Wayward Read online

  “I thought that she only drained Jasper because he was frightening me.”

  Ollivan’s jaw was clenched tight. “She may have done, if indeed she’s formed an attachment to you.” He was pacing across the room. “And she drained Sybella because she tried to stop her. Neither means she’s less dangerous.”

  “Ollivan, what in the earth and stars is this spell?” said Sybella.

  His explanation washed over Cassia, like the murmur of people talking in the next room. Dangerous. She had known it, and still she’d helped Violet flee. Perhaps she was as consumed with resentment for her brother as he was with resentment for Jasper. Perhaps she wasn’t so different from him at all. The thought made her shudder.

  “Alright,” said Sybella with surprising calm once Ollivan had filled her in. “So she’s drinking people, instead of spells?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “And the ability to speak? To move?”

  “She walks now,” Cassia heard herself say, bringing a moment’s ringing silence to the Sanctuary as the others no doubt pictured the horror she had seen first-hand.

  “She was an ordinary enchanted doll before I performed the Guysman,” said Ollivan eventually. “That original spell accounts for the talking. Her moving independently was yet another unintended outcome. The real danger, however…”

  Sybella caught her eye with a long-suffering glance, and something in Cassia released as she remembered: this was not her fault. Sybella knew as well as she did that Ollivan and his dogged fascinations with magic and revenge at all costs had caused this.

  “The thing about Guysman’s draft for this spell, the thing that unfortunately didn’t occur to me until too late, is that the vessel only absorbs magic.”

  “Yes?”

  “But then what? Even when you mend a button, say, you burn magic on that action, but it doesn’t just vanish. There’s an exchange: magic for new thread. What neither Guysman nor myself accounted for was what happens to the magic next. The Guysman vessel is not just a vessel for the spell – it must also be the vessel for everything it takes, all the magic it absorbs. When I started to think about the spell in the Otherworld, that was my main concern: that it would release it spontaneously in some kind of eruption. I don’t know what the effects of that would be but I’ve theorised that all existing magic and magical peoples in the blast radius would be overwhelmed. That any magical infrastructure would fall apart. That people could even be harmed, if a blast of unchannelled magic were to hit them.” He glanced then at Sybella, who grasped some meaning that was lost on Cassia. “But it appears the doll is not merely releasing the magic.” He ceased pacing and rubbed a hand over his face. “She’s using it.”

  Sybella was shaking her head. “Ollivan, that’s… impossible.”

  “Spells do it all the time,” Ollivan countered. Then he tilted his head in concession. “Alright, not in the way we do. But think of your grandmother’s vanity mirror, the one that advises her on which hat to wear with which jewels and such. A clever, well-executed spell has the function to make independent decisions. It’s not true sentience, but put it in something that looks like a person and it could appear to be.”

  “And because you neglected to tell this spell what to do with the magic it absorbed,” said Cassia, “it decided on its own?”

  Ollivan made no reply. It clearly pained him to have no response, but Cassia knew what it meant. Most spells that made independent decisions were designed that way; it was a function of the way they were meant to work. Absorbing magic, even if it didn’t know what to do with it, did not automatically lend itself to using it. Unless the intention was corrupted in such a way that, somehow, Ollivan had commanded this doll to wield magic.

  “Ollivan,” said Sybella, “she jumped out of a window and fled into the night. She’s loose, with her alarming new talents for moving, decision-making, and casting spells. And if she continues to attack people, isn’t she just going to get stronger?”

  Loose. Gone. Another wave of sickening regret overcame her, but she buried it under indignation and pushed off the couch.

  “You have to tell Grandfather.”

  He stared at her, but it was as if he didn’t see her at all. He wore that dogged look on his face. “No. I’ll be arrested.”

  “As you should be! What in the heaven and earth possessed you play around with some shoddy, half-thought-out work of a madman? She’s going to hurt people, Ollivan. Tell Grandfather. He’ll respect that you’ve told him yourself. Perhaps he’ll take that into account before he punishes you.”

  She didn’t know who she thought she was fooling. Certainly not Ollivan, who shot her the look of derision she deserved. Then he turned his gaze on Sybella, his ex-love, his new partner. Sybella held his gaze for a long moment, indecision warring behind her eyes. Eventually, she lowered them to the ground. She could not, or would not say Ollivan should be spared.

  “Ollivan?” Cassia prompted again.

  “I won’t,” was all he said, and for maybe the first time in her life, Cassia pitied him. Pitied the wall of pride that would not be brought down, even for the smallest fool’s hope of saving him from a fate that tormented him. She could practically see him withering inside.

  “Then I will.”

  “Do what you must, but I would ask you to reconsider.” His voice was low and steady, but belied by the edge of desperation in his gaze. “I underestimated the Guysman, as I’ve underestimated a great many things these last couple of years. But I do not underestimate my enemies twice. Jupitus will have no mercy for me, Cassia. And I know this spell better now. I can fix this, and no one else can. Just let me try.”

  She had already let him. She had given him one of the famous second chances she so resented her mother for, and a day later, the problem he had already sworn he would fix was worse.

  Because of you.

  No, because of Ollivan. This was his doing.

  “Your curfew is upon us,” she said. “You have until I get home to do the right thing.”

  Cassia did not look back as she marched from the office and back out into the rain.

  * * *

  She had walked to the Wending Place, but now she approached the guard point by Westminster Bridge, and asked one of the militia to fetch her a carriage. He disappeared on the spot. In less than five minutes, her grandfather’s carriage pulled up. In twenty, she alighted onto the pavement outside her house.

  Voices floated to her from the drawing room as the maid took her coat. Jupitus was there as well as Alana, but Ollivan’s was most frequent. Disbelief, then irritation flooded her. He could not be confessing. She had not believed for a moment that he would. This damning affair was Cassia’s to bring to them. He was robbing her of the chance to watch their faces as they discovered she was the only one who had seen him for what he really was.

  But it was not a confession she could overhear. She stood beyond the light pouring from the doorway and listened as her brother recounted his day for them, minus any mention of the magic-sucking horror doll he had set loose on the city. He was fulfilling their grandfather’s condition of his being allowed to stay in the Witherward.

  Why was he bothering? He had already destroyed his chances of spending the next two years as a free man in Witherward. If Jupitus couldn’t undo the magic of the Society charter, he would simply keep Ollivan in a cell until the protection expired.

  Cassia’s mother and grandfather thanked and dismissed him, and Ollivan bade them goodnight. When he stepped into the hallway, he was unsurprised to see her lurking there. He stopped, so they were face to face, and looked down at her for a long moment. Cassia met his stare defiantly, even as his expression ate into her very soul. Resigned disappointment. She would not have cared that it was coming from him, if only she didn’t recognise that look. It was the look their grandfather had given her the night of her second failed initiation. It was the look her mother had worn when she demonstrated her magic for her upon coming home, and was found wanting.

  Stars, she hated him. She would follow the enforcers the day they dragged him to the portal. She would watch them see him through and forbid him from ever returning.

  He left her there without a word and slowly climbed the stairs, and that’s when she realised: he had given his report because he still hoped she would change her mind. He took the stairs in favour of transporting to watch her a moment longer, in some misplaced hope that she wasn’t about to ruin his life. Let him watch, she thought as she moved towards the drawing-room door.

  “How unexpected,” Alana was saying, and Cassia paused. “That in spite of everything he shows the political acumen we had hoped for.”

  Cassia shot a glance at the stairs, but Ollivan had finally vanished up them. For the second time that evening, she questioned whether her brother had somehow mastered the Whisperer talent for mind control.

  Jupitus, at least, still had some sense. “Do not get any ideas, Alana,” he said sternly. “If he lasts two years without giving me cause – and I’m afraid I doubt that he will – then he’ll be returned to the Otherworld. There is no political future for that boy here.”

  “I know that,” said Alana, though her tone carried the hurt Cassia knew she had suffered over Ollivan’s crimes. “I was merely commending his successes. Can I not do so? My son may be a criminal, but he is a lot of other things besides.”

  Cassia would have chosen this moment to interrupt, had the next word not been her name.

  “Cassia, though. Father, I still think we ought to explore the possibility that she could replace him.”

  “There’s nothing to explore,” said Jupitus, without a second of consideration. “She’s bright, she’s quick-witted. She has the will for it, I’m sure, but she’s not respected among the Sorcerers. Fla
unting her poor command of her magic so publicly has damaged her. Her generation would never allow her to lead them.”

  “Has her magic damaged her,” Alana said softly, “or have we damaged her? We’ve confined her to her role as a peace-maker, the effect being that she can be nothing more. Here, she’s practically a Changeling, by association.”

  Practically a Changeling. She had been told that before, by Camden folk wishing to be welcoming. It did not impress her then, as it did not impress her now. Practically a Changeling was not a Changeling, but it definitely wasn’t a Sorcerer either. She was neither.

  She was nothing.

  And her own mother agreed.

  “She is a good girl,” Jupitus continued. “She will continue to toe the line, and she’ll do us proud when she’s safely back at the Zoo, beyond everyone’s notice. Soon, hopefully.”

  Jupitus's last statement was half request and half command. “Give her more time, Father. Another year. She could still find her footing. It will improve her character and perhaps settle her into her place here.”

  Cassia leaned against the wall and listened to her grandfather reply, though she heard none of it. They had said nothing she didn’t already know. She was not liked among the Sorcerers. She was not respected. She was unfit for leadership. Ollivan was better. Also, that they believed her path was set, and she would go back to Camden. Soon, hopefully.

  So why did it hollow her out to hear it aloud? Why could she say such things to herself and feel them fuel her, spur her onwards, and when it came from her family, it stilled her completely? She had known it was true, and she had known that they knew it too.

  She wished she wasn’t crying. She wished she didn’t feel so foolish for how certain she had been only moments before; certain she held a victory she was about to deliver into their hands. What had she expected? A pat on the head? To hear that they were proud? No, if she went in there and told them about the Guysman, it would be about Ollivan, as everything was. She could not impress them by toeing the line.

  She crept from her listening spot and up to her room, scarcely breathing so they would not hear her sniff, treading only where the stairs wouldn’t creak; a quirk of her family home she had only mastered in the last two years. Ollivan had known these stairs since he was a child.

  Her mother wanted her to have another year of chances to be a proper Sorcerer, but what good would it do? Would they even be proud of her if she succeeded? Or was it only what was expected, and not worthy of commendation? If Ollivan could get banished and still deserve praise, then Cassia had been labouring under a misconception. That toeing the line was how to earn her family’s respect.

  Well, Ollivan had earned their respect; their disappointment, yes, and in Jupitus’s case, resentment, but their mother’s respect at least was intact, and even their grandfather took him seriously. So Cassia would try it his way. She didn’t have as much to lose here, and if they could do it, if they could fix this together, she would be a hero. A maverick, but what did that matter now?

  When all else fails, spite.

  She knocked softly on her brother’s door, and there was commotion from the other side. It sounded like he was shoving something heavy under the bed. When it quieted, he beckoned her in.

  Ollivan sat on the edge of his bed, his hands between his knees, as if she might believe he hadn’t been up to anything. When he saw it was her, he relaxed and knelt on the floor.

  The thing he had hastily hidden was a suitcase. He was escaping.

  “Where will you go?” said Cassia.

  “The continent,” he said without looking at her, and commenced throwing things into his suitcase.

  “Aren’t you in a hurry? You won’t find a ship leaving at this time of night.”

  “I’ll probably get out of the city first. I’ve less chance of getting caught boarding a ship in Wessolk.” He stopped and looked up at her warily. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

  Then he truly looked at her, and stopped his frantic packing. “Why are you crying?”

  She wasn’t any more. She couldn’t even summon the feeling that had brought tears to her eyes outside the drawing-room door. A new calm had overcome her, and into it had fallen all her foolish anxieties. There wasn’t space for them any more, not where Cassia was going. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and looked her brother in the eye.

  “I’ll help you,” she said, hearing a steel in her voice. “I’ll help you stop Violet.”

  19

  Ollivan had somehow convinced his sister not only to refrain from turning him in, but to actively help him. His next problem was convincing her it could wait until morning.

  “What about this situation doesn’t strike you as urgent?” she said when he asked her to vacate his room so he could get some rest.

  “The size of her legs, for a start,” he fired back. “Her inability to find, hold, or indeed read a city map for a second. I will eat the glass shards off the carpet in the Sanctuary if the thing has gone far by morning.”

  * * *

  “What now, genius?”

  Cassia stood with her arms folded and squinted at him in the morning sunlight. A thorough sweep of Drusella Square and the surrounding area had turned up no trace of the stars-damned doll.

  The truth was, Ollivan had stalled because he didn’t know what they ought to do now. He hadn’t known the night before, and after lying awake until dawn, exhausted and wound as tight as a spring, he still had no idea how he planned to capture the vessel or undo the spell.

  “Let’s go up to the Sanctuary,” he muttered, stalking past her.

  “No.” Ollivan stopped. “I’m not sneaking into that place ever again.”

  “You wouldn’t be sneaking in. As the President, I can invite whomever I wish. Now let’s get off the street before we’re seen together.” Cassia’s folded arms dropped to her sides in rising indignation. “It looks suspicious! The last time we willingly associated you were four and I was interrogating your ragdoll for espionage… and now that I think on it, perhaps only one of us was willing.”

  “You sliced her arm off with a cutting curse,” snapped Cassia as she stalked past.

  He followed her to the Sanctuary, where Cassia spun to face him and leaned against his desk, her white-knuckled grip on the edge. “Let’s try a locating spell.”

  Ollivan couldn’t contain a snort of laughter. “We are in a house of immense magic, Cassia. Please don’t desecrate it by calling some hack’s half-thought-out and then disproved theory a spell.”

  “Ollivan—”

  “Location is antithetical to everything I stand for. We may as well turn our hopes to the mysticism they pretend to practise in the Otherworld. I cannot understand why it ever caught on.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. The way the history of an object and of everything it had come into contact with complicated the finding of it was compelling to Ollivan, the way it had been compelling to theoreticians throughout history. It suggested that everything left a magical footprint; that magic was part of the fabric of the universe, which was a cornerstone of its exploration.

  As a way to find things, he would see it banned even faster than the work of Everard Guysman.

  Location magic claimed that with a map and a marker of some kind, one could pinpoint the location of anything, including a person. The reality, however, was that locating spells only worked without failure or flaw when the Sorcerer performing one already knew where the thing they sought was, and was concentrating on it as they performed the spell; making the results when used for its intended purpose anything from misleading to utterly useless.

  “You don’t have to be so dramatic,” said Cassia. “Would you at least try it?”

  “Why don’t you do the honours, if you’re so married to the idea?”

  She tensed, and when she drew breath to speak again, her lip shuddered. “Fine. Do you have a map?”

  Of course he did. Maps of the city were almost as abundant in London as copies of the morning paper, and in fact one often accompanied the other. Having somewhere to mark the changes in borders during the night, and the no-go zones where skirmishing was active, could both save one’s life and facilitate trouble-free route planning.