by S. W. Clarke
Seconds. Just seconds. It had felt like minutes, at least. And in a fight like that, a few minutes was exhausting. Minutes were like hours when you were battling for your life.
Loki’s tail feathered against me. “Clem, this is going to sound insane…”
“He hexed me,” I said. “I know he did.”
“Okay, apparently not so insane.”
“But I don’t know how he hexed me.” I ran a hand over my face as we passed through Umbra’s enchantment and onto the academy grounds. “The man’s a fire mage. Just like Callum.”
Loki went silent as we closed in on Neverwink’s infirmary, where the guardians had gathered with Umbra. Nissa and Florian weren’t among them; I figured they were inside with their daughter.
I broke into the group. “Eva?” I said to everyone.
Liara turned to me, her eyes sadder and softer than I’d ever seen them.
“She’s being treated as we speak,” Umbra said. “Her wound is grievous.”
I started toward the door, but Umbra put a hand out. “Not now, child. Your presence will only distract Nurse Neverwink. She has a delicate and long business ahead of her.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, and the tears that came out were as much of frustration as anything. “This was a mistake,” I whispered. “We were so goddamn arrogant.”
To think we could take William Rathmore. Lucian the prince. He’d flicked us off like flies, toyed with the Whitewillows, with me. Put Eva in the infirmary.
And he’d smiled while doing it.
I wasn’t able to think, to do anything, until I could see Eva. And I was allowed to do so until late the next night, when stillness settled over the grounds. Nissa and Florian hadn’t reappeared until dusk the day following our failed mission, which was in itself an indicator of how serious Eva’s injury had been.
But when they left, holding each other, they looked exhausted. Drained. But not in grief.
I met them in the clearing. “Can I see her?” I said.
“She’s asleep,” Nissa said. “But I’m sure she’d be happy for your presence nonetheless.”
Guilt was written all over her face. And a hard part of me felt she deserved that, to feel what she’d led us into. What had come about as a result of her mission.
But we had agreed to it. It was our mission, too.
I only nodded, moved past them. When I came into the infirmary and Eva’s bedside, her eyes were closed and bandages had been wrapped around her chest, which moved in a shallow way.
She opened her eyes, looked at me, smiled. “Hey.”
I came to a seat on the bed beside her. “I didn’t expect you to be awake.”
“I’ve been sleeping for two days. Awake is the only thing I can be right now.”
I took her hand, lifting it between both of mine and setting it in my lap. “The mission failed.”
“I know.” She nodded toward the entrance, where her parents were. “It was the first thing I asked on waking up.”
“I’m sorry, Eva.”
“It isn’t your fault, Clementine.”
“It kinda is, though.” I rubbed her fingers. “What happened to you, at least.”
“No.” She pressed her head into the pillow, eyes finding the ceiling. “Clem, I’ve fallen behind you.”
“What?”
“All these years, you’ve never stopped working, training, obsessing over growing into this power—”
“Okay,” I said. “Now you’re making me sound a little unhinged.”
She smiled. “This powerful, badass witch,” she finished. “And I don’t want anyone rescuing me. Not like that. Not again. I’m going to do better.”
“You’re doing just fine, Eva.”
She squeezed my hand. “Mama said something strange happened to you. That you and Rathmore faced off.”
“Yeah.” I blew out my cheeks, then let my breath loose slowly. “Rathmore hexed me that night. The man hexed me.”
Her head half-lifted. “How?”
“Can’t say. And it was a hex Frostwish never taught me.”
“What happened?”
“He said a word, and suddenly the whole world was on fire, and I couldn’t move, and he was in armor, and—”
“The word. What was it?”
I paused. “Started with an L.” Squeezed my eyes shut. “Leir-something.”
“Lèirsinn?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was it.”
“It’s Old Faerish,” she said. “The word means ‘vision.’ He put you under the visions hex, Clementine.”
Another hex. Another set of problems.
“Bastard.”
“Agreed.”
So how are you going to make him pay? a voice in my head asked.
I turned to fully face Eva on the bed, still gripping her hand. “That night made it clear to me what I have to do, Eva.”
Her eyebrows lifted, and she waited for me to go on.
“The only way to defeat Rathmore—much less the Shade—is to become stronger. And the best way I know how to do that is to complete the weapon.”
She nodded. “You need the blade. Do you know where it is?”
I shook my head, eyes drifting to her hand in my lap. “I’ve checked every close but one.”
“Which one?”
I half-smiled, closed my eyes. “The one I have to pay to take a tour of.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Mary King's Close was a tourist trap.
Two days later, I came into the gift shop with an enshrouded Loki by my side. A stand of postcards waited to be spun, each of them offering a little glimpse into Edinburgh’s dark underside. On one of them, someone had Photoshopped a ghostly family—mom, dad, and two kids—standing in their home, deep down at the bottom of the close, flanked by a pile of real stuffed animals. Apparently tourists loved leaving toys for the ghost-kids.
If the blade was buried beneath this place, I’d eat my own cloak. But I was almost out of options.
“Here for the tour?” a man’s voice said from my left.
I set the postcard down. “When’s the soonest you have available?”
He was old, well-groomed and probably retired, and set his thumbs in the pockets of his old-fashioned jacket. “You’re in luck. The next one’s gathering up now, and we’ve got a spot with your name on it.”
“My name?” I started toward the ticket counter. “I can’t very well not go then, can I?”
He swept his hand for me to do my thing.
When I’d bought my ticket, Loki nodded toward the other half of the gift shop, where a cafe offered overpriced drinks and sandwiches. “You sure you don’t want high tea before we head into the scary, spooky dungeon?”
“Oh, bite me.”
A woman at a nearby table met my eyes over her teacup, eyebrows rising.
I only smiled, gave a little wave. I couldn’t even use the excuse of talking to my cat this time.
When the appointed hour came, we followed stairs down to a waiting area below the gift shop and stood with a group of twelve other people, half of them couples from other countries, a few of them families with young kids. When our retired tour guide arrived, he opened a regular old door—one of two set into the alcove beneath the gift shop.
Inside, a dim-lit hallway awaited, the floor angled ever so gently downward. He passed through, gesturing for us to follow. “Step inside, travelers, and journey into the past.”
I let the others go ahead of Loki and me, the two of us bringing up the tail of our group. And not just because I was here for non-touristy reasons or because I was a wanted witch. In fact, I realized as the door closed behind me that I’d been doing this for ten years: keeping my back safe, ensuring I could keep an eye on everybody else.
Strange, the little things we do and don’t realize why until the day we’re under the streets of a foreign, dangerous city, and then it comes to us with total clarity.
Our footsteps echoed on the ramp as we went down, down, arrivi
ng in a chilly room with projections of people in old-style clothing describing their lives in Mary King's Close, and beside them, placards to read.
People milled around the room while our guide stood in front of a door at the far end. When a few minutes had passed, he set his hand on the knob, describing it as the true entrance to the world beneath the city. This wasn’t just an alley, he told us. It was a world around the street, people’s homes that we’d be passing through. “Some of what we’ll encounter down here,” he said, “was built—and occupied—over four hundred years ago.”
He opened the door, and we passed through, me last of all. And to my left, the wall ended to reveal the long cobblestone alley sloping down, deeper into the earth for at least hundred feet, lights and small windows and viewing spots set at intervals into the walls. The ceiling was cast in darkness, but I knew that once upon a time, it had been open to the sky. A narrow, precious view past buildings to the natural world.
I set my hand on the railing and stopped, allowing the others to pass on into the next room. When I took the weapon out of my cloak, I kept the chain tight to it, avoiding the echoing clinking. There, standing at the head of the close, I held it in my hand before me.
“Come on,” I whispered, “light up like a Christmas tree and make everyone happy today.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Loki murmured, sounding distinctly skeptical.
No dice. It remained obstinately the same, no matter which way I angled myself. It had been a faint hope; even if the blade was hidden here, it wouldn’t be right at the entrance.
We would have to go deeper into the close.
So I stepped away from the railing and followed the group, Loki trotting alongside. I arrived in a low-ceilinged, tight room that our guide described as the eating room of a house—it contained only a table and chairs, a ceiling light, the projection of a woman standing in the corner, preparing a meal for her family.
The people who’d lived down here, he said, were poor. They subsisted, but as we passed to the next room, then the next, and arrived in a room with bunkbeds pressed into all corners of the room and figures with beaklike masks leaning over them, I knew they often didn’t subsist.
“Here,” our guide said, “we’ve created a replica of what a sick room might have looked like during the Black Plague. When the plague came, many of the close’s residents died down here. Some were walled in to prevent the disease’s spread.”
If ghosts did exist, they would absolutely be here.
I crossed to one of the figures in his long jacket and his mask and found him caring for a lifelike replica of a child, a little boy with lesions on his face and his eyes shut. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, barely conscious of the world and his place in it.
For nineteen years I’d lived in a world where I was just as fragile as the boy. In that world, breathing in the wrong air could have ended my life. And I’d never felt grateful for the fact that my life hadn’t ended because of sickness. I’d taken it for granted as much as I now took Nurse Neverwink instantly healing two broken arms.
We wound our way through more homes, moving lower and deeper into the earth, for the next half hour. The last room we came to was the deepest in the close, a home with the original wood still laid into the floor and the walls. It was dark, support beams cutting through the already-tight space, and in one queerly lit corner lay a huge pile of old, dusty stuffed animals.
“This,” our guide said, “is where people like to leave toys for the children of the close.”
And, creepy as it was, I knew this spot was where we needed to stay.
As the rest of the group made their way out of the old home at the bottom of the close, I backed toward a corner not far from the toys. When all eyes were off me, I enshrouded myself, disappearing in a moment.
My best hope was that our guide was old enough—and tired enough—that he would forget about the quiet redhead who’d stuck to the back of the group. Or if he remembered me, he’d assume I stayed long and got caught up in the next tour.
They were, after all, only a few rooms behind us. The tours were staggered close together, feet constantly moving through the spaces of the close. Loki quickly curled up and fell asleep in a tiny enshrouded ball at my feet. For my part, I waited. And waited, keeping vigilant, ready to move us if someone stepped into our space.
But no one did. It was funny how much alike people were: I watched ten groups pass through in three hours, and most adults followed the same path through the old home—basically a circle, eyeing the toys last of all. The kids, on the other hand, beelined to the toys. From there, they zig-zagged, their attention moving effortlessly from spot to spot, whatever their eyes caught on.
At ten-thirty, the last group finally came through. And fifteen minutes after they left, the lights went out. Darkness consumed the space instantly, and it was so all-consuming I felt a moment of absolute terror before I could ignite a flame in my palm.
I was a witch, but I was still a human.
The world came back into flickering, dancing view, but with new shadows. The eyes of the teddy bears in the pile gleamed in the light, which wasn’t at all wildly creepy. Above me, I heard soft, intermittent creaks, which my rational mind convinced me were just the sounds of all the wood and earth and stone slightly shifting, settling after a day of people moving through.
When I glanced down at Loki, he was still asleep.
It was only here, in this suffocating darkness under the city, I realized how crucial he was. Without him, I wasn’t sure if I could have done this—staying down here alone in the dark until the witching hour.
I allowed the enshroudment to drop, and the stress of keeping it going fell away. Finally, after three hours, I could just be.
I reached into my cloak, pulling out the weapon for a second time since I’d arrived. I was already ribbing Saoirse in my mind, planning how I’d tease her when I got back to the academy. As I held the weapon out before me, it didn’t glow. Not even a little.
But something else did. There, just at the edge of my cone of light, a pair of eyes appeared and then disappeared as the flame wavered. And a moment later, the faintest sigh.
A jolt passed through my body, every nerve coming alive. Here in the deep darkness, I felt as primal as I ever got, fully neolithic cavewoman. “Loki,” I whispered, “wake up.”
His tail brushed against me, a single flick he often gave right when he woke. “Is it time to go yet?” he said, unconcerned and sleepy.
“No,” I said in my smallest voice. “Tell me what you see past my light.”
A pause. Then, fully awake, he said, low and gentle, “You won’t like it, Clem.”
“Tell me.”
Before he could respond, footsteps sounded from the darkness. Tap-tap-tap, moving fast, and a little girl raced up to me, her red hair short and unkempt, her cheeks dirty. She wore an unfitted brown dress and patched-together foot coverings and her green eyes were blazing with interest.
But the most notable part of all: I could partially see through her.
Her finger went out, pointing. “Is that your cat?” she said, the Scottish brogue thick in her voice.
I stared, lowering my weapon, then found my voice somewhere beneath the rushing blood and my thumping heart. “Yes.”
Ghost. This child was a ghost.
One part of my brain acknowledged this as fact, but another felt like I’d entered a dream. It was as surreal as the day I’d found out magic existed. My world had just been turned on its side again, and I had to keep my back against the wall as a reminder something solid and firm still existed.
The girl’s tiny teeth appeared as she grinned, clapped her hands. “I’ve never seen a black cat. Oh, Wil, this miss brought a cat!”
More footsteps in the darkness. I swung my flame just as two more faces appeared, a boy and a girl about the same age, except these ones were in what looked like bedclothes.
The boy had lesions on his face, just like the one
I’d seen in the sick room. He said, “Now come on, Jonet, you’re pulling our—”
Loki let out a gentle, friendly meow, rising from the ground and crossing into my light.
All the children let out peals of delighted laughter, the red-haired girl jumping away, her hands clasped tight to her chest as though she were as uncertain as she was excited.
“Nobody ever brought a cat,” the other girl said. “Wil, go get the others. They’ll want a look.”
“Others?” I echoed, but the boy had already disappeared, feet clapping over the wooden planks.
A minute later, six children of varying ages and heights were in the room with me, all of them gathered at a respectful, uncertain distance, their attention fully fixed on Loki. However long they’d been down here, it was obvious they hadn’t seen a non-human in a very, very long time.
It was clear what they wanted. And so I said, “He loves to play.”
The first girl glanced up at me. “Aye?”
In answer, Loki came forward, tail upright, and gave a trill. This delighted the children all over again, who soon began to run through the room, Loki following and hopping and meowing like a young cat. And it was in watching them play that I knew whatever Milonakis had seen beneath Edinburgh, it wasn’t these ghosts. They wouldn’t harm me or turn my eyes milky or make me go mad.
They weren’t what I’d been looking for, but I had once been just like them: lost, trapped, afraid. Why else would they be down here?
Chapter Thirty-Four
Within the hour, I had learned all six of their names. Two were siblings who had died of the plague, three had been lost to regular childhood illnesses, and one boy—Thom, who often stood off to the side with folded arms, a straight back, and severe eyes—wouldn’t tell me what had happened to him. It was clear he didn’t trust me.
I showed the others my favorite games as a little girl: paddy cake, thumb wrestling, rock-paper-scissors. They were fascinated, especially when I told them about television and my favorite 80s shows: Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony (the group home I lived in played a lot of 80s stuff on the TV). The children only half-believed television existed, but they were completely absorbed by my descriptions of the characters.