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  “I know, but it’s distracting. Please.”

  Jasper quirked an eyebrow, but turned around.

  “No peeking.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  Cassia watched him a moment to see if he would sneak a glance, then turned her attention back to the hedge. She raised her arms, aiming her open palms at the entrance to the rose garden. It wasn’t how the magic would act upon the hedge, but using one’s hands still helped guide the spell in the right direction.

  She drew a deep breath and banished her previous frustrations, then she called her magic to rise. It did so obediently, pooling just below her ribs to be directed where she willed it. So far, so good. With the intention at the forefront of her mind – close the gap – she encouraged the warm, effervescent power to rise through her chest and into her throat.

  Don’t let me down this time.

  Cassia felt some resistance as her lips formed the spell, but she pushed through it, focusing on growing the sensation as she started murmuring the words.

  “Close the gap,” said her mouth. Do it, do it, do it, implored her mind.

  The magic left her lips as she repeated the mantra, a thinner, slower trickle than she had hoped for. No. She pushed uselessly with her hands, and then remembered that would do nothing. The intention slipped down under her anxiety; the clear image in her mind of an unbroken, lustrous hedge flickered, and a humiliating alternative forced its way in.

  I can’t fail at this again, she pleaded, but her magic took no notice. Leaving a taste in her mouth that was vaguely vindictive, her magic began to work the glamour. The gap shimmered. Dead, black vines studded with thorns stretched across it and immediately started to crumble. As Cassia lowered her hands, she was hit by an irrational certainty that Jasper would tell his fellow Society members about this. About how weak she was.

  “You can turn around now,” said Cassia weakly.

  Jasper turned. She expected to see that unfailing patience, the hint of sympathy that made her cringe, but before he could stop himself, he laughed.

  At that, Cassia chased the last of the magic inside her away with an angry internal hiss. She almost threatened it against ever coming back. Her hands balled into fists.

  “Well, you’ve cast a glamour,” said Jasper, ceasing his laughter at the look on Cassia’s face. “It’s progress.”

  “Progress.” She shot him a look. “You must be so proud.”

  “It’s not that bad,” assured Jasper. He tried to lay the tip of an index finger against a thorn and watched it pass straight through, clearly without the impression of having injured himself. A good glamour acted upon all the senses. Cassia’s monstrosity was just an ugly mirage. “Well, the visual rendering is really quite convincing, if you ignore the… flaking.”

  “Jasper, they could be the deadliest-looking thorns the gardener’s ever seen, and she still would never believe this was anything other than a glamour,” said Cassia, gesturing at the lush green hedge on either side. “Please let’s try something else. Won’t you teach me to ward the rose garden instead?”

  “Wards?” Jasper scratched at his russet hair. “That’s, ah…”

  Too advanced for you That was what he didn’t want to say. And he was probably right; wards protected against intrusion, interference, or magic, or alerted the spellcaster to any of the above. If they were not sturdy, they were useless. “Never mind, then,” Cassia said tonelessly.

  “But why don’t you try unravelling a glamour instead?” he said hastily. “I think you can do it.”

  She couldn’t. Jasper explained the correct intention for removing glamours, and even demonstrated it for her on a lilac he glamoured a vivid orange, but Cassia’s magic still refused to cooperate. Before she could inflict any will whatsoever on the mess of black thorns, they disintegrated entirely.

  “Let’s call it your practice assignment, then. For tomorrow.” Jasper gave her a reassuring smile, the single dimple on one side wrinkling his pale cheek. “How is the spell for your initiation coming along?”

  Anxiety tightened Cassia’s chest. Her second attempt to be initiated into the Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers was in three days’ time. She and the other hopefuls would demonstrate an enchantment of their choosing in front of the entire assembled Society who, if they were adequately impressed, would accept their new member with a vote of ‘ayes’. Those whose enchantments underwhelmed earned a cheer of ‘nays’, were awarded a children’s book of basic spells as a consolation prize and invited to try again in a year.

  It was all supposed to be good fun, a sort of ice-breaker for new members. Only, if you were the only member of your family to have failed their first initiation, there was nothing fun about it.

  High Sorcerer Fisk – the ruler of the Heart – would be there, of course, because Cassia’s luck dictated so and because this season’s initiation ceremony happened to be taking place on the same night the Society would vote in its new President.

  She had been working herself to death not to embarrass herself. She had designed a beautiful spell; straightforward in intention but complex enough magically, just as Jasper said all the best spells were. It would be a crowd-pleaser, a signature people would remember when they saw her in the common room of the Wending Place, the Society clubhouse.

  If it worked.

  When Cassia thought forward to the night of the initiation test, she saw it going one of two ways. In the first, the spell plays off as she intends. She breathes a sigh of relief, gently, so they won’t guess she ever had a doubt, and smiles at her new brothers and sisters as the President calls for their votes and a chorus of ‘ayes!’ ring out across the ceremony hall.

  In the second, the spell fails. The moment she knows all is lost stretches on as if she’ll be stuck in it forever. The hall is quiet for that endless moment; the one in which Cassia knows she’s failed and everyone else is about to know it too. It’s so quiet she can hear someone shuffle impatiently at the back of the crowd, near the fireplace. And then understanding seeps through the watching crowd like laughing gas. From the corner of her eye, she sees the Society Secretary, Jan Lenniker, whisper behind his hand to Iwan Goff, who covers his own mouth in an attempt to hide his smirk, but fails. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears. Heat rises in her cheeks. Everything they think of her is suddenly obviously true.

  The details were sharper in the second scenario, the feelings more compelling when her mind wandered onto the night of the test. She had lived it before, after all.

  “Fine,” lied Cassia in answer to Jasper’s question. “The spell’s coming along just fine. In fact, I think I’m almost ready.”

  Jasper looked unconvinced and Cassia couldn’t blame him. “You’ll be brilliant, Cassia. I have every faith in you. You’re from a strong magical pedigree.”

  A strong magical pedigree who had sent her away when she was five. She hadn’t been brought up among her own people, let alone enjoyed the influence of her family’s magic. And if the tutors they sent to train her were enough to make up for it, there was no way to know. Cassia’s magic made her different, so she had shunned it.

  Jasper must have seen from the look on her face that it was the wrong thing to say.

  “Listen,” he said hastily, “I don’t think here is the best place for you to practise. There’s a room at the Wending Place that’s become a junk room of sorts. Full of props left over from games, equipment for the summer festival, things like that. I cleared a proper space in there a few years ago and I use it as a sort of practice room when I’m trying something new. No one’s ever disturbed me there. It’s a complete secret.”

  Cassia shook her head. Only the Society members – known to each other and wider society as the Successors – were allowed inside, unless by express permission of the President. “But I’m not a Successor.”

  “Yet.”

  “I’m not allowed in the Wending Place.”

  “I can sneak you in,” he said, his lopsided grin widening. There was glint of mischief
in that smile that Cassia had never seen before. Jasper was always perfectly sensible in their lessons, but perhaps that was only because he was working. “I think it would do you some good to have some real privacy when you practise, not just an overbearing tutor trying to stare at a fountain instead of at you.”

  Cassia smiled. “You’re not overbearing, Jasper.” She said nothing of the comment about staring at her. She was worried he meant it exactly as it sounded.

  She was fond of Jasper. She enjoyed spending time with him in their lessons, but she had always suspected he had other ideas when he had answered her mother’s advertisement for a tutor. Was it real affection that had made him want to see more of her? Or was it all an attempt – a second attempt – to ingratiate himself with their faction’s most powerful family?

  She wanted Jasper as a friend. Too many of her peers were gracious to her face, then shot her sidelong glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. But Jasper existed on the fringes of them all. He moved through social circles as much as was expected of him, but never within them. He was studious, and somewhat solitary; well-spoken-of when he was spoken of at all. In short, she would never suspect him of gossip, and that was priceless to her. Cassia was the subject of such volumes of gossip that she feared she would get used to it.

  Was she imagining that the way he was looking at her now threatened to ruin their friendship? If she gave him too much opportunity or confidence to do something neither of them could take back, could they still be friends? He had called the junk room a secret; his secret that he was sharing with her. It felt too… intimate.

  And yet, the allure of a place to practise without fearing that her mother watched was too good to pass up.

  She returned his smile. “It sounds perfect.”

  3

  If Ollivan hurried on his way to the boarding house, it was not because of the rain; he was in too good a mood to feel it. The only thing quickening his step was anticipation.

  He paused only once, before the free library on Brompton Road. He was banned from entering, as he was banned from a great many places. But that was about to change.

  “Nice coat, mister.”

  Ollivan looked round. The street urchin on the step behind him was eleven or twelve, and covered in grime. He was tensed from head to toe from the chill.

  “Have it,” said Ollivan, slipping the coat from his arms and handing it to the boy. He could feel the rain now, but it only made him want to chuckle.

  The boy didn’t dare hesitate. He reached for the coat with both hands and darted away lest Ollivan change his mind.

  He took the rest of the walk at a brisk stride, but he was still soaked through by the time he reached the boarding house. Mrs Flint, the owner, offered to dry his clothes in front of the kitchen range, but Ollivan cheerfully declined; he was changing into his best suit anyway. He forced his key into the rusty lock and kicked the base of his door as he pushed it open, as was his method to make the aged, warped thing budge. The room looked out on nothing but a brick wall across a narrow alley. It had never caught a glimpse of the sun, and was all the colder for it. The hairs on Ollivan’s arms stood on end as he swapped the buckets under the leak in the roof, and emptied the rainwater into the alley. He had promised himself not to fix the leak, or the lock, or the door. Settling in would be defeat, and Ollivan had not been defeated. He saluted to the door, the bucket, the miserable brick wall outside the window, and thought of how the months of discomfort had all been worth it.

  Then he took his good suit from the wardrobe and beat the dust from the lapels, all the while whistling the tune still stuck in his head; a folk song he’d learned as a child about a woman who became a whale and ate all the people who’d wronged her.

  When he was dressed, Ollivan stood before the dusty mirror and admired the effect. He was thinner than he’d been a year ago. Shop work earned him enough to keep a roof mostly over his head and feed him thrice a day, but it wasn’t the fare he had grown up with. He wondered what his family were dining on tonight. He wondered if it was duck.

  Then he tidied every trace of himself out of the tiny room, left his final week’s rent on the bed, tucked his umbrella under his arm and the pages from Mr Holt’s sale ledger into his notebook, and left the boarding house, all the while whistling off-key.

  4

  TWO DAYS EARLIER

  Cassia stood at the corner of Drusella Square, looking up at the forest of blackened turrets growing from the gothic mansion the Successors called their clubhouse. The building below was shrouded in enchanted ivy. Each dark leaf was a butterfly, their wings closing and opening in lazy synchrony, so that they shivered across the brickwork like ripples on a pond. It made the whole house appear alive.

  And perhaps it was. The enchantment on the Wending Place was one of the oldest and least understood pieces of magic in London. It was said that the spell had outlived not only those who had cast it, but their entire ancestral lines, and in reward, had been granted dominion over itself.

  If Cassia knew anything about magic, such a thing wasn’t possible, but generations of Successors had been swayed by the legend. The house played practical jokes. It was known as the Wending Place partly because the corridors had a habit of taking you to unexpected locations. It echoed with inexplicable noises, lost rooms, found them again on a different floor. It rearranged paintings, changed locks, cast shadows of doorways that weren’t there. In the entrance foyer was a famed record of every Successor who had gone missing and never been seen again, including one name crossed through; Juniper Henry had eventually stepped out of the water closet eighty-five years after going in, still nineteen years old and with no recollection of where she had been for decades.

  But it was also called the Wending Place in reference to the journey of those who occupied it. The Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers was the avenue one walked between adolescence and adulthood, along which its members acquired the wisdom and self-confidence to go forth and conquer. In real terms, it was where the next generation of wealthy, elite Sorcerers made connections and built a reputation. Anybody who was anybody had been a member before they turned twenty-two and aged out of the Society and on to bigger things: politics, business, the old, esteemed institutes of learning on the continent. The nickname of the members, the Successors, was supposed to invoke coming into adulthood and taking the mantel from the previous generation. It was a little too on the nose for Cassia. She had grown up among the ruling family of Camden, who inherited their power and status in a way that was even harder to ignore than it was among the Sorcerer elite.

  Cassia had a place in this world carved by her birth, and yet she was struggling to fit in to it. Staring down the Wending Place from the other side of Drusella Square was the Chambers of Alchemy, the offices from which High Sorcerer Jupitus Fisk reigned over the Heart. The Chambers was a veritable palace, built to Fisk’s liking when he first came to power fifty years previously. Unlike most of the buildings in the Heart, there was no obvious aesthetic enchantment on the façade, and yet the black marble had an uncanny depth; like looking down into a well and seeing nothing, but sensing a chasm that could swallow you whole.

  They said looking the High Sorcerer in the eye carried the same feeling. Cassia could confirm this was true.

  The square itself was crowned with an opulent fountain, the white paving stones cleaned almost to a shine, the streetlamps finished with gilded embellishments. The High Sorcerer liked his people to be reminded of how wealthy he had made them each time they returned to the Sorcerer quarter.

  For on the western edge of Drusella Square, Westminster Bridge stretched across the Thames, the divider between factions. On one side, Cassia’s home quarter of the Heart, territory of the Sorcerers. On the other, Camden Town, the Changeling quarter. Militia of both factions – Heart enforcers and Camden wolves – attended the bridge, each with a guard point on their own bank.

  From where Cassia waited, fifty paces away, the Sorcerer guard point did not look like much.
One needed to be moving across the square to notice how the ward refracted the light, so that the bridge beyond appeared to hover, disconnected from the bank. Sorcerers could pass straight through it without feeling a thing, but Londoners of other magics would find themselves trapped in the ward like flies in a spider’s web, unless the enforcers at the border commanded the spell to let them pass. On the far bank, the Changelings accomplished their security with sand bags, a wooden barrier, and their own magic; half a dozen militia wore the forms of wolves with maws the size of Cassia’s head.

  So it was all over the city. Six peoples occupied London – Sorcerers, Changelings, Wraiths, Whisperers, Oracles, and Psi – not as one community, but as isolated factions divided along brutal, ever-shifting borders. Everything west of Hyde Park and most of what lay south of the Thames was the Sorcerer territory. It met the Docklands, the Oracle territory, east of Tower Bridge. Just across the river from where Cassia stood, Camden Town came to a point, but widened as it stretched towards its northern border before Hampstead Heath. To Camden’s east lay Whitechapel, the Whisperer quarter, and above them both, the Wraiths occupied the territory of the North. Invisible on a street map of the city was the territory of the Psi; dozens of staircases across every quarter led below the cobbles and foundations, past the sewers and long-buried ruins, to the cavern known as the Underground.

  It had been more or less the way in London since the Sorcerer empire of Callica had founded the city two thousand years ago. Then, they had tried to maintain power with a hierarchy of magical castes, sowing tribalism and mistrust among the four other factions as a means of control.

  It had lasted until the celestial event known as the Shift; the advent of the Changelings. The sudden existence of a sixth people in London had thrown the city into chaos and led to widespread slaughter, and the fall of the Callicans. But the entrenched divides between the factions could not heal, only deepen. For centuries, the city navigated the ebb and flow of perilous peace and outright war.