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  A third age in the battle for London had begun around the time Cassia was born, when the faction leaders had agreed a set of rules known as the Principles. It was these accords that mandated the passing from territory to territory by way of the guard points, and threatened punishment to those who used their magic beyond their own people’s quarter. It was the faction rulers who enforced the Principles, and they who paid the cost if one of their own was caught breaking them.

  Cassia had not crossed a guard point into Camden in nearly two years, not since the day she was collected from the home of the Changeling’s ruling family and brought to the Heart to receive a proper Sorcerer’s education, somewhere where she wouldn’t mark herself as different for doing so; where she could embrace her magic as she had always feared to while trying to be a Changeling.

  She squinted at the opposite bank to see if she knew any of the wolves at the guard point. Were any of them among those who used to watch her with suspicion, or turned a blind eye if a Changeling cursed her on the streets of Camden? Were any of them the friends she never wrote to? Cassia had thought she had more chance of belonging in the Heart, among her own people, so she had put all the good of her life in Camden behind her with the bad. But it hadn’t worked out that neatly. At seventeen, she was a Sorcerer of seven years, but a Changeling of ten… and a true member of neither.

  But she was not ready to give up. She would master her magic, she would join the Successors, and she would shed the mantle of ‘outsider’. She would become the person everyone expected High Sorcerer Jupitus Fisk’s granddaughter to be.

  With her gaze turned to the Camden militia, Cassia was late to notice that someone had crossed the bridge and was on a collision course with her. With his nose in a newspaper, it seemed he hadn’t noticed her either. They were close enough to touch – Cassia stepping one way and then the other in an effort to anticipate his movements – before Virgil Pike looked up and jerked to a stop.

  The blood drained from his face as he folded the paper. Virgil was two heads taller than her, with dark eyes, sharp cheekbones, and deep brown skin. His long fingers fumbled as he tucked the paper under his arm, beneath his jacket, where it sat nestled against a book.

  “Good morning, Virgil.” She suppressed the urge to ask about his trip to the neighbouring quarter, because then he might ask why she was hovering outside the Wending Place. Waiting for Jasper Hawkes to sneak me in wouldn’t go over well with another Successor. It might even get her banned from joining.

  “Cassia,” said Virgil in greeting. He didn’t meet her eye, his gaze roaming around them instead. Cassia recognised that look; she had seen it the first time she’d tried to talk to a Sorcerer her age, and many times since. It was her mother who had tactlessly informed her that many in the Heart thought her some kind of spy from Camden, or else just too inclined to sympathise with Changeling causes and Changeling concerns. The Heart enjoyed a good relationship with Camden, but it was not that good, and two thousand years of history had taught the people of London how volatile these alliances could be.

  It was to be expected, yet every time it happened, Cassia’s heart sank. She and Virgil did not know each other well, and though he always came across as reserved – sullen even – she had heard people say that’s how he was with everyone. He had a handful of boisterous older sisters, which gossips liked to point to as the cause.

  Then he fumbled the book tucked into his jacket, revealing a peek at the title, and the knot in Cassia’s chest released. Laughter burst from her.

  “Goforth’s History of the Heart,” she said, and the whites of Virgil’s eyes expanded. Cassia waved a hand. “Oh, no. Please don’t fear, Virgil. I’m not going to tell my grandfather.”

  Goforth was one of the histories that delved unreservedly into how Jupitus Fisk came to power; it had involved the disappearance of the previous High Sorcerer, and the unsolved murder of two of his advisors. The work was not explicitly banned in the Heart, but it wasn’t sold, and Cassia suspected those known to have read it crossed the militia on their way to work more often than usual. Jupitus preferred the histories that focused on his masterful trade deals and spun the signing of the Principles as his own great plan for peace.

  So it was understandable that Virgil still assessed her warily. “One must consult a range of sources to get a balanced view of things,” he said, his tone probing.

  “I agree,” she said, offering a smile. “And I’ve read it too.”

  Virgil drew up in surprise. “You have?”

  “It’s not quite so scandalous where I grew up.” Cassia regretted reminding him of it the second it left her mouth – as if the people of the Heart ever forgot – but if Virgil was put off, it didn’t show. He drew closer, and looked about them again.

  “Have you also read Martinez?” he said quietly. “Because I think some of her insights regarding Fisk’s coup are uniquely—”

  He looked up, gaze catching on something over Cassia’s head that made him frown. A beat later, she heard footsteps.

  Jasper had rounded the corner and was slowing as he got closer. He stopped beside her, and Cassia thought she saw the muscles in his jaw tense and release. “Pike,” he said with forced cheer. “Good morning.”

  Virgil returned no greeting, but the look he gave Jasper surpassed his usual sullenness. It promised venom. Jasper had the High Sorcerer’s favour, and it was wise not to continue their conversation in front of him, but this was more. He dragged his gaze back to Cassia, and drew breath to speak before settling on a nod and striding away, his arm curled protectively over the cargo under his jacket.

  Jasper watched him go.

  “I’m going to go out on a limb and say he doesn’t like you,” said Cassia, and Jasper grinned.

  “I think you might be right.”

  “What was that all about?”

  But Jasper was already shaking his head and taking her hand. “Come on. We can sneak in through the servants’ entrance.”

  He took her around the side of the building, where a short set of steps led down to a nondescript door. Cassia paused.

  “Is this a good idea?” Jasper frowned in question. “If I’m caught sneaking in, won’t it affect my chances to join?”

  “You’re not going to get caught. Trust me.” He squeezed her hand, and Cassia wanted to. He was doing a kind thing for her. “All the members inside are far too occupied to notice us. You’ll see.”

  The door led to the kitchens, which smelled tantalisingly like pastries; the breakfasts members were served at the Wending Place were whispered about among hopefuls as often as the prestige of being initiated. A young kitchen maid watched them cross to the interior door, but she only blushed and smiled when Jasper winked and tugged Cassia onwards.

  Then they were in a main corridor, and Cassia tried to contain her awe. It wasn’t that the Wending Place was beautiful, though it was: the walls were panelled in dark wood carved with curling leaves and blooming flowers. The floorboards were ancient and worn, but polished to a liquid finish. But it was the atmosphere of ancient, living wonder. Her nose tickled with hallowed magic. A Sorcerer could sense any significant spell, but this was like swimming through champagne; the same feeling that rose in her when she called her magic, but flitting through the corridors and clinging to the walls. Even in the silence, it seemed to Cassia that she could hear the old place breathing.

  And then a shriek went up, and a round of cheering. Cassia looked at Jasper, wide-eyed. He nodded towards the staircase and rolled his eyes.

  “Come on.”

  In a common room on the first floor, two dozen or so rowdy Successors crowded around, watching something on the floor. Cassia and Jasper stood half-hidden behind a heavy velvet curtain in the archway leading from the hall.

  “What are they doing?” Cassia whispered.

  “Wasting their youth?” said Jasper. “Dulling the misery of their empty lives?”

  She couldn’t read his tone, but the smile he shot her rang false. Was thi
s what Jasper thought of his peers?

  Cassia craned around the curtain and started to piece together the game. The players had enchanted paper frogs to leap in some kind of race, while others magicked obstacles into their way. There were heats, and – most importantly, it seemed – a drinking component; the loser in every race was handed a glass of brown liquid to down in one.

  Something squirmed in Cassia’s belly, but she wasn’t sure if it was anticipation or anxiety. She didn’t much like to drink, and she always felt a little lost in crowds, though she attributed that to not having found her crowd in the Heart yet. Once she made friends, drinking games and boisterous behaviour might not intimidate her so much. Besides, she was sure plenty more went on at the Wending Place than this. She understood they had a library, and visiting lecturers who gave talks on magic and history, and the virtues of future careers and pursuits.

  She was aware of Jasper watching her watch the Successors, so she gave her best impression of mild intrigue, then told him to lead on.

  He took her to a narrow corridor on the mansion’s top floor, with a single window at one end looking out onto a rain-damp roof. A door in the curved wall clearly led up a spiral stair to one of the turrets, and this is where Cassia assumed they were heading, so hidden was the second doorway. It blended in with the panelling; even if one spotted it, it looked like a cupboard of some sort, nothing but a void under the stairs. Yet Jasper produced a small iron key and fitted it into the lock.

  “Do they know you have that?” Cassia asked, nodding to the key.

  Jasper grinned. “Of course not. I used to sneak it in and out of the key safe, then I realised no one ever questioned why it was missing. Now, it’s mine.”

  Cassia wondered again how well she knew Jasper, the studious, well-mannered tutor her grandfather liked so well.

  As he jostled the key in the ancient lock, Cassia turned the other way to keep a lookout, and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She hadn’t immediately objected to the idea of sneaking into the Wending Place. Jasper had been so energised by the idea that she mainly didn’t want to let him down. But for the first time, she was afraid. She put it down to breaking the rules, until the door creaked behind her and the feeling intensified. She turned around as Jasper opened it, her apprehension telling her not to put her back to the growing chasm of darkness that appeared as the door opened wider.

  “Is this a trick?” she blurted.

  Jasper froze with his hand on the latch. “A trick?” he said, failing to mask a confusion that bordered on hurt.

  “There’s a glamour or spell or something,” Cassia persisted, though she regretted opening her mouth at all. She gestured at the room with her chin. “Can’t you feel it?”

  Jasper looked into the darkness and back at her, his earlier expression melting into delight. “Oh, it’s not a glamour.” Though his face was full of light, darkness limned his voice. “There’s a lot of magic in here. Look.”

  But this magic felt strange. Fetid, souring, like wine turned to vinegar, food turned to poison. Perhaps she was on edge, the intense atmosphere of the Wending Place and the junk room, and her anxiety about sneaking in combining to play tricks on her. Jasper was holding the door patiently for her, so Cassia pushed the feeling down and stepped inside.

  The room was a lot bigger than she’d expected. It might have been that her sense of the building was muddled, but she had a feeling it was a trick of the Wending Place; that the room existed in the enchanted space within the walls and between the floorboards. A large window in the slanting roof revealed grey slate tiles and a grey sky beyond, but darkness still clung to the corners. Jasper found a lamp, and turned the mechanism to activate the lump of clara stone within – a quartz-like mineral that could be enchanted to glow.

  On one side of the room, rows of shelving stretched away into shadow, but on the other, a space had been cleared, an array of random objects pushed up against the wall or into piles. A spinning wheel. A miniature shadow puppet theatre. A collection of rocks and uncut gems in a wooden display case. An entire barrel of marbles.

  “Sorry about the mess,” said Jasper, brushing his handkerchief along the windowsill and coughing when he stirred up a cloud.

  “What is all this stuff?”

  “Things I’ve found.” Jasper shrugged. “Things I’ve made.”

  “Things you’ve…” Then Cassia understood what he meant when he said there was a lot of magic in this place. “These things are enchanted?”

  His wicked grin was back. “Of course. What did you think I use the space for? It’s a laboratory. These are my experiments.”

  Cassia wandered among the stacks of artefacts and bric-a-brac. There was a table crammed with glassware – beakers and boilers, some of them burned from use – shelves of bottles on the walls.

  In one corner was a tailor’s dummy. It wore the uniform of the stewards, the Whisperers’ militia force. Except that the stewards’ uniforms were midnight blue. This uniform was only that shade when she looked at it straight on. In the corner of her eye, it flashed teal and purple. At certain angles it became a shadow that reached for her until her eyes flickered back to it. Turning her back on it and walking away felt like running to the safety of her bed in the middle of the night when she was six years old.

  Sorcerers considered their magic to be a sacred gift from the stars, and so nothing was forbidden. Experimental magic was an essential cornerstone of Sorcerer academia. New spells were invented and recorded continuously, in the same way that technical, medical, and engineering advancements progressed too. But magic was not technology, nor medicine, nor engineering; it was infinitely more dangerous and volatile than any, and experimentation in the realms of spellwork, potion making, the enchantment of objects – there were unspoken lines dictating what was considered fair play, and what was spoken of in wary tones. Judging by the contents of the junk room – and the fact he kept it all a secret – what Jasper was doing was, by silent agreement, usually the purview of the most learned scholars at the most prestigious institutions. Cassia wasn’t even sure he was allowed to be testing his spells in secret.

  He must have read some of these thoughts on her face. “This stuff isn’t regulated,” he said, a little defensively.

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Who’s going to correct you if you misstep?”

  “I don’t need correcting,” he said, smiling.

  “People die meddling in magic, Jasper—”

  “Are you worried about me?”

  Cassia understood his smile then. She understood the way he was moving closer. Perhaps this had been a bad idea after all.

  “You’re right. It’s none of my business.”

  The attempt to brush his comment off didn’t work. Jasper took her hand. Her instinct was to pull it free; her loneliness told her she didn’t want to. But Jasper only pushed the key into her palm and retreated.

  “Stay as long as you want,” he said. “But, ah, try not to touch anything.”

  And then Cassia was alone. She locked the door and stood in the centre of the room, listening. But the silence was absolute; the Wending Place had swallowed up the shrieks and cheers of the Successors downstairs like it had Juniper Henry. She couldn’t even hear the pigeons on the roof, though their wings cast the occasional shadow, and she wondered if there was an enchantment on the room to make it so. Either way, she could mess up a dozen spells and no one would come to investigate; her mother couldn’t knock on the door or look down on the rose garden from the window. Jasper was right; it was exactly what she needed.

  There was nowhere clean to place her bag, so Cassia spread her handkerchief on the floor and set it down on top, then retrieved the jar from inside and put it in the space at the centre of the room. It was filled halfway with soil, and she had punched holes in the lid. Wedged into the soil was a small cutting from the rose garden. It was her prop for the spell she had been developing for her initiation; the one she was yet to successfully complete. r />
  Cassia took several slow breaths to chase away the sick anxiety that filled her whenever she confronted the spell, or the initiation. It wouldn’t help her to grow frustrated before she even began. She took the lid off the jar and moved away.

  A crowd-pleaser. Simple but visually impressive. That had been everyone’s advice, asked for or not, when it came to the initiation. There was a formula for success, that was the implication; to succeed, one simply needed to know it. And who knew it better than a dynasty heir like Cassia Sims?

  She took out the slip of paper on which she’d written down the intention – bloom and grow – and some notes to help her visualise it. More complex spells could be written out on hazel wood paper, which had binding properties. The Sorcerer would enchant the paper to burn as they cast their spell, splitting the focus of their magic in a way that required a great amount of power, but purifying their intention into a single command.

  Cassia had never performed such a spell; few Sorcerers her age were advanced enough in their talents. Cassia was merely using the notes as an aid, for the intention behind her spell was not as straightforward as some might assume. Grow was not all that descriptive, and that part had been the downfall of her first dozen attempts. She had once succeeded in swelling the cutting to the size of a small tree stump, shattering the jar before the thing withered without sprouting a single leaf.

  So to help her clarify the command, Cassia had read half a dozen biology tomes, until she was confident she knew, scientifically, what she was asking for when she commanded the cutting to grow.

  Then there was the trick of getting the resulting plant to bloom. Intense visualisation of the rosebush bursting into flower had caused more than one explosion. So Cassia had researched the way a rose plant moves through its annual cycle, to better understand how she was manipulating it. After eight weeks of practice and study, Cassia could name and identify eighteen species of rose, plus explain the mechanism of photosynthesis and the mathematics behind the arrangement of petals in a rose head, but still she had not enchanted a single starsforsaken cutting to grow into a rosebush and burst into flower.