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  “Partners,” he said to Jasper, and it was done.

  They stood in awkward silence on the outskirts of the room as the enchantournament began. It was Jasper who spoke first.

  “I admired your initiation spell. That you enchanted your phantoms to move as the High Sorcerer moved.” A sharp-edged grin spread across his face. “And that you made him laugh at it.”

  That had been the real trick of the performance. It had been a year since Ollivan had finally been pressed into gaining admission to the Society, and he had taken his revenge with his chosen enchantment. He had conjured three dozen sparkling, pearlescent spectres of his grandfather; pretty, ethereal things each in a different hilarious garb; babies’ overalls, nightclothes, frothy, hoop-skirted dresses. He had designed the spell to latch onto Jupitus; to raise the spectres’ hands when he did, to promise death with their glares when he saw Ollivan was making a mockery of him.

  But no one made a mockery of the High Sorcerer, especially someone he should have more control over, and so Jupitus had been forced to save face by laughing along. The Successors likewise had no choice but to laugh too, and Ollivan had been voted in unanimously.

  Was that the reason Jasper Hawkes watched him from the corners of every room he entered at the Wending Place? No other member had ever dared make mention of the prank beyond that night. And it was not just Ollivan’s magic Jasper was complimenting, it was his rebellion.

  They played a couple of rounds of the competition in easy company with one another. Jasper was more proficient with his magic than Ollivan had known, and they shared an eye for spectacle. In their first bout, Ollivan caused the floor of the common room to ripple, lifting waves of onlookers towards the ceiling and back again, which they found so fun they asked him to do it again. In the second, Jasper opened a window and drew in a flurry of snow, which he turned rainbow-coloured and sweet-tasting as it fell on the Successors. Inevitably, they wanted more of that too. To call either round a competition was too generous to their rivals.

  They were awaiting their third match when Jasper spoke quietly in his ear.

  “If you’d rather a real challenge, I know of one not far from here.”

  Looking back, Ollivan realised that Jasper was lonely, in his own way. In the way an actor performing the role of a lifetime to an empty theatre is lonely. He craved a witness as much as a friend; someone to think him clever and daring, to reaffirm the man he was trying to be but was forced to be in private. And he had chosen Ollivan as the safest confidante because he believed them to be the same. In some ways, they were. Hadn’t Ollivan been lured in that evening by a compliment no one else dared to pay him? Hadn’t he been entirely helpless to refuse when Jasper had told him with a look that where they were going was a dangerous secret?

  No one noticed them leave. They followed the river west, collars pulled up to their ears, heads bowed against the snow. Jasper walked with long, loping strides and did not keep step with Ollivan, instead walking several paces ahead. But the frequency with which he looked over his shoulder – every few strides, as if he feared Ollivan would disappear – belied any nonchalance.

  By the time they reached the shelter of the tunnel beneath the railway bridge, Ollivan was soaked through, and his face and fingers were numb with cold. The crunch of pebbles underfoot echoed off the arch above as he blew into his cupped hands. He almost stumbled into Jasper’s back when the boy stopped before a metal door halfway through the tunnel. He rapped twice, and the hollow thud rang around them.

  The door opened a crack and Jasper spoke to someone on the other side, then they were admitted into a dank, brick corridor that sloped gently down. Sounds like those of a raucous party or a heaving market grew louder as Jasper confidently led the way around several turns. A warmth Ollivan knew to be body heat burned his numb fingers but pulled him onwards. When the final turn ended in a crowded mezzanine and a set of rusting stairs, he knew in his whole body that whatever lay below was the thing he had been looking for.

  Five hundred people, maybe more, were pressed together around an Oracle woman and a rangy, snarling dog. The woman wielded a long staff, and was using it to take hits at the beast as she danced to keep out of its reach. The dog had set itself to disarming her; every time the woman got close, it snatched at the staff with its jaws or tried to swat it from her grip with a paw.

  A real animal would have no such sense. The woman was fighting a Changeling.

  “Jana is one of the best duellers here,” Jasper shouted over the crowd. “She’s an acolyte, trained in combat.”

  Acolytes were the militia of the Docklands. In the fathomless mass of all space and time an Oracle was capable of Seeing, they sought only to know the very next moment; to See where their opponent would step and know how to strike them down. No wonder she was winning.

  But even as Jasper spoke, Jana stumbled, exhaustion wrought on her sweat-soaked face. The Changeling saw their chance and lunged, but before they made contact, Jana ducked under their guard, and with a two-hand grip on her staff, forced the dog away from her and out of the ring.

  The crowd roared. Money changed hands. The dog became a man who was pulled to his feet by onlookers. He spat blood in Jana’s direction and limped away, cupping his jaw. New fighters were announced – a Sorcerer and a Wraith – and the next duel commenced.

  “We meet under every full moon,” said Jasper. “Dozens of different locations all over the city. Every faction.”

  Ollivan’s blood was pumping. He felt like he had stumbled upon treasure; like a child waking up on his birthday. Every faction; all fighting with magic outside of their own territory, all of it against the Principles and right under Jupitus Fisk’s nose. It was the perfect revenge for the old man’s authoritarian hold on his life.

  Ollivan started duelling at every evening. Every opponent was his grandfather, every broken rib and exquisite pain was a medal that said he had fought back. He introduced Jasper to his distributor, who sold the magical drugs he designed to customers all over the city. Jasper introduced Ollivan to the crook who auctioned his stolen wares and ferried them out of London. There was no trust required to fall in together, or so he’d thought; the risks their choices brought were all the insurance needed. If they went down, they were going together.

  It was only in hindsight that Ollivan realised how little he had ever known of Jasper Hawkes. He was an only child who thought of his father the way Ollivan did Jupitus, though in private Ollivan sneered at the comparison; boys like Jasper would never appreciate how inconsequential their petty complaints with their families truly were. He was disinterested in girls, not because he was unattracted to them, but because he found their attraction to him unappealing. He kept a cat. In places with Changelings, pets made most people uncomfortable, including Ollivan. Even working animals were only relied upon when absolutely necessary. But Jasper was fond of the things that made people uncomfortable.

  He was working on an enchantment to that effect the night Ollivan had let himself into the flat above the abattoir and collapsed onto the moth-eaten couch. Jasper ignored him. The cat sat on the arm and stared with round green eyes until Ollivan looked away. He didn’t think those eyes were human, but it was hard to know for sure.

  “Look,” said Jasper after many long minutes of toiling at the table. He tossed the thing he had made to Ollivan, who caught it. It was a locket removed from its chain. “It’s my aunt. My mother wants a locket with her sister’s portrait for her birthday.”

  He was holding back giddy laughter, so Ollivan opened the piece to see what Jasper had done. The animated woman in the frame was screaming silently at him, horror wrought on her tiny features. She slammed her fists against an invisible barrier, and cried and begged as if desperate to escape the painting. It was pointless and unsettling, and not even very clever. As Ollivan wordlessly threw the thing back at Jasper, he wondered if this wasn’t all very boring.

  Jasper’s joy shattered. “What’s the matter with you?” he sneered.

  Ollivan let his head fall back against the couch and closed his eyes. He swallowed before speaking, but his voice still broke. “Sybella’s left me.”

  He had not said the words out loud. They shocked him as acutely as they had coming from her.

  Jasper made a disdainful sound. “You were tired of her anyway.”

  “No—” Ollivan began, but he couldn’t find the calm to tell Jasper how he was wrong, or ask how a person grew tired of Sybella Dentley. If Jasper believed that, it was because Ollivan had allowed him to believe it. But the truth was Ollivan had seen the rest of his life with Sybella in it. He could not convince himself that only a month had passed since they’d been curled around each other in the chair in his bedroom, murmuring plans about a house in Chelsea, with windows that moved in a circle to look like the gondolas of the big wheel where they’d first kissed, and a gaggle of children with her freckles and his eyes.

  Stars, he was drowning. Ollivan loathed nothing more than his own helplessness, and while he couldn’t persuade Sybella back, he could take his mind off her. And he would do so in the most spectacular fashion.

  He lifted his head off the couch. “Hey. Do you remember that door?”

  Jasper looked up from packing the macabre locket in a gift box and grinned. Of course he remembered the door. For a time, it had been all they talked about. They had found it one night when they had broken into the Chambers of Alchemy to lay pranks to trip up enforcers; a wholly unremarkable door at the bottom of a staircase thick with dust and cold with disuse. Were it not for the sharp sting of magic they both felt when they touched the handle, they would never have thought on it again. It must have been storage of some kind, they had decided. Storage for valuables, Jasper had theorised. Storage for secrets, thought Ollivan.
br />   “You mean the door with the ward we couldn’t crack?”

  Ollivan smiled. “I think it’s time to try again.”

  * * *

  Ollivan trod softly as he approached the apartment. If Jasper was dead, he didn’t want to be caught at his home; if he wasn’t, the risk was being seen by Jasper himself.

  He thought again of this boy tutoring Cassia, and his stomach turned. What was his interest in her? Did he think she shared her brother’s inclinations, and that he could welcome her into the fold of his misdeeds? Had he used her to get at Ollivan’s notes?

  He feared the answer was worse; that Jasper’s interest in Cassia was sincere. His sister was beautiful, an outcast, a little odd. She had a standoffish, stone-faced way about her that might convince Jasper that she disdained all the same things he did. What was worse, Jasper could play a charming, mild-mannered young man when it served him. He didn’t doubt his nemesis’s ability to cheat his way into Cassia’s heart if he put his mind to it. Ollivan made a mental note to double his efforts to convince Cassia to stay away from him.

  But there were no lights on in the rooms Jasper occupied. They ran above a narrow alley that led to the back of the abattoir, through which was an external staircase that led to the flat. Ollivan crept to the bottom and listened. There was a feeling he had in being here; a slimy prickling on the back of his neck. A tightening in his stomach. It put him on edge. He stood for several minutes in perfect stillness, not daring to look away from the window above the alley and miss any signs of movement in the flat.

  Because if Jasper wasn’t dead, perhaps he was inside, and perhaps he was waiting for him. Ollivan wasn’t here for revenge, but if the opportunity presented itself, he would take it. He didn’t want to kill Jasper; he would gleefully hurt him though. And Jasper would expect as much. It gave Ollivan a sick thrill to imagine that the boy had got little sleep since he had stepped back through the portal.

  In some ways Ollivan’s year in the Otherworld had been a period of cooling off; in others, it had festered resentments. The only reason revenge was not his first port of call was that it didn’t serve his purpose. And his purpose was what mattered most; his life back. Magic. Unravel the Guysman before it incriminated him and made matters with Jupitus irreparable.

  But silence reigned, and the curtain did not flutter, so with slow steps Ollivan climbed the stairs. The old wood creaked under his weight, sending a fresh wave of anxiety over him with each step. He readied a spell at the tips of fingers he could not convince to stop shaking. Three steps from the top, he heard a soft click, and then a whirring, fizzing sound halfway between a grinding cog and steam escaping.

  And Ollivan understood. The prickling on his neck. The tightness in his stomach.

  It wasn’t just tension. It was magic.

  A flare of burning orange burst into life on his left. Ollivan didn’t wait to see what the spell was. He leapt out of its path – backwards, air replacing wood as he missed the steps and went tumbling.

  He was not fast enough to miss the flaming darts entirely, which caught him on one side and tore through layers of clothing to bury themselves in his flesh.

  The world spun around him, fire consumed him, and all Ollivan could do was brace to hit the ground.

  14

  Jasper was dead.

  He had fallen face first to the ground, arms at his sides, one leg askew, one cheek mashed against the bricks that lined the floor of the pavilion. He looked somewhat comical.

  “Jasper?” It was just a whisper; her true voice stuck in her throat.

  Cassia crossed the pavilion slowly – eking out the moments before she confirmed what she already knew – and knelt beside him. It wasn’t so easy to find where his pulse should be with his head bent at such an angle. She poked clumsily at the flesh under his chin a couple of times, but found nothing.

  Her next instinct, she was ashamed to find, was to turn off the lamp that hung above them and douse the scene in darkness, then retreat; out of the pavilion and into the shadow of the hedge where she was as good as invisible. There, she gulped in air to keep up with the galloping of her heart, and tried to think of what to do.

  Cassia had never killed anybody before, which was unusual for one so close to the powers in London; so close to Jupitus Fisk especially, for whom violence was a core tenet of leadership. She had always reasoned that it would happen eventually, but she had imagined it differently. First, that it wouldn’t be until after she’d mastered her magic. Second, that it would be in defence of something worthwhile, like her people, or her own life. And third, that it wouldn’t be a fellow Sorcerer.

  Was it better or worse that it wasn’t a militia of a rival faction, or a would-be assassin come for her grandfather, or someone else of value in the Heart? It did not break the Principles to kill one of her own people; that was a matter dealt with by every faction in their own way. Jupitus’s way was execution. If he favoured her for being his granddaughter, perhaps she would only be banished.

  Would that be so bad?

  The thought surprised her, the implication so dismal that it stung the backs of her eyes. Were things so awful, that she would shrug at being banished to another world? She could fit into the Otherworld London with a little effort. Forget magic altogether and find something she was actually good at. Growing things, perhaps. Cassia would like to grow things. Or perhaps the reason she was drawn to banishment was that she wanted to prove that she could do something Ollivan had failed at.

  Ollivan.

  Her brother would not turn her in. Not out of love, or loyalty, but out of a life-long disrespect for their grandfather’s rule. Nor was he likely to care that it was Jasper she had ended, given the way he had spoken about him at dinner.

  It was a risk; she would turn him in without a second thought, after all. But she doubted Ollivan thought of anything beyond himself enough for Cassia’s animosity to be mutual. Her brother barely knew she existed.

  That was about to change.

  The servants had all turned in, so she slipped through the kitchen unnoticed and crept silently up the stairs. The light was still on in Ollivan’s room, and Cassia didn’t knock. Being caught willingly interacting with him would be as damning as the body she had left in the garden.

  The broken mirror was the first thing to catch her attention. He had probably smashed it in one of his rages when he transported home from their grandfather’s dinner. That he hadn’t mended it – a spell well within his capabilities – was the first piece of evidence that he had not let the matter go.

  The second was that he didn’t acknowledge her when she entered without knocking. He had moved a wing-backed chair to face the window, and he sat with an arm draped despondently over the side, and a foot propped against the windowsill.

  “Ollivan,” she whispered as she shut the door gently.

  She only realised she was still breathing hard when she crossed the room to stand by the window and thought how she must look. Pale, probably, and wide-eyed. Not unlike Jasper when he had showed up in the garden. “Ollivan,” she said again.

  Still, he did not acknowledge her. The scowl he aimed out at the world did not even twitch. Typical. Nineteen, and still throwing tantrums like a five-year-old.

  “Ollivan, Jasper is dead.”

  In her brother’s defence, she couldn’t fault his thinking. There weren’t many things one could say to him in such a mood that he would listen to. How was he to know she would burst in here in the dead of night and announce a murder? It was the one misfortune that would catch him out.

  For Ollivan had no response to the news at all, proving that this was not Ollivan, but a glamour designed to hide the fact he was not in his room despite his curfew.

  A disrespect for their grandfather’s rule indeed. And Cassia had truly believed him sufficiently warned this time.

  “Stars forsake you, Ollivan.”

  She pressed her head against the window and tried to think. The body in the garden thrummed in her awareness in the same way as someone talking about her across the room, yet here, away from it, it seemed too impossible to be real. How had this happened? How had she lost so much control of her magic that it was capable of doing something like this against her will? She had never even read of a person’s power going rogue that way, let alone how to fix it.