A Matter of Magic

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “I thought you were going to do that after the cracksman piked off,” Kim said to Mairelon.

  “Yes, well, it slipped my mind,” Mairelon said. “It wouldn’t have helped with this, anyway, not with as much power behind it as it had.”

  “You will not forget this time,” Lady Wendall said firmly. “Only think of the difficulties another such disturbance would create! We are going to cast a full ward; we shall do so as soon as possible; and we shall maintain it at least until Kim’s ball.”

  “A full ward?” Mrs. Lowe looked inquiringly at Lady Wendall.

  “To keep this from happening again.” Lady Wendall’s wave encompassed the entire library. “All this excitement is very bad for Maximillian.”

  “I should think that that monkey would be the least of your worries!” Mrs. Lowe said. “If that was some sort of spell, I want to know who was responsible.” She looked suspiciously from Mairelon to Lady Wendall to Kim.

  “I’d like to know that myself,” Mairelon said. Bending, he picked up the blue book that had caused all the commotion. Mrs. Lowe flinched. Apparently oblivious, Mairelon went on, “It was another puzzle-spell, stuck together out of pieces that didn’t quite fit. A bit of summoning here, a bit of levitation there, a few other odds and ends, and a really awkward binding holding it together like a piece of string. It couldn’t have lasted much longer, even if we hadn’t arrived when we did.”

  “That book didn’t look to me as if it were getting tired,” Mrs. Lowe said. “And it had been bashing itself against the wall for a good half hour.”

  “Half an hour?” Mairelon blinked at his aunt. “Oh, come, you can’t have been holding it off with the poker that long.”

  “I didn’t say I had,” Mrs. Lowe replied dryly. “It’s only been about five minutes since that extremely foolish girl panicked and ended up in the corner. Your precious heroic footman was no use whatever, and something had to be done. I trust it will not be necessary again.”

  Lady Wendall tilted her head to one side and looked at Mrs. Lowe. “If you were not belaboring it with the poker for half an hour, what were you doing, Agatha?”

  “Writing a letter to Lady Percy in my room,” Mrs. Lowe replied. “The noise in the library disturbed me, so I rang for a footman—who took an amazingly long time to arrive—and sent him to put a stop to it. He proved unable to do so, but did not think to report back to me when he discovered the cause of the disturbance. When the noise did not subside after ten minutes, I came down to see for myself what was going on. By then, half the household had gathered, and while I was considering what was best to be done, the book made a more than usually erratic swoop and that silly girl panicked. I make it approximately half an hour from the time I first noticed the noise to your arrival.”

  Mairelon looked down at the book in his hand with a thoughtful expression. “This gets more interesting all the time.”

  “Why’s that?” Kim demanded. She could see that neither Lady Wendall nor Mrs. Lowe was going to ask, and she knew that if no one asked, Mairelon wouldn’t think to explain.

  “For one thing, it means I was mistaken about the scrying spell at the opera,” Mairelon said. “The caster wasn’t looking to see whether we were there; he was looking to make sure we weren’t here.”

  “Very clever of him,” Lady Wendall murmured encouragingly.

  “Furthermore, the spell on that book was an incredible mishmash. Holding it together for even a few minutes would take a lot of power,” Mairelon went on. “To hold it together for half an hour—well, there are only two or three wizards in England who could manage it. That I know of.”

  “Then one may presume this wizard is no one you know of,” Lady Wendall said.

  “More than that,” Mairelon said. “I think he’s someone I couldn’t know of. I think he’s either largely self-taught, or foreign. Very foreign.”

  Kim thought instantly of the handsome Russian prince at the opera, and she could see the same thing occur to Lady Wendall. “Why?” she said again.

  “Because I’ve found very little trace of any traditional spell structures in any of the spells he’s cast so far,” Mairelon said, waving the blue book for emphasis. “That scrying spell this evening, for instance—no one who’s had a proper magical education would bother reinventing something like that, not when every apprentice learns the standard scrying spell by the end of the second year. So our mystery wizard hasn’t had the kind of magical education magicians get in England, which means he’s either self-taught or foreign.”

  “If it’s a he,” Kim said. Something was niggling at the back of her brain, something important that she couldn’t quite get hold of.

  “That fellow who tried to burgle the library last week was a man,” Mairelon pointed out.

  “He was a toff,” Kim objected. “You said this wizard had to be self-taught; toffs get training. At least, more training than this.” She looked around at the library.

  “An excellent point,” Lady Wendall said. “Though very few gentlemen practice, any more than they read Catullus in the original once they have left school.”

  “They read Catullus if they read anything,” Mairelon said. “He’s too salacious to be so easily forgotten.”

  “Virgil, then,” Lady Wendall said impatiently. “The point is that anyone who attended Oxford or Cambridge has learned at least a little magic.”

  “I should rather say they have been exposed to a little magic,” Mrs. Lowe said austerely. “Whether they have learned any of it is another matter.”

  “Ladies are not so universally educated in magic as gentlemen are,” Lady Wendall went on. “And such a display of vindictiveness as this—”

  “What display of vindictiveness?” Mairelon said with a puzzled frown.

  Lady Wendall gestured eloquently. Mairelon looked around as if seeing the chaos for the first time, and his puzzled expression vanished. “Oh, the mess. That’s all just a side effect, really.”

  “A side effect?” Mrs. Lowe said indignantly. “Next I suppose you’ll tell me that this object wasn’t attacking me!”

  “It wasn’t,” Mairelon said. “It was simply trying to get somewhere in as straight a line as possible. If this house were on the east side of the square instead of the west, the book would have smashed through a window in one or two tries and been gone.”

  “East?” Lady Wendall looked at the wall of bookcases. “Yes, I see. What a pity; practically all of London is east of us. If it had been heading south or north, we could have eliminated a great many more possibilities.”

  “If that book was just trying to get somewhere, why didn’t it just smash a window and go?” Kim asked.

  “That’s one of the things that makes me think we’re dealing with a self-taught wizard,” Mairelon said. “The way that spell was cobbled together was so thoroughly inefficient that he didn’t have room for an additional element, and so unstable that my analytical spell unbalanced it completely. What he left out were the comprehensive directional controls and the visual component. He could make a bit of change up and down and side to side, but he couldn’t adjust the primary axis of movement at all, and he had no way of knowing which way he ought to send it. He’s either very stupid, very careless, very ignorant, or very close; even if he’d gotten the book out of the house, it couldn’t have gone far without running into something else.”

  “Do you mean to say the person responsible for this outrage may be standing in the street outside at this very moment?” Mrs. Lowe demanded.

  “Possibly,” Mairelon said. “I thought he might be, even before I came into the library, because of the power level. So I sent Hunch to look. He should be—”

  Someone knocked at the library door. “That will be him now,” Mairelon said. “Come in, Hunch.”

  The door opened and Mairelon’s manservant entered, wearing an expression even more dour than usual. He nodded respectfully at Lady Wendall and said to Mairelon, “There weren’t nobody around but a couple of toughs in back. They
ran off when they saw me.”

  “Possibly a coincidence,” Mairelon said. “Or possibly they were hired to catch Madame de Cambriol’s book when it flew out a window, and then bring it to our mysterious spellcaster. That would have gotten around the problem of flying the thing through the London streets.”

  “I ought to ’ave stopped them,” Hunch said, chagrined.

  “I told you to look for a spellcaster,” Mairelon said. “I didn’t realize, at the time, that there might be other possibilities.”

  “I still ought to ’ave stopped them,” Hunch said stubbornly.

  The thing that had been niggling at the back of Kim’s brain suddenly came clear. “Ma Yanger!” she said before she thought to stop herself.

  Everyone looked at her. “She’s a witcher that lives up on Ratchiffe Row by the Charterhouse.”

  Mairelon’s eyebrows rose. “And you think she’s involved in this?”

  “I might have guessed it would be something like that,” Mrs. Lowe said, giving Kim a dark look.

  Kim shook her head. “Not exactly. She used to do spells for people, though, and I think she put them together out of bits and pieces, like you said this one was. Tom Correy told me she’s given up witching people, but she’s got to do something to eat. Maybe she sold the idea to somebody, or sold them part of the spell they used.”

  “An interesting idea,” Mairelon said. “We’ll pursue it tomorrow. In the meantime, Mother, you and I should get to work on that warding spell. Kim, you’ll watch; you’re not quite ready for a long-term spellworking yet, but watching one will give you some idea what’s ahead of you.”

  “I’ll leave you, then,” Mrs. Lowe said. “Kindly let me know when it will be convenient to have the servants come and clean up.”

  “I will see to that,” Lady Wendall said. Mrs. Lowe nodded and left.

  As the door closed behind her, Mairelon let out a long breath. “Good. Now, Kim, I take it you wish to visit this witch friend of yours tomorrow?”

  “It’s a place to start,” Kim replied with a wary look at Lady Wendall.

  “When, exactly, were you thinking of going?” Lady Wendall asked. “There’s a new bonnetmaker I wished to investigate, and we are engaged for dinner with the Black burns.”

  “It’ll have to be after dark,” Kim said, resigning herself to the bonnetmaker. “I won’t pass for a boy in daylight.”

  “I’ll make your excuses to Lady Blackburn, then,” Lady Wendall said.

  “Mine as well, Mother,” Mairelon said, and looked at Kim. “The same procedure as last time, I think? Hunch and I waiting in the carriage.”

  Kim was too surprised by the ease with which everything had been arranged to do more than nod.

  Lady Wendall looked thoughtful, then smiled. “I shall tell Lady Blackburn that you have both been called away on some magical project. It will raise your stock with her considerably; she’s terribly intrigued by wizards, though she’s not in the least magically inclined herself. And it has the additional merit of being entirely true.”

  “That’s settled then.” Mairelon tucked the battered little book absently into his jacket pocket. “Now for the general warding spell. We’ll need four candles, Kim, as closely matched in size and shape as you can manage. Hunch, will you fetch the largest lump of coal you can find from the kitchen? Mother, would you like to be the Respondent or shall I?”

  Hunch nodded and left, Kim began hunting through the candlebox, and Lady Wendall moved to Mairelon’s side to discuss their respective parts in the upcoming spell.

  11

  For the second time in less than a fortnight, Kim slipped through the dark London streets in her boy’s clothes. She was considerably more nervous, though she did not have as far to go—Ma Yanger’s rooms were only a block and a half down Ratchiffe Row from Bath Street, where Mairelon and Hunch waited with the carriage. Because she was not answering a summons from Tom this time, it was earlier in the evening, and there were more people about. Several bricklayers clustered around an iron brazier on the corner, warming their fingers, while on the opposite side of the street a toothless old woman offered a cup of soup to anyone with a ha’penny to pay for it. A collier strode toward the bricklayers, possibly hoping to sell them another lump or two of coal before they packed themselves up. Huddled in a doorway, a young girl with haunted eyes took a swig of bottle courage from a flask. As Kim passed, the girl pulled the neck of her dress lower and started toward the bricklayers in a cloud of gin fumes, her hips swaying suggestively.

  It was with a degree of relief that Kim arrived at the tenement at last. Like most such buildings, it was a rickety wooden structure—Ratchiffe Row was an alley well away from the center of London, and no one enforced the laws that, since the Great Fire, had required bricks to be the principal building material. The rates, however, were collected regularly, and as a result most of the windows had been blocked up to avoid the window tax, giving the exterior a hodgepodge look and making the interior gloomy and airless.

  Kim climbed the dark stairs with care; it was early to find squatters sleeping on the steps and landings, but some liked to stake out a space before the competition got too intense. She stepped over one man who was already snoring loudly, but from the smell of him, it was liquor and not opportunity that had put him to sleep.

  Ma Yanger had two rooms on the third floor, a palatial home by the standards of the place. No one had ever dared to complain that she was taking more than she should—not when the occupant of the rooms was commonly known to be a witch. So long as the landlord received his rent on time, the rooms were hers . . . and possibly longer. It was widely speculated that the only reason this building hadn’t collapsed like so many others was because of Ma Yanger’s spellworking.

  Once, Kim had believed those speculations like everyone else. Now, with her magical training and her sensitivity to spells, she was fairly certain that the only thing holding the building up was good fortune. Even right outside Ma Yanger’s door, there were no traces of magic.

  Frowning, Kim rapped at the door. There was no answer; well, Tom Correy had said that Ma had holed up in her rooms and wasn’t seeing any customers. But unless she’d cut off her friends as well, she’d have to answer the door to find out which it was. Kim’s frown deepened, and she rapped again.

  There was still no response. Kim glanced quickly up and down the hall to make certain that no one was in sight or earshot, then pulled a bit of wire from her pocket. She was out of practice, but the locks in a place like this wouldn’t be much. She bent toward the lock, then hesitated. The locks wouldn’t be much, but Ma Yanger was a magician of sorts, and she’d know that as well as everyone else. And Ma was too canny to rely on her reputation to keep the cracksmen away. If she’d witched the lock . . .

  Kim straightened and returned the wire to her pocket. That spell Mairelon had taught her last week would tell her whether the lock was enchanted, but she hadn’t thought to bring paper or ink with her. Well, Mairelon was always working spells without actually drawing the diagrams; maybe she could, too.

  Slowly and carefully, she traced the diagram in the air, visualizing it as her hands moved. “Epistamai, videre, l’herah, revelare,” she said, and with the final word she felt the spell take hold.

  The lock did not glow even faintly green. Puzzled but relieved, Kim retrieved her wire and bent to her work. Two minutes later, the lock clicked open and she slipped inside.

  Ma Yanger’s front room was one of those that had had its window blocked up to save taxes; it was nearly pitch black and smelled suffocatingly of herbs. Nothing in it glowed green, either, though Kim could feel that the spell she had cast was still active. How come a witch doesn’t have anything magic in her rooms? But Tom Correy had said that Ma hadn’t done any witching for two months; maybe she had let her personal spells lapse, too, if she’d had any.

  “Ma?” Kim called into the darkness. “Ma Yanger? It’s Kim, from the Hungerford Market. I got to ask you something.”

  Th
ere was a shuffling noise in the next room, which subsided almost immediately. “Ma?” Kim called again.

  No one answered. Kim thought about working the light spell she had shown Tom Correy, but Mairelon was always warning her about overextending herself, and she had a great deal of respect for his advice in matters magical. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom, and there was no great hurry. She waited a moment longer, then began picking her way toward the far door, past a table strewn with anonymous packets and a set of shelves laden with jars. At the far door, she hesitated again. “Ma? Ma Yanger?”

  On the other side of the door, something grunted. Kim’s throat clogged, and she almost turned and ran. It’s just one of Ma Yanger’s tricks to discourage visitors, she told herself firmly. And anyway I probably know more magic than she does, now. Whether it was the sort of magic that would do her any good in a confrontation with Ma was something about which Kim refused to think. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.

  Ma Yanger was clearly visible in the faint green-glowing haze that surrounded her. She sat on the edge of a low, lumpy bed, one corner of which was propped up by an orange crate because the leg was broken. Gray hair hung in rat-tails around her face. Her eyes were empty and her mouth hung slack; a thin trickle of drool trailed from one corner.

  “Ma?” Kim whispered.

  “Uuunh,” said the woman on the bed. The noise was clearly only a reflex; no trace of sanity or intelligence showed, even for a moment, on her face.

  Kim started forward, then paused. Mairelon hadn’t glowed green when she cast the magic-detecting spell before; only the button on his jacket that he’d enchanted to foil pickpockets had responded. Ma Yanger wasn’t glowing green because she was a witch. She was glowing because someone had cast a spell on her. And there was no knowing what the effect would be if Kim touched her while the spell was active; the contact might cure her, or it might kill her, or it might afflict Kim with the same bizarre malady.

  This is too much for me. I’m getting Mairelon. Kim backed out of the bedroom and hurried across the front room. By the time she reached the stairs, she was running. She vaulted the drunk and pelted up the street at top speed, ignoring the attention she attracted.