Wayward Page 18

  He had reached a hand towards the doll before snatching it back as he suffered a flicker of doubt. This was his vice; his true vice. Not chaos, or rebellion, or a taste for the edge of the knife. Ollivan’s vice was discovery. Magic. Wanting to know it fully, intimately. Everything it could do, the wondrous and the ugly. If he unravelled this spell, could he recreate it? At another time, under controlled circumstances? Impossible. The spell was wrong, it didn’t work, and he couldn’t truly know why, because emotion led to unpredictable results.

  He could perform a revealing spell. It was simple, tempting magic, but cautioned against in most circumstances. This particular circumstance was a textbook example of when not to invoke the simple intention of a revealing: show me what you can do. Such a warning ringing in his head would not normally dissuade him, but since he was likely to pass out, there wasn’t much point.

  So he mournfully placed a hand over the doll, held the paper aloft, and burned.

  When it was done, he propped the doll upright, wiped the watery residue off his fingers with a handkerchief and allowed himself a deep and nourishing relief. By some magic he had yet to learn, all his other problems shrank. He held them in his mind and turned them this way and that, and couldn’t fathom how he had ever thought them so insurmountable. He had two whole years to find another way to stay his banishment. And when he did, he would no longer be President. He would never have to mediate another grievance, or approve another proposal. He may never even have to see Sybella again, and the problem of his weak and aching heart – the problem he had carried to the Otherworld and back again – could begin to be dealt with.

  It called for a drink. He left the doll on his desk, turned off the lamp and ventured out into the hall, his breath catching in his chest when he found he was not where he’d expected. The corridor he had emerged into was a dark and draughty passage he believed led to the library.

  The scavenger hunt. He had forgotten. As the Successors navigated the house in search of clues, the Wending Place was laying a maze for them. The corridor was deserted, the lamps all doused. The sounds of revelry seemed very distant.

  He had an hour until his curfew; enough time to join in the hunt, if not enough to win it. But with the unravelling of the Guysman, he found himself so content that he could not imagine wanting anything more than to bask. He followed his elongated shadow into the first-floor common room, where a single light above the bar called him to come closer; to pour a glass of the expensive snake-venom whiskey that had helped him win the election and raise it. How long had it been since a moment had delivered everything he wanted of it; solitude, satisfaction, relief? It was all the sweeter for how long he had waited, and how deeply he ached from the longest of days.

  And then a sound ruined everything.

  It was a series of thuds; organic, irregular, and ending abruptly. The glass was still a breath from his lips, and it paused there as he listened. The Wending Place made noises sometimes as it went about its mysterious business, and this night its business was especially enigmatic. But the noise had come from the direction of the Sanctuary, and the feeling that it was something he needed to attend to was instinctive.

  Still holding his drink, Ollivan went back down the hall, listening all the while. He had pulled the door of the Sanctuary closed as he left, hadn’t he? That it was open could only mean one thing.

  “Miss Dentley?” he called into the shadows of the Sanctuary.

  All the lights were out, as he had left them. He stood in the doorway and swept his gaze over the room. The Wending Place playing a trick on him, surely. Nothing was out of place, except—

  A dark shadow lay near one of the couches. Ollivan reached for the lamp on Sybella’s desk, and felt his heart fall out through his feet when he turned it on.

  She was unmoving, a crumpled heap on the office floor, her brown curls in disarray about her face.

  He didn’t know if the glass fell from his fingers or if he tossed it aside, but it shattered on the floor at the same moment Ollivan slid to his knees by her head.

  “Ellie,” he barked at her. He took her head in both hands and held it firmly, but she made no response. “Sybella!”

  He gripped her by the shoulders and shook her more roughly than he intended, which prompted him to sweep a gaze over her for injury. He found none, but still she didn’t wake. Her skin was cool and pale. She couldn’t be – she wasn’t—

  Her mouth opened, just a little, and she drew in a desperate breath.

  “Ellie,” he breathed. How had he thought what he was feeling in the common room was relief? This was relief. He moved his hands to her face again, but resisted the absurd desire to force her eyes open; to see them, and see life, and make her come awake at once. “Wake up.”

  Sybella’s eyelids fluttered, and she moaned softly – like she was in pain? As she struggled to come round, Ollivan’s gaze skittered around the office for whatever had harmed her. There were no fallen objects, no misplaced furniture, no damage to the floor, the walls, the door. Everything was as he had left it five minutes before. Everything except—

  “Earth and stars.”

  His coat lay across his desk, the notebook beside it.

  And the doll gone.

  “Ollivan.”

  Sybella opened unfocused eyes into his. There was some colour in her cheeks now. She was alright. She had only been knocked out by the same spell that had injured Jasper.

  A spell of Ollivan’s making.

  He scooped an arm around her neck and helped her sit. “Are you alright? Are you hurt? Can you breathe? Are you faint?”

  “I’m alright,” she said blearily, before correcting herself. “Faint. Yes.”

  There was a pitcher of water on a console behind his desk. He couldn’t reach it from here. “Can you stand?”

  Sybella nodded her acquiescence and unprotestingly put her arms around his neck so he could lift her to her feet. She swayed, too weak to support herself, and he gripped her tighter and guided her to one of the chairs in the centre of the room. That she let him, without a flinch or a protest, was testament to how unwell she still felt.

  He fetched some water – spelling it to icy cold as he poured – knelt before her, and folded both of her shaking hands around the glass to be sure she could hold it. All the while, the persisting danger assaulted his thoughts – the Guysman was still intact, and it was gone – but he would tackle one problem at a time. The most pressing was that Sybella was hurt.

  “Sybella,” he said, not softly. He needed her attention. “What happened? Where’s the doll?”

  “Doll,” she muttered thickly, and took a drink. The cold water appeared to revitalise her, her eyes gaining focus as she drew several long gulps. When she lowered the glass, they had taken on an alarm and an urgency that he found perfectly fitting. “It was standing on the desk.”

  Standing. “Did it move? Did it speak?”

  Sybella searched the desk, then his face, like she couldn’t believe Ollivan hadn’t removed it while she was unconscious. It hadn’t moved, then. Not in front of her, at least.

  “What did it do to you? Did it—” He stopped himself, all his earlier questions, desires, and dreadful fears coming back to him. He had got exactly what he wanted; a second victim of his creation he could use to understand the Guysman. But not like this.

  “Ellie. I mean, Miss Dentley.” She looked at him strangely, like the awful formality between them had been his idea. “How do you feel?”

  Sybella’s eyes unfocused. “Strange. Like there was something… wait.” Her expression wiped clean in shock, and she gasped. “Ollivan. My magic. I can’t reach my magic.”

  It was as if she had tipped the ice-cold glass over his head. He had designed the Guysman to absorb magic, but not like this. Not from a person. Had the same thing happened to Jasper? He had got up and walked away, they presumed, but had his magic come to him when he called it? Had the Guysman broken something in him?

  Magic could be lost. The physical power or Wraiths and Changelings could suffer from injury. The psychokinetic Psi had been known to lose fine control of their skills if the markings on their brows – those that glowed silver when they used their power – were scarred or damaged. A head injury could silence the mind of the Whisperer forever. He had never heard of such a thing happening to a Sorcerer.

  “What did that thing do to me?” Sybella said, her voice trembling.

  “I don’t know yet,” Ollivan replied, and the words killed him.

  Sybella made a sound like a sob. He could tell that she was mining for her power like it was drowning down there without her, despair and grief wrought across her features. Tears filled her eyes.

  “It’s alright,” he said, squeezing her hand and praying to the stars it wasn’t a lie. “You’re still recovering, perhaps your magic will—”

  “Ollivan,” she cried again.

  And Ollivan was helpless. He stood abruptly and turned away, for he couldn’t think clearly in the face of her anguish. He knew panic might come, but not yet. Not until he had considered all the solutions. Now that he was reassured that Sybella was at least physically unharmed, he had come back to himself; he was once again the person who would not believe all was lost until he had proven it to himself.

  And Ollivan had a solution.

  A fool’s hope, perhaps, and a dangerous one. They could wait. It was the scientific thing to do. If the Guysman drew a person’s magic from them, against their will, there was no reason to believe it couldn’t keep doing so after they lost consciousness. But the spell appeared to have stopped of its own accord both times. There had to be some type of disruption, some end to what it could draw from. It made sense that a recovery period existed. Perhaps they should wait and see.

  Perhaps
that’s what I should do, his inner voice said wryly as he turned back to Sybella. Perhaps, but she was panicking, as he would if he called on his magic and nothing responded. He couldn’t let her wait – and for how long? An hour? A day? – and suffer, when the potential solution had sprung straight to mind.

  “Miss Dentley, I need you to do something very difficult.”

  Sybella halted her tears, perhaps sensing from his tone that he had a solution.

  “I need you to trust me.”

  He knelt before her again, and took a moment, then two, to collect the best words. “I don’t believe your magic is gone. We’re Sorcerers. Conduits for raw power, nothing else. We have no organ or method of channelling power that can be lost or damaged. So it doesn’t make sense to me that any spell could entirely turn our connection to magic off. But the connection might need to be woken up. And I think I can wake yours.”

  Sybella shook her head. “How?”

  “I can channel my own magic into you. A spark, for your flame.” She gave an involuntary laugh, that stymied swiftly when she saw he was serious. Ollivan went on, so as to avoid any questions. “I know it sounds unorthodox. I know it’s not the way magic is supposed to work. But I’m not talking about performing magic on you, as in all those cautionary tales they taught us as children. I’m not going to try to enchant your mind or change anything about your body. I’m going to give you the magic, and I’m hoping your own will respond.”

  Sybella shook her head throughout his whole explanation. “Ollivan, I know you’re brilliant. It’s the thing I hate the most about you.” She said the last softly, and it didn’t sound like hate at all. “But it’s not possible. Sorcerers would be combining their magic all the time if it were.”

  “Not if someone judged the cost of that knowledge to be too great.”

  She cocked her head to one side as she tried to puzzle out his response. Ollivan averted his eyes. They both knew if she pressed hard enough he would crumble. He could only hope she knew how cruel it would be to play on his sympathies that way.

  “Just because you read a bit of bizarre theory in some little-known journal of some medieval eccentric, it doesn’t make it practical magic,” she said. Ollivan almost made a quip about how uncannily spot-on her assumption was, but she dropped her voice, fear creeping in as she added, “I don’t want to join that list of cautionary tales.”

  “Do you want to be without magic?” He met her eyes, and hoped she saw in his the boy she had once trusted never to hurt her. The room was dim, but the lamplight still caught her tear-limned eyes and lit them on fire. They were brown and gold and green and orange. Ollivan could have forgotten the Guysman, her missing magic, the time ticking towards his curfew – towards risking everything, yet again – for this, he could forget that it existed. His hands rested either side of her, on the arms of the chair, and he gripped them hard to stop from reaching for her. When she sighed, he almost gave in.

  Her voice was a whisper. “What do I have to do?”

  He smiled. He hoped it was reassuring.

  “Relax,” he said. “The sensation will be foreign – uncomfortable, even – but don’t let it alarm you. And don’t fight it.”

  Sybella nodded tensely and squeezed her eyes closed. Ollivan took a moment to quiet his thoughts and banish his uncertainty. This was not like transporting, but all magic, he found, responded readily to courage. It would respond to Sybella’s too.

  He directed his power into the fingers that gripped her shoulder, and without hesitation, sent the smallest spark of it into her skin.

  He knew it had worked before Sybella reacted. He could feel another force pull on his like a magnet, and shut his magic off abruptly. Sybella gasped, her eyes flying open. The water pitcher behind him shattered, but Ollivan paid it no notice. Sybella jerked out of his grip; a reaction Ollivan knew to be reflexive and not personal.

  “Earth and stars,” she breathed. She trembled like she had been dunked in icy water. She probably felt a lot like she had.

  “Are you alright?”

  She studied her shaking fingers, breathing hard. “I think so.”

  Ollivan put some distance between them, wordlessly moving the water glass out of her reach as he did so. She would not regain the ability to swallow for another minute or so. She would also be seeing spots and experiencing pins and needles in her limbs. “You’ll feel like yourself very shortly, I promise. It’s just shock.”

  “It… hurt, I think, and yet it wasn’t bad. It felt like – like…”

  “Power.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes sparkled with it like she’d had too much champagne. Her formerly drained complexion was flushed. “You must teach me how—”

  “No.”

  He should have been more afraid of this, but he had been so concerned with whether he could get her to trust him, he had barely considered whether he could trust her. He had tried to hint that the knowledge came with a cost. Of course it wasn’t enough once she’d experienced it for herself.

  She was looking at him like he’d insulted her, and Ollivan sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “It is not commonly used magic because it will drive one mad. I believe it’s because magic is unique to the one who summons it. My magic is not meant for another. I understand the appeal of the feeling, believe me I do, but you mustn’t try to use it again.” He waved an arm at the shattered pitcher on the console. “You did that without even calling your magic, and with only the smallest jolt of mine. It’s dangerously volatile.”

  Sybella’s eyes lingered on the shards of the pitcher, deep in thought. “How do you know so much about this?” she said eventually.

  “Practice,” he said darkly, and swiftly changed the subject. “What did the doll do to you, Miss Dentley?”

  Her face shuttered, perhaps out of fear as she recalled the doll standing on the desk. “She pulled on my magic,” she said, one hand unconsciously clutching just below her ribs. “I didn’t call on it, but it rose anyway, and then it was escaping.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. Straight through my skin.” She swallowed heavily, lip trembling, and Ollivan slid the water back towards her. “It was… it was as if she was extracting my soul, or my life force. Some essential part of me that couldn’t simply be plucked free. I was frozen still. If I hadn’t been, I’d have been pulled towards her along with it.”

  “And you passed out?”

  “I was certain it was death,” she said softly. “All my energy, all my strength. I thought that I would never… that it was over.” She took a breath as if to continue, a flash of vulnerability crossing her face. Then her eyes darted away from him and she fell quiet.

  Ollivan stood by the window, frowning out into the night. Rain had started to fall, blurring the slow trickle of carriages and pedestrians in the square. He didn’t have long until he had to be home, but he could make time to see Sybella to her door, if she had the strength to transport.

  “I wonder why the spell targeted you,” he said, more to himself than Sybella. “I was in this room with the doll and it was so inanimate that I believed the magic gone.” Though perhaps that was only what it wanted me to believe.

  “Because I tried to destroy it,” said Sybella. Ollivan saw the reflection of her head snap up in the glass, and swung round.

  “What is it?”

  “I forgot. I tried to destroy her. When she—” Sybella cut off, her eyes going wide. “She spoke to me. Oh, stars. I tried to destroy her because of what she said!”

  She climbed clumsily to her feet. Ollivan was frozen with dread and confusion.

  “Ollivan,” said Sybella desperately. “The doll wants Cassia.”

  18

  The clouds had rolled in and a steady rain was falling by the time Cassia climbed the steps of the Wending Place.

  She longed to be able to transport, and suspected she was physically capable, even if her magic would not allow it. But Cassia did not mind being out in the rain, and especially enjoyed it at night. Rain was nostalgia in liquid form. Dry weather did not invoke the hazy impression of dry weather past; it was waking up every morning; it was eating lunch. Rain was being up past midnight and cinnamon loaves on the solstice. The smell of earth and iron, the sound of water knocking, just to let itself in without invitation; rain invoked the memory of every rain before it.