by Emma Newman
With a deep breath, Cathy fixed the sigil in her mind, willing the world to be restored to a place of both magic and mundanity with each movement of the brush. As she focused on the magical intent, the doubts receded and her hand steadied. She could do this. With the last stroke she held her breath.
It felt like she’d been trapped in an airtight room and someone had opened all the windows as a wave of fresh, cold air crashed over her. As she breathed in sharply, reality warped around her, rippling out from the glass she’d painted the formula onto so quickly she couldn’t follow its progress. One moment she was in the topmost room of the Nether tower and the next she was standing out in the bitter cold at the top of a crumbling tower with no roof. The sky was the grey blue of pre-dawn, with blushes of red just starting to appear on the horizon, and she could hear birds calling.
There was an almighty crash below her and she looked down to see rough wooden boards instead of the polished floorboards of the tower. All of her books and the magical equipment were still there, so she assumed the crash was all the other furniture falling to the bottom of the tower. The anchor property seemed a lot less intact than the Nether reflection.
It felt as if they were in Mundanus. The fact that the tower had changed around them proved that couldn’t be true, though. They hadn’t moved from one world to another. It had collapsed into one around them at the completion of the formula.
Cathy looked up at the sky, at the reddening clouds, and realised it was over. She’d done it. She had restored the world to what it once was, and for the first time in a thousand years, everybody would wake in the same reality. She started shivering, feeling tearful and somehow hollow, as Tom wrapped his arms around her. She had destroyed the Nether, fulfilling her potential at last. It was over. It was done.
• • •
Lady Rose stretched out her hands and, looking past his shoulder, seemed to beckon to someone outside the castle. Will turned to see a wall of greenery surging in through the window, and then there were thorns, everywhere. He covered his face as they enveloped him, tearing through his clothes and making him cry out as they pierced his skin. He fell, trying to curl into a ball as the thorns rent his flesh. Where was Iris? Did that promise mean nothing?
Then something changed. The air was suddenly bitterly cold and he could feel a sharp breeze through the tendrils. They stopped constricting, leaving him trapped in thorny bonds, too scared to try to move his arms in case the thorns reached his eyes.
“Mundanus!” Lady Rose gasped. “No…no, this feels different…”
Will heard a car smash into something and shouts and screams nearby. He was lying on cold ground, outside somewhere.
“You there, what is that?” Lady Rose shouted at someone.
“It’s a car, you silly cow, call an ambulance!” Whoever shouted it soon cried out in pain.
“I’m free!” Lady Rose laughed. She squeaked with delight and then there was the sense that she’d gone.
Will strained experimentally at the thorns and they snapped, not without tearing at him more. He winced with each movement, feeling every one of the dozens of puncture wounds as he moved. The thought of Sophia having suffered this made him curse the Rosas with renewed vigour, then look around fearfully in case Lady Rose was closer than he thought.
She was gone, having left him where they had arrived in Mundanus. Was that the right name for it now? Peeling the last of the thorny tendrils away as carefully as he could, Will got his bearings. He was sitting on some sort of village green, by the look of it, on a frosty morning shortly after dawn. Next to him was a stone monument, worn with age, with a pale metal plaque riveted to a stone plinth. One phrase stood out in particular: …and by tradition it marks the centre of England. The monument was apparently five hundred years old. It looked like Will felt.
“You all right, mate?” a man said, jogging over with a pug dog on a lead. “You’re bleeding. Come and sit down, there’s an ambulance on the way for that crash.”
Will followed the man’s pointed finger to a car that had ploughed into a fence across the road. There were people in dressing gowns and coats clustered around it. “What happened?”
“That weirdo in the ball gown freaked them out, I suppose. I didn’t see it myself, but Jim said she just jumped out from behind the monument, like some sort of bloody prank. Honestly, there are some real cockwombles around.”
The pug was sniffing at Will’s shoes. He shuffled them away from it. “Where am I?”
With a raised eyebrow, the man said, “Meriden. Near Coventry. You must be in shock. Here.” The man took off his coat and draped it around Will’s shoulders. A siren in the distance made him smile. “That’s the ambulance now. It’s all going to be all right, see? I live just over there,” and he pointed at a house on the edge of the green. “I’ll make you a cuppa once they’re here. You’ll be right as rain in no time.”
34
Sam went to the edge of the tower room, shivering. The roof and windows were gone and everything from Beatrice’s room lay in disarray around them. The sun was rising and the clouds were a brilliant red. If he weren’t freezing cold, he’d have thought it looked lovely. He went as close to the crumbling wall as he dared and looked out, seeing nothing but marshland all around. “Where the bloody hell are we?”
Tom came to his side. “Well, I’ll be damned. I’d wager that this is Hadleigh Castle, or rather, what’s left of it. Those are the Essex marshes. Lucky for us, they’ve been doing restoration work.” He pointed out the scaffolding and Sam realised they were actually on a large temporary platform. “Without all this, we’d have fallen right to the bottom.”
Restoration work in the winter? Sam wondered if Beatrice had set all this up to make sure she didn’t die when she’d reached the same point. He didn’t agree with her methods, but he had to admire her ability to plan ahead.
“It worked,” Cathy said. She was still standing with the brush in her hand, even though the glass she’d painted the last clause of the formula onto had smashed. “It really worked.”
“You did it,” Sam said, going over to her. “You’re bloody brilliant.”
“I’m bloody cold,” she said, and he embraced her. “Can you see the mansion?” she asked Tom.
“No. There’s something over there, but it’s a modern building, nothing like the one in the Nether.”
“It must have been anchored to a different property,” Cathy said. “I hope Max and the gargoyle are all right.” She pulled her phone from her pocket. “No signal here.”
“Shit, what about Lucy?” Sam said, trying to peer down to the bottom of the tower through the gaps between the rough wooden boards.
“She was with Max in the mansion,” Tom said, still looking out over the marshes. “I doubt we’ll see her again.”
Sam didn’t feel he knew Tom well enough to say anything about that, so he just shared an awkward glance with Cathy before going to look over the edge of the parapet. He noticed the corner of a book caught in the long grasses below. “Are you missing a red book, Cathy?”
Cathy scanned the pile. “No, not that I know of.” After a quick rummage, she held up a doorknob. “This will take us back to your place, Sam! We’ll open a Way, chuck all of this stuff through, and then I need to sleep for about a week. After some apple crumble.”
Sam nodded. “Crumble, custard, bath, booze, bed. In that order.” He looked over at Cathy, who was looking for the best place to use the gadget. There were dark circles under her eyes, she looked almost ill with fatigue, and her hair was a tangled lump of a messy ponytail, but he’d never wanted to kiss her more. She settled on a portion of the wall that was higher than her waist and pushed the pin into the crumbly mortar. They all watched the Opener burn a line into the stone, then in the air, and he breathed in relief.
It didn’t take them long to chuck everything through into Beatrice’s old bedroom, leaving the tower’s platform clear of any sorcerous materials. Tom volunteered to climb down the ladder an
d reopen the Way at the bottom to clear out everything that had fallen through from the lower floors, aside from the largest pieces of furniture. Sam had the feeling that Tom wanted to keep busy, so he left him to it.
Mrs M was on the upstairs landing in her dressing gown when Sam opened the door. “I thought it were you,” she said, her arms folded, looking tired. “Look at the state of you. Max just called. He’s in London, he’s going to go to York and wants help to get back ’ere. I told him to call when he gets there.”
Sam whipped out his phone and sent a text to Ben to have a car sent to York. There were so many messages that his phone had stopped displaying them after fifty and just added a plus sign. He sighed. No doubt all hell was breaking loose, but he was just too wiped to deal with it. He texted Des, asking him to come over that afternoon with a prioritised list of fires he needed to fight and then switched his phone to silent.
They ate a full English breakfast, Tom joining them as it was being served, all too tired to chat. Then everyone went off to bathe and change. It all helped, but Sam knew he needed to crash for a few hours. He flopped onto the bed and lay there, so tired yet unable to drop off. He waited a little while, swore, and then went to Cathy’s room. He tapped lightly on the door. “Cathy, are you asleep?” he whispered through the wood.
“No. Come in.”
She was dressed in one of his hoodies and a pair of jeans that were too big for her, lying on the bed, watching the rain fall outside. He came in and she patted the empty half of the bed. He went and sat down next to her. “I’d thought I’d go straight off,” he said. “I’m knackered.”
“Same,” she replied. “I can’t stop thinking about how close I was to fucking it all up. I’m still not sure I haven’t. I had a quick look at the news and there are a few breaking stories that could be Fae stuff, but it’s not obvious.”
“That’s a good thing, though, right?” he said. “If something really catastrophic happened, we’d know. Maybe it’s just like you said it would be, the Fae-touched just appearing in their anchor properties and scaring the staff.”
“I think we’ll hear a lot more over the next day or so,” Cathy replied.
He reached across and brushed the back of her hand with his fingertips. “You don’t seem very happy about it.”
She sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “I think I’m just wrecked. I keep waiting for something really awful to happen. I’ve no idea where Miss Rainer is, or if she’s okay. I don’t even know if we did the right thing.”
“We did the best we could at the time,” Sam said, feeling her thumb hook around his fingers. “It’s gonna take a few days for it all to settle down and to get a sense of what things will be like now.”
“Don’t you think we should be in London or something? Somewhere there were Fae-touched?”
“I think we need to rest. The boxes are being delivered to their houses. We’re still wired right now, but I reckon in half an hour we’ll be conked out.”
“But they’ll be freaking out. Maybe I should send a Letterboxer. But I’m not sure I can now…I’d have to change the formula to account for it not being the Nether anymore, and—”
“Cathy, they’ll sort themselves out.”
“But we’re responsible! Some of them won’t even know what cars are!”
“And they’ll be the ones staying indoors while they get their bearings. And we’re not responsible for every single person affected. We didn’t split the worlds and lie to people for hundreds of years. We haven’t dislocated souls or murdered people or made the Elemental Court into twats. We didn’t do any of that. We take a breath, we rest, and then we release the information we prepared before and we figure out how to sort it in the long term, okay?”
Still staring at the ceiling, she let out a long breath. “Yeah. Okay.”
They were holding hands now. “Is it okay if I lie down?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Their arms were touching now as they lay side by side. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted more than that, but he’d forgotten how to initiate that sort of thing. He’d only had two girlfriends before Leanne, one he’d only kissed, the second he’d been dumped by after they’d had a fumbling attempt at sex. Leanne had led everything and had always joked that she’d had to seduce him because if she’d waited for him she would have died a spinster.
He felt a pang in his chest, a sudden longing for her and a crushing guilt that he was even considering moving things forward with Cathy. But as it receded, he remembered that it had been a long time since he and Leanne had really been together. And that she’d wanted him to find someone else and be happy. She’d said so in her letters.
Turning his head made Cathy look at him. Slowly, tentatively, he closed the gap between them and kissed her. She kissed him back and then broke away to prop herself up on one elbow. “That’s the third time you’ve done that.”
“Sorry?”
She smirked. “That wasn’t an accusation.”
“I really like you,” he said. “Like, really, a lot. I was wondering if you wanted to stay here and…if you wanted to, um…be my girlfriend. Oh God, that sounds so lame.”
She flicked a strand of damp hair from her eyes. “I really like you too. But I’m not going to stay here and I’m not ready to commit to anything. I think it’s going to be a really long time before I could do that again.”
“Oh, yeah, of course.” Sam silently berated himself for his selfishness. He should have known it was too soon.
“Can we take it really slow? I need to get my life sorted out. And I want you to be in it. I really do. I just need you to be patient. Is that okay?”
He felt like a pillock. “Yeah, of course it is. I should have thought about it. It’s fine.”
She lay back down, shuffling closer until their arms were touching again. She squeezed his hand. “If you want to get all mushy, I do love you, Sam. I just need to do this at my own pace.”
“Okay,” he said, grinning at the ceiling. “I love you too. In a totally non-pressured, non-shit way.”
“Good. That’s that settled, then.” She wriggled closer and rested her head against his shoulder. “Urgh, I’m so tired.”
In moments her breathing slowed and her hand relaxed. He breathed in the scent of her freshly washed hair and looked out of the window at the anvil-coloured sky. He wasn’t looking forward to the fall-out from the return of the Fae, but as they lay there, rain pelting the window, he knew they were going to be okay.
• • •
Sitting outside the cottage, the wind howling and the rain beating on the car roof, Will considered that following the advice of a five-year-old was probably not the most sensible thing he’d ever done. But then, he’d done so many stupid things, it was hard to tell if it was the worst.
Carter sat silently in the driver’s seat in front, waiting patiently. At least he’d decided to stay in his employ, unlike the majority of the staff. Not even his valet could be persuaded to stay in service, now that the worlds had collapsed into one. Will had expected Carter to leave, too, knowing his loyalty towards Cathy, but it seemed the huge man needed to feel rooted somewhere. When Will had gone back to Lancaster House to pay off the staff and ensure they’d remain silent about their life before, Carter was the only one who’d stayed when given the chance to leave. Will couldn’t bring himself to explain that Cathy hadn’t been kidnapped—it was too shameful a lie to admit to—leaving him wondering whether Carter had stayed out of pity. They would never speak of it, of course. Whereas Cathy was happy to blur the boundaries of the relationship with staff, Will never would.
Sophia had fallen asleep in the last hour of the drive and he didn’t have the heart to wake her. She was curled up against him, arms wrapped around his, head resting against his chest. She’d barely let him out of her sight over the past two weeks.
The first week after Exilium’s destruction had been an exercise in logistics. Thankfully his room was still being kept at the hotel, as he’d given no
check-out date. The bill was horrendous, but all his belongings, including all the assets he’d taken from his house, were still in the safe. He wasn’t going to be destitute, but he was still homeless. He’d found his family at Oxford Castle, all of whom were rather traumatised by having fallen afoul of the newly returned Sorcerer and being sealed in, and installed them in a rental property just outside the city. Despite Nathaniel being convinced they were still favoured, Lord Iris never came. Watching his family struggle to come to terms with the fact that they were just average people now was simply too miserable, so he’d left them to adjust and went back to London.
Uncle Vincent’s small Hampstead anchor property was cosy and easy to care for, giving him a base to work out his next steps. Will couldn’t quite admit to himself that he couldn’t bear to be around his mother, a mere shadow of the woman she’d been before Iris took what he had from her. He didn’t like the way it made him reflect upon how much of her warmth towards him was evidently rooted in her disobedience to the family. Her love for Sophia, as weak as it had been, had also died. Without any need for an excruciating family debate, everyone accepted that Sophia would be better off staying with Will and Uncle Vincent. Will suspected his father never wanted to see the poor girl again.
Once he’d seen his immediate family safe, Will found himself unable to do anything of note. He drifted through the days, initially scouring the newspapers for coverage about the Fae. But soon he started dreading finding the stories about Iris and Poppy, and the rest of them, plucking new people out of the masses to favour. He really was nothing now. He stopped reading the papers.
Then he stopped leaving the house.
“Will-yum,” Sophia had said to him a couple of days ago. “Why are you still in bed? Are you poorly?”
“No.”
“Can you take me to the park? Uncle Vincent went out and I’m bored.”
“No.”
Instead of leaving him alone, as he’d hoped she would, she came in and bounced on the bed. “Bored. Bored. Bored.” She sniffed. “It’s smelly in here. It smells better at the park. We can feed the duckies.”