Wayward
Contents
Cover
Praise for the Author
Also by Hannah Mathewson and Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR
“An impressive novel from Hannah Mathewson. Rich and intricate world-building evokes a London that is both familiar and unfamiliar. The reader is swept into a world that is sometimes unsettling, sometimes terrifying, but always exciting.”
JODI TAYLOR, AUTHOR OF JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER
“Witherward is catnip for fans of complex characters and delightfully messy worlds. It delivers on a world of intricate factions and intrigue, without ever losing track of the vividly written living, breathing characters that are at the heart of it. This book broke my heart in the best ways.”
A.J. HACKWITH, AUTHOR OF THE LIBRARY OF THE UNWRITTEN
“Mathewson has delivered a dazzling, fantastical adventure where magic awaits you on every page, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. With a magnificent world I’d love to get lost in, intriguing magic, and a wide cast of dynamic characters you can’t help but love, Witherward is a phenomenal and immensely fun debut that will leave readers wanting more.”
ADALYN GRACE, AUTHOR OF ALL THE STARS AND TEETH
“Street-smart and wounded, Ilsa is a protagonist to cheer on as she navigates two Victorian Londons, both familiar and strange.”
MARIE BRENNAN, AUTHOR OF A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS
Also by Hannah Mathewson and available from Titan Books
Witherward
LEAVE US A REVIEW
We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.
You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:
Amazon.co.uk,
Goodreads,
Waterstones,
or your preferred retailer.
Wayward
Print edition ISBN: 9781789094459
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094466
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: May 2022
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© Hannah Mathewson 2022
Hannah Mathewson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
In loving memory of Uncle Matt
THE WHISPERERS
Whitechapel
LEADER: LORD JERICHO VOSS
MILITIA: THE STEWARDS
THE ORACLES
The Docklands
LEADER: THE SEER
MILITIA: THE ACOLYTES
THE WRAITHS
The North
LEADER: LADY JOSAVIE WRIKE
MILITIA: THE BLADES
THE SORCERERS
The Heart
LEADER: HIGH SORCERER FISK
MILITIA: THE ENFORCERS
THE CHANGELINGS
Camden Town
LEADER: ALPHA HESTER
MILITIA: THE WOLVES
THE PSI
The Underground
LEADER: THE TRINITY
MILITIA: THE CLOAKS
1
Ollivan was fired from Pendergast’s Occult Emporium at ten past nine in the morning, which he thought was leaving it a bit late.
The shop had been open for over an hour, but a persistent autumn rain was keeping the customers away. Mr Holt had retreated to the back room to manage his stock, or possibly to avoid Ollivan’s cheerful whistling, when the bell above the door finally chimed.
“She said it was a very old technique from Malaysia, used to bring one in closer communion with the spirit world,” the lady in green was telling her companion as they folded their umbrellas. “Before our very eyes, she put Louise in a trance. Just by touching her shoulder!”
At the counter, Ollivan went back to scribbling in the sales ledger, having determined that the women would not know real magic if it reached out and swept them into a waltz. The morning paper lay beside it, the front page similarly defiled. An illustration of Queen Victoria on some public duty that weekend now bore the note but where is the rat??? across it.
He was working on an unravelling – a spell used to undo another spell – for a particularly tricky ward he needed to put to rest. Get it wrong, and Ollivan would suffer gravely unpleasant consequences. Get it right, and the last few touches were finally falling into place.
“Hello there?”
It was the lady in green. She summoned Ollivan with a polite wave, and he put his pen down and weaved between the tables and shelves to join them.
“Beautiful day,” he said in greeting.
The customer turned her curious gaze to the window. Ollivan watched rivulets of rainwater roll down the glass, and his mind filled unstoppably with the scent of daffodils, and the unspoiled green of new leaves. It was a beautiful day; with any luck, his last on this hellish grey plane.
“I’ve been told,” the lady in green said, visibly preening, “that I have a true aptitude for precognition and that I could encourage it by burning sage or mugwort. Which would you suggest?”
Ollivan didn’t know where to start. “Precognition?”
“The talented medium Madam Rosalie told her so,” said the woman’s companion, and they exchanged satisfied smiles.
Ollivan looked at the woman in green again. Her eyes were brown, the pupils wide in the ‘atmospheric’ dimness of the shop; Mr Holt said the darkness gave the place an air of mysticism. If the customer was truly capable of precognition – a real Oracle – Ollivan would be able to tell from her eyes. And even if she was, no herb would help her. Only a Sorcerer, and not an Oracle, was capable of drawing out the magical properties of a substance, and he doubted the woman was one of those either.
“And how much did this medium charge you for knowledge of your gift?” he said.
“Well I—”
/> “Since you have the gift of precognition, perhaps you ought to have foreseen this charlatan spending your money with a swindler’s grin on their face.”
The woman started to turn red. A shuffling at the office door said Mr Holt had emerged into the shop.
“What a rude man you are,” her friend exclaimed. “It is none of your business how Fiona learned of her gift. She merely asked your advice on herbs.”
“Herbs.” Ollivan cast an eye over the shelves of bundled dry herbs and sticks of incense. “The only herb we stock with any magical properties to speak of is rosemary, and that won’t help except to counteract a nightmare tonic or encourage snow to stick, and either way you could buy it at a grocer’s for half the price.”
“Sage!” Mr Holt put a hand on Ollivan’s shoulder and pressed him to the side. The women continued to stare at Ollivan in open bewilderment as Mr Holt reached up and collected a bundle of sage from one of the shelves. “For clarity, ma’am. It ought to clear the obstacles of your gift and bring you stronger visions.” He handed the sage to the woman in green, who eyed what Ollivan knew to be nothing but overpriced seasoning suspiciously until Mr Holt added, “Consider it a gift.”
The women left.
“Ollivan.” Mr Holt sighed. “I’m letting you go.”
“I’m fired?” said Ollivan mildly.
Mr Holt ran a hand down his face. He was not skilled in confrontation. That much Ollivan had deduced from the fact he had kept a job there for the past year. “You are simply not suited to this type of salesmanship. Perhaps you are a sceptic about these matters” – Ollivan objected to that characterisation; it suggested faith and mystery and other things that had no place in the practice of magic – “but you’ve cost me too much business by not being able to put your own feelings aside.”
Ollivan couldn’t argue with that. The lady in green had only been the most recent of many. Last week Ollivan had almost brought a patron to tears in an argument over astrology. And before that, the man who had tried to lecture him about how a glamour was performed. Something about faeries and mind control, Ollivan couldn’t remember. He had glamoured the man’s shoes to appear tied together and watched him hobble needlessly down the street when he couldn’t unknot them.
Ollivan beamed his widest smile at Mr Holt and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry it had to end like this, Mr Holt. All the best in your future endeavours.”
Mr Holt blinked stupidly as Ollivan fetched his coat and hat from the hook by the door; he had forgotten his umbrella that morning, but it was alright. He was tearing his notes out of the sales ledger and tucking them away when his former boss came to his senses.
“Wait,” said Mr Holt, shuffling towards the back room. “Your pay.”
“No need,” Ollivan cut in. “I’m an undisciplined liability who has defaced nearly every page of your ledger and cost you good business at every chance I’ve had since you hired me. Keep your money. Buy some more herbs. You could make a nice stuffing.”
Mr Holt glanced warily at the sales ledger, then the shelves of bundled herbs, as Ollivan tipped his hat to the old man and stepped out of Pendergast’s Occult Emporium for the last time.
* * *
“You must write and tell me everything about Sorcerer magic,” says Fyfe. His voice is muffled by the shoulder of your coat. His skinny, too-long arms squeeze you tightly. You’ve promised him he’ll grow into them. You realise for the first time that you won’t be here to see it.
When Fyfe lets go, Aelius shakes your hand and beams his winning smile. “Knock them dead, my dear.”
“I will,” you promise.
And then you’ve said goodbye to everyone, and you’re certain, just for a moment, that this is a terrible mistake. Your friends assemble behind you, their warm, melancholy presence a magnet drawing you back.
But you don’t go back. You go forward.
2
THREE DAYS EARLIER
Cassia was furious with herself.
She had been standing before the gap in the hedge – the one that led to the rose garden – for nearly three minutes, waving her hands in front of it as she willed it to do her bidding.
But it wouldn’t.
Jasper had chosen this exercise for her because the intention behind the glamour was clear and visual: make the gap invisible. Make the hedge appear as one unbroken wall of new green, flush with spring. She didn’t need to work that hard to visualise it.
But her intention wasn’t the problem.
“What are you asking the glamour to do?” said Jasper from behind her. His voice was soft. Cassia had heard him draw breath to speak several times before braving the question. “You’re right to say the intention under your breath, it’s good control, but tell me in the exact wording.”
She let her arms fall to her sides in defeat. “Close the gap.”
“Good.” His tone was too positive; so infused with praise that Cassia’s frustration with herself must have been blindingly obvious. “Your intention is perfect. It couldn’t be simpler.”
Cassia flinched at his choice of words. Her shoulders grew heavier. It really could not be simpler.
Jasper was only trying to help, as always. In fact, he was one of the better tutors Cassia had had. He had never shown surprise at how rudimentary her skills were, having known she spent most of her childhood outside the Sorcerer quarter of London and without the influence of her own people. And he was patient, unlike her last tutor; an older man who, when all else failed, had threatened to encourage her progression with a strap.
But at the same time, studying with Jasper was torture. He was eighteen, only a year older than her, and yet his confidence in his magic emanated from him the way spellwork did from his fingers. He was, in Cassia’s grandfather’s words, a jewel in the crown of the Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers.
A society that had refused Cassia entry a year ago, and in three days’ time, would have an opportunity to turn her down again.
Not for the first time, she wished she wasn’t a Sorcerer at all. Changeling magic – the power to shift form – surely wasn’t this hard. Oracle magic was impossible to fail at, technically; they Saw the past, present, and future almost uncontrollably. Their first lessons in using their magic were in blocking it out. Wraiths had to learn how to pass through solid objects, but their heightened physical abilities came naturally to them, as did a Whisperer’s ability to read minds. And the Psi’s power was psychokinesis; the ability to move and control objects without touching them. Cassia wasn’t sure how one learned that, and it was probably very difficult at a high level, but it was still a single skill; the equivalent to a Sorcerer mastering just one spell.
She could have belonged to any of six incarnations of magic, and she belonged to the one who channelled and tamed raw power; who shaped something stronger and more wilful than themselves; gave form to something formless. Sorcerer magic was the most complex of the six, that was well known. And Cassia was starting to fear she just wasn’t talented enough to wield it.
Compulsively, she looked up at the townhouse looming above them, afraid that her progress – or lack thereof – was being seen from within. But she would never know if her mother watched her lessons and judged her progress, as every pane of glass in every window was enchanted to reflect a pink and perfect sunset, regardless of the weather or the time of day. It was one of the subtler magical adornments on their street. The house on their left vanished at certain angles. The one on the right had the crown of a colossal oak tree in place of a roof. On the mornings when Cassia awoke from dreams of giant wolves and transforming wings – the trappings of an altogether different magical childhood – all she had to do was look out of her window to be reminded that she was in the Sorcerer quarter of London now.
As if she could ever forget.
“The problem isn’t the intention,” she said, glowering at the gap in the hedge.
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“If I intended to give this up and
find a cup of tea, do you think I’d have more luck?”
Jasper grinned. “Not on my watch. Describe how it feels. Does your magic answer when you call it?”
“Yes.” Just to make sure, Cassia called it again. It took no more than a thought, and she felt it bloom in the centre of her abdomen, strong and eager.
Jasper hesitated. “And you’re directing it to your throat?”
“Yes,” snapped Cassia. She caught herself, meeting Jasper’s sharp blue eyes in apology. “I know how to perform a glamour.”
Magic was channelled in one of several ways; through the body, through an object or substance, or in words. Because a glamour only acted on a thing, rather than imbuing it with magic, the intention was grounded with the latter, and to do so, the Sorcerer directed their power to their throat.
Five-year-olds knew these principles of how to perform magic; it was the first thing a Sorcerer learned, prioritised over even their letters and arithmetic. Cassia had learned it herself, and had been chagrined by every tutor in the last two years who had asked her to recite her magical theory aloud.
Jasper, thankfully, did not, but Cassia could tell what he was thinking. Her intellectual grasp of Sorcerer magic was solid, her intention flawless. So what was wrong?
She hadn’t always been this hopeless. Before returning to the Heart – the name given to the Sorcerer quarter of London – she had cast spells more or less at will. Nothing complex, as she was untrained; her parents had arranged for a visiting tutor for years, but Cassia had been reluctant to practise and made very little progress. But since applying herself, it was as if the more her theory advanced, the less her magic showed itself. Occasionally, she could still pull off an enchantment without a hitch, but she was unable to predict or replicate it when it mattered. She had no idea what she was doing wrong.
“Would you mind just… turning around?” she said. “I can feel you watching me.”
Jasper smiled and cocked his head. “Of course I’m watching you. I’m your tutor.”