Half a Soul

by Olivia Atwater

  There was another knock at the door, however, and this made Elias tense and press her away from him. His now-ungloved hand brushed hers, which made Dora’s heart turn in her chest queerly—but he then let out a surprised hiss of pain, and she saw that he had touched the scissors by mistake. She blinked and set aside the scissors, reaching down to take his hand in hers. “Are you all right?” Dora asked. “I forgot that I had these out. Please say that I haven’t cut you?”

  Mrs Dun came inside, and Dora became dimly aware of the impropriety of the situation. Not only had they been in the room alone together, but Dora had ruined Elias’ attempt to salvage her dignity by taking up his hand and touching him. But surely, she thought, a practical woman like Mrs Dun must have some understanding if Elias were injured.

  Elias tugged his hand back stiffly. But Dora saw before he did that there was no blood of which to speak—only a small, angry red burn in the shape of the edge of her scissors.

  “I’m fine,” Elias said stiltedly, covering his hand. “Only surprised.”

  Mrs Dun looked between the two of them. For a moment, Dora worried that the woman might say something about their closeness—but she smiled pleasantly instead and smoothed the matter over as though nothing obviously untoward were going on. “Miss Jennings mentioned that neither she nor Miss Ettings have had aught to eat for a while now. I have some light pickings if you would like to fix that, Miss Ettings.”

  Dora nodded. “I am nearly done with Jane’s hair,” she said. “I will come down afterwards.”

  “Jane?” Elias asked. “Is that her name?”

  Dora avoided his eyes. “It is what I have called her for now,” she said. “Since we cannot know her real name until she wakes up.”

  Elias winced at that for some reason. But whatever he was thinking, he didn’t say it out loud. Dora turned her attention back to Jane’s hair, making somewhat quicker work of it than she had first intended. As Mrs Dun waited politely, hovering just outside the doorway, Dora murmured to Elias: “Are faeries and magicians both afraid of scissors, then?”

  Elias watched the wall with a stoic sort of expression, rather than look at her as she spoke. “Iron,” he corrected her quietly. “It is bane to faeries, and anathema to all magic. I would appreciate it if you did not speak of it again, Miss Ettings.”

  She narrowed her eyes—and with her next sentence, dropped her tone even further. “And that is why your magic failed upon the battlefield, isn’t it? You were pierced with iron. You could not use it again until Mr Lowe pulled the shards from your body.”

  “It is not common knowledge,” Elias said in a low voice. “Please do not spread it about, Dora.”

  Dora nodded seriously. “I cannot think why I should do so,” she told him. “You are keeping my secrets. I shall keep yours as well.” As the last of the matted hair fell away beneath her scissors, she turned to face him directly. “But are magicians burned by iron, Elias?”

  His golden eyes shuttered at that, and Dora was certain that a brand-new wariness had blossomed in his manner.

  “I will not press the matter,” she said. “I know that you have work to do.”

  Elias nodded shortly, and she rose back to her feet, walking past him for the hallway.

  Mrs Dun, Dora discovered, had found far more than just light pickings. She had put herself to the trouble of making them a proper lunch—and as Dora ate, she found that she was actually quite hungry. Afterwards, she dared to go back upstairs to check on the Lord Sorcier’s progress; but since the door was closed, she found herself too worried to knock and possibly disturb him, so she came downstairs again and visited with Mrs Dun and some of the other children.

  There were eighteen of the children in the house, she came to learn, excluding Jane—all of them had been taken from the workhouses and relocated, and many were patients which Albert had treated at one time. Mrs Dun, whom Dora learned to be a widow, had the running of the house, and the sheer extent of her duties sounded exhausting. For much of the time, she was responsible for cooking, cleaning, and educating all eighteen children, though some of the older ones had learned to help her. The children clearly adored her, however, and Dora could not help but favourably compare Mrs Dun’s stern but loving manner to the awful hardness that she had seen in George Ricks.

  Miss Jennings, though weary, was instantly at ease with the children in a way that Dora was not. The ex-governess smiled at them and humoured their stories, occasionally reaching out to absently fix a shirt collar or wipe a cheek.

  Eventually, Elias reappeared at the foot of the stairs with an annoyed frown on his face. “You, Miss Ettings!” he barked.

  Dora blinked over at him.

  “You have a tolerable understanding of French, I believe?” he asked.

  “Yes, tolerable,” Dora agreed.

  Elias gestured towards the stairs. “I’ll need your opinion on a translation.”

  Dora rose to her feet and headed over to join him. To her mild disappointment, Miss Jennings followed after her this time.

  Upstairs, Elias settled Dora in front of one of those medieval French tomes, whereupon she struggled through a translation of the qualities of the phlegmatic humour. After she had read it to him multiple times, the Lord Sorcier nodded and pulled out his wooden wand, passing it over Jane. Nothing in particular happened that Dora could see, and he frowned in consternation.

  “Were you expecting something in particular, my lord?” Miss Jennings asked curiously. The ex-governess, it seemed, was not immune to the novelty of watching a magician work.

  “If we are dealing with an imbalance of humours, then phlegm seems to be the most likely culprit,” Elias said slowly, as though thinking aloud. “According to these scholars, too much of it should lead to sleepiness. And if it is associated with water, as they say, then I should be able to dowse its overabundance. But there is nothing unusual in it that I can tell.” He turned towards the two of them. “Might I compare to one of you two? Miss Ettings—” He paused, and shook his head, and Dora thought that he might have remembered too late that she was also unlikely to have a normal set of humours. “Miss Jennings, if you would.”

  The ex-governess agreed, with the sort of smile that suggested she would be telling the story of her examination by the Lord Sorcier for the next few weeks, at least. Elias passed his wand before her—and this time, it seemed to waver in his hand this way and that, as though pulled along an invisible tide.

  This did not seem to please him, of course, since it had put him back to square one. He let out a violent sigh and closed the book in front of Dora. “Not the humours, then! How useless.” He waved them away. “I will be at this all night. Unless the two of you intend to sleep in the other bed, you will wish to take your leave soon.”

  “That does not sound so terrible,” Dora observed. Miss Jennings shot her a bewildered look, however, and Dora realised that she had said something strange again. “I was... attempting a joke. Forgive me.” She still wasn’t quite sure which part of the suggestion was so unbelievable, without any hint to go on, but Miss Jennings had seemed so instantly astonished that she supposed it was something to do with her chaperone’s duties.

  “We’ll take our leave, then,” Miss Jennings informed him. She took Dora’s arm, and the two of them headed for the door. Dora could not help but glance back over her shoulder as they left, however.

  The last thing she saw before leaving was the tense, frustrated figure of the Lord Sorcier, settling into a chair to theorise anew.

  Chapter 9

  Auntie Frances was at home when Dora returned with Miss Jennings. She was instantly eager to hear all about how Dora’s day had gone and whether she had successfully caught Albert’s attentions. Dora found that she was feeling less patient with this nonsense than usual, given the things she had seen that afternoon—but her aunt could not tell the difference between Dora’s normal distraction and her current shortness, which played in her favour for once. Dora mentioned Albert’s assertion that she wo
uld be welcome to join him in his work again, which pleased her aunt well enough that she only frowned a little bit at the addendum that Dora had spent part of the afternoon helping the Lord Sorcier instead of Albert.

  Vanessa, it turned out, was at a private dinner party that evening—and so Dora took her dinner in her room, and stared at her dresser with a great temptation. Somehow, she managed to hold herself off for another hour yet, before she went to retrieve the mirror there.

  Dora’s mind was so intent upon Elias that it did not take her long to solidify the sight of him in her imagination. A vision of him swam before her, now sitting in a chair next to Jane’s bed with an awful, tired-looking expression on his face.

  Since Elias had felt her presence before, Dora had to assume that he knew already of her intrusion. Still, there was a long silence before she could figure out just what to say.

  “Things are not going well,” she observed evenly. The idea pressed upon her more heavily than she could properly express.

  “I have spent all this time trying to formulate theories and tests for when we found another victim,” Elias said wearily. “I thought certainly, this time, that one of my ideas would work. But I have tried everything on my list, and I am out of ideas once again.”

  There was a grim finality to that statement that Dora very much did not like.

  “But you have time,” she said slowly. “You have found the victim much sooner, you said. And Jane does not seem to be feverish or suffering.”

  Elias closed his eyes. “It is difficult to keep alive someone who cannot eat or drink on their own,” he said. “Mrs Dun will do her best. But I cannot in good conscience raise your hopes.”

  Dora settled onto the other empty bed, nearby. It had no weight, and no real feeling beneath her fingers. But it was so easy for her to forget what real things felt like that it hardly made a difference, she decided, if she were awake or dreaming or scrying.

  She was upset, of course. The hopelessness on Elias’ face came with a melancholy realisation that even this small, specific attempt to fix things likely would not come to fruition. But Elias, Dora thought, had both the long-tailed emotions and the acute ones, and she could not imagine how much more wretched this whole business must have made him feel.

  Jane, she thought, had not been the first victim to lie in this room. Mrs Dun had told them that Elias had brought more than one child here, to try and understand their condition. He had given each child a soft, quiet bed and a bit of sunlight—but he had failed, each time, to stop their inevitable deterioration as they slept away the last of their lives.

  Dora reached out towards his hand, on the arm of the chair. Her fingers met some sort of resistance as she touched him, but there was an odd numbness to the sensation that suggested neither of them could feel it much at all. Still, she held on, for lack of anything better to offer.

  His fingers curled around hers, though it was rather like grasping for the hand of a ghost.

  I wish that I was here again in-person, Dora thought.

  “You will be at this until the end, then,” Dora said, breaking the bleak silence that had descended. “You will be here, or searching for more books, or researching new ideas?”

  Elias nodded slowly. “I won’t leave her be and give up,” he murmured.

  Dora tried to squeeze his hand, but she knew that the gesture had done nothing from his lack of reply. “You are the best person to try, of course,” she said. “But perhaps while you are trying your magic, Mr Lowe and I can search for answers by other means. Have all of the afflicted children so far come from the workhouses?”

  Elias frowned at that. Dora saw him fighting against the glazed defeat in his eyes. “They have,” he said slowly. “But that is not necessarily significant. Albert sees the workhouses often, which is how he came upon this plague. It is quite possible that if he more often saw the countryside, he might have brought the first cases to me from there.”

  Dora thought on this. “Either way,” she said. “You have never seen an adult with this strange disease. If we speak to the children at the workhouses and watch them closely, perhaps we might find a commonality between the ones who fall prey. If the plague is magic, as you suspect, then they all must come into contact with its source at some point.”

  Elias took in a deep breath. Some of the awful malaise cleared from his posture, and Dora’s own helplessness retreated as she realised she had been the cause. “That is... quite a good idea,” he said. “I would be obliged to both of you if you might pursue it further.” He turned to look at her, and his golden eyes flickered with uncertainty. “I fear that I will be unable to research your curse for a time, however, now that there is another victim. I’m sorry, Dora.”

  Dora shook her head clearly. “What good would it do to have all of my feelings again, if I must use them only to look on all this misery?” she asked. “I would rather see this done before you spend another moment on me. My troubles are not pressing.”

  Elias managed a small, wry smile at that. “Do you know, Dora,” he murmured. “I have known many human beings with a full soul to their name who do not have half so much compassion or practicality as you. On a poor day, I might assume this to be a kind of indictment of the human soul. But today, I believe that you might simply have an overabundance of both qualities.” He met her eyes, and she felt his warmth seep into her soul, like a balm around its ragged edges. “In short, though I am terrible at saying it... I am glad that you are here.”

  The gratitude in his face gave Dora pause. It was yet another expression that she had not ever expected to see upon the Lord Sorcier. How different she found him in that moment from the man that had first tried to startle her in the magic shop on Berkeley Square! Yet it was not the man himself who had changed, so much as her perspective on him. He was still disagreeable to all proper society and politeness. But as Dora inspected herself, she found that he had claimed a warm spot in her heart that she normally did not lease to anyone but her fondest cousin. That he seemed to have found a similar fondness for her, even for an instant, started up again those distant, confusing flutterings for which she yet had no name.

  “I think you are a good person, Elias,” Dora told him in reply. In public, she might have censored the thought—but doing so took an uncommon effort for her, and she had started to find that effort to be pleasantly unnecessary around him. “And whether we should succeed this time or not, I think that Jane is lucky to have your effort.” Dora glanced towards the girl in the bed, and was reminded of the undercurrent of dread that still played beneath the surface of her mind, thinking of how little time she might have left. “If you require any more translations, and Mr Lowe is otherwise engaged, I hope that you will let me know.”

  An odd confusion played about the magician’s features as she spoke. Dora wasn’t quite sure of the cause—in fact, she thought that she had spoken rather too bluntly, so that her meaning could not possibly be mistaken.

  Elias’ face smoothed again, however, and he returned to his more usual sardonic smile. “I am sure that I will take you up on your offer,” he informed her. “Though it may require me to bypass the dragon that guards you. I will be sure to set aside my dragon-slaying accoutrements in preparation.”

  Dora stayed with him for a while longer, sitting in companionable silence while he continued to consider his options. The hour grew quite late, in fact, before she blinked and found herself slumped over in bed, with her cheek upon the mirror and her thoughts in disarray.

  When Dora roused herself, she was pleased to find that she had a rare breakfast alone with Vanessa, since she had waited for the latter half of it. Unfortunately, Vanessa had heard of her brush with the Lord Sorcier the day before, and she was most eager for news on his progress. When Dora told her that the Lord Sorcier had no intention of pursuing her cure for the meantime, her cousin was aghast.

  “But he must!” Vanessa cried, and Dora had to shush her before she drew the wrong sort of attention. Vanessa reluctantly lower
ed her tone, but her expression was distressed. “If he will not cure you, then I cannot think who will, Dora. And what shall we do when the London Season is over, and you must go back to Lockheed?”

  Dora shook her head at her cousin. “You misunderstand, Vanessa,” she said. “I will not be pursuing my cure for the meantime either. There are more important matters afoot, and I cannot in good conscience look away from them.”

  She tried to relate the horrible things she had seen in the workhouse, and her concern for Jane, who even now weakened by the hour. But to Dora’s surprise, Vanessa did not seem to be listening to her as closely as she might have expected. Instead, her fair cousin’s face grew distant and worried, and Dora suspected that Vanessa was even now attempting to concoct some new plan to salvage her soul.

  “Vanessa!” Dora said finally. “Are you not listening? There are people suffering much greater awfulness than me.”

  “Oh, Dora!” Vanessa replied, with tears in her eyes. “There have always been people suffering more greatly than you, I am sure. But you are my cousin, and I love you best. Is it so wrong of me to put you first, after all the years you’ve borne this hardship?”

  Dora blinked at her. It was exactly the sort of heartfelt speech she might have expected of Vanessa. But for once, the subject gave her uncomfortable pause.

  “Vanessa,” she said. “I have always held your sweetness and generosity in the highest of esteem. I am beyond surprised—nay, disappointed—to hear you suggest that I should leave a little girl to die, in favour of my own needs.”

  Vanessa faltered at this. Dora saw the struggle on her face, as she attempted to reconcile her impulses. She pressed a hand to her mouth, and briefly ceased to speak.

  For the first time, Dora saw her cousin in a different light. Her love and generosity were still profound, of course—but these feelings of hers were also quite simple and childish, in a way. Vanessa loved fiercely, and protectively, and she always did prefer to champion those she thought abandoned. But never, Dora realised, had her cousin ever exhibited love or even pity for anyone that she had not seen with her very own eyes.