded creature carrier and set off up the steps. After a few moments’ hesitation, I heard Jay’s footsteps ringing behind me.
There was no door at the top, but there was a long window set with many small panes of glass. When I reached the top, about fifty of those panes flickered and vanished, creating an entryway just large enough to admit Jay and myself.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘How convenient.’ For beyond the makeshift doorway I could see one of the lar
ger, oak-panelled drawing-rooms of the first floor, or what had been a drawing-room once. It was now used as a kind of common room, and one of its occupants was Miranda Evans, our vet and specialist in magickal beasts of all kinds.
‘Hi,’ I said as I wandered through the window, and set the creature carrier down at her feet.
She was lounging in the kind of shabby, velvet-clad wing-back chair in which Home abounds, her red robes partially open to reveal a chunky hand-knitted jumper worn underneath. Her blonde hair was half out of its bindings, as usual; she took one look at me and Jay and the present we’d brought for her, and immediately scraped it back into a more business-like ponytail. ‘More work,’ she said with her quirk of a smile. ‘Lovely.’
‘Alikats, breeding pair. Extracted from South Moors.’
Her brows went up at that, and she hastily swallowed the dregs of her cup of tea. ‘Injuries?’
‘None visible. I think they’re unharmed, they just need a check-up and then resettling.’
By the time I had finished this sentence, Miranda was already on her knees, peeking through the bars at my slumbering alikat. ‘Gorgeous,’ she commented.
I’d lost her attention altogether, but that was all right. Jay and I watched as she gathered up our beleaguered pair; with a nod to us both, she left the common room at a smartish pace.
Jay glanced behind himself. The door we’d used had sealed itself up again, turning back into a window. ‘Is it a coincidence that we found Miranda right here?’
‘No,’ I said, making a beeline for the kettle and the tea cupboard. ‘That was the House helping us out. It does that.’
‘When it isn’t trying to kill us.’
‘It wasn’t trying to kill us.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘It was trying to kill you. I was fine.’
This was a joke, of course, but I regretted it when Jay developed an expression of mingled anxiety and affront. I put a cup of tea into his hands to pacify him, or at least to distract him, neither of which worked. ‘Haven’t you seen the House do that before?’
‘Nope.’
‘It’s because you’re new,’ I decided. ‘It hasn’t figured you out yet. It will soon.’
‘Then it will stop trying to kill me?’ Jay looked profoundly sceptical.
‘No. Then you’ll stop being careless enough to get in the way of House’s helpful gestures. Or Zareen’s pranks, for that matter.’
Jay took a long gulp of tea, like a man chugging something strong and alcoholic. ‘Survive a few more weeks for optimum results. Got it.’
I chugged mine, too, for we did not have time to linger. Somewhat to my regret, for the first-floor common room is one of my favourite places at Home. It’s something to do with the quality of the light, I think; those long windows somehow admit the perfect degree of it, in the perfect quantity, keeping the room bathed in a peaceful glow that perfectly brings out the mellow tones of the wooden walls and flooring. Those chairs are remarkable, too. We might not have had time, but I sank into one of them anyway, the crimson one. Its proportions immediately adjusted around me, creating of itself a seat of perfect size and dimensions to accommodate my frame. The cushions softened, too, since I prefer a pillowy structure, and the back shortened a little to suit my height — its previous occupant was apparently rather taller than me, which isn’t unusual.
‘Lovely,’ I said, wearing my smile of serene contentment.
‘Out you get,’ said Jay unsympathetically. ‘We’ve a report to make.’
I sighed, deeply, but he was right. Something was very much amiss at South Moors, and the Powers needed to know about it right away. ‘Fine, fine,’ I said with decided ill grace. I threw a cushion at him as I rose; unlike the loose earth from Zareen’s inverted trees, this he dodged with easy grace, and raised a single brow at me.
‘Have you no mischievous side?’ I asked him in exasperation.
‘None whatsoever.’ He said it with such a straight face, I had to believe him.
‘You and Zareen should get on like—’
‘Cats and dogs,’ he interrupted. ‘We do.’
I tossed the tangles from my hair, adjusted my poor ruined dress, and made for the door. ‘They should have given you someone much more serious to work with.’
‘But you’re the one who needed me.’ Jay somehow beat me to the door, opened it, and held it for me with an ironical little bow.
Considering the most prominent of the reasons why I needed him, that reflection was mildly embarrassing, so I responded only with a haughty look of disdain and strode forth.
Jay was kind enough to fall in behind me without further comment, and I was able to pretend that I didn’t hear the low chuckle that was almost masked by the sound of the door closing behind us.
The process for seeking an audience with Milady is rather particular.
First, one is expected to present oneself in her preferred location, that being at the very top of the very tallest tower of the House. And why not? There is something agreeably fairy tale about it, even if the physical exertion required is not always well received by her supplicants.
Jay managed the ascent of three narrow, winding stone staircases in increasingly strained silence. They are the kind with uneven steps (charmingly worn by time, and the passage of a million footsteps); spiralling construction (tightly wound, so as to make of them the greatest possible obstacle); and occasional landings, randomly dispersed (the kind with dark, shadowy corners, wherein one half expects to find all manner of disagreeable creatures residing). And of course, none of them has fewer than thirty or so steps. All things considered, I was impressed that he made it halfway up the fourth staircase before the complaints began.
‘Isn’t there a lift?’ He sounded faintly breathless but not excessively so, which wasn’t bad. Jay obviously kept himself decently fit.
‘Of course not,’ I said, in the ringing tones of a supremely fit woman (a boast, but what can I say? I’ve been climbing these staircases every day for more than a decade. That alone will give a woman lungs of steel, and the hind quarters of a racehorse).
‘What do you mean, of course not? Lifts are wonderful.’
I cast him a withering look over my shoulder. ‘This is a seventeenth-century mansion. Where do you suggest we put an elevator? Which priceless and irreplaceable features shall we rip out in order to make room for it?’
‘Fair point. What about the house itself, then? If it can present you with a staircase straight up to the common room, it can whisk us up to the top tower in a jiffy.’
‘Are you in a wheelchair, Jay?’
‘Uh… no.’
‘Valerie Greene — have you met her yet? Library? — is wheelchair-bound. Dear House takes the very best care of her. Any door she approaches opens upon just the place she wants to go.’
‘That’s good of it.’
‘Isn’t it? And quite ingenious.’
‘So we’re left to haul ourselves up all these stairs because…?’
‘Because we are able-bodied, fit young people, Jay, and I don’t think House approves of laziness.’
I fancy it was the word laziness that silenced him, or perhaps he simply ran out of breath. Either way, he had not another word to advance until we arrived at the top of the sixth set of stairs and stood, briefly winded (or he was, at any rate; I deny all such charges), and taking great gulps of air. We were in a cramped, rounded tower; before us was one of those narrow, arrow-slit type windows filled in with glass, through which we were afforded a fine view of the green, sun-dappled hills beyond the gates.
‘Lovely,’ I commented.
Jay said nothing, so I turned to the one other feature of that stark little tower: a heavy oak door, closed and barred.
I knocked.
‘What now?’ whispered Jay, when nothing happened.
‘House is consulting with Milady as to whether she wants to admit us.’
‘Does she ever decline?’
‘Me, no. You, however�
�� who knows.’
Jay allowed that to pass in silence. ‘Does she really live up here?’ he said after a while — just as the door unbarred itself with a clang and swung slowly inwards.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Jay made no move, so I entered the room first.
Milady’s room is only about six metres across, its walls curved most of the way around. Those walls were fitted with panelling at some point in history, though not with the smooth, warm-hued oak that’s prevalent across most of the House. The tower’s walls are sheathed in iridescent crystal. There’s one window, but it doesn’t look over the countryside like the one in the antechamber. Through it one can see only swirling white mist.
I stepped into the centre of the room, and positioned myself in the middle of the thick, royal-blue rug that covers the floor.
‘Afternoon, Milady,’ I said cordially, and curtseyed.
‘Uh.’ Jay came up next to me and turned a full circle on the spot, neck craning, as though Milady might be hidden somewhere in a room with no furniture and no corners. ‘Where is she?’ he whispered to me.
I elbowed him. ‘Say hello,’ I hissed.
‘Hello, Milady.’
That was it. I elbowed him again, a bit harder this time, and by way of judicious application of pressure to his upper back I contrived to force him into a semblance of a polite bow.
The air sparkled. ‘Cordelia Vesper,’ said a low, cultured female voice. ‘Jay Patel. What have you to tell me today?’
4
Nothing ever worries Milady. I could tell her an army of hostile magicians was advancing upon the House with a legion of direbeasts in tow, and she would merely say, ‘Unfortunate. Very well,’ dispense a simple, efficient plan for containing the problem which would work perfectly, and then invite us all for tea afterwards.
She heard our account of the South Moors Troll Enclave in thoughtful silence, a silence she maintained for some ten or fifteen seconds after I had finished speaking. That, it seems, was as much time as she required to consider our information, place it in context, and devise her response.
‘You did well to retrieve the alikats,’ she said. ‘There are but twelve breeding pairs left in England, at least that are known. We could not easily bear to lose one of them. They are in Miranda’s care?’
The Road to Farringale Page 2