Thornbound

by Stephanie Burgis

  “But Miss Harwood...” Miss Banks’s pale eyebrows furrowed in concentration. “You lost your magic because you took those risks alone. You had to, to prove women could be magicians, because you were the only one available. But look at us now!” She swept out an arm to indicate her assembled classmates. “We’re not alone, any of us...because of you.”

  It was such a simple statement. But for a moment, I couldn’t breathe as I absorbed it.

  “That’s the trouble with being the first, isn’t it?” Amy’s tone was gentle but unrelenting. “You may have had our family’s support, but none of us could help when it came to magic. So I think you forgot, over the years, that even a truly remarkable, groundbreaking woman can let others work by her side.”

  “And how many more people will be hurt if I let them?” Bitterness coated my throat; I swallowed hard, fighting to keep my voice calm. “You say you don’t regret giving up your own career for Thornfell—but I found out last night that Wrexham lost his dream, too, because of mine...and that was before he went into those damnable woods this morning.”

  I’d expected sympathy or horror in response to my awful revelation. Instead, Amy let out a bright peal of laughter. “I don’t believe that for an instant! Have you ever actually asked Wrexham what his greatest dream is?”

  My eyebrows snapped together. How ignorant did she imagine I was about my husband? “He could have been the chief magical officer for the Boudiccate if it weren’t for this school. Mr. Westgate told me so last night!”

  “And I know that you would have loved that post for yourself. But do you genuinely believe that that was ever Wrexham’s greatest dream?” Amy shook her head at me pityingly. “Oh, Cassandra. How can you be so very clever when it comes to understanding magic...and so very, very not when it comes to understanding other people?”

  I blinked rapidly, caught off-balance. “What—?”

  “Ahem.” Miss Birch cleared her throat. “If you ladies don’t mind putting off the rest of your conversation...” She tilted her head at the window, where the sky was rapidly darkening. The green streaks had faded from her skin since she’d first charged into the room, but her eyes glinted with gold flecks as she finished drily, “I believe you’re still in a hurry?”

  “Yes.” I let out my breath in a whoosh. “Of course you’re right.”

  There was no more time for arguments—and even I could tell when I had lost a battle for good.

  I might not always understand other people, but right now, I didn’t have to. I had Amy and Jonathan to manage that. With the two of them by my side, I could safely focus on the magical issues whilst my students managed the active spell-casting...and Miss Birch’s first words, when she’d entered the room, had been nagging at the back of my mind ever since.

  “Tell me again,” I told her. “The ring’s gone missing? When exactly did that happen?”

  “When that creature broke through all of my barriers.” Her lips pursed as if she’d bitten into something sour. “I’d been looking it over just beforehand, trying to siphon any old kinships from it without luck. I’d swear it hasn’t been worn on any human finger in the past month, at least. But when I woke up, it was gone.”

  “So someone took it.” But why had it been sacrificed in the first place, if its owner never even wore it? For a sacrifice to successfully seal a fey bargain, it had to carry real emotional value. “Was the door left open?”

  “Didn’t need to be.” She grimaced. “The magic of the completed bargain claimed it.”

  “Completed?” I blinked, twice. “That can’t be right. Abducting Mrs. Renwick couldn’t be enough to complete a full bargain of mischief against Thornfell. We haven’t even been forced to close down yet, or—”

  “What bargain?” Jonathan demanded. “You still haven’t told us anything!”

  I gave an impatient shrug, directing my rapid explanation at the entire company. “Someone set out an altar in the library last night. It had all the usual sorts of illicit offerings to summon fey help, including blood to seal a very nasty bargain—and one silver ring, too, but none of us recognized it.”

  “Yet you still didn’t summon me?” Amy sighed. “Never mind. Just tell me now: what did it look like?”

  “Plain. Silver. Thin. Unremarkable.” I looked to Miss Birch. “Anything else?”

  “I found a bit of hidden writing inside it this afternoon,” she told me. “It took a deal of poking and experimenting to bring it up, and I’d only just managed that before the creature arrived...but it looked like curly gibberish to me. I would have shown it to you if we still had it, but—”

  “Hmm.” I frowned harder. Hidden writing masked in silver? “That sounds like—”

  “Oh, no.” Amy’s face twisted with what looked like pain. Pressing her lips tightly together, she pulled her well-used silver pencil and commonplace book from a hidden pocket in her gown and started scribbling intently. A moment later, she held up the open book, angling it carefully so that only my housekeeper and I could see it. “Did it look anything like this, Miss Birch?”

  Curving, elegant lines scrolled across the creamy paper, written in a language never seen by most people this far south of the elven kingdom...and my housekeeper’s eyes widened. “That it did! What is it, then?”

  Hurrying footsteps sounded through the open doorway.

  “Out of my way!” Lady Cosgrave’s voice rang out with the full force of her authority, sending my clustered students scattering before her.

  I smiled grimly as the pieces all finally linked together. “Indeed,” I said, “let us invite the former ambassadress to the elven kingdom to join us, shall we? I believe we may have found something that belonged to her.”

  With Annabel gone, Lady Cosgrave had been my only real suspect left. Even I knew I’d been contorting logic to an unreasonable extent, earlier, when I’d reasoned out all the ways that Annabel could still somehow have been our fey’s summoner.

  But sick betrayal still coiled in my stomach as Lady Cosgrave stepped into the room and I met her familiar, commanding gaze.

  Honoria Cosgrave had been a firm feature of my life ever since I’d been a child. She’d been a warm, familiar presence for years before this visit—a true friend of the family, if not of my own, and a woman I’d trusted to never break the laws of our land in such a vicious fashion.

  She might hate the very concept of my school. She might be furious at me. But how could she have developed such a festering hatred that she’d risk everything to end us?

  None of my students had been close enough to see those elven lines written in Amy’s commonplace book, but I heard a hiss of indrawn breath from Miss Banks. That sound made me glance at her, catching her wince as she glanced from Lady Cosgrave to her own fiancée. Miss Fennell’s amber eyes were wide and wary. While her strong-boned face remained set in neutral lines, her intelligent gaze darted around the room, clearly searching for clues.

  Poor Miss Fennell. Even through my blazing rage, I felt a sliver of pity as I saw how rigidly she held herself. She’d been balancing between two worlds for months, keeping everything she felt so carefully closed off from view that even her closest family and mentor couldn’t glimpse it. All of her secrets were finally coming to roost now, though—because all of her disagreements with her aunt had been kept private. To the outside world, she was known only as Lady Cosgrave’s brightest protégée. How could she not be caught up in the political fall-out once her aunt’s treachery was revealed?

  Miss Stewart tucked a protective hand around Miss Banks’s arm and tugged her backward, setting clear battle lines as the two Boudiccate inspectors swept past. Miss Banks’s lips turned down unhappily...but she followed her new friend’s guidance.

  “Don’t look away from me, Cassandra Harwood,” Lady Cosgrave snapped. “You know perfectly well that it’s explicitly forbidden to gather your students together without us when your school is under official inspection. Even more so when one of our own members has been kidnapped! If you’re
trying to—”

  “Honoria,” said Amy gently, “where has your necklace gone?”

  Lady Cosgrave sucked in a quick breath, one hand flying to her throat...where her elaborate elven necklace from earlier still lay. That contradiction was enough to make me frown—but she swallowed visibly as she met Amy’s gaze.

  “Every day since we first met,” Amy said, “you’ve worn a thin silver chain hidden beneath any other necklace...a chain with a plain silver ring that hung from it. Just once, that chain broke in front of me as you were propping up a fire. I picked up the ring from the hot stones near the fireplace where it had fallen.”

  Aha.

  Lady Cosgrave swallowed before drawing herself back up to her full height with a visible effort. “I don’t know—”

  “Well, of course you don’t know where it is anymore.” I picked up the lead from my sister-in-law, who gave me a subtle nod of agreement. “It was claimed by your co-conspirator tonight, when your illegal fey bargain was fulfilled.” I shook my head, grim satisfaction battling with rising fury. “After all of your self-righteous lectures about the good of the nation and how determined you were to protect young women, you set a powerful, malevolent fey to attack a whole school full of them!”

  “I did not!” High color flushed Honoria Cosgrave’s cheeks beneath her silk turban. “Even if you had a single shred of evidence that I had ever been involved in any private fey bargaining—”

  “Oh, Honoria.” Amy sighed, and Jonathan shifted to stand behind her, a silent wall of support. “Don’t make this even more painful.”

  “I would never put innocent young women at risk,” Lady Cosgrave finished. “Never!”

  I let out an involuntary crack of laughter. “I beg your pardon? You blood-bargained with a fey to attack our school—”

  “I did no such thing.” She bit out the words. “No matter how strongly I disapprove of your reckless, irresponsible choices—”

  “My irresponsible choices?”

  “I would never condone such an indiscriminate attack.” At my look of open disbelief, she waved imperiously at my staring students and at her own younger cousin, who had paled and stepped backward, looking stricken. “Well? Do you see any injured or abducted young women among their numbers?”

  “That was pure good fortune! If that creature had chosen any other bedroom to attack first...” I stumbled to a halt, my eyes widening. Of course!

  True, those vines had tried to search Luton’s house for their target this morning when they’d been repelled by Thornfell’s own defenses. But when the fey who controlled them had been re-summoned within the walls of Thornfell itself, they had shot directly up to Annabel Renwick’s room...

  And the bargain had been completed.

  “It was never about Thornfell at all,” I said blankly. “You weren’t even thinking about me or my school...except as collateral damage to your own personal schemes.”

  Lady Cosgrave’s nostrils flared. “I told you, no one else was going to be hurt—”

  “But my school would have been forced to close down due to the scandal if we hadn’t discovered the true culprit. Your clever little bargain would have been taken as evidence that I wasn’t providing a safe home for my students!”

  I shook my head slowly as I looked at the master politician before me. “In other words...you would have accomplished two goals at once. You would have freed yourself from an inconvenient blackmailer and ended the debate over women and magic...by participating in a forbidden magical rite that I would never engage in myself. You hypocrite, Honoria Cosgrave! You weren’t trying to protect the innocent at all. All you wanted was to cover up your own personal indiscretions!”

  “I—”

  “Wait!” Amy stepped between us, her voice firm—and compassion shining in her eyes. “Cassandra, wait.” She looked past me to her former friend, who stood alone in the room. Everyone else had drawn their skirts away...even her cousin.

  Amy, though, put one gentle hand on Lady Cosgrave’s stiff shoulder. “I remember,” she said, “those walks we used to take together around the grounds of this estate, Honoria, and how we sometimes discussed the local fey traditions. Neither of us has ever known or cared much about magic—but everyone knows that a fey bargain must be sealed with a true sacrifice.

  “And...” She gave a rueful smile. “I know you, Honoria Cosgrave—even if you no longer wish to know me. So I know you would never wear such a plain piece of jewelry hidden around your neck for all these years if it didn’t hold a vital piece of your heart. You care more about the welfare of the women of this nation than any other politician I know. So why don’t you give in and simply tell us all now: who were you protecting with that fey bargain, to make such a terrible act worthwhile?”

  Lady Cosgrave stayed silent for a long, frozen moment.

  Then she said, very quietly, “It wasn’t that I didn’t wish to know you, Amy. I had no choice in the matter.”

  Glowering, I opened my mouth for a hot retort—but my sister-in-law silenced me with a look.

  “I do know,” she said to her former friend. “Annabel forced it, didn’t she?”

  Lady Cosgrave moistened her lips with a quick flick of her tongue. “It is...painful to give up a friendship,” she murmured. “But some threats...some dangers are even worse. And some are even more vulnerable. Some women. In nations where men control everything.”

  Elven writing.

  Our former ambassadress.

  “An elf?” I asked tentatively. “Is she a friend of yours? Or...?”

  Her lips tightened, and I understood.

  More than a friend.

  Ohhhh. I blinked rapidly as agitated whispers rose from our crowded onlookers, all of us absorbing the revelation together.

  Fey-human matches like the one that had borne Miss Birch might be considered shocking by small-minded people even now, in our supposedly enlightened era. But it was genuinely unheard of for any haughty elf and a mere human to conduct a liaison...and after the wars that had scarred our nation’s history, the thought even carried a faint, leftover whiff of treason.

  That revelation might well have sunk her political career for good, whether or not the affair had taken place before her sensible marriage to a gentleman magician—the sacrifice that she’d told her cousin every politician must simply accept.

  Honoria, though, would never be the one to suffer most if the truth ever came out. In the hopelessly masculine elven kingdom, as she had reminded me this morning, ladies were considered the legal property of their husbands or male relatives. The punishments for any elven lady who flouted their archaic rules of ‘purity’ were known to be astonishingly brutal.

  Now I knew why Honoria had railed so passionately about the horrors of their system—and why they had felt so fresh in her mind. What threats had Annabel been whispering in her ears for all these months?

  “Annabel was going to tell the elves, too, wasn’t she?” I breathed. “If you didn’t do everything she told you—”

  “Or for simple amusement,” Lady Cosgrave said bitterly, “if she ever tired of playing with me. She said as much, the last time I tried to argue against one of her unreasonable demands. It might never have happened, if she’d decided it was more amusing to keep me in suspense forever...but.” She sighed, and slid a sidelong glance at her young cousin. “There were always fresh scandals brewing, she said, that could be used to keep any future members of the Boudiccate in line.”

  The last of the color drained from Miss Fennell’s face. Miss Banks made a quick, abortive movement toward her and then stilled.

  “Honoria,” Miss Fennell began, her voice thick with emotion.

  “Enough.” Lady Cosgrave gave a quick, warning shake of her head. “I have made my own decisions, now and always. And I will allow no one to hurt anyone in my care.”

  Well. I straightened my shoulders, adjusting to the new situation. “Neither will I,” I told her firmly. “This school is not a pawn to be sacrificed. Nor is my h
usband.”

  “Oh, for—!” She closed her eyes and sucked in what looked like a sustaining breath. “I told you, I never directed that creature to—”

  “You may not have asked it to attack anyone but Annabel Renwick,” I said, “but you summoned it into this house, unleashing it from the old agreement that kept it safely off our grounds. And he went into those woods hunting it because of you.” I took a step closer as her eyes reluctantly reopened. “So, right now, Honoria Cosgrave, I want you to tell us everything you know about the fey holding Wrexham...

  “And then we are going to walk into those woods with my students to save my husband and our school and complete a very different bargain.”

  15

  We left Thornfell fifteen minutes later with a grumbling Gregory Luton in tow. We’d swept him up from the meal he’d been busily devouring alone in the dining hall, and he still held a chicken leg impaled by his supper-knife as he trailed after us into the dimly-lit foyer, complaining all the way.

  “I told you, I spent hours trying to talk sense into that blasted fey already. If you imagine that I could persuade her—”

  “I wouldn’t even ask you to try.” I flung open the great front doors. Outside, the sky spread dark blue above the trees, fading gently into black. The lanterns hanging from our hands shone in the evening air like golden, clustered stars. “Trust me, Mr. Luton, I haven’t collected you for your diplomatic skills. As everyone in Angland knows, you haven’t any.”

  “Hmmph.” He took a large bite, glowering, while our surrounding students variously watched us with wide-eyed interest or pretended not to be listening with all their might. “Why bother hauling me along at all, then?”

  “I’m not accomplished at diplomacy, either,” I admitted—both to him and to our listeners. There was no use in pretending anymore that I was always flawlessly in control, no matter how hard I’d fought to present that deceptive façade earlier. By now, my students had all witnessed my deepest and rawest vulnerabilities...and yet, miraculously, they were all still here, gathered around me, and even more committed to our school now that they weren’t simply following my instructions without question.