Wayward Page 9

  When Ollivan had done the arithmetic, he had quickly realised accumulating twenty votes would be impossible. He didn’t have the leverage, and too many of the ‘maybes’ were a gossiping risk; he couldn’t have anyone who would move to block him finding out Lev and Virgil were campaigning on his behalf. One quick amendment to the charter and Ollivan would be working the rest of his life in Pendergast’s Occult Emporium.

  So he had come up with a plan to shave a couple of votes from each candidate and earn himself an easier victory: add another write-in ‘hopeful’ to the race. Only eighteen to win.

  “And my voters?”

  “It was all just as you said it would be,” said Lev. “You won your first three votes by just existing. Orson Halonen was the easiest – he barely needed reminding how bad you were for your grandfather’s image before he agreed.” Orson’s father had been Jupitus’s biggest political rival until he suffered a gruesome accident and untimely death. And they had comfortably banked on a couple of other members willing to quietly – very quietly – enable Ollivan in making Fisk’s judgement look ineffectual. “Iwan Goff does indeed have an ideological issue with banishment as a form of punishment.” Lev’s eyes took on a haunted look. “Along with militia in the streets, centralised power, capitalism, the entire faith of the Oracle people…”

  Virgil was nodding along empathically. “I can’t say I agree with most of what he had to say, but he has a lot of fascinating ideas.”

  “What Virgil’s saying is our conversation with him cost me three hours of my life, Ollivan. Three hours.”

  Ollivan suppressed a smile imagining it. Lev was never interested in anything more serious than a billiards tournament. It was a miracle that he and Virgil were so in love.

  “I’m sorry you were made to suffer so,” he said, ignoring Virgil’s indignant double take. “And Alden and Braswell?”

  “Were bought with a promise of stocking snake-venom whiskey in the bar again. They’re greatly looking forward to it. You better make it the first item in your budget.”

  Ten votes to win. “I have to write a budget?”

  Lev laughed. “You have to do a lot of things. Including two lots of extra charitable duties every month for the entire duration of your term.”

  Ollivan’s head fell back as the will to live deserted him. “I agreed to one additional monthly charitable task maximum.”

  “Well, Kiva moved on from her infatuation with you so we needed to improvise,” said Virgil. He tilted his head thoughtfully. “It says a lot about you that you never questioned the limits of your charms.”

  “Kiva,” said Ollivan wistfully. He had never entertained her advances, and yet he felt bereft. “But has she seen my rakish new scar?”

  “Lenniker is very grateful for… whatever it is you did for him.” Lev shrugged. “I mentioned the favour he owes you and he was agreeing before I could finish speaking. Then he vanished. Just transported himself right out of there.”

  “Perhaps he feared I’d told you all about the incident with the eighty-year-old Whisperer charlatan who compelled him to ask her hand in marriage one drunken evening when we were seventeen, and how I extricated him from the chapel just in time. But of course, I would never do such a thing.”

  Seven votes to win.

  “And the, ah, greyer tactics I suggested…”

  “The blackmail?” deadpanned Virgil.

  “Now, that tone is unnecessary. The charter very clearly fails to mention that blackmailing voters is against the rules.”

  “Yes, I remember you assuring us of that fact. What I still wonder is when and how you had so much dirt on your fellow members.”

  Ollivan grinned. “Please. Did the name Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers fool you? It should have been called the Society for the Over-Privileged, Morally Corrupt Progeny of the Sorcerer Elite. The dirt, as you say, was just lying around. This place is filthy.”

  And Ollivan was smart enough to know in a city such as this, knowing anyone’s weakness was a valuable use of his attention.

  Not that every vote had cost him much attention. He had known at a glance that the mirror Tan Medhurst used in his initiation – which was spelled to reveal Drusella Square outside – had been enchanted ahead of time, which was obviously disallowed as anyone could have performed the enchantment. In the case of Tan’s mirror, it had been spelled by Ollivan.

  Harland Wise had been dosing the Wraiths with whom he played cards with a beautifully clever potion that mildly dulled one’s reasoning skills. Ollivan knew because he had supplied him with it.

  And Patience Cleverly interned with his grandfather’s treasury. He knew she had found a way to siphon a little of the Heart’s money into her own pocket because he himself had casually pointed out to her the flaw in the way they accounted the protection fees the people paid to Jupitus. For that matter, he had suggested she take the internship in the first place.

  Four to win.

  Ollivan hadn’t had blackmail in mind when he aided his peers in their creative wrongdoing. He had simply enjoyed a little disobedience, especially of the kind that caused problems for his grandfather.

  But he was past that now. The newly repatriated Ollivan Sims had his priorities in order. Or rather, a single priority: stay in the Witherward. Live a life of magic.

  “Well, you’re not the only one who can gather dirt,” said Lev, smugly straightening his shirt-cuffs. “Lucas Viotto has a secret too. He’s romancing the daughter of Madam Arcana, dressmaker to the elite.”

  Ollivan frowned. “That’s not a secret. They’ve been involved since before I was banished.”

  “He’s romancing the dressmaker too.”

  Ollivan let out an involuntary sound akin to a bark. “Stars! I’m not sure I can blame him, she’s far more charming than her daughter.”

  “We were lucky with the timing of the election. He ages out of the Society in a month.”

  “Gale Garner was too smart for us,” continued Virgil.

  “He’s a smart fellow.”

  “He could smell the potential for bribery a mile away.”

  “What do I owe him?”

  “Dinner.”

  Ollivan cocked his head to one side. “I thought he liked girls.”

  “He does. One girl in particular. He wants dinner with your family. Three evenings. Cassia has to be there.”

  Ollivan winced. “That’s all I can promise him. I don’t have any sway with her.”

  “I told him that.” Lev nodded at Virgil. “But we think they’re a good match. He’s too good-looking for anyone else. And he won’t care that her mother’s the next High Sorcerer.”

  “You think they’re a good match,” corrected Virgil. “That much cynicism in one room can’t be good.”

  “So that just leaves…” Ollivan made a gesture that he hoped they could interpret.

  He had worked very hard at pulling off a legitimate win. He needed a victory so watertight that reversing it and sending him back to the Otherworld would mean all but dismantling the Society – a defeat he knew Jupitus would refuse to be forced into, as a matter of pride. And he had got so very close to everything being – at least by the standards and oversights of the Society charter – above board. So close, in fact, that he would allow himself to be proud of the accomplishment.

  But after accounting for every vote he could squeeze from the members by all the usual means, he still couldn’t reach the minimum threshold they were wildly hoping would get him through.

  That is, if everyone voted.

  So they had formulated a last-ditch plan to shave off another vote. Ollivan listened for sounds from the corridor, then lowered his voice anyway. “Did everything go smoothly?”

  “Easy peasy,” said Lev, shuffling from foot to foot. “I invited the four of them for lunch this afternoon, just as you said. And you were right, yet again” – Ollivan allowed himself to preen, then stopped when he caught yet another of Virgil’s glares – “lunch on me was enough to get them to pretend to entertain the idea. And who can resist the beef bourguignon at The Beringer?”

  “You can,” said Virgil seriously. “Because you’re experimenting with vegetarianism.”

  “Precisely. One of them mentioned that the stew tasted a little funny but he clearly ate enough of it, and no one else seemed to mind. They’ll all be right as rain by tomorrow, won’t they?”

  “Absolutely,” said Ollivan with a hand on his heart. “The tonic is designed to mimic food poisoning, and will pass through their systems by morning. In the meantime… well, stars watch over them for a night of clinging to their chamber pots.”

  Virgil made a noise that sounded like a huff.

  “What’s wrong?” said Ollivan.

  “What’s wrong is that you’re back, you’re unbanished, and you’ve been behaving like a renegade even before it was official. Only this time you have Lev and me in it as well. Neck deep in it, Ollivan, while you were twiddling your thumbs in the Otherworld and selling healing crystals to people who didn’t know any better.”

  “I can assure you, Virgil, they knew better by the time I saw them out.”

  “Blazing stars, that’s what you heard?”

  “It’s not everything I heard, just the most unfair of several spurious accusations.”

  “And what were the others? That you were somehow able to blackmail half the members into voting for you—”

  “Four.”

  “—that you resorted to poisoning them when that wasn’t enough?”

  “Lev poisoned them.”

  Virgil’s hands balled into fists. “I swear to all heaven and earth—”

  “Virgil.” Lev’s usually booming voice was soft and carried the weight of conversations Ollivan hadn’t been privy to; fights they’d already h
ad as they worked and scraped and fought tooth and nail to bring him back. “You said you’d give him a chance.”

  Ollivan’s irritation had been rising, but it collapsed, and his throat closed. Because Lev still believed in him, and because Virgil didn’t.

  When they had found him at Pendergast’s, Ollivan had told them the truth of what had happened. Not all of it, for reasons he maintained, but that he was innocent of the murder of the Wraith Jonas Benn, the crime that had been the final nail in the coffin for Jupitus, Jupitus’s advisors, and his own mother. And they had believed him. Or, at least, they had said they did. As he looked at them now – Lev imploring Virgil with a look, Virgil slowly relenting, as he always did for the boy he loved – Ollivan had an uncomfortable awareness of things not being as right and hale as he had hoped.

  “Believe me, Virgil, I will spend the rest of my life repaying you for this,” he said. “It’s the single greatest thing anyone has ever done for me. As a start, I’m making you joint Secretaries.”

  Virgil swallowed. Lev laughed nervously. “Actually, that’s not possible,” he said.

  “Against the rules? That’s a shame. We’ll have to flip a coin.”

  “No, I meant the position’s already been filled.”

  Ollivan gaped. “But the President gets to name a Secretary. I’m the President.”

  Virgil snorted. “How’s your arithmetic, Sims?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “That’s only seventeen votes. Don’t you want to know who cinched you the presidency?”

  “You… you bribed someone with the Secretary role?”

  “It’s not that simple,” said Lev, shaking his head. “All the cross-campaigning got too risky. Some of the people we would have needed to vote different ways are good friends; they would talk, and they would realise that we had persuaded them to vote for different people.” He scratched the back of his head self-consciously. “After everything, we simply needed another body.”

  In planning the coup, Virgil had raised the idea of getting one or two of their blackmailed voters to persuade a second, or even third person, as part of the deal.

  Ollivan shook his head vigorously. “I rejected that plan. You said you agreed that coercion was too nebulous a way of getting someone to behave as one wishes. The chance they would rebel, or muck it up, especially in a task as delicate as covert persuasion. This whole plan was already balancing on a knife’s edge.”

  A female sigh sounded from the open door. “Earth and stars, do you always have to be so dramatic?”

  Ollivan went cold and hot all at once. His eyes locked with Lev’s, who mouthed sorry even as an entertained grin crept unbidden across his face. Ollivan shot him his best death stare as he turned around and, for the first time in over a year, came face to face with Sybella Dentley.

  He was devastated to find she was just as lovely as he remembered her. Wide-set, light brown eyes looked out at him from a freckled, brown face. Her curls were pinned back and falling over one bare shoulder. It was whispered that she glamoured those curls to shine as they did; Ollivan had never learned if it was true. With the added width of her ruched taffeta skirt, her frame filled the doorway. Her mama said she was too fat, whatever such a thing meant. Ollivan thought she was perfect.

  He could tell from the way her chin was dimpled that the air of cool nonchalance hid a thousand barbs, no doubt for him. It made him wonder if she’d been drafting them in his absence; if she’d been thinking of him.

  “Ellie.”

  “Miss Dentley,” she corrected.

  Ollivan cursed the heavens. Were they all determined to take him to task?

  He turned to Lev. “You needed a body,” he said slowly, “and the best person you could think to ask for help was… Miss Dentley?”

  He aimed the last two words at Sybella, and she widened her eyes in challenge.

  “Actually, I found them out,” she said with a sing song lilt to her voice and a toss of her hair. Earth and stars, Ollivan hated her. “Jan Lenniker cornered me all a-fluster about a month ago, and asked who I told about that night with the Whisperer woman, do you remember?”

  Ollivan cursed himself. Of course he had remembered Sybella had been there, he just hadn’t considered that Lenniker would double-check whether he was really being blackmailed by a boy in another dimension.

  “Sybella came to us and said she knew what we were up to,” said Lev shame-facedly. “Only—”

  “Only she didn’t know,” finished Ollivan, already seeing where this was going. There was a reason they had once been joined at the hip. Ollivan and Sybella’s poison had been trouble, but in the end, her taste for it had only been a phase, while Ollivan’s had been a calling.

  “I did, once Lev and Virgil were kind enough to confirm my suspicions.” She pouted. “What’s the problem, Mr Sims? You seem so fond of a little blackmail.”

  Ollivan folded his arms, so that she wouldn’t see him clenching his fists. If Sybella Dentley got the slightest hint that she was getting under his skin, the humiliation would be so acute he may as well walk himself straight back to the portal. “And now you’re Society Secretary.”

  She beamed. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

  “Congratulations. I hope you know you’re about to have your work cut out for you. Being President of the Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers is an irritating means to an end for me, and I plan to treat it as such.”

  “Oh,” she said softly. She had come very close; so close Ollivan could see the flecks of green in her caramel eyes, and smell the lily scent of her perfume. “I’m afraid that’s not how this is going to go. You see, at the end of your term, I’ll be eligible to run for the presidency. The more successful my tenure as Secretary, the more likely I am to win. And I will win, Ollivan. Anything you do to get in the way will see you whisked back to the Otherworld before you can say ‘food poisoning’. Probably with Lev and Virgil too. The charter may neglect to say anything about blackmail, but it’s perfectly clear about voter suppression. So I suggest you strive to be the most perfectly adequate president this society has ever seen, and do exactly as your Secretary asks of you. Now, do you mind? You’re leaning on my desk.”

  Few things could have truly dampened Ollivan’s spirits this evening. The reality of working with Sybella Dentley – and working well, on threat of exposure – was one of them. All the magic and peace of the President’s Sanctuary leached away; it was a cage that he would share with her. He could not get out of there quickly enough.

  Sybella spoke again as the three of them were leaving.

  “Close the door behind you.”

  His friends didn’t catch the tone, but Ollivan spun, horrified. Sybella was smiling sweetly at him, venom in her eyes.

  She knew exactly what she had said. They were the starsforsaken words she had spoken on the night she broke his heart.

  * * *

  “Where’s my book?”

  Hester might be talking to you, but your eyes bore a hole in the chessboard, your whole body tight with anticipation.

  “On the table by the window,” says Fyfe breathlessly.

  The table beyond the sofa, where Gedeon is hiding.

  You dare to look up as she crosses the drawing room, unawares. Gedeon’s timing is perfect as he springs, lion-shaped and roaring. It scares you and terrifies Hester, whose fright transforms her into a tiger.

  A second later they’re both human, and a lamp lies decimated on the rug.

  No one breathes. The prank is ruined. Then from across the chessboard, Aelius gasps. No, laughs. Fyfe falls next. When Hester joins in, you know it’s safe.

  “And you, Cassia! You were in on this?”

  You were. The newcomer; the quiet, unsure Sorcerer, a co-conspirator. Hester scolds you with a smile and a swat on the arm, and you swell to the size of a tiger.

  10

  It was the sort of family dinner that made Cassia wonder why she had ever wanted to come home.

  The five of them picked awkwardly at their food; Cassia, her mother, her grandfather, Ollivan, and – for reasons unknown – Gale Garner. More perplexing than his presence was how pleased he appeared to be there. He kept catching Cassia’s eye and shooting her smiles from across the centrepiece.

  It was not as disconcerting as the seething rage burning her from her grandfather’s end of the table. If she were Ollivan she wouldn’t be able to withstand it. But her brother had never cared what anyone thought.