Wayward Read online

  “This is why I’ve been looking for that starsforsaken doll since I got back,” he said. “I didn’t have long to set the enchantment, five minutes at most when I was supposed to be saying goodbye to Mother and… I was emotional. But I was getting shunted through the portal at first light and I couldn’t wait to be in a better frame of mind before performing the spell. There would be no other time.”

  “So your intention was poisoned,” said Cassia.

  “May have been poisoned.”

  “Earth and stars, that doll knocked someone out, Ollivan. And who knows what else it did to him.”

  “Well it seems he was well enough to get up and walk from the garden.” He rubbed his eyes. He put a finger in his right ear and jiggled it around. Perhaps it was waterlogged. “But. Yes, the intention was not my finest work. When I was in the Otherworld, with nothing but a bleak, grey future staring me in the face, I started to consider the spell a bit more. Where its… weaknesses were.”

  “Where you got it wrong, you mean. That enchantment could do anything, and we have no way of knowing what, because you were too hot-headed to think.”

  “I am trying to be forthcoming with you, Cassia,” he snapped. “I don’t have to tell you any of this. And if you hadn’t stolen it in the first place, that spell would still be sitting dormant in the junk room.”

  “If I hadn’t—” He shot a look at the door and Cassia realised she was shouting. It occurred to her somewhere in the back of her mind that the only thing that ever made her raise her voice was her brother.

  “What were you doing in the junk room in the first place? Or the Wending Place for that matter? Excepting occasions, only the President is allowed to have guests.”

  “It was so I could practise my magic in private. Jasper said no one ever went to the junk room. He’d stolen the key.”

  Ollivan smirked. “It seems Jasper wants a new me. He’s certainly chosen the right family to try to ingratiate himself with.”

  “Why are you such a bastard?” Cassia whispered.

  His head snapped up. His eyes flashed with that famous temper. “Excuse me?”

  “Not everything is about you, Ollivan,” said Cassia, her own temper flaring. “Jasper and I are friends.”

  Ollivan stifled a laugh and put on a serious face. “Where did you and Jasper conduct your lessons?”

  “What’s that got to do with—” Cassia huffed out a breath. “In the garden.”

  “And did you ever show him around the house? Did he ever ask you to show him around?”

  “Well… yes.”

  “Was he curious about my belongings? Storage? What Mother had kept, and where?”

  It had only been a month or so ago. Cassia had been losing patience with a spell, and Jasper had suggested a distraction. “I pointed out your room. He was just making conversation,” she said slowly, though doubt was creeping in.

  “I had notes. Books’ worth of them, on spells from the ledgers. Evidence that would incriminate him as much as it would me, if I decided revenge was worth it. They’re gone. So are the ledgers.”

  I knew he was going to do something like this, Jasper had said. I even prepared.

  No. This was Ollivan she was talking to. He was just trying to make her feel a fool. “You’re lying.”

  He was quiet a moment as he studied her with a scowl. Cassia readied herself to fire back with as much venom as he gave, but after a while he looked away. “I suppose it doesn’t matter,” he said quietly.

  “Why, Ollivan? Why do all of this to set Jasper up in the first place?”

  “Because he got me banished,” he said fiercely, eyes flashing. “He tried to ruin my stars-damned life.”

  Cassia smiled. She modelled it after one of his smiles; the derisive half-smirk, half-grimace that he liked to level at people he thought were stupider than him. “Tell me, please, how you killing someone was Jasper’s fault. I haven’t had a good laugh in a long time.”

  There was the smile; the very one. She folded her arms to maintain her composure.

  “Say I laid the whole thing out for you, exactly what happened.” His voice was level, but there was self-pity behind it. “Say it was his word against mine. Would you believe me?”

  Jasper had asked her something similar that same night, and she had not hesitated over the answer. But still, Cassia gave Ollivan her full consideration. She had seen a different side to Jasper tonight, one that threw the sensible, gentle version she knew into question. But Ollivan had it in for him, she knew now that it was true. Cassia would probably have as much nervous energy if a Sorcerer with Ollivan’s skill and a fierce vendetta had just landed back in her universe. And then there was Ollivan’s claim about Jasper becoming her tutor; a watery assertion that whatever his reasons – an interest in Ollivan’s belongings or an interest in the High Sorcerer’s family – Jasper was using her. As if Ollivan knew more of what had occurred these past few months from another dimension than she did living it.

  She studied him. He had come home about as worse for wear two dozen times in the only year they’d lived together since she was five. He wore an angry, sullen glare as he waited for her response, the same starsforsaken expression he always wore when he challenged someone to call him out on whatever awful thing he’d done or blatant lie he’d told. Yes, she had seen shades of wrong in Jasper tonight, but she saw Ollivan in full colour.

  “No,” she told him. “Of course I wouldn’t believe you.”

  His head dropped, but not before Cassia saw the hurt in his eyes. The flutter of guilt came before she could convince herself it was an act. No, not an act. Ollivan always truly believed himself the one wronged.

  “So Jasper has you on a string, as he once did me.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not about Jasper. It’s about you. I suppose you think Jasper’s also to blame for maybe nearly dying in our pavilion because he provoked you into this most recent stupid idea of yours.” She gestured to the wet jacket in which Violet was still bound. “Just tell me you know how you plan to destroy it.”

  “Of course I do. I’ve been perfecting the unravelling spell for a year. If you would just pass me my notebook, the red one – ah.”

  “What’s ah?”

  “I left it in the President’s Sanctuary.” He yawned loudly and fell back onto his bed. “All the better. I’m too tired to deal with it now. I’ll take it to the Wending Place with me in the morning.”

  He looked exhausted. She hadn’t even got to the bottom of how he ended up on fire by some workings of Jasper’s – ostensibly – but she was exhausted too, and being around him only made it worse.

  She turned to the door, then back, the jacket on the desk tugging at her. If Ollivan was right about how dangerous the spell was – and he would never have exaggerated how stupid he’d been – then there was nothing for it; Violet needed to be destroyed. Cassia wished she didn’t regret that so much. She had the melancholy urge to say goodbye but did so silently, like a prayer to the stars, so her brother couldn’t mock her.

  “Make sure you do,” she said as she left the room. “And hope that I don’t see fit to tell Grandfather that you made it in the first place.”

  His humourless laugh came to her as she shut the door. “Right. If the first dozen threats don’t sufficiently frighten me, I’ll be sure to keep yours in mind.”

  15

  “… and once the burn victims are pickling happily in their ointments, I’ll be heading back to the Wending Place to deal with three dozen scintillating tasks Miss Dentley has earmarked for me. I plan to escape in record time, but I fear I’ll be stumbling home just before midnight. So please don’t set a place for dinner.”

  Alana rubbed her temples as Ollivan’s ten-minute soliloquy came to a close. “What a life you’re leading these days. Did your grandfather mention for how long I have to hear these morning sermons?”

  Ollivan put a hand to his heart in mock offence. “But you always said we should spend more time together.”

  “I was imagining afternoon tea once in a while. Trust you to let it come to this.”

  “Then I’m dismissed?”

  He was turning on his heel when he heard Alana rise from the couch. “Just a moment.”

  A man has a way of recognising his mother’s tone. This one told Ollivan that he might as well put his case down. He had lined the inside with linens; it ought not to leak onto the rug.

  “Ollivan, you know that your grandfather took no pleasure in banishing you, don’t you?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Let’s not be so sure about that.”

  “Well…” She shook her head in a long-suffering manner, and Ollivan offered a smile. She returned it gratefully.

  They could be like this, when all was well. By the grace of the stars, his mother was not the thug her father was. Perhaps that was because of her father’s thuggishness. Perhaps she had been the one tasked with tempering him after her mother, Ollivan’s grandmother, had died when Alana was just a child. Whatever the reason, he was hopeful Alana would make a more even-handed ruler than Jupitus one day.

  She ruined that illusion as soon as it entered Ollivan’s mind.

  “The fact is, your grandfather’s first duty is to the Heart,” she went on, sobering like the man himself had stepped into the room. “Not to us, his family. I forgot that last night. But he has no choice but to treat us – to lead us – the same way he would lead any other Sorcerer.” Her eyes flickered away from his. “And it’s the same way I must rule when I’m High Sorcerer. You know enough of how this works to understand that.”

  He knew enough, because she had trained him. If you had turned out how we hoped, if you hadn’t been made a pariah, if you had been High Sorcerer, it would be expected of you too. If she was trying to engend
er some understanding of the way he had been treated by implying he would treat his children and grandchildren that way too, she was going the wrong way about it. It was precisely why Ollivan despised the very idea of power and everything it stood for. He did not wish to bow to his own office, as his mother had clearly already resigned herself to doing.

  “If,” Ollivan said.

  “What?”

  “If you are High Sorcerer, Mother.” He spread his arms and gestured to himself, then reclaimed his case from the floor. “Clearly, things do not always go according to Grandfather’s design.”

  Again, he attempted to leave, and again, Alana stopped him.

  “You should spend some time with your sister, while you can,” she clipped. He had clearly struck a nerve; her tone was full of accusation. They were back to swiping at one another. “Make some effort to get to know her.”

  Ollivan could not quite account for the quiet fury that set him alight, but this one accusation – this, of all things – he knew he could not endure. He let the case fall from his hands once more and hit the rug with a thud, only belatedly worrying for the binding spell on its contents.

  “I’ve failed to make an effort to know my sister? My sister who you sent away when I was seven years old? Whom I was never allowed the chance to know after you made her a pawn of the Heart because your papa told you to? Tell me, will you groom her for politics now that I’ve outlasted my usefulness in that lane, or is there a nice place for her among Grandfather’s foot soldiers perhaps? The ranks are a little thinner after this morning.”

  Alana had drawn so tense he could see the tendons in her neck and the whites of her eyes. “You know nothing,” she hissed at him, spittle flying from her lips. “Nothing of what it takes to wake up and coax hundreds of thousands of people through survival every day. You were lucky to have been banished. You would never have lasted in this London.”

  Perhaps he got his temper from her. He only wished she would unleash it as freely on her father as she did on him. He had been entirely wrong, he thought, as he swept up his case and left.

  Alana Sims had all the makings of the tyrant her father was.

  * * *

  The Whisperers had pushed into the Docklands – Oracle territory – in the early hours and won a stretch of road that was easier to defend than their previous border. It had probably helped the Whisperers that the Oracles had had problems near their southwest border too; the border they shared with the Heart. A distillery had exploded in Southwark, wreaking havoc and causing death and injury on both sides of the border. Eight Sorcerers and considerably more Oracles had lost their lives.

  Five of the Sorcerers killed had been militia. They had realised the danger to their own people when the distillery caught fire, said their surviving comrades, and a band of them had flocked into the Docklands to try to stop the fire. The effort was unsuccessful, and the Oracles had suffered two crushing losses, their militia and their Sight weakened by the double misfortune of an attack at one border and a horrendous accident at another.

  This Ollivan pieced together by talking to some of the sixty-something injured he was helping to tend at an overrun hospital on Blue Anchor Road. Sybella had offered the Successors’ help and called upon a dozen of them to fulfil their charitable requirement. Given the extra shifts Ollivan had taken on, it was basic arithmetic that he was likely to be among them.

  The rest of his understanding of the events he pieced together alone. His grandfather had long wanted that distillery, and he would wager that an Oracle questioned about how the enforcers came to be there would give a different version of events. It was just a little too inconvenient for the Docklands that at the same time Whitechapel attacked, a valuable asset elsewhere was in danger, less than a week after Lord Voss and the High Sorcerer parleyed at the Wending Place.

  How the distillery came to be destroyed – well, Oracles were the ones blessed with Sight, but anyone paying attention could predict them as well. When they Saw they would lose the distillery to Jupitus, they had blown it up, the victims among their own people be damned. They had shown as much care for their own countless times before, and Jupitus had shown as much cunning. Ollivan was in no doubt the explosion wasn’t an accident.

  “Does Sybella dislike me?” said Lev, breaking Ollivan out of his dark thoughts; thoughts of how he would ever get the better of someone who would go to lengths he dared not.

  They were at the makeshift medicine counter that had been set up in the middle of the hall, Lev soaking strips of gauze in the burn salve Ollivan was making. As well as the salve, they’d been making pain tonics of rudimentary formulas, a smell-inhibiting potion – for those who couldn’t stomach the smell of burning flesh – and a powder that, when brushed over a person’s eyelids, caused them short-term memory loss. Lev had wondered aloud about the need for the latter – until a man was brought in screaming in shock. He had seen the burned-up husk of a dear friend’s body. Now, he had unseen it.

  “Nobody dislikes you, Lev,” Ollivan assured him.

  “Then why couldn’t she assign this duty to someone less passionately committed to having a good time?” he said, transferring the ointment-soaked gauze to another bowl at arm’s length. “This is not a good time.”

  He could have fooled Ollivan. Between batches of medicines, Lev had been working the room like they were at a soiree, making patients laugh and flirting with healers.

  “I’m sure you can offset the difference with the three party invitations you’ve collected.”

  “It’s four now,” said Lev, beaming.

  Ollivan tried to share in his good spirits and failed. They had been brainstorming ideas to keep him in the Witherward, and no solution was presenting itself.

  “Have you thought of adding an amendment to the charter?” Virgil had said when he came to collect more gauze. He had volunteered for the least pleasant job going; cleaning and dressing burns. Ollivan sometimes wondered if Virgil was only happy when he was miserable. “Something that says you can run for a second term, to give yourself more time.”

  Ollivan shook his head. “It’s been tried, by multiple people. The Wending Place has not taken kindly to any one of them. The last fellow fell through a hole that spontaneously generated in the floor, into the cellar that doesn’t exist, and hasn’t been seen since. You know that stone hand that emerges at the bottom of the main staircase every once and while and trips people? They think it’s his. Besides, I’m nineteen. I’d be too old to run in the next election even if I was eligible.”

  “What if you found somewhere to live in another territory?” Lev said now. “Like Whitechapel! You could room with my cousin Finlay, start going by a different name, get out of your grandfather’s field of influence.”

  “Does your cousin Finlay like you enough to risk Jupitus Fisk’s wrath?”

  “Everyone likes me, remember?”

  “All the same, if I’m to retreat to another quarter, I’ll do it in secret. The more people involved, the more heads for Jupitus to make roll.”

  “Like mine?”

  Ollivan stopped funnelling swiftberry juice into the salve and turned to his friend. He knew all too well the things his grandfather would threaten if he thought it would give him some leverage. He had made that fact very clear to his friends before he involved them in his coup. “Are you afraid of him?”

  Lev grinned. “Of course not.”

  Perhaps you should be. He dumped the rest of the juice into the flask too quickly; it foamed threateningly and started turning blue. “I meant it when I said I’d do everything I could to protect you and Virgil, Lev,” he said. “But I’m back now. You’ve done your part. Maybe you should leave the rest up to me and keep your distance. I’ve got two years. I’ll think of something.”

  Ollivan added a pinch of ash to his concoction to undo the foaming and swirled the flask. It was several moments before he realised Lev had stopped his work. He was leaning against the workstation, worrying at a bit of dry skin on his palm that the salve had given him.

  “It’s not that scheming with you isn’t the peak of good fun for me, Lev,” he began, but Lev was shaking his head.

  “You wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place if it wasn’t for me,” he said.