by Emma Newman
“And if Cathy succeeds, and the worlds are rejoined, what then? What will the Fae do?”
“We shall revel in our freedom! Nothing ever changes here, in our prison. When this place is gone, we will plunge ourselves into the chaos of humanity. Mortals are always creating things. We shall feast ourselves upon the sheer novelty of it all.”
“And then you’ll enslave them?”
“Some, probably,” Iris said with a shrug. “But we have had many slaves, during our confinement. The free will fascinate us far more, I should imagine.”
“And your ‘pets’? They’ll age and die like the rest of the mundanes?”
“The ones we’ve lost interest in, yes.”
“Have you lost interest in me, Iris?”
The Fae’s smile was horribly enigmatic.
A trembling, felt first through the floor and then the throne, distracted Will. It built steadily until a terrific shudder ran through the entire palace, shattering the windows and making the throne rock. He gripped the arms and looked out the window to see faeries and sprites bursting out of the castle as the sun itself seemed to dim.
Will felt suddenly tired and heavy-limbed, and in the next moment his crown cracked and tumbled from his head. He watched, dumbstruck, as the oak leaves lost their lustre and fell from the gold circlet. The same was happening to the Queen’s crown, and even the decoration on the thrones was beginning to crumble. The oak leaves on the pillars were peeling from the stone, collapsing to the floor in plumes of dust as the gilded stars on the ceiling fell away.
Iris laughed, scooping up the remnants of the crumbling leaves to toss them into the air like a child playing in an autumnal park. He gave Will one last glance before running out of the throne room calling for Petra.
Will went to the window, his shoes crunching over the glass. It was over. He was merely a man again. He’d reached the top of the ladder, only to have Cathy pull it away from under him.
But there was no anger. It was as if all his emotions were spent, having peaked in his rage against Poppy. Now? He felt tired. How long had he been lurching from one crisis to the next? How long had it been since he felt truly secure? He looked back at the throne. Had he really felt in control wearing that crown? No. He had felt like a prisoner. How long could he realistically have kept pushing that sensation aside? He’d been distracted by the overwhelming need to bring Cathy so they could suffer luxurious imprisonment together. Why? What madness was that? How could he have believed that it was the right thing to do—for either of them? Yet again, what he had perceived as power—and the desperation to retain it—had merely driven him to commit more horrific acts. All in the hope that he would finally feel safe and powerful and free of vulnerability.
Tabula rasa. He was no one now. Not an Iris. Not a king. Not a Fae-touched. Not a mundane. There was a hollowness he’d never dared to face before and now he realised it had always been there, covered up by the desire to please his family, his Patroon, his patron. It had been beneath the surface long before Iris took his name in Aquae Sulis. Perhaps if he’d stopped and faced it earlier, none of this would have happened. But then again, what could he have done differently? How can the pawn abandon the game by choice and leave the board of its own volition? To think he had once believed that he controlled some of the pieces. He laughed, bitterly. Now there was no game to play.
Sophia was safe, at least, but he had no way to get back to her. At least she wasn’t alone, and now that everything was changing, Uncle Vincent wouldn’t be under pressure to take Jorvic. Soon that place wouldn’t even exist.
He swept the shards of glass from the windowsill and sat there, staring out at the horizon. Was all of this simply going to disappear? Was it going to fracture, like the crowns, and kill him in the process? He couldn’t even muster any concern about that. He was too tired, too ashamed of himself to care what would happen to him.
“There you are.”
Will didn’t recognise the woman’s voice, so he turned to face the doorway it came from. All the exhaustion was pushed from his body at the sight of Lady Rose and the murderous glee on her ethereal face.
“I’ve waited so long for this,” she said. “You didn’t really think I’d forget what you did to my family, did you?”
33
Cathy stepped through the Way, back into the tower room for the last time, shaking with fatigue. The last of the iron cables had been destroyed.
“Did you do it?” Tom asked, rushing over to her and Sam. When she nodded, he pointed out the window at the silver sky. “Well, it didn’t work! Look, we’re still in the Nether!”
She waved him to one side so she could put the paint pot down and stand in front of the glass again. “It has worked, it just isn’t finished,” she said as she tried to flex the cramp from her fingers. “We’ve broken the bonds that keep Exilium stable and separate from Mundanus.”
“So Exilium is just…floating somewhere?” Tom asked.
She nodded. Exilium felt like a world contained in a helium balloon and she’d just cut the strings that held it tethered to the earth. Now that she was stopping to think about the magnitude of what she’d done, it seemed too big, too important for her to finish. For the briefest moment, she imagined letting it just float off, no longer her concern. She dismissed the fantasy. If she did that the Nether would still be there, and anyway, the Fae had a right to exist. She wasn’t sure if they’d survive indefinitely without the whole ritual being intact. She hadn’t broken those cables to commit magical genocide. “Where are my notes?”
Tom grabbed them from a nearby table and put them in her hands. “I haven’t been able to make any progress. All three concepts seem appropriate. I think it comes down to which one you wish to emphasise: completion, unification, or stability. Alone, none of them seems enough.”
Cathy scoured her workings, double- and triple-checking her deciphering of Beatrice’s formula and the logical endings she and Tom had pieced together. They fit with the shape of the working as a whole. All were plausible. But there was no way to tell whether any of them were what Beatrice had in mind. It was like trying to predict the final sentence of a political speech. They’d analysed the content, could see the structure, and knew the argument. But predicting what the final note should be—which aspect of rhetoric or statement of fact should be used—was more difficult than she’d appreciated.
The notes read like gibberish and the symbols blurred on the page. How could she work out how to finish this formula? Why had she started it all without knowing how to finish it?
“Cathy.” Sam was standing there, on the other side of the notebook, pressing it down so he could look into her eyes. “Breathe.” She tried, but it seemed to snag in her throat. “Breathe,” he repeated, and she slapped his hand away.
“Don’t just stand there and tell me to breathe! What fucking use is that?” Both he and Tom stared at her, making her feel wretched. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, determined not to cry. “It’s just…it’s really hard.”
“Why don’t you talk me through it,” Sam said gently.
“I need to close the formula. Beatrice wrote everything I’ve used so far and I understand it, but the way it’s closed is important and she didn’t get that far because she had to break all the cables first, just like we have. There aren’t any notes. I think she just knew what to write. I don’t. I don’t have that kind of knowledge.”
“Okay. So there are three options, that’s what you said. How have you got those?”
“Logical progression, using the same techniques that made the rest of the formula. Some of it is drawn from the Coptic alphabet. Some of it is drawn from sorcerous symbols, luckily the ones I’ve learned; it’s like an inversion of warding. And she made sigils, pretty basic ones, really, drawing upon those sources. It opens with sigils, so I think it should be closed with them. Thing is, I don’t know which one. I could use any of them—I drew them up using the same base sources as her—and I just need to work it with some will behin
d it.”
“And what do the opening sigils do?”
“They define Mundanus and Exilium and express the connections between them. Then the middle section involves the seven locations we went to, breaking them from the definition of the part that expresses the connections one by one. The first part of the closing clause defines Mundanus and Exilium at the start, with no connections between them. Which is fundamentally unstable for Exilium.”
“Didn’t you say one was for stability?” Sam asked Tom, who nodded. “Well, maybe that’s the closer.”
Cathy shook her head. “No. I see it now; if I closed it with the concept of stability, they’d remain as they are but separate, and the Nether would be unaffected. Okay, that’s that one out.”
“What was the second one?” Sam asked.
“Completion,” Tom said. “For obvious reasons.”
“That’s wrong, too,” Cathy said confidently. Now that she’d written the rest of the formula out and immersed herself in the meaning behind all the formulae she’d written, she knew it wasn’t right. “How can we say it’s completed when the purpose of the formula itself can’t be? We’re still in the Nether, so we’re not done. Dump that one too.”
“It’s unification, then,” Tom said firmly. “That’s the one you should use. The worlds are separate and they need to be unified once more.”
Cathy focused on the idea and felt a shadow of doubt. She recalled saying something along the lines of dumping Exilium into Mundanus to Beatrice, who’d rejected that. Shit, what did she say? Cathy closed her eyes, pressing her thumb and forefinger against her forehead, dredging it back from memory. I am trying to restore something that was broken was what she’d said, or something very close to it.
“I’m so stupid,” Cathy muttered. “It’s bloody obvious.”
Tom nodded. “Good, yes, unification! I’ll hold the page so it’s easier for you to—”
“No,” Cathy said, dashing over to the desk to grab a pencil. “Unification is wrong too. It’s not unifying two separate things to form one.”
“Yes it is,” Tom said, following her. “You said it yourself, Exilium is separate from Mundanus.”
“No. That’s the effect of what the Sorcerers did. Beatrice said she was trying to restore something that was broken, and she didn’t talk about it like sticking two halves of a broken jug back together again. This is sorcery! This is redefining reality. The Sorcerers imposed their own definition upon the world and she wrote that definition out to start the formula and then it systematically breaks each of the things that makes it true. I don’t need ‘unify.’ I need to define a single world, encapsulating both, within the concept of restoration. Nothing is actively holding them apart any more. There should be nothing that can stop it from being true.”
“From what being true?” Sam asked. “You lost me.”
“That there is no Mundanus and Exilium. There is only the world, and it can hold what used to be Mundanus and the Fae and their magic too. If I conceptualise a distinction between the two—even if it’s just to express unification—I’d be reinforcing the idea of them being separate. I mustn’t do that at all.”
“I don’t know, Cat,” Tom said as she rifled through the pile of books on the floor. “That’s quite an assumption. Did she say anything else?” He interpreted her silence as a negative. “So you’re basing this on one comment in one conversation that you may have misremembered?”
“Tom,” Sam said quietly. “Are you a Sorcerer?”
“No, but—”
“Have you had any lessons from a Sorcerer?”
Tom folded his arms. “No, of course not, I just—”
“Have you just managed to work a tonne of kickass sorcery, under pressure, with minimal assistance?”
“No.”
“Then, no offence, but I think you should let the one person who can answer yes to all of those get on with it.”
Tom nodded. “Sorry, Cat.”
“It’s okay,” Cathy said, and got back to work.
It didn’t take long for her to look up the base symbols that would make a good sigil to express the concept, and as she worked, Cathy started to feel more confident about her decision. Tom suggested a couple of symbols from the Coptic alphabet and then, thankfully, backed off. She could tell he was desperate to do more, but appreciated that he wasn’t the one to do it.
She designed the sigil in pencil first, layering the ancient letters along with a couple of symbols that Beatrice had used in the first part of the formula, reduced to the purest concept of “world” rather than “world without Fae magic” that had been used to express Mundanus. As the sigil took shape, Cathy started to realise that it was only the way they focused her mind that was important, rather than the actual form itself. After all, by the time the sigil was designed, it was hard to make out the individual components, layered as they were, one on top of the other. Only now, right at the end of the complex formula, did she appreciate that it was probably the point; constructing the sigil made her consider the nuances and complexity of the concept she wanted to work into the magic, but when it came to writing the actual sigil itself, it was little more than shorthand for the will behind it. She suspected that the way she concentrated on the intent behind it was far more important than the shape of what she painted. The only doubt now was whether her concentration and intent were strong enough.
• • •
“The Irises are like weeds,” Lady Rose hissed as she approached Will, her auburn hair almost glowing against the room’s decaying decorations. “You spread and choke and want everything for yourselves.”
Will stood up and went to straighten his frock coat, only to realise he was wearing the mundane clothes he’d arrived in before taking the crowns. “I am no longer an Iris.”
“That offers no protection. You were an Iris when you ruined everything.”
“Your pets did that all on their own,” Will replied, planning to leap out of the window if she got any closer.
“Where are my brothers?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Then there’s no reason to let you live!”
• • •
“Okay. I’m ready.”
Cathy pushed away the other books, clearing a space around the glass, leaving her notebook open at the correct page by her feet. She grabbed the brush, dipped the tip in the pot, and stared at the sigil, seeing it as something new, rather than a composite thing. That was good; the meaning was more important and prominent in her mind than anything else. It was time.
But as Cathy held the brush poised, ready to undo the work of the Sorcerers and restore the world to what it used to be, crippling doubts kept her hand inches from the glass. Lucy’s words echoed: You’re going to kill everyone! And she was right. She was going to condemn everyone in the Nether to mortality. To ageing and disease. Did she have the right to do that?
And what if Beatrice was wrong? What if the Fae simply made things worse without balancing out the Elemental Court? What if they were just as cruel as they’d always been, only with the technology and tools of modern society?
What if she’d interpreted the formula incorrectly? What if she wasn’t about to simply restore the world to its original state? What if this sigil was in fact going to make all three planes of existence collide together in a fatal, chaotic crash of realities?
The tip of the brush trembled over the glass. Poppy had told Sam that her potential was to destroy. She’d already helped Sam to destroy the connections between the worlds; now she was trying to destroy the Nether, and Exilium too. Her vision blurred as her confidence crumbled and tears welled. She was only doing this because she had failed to change the Nether. Should she have stuck it out? If she’d been a better diplomat, a better politician, would she have made enough progress instead of just running away and deciding to blow it up instead?
“Cat?” Tom whispered. “Is something wrong?”
Cathy sniffed and blinked away the tears. “Just making sur
e I’m doing the right thing,” she said, trying to sound brave and in control. She looked back down at the sigil. The only thing she didn’t have any doubts about was its construction.
But then she remembered life in the Nether. How it crushed people and forced them to lead miserable lives. She remembered her mother, forced to hide her sexuality for so many years in a loveless, violent marriage. How many other men and women were hiding theirs? How could they ever hope to be happy in that stifling hell? She couldn’t imagine anyone diplomatic enough to be able to persuade the Patroons that everyone had the right to live their lives as they wished.
She had failed. But she couldn’t see how it would ever change. How many times had she thought of the Nether as a gilded cage? Why was she so concerned about breaking those bars? What was the point of living forever in a place like that?
Sometimes something had to be destroyed, so that something better could be built.
Besides, she’d come too far to run away now. She’d broken the chains holding the worlds apart, forged by men unwilling to live in a world they could not fully control, and now that she considered it, something already felt different. There was a sense of danger, yes, but also potential. The Sorcerers had pushed magic out of reality, condemning it to myth and folklore and reducing Mundanus to a sterile shadow of itself. Now something that had been wrenched away from humanity was poised to return and somehow she could feel that. She had grown up in worlds shaped by misogynistic, cruel, selfish men. Now that she was smashing the reality that they had imposed upon everyone, not just the Nether, perhaps there would be other ripples through the world, other balances restored along with magic. And somehow it felt right that she, a woman who never fitted in anywhere, who had constantly struggled and railed against a twilight world created by their magic, was the one undoing their work.