Wayward Page 11

  Ollivan took back every pleasant thing he had thought about the Wending Place and glared at the ceiling. “If it means anything to you,” he said to the building, “my idea of a sanctuary does not admit Miss Dentley.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Sybella lightly. “The Wending Place may be kind to the President, but it’s kind to the Secretary too. This morning, the portraits in the entrance hall all curtsied to me as I passed. I must say I’m enjoying this job immensely.”

  “That makes one of us,” muttered Ollivan. “How long have you been here, Ell—Miss Dentley? It’s late.”

  “There’s a lot to do,” she replied. “Which you would know if you’d come when I messaged.”

  “You messaged?” Even as he asked the question, Ollivan vaguely recalled tossing a note in her handwriting onto the fire earlier that day. It had arrived at a sullen moment, before he had had his morning coffee, and Ollivan had a strict policy of not thinking of her at low moments. It only ever made matters worse.

  “You need to approve the menu for the militia luncheon on Saturday, and arrange a date to draw teams for the spring croquet tournament. You know if we don’t announce it with plenty of notice no one will come and then they’ll all cry cheat when they don’t like the teams. Also, I should remind you that you’re expected to give a speech before the annual spring scavenger hunt tomorrow night, so write one. And Edward Dvorak was stuck in the broom cupboard all of last night after someone charmed the door out of existence. He says it was that new initiate, Aubrey Cai. You’ll need to mediate a grievance hearing. Preferably tomorrow.”

  There was a pause as Ollivan waited for a punchline that never came. “None of that sounds interesting.” Sybella’s eyes hardened. “Ellie—”

  “It’s Miss Dentley,” she bit out, startling Ollivan with the bite in her tone.

  “Miss Dentley,” Ollivan corrected calmly, though every stars-damned utterance of the formal address twisted the knife she had buried in his chest. “I don’t believe for one moment that you truly care about any of this stuff, so why don’t we agree not to care together and end this mind-numbing charade? Arranging grievance hearings for what sounds like a perfectly entertaining prank isn’t you.”

  Sybella cocked her head to one side. The frown brewing across her brow had only deepened as Ollivan went on. “You know this does matter to me,” she said quietly, as if she feared invoking days gone by. “I’ve talked of politics for years.”

  Ollivan made a non-committal sound. “I know you talked of it.” Sybella’s parents had pushed her in similar ways to Ollivan’s. Venting their frustrations about the paths they were expected to follow was how they had first grown close, aged just fourteen. But somewhere along the way, Sybella had started echoing the things her mother and mama wanted for her. “I never imagined that you were serious. I suppose that was my fault.”

  “Of course it was your fault,” she said irritably. “I expect the courtesy of being taken at my word, Ollivan. You just never wished to believe I wanted something so beneath you.”

  Ollivan drew breath to argue, but he was overwhelmed by the unfairness of the accusation. Being angry with Sybella was uniquely torturous. When he directed it at others, anger was its own reward, its own release; with her, he was fighting through it to be understood. It was like being pulled under by the current; like he could clear all the obstacles of their own frustrations if only he kept kicking.

  It galled him to know that nothing had changed.

  “Politics is not beneath me,” he said with all the calm he could muster. He had to close his eyes. His headache was returning. “It’s just not for me. You know that.”

  He readied himself to be rebuked for presuming what she knew, but Sybella’s reply was worse.

  “Did you do it?”

  Ollivan’s eyes shot open. She met them with a defiant stare, but the fragile whisper of her question belied her steel.

  Ollivan’s voice was just as quiet, and laced with fury. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Because I need to know.”

  “Why are you here, Ellie?”

  “It’s Miss—”

  “Why are you here? Is it to torture me? Because it certainly isn’t that you enjoy my company any more, you made that perfectly clear.”

  Sybella sucked in a breath. The hurt on her face seared his soul, and yet he was glad. He didn’t wear his hurt as openly as Sybella did, but she should know how he felt. That she of all people would suspect him of having done what the rumours said he had; it made him wonder, for a fleeting moment, if he had ever belonged here at all, if even she did not know him.

  “I tried—” She cut off, swallowed, and started again. “I tried to tell you, back then, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “I remember,” said Ollivan softly. He stood and rounded the desk, stopping when she took a step away from him. “I was in your house for all of sixty seconds when you swept the rug right out from under me, and then you kept talking, like you expected me to stand and attend to you any longer. Well, I couldn’t.”

  Ollivan tried to never think of that day, but stood in front of her as she wore the same look on her face, it was impossible. He had been late, and she hadn’t commented on it, which was how he knew something was wrong. She hadn’t come to him when he crossed the room to meet her, hadn’t slipped her arms around his waist and smiled up at him like she always did. He’d thought she had had bad news; that her mother or her mama was ill, that the adoption of her little sister had fallen through. Still, he had no clue. He was entirely unprepared when she told him he wasn’t hers any more.

  “In fact, I take back what I said,” he went on. “This busy-body, bureaucratic tedium might be exactly who you are. Who am I to say, when I only ever thought I knew you?”

  Sybella’s face crumpled, and Ollivan staged a dramatic exit, sweeping around her and storming from the Sanctuary so that he wouldn’t have to watch her cry.

  * * *

  The Wending Place was quiet, as Ollivan had hoped, and the only other members he saw were those in the bar as he crept past. When he reached the corridor where the door to the junk room waited, he knew he was alone. No one ever came this way.

  Sybella would not leave his mind. The whole thing was so wrong; so uncanny. The same perfume, longer hair; the space between them that never used to exist when they were alone. Ollivan hadn’t considered himself a tactile person before they fell in love, but they had always been touching.

  Before he fell in love, he reminded himself for the millionth time. It had never been what he thought it was.

  He shook the handle of the junk room door but, obviously, it was locked. He could also sense that the ward was still in place. A Sorcerer needed to understand the mechanisms of a piece of magic to unravel it. It was like untangling a knot, except instead of using one’s eyes and fingers to navigate the loops and snags, one used precise intention. The more specific a request, the more successfully magic obliged it.

  And very few knew the specifics of this ward. Ollivan had found it among some little-known records of magic; a series of ledgers recording the discoveries and missteps of Sorcerers whose lives and existences had otherwise been lost to history.

  No, lost was not the word: they had been erased. Sorcerers whose appetite for discovery – and sometimes for violence, and destruction, and the purely macabre – had been so inconvenient to society that they had to be disposed of.

  Sorcerers like Ollivan.

  Yet someone had seen fit to preserve the work of these Sorcerers for posterity, and Ollivan and Jasper had pilfered them. This particular ward was insidious for its apparent lack of violence. It sounded mundane, even, on paper. Should someone attempt an unlocking spell on the door, it would swing open obediently and reveal the junk room beyond. But should the spellcaster step over the threshold, they would find themselves somewhere else entirely. Where, Ollivan did not know, but he had conducted some experiments on the door and he didn’t believe the destination existed in this reality. No one cared to visit the junk room but him and Jasper, and so the only victim of the spell had been an unfortunate rat who had nobly tested the mechanism for him. As Ollivan knelt by the lock and unravelled the spell with the notes he had made on his last morning at Pendergast’s, he sent up a quick prayer for the intrepid rodent.

  The ward came down, and Ollivan cast his senses about for any other magic on the door, but it seemed it was safe to force entry. He wrapped his fingers around the latch and his magic popped the lock. He pushed the door open – then leapt back as a high-pitched, tormented squeal came from within.

  A rat burst from the room, skinny, red-eyed and shedding patches of its fur. The end of its tail was dyed blue. Ollivan had dyed it, so he could identify him later. The rat cowered, trembling, against the skirting board and would not cease shrieking. Alarm coursing through him, Ollivan enchanted him with a wave of calm; a spell useless on other human beings, but employed by stable workers, shepherds and the like on their charges.

  The rat quieted. Ollivan released a shaking breath.

  He enjoyed the ward for its myriad mysteries; for the theoretical possibilities it posed. Now, he wanted to fall to his knees and thank every last constellation that no one had been reported missing from the Wending Place since he cast the spell, for this was what would have become of them.

  He stepped warily over the threshold, and when nothing launched out of the gloom to decapitate him, he ventured inside, treading lightly and ensuring he didn’t touch anything. He didn’t know what dangerous magic had been developed and tested in this room since he was last here.

  The same familiar smell – chemical, but also botanic, like sulphur mixed with thyme – permeated the room, and as Ollivan inhaled it, he was taken back to all the wonderful things t
hat had happened in here. The discoveries, the euphoric feeling of unstoppable power. He must have been younger than he knew. None of the spells he had cast in here seemed so appealing now.

  He found and lit a lamp, and raised it above his head to cast its glow over the junk room. The first thing the light caught was something sparkling in the centre of the floor. Several somethings, Ollivan found as he bent to inspect them. Shards of glass. There was something that looked like soil too, faint lines of it, as if someone had tried to sweep it away.

  Most of the objects he had enchanted in the year before his banishment were where he had left them. There was the spinning wheel that, when turning, emitted an enchantment that would put everyone in a quarter-mile radius to sleep, save the spinner. They had only tested it once, giddily nervous and snickering like schoolboys, and only for ten seconds or so; just long enough for one of them to collapse and the other to confirm it worked. No one had died when they fell asleep on the spot in the middle of a normal working Tuesday, thank the stars, though a Changeling in flight on the other side of the river had plummeted to the earth and broken all their limbs. Jupitus and his enforcers had tried to investigate the spell, to no avail.

  There were the seemingly empty glass vials that drew sounds of violence from the air when they were unstoppered. Ollivan could only assume their purpose was hurting people without anyone hearing them scream. He hadn’t enchanted the vials with that intent, he just wanted to know if they worked. They did, as his sister could attest when he shot her in the neck with a pea shooter and her shriek was sucked from the air.

  There was no sign of the ledgers. That was to be expected. If Jasper had any sense, he would have destroyed them the second Ollivan stepped back through the portal.

  But to Ollivan’s horror, the most dangerous thing that had ever been in this room wasn’t there either. The Guysman enchantment was gone.

  “Heaven, earth, and all the damned constellations,” muttered Ollivan, trying to think. Could the trap have been set off? Maybe Jasper had disarmed it somehow. Maybe it had done nothing, and all his months of fear and second-guessing had been in vain; the danger he was trying to get ahead of had been a phantom conjured by his paranoia. Surely, if it had been triggered and gone as wrong as he dreaded, he would know by now. Unless…

  Ollivan set the lamp down so that his shaking hands wouldn’t drop it. Jasper had not turned up for his tutoring session with Cassia today. What else had his sister said? Had she spoken to him since? Ollivan couldn’t remember. He had assumed that Jasper was absent because he hadn’t wanted to run into Ollivan at the house, but what if, by another stroke of Ollivan’s incredible misfortune, Jasper had woken the Guysman the very week Ollivan had returned to the Witherward? If the spell was nascent, perhaps they hadn’t seen the full effect yet.

  Whatever that effect turned out to be. If it was as Ollivan intended, and the spell was out there, it wouldn’t be long before the whole quarter knew that something was happening. But if it wasn’t, as he feared…

  He found he was feeling something about Jasper he would never have imagined when he placed a trap to destroy the other boy’s life:

  He did not want to have killed him.

  Ollivan had done a lot of bad things, and cast a lot of dangerous and unsavoury spells. The limits of magic were what truly fascinated him, but the fact was the limits were frequently horrifying. Spells that forged weapons from things one would never have imagined as a weapon before. Spells that were done to bodies and minds; things that required stolen cadavers to test in practice. In fact, for a period of six months or so, his primary fascination had been with the intricate magic of spells used for stealing itself; variants on transporting magic and elaborate glamours that could conceal – at Ollivan’s most extravagant theft – a grand piano.

  And he would freely admit, with very little shame, that the death of Jasper Hawkes had once been his heart’s desire. But he had never acted on that wish, though several of the artefacts in this room would have made it easy. Because Ollivan had never intended to be a killer.

  It might be too late for that, but there was only one way to find out.

  12

  Cassia snapped her shears and the flower heads tumbled to the ground.

  “If you like flowers, why do you wish to kill them?”

  Violet was propped on the bench that lined the edge of the small pavilion at the bottom of the Sims’ garden. It was late to be collecting cuttings for drying, but Cassia had left her grandfather’s dinner party wound tight with frustration, and this corner of the garden was her bit of calm.

  It also helped to have something sharp in her hand. With each snip of her shears, she cut away thoughts of Ollivan’s smug face and entitled words; of her mother’s enraptured gazes at her firstborn, the way she danced around the truth of his banishment. Even her grandfather, who would let the rules of his revered society win out without even attempting to magically alter the charter. Perhaps Jupitus thought he was winning by not letting Ollivan destroy the Society as they all knew it, but he was playing right into his hands.

  “I wish to kill a lot of things right now,” she replied, dealing a series of lethal blows to the climbing blossoms spilling into the pavilion. “Be thankful I’m restricting myself to plants.”

  “So you do this to get the violence out?”

  The thinly disguised note of alarm in her voice made Cassia smile. “It’s not the main appeal.”

  “Then why?”

  She collected the stems from the ground and held one to her nose. “After the bees and perfume, flowers will die, whether I cut them or not. But I can let a flower drop its petals, and the petals can rot on the ground, or I can protect them as they decay, so that they transform into something else. Something with a different kind of beauty.”

  “But they won’t be as beautiful as a fresh flower.”

  Cassia smiled. Violet wasn’t the first to find her predilection strange, but she didn’t mind. If it was only for her, that made it all the more precious. “They will be to me. Sometimes a thing is beautiful because it has endured. Like a sparrow’s skull, or a pale blue eggshell. Just because something is dead, it doesn’t make it worthless.”

  She gathered the cut flowers into a neat pile on the bench. All the while, she sensed the doll taking her measure.

  “These dead things are a comfort to you,” Violet said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re sort of like… treasured toys.”

  Cassia considered the pile of cuttings and shrugged. “I suppose, in a way. Though I don’t think people my age attach themselves to their toys the way children do.”

  A noise sounded from near the garden gate, and Cassia turned towards it. Sat as she was under the clara stone lamp of the pavilion, everything beyond was dim, but she could just make out the shape of a bird rustling the branches of a pear tree as it took flight.

  Cassia sank against the bench. What had she expected? That Jasper would let himself in, place his books on the bench, ask her how she’d slept? That was how their lessons always began, but today, he had never showed up.

  She had sent a messenger checking on him, knowing it was both the polite thing to do and a burden on Jasper, who had already made clear he was distancing himself from her on initiation night. She had looked for him one final time as Ollivan made his dramatic entrance, and seen him stalk from the room with a cold sneer. Cassia would probably have distanced herself too after her embarrassing display.

  Still, it had left her feeling confused and hollow to lose him. He had never seemed to care that she wasn’t skilled with her magic. He had been patient and reassuring through their lessons, determined that she would succeed but not irate when she did not. And now, out of nowhere, the only friendship Cassia had made since coming to the Heart was over.

  “I would like to be a comfort to you,” said Violet, and Cassia started. She was slow to remember what they had been talking about, and Violet’s wistfulness had caught her off guard.