Whisper the Dead

by Alyxandra Harvey

  “Welcome, students,” Mrs. Sparrow said. She didn’t raise her voice but no one dared talk over her. “As you know, the Order has recently closed several gates to the Underworld and banished and bottled the three Greymalkin Sisters.”

  “The Order didn’t bottle them,” Gretchen felt the need to mutter. “Emma did.”

  “The kind of magic the Greymalkin family deals in draws only the most restless and hungry of spirits,” Mrs. Sparrow continued. “As such, spells and wards may be particularly volatile. The Order will, of course, maintain your security, but you must be on your guard.”

  A Keeper standing next to the headmaster frowned. Gretchen felt certain Mrs. Sparrow was advised not to worry her girls.

  “And as you no doubt also know, every summer we hold a demonstration of the Ironstone graduates for the Order to assess where they might be most helpful. After recent events, Mr. Whitehall has decided to have his students exhibit some of their skills to better reassure you of your safety.”

  “How’s that going to make us feel safer?” Gretchen whispered, disgusted. “Do you know what would make us feel safer? Learning to do all of those things ourselves.”

  “You can take my place,” Godric muttered. “I beg you.”

  The lawn cleared and two students stepped into the ring created by stones and students. One held an energy shield so well spelled it looked real, except for its faint blue glow. His opponent held a dagger made entirely of iron nails.

  “Oliver Blake and Finnegan something-or-other,” Godric told the cousins.

  “Lady Daphne, if you please,” Miss Hopewell, one of the teachers, called out. Daphne stepped into the circle, graceful in a dress edged with pearl embroidery. Her hair shone like honey.

  “As Rowanstone’s top student, Lady Daphne will play the part of the damsel in distress,” Mr. Whitehall announced.

  Gretchen huffed. “If she’s the top student, shouldn’t she be fighting?”

  “That’s not what Rowanstone girls do,” Olwen, one of Cormac’s sisters, murmured from the other side of the tree. Gretchen stood up on the bench, looking thoughtful.

  Penelope groaned. “I wish you hadn’t said that, Olwen.”

  The mock battle began before Gretchen could hurl herself into it. Oliver was charged with defending Daphne, who had draped herself artfully over a nearby statue of Hercules. Finnegan attacked with elf-bolts he created out of nothing at all. They slammed into Oliver’s shield like wasps. Oliver grinned when some of the girls shouted encouragement.

  Finnegan prowled the lawn. He threw a smoke bomb, which made everyone cough. Oliver pierced through it by gathering the light from the torches and focusing it like a sunbeam. Finnegan retaliated with whips of fire. Oliver stumbled to one knee. Someone gasped loudly.

  Finnegan flung his dagger. It came apart as it whirled toward Oliver, sending iron nails flying like arrows. They left a trail of blue sparks and the smell of burning apples.

  Oliver threw his shield up to take the brunt of the attack. He spun around, clasping Daphne around the waist and depositing her safely behind the statue. The iron nails not already embedded in the shield targeted them. Oliver blocked, flinging his hand up. The nails hovered, vibrating for a long, quiet moment. The invisible wards he’d raised held strong. The nails clattered harmlessly to the ground and applause erupted.

  Oliver and Finnegan shook hands and bowed. Daphne curtsied. Gretchen made rude noises.

  Once the applause faded, poppets of birds were tossed into the air, animated with magic. They flew fast and erratic, purple-and-blue sparks shooting from their feathers. They dove, pecking at the Ironstone students standing in a row and the girls clustered behind them.

  The Ironstone boys showed off their aim and skill one at a time. The first used a slingshot, whipping a charm shaped like a glass marble at the nearest poppet. He clipped its wings and it plummeted, spinning. When it hit the ground, it dissolved into rose petals.

  The second student used an iron-wheel pendant, looping it around the neck of a poppet. He tugged and it fell, catching fire as it went down. His feat was followed by elf-bolts, levitating pebbles, and fiery Catherine wheels. Familiars darted in and out of the melee. There were three cats, two toads, a heron, a fox, a rabbit, and a hummingbird.

  The poppets vanished one by one, until all that was left was a wolf made entirely of magical energy. It prowled the circle, dodging a combination of charms, amulets, and a spell in the shape of a goblin. Magic crackled and sizzled like fireworks. The wolf was faster than all of the amulets combined, dodging between them, blurring white as the tail of a comet.

  He wasn’t faster than a bullet.

  It tore through him and he fell apart in a flurry of stuffing and thread. Everyone swiveled, trying to find who had done it. The Ironstone boys gaped at one another.

  Gretchen stood on the bench, her brother’s pistol in her hand and a cocky smirk on her face. She bowed theatrically. There was a lot of blinking and a smattering of applause.

  Unfazed, Godric reached up to reclaim his pistol. “Give me that.” He snatched it out of her hands, but he was grinning the same smug grin as she was. He’d taught her to shoot, after all.

  Magic sparked in the air as the remains of the wolf smoldered. Tobias stepped forward and snapped, “Finis.” The magical traces vanished until only smoke remained.

  “Thank you, Lady Gretchen,” Mrs. Sparrow said. “That was very proactive of you.” She didn’t sound angry. In fact, she rather sounded as though she was trying not to laugh. She nodded once at the students. “You are dismissed.”

  They dispersed, whispering frantically to one another. A blistering kind of excitement went through them the farther they got from the scorched lawn. Groups clustered together, taking advantage of the proximity of the students from the other school.

  “I didn’t know you could shoot like that,” Olwen said. “Does Colette know?” she asked, referring to one of her sisters.

  “I don’t know. Isn’t she here?”

  “No, she was expelled before Christmas.”

  “What for?”

  “That was a crack shot,” Finnegan interrupted, elbowing his way through the crowd toward them. “Well done.” Gretchen offered him her most feminine curtsy. He chuckled. “If they’d let you join the army, old Bonaparte would be dead by now.”

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” She beamed at him.

  “You shouldn’t encourage her,” Tobias interrupted frostily from behind her left shoulder. “Pistols are useless in most magical battles. And that kind of recklessness is dangerous.”

  “And that’s the most boring thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Gretchen said. “We’re not all damsels in distress waiting to be rescued, my lord,” she added scathingly. “And since I’m on school grounds, I don’t believe your spying services, or your opinions, are currently required.”

  “The Order set you to watch her?” she heard Olwen ask as she stomped away. “Have they completely lost their minds?”

  • • •

  Gretchen had stabbed herself in the finger more times than she cared to count. Embroidery ought to be classified as blood magic, she thought. The white handkerchief on which she was attempting to replicate a passable witch knot was hopelessly spotted with blood. She poked herself again when the needle stuck in a tangle and she yanked too hard.

  Miss Teasdale looked up from her flawless rendition of Aphrodite emerging from a clam shell. She made it look easy. And she never smeared her threads with blood. “Gretchen, not again. You must be gentle.” Her eyes were the eyes of a wounded rabbit, wide, dark, and bewildered. Gretchen may as well have stabbed her, as mangled her embroidery.

  She abandoned the handkerchief to pace. Miss Teasdale’s parlor was famous for its calming effect. The soft carpets were the color of soothing mint tea. Everything was pretty and perfect, designed to uplift and encourage genteel instruction. Gretchen was a feral dog among perfumed poodles.

  Two younger girls
sat under the window, peacefully working at their sewing. They never cast longing glances outside. Gretchen’s familiar was already out on the lawn, racing in happy circles. The ache to join him was physically painful.

  “Can’t I learn ax throwing?” she asked, turning her evil-eye ring around and around her finger. “Or archery?”

  “Those aren’t necessary arts for a Whisperer,” Miss Teasdale replied as Mrs. Sparrow strode into the drawing room. Her white-streaked black hair was in its customary bun. “You need to learn all aspects of spellwork first. How else will you be able to create your spells?”

  “Instinct.”

  “Instinct is for animals, dear,” Miss Teasdale replied. “You’re a lady.”

  Mrs. Sparrow glanced at Gretchen’s clenched fists and the decidedly unladylike turn of her mouth. “Hmm. Even ladies require exercise,” she said. “Come with me, Gretchen. Let us take a walk.”

  Gretchen all but ran from the room. She didn’t care if Mrs. Sparrow scolded her, as long as she did so without a needle and thread in her hands. They crossed the stones to follow the path around the fountain. Peonies bloomed all around them.

  “Whisperers are very rare,” Mrs. Sparrow said. She didn’t sound particularly cross.

  “Yes,” Gretchen replied, mostly because she felt she ought to say something.

  “There have only ever been two Whisperers at this academy,” she continued. “While the boy’s school has had five Whisperers. And they feel quite superior over it.” Now she sounded cross.

  Gretchen felt the fire of indignation before she realized the headmistress had expected it. “Well done, Mrs. Sparrow,” she said with reluctant admiration. Even knowing she was being manipulated didn’t take away her desire to prove herself as good, if not better, than any Ironstone student. Past or present. Especially past. And especially if that student was named Tobias Lawless.

  “What happened to them?” she asked. “Are they still here at the school?”

  “One is in her first year. She’s barely thirteen years old.”

  “And the other?” she asked as they came to the life-sized statue of Hecate, bronze dogs straining at her leashes.

  “She went mad.”

  Gretchen came to a halt. “What? No one ever told me that!”

  “She couldn’t cope with the buzzing. It built and built until it was all she heard. Her family took her to a secluded Scottish island, but it was too late to regain all of her faculties, I’m afraid.”

  Gretchen sat down on the marble bench. She thought of Emma’s mother, mad in the woods. “Does it seem to you that there’s an awful lot of mad witches about?”

  “Everything has a price,” Mrs. Sparrow replied. “Especially power.”

  “Even yours?” she asked. “I should dearly love to be able to put my mother magically to sleep every time she mentions finding me a husband.”

  “For every moment of sleep I conjure on another, that same sleep is stolen from me. It becomes … uncomfortable. Magic is never to be taken lightly,” Mrs. Sparrow added. “It’s a force. And like a wild horse, if you don’t tame it, it will trample you to death.”

  Gretchen blinked. “That’s hardly an inspiring speech.”

  Mrs. Sparrow smiled briefly. “You don’t need soft words, Gretchen. You need truth.”

  “Whispering used to be just another word for spellcasting,” she continued. “To the untrained eye, a witch reciting a spell looked like she was muttering to herself. After a few years of being hanged or burned at the stake for it, we learned subtlety,” she said wryly. “But Whisperers such as yourself can still hear those spells being cast. That’s what the terrible sound you hear is. Hundreds of witches over hundreds of years all casting their spells at the same time.”

  “That explains why it makes me feel so odd,” Gretchen said. It didn’t feel any less odd to think that she was hearing voices of dead witches. No wonder Godric drank so much.

  “Yes, but with discipline, you can focus on the spell you need. At the very least, you’ll be able to quiet the thunder to an actual whisper.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Gretchen murmured. To be fair, she hadn’t thrown herself into learning the history of the witching world like Emma had.

  Mrs. Sparrow led them back inside to her personal study. The shelves were stuffed with books and jars of evil-eye rings and rowan berries and was far less tidy than expected. The desk was sturdy and simple, nothing like the scrolled and gilded desk her mother preferred, with its curved legs and gold-leaf accents. Mrs. Sparrow did not sit down. Instead, she picked up a worn leather-bound journal the size of folded letter paper.

  “I think you should have this,” she said, handing it to Gretchen.

  The leather cover was faded and soft and the pages were thick, uneven parchment. Some were stitched with red thread; one had a silver triangular cap on one corner from which hung a tiny bell. When she opened the book, a pressed violet drifted to the carpet. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured. And it was, in its own tattered way. Someone had loved this book until the bindings were reinforced with gold thread. “What is it?”

  “It’s a grimoire,” the headmistress replied. The sun fell through the window beside them, falling on the white streak at her temple. The rest of her hair was so black it absorbed the light. “It’s a magical journal,” she elaborated. “Full of spells and bits of folklore. Most families have one they pass down through the generations.”

  Gretchen looked up from the book. “Is there a Lovegrove grimoire?”

  Mrs. Sparrow shook her head. “Your aunt told the Order that Theodora Lovegrove burned it.”

  That Emma’s mother had destroyed a family heirloom stuffed with priceless magic gathered over centuries in one of her mad fits was no surprise at all. Still, it was disappointing.

  “I found this one in a bookshop in the goblin markets. I don’t know who it belonged to, but the information is sound. If you study and memorize the uses of plants and stones and colors, it will make it much easier to identify the kinds of words you should be listening to when the witches whisper spells in your head.”

  The pages were the color of tea, with ink that was faded but still legible. Sketches of tree leaves and flowers, and rhymes written in a sweeping hand, crowded next to lists of colors, stones, and herbs and their attributes. There was a drawing illustrating how to gather Saint-John’s-wort on Midsummer Night and a rhyme about mullein leaves, and hundreds of symbols and sigils. Gretchen felt a bubble of excitement in her chest. She might not love studying, but she did love having a purpose, a way to stand up to the pressure of this new magical world that threatened at any moment to sweep her and her cousins away. The sting of the embroidery needle’s pinpricks on her fingertips suddenly felt like battle scars.

  “The other side of your gift is what allows you to create new spells,” Mrs. Sparrow told her. “Witches are always attempting them, with various degrees of success and no small danger. But as a Whisperer, you’ll be able to hear what others have done.”

  “Is that why it goes silent when I’ve found something that works?”

  “Yes, the spell memories fall away because you don’t need them. Creating spells requires many elements: symbols, harvesting flowers and plants at the proper hour, the alignment of planets, the theory of colors, and so on. A good deal of which you will find in that grimoire.”

  “I really am dismal at sewing though,” Gretchen admitted.

  “You’re dismal because you don’t take it seriously,” Mrs. Sparrow replied blandly. “You refuse to practice. But knowing what you know now, does a little embroidery still seem like such a hardship?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Don’t fight your own self.” The headmistress looked sad for a moment. “It’s a battle you’ll never win.”

  Gretchen tilted her head. “Can I still fight the lads of Ironstone?”

  Mrs. Sparrow smiled. “In fact, I would consider it a great personal favor.”

  Chapter 4

  �
��Do you think these flowers make me look like Ophelia?” Penelope asked hopefully as she added another peony into her chignon. Pearl-tipped pins and a garden’s worth of flowers secured her dark curls. She stood in front of the looking glass in a rose-colored gown, frowning thoughtfully at her reflection. She had the only parents in London who didn’t care if she rejected the fashionable white of the proper debutante.

  “You are aware that Ophelia drowned, aren’t you?” Emma teased her. Her slender antlers curved elegantly from her red hair, which was braided around them.

  “It’s romantic,” Penelope insisted. Glowing spiders crawled over her hem, but she studiously avoided looking at them.

  “It’s soggy,” Gretchen said. “And ridiculous. Tossing yourself away for some moody git,” she scoffed.

  “You simply have no poetry in your soul,” Penelope returned with all the offended dignity of a wounded reader. She adjusted the rose tucked into the wide ribbon tied under her breasts. “I hope Lucius is there.”

  Gretchen raised an eyebrow. “It’s Lucius, now, is it? Since when are you on a first name basis?”

  Penelope blushed. “I just meant I hope he attends tonight.” She wrinkled her nose at her grinning cousins. “Oh, hush.”

  “What about Cedric?” Emma asked.

  “What about him?” Penelope said softly. “He doesn’t care for me that way. He never would. Surely, I have to face that.”

  “You most certainly do not,” Gretchen said decisively.

  Emma frowned. “And what makes you think he doesn’t care for you?”

  Penelope shrugged. “I didn’t say he didn’t care for me, just not in that way. I’m like a sister to him.”

  When Emma opened her mouth to protest, Penelope turned away, clearly not interested in discussing it further. Which was telling in itself. Penelope always wanted to discuss love.

  They were tucked away in Emma’s chambers, preparing for the MacGregor ball. As usual, Penelope looked forward to the flirting and the dancing. Emma hoped to catch a moment alone with Cormac, and Gretchen had already mapped out the location of the library for her escape. After her discussion with Mrs. Sparrow, she was inclined to take her studies more seriously. Nothing on earth could convince her to take her mother’s wedding plans more seriously though.