Wayward Page 14

  Cassia turned back to the room. Ollivan’s books. He had thousands of them, on all kinds of magic. They lined most of the room across dozens of shelves; shelves that sagged under the haphazard piles of volumes he had crammed onto them. Ollivan wasn’t here, but the answers to what had happened in the garden might be. She would start there.

  There turned out to be some sense to Ollivan’s chaos; if only in how he organises his books, Cassia thought. Volumes about potion-making were stacked onto adjacent shelves, those about glamours and corporeal magic also. There was also a section on spell theory that could hold the answers, but how could Cassia guess when she didn’t know what she was looking for? She could only grab for the nearest book that looked like it might have some relevance and start skimming through.

  She had a pile of discarded books beside her, and an ancient-looking, leatherbound tome in her shaking hands when she heard a creak of a floorboard and a flapping, like wings.

  She spun. Ollivan was fighting his way out of his overcoat, which was on fire. He threw it to the floor and stamped on it, while simultaneously pawing at one side of his torso. There were… spikes impaled there, Cassia realised, as he tore each from his flesh with a groan, still dancing on his blazing coat. Then his eyes landed on the jug on his washstand, and in one motion he grabbed it with both hands and tipped it over himself and the coat.

  Dropping the jug unceremoniously onto his coat, Ollivan half collapsed across one corner of his bed, an arm gripping the bedpost like a sailor clinging for life to the mast of a ship in a storm. It was then that he finally saw Cassia standing in the corner with a book in her hand, and froze.

  They stared at one another. Ollivan pushed himself upright, one arm cradling the injured side of his torso. He glanced at the glamour by the window and back at her, then sighed like the whole thing was a grave injustice.

  “Oh, earth and stars,” he muttered. “Listen. Cassia—”

  “I’ve killed Jasper Hawkes.”

  Ollivan’s expression wiped blank, his mouth hanging open on whatever excuse he had been about to give. Then he blinked several times and regarded his sodden person with what appeared to be scepticism.

  “Where?”

  Where wouldn’t have been Cassia’s first question, but it was better than marching from the room to tell their mother.

  “In the garden. Just now.” Ollivan’s eyes flicked around the room, and Cassia intuited the next question. “I left him in the pavilion.”

  “You killed Jasper Hawkes? You?” He shook a sleeve of his dinner jacket, and more water splattered the floor. That Ollivan wasn’t all that perturbed by the news boded well for her. But then she realised the arm he shook water from was a distraction. The other waved vaguely in the direction of the window and undid the glamour he had used to disguise his own wrongdoing that evening, and the relaxed levity in his manner made sense: Ollivan may have broken his curfew, but Cassia had killed someone. This time, he was off the hook. “Did you use a weapon? I don’t mean to disparage you in any way, but I hear you and magic are struggling with some differences of opinion.”

  Cassia snapped the book shut and set it down. Was she really having this conversation with him? Had any of this really happened? “I’m not sure what I did, exactly. One moment we were talking and the next, he had keeled over.”

  “Could it have been poison?” Ollivan gestured to her fingers, which were stained green. “I assume you were handling a range of flora out there.”

  Cassia turned over each flower she had plucked in her mind, but she didn’t know of any that could kill someone on contact. Besides, if it had been poison, wouldn’t she be lying cold in the pavilion too?

  “It wasn’t poison.” She pushed down her pride and did what she had come to his room to do; the only thing she could think of. “Will you help me?”

  Ollivan was watching her sceptically, like he thought this was all some kind of ruse. She couldn’t blame him; she wouldn’t believe her either. But she needed his help, and if it meant saying please…

  Cassia took a deep breath and prepared herself. “Pl—”

  “Well, I can’t pretend I’m not curious,” said Ollivan, and he disappeared.

  Stunned, she stood for a beat in the sudden solitude before racing back to where she had left the body. When she emerged from the hedge around the rose garden, she found the lamp in the pavilion illuminated again and Ollivan stood beneath it.

  But the pavilion was otherwise empty.

  “You didn’t eat any of these plants, did you?” said Ollivan, whose mood appeared to have plummeted upon not discovering a dead body in the garden. “Those blue ones look like they could cause hallucinations.”

  “I left him here.” Cassia stepped slowly into the pavilion, braced for whatever this night’s hundred-and-tenth nasty surprise would be, but Jasper was truly, fully gone. She squinted across the garden. The gate was open. After his unexplained episode, it seemed Jasper had got up and walked away. At least, she could hope that’s what had happened. “I thought he wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t find a pulse.”

  “Well, it seems he found it by himself. Next time could you please be sure he’s dead? Something sharp in the jugular ought to do it.”

  Cassia rubbed her eyes. “And he took Violet, of course. I forgot about her.”

  “Who’s Violet?”

  “She’s this… doll that I found.”

  Ollivan’s head snapped up, his eyes wide. “What doll?”

  When Cassia hesitated, caught off guard, he snapped the question at her a second time, the urgency even sharper. “I found an enchanted doll,” she hastened to explain. “I know it’s a children’s toy but I just sort of—”

  “Found it where?”

  “At the Wending Place. Jasper snuck me into the—”

  “—junk room.”

  Cassia felt cold. Was it looking at Ollivan, soaking wet, or the dawning sense that something she couldn’t grasp was happening?

  “Where did you leave it? Cassia!” When she was slow to reply again, Ollivan took hold of her shoulders and ducked so they were eye to eye.

  But Cassia barely noticed him. She was gazing uneasily at something behind him, something that hadn’t been there a moment before. “She’s right there,” she said quietly.

  Violet was standing at the other end of the pavilion. She was supported by nothing but her own small legs, and in the light of the clara stone lamp above, her glass eyes appeared to glow, the way they had in the junk room.

  “Violet.” Cassia took a step towards the doll, reaching down to grasp her, but Ollivan pulled her back and put himself between them.

  “Don’t,” he said, his voice soft. “Don’t go near.”

  He shucked off his sodden dinner jacket; wincingly, but without making any sudden movements.

  “Ollivan?”

  “It’s a Guysman spell,” he said in answer to her unasked question.

  “A what?”

  “Everard Guysman. He was a fifteenth-century spellmaker. And a madman.” He said all this in a quiet, flat voice that gave away his tension. He took two long, slow steps towards Violet, jacket raised before him, as the doll stood unthreatening and silent. When he was in range, he threw the waterlogged jacket over Violet, and immediately crouched to wrap it tight around her. Cassia sensed a flare of magic as he cast a spell on the jacket – a binding spell of some kind, she guessed – then the tension leached visibly from his shoulders, and he looked up at her.

  “How long have you had this?” he asked.

  Cassia still wasn’t sure what a Guysman spell was, but the words spellmaker and madman told her all she needed to know. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “In a manner of speaking. How long has it been… moving on its own?”

  “Moving?” Cassia thought of Violet’s roaming eyes, but she didn’t think that’s what he meant. “She doesn’t.”

  “She?”

  She refused to flush in front of him, and opted for scowling instead. “You’re the full-grown man who apparently owns an enchanted doll.”

  Ollivan climbed to his feet with a heavy sigh. The doll-jacket package dripped in his arms. “She is not an enchanted doll. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bed.”

  “But—” Ollivan held the jacket at a distance, as if it carried refuse fished from the Thames and not something that mattered to her. “You can’t just… take her. She’s mine.”

  “You just said she was mine.”

  Cassia couldn’t push any harder without making a fool of herself – it was a doll, for stars’ sake. Ollivan raised an eyebrow in challenge, or maybe victory.

  And then he was gone.

  Cassia stared at the spot where Violet had been standing and shivered. Not an enchanted doll. Perhaps she should have known that; the spell had been far too sophisticated for a children’s toy. And deny her senses all she liked, she had been unsettled to see Violet standing where she hadn’t been a moment before.

  But now she had even more questions than before. She was at Ollivan’s bedroom door a minute later. She tried to let herself in, but after transporting back up here, Ollivan had clearly had the sense to lock the door, if not sense enough to know that wouldn’t stop her. She crouched down and put her mouth near the keyhole.

  “Ollivan,” she hissed. “Do you forget I know you weren’t in your room all night?”

  For a moment, nothing. Then the key rattled in the lock in a decidedly irate fashion, and the door opened. Ollivan was halfway out of his waterlogged clothes. “Be so good as to fetch me a towel and you can come in,” he said.

  Cassia had no chance to tell him he wasn’t in a position to negotiate before he closed the door again, so she swallowed her frustration
and fetched one.

  Ollivan had discarded his clothes in a heap when she returned, and he sat slumped on the edge of his bed with just a blanket across his lap. A blanket that he tried to use to hide the five or six ugly, bleeding burn marks on his chest and ribs. When he saw her looking at them, he gave up and finished applying ointment from the tin on the bed beside him.

  “How in the heaven and earth did you get into trouble between dinner and now? And after Grandfather gave you a curfew.”

  “You should see the other fellow. At least I assume I fared better, since you mistook him for a corpse just now.” He was rubbing his hair with the towel, and when he emerged from under it, he attempted a smile. Cassia didn’t return it. “It seems the bastard had the sense to booby-trap his flat to the nines. I did try to tell you to stay away from him.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t consider you a fountain of sage advice.”

  “You should. I’m smarter than you.”

  Incensed, Cassia snatched at the towel she had brought him. He tried to grab onto it but she was faster, and yanked it from his reach. “Then what did you do, genius?” she demanded, holding the towel out of reach. “What in the heaven and earth is a Guysman spell?”

  Ollivan sighed. He leaned back on his hands and stared at the ceiling. “Jasper snatched that enchanted doll off a child for sport. There was a spell he had in mind, I don’t remember what, but he kept the doll because it would make a good test subject.” He grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I turned it into a trap. The Guysman spell is an enchantment we… found. Or rather, the workings of one. A draft. Everard Guysman never finished a working version of it, but I had some ideas on how to build upon what he’d started. How to make something that absorbs magic.”

  Cassia couldn’t help but shudder. It was perverse, horrifying, that a thing could exist that was capable of sucking away magic like that. It threatened everything that mattered to the people of the Witherward. And Ollivan had made it.

  “Guysman designed it as a way of neutralising the work of another Sorcerer. He had a rival he wished to sabotage at a showcase. He imagined the enchantment would be performed on some kind of object with a shutter or a stopper. One he could open and close at will.”

  “Is that why you put it in the junk room? Because Jasper does all of those experiments in there and you wanted them to fail?”

  “I left the doll where I’d found it, so Jasper would enchant it as he’d intended to. My take on the Guysman was not so… controlled.” He smiled cruelly. “If you ask me, the man’s idea of sabotage was a little tame. There were some records in that junk room; Guysman’s notes but a wealth of other spells too, things that would ruin Jasper’s life if the wrong people found out he knew about them. Maybe even get him killed.”

  He gestured for the towel and Cassia let him have it back. “What are you talking about? Magic isn’t regulated like that. It isn’t regulated at all.”

  Ollivan laughed. “That’s what we’re supposed to think, yes. The records we found – a series of ledgers – were locked in an archive beneath the Chambers of Alchemy. They tell a different story. Officially, raw magic is this… sacred good, and a gift from the stars. Oh yes, if we manipulate it in certain ways, it can cause suffering – death, even – but that’s the failing of human beings, not of magic. Sorcerers can never be persecuted for what we are because our magic is pure. Untainted. Don’t you see how some might find that a lie worth protecting? Because it is a lie. Magic is capable of terrible things, with the right application. And the powers in the Heart have been making it their business to bury those things for centuries, along with everyone who ever knew them. And then Jasper and I stole them.”

  Cassia couldn’t help but ask, even though she feared the answer. “Terrible things like what?”

  Her brother gave a nonchalant shrug. “Oh, let’s see. Animating a corpse? Turning an animal on a victim to ravage them until the beast’s heart gives out? A thousand-and-one things to get addicted to, before they kill you. I’ve seen recipes for potions that make one crave the taste of human flesh—”

  “Stop.” She realised she had put her hands over her eyes, perhaps because she couldn’t look at him any more. “I understand. Somebody had the sense to ban these things and that was enough for you, wasn’t it? You were like a moth to a flame.” Ollivan shot her a hurt look and she ignored it, because she knew she was right. But there was more. Rebellion had led Ollivan to plenty of places, but it had led him to magic for a reason. “Father made you like this, didn’t he?”

  He looked up, surprised by the rare mention of Grayson Sims, who had made the study and teaching of magic his life’s work.

  “It probably started like that,” said Ollivan. “I used to visit him at the university when I was small. I even saw him give a lecture or two. Sometimes it felt like the only way to get his attention was with magic.”

  Cassia made a noise, half agreement and half surprise. It seemed a small thing, but that flame of something – something deeper than understanding – was so foreign when it came to her brother that for a second it flared inside her like an inferno. Repulsed, Cassia snuffed it out.

  “But we’re talking about magic, Cassia. Magic. The very nature of the world – what’s possible – it’s defined by the boundaries of what magic can do. And no one even knows where those boundaries truly lie, or why. Just think about that. Isn’t it enough of a reason?”

  It was enough of a reason, when he put it like that. But it didn’t make her first instinct wrong. There were countless ways to explore and practise magic; Ollivan had picked the one that pitted him against Jupitus.

  “And you… practised this banned magic?”

  Ollivan was rueful. “Some of it. Those were only the worst examples. Besides, as I say, my interest was in the theory. The underlying mechanisms.”

  He did not say Jasper’s name, but the implication was clear.

  “I left the Guysman in the archive so that when spells started winking out like candles all over the Heart, it would eventually lead back to those ledgers; to that room. The effect would be fastest and most destructive at the Wending Place, so someone would trace it to there eventually. I even worked a safety into the spell so that I’d be long gone and above suspicion when the chaos started. A delay, so that the spell wouldn’t wake until I was in the Otherworld.”

  Cassia felt her lungs release. “So this Guysman spell hasn’t been woken yet,” she said.

  Ollivan shot a look at the bundle that was leaking onto his desk. Cassia didn’t like the thought of Violet inside that mess. It caused her a pang of guilt to realise her hair would be ruined.

  “That depends. I assume Violet encouraged you to practise an enchantment on her?”

  “Well… yes.”

  “And did you? Has any magic touched her at all?”

  As if playing with a doll wasn’t embarrassing enough already. Cassia massaged the spot between her brows. “I woke the enchantment, didn’t I?”

  “Given Jasper’s unexplained almost-death, I’m assuming so. I designed the delay so that the vessel needed a taste of magic before the spell would activate. I imagined that Jasper would trigger it unwittingly when he got round to experimenting with the thing, and the longer it took him, the cleaner I would look. I just didn’t imagine I would be back in the Witherward before then.”

  Cassia narrowed her eyes at him. “You think it was Violet who did… whatever that was to Jasper.”

  Ollivan laughed. “Well it wasn’t you, was it?”

  She didn’t think he was even trying to sound condescending; it was just so obvious that he couldn’t help it. Of course Cassia hadn’t magically attacked someone without even trying. What had she been thinking? That her magic had sensed her tension and leapt to her defence?

  It was typical. Not only had it not been Cassia’s magic; it had been Ollivan’s. Only her brother could make her feel small for not killing someone.

  “You said Violet was supposed to neutralise spells,” she said, hearing the resentment in her own voice, “so what did she do to Jasper?”

  Something I didn’t mean her to, was the answer written across his face. It gave Cassia a pang of satisfaction to see him struggling with how to reply and keep his dignity.