The whisper faded. There was a breath of air that felt chill and smelt faintly salty…then only the warm stuffiness of Hazel’s bedroom. She sat on the floor, trembling and hugging her knees. Staring and staring at the broken mirror.
It was a long time before she moved.
INEVITABLY, THE kidnapping led to a rapprochement between Nathan and his mother. The barriers were not dissolved but accepted, of necessity on her part; hostilities were over. At Ffylde, Nathan did his best to gloss over the whole incident, saying as little as possible even to Ned Gable. Damon reputedly came in to finish his exams but wasn’t seen on the premises at all, leading to rumors he had been expelled. Stories began to circulate about his poker debts, becoming increasingly improbable, pushing them into six figures. Everyone waited hopefully for dramatic developments, but nothing happened. In Eade, Bartlemy dropped into the bookshop and asked Annie to accompany him to the Hackforths. “They know you. Under the circumstances, I don’t think they will refuse to talk to us.”
Annie thought of Selena’s face, worn out from the long struggle against her daughter’s illness, her son’s delinquency. “Must we?” she said, and then, answering her own question: “Of course we must. After all, what Damon did wasn’t really his fault—was it?”
“Not entirely.”
And, on a note of hope: “Could you—could you help the girl—Melly-Anne? You know so much about medicines…”
“Help—maybe. Cure—no. I cannot perform miracles.”
“Isn’t that what magic is for—miracles?”
“I wish it were,” Bartlemy said, a little sadly. “But magic cannot change the world, only twist it. The Gift, at its most potent, is about power—not the power to do good, but power for its own sake. The mightiest wizard may bend the universe around him, but he cannot stop the sparrow’s fall, nor turn a few grains of dust back into a man. Magic is mere force, like electricity. Miracles are beyond explanation.”
“Have you ever seen one?” Annie asked.
“I’ve seen many. The beauty of the sunset—the strength of the human heart—these are the true miracles. What scientific or magical explanation is there for our pleasure in nature’s loveliness—for mercy, kindness, selfless love? We have analyzed our world down to the smallest particle, but the answers only pose more questions. As for creation, forensics may tell us how the crime was committed, but not who did it, or to what end. Magic can weave a spell powerful enough to open a door between worlds, but it cannot make those worlds anew, nor restore what has been lost. Keep faith—have hope—and be comforted. Life is full of miracles, though they don’t come to order.”
They drove to the Hackforth home in Annie’s car, arriving just before teatime.
“We should’ve called,” Annie said. “They might be out.”
“They won’t be out,” Bartlemy said with the air of one who knew. “I preferred to take them by surprise.”
Selena greeted them, looking wearier than ever. “Of course,” she said. “I suppose…I’ve been expecting you. Is this your lawyer?”
“My lawyer?” Annie looked blank.
“Giles thought—Giles said you would take legal action. I can’t blame you. Damon told us what he did.”
“I’m a friend,” Bartlemy said. “I stand to Nathan in the relationship of an uncle. My name is Goodman, Bartlemy Goodman. Your son may have mentioned me.”
“Yes, he…he said something…”
“May we come in?”
They went in. The dogs rushed forward, welcoming Annie like a long-lost friend, mobbing Bartlemy, who calmed them with a word. They followed him past the kitchen into the drawing room, where a gray-faced Giles sat on a gray-covered sofa. He got up, looking guarded; hands were shaken.
“I’m prepared to pay compensation,” Giles said, rushing into speech. “If we could just keep the matter out of the courts—”
“We don’t want compensation,” Annie said. “Honestly. I never even thought of it. We just want to talk.”
Hackforth didn’t look particularly reassured.
“If I might have a word with you alone,” Bartlemy said, flicking a glance at Annie, who suppressed her curiosity with reluctance.
“We’ll get some tea,” she said.
In the end she steered Selena into the garden, wandering between color-coordinated banks of flowers, admiring the roses, the shaved lawn, the dubious sculpture in the water feature. “Barty’s really good with homeopathic medicines,” Annie said at last. “He might have something that would help Melly-Anne. Not—not exactly a magic potion, but—it’s all natural stuff, it can’t hurt to try it.”
“It’s nice of you to think of her,” Selena said with automatic courtesy. “After Damon…” She couldn’t bring herself to be more specific.
“Barty says—it wasn’t his fault,” Annie said with difficulty. “He thinks Damon was controlled—influenced—by someone. I expect that’s what he’s discussing with your husband.”
“You mean, one of his friends? We’ve never really known who he…hangs out with.”
Annie thought of Ram and Ginger. According to Nathan, they had been controlled by Damon, not vice versa. She said: “Possibly.”
Later the men joined them for tea. Giles, Annie was pleased to see, appeared less tense, less anxious, almost relaxed. It was Bartlemy in whose manner she detected a faint—a very faint—undercurrent of something she couldn’t define—worry, uncertainty, fear. But Bartlemy was never worried or afraid. On the way home she asked him what was wrong, but his response was noncommittal.
“You’ve found out something,” she accused. “Something about who was really behind the burglaries, and manipulating Damon. Nathan thinks it was Giles himself, but…”
“Attempted burglaries,” Bartlemy corrected her. “Anyway, I only had a suspicion confirmed.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“Nothing. For now.”
ARRIVING AT school on Monday, Hazel found her worst nightmares coming true. Ellen Carver and her entourage were gathered in a little group, talking in gleeful whispers, watching her sideways, sniggering. The snigger spread through the class like a ripple as the whisper passed from mouth to ear, unhindered by lessons or the presence of teaching staff. The teachers were divorced from the teenage world, existing on an aloof plane while the real life of the school seethed and festered underneath. If they noticed Hazel was quiet that meant little; she was always quiet, a loner with few close friends who made scant contribution in class. Inside the armor of her silence she thought she died a hundred times that day, stabbed by the giggles, the nudges, the sly remarks, the derisive glances. Those who had been her mates backed off, joining the enemy or simply avoiding her, unwilling to be identified with the pariah. She curled up inside herself like a hedgehog, all prickle, showing no reaction, pulling her hair so far over her face that the gym mistress told her rather sharply to tie it back. Whether Jonas Tyler had heard the story she didn’t know—she saw him only at a distance, and he didn’t appear to see her—but her faith in the magic was gone. The spell was mere words—words and dreams—the reality was private folly, public shame. She had been stupid, credulous, childish, and now she was paying the price.
It was all Lilliat’s fault.
She was leaving school around two, playing truant from her last lesson, when she ran into Jonas. He said “Hi,” taking her off guard. She hadn’t expected a normal greeting from anyone. She grunted in reply—she couldn’t manage hello.
They stood for a minute in mutual embarrassment, looking at each other. At least, Jonas looked; Hazel could see little through her hair.
“Thanks for the bandage yesterday,” he went on with youthful tactlessness. “I’m sorry the others seem to think…Well, thanks anyway.”
Hazel gave a shrug that emerged as a twitch. Why on earth was he thanking her for a Band-Aid, for God’s sake? Perhaps he was mocking her.
She expected him to go away, but he hesitated, shifting his feet.
; “They’re giving you a bad time, aren’t they?”
“I’m all right.” Hazel was gruff.
“Girls can be so bitchy. I don’t mean you—you’re not like that—but even Ellen…”
“I thought she was your girlfriend?”
Jonas fidgeted more than ever. “Um…sort of. Only—I don’t like bitches. Of course, she’s very pretty—lots of blokes want to go out with her—but she’s a bit of a tease. She comes on really sexy and then…” He stalled, fumbled, restarted. “Look, I like you a lot. Honestly. I wish…I wish we could talk sometime.”
What’s happening here? Hazel thought. He’s almost asking me out.
This time it was surprise that paralyzed her vocal cords. The spell must have worked. Wow.
“The thing is, all my mates would laugh. Maybe we could meet somewhere…secret. Get to know each other a bit better. Without anyone finding out…”
Wow?
“Romeo and Juliet?” Hazel said. “That sounds pretty silly to me.”
“They just had family problems, didn’t they?” he commented vaguely. “We’ve got the whole school to contend with.”
“I don’t know…” This wasn’t working out the way she’d fantasized at all.
“I really do like you.” He reached out, touched her. She found herself shrinking away. “I bet you’re not a tease. I bet if you liked someone…”
Hazel gazed into his face and saw the mystery evaporate. He was just a rather shy boy who wanted to get laid. And he thought she was so hooked on him she’d be a pushover. Whether the spell had actually worked or not she never knew. In that instant of disillusion, she felt it didn’t really matter.
“I don’t like you that much,” she said. “Sorry.”
She hitched her rucksack farther up her shoulder and hurried off, suddenly eager to get away from him. Now he, too, would be against her. But her brief glimpse into the shallows of his soul had filled her with panic. The sweet, sensitive persona she had created for him, burdened with unknown sorrows, had disappeared in the glare of reality, leaving an ordinary boy, with ordinary preoccupations—a boy who was hardly worth heartache and dreams, let alone scheming and spells. After all she had borne that day—for his sake, or so she told herself—it was too much. She fled home and shut herself in her room, gazing savagely at the cracked mirror.
She wanted to summon the spirit—the spirit who had lied to her and cheated her, exacting a price she never wished to pay for a spell that had turned sour on her. The bile in her was so strong, the memory of Lilliat’s true nature—the darkness behind the veil of flowers—barely daunted her. Without even knowing it, she felt the certainty of power, filling her, driving her, a force all destruction, without principle, incapable of good. “You said I would call you—” she spoke aloud, pushing herself on, sensing it was foolhardy, knowing it was pointless, but rage gave her the delusion of purpose. “I’m calling.” And now there were words in her head that she had never even read, tugging at the roots of the air, winging on the wind. “Santò daiman, santò m¯ana, santò m¯ana maru! Venya! Fia! Vissari!”
Lilliat’s face hovered beneath the surface of the mirror, split in two by the crack, one side silver-eyed and silver-haired, the other all shadow. When she spoke, only half her mouth moved—the half in the light. Hazel fancied she was confused by the crack, and had simply forgotten to move the other half. Her voice came from within; any motion of her features was merely cosmetic.
“What of the spell?” she asked. “Are you content?”
“No!”
The phantom didn’t seem to understand. “I gave him to you, the one you love. I made him desire you. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“No! He just lusted after me, because I was there, because he thought I was available. I wanted him to care.” I wanted him to be special, the boy in my dreams, not a standard boring male with standard teenage hormones. “I wanted him to love me.”
“He loves you.” Lilliat’s half face went cold. The dark side did not change. “Love is desire. Desire is love. What else is there?”
“You wouldn’t know. You’re stupid as well as a liar. It doesn’t matter, anyway. It was all for nothing. And now the others—Ellen and her friends—they despise me—everyone despises me—I’ve become the butt of the whole school. All thanks to you…”
“This Ellen—she’s the one the boy loved—the one whose token you gave me?”
“Yes. I hate her. I hate her—”
“Hate is good.” One end of Lilliat’s mouth remembered to smile. “Hate is desire. Desire is hate. What else is there?”
“Nothing else,” Hazel said. She was panting as if she had been running, breathless with the emotions that battered and pummeled at her spirit. Hate at least was clear, filling her with a dark burning glow, driving the doubts from her mind. It was easy to hate.
“I granted your wish,” Lilliat was saying. “The wish of your heart. But…”
“It’s usual to have three,” Hazel said defiantly. “I’ve read the stories.”
Lilliat laughed—half a laugh. The other side of her face was utterly still. “I cannot be dictated to by stories. I owe you nothing: remember that. But maybe—for the sake of your youth, for the sake of your power—I will give you another throw. What do you wish for this girl Ellen?”
“I want her to suffer. I want her to be scorned and reviled. I want her to hurt.”
“The wish of your heart?” The question sounded oddly significant, as if it meant more than it said.
“Your spells all go wrong,” Hazel said bitterly. “It won’t work, will it? They never work.”
And: “Yes. The wish of my heart.”
Afterward, she thought something changed inside her at those words: feeling became stone, her spirit set in a pattern that could not be undone. But really she knew that was mere self-dramatization, and the change sneaked up on her, moment by moment, stealing her soul, an atom at a time, turning it to dust.
The pale side of Lilliat’s reflection faded first, leaving the dark half somehow more defined, the single eye wide and staring against the waxy skin. There was hunger there, Hazel thought—the hunger she had seen before—and menace. It vanished in a swirl of hair, leaving the splintered glass beaded with water drops. Suddenly, Hazel remembered the head she had seen once, conjured by her great-grandmother, rising from a porcelain basin in the attic above. A white drowned head with eyes deep as the abyss, lifting itself from an inch of river water…
But there was no point in thinking of that now. In any case, Hazel told herself, Lilliat is my conjuration, my familiar. Effie Carlow was long gone.
She slept badly that night, troubled not by dreams but waking horrors, dreading school the next day. She wondered about confiding in Nathan, the following weekend, warming herself with his sympathy and partisanship. He would feel for her, he would champion her…he would be sorry for her. The thought of his pity gave her an inexplicable shrinking of the heart. After all, wasn’t pity the flip side of contempt? A looking-down on someone, an acknowledgment of their weakness and inferiority. Perhaps Nathan had always considered her inferior—less in cleverness, less in beauty, with no alien powers, no heroic qualities. Why give him the chance to confirm his superiority?
Besides, there was too much she couldn’t tell him. About the stupidity of her passion for Jonas (that was how she saw it now), and pocketing the soiled bandage, and conjuring Lilliat, and most of all about the third token, the rugger shirt—the token of her betrayal. “I’ll get it back,” Hazel vowed, trying to convince herself, to make herself feel better. “Anyway, she took it from me. I would never have given it to her. She took it.” Like Effie more than a year ago, who had made her take hair from Annie’s brush and something from Nathan, so she could weave a charm to spy on them. Nothing terrible had happened to them because of that, had it? Annie had fainted once—in London—but that was all. (Anyone could faint in London; the mere idea of it made Hazel swoon.) And even as sleep crept over her mind at last H
azel thought drowsily: “They’re all after Nathan.” Her great-grandmother…boys at his school…denizens of the spirit-world…
…all after Nathan.
It was midweek before Nathan was summoned for an audience with the abbot. “It’s getting to be a habit,” Ned Gable said. “What are you going to tell him?”
“I don’t know,” Nathan admitted. And, with a flicker of mischief: “It depends on what he asks me.”
But Father Crowley, as ever, seemed to know almost everything already.
“I fear it’s partly my fault,” he said. “I’ve known for a long time that Damon was dangerously unstable, but I hadn’t realized how close he’d come to genuine psychosis. I’m sorry, Nathan: you had an uncomfortable evening, and I might have prevented it.”
“It was a bit,” Nathan said, mesmerized by the understatement.
The abbot allowed himself a smile. “More than a bit. You showed great courage under conditions of ultimate stress. Life cannot ask more of anyone.” Nathan began to be embarrassed and, seeing that, Father Crowley moved on. “Afterward, too, you seem to have demonstrated amazing self-restraint. I gather you haven’t discussed the—er—gory details with your friends here, or made any demands for revenge or punishment. A more extreme reaction on your part would have been perfectly understandable, under the circumstances, yet you appear to have displayed a truly Christian spirit of forgiveness.”
There was the hint of a question in his voice and Nathan, reddening, responded to it. “It’s not like that,” he said, and then stopped. He couldn’t possibly take credit for a Christian spirit—the idea made him cringe—but the truth was too difficult to explain.
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