by S. W. Clarke
Chapter Twenty-Two
The next day, Umbra spread her robes around her as we sat on the cliff’s edge, our legs hanging over. This was the only part of the academy grounds that met up with real geographic peril, not far from where I’d first met Callum Rathmore.
“So,” she said, gazing out over the late-fall landscape, “you snuck into the prison, caused a kerfuffle with the guards, Liara was hurt, and we lost one of the fae.”
“Yes, yes, yes, and we didn’t technically lose the fae. Not in the mortal sense. He just flew off talking about sucking—”
She raised a hand. “I know. The fae twins made sure of it.”
Even while I knew I was in some trouble, and even while I did my best to keep the enshroudment alive around me, I wondered if Umbra ever thought of those things. If she’d ever loved someone in that way.
She had a daughter.
“I needed to find him,” I said.
“Oh, I understand well.” Her eyes caught mine at the corners, her mouth in a slight upturn. “We always have reasons for what we think we need. Excuses for the mayhem we create in attempting to get it.”
“It wasn’t mayhem…”
Her face turned skeptical.
“Fine,” I said. “It was a little bit of mayhem. Just tell me my punishment.”
“Your punishment”—a slender thread of humor wove through the gravity of her voice—“is not for me to deliver. We punish ourselves worst of all for our own mistakes, if we care even a little.”
I sat in silence, my own eyes traveling across the sunlit hills.
“I think you would like to speak to Liara,” she murmured, “about everything that has happened. But you feel guilt, and maybe an ever-present shame interwoven, too.”
She got it. How did she get it?
“And so,” she went on, “since you arrived back you’ve avoided the fae, probably didn’t sleep well last night. Maybe you even had a moment in the bathroom mirror, staring at your own—”
“Okay.” I lifted my hand as a white flag. “I get it. You’re either spying on me or spying on me.”
“Like you did the evening you followed Nance, Nurse Neverwink, and me into my underground chambers?” She watched me with the sagest gotcha face.
I tugged at my uniform’s collar, then found sudden interest in the pleats of my skirt. “So different.”
She laughed. “I’m not spying on you. But I’ve lived long enough to know what a drop of empathy will produce when we’ve wronged someone else.”
My magic simmered around us; it had been keeping the two of us warm for the past fifteen minutes. Today, after the insanity of yesterday, Umbra had decided this would be the perfect afternoon for me to begin enshrouding not just myself or my familiar, but other people, too.
“I’m going back there,” I said, raising my face to her. “I’m going back to Edinburgh.”
She shrugged. “Of course you are. You’re the only guardian who can skip around the city in your skivvies, singing your country’s national anthem without the slightest concern. You think I’d just keep your power locked away here?”
“You tried to. At first.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “I wanted to see your grit, child. Your assertiveness, your perseverance in the face of authority. No wallflower will save this world.” She paused, angling her head toward me. “And what I taught you while you were here was important. More important than you may think.”
At this, something tensed, snapped in my chest; the familiar feeling of reaching my limit. My magic faltered around Umbra, the red-orange sheen of it drying up and leaving her out in the wind.
“Twenty minutes,” she said, pulling her robes tighter around her. “A fine first effort.”
When Umbra began to stand, I stared up at her. “So, your baby daddy.”
Her eyebrows rose. She blinked twice, lost for words.
“Did you love him?” I said. “Your daughter’s dad.”
“Oh.” She gave a thoughtful shake of the head, as though finding those memories. “It was long ago. After so much time, it’s hard to identify exactly what the feeling was.”
“How long ago?” I pressed.
Her fingers played over the grip of her staff. “Feels like centuries to me.”
I stood with her, the wind blowing my skirt back toward the headmistress. “Headmistress, how old are you?”
We began walking, and she leaned toward me, her elbow finding my side. “Impolite. But some days I feel about five hundred years old.”
I laughed. “Sometimes I do, too.”
She went silent, staff tapping over the ground as we walked, her eyes lowered. Then, in a clipped, serious voice, she said, “Time grows short.”
I eyed her. Was she feeling that ancient? “Short?”
“The Shade has grown in power even since this summer. I can feel it; all but a few of the leylines are no longer safe to travel by.”
“So we’ll take the scenic routes.”
Her eyes narrowed on me. “Only you would so flippantly analogize leylines to highways.”
I shrugged. “I guess more people need to be daring with their analogies.”
She gave a sigh as we continued on, her pace increasing. “You must go back to Edinburgh, and soon. The more intimately you know the city, the more information you gather, the better prepared you will be to retrieve the final piece of the Shade’s weapon when the time comes. Wherever the damned thing may lie.”
So she fully believed in the prophecy, too. I wasn’t exactly sure when that had happened, but it was clear now she had crossed a threshold in her mind.
“Good. Great. When do I go?”
“As soon as you’ve gotten the proper feel for sharing your enshroudment. Someone must go with you for what I have in mind.”
“And what do you have in mind?”
Her jaw hardened, eyes ahead, as though Edinburgh lay before us, the Royal Mile stretching long instead of the forest. “You will enter the Mages’ Council building, and you will put those eavesdropping skills to better use than on me and Nance Milonakis.”
“I didn’t—”
We had arrived in the central grounds, and she stopped, turned to me. “You did, and it’s a waste of both our time discussing it.” She turned toward her office, turned back toward me. “Don’t go to Liara. Wait for her to come to you. She will.”
And then she left me there in the clearing, my hair blown back. I had been Maeve Umbra’d.
After the prison rescue, Liara, Elijah, and Isaiah couldn’t show their pretty faces in Edinburgh. They were wanted, all three of them, and would replace the rescued fae in those prison cells if they were ever caught.
I couldn’t show my face, either, but I had one thing they didn’t: enshroudment. Which meant I could still move freely through the city.
And I would. Oh, would I.
William Rathmore led the Mages’ Council, and we knew the Shade owned him. We needed to know what he told the council, to know their plans in the midst of the corruption spreading across the world.
Much of the Shade’s power in the world stemmed from Edinburgh. And it grew every day. The more powerful she grew, the narrower my chances of killing her.
My second opportunity came in November, when Umbra gave us our next mission based on the intelligence she’d gotten from one of our rescued fae, a former professor at the University of Edinburgh. A security tunnel ran from the university to the Mages’ Council building, created long ago in case of outside threat, and forgotten—abandoned—when the formalists took over.
The formalists had been the inside threat the city’s government hadn’t expected.
The fae professor showed us the tunnel’s location on a map, explained that it emerged into an unused space behind the walls of the building. From there, a secret door led into the building’s offices and corridors.
“And once you’re inside,” she said with a gleam in her eyes I hadn’t seen the day she’d been rescued, “well, who knows wh
at you’ll hear?”
And because of my power, it came to me to get inside. Me and Loki.
I would have gone anyway. I’d have insisted on going. If there was a chance I’d learn the truth of what William Rathmore had done with his son, I’d take it.
We’d learned from another of the fae prisoners, a native of Edinburgh, that the council met on the last Thursday of every month. That meant I would be headed into the frigid city at the end of November.
The other guardians—minus Liara, Elijah, and Isaiah—would watch outside the building as the council members came and left, keeping me apprised of everything I couldn’t see.
After that meeting, when I’d volunteered myself so easily to sneak into the tunnel and spy on the council, was when Liara finally decided to warm to me.
I’d seen it in her eyes for weeks. She’d wanted to talk to me, but the thawing came that day in November when the first snowfall arrived.
She’d pulled her cloak on, nodded me away from the others as we came into the flurries. Our boots crunched over the earth as we walked together through the academy grounds, and she said, “So you snuck into the prison.”
It wasn’t a question. And I knew it would be pointless playing dumb.
“It was me,” I said. No one knew but her and Eva—at least as far as I understood. “I snuck in after you. Hidden.”
“I know,” she said, low and level. “I’ve known since the day it happened. Since you told me I needed to get out of there.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “And you’ve been hating me even more?”
“At first, absolutely. But over the years, I’ve come to learn one important thing about you.”
My eyes opened, the blistering white of the snow all around me again. “And what’s that?”
“When you do reckless things, you have good reasons for doing them.” She stopped, turned to me. “And that’s more than I can say for myself.”
A sudden jag of emotion hit me. I hadn’t expected that empathy from Liara, of all people. I stopped with her, raised an uncomfortable brow, unsure how to handle this moment.
“I’m sorry, Clementine,” she said. “For slapping you.”
That was maybe the first time I’d heard an apology from her lips.
“Liara—”
“I should not have slapped you,” she ground out, like a child repeating a phrase she’d been told to say. I could see how hard this was for her. Then, in a rush, she said, “I really shouldn’t have. It wasn’t okay.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said, low. “But neither was what I did in the prison. Lying to you. To everyone.”
“And then you made up for it”—she flicked the edge of my cloak—”like you always do. You make it so hard to loathe you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I settled on: “That’s my goal. Invoking slightly less than loathing.”
She walked on, shaking her cloak off, a drizzle of snow falling to the ground. “If you had slapped me, I don’t know if I would have helped if it was you who’d been beaten with a nightstick and lay unconscious on the ground.”
“You would have,” I said, and in the silence that followed, I wanted to tell her I’d experienced worse, much worse, than a slap. But she probably knew. She had, too. “You would, Liara.”
Then, because neither of us knew what to do with compliments, she said, “Umbra asked me to go into Edinburgh with you.”
“With me?” I echoed.
Her eyes drifted up and down me. “Yeah. Inside your enshroudment.”
I sucked in air. “That was bold of her.” I’d only been studying the enshroudment of others for a month.
“Are you saying you can’t do it?”
I scoffed. “In front of Liara Youngblood? Never.” I glanced over at her. “Why does she want me to bring you, anyway?”
Liara shrugged. “I know all the council members’ names, the names of their wives, their assistants, their pets. You know, just part of growing up with a powerful formalist dad.”
That made sense. A lot of it.
I also suspected Umbra had another reason for sending Liara with me: to stress-test me the way she’d been doing since the summer. It was effective, if not an absolute pita.
“And what did you say to Umbra when she asked?” I said.
“I told her it was up to you.” She turned to me, snow dotting her black hair. Her eyes were wide and wet with the cold, or maybe real feeling. “I just want you to know, I don’t hate witches,” she said. “Not all of them, anyway.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
On the third Thursday of November, Liara and I moved through the city side by side, almost but not quite touching. Loki jogged between us, tail upright, the three of us enshrouded from the world.
Ever since the day of her apology, I’d kicked my own ass to be able to enshroud another person the way I was doing for Liara now.
“So this is what your magic is like,” Liara said as she weaved her way around a young guy who would have walked straight into her. “Feels like being encased in jello.”
I glanced at her as we turned a corner, now just a few blocks from the campus. “You know what that feels like?”
“Please.” She returned to my side, still not touching but close enough not to strain my enshroudment. “Everyone who’s not a prude knows what it feels like to be encased in jello.”
“Well”—my attention drifted to a man playing bagpipes in the middle of the campus—“now you’re just screwing with me.”
Liara’s hand reached out, redirected my attention. “I know the kilts are distracting, but the council convenes in thirty minutes.”
Loki struck out a few feet ahead of us, leading the way. “Twenty-nine minutes.”
When we came to the right building, we had to idle by the doors for a few minutes, waiting for someone to come in or out. At this time of day, with students everywhere, it would be conspicuous for the door to simply…open.
We got our chance soon enough. A group of students passed out as a class ended, and we were able to slide inside the building as they allowed the doors to swing shut behind them.
I’d never been in a university this old. It even smelled old and austere in here, the hallway wainscoting a beautiful old oak, the doors to the classrooms the same.
And the oldest building on campus held a secret.
We started off, passing down the hallway and taking our first left to a dead-end stairwell with a half-height door placed beneath it I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been looking.
“Ah,” Loki said, trotting up to stand beside it as though waiting for his servants to do the honors. “A familiar-sized door. Finally.”
Liara ducked, tried the latch. The door jiggled, but didn’t give. She glanced back up at me. “What do you think—a little spritz of lightning?”
I shrugged. “Sure.” Then leaned back, waiting for the sound of footsteps to pass. One student came down the stairs, continued on toward the main hall. When they were out of sight, I nodded at Liara.
She lifted her finger and a blue flash appeared, disappearing with a crackle into the door’s keyhole. The door flung itself open, the latch coming half-dislodged from the wood itself.
Inside, darkness awaited.
Loki disappeared straight in, upright tail brushing the doorframe. Liara followed at a crouch, and I came last of all, pulling the door shut behind me. Inside, I found myself in a tight space with her, the ceiling too low to stand properly.
“I spotted stairs,” Liara said. “Can we get some flame?”
I dropped the enshroudment around us and ignited a large flame in my hand. The staircase came illuminated—gray, monochrome steps down into the darkness. The walls and ceiling were the same, low and tight and stifling.
My hand went out, bracing myself against the wall as I started down after Liara, who’d followed Loki. “Am I missing something, or were the Scottish a hell of a lot smaller thirty years ago?”
“It wasn’t meant for adults,” Li
ara said with her familiar petulant impatience. “The tunnel was designed to ferry children who lived nearby.”
“And cats,” Loki said.
My hand went up to gauge the ceiling and avoid running into it as we passed down the straight steps. “Isn’t it generally best for adults to accompany children into dark, spooky tunnels?”
“Who’s spooked?” Liara’s voice lilted now. “Are you, Clementine?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I’m woman enough to admit it.”
Her faint laugh bounced off the close walls as she reached the end of the stairs, her boots tapping on the cement. “You should be. Beyond this tunnel lay the crypts of Edinburgh. Skeletons, ghosts…”
“Not ghosts again,” I said.
She glanced back at me as she walked ahead, her dark eyes gleaming. “Again? That’s a story if I’ve ever heard one.”
I told her about Milonakis’s return to the academy. About the things she’d said of her time under the city. How her eyes had turned white and milky. About Aidan’s grandmother, who’d experienced the same thing and never been the same afterward.
“So Milonakis and Farina North both saw them,” Liara said when I’d finished. “They wouldn’t be the first.”
I stopped. “You believe they saw ghosts?”
She disappeared from the halo of my flame, and I continued on after her. “Of course I do,” she said. “Because they’re real. My father used to tell me stories about his trips to Edinburgh, the times he visited the undercity.”
The undercity. That was the first time I’d heard that word, as though an entire bustling population existed under the ground.
It creeped me out. Especially down here.
“What about the white eyes?” I said.
“Nasty, huh? He always told me it’s an overexposure thing. If you’ve seen too much of them, it’s like staring at the sun too long, or into a camera’s flashbulb. It’s only cured with valerian.”
To this point I had never considered the real possibility of ghosts, or ever meeting them. All my life I’d been agnostic about the paranormal, but then again, I was a witch. I had a familiar. I was walking through a tunnel under Edinburgh with a girl who had wings on her back.