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  What Cassia did mind was being made to stand on a doorstep in anticipation of a door that may never open. She rang the bell thrice and heard it chime heavily from deep within the building each time. But that was not all she heard. Shouts and laughter punctuated the patter of rain; silhouettes cut through the yellow light shining from the windows in a frenzied dance. The Successors were there on the other side, creating such a raucousness that they couldn’t hear the bell. Someone should be listening for it, shouldn’t they?

  She switched to pounding on the door, but after another five minutes had passed she tried the handle, cringing at her own boldness as the great old door swung open on groaning hinges and admitted her where she was not supposed to be.

  Cassia had one foot inside when someone collided with her, gasped an apology, and spun away again before she could react, which she supposed was better than some curse for trespassing. The tingling brush of magic raised the hairs on her skin like the last time she was there, but this felt different. Fiercely alive. She held her breath. Was what they said about the Wending Place true?

  A scream. Cassia’s heart pounded as she spun towards to sound, one hand already reaching behind her for the doorknob, the way out. But it wasn’t that kind of scream. The gaggle of Successors who burst from a doorway along the hall were laughing.

  “I’m looking for Ollivan Sims,” Cassia called to them as they ran past, but they paid her no notice. Their feet pounding the stairs joined the sound of abused floorboards from above; more Successors running from room to room, she imagined. But why?

  Cassia drifted through an archway in search of someone else to ask and caught a snippet of chatter as two girls dashed past in the adjacent corridor.

  “But the clue said chord with an H, as in music, not cord as in rope. It was a play on words!”

  The scavenger hunt. She remembered Ollivan mentioning it to their mother. But how was she to find him among all this? Now that she was inside, the warm lighting she had seen through the windows must have been part of an illusion. A scarce few lamps glowed softly, their circles of light pinned in the corners as if beaten back by the shadows. The Successors were faceless shapes tumbling past her in the gloom. Any one of them could be her brother.

  She would head to the President’s Sanctuary, wait for him by the door, and hope the havoc ended quickly. How long could it take near-adults to play a simple children’s game?

  But when she turned to go back to the stairs, the walls had moved.

  She almost collided with the dead end of the corridor inches in front of her. Cassia lifted a hand to touch it, her palm landing flat on aged burgundy wallpaper – solid, real – and she recalled more about the scavenger hunt. It was an annual tradition, and that meant it was woven into the fabric of the Society, and of their clubhouse. The Wending Place was more than involved in this hunt, it was the grand architect, and it had taken Cassia for a player.

  How long did she have until Jasper was expecting her? They were meeting at Cassia’s house. If she didn’t show up on time, how long would he wait before he carried out his threat to tell her mother she’d attacked him?

  It wasn’t worth worrying about now. She just had to get the doll as quickly as possible and get out before the Wending Place played any more tricks.

  There was a lone door at her end of the corridor. It had to lead her closer to the main staircase, so Cassia pulled it open – and almost tripped down the step on the other side.

  But it wasn’t a step. And that wasn’t a white, plastered floor beneath her, it was a ceiling. She was in another corridor. Long, deserted, and upside down. Between her and the only other door at the far end was a row of ceiling lights on brass chains, stood on end like tiny streetlamps, oblivious to the pull of gravity calling on them to collapse. The objects along the walls – a suit of armour, a bust of one of the founding Successors on a mahogany stand, a shallow console with a vase on top – weren’t concerned either; they hung from the ‘floor’ as though they had been nailed down. Still, Cassia leaned away from them as she navigated the ceiling lights. Nailed or fixed there with magic, if the Wending Place could turn a corridor on its head, it could drop a suit of armour on her at will.

  As she passed a painting of a horse that appeared to hang like a bat, a flutter of paper caught her eye. It dangled from a string around the neck of the bust. A clue, out of reach, and in a corridor Cassia was certain hadn’t existed five minutes before. Perhaps the scavenger hunt was more challenging than she imagined.

  When she made it to the end and stepped over the threshold, she was no longer upside down, but neither was she inside the Wending Place. Cassia had found herself in a walled courtyard garden. There were no Successors here either, but still the sounds of the hunt drummed around her. Creaking floorboards, slamming doors, shrieks of laughter and surprise. She hadn’t known the Wending Place had a courtyard, and as she peered around her, looking for another way back into the house, she wasn’t sure it was a courtyard at all.

  For a start, it wasn’t raining. The constellations hung above her in the deep blue of a clear sky from horizon to horizon. What she had taken at first glance to be a bonfire was a fireplace, recessed into the wall between two dogwood bushes. Paintings hung along the brickwork, and when she moved across the patio, the stone slabs groaned like labouring hardwood.

  Stranger still was the fact that her own shadow, thrown far across the courtyard by the trembling flames in the fireplace, was not alone. Silhouettes dashed across the bricks, stones that weren’t stones creaked under invisible feet. Someone laughed, very close to her ear, and Cassia shuddered. She had read about glamours that revealed different things to each person who encountered them. She might be surrounded by Successors in an ordinary parlour, each person there under a different spell. Perhaps they could all see her. A breeze tickled her hair as someone ran past and, discomforted, Cassia raced across the courtyard to the door on the other side.

  And then she was in another corridor, and rain pelted the windows, throwing pebbled shadows across a carpet that was, mercifully, underfoot. She jumped as a door to her right clattered open, and two girls tumbled out, breathless and giggling. One was adjusting the bodice of her dress as the other re-pinned her hair. They stopped short at the sight of Cassia, who averted her eyes from the mouth-shaped bruise over the first’s collarbone.

  “I beg your pardon, but I’m trying to find the President’s—” Cassia began, but the girls burst into shrieking laughter, and before she could force her question upon them, they sprinted off down the corridor.

  “At least someone’s having fun,” Cassia muttered as she peered into the room the girls had come from, drawn in by the sound of music. A vast mirror rested against the far wall, in which she could see the string quartet in the opposite corner, behind the door. Employing musicians to play in an out-of-the-way room seemed an extravagance for even the Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers, but when Cassia cleared the doorway and turned around, the musicians weren’t there. Another illusion. She looked into the glass again and a violinist winked at her. There was a clue tied around the neck of her instrument, and it danced and spun as she dragged her bow across the strings. Drawn in, Cassia stood with her nose to the mirror and squinted at the slip of paper for a long moment, before deciding there must be another trick to finding out what it said. It was impossible to read.

  At the end of the corridor she finally found a staircase, and she started up it gratefully. The echoes of the hunt were fainter here, though she was certain the way she’d come had taken her in a loop. A single sound punctuated the sudden hush: the creak and thud of a door slamming somewhere above.

  “Ollivan?” she called up the stairs.

  It was darker now, every shape looming and unknowable. A curtain, or the fall of a coat as its wearer stood silently, watching her? One of the house’s famous draughts touched her skin, still damp from the rain, and a shiver rolled through her. She couldn’t bring herself to call out for her brother again, and she couldn’t say why.

  She was watching her feet as she took the stairs, so she did not notice the movement beyond the banister until it was very close; a silent, steady motion as two shadows peeled apart. When she turned her head, breath held tight, they had already folded back together. She stared into the darkness for several endless seconds and waited for the movement to make sense. But the darkness was too thick.

  And it did not dissipate as she reached the first-floor corridor. Cassia stood clutching the banister as her eyes adjusted, her breaths too shallow for the thumping of her heart, but she didn’t dare to make a sound. Quick, light footsteps retreated somewhere behind her, making her jump, but when she swung round, she could see no one.

  “Ollivan?” she said, but it was only a whisper. Could he be playing a prank on her? Well, Cassia was not a fool, and she could take a joke, but not tonight, and not from him. Cursing her brother, she marched confidently down the corridor after the sound of footsteps.

  She was brought to a leaping halt when she reached the end. The corridor let out into another, at the far end of which was a picture window throwing impressions of the rain onto the floor. And before it, shadow stretching towards her, was Violet.

  Her visage was hidden by the darkness, but her hair was unmistakably wild, the ringlets pressed into ragged shapes around her head. He had surely unravelled the spell by now, but he had placed her in a standing position, probably propped up to best startle her.

  Cassia sighed heavily and started down the corridor.

  “Heaven and earth, Ollivan,” she grumbled.

  “Ollivan is irrelevant to me,” said the doll.

  Cassia couldn’t contain her gasp. She grappled desperately until she found a lamp and turned it high.

  Violet was not propped agains
t anything, but stood on her own, as she had inexplicably in the garden. Her head was gently turned in Cassia’s direction, green eyes on hers.

  “He bound you,” she said. “In his jacket.”

  “Yes. But he could not perform his little spell without unbinding me.”

  “His… little spell?”

  Violet’s head turned, just a little. “It was an unravelling, I think,” she said.

  So it hadn’t worked; whatever Ollivan had written to undo the Guysman had failed. Cassia’s mind flashed with Ollivan unconscious in his office. She had to trap her somehow, or bind her. Cassia called upon her magic, but she already knew: if Ollivan hadn’t been able to best his own creation, she had no chance of succeeding where he had failed.

  But perhaps she could stall her. Perhaps, if she could keep Violet here, there would be time for Ollivan to recover, and bind her again.

  “Where is he, Violet?” Cassia asked, attempting to sound casual.

  “Somewhere.” The doll’s voice was disinterested and slow. “I was looking for you.”

  “For me? What for?”

  “Because I want to help you.”

  At that moment there was a bang as a door was flung open. Cassia both prayed and dreaded that whoever it was would venture this way. But their footsteps disappeared in the opposite direction.

  “Why did you call out to me in the junk room? Why did you ask me to cast a spell and wake your magic? Is it because Jasper wouldn’t?”

  Violet’s porcelain face was blank, and yet the flash in her eyes made her look angry. “I didn’t like that boy. He would throw things and scream when he was angry. And he stole me. But I saw you, and I knew you were different. That you and I could be friends.”

  At least Jasper also hadn’t seen the danger where Cassia had failed to. Yet even as she released a breath, something twisted inside her. She and Violet had been friends, until Ollivan had swept in and taken that away from her. He had taken Jasper too, in a way.

  “I want to help you, Cassia,” repeated the doll. “But for now I need to escape here. Could you please open the window?”

  Cassia shook her head and banished her sadness. She was taking slow steps backwards towards the adjacent corridor so that someone could see her should they come this way. “I can’t.”

  “You wish to fix your brother’s mistakes for him?” Her girlish, musical voice was weighed down with disgust. A disgust Cassia should not have let hurt her, coming from a stars-damned doll. But nevertheless, the denial was forced from her on a swell of shame.

  “No—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “You hurt Jasper.”

  “Because he would have hurt you. I’ve watched him from that room you found me in. He’s not your friend, Cassia. I am.”

  With an uncanny, vaguely macabre motion, one leg pivoted at the hip and landed before her. She was walking; clumsily, and without the joints and tendons of a fluid human body, but the doll was walking. “But I’m not your fault. Open the window. Let me go, and I could be Ollivan’s downfall. I know that’s what you want.”

  It wasn’t – was it? Something in her responded to the words, the way her magic responded when she called. It wasn’t possible that Violet could read her mind; Ollivan’s magic – a Sorcerer’s magic – could never have achieved such a feat. But then again, she didn’t need to. She had told Violet enough to piece together that conclusion.

  Cassia shook her head, but her conviction was wavering. “You’re dangerous,” she said.

  “I don’t wish to hurt anybody. I’m your friend, Cassia. You can trust me.”

  The words had a rightness that settled on her skin like a balm. Violet was her friend. Even attacking Jasper had been in her defence.

  Footsteps landed at the top of the stairs.

  “Try that way!” called a voice – Ollivan’s – and Violet’s porcelain face snapped to the corridor. He was coming their way, loudly but slowly. He was combing the Wending Place, flinging doors open and curtains aside in search of his creation. If Cassia called out for him now, he could transport here. He would bind Violet again and find a fail-safe way to destroy her.

  And Ollivan would get away with it. Again.

  Her brother had been handed magic, status, most of their mother’s love; everything Cassia dreamed of. He had squandered and sullied it; he had cheated, stolen, hurt people, killed, and somehow the consequences slid off him. It felt like she was the only one to notice. Maybe that made her the only one who could do something about it.

  So Cassia marched to the window, undid the latch, and pulled it open. She hesitated with her hands on the frame.

  “You have to promise me that—”

  But there was no time to extract a promise – no time to voice the thousand questions and hesitations dancing on the tip of her tongue – because footsteps were upon them. Cassia spun round just as Sybella Dentley emerged into the corridor.

  “Cassia!” she gasped in alarm. Her wide eyes went to the window. When Cassia turned around, Violet was somehow stood on the ledge.

  Sybella raised an arm to hit the doll with a spell. “Stand back.”

  Cassia leapt out of the way, but something stayed Sybella’s hand. Violet, too, had raised a tiny arm. Her eyes glowed a dreaded gold.

  “No—”

  But Violet was not drinking Sybella’s magic. She was attacking her with a spell.

  The sparks crackled down the corridor. When they cleared, Sybella was gone. She had ducked around the corner, and emerged again unscathed and ready to fight back.

  “Oh, stars,” she said, her hand dropping to her side.

  Cassia turned back to the window, but Violet was gone. They both ran to it and looked down, but in the dark and the rain, it was hopeless.

  “Cassia?” called a second voice, Ollivan’s, and then he was there too, alarm wrought vividly across his features at the sight of her. They both came closer than she thought necessary given she could hear them from across the passage.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, eyes sweeping the corridor and hands ready to channel magic.

  It was only then Cassia recalled her purpose. “Jasper. When Violet knocked him unconscious, she drained his magic somehow. He threatened to tell Mother I attacked him if I didn’t give him the doll back.” She would have to tell him that Ollivan had destroyed her.

  “She’s gone, Ollivan,” said Sybella, before turning to Cassia seriously. “Are you alright? Did it hurt you?”

  “Hurt me?”

  “The doll was looking for you,” said Ollivan. “She drained Sybella’s magic too. Come back to the Sanctuary, quick.”

  They ushered her back down the hall to the Sanctuary, and shut and locked the door. Then Ollivan started pacing the perimeter of the room as he set a ward. In the light, it was clear that Sybella was pale and wan too. Sick regret filled her.

  “That thing is wielding magic, Ollivan,” said Sybella.

  Ollivan spun, wide-eyed. “What? That’s impossible.”

  Sybella looked to Cassia expectantly.

  “It’s true,” said Cassia. “I saw her attack Sybella with a spell.”

  Right after assuring her she didn’t wish to hurt anybody. Right after Cassia had set her loose to spite Ollivan. She went to the couch and sank onto it to stop the room spinning.

  “Why was she looking for you?” said Sybella.

  I want to help you, Cassia. “Strange as it may seem, I believe she’s fond of me.”

  “Fond of you?” said Ollivan, as if she had just suggested they braise a leather boot with carrots and greens for dinner. “She can’t be fond of you.”

  “Stars, thank you, Ollivan.”

  “We assumed she wanted to hurt you,” explained Sybella, shooting Ollivan a look.

  “Oh.” That struck Cassia as a sensible assumption to make about a dangerous spell that had already attacked someone, and yet the sensible had eluded her at the crucial moment. Fool. “You don’t have a drink of water, by any chance?”

  In answer, Ollivan lifted the glass handle of what had probably been a vessel, but now clung to only a shard of the thing.

  “Here.” Sybella put a glass of water in her hand. Cassia hummed a thank you and took several long gulps before she spoke.