The Threads of Magic

by Alison Croggon

  “You’ll have to be patient, then. Want something to eat?”

  “I said I’d wait.” Oni turned to leave. “No, maybe some bread. Have you got any eggs?”

  Oni nodded, already busy with another customer, and Pip returned to his brooding.

  When he had given El the money from Olibrandis, she had just assumed he had thrown away the Heart. Why, after all, would he keep such a grisly object?

  Pip felt a little guilty, because he hadn’t disposed of it. He had walked to the Mascule Bridge and, gripped by a strange reluctance, leaned over the parapet and stared down at the blackish-brown water that flowed sluggishly beneath. He didn’t reach inside his clothes to take out the Heart, but he could feel it there, warmed by his own body heat, as if it were a live thing. Why should he throw it away? Maybe he could still discover what the Heart was, and find a way to turn it to their advantage. He thought of the expression on the noble’s face when he had realized that they’d lost the treasure. It was important. Really important. Nobles wouldn’t call a mere silver box a treasure; they had rooms full of gold.

  He knew that he’d regret it for the rest of his life if he threw the Heart away without even trying to find out why it mattered. He was sure it was magic. Perhaps it was some kind of spell for getting rich, if he could only work out how to use it. He had already noticed how it changed temperature: right now it felt cold, like he had a snowball in his breeches.

  After El had left with her basket he’d mooched around the Choke Alleys, wondering who he could ask, discreetly of course, about magic objects. There weren’t any witches left in Clarel. He and El had sometimes suspected that Missus Pledge, the old lady who had given them their apartment, had been a bit magic: there had been one or two strange incidents … but she never said so outright. And anyway, she was dead.

  He was halfway through his hard-boiled egg when El arrived at last, flushed and slightly out of breath, her hood drawn low over her face. She slid in next to him on the bench.

  “You took your time,” said Pip.

  “No need to splutter egg all over me.” El lowered her voice. “I got news. Bad news, Pip.”

  “What kind of bad news?”

  “You know you went to Olibrandis this morning?” He nodded. “Well, it’s all around the market. He’s dead.”

  “Dead? Olibrandis?”

  “It must have happened after you went there. I reckon it’s to do with that box. I told you it was bad luck.”

  “Probably just a coincidence,” said Pip. “Or maybe it’s just a rumour. He looked right as rain when I saw him.”

  “No, listen, Pip. They reckon that he was tied up in his chair and then someone cut his throat – whisht – just like that.” She drew her finger across her neck. “But he wasn’t robbed; stuff was thrown everywhere, but the cash box was still there, and all his jewels, and most everything else, so far as people can tell. Lindy went in to sell some bits and bobs and found him sitting in his chair, with blood all over the floor.”

  Pip didn’t respond. He had to admit that didn’t sound like a rumour. He felt a stab of sorrow for Olibrandis, whom he had always rather liked. “Did you talk to Lindy?”

  “Yes, of course I did. What you think I been doing? But there’s worse. Someone is looking for you. A man cloaked all in black, Lindy said, like an assassin. Asking around the place, looking for a thieving young man called Pip what lives in the Choke Alleys, black hair, short, scrawny, legs like sticks, weasel eyes.”

  “Weasel eyes!” Pip was offended.

  “He knows your name, Pip. He must have got it from Ollie.”

  Pip shifted uncomfortably. “There’s probably hundreds and hundreds of people who look just like that around here. And probably lots of Pips among them.”

  El stole a glance around the alehouse and leaned so close to Pip that he felt her breath on his cheek. “He’s offering silver for information. He probably knows everything he needs to know already. Maybe he knows where our house is. I mean, we keep it dark, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t talk.” She bit her lip. “It’s got to be the same man what cut poor old Olibrandis.”

  Pip thought that seemed likely, but he wasn’t willing to admit it. “But why would he cut poor old Ollie’s throat? If he wanted to know my name, Ollie would have told him without that. It’s probably about something else, like I said – some deal that went sour.”

  “I told you I had a bad feeling.” El brushed her hair back from her face. “What if he’s waiting for us at home? He might already be there.”

  For a moment they both imagined an assassin, skeletal and sinister, his face concealed in the shadow of a hood, hiding behind the door as they entered, his lifted blade shining in the dim light…

  Pip looked furtively around the taproom, which was beginning to empty out after the noon rush. He wouldn’t trust anybody here as far as he could throw them. If silver was on offer, the Choke Alleys would be solid eyes, looking for him.

  “But we’ve got nowhere else to go,” he said at last. “Where could we go?”

  “Oni’s got somewhere.”

  “But she doesn’t like me.”

  “She never said she didn’t like you. She just thinks you’re annoying. Which you are.”

  It was Oni who was annoying, Pip thought, but he didn’t say so out loud. He pushed away the bread. His stomach seemed to have unaccountably gone missing, and he wasn’t hungry any more.

  Chapter Ten

  “BUT WHY WOULD AN ASSASSIN BE AFTER YOU?” ONI crossed her arms and stared belligerently at Pip. “You’re not important. Assassins only go after important people.”

  After lunch, at El’s request, Oni had begged an hour off from the innkeeper. The three of them had repaired to Oni’s place, an apartment in a crumbling building a few streets from the Crosseyes. It had once been a mansion but, like most of the people who now lived there, it had fallen on hard times. Oni’s apartment was on the fifth floor, an airy attic room that looked over the roofs of the city.

  She was being annoying again.

  “It’s because of this box I found,” said Pip, trying to be patient. “A silver box. It was precious.”

  El cast Pip a speaking glance. Against El’s objections, he had argued that they shouldn’t mention the Heart to Oni. Without being able to say why, Pip felt they shouldn’t talk about it. Part of him worried, irrationally, that someone might hear.

  “So you want to move into my place with no notice and maybe for ever because you think an assassin is out for your skin because you stole a worthless silver box?” said Oni. “Pull the other one. It’s got bells and spangles.”

  Pip had been annoyed by Oni for about five years. He and El had met her shortly after they arrived in the City of Clarel, when he was seven years old. She was a dark-skinned Eradian, but she had never lived in the Weavers’ Quarter where most Eradians lived. Her mother was the housekeeper at the Old Palace and she had been raised there. Oni’s mother had found Pip and El sleeping under a bridge near the Old Palace, half dead from starvation, and had given them a meal and introduced them to Missus Pledge, who gave them a place to live.

  Oni and El had become best friends almost straight away. Pip had many acquaintances, but he didn’t have a friend like Oni, and he was secretly jealous. Oni knew this, of course. It was one of the reasons she was annoying.

  “I think, if you’re going to ask such a big favour of me, you should tell me the truth,” said Oni.

  “I think we should too, Pip,” said El. “It’s only fair.”

  Pip squirmed under their double gaze. “But what if the assassin decides to torture you, like he did poor old Ollie?” he said.

  “Lindy said nothing about torture.”

  “You said he was tied up in his chair,” said Pip. “Of course he was tortured.”

  For a moment the three of them were silent. They had all known Olibrandis, and had often made fun of his wonky gait and wheezy voice. In a city full of liars, thieves, murderers and frauds, Olibrandis
passed as a decent person. That was quite rare. Old Ollie hadn’t deserved what had happened to him.

  “An assassin would probably torture me anyway,” said Oni. “That’s what they do.”

  El leaned forward and dropped her voice to a low whisper, even though there was no one else in the room. “It’s about magic. This treasure box Pip found…” She shuddered. “It opened by itself and there was this nasty leathery thing inside. It’s bad magic – I could tell as soon as I saw it.”

  A strange expression crossed Oni’s face, a flicker of caution. “But there’s no magic any more,” she said. “Not since they burned all the witches. You know that.”

  “Maybe there is,” said El. “Just because something’s against the law doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I mean, thieving’s against the law, and Pip happens all the time.”

  “If it’s about magic I don’t want anything to do with it.” Oni spoke with sudden violence. “If it’s magic, you have to find somewhere else.”

  El took Oni’s hand. “Please, Oni. We need somewhere to hide. Just for a few days. Just until it all dies down.”

  Oni squeezed El’s hand, let it go and sighed heavily. “Maybe. If you’re straight with me.”

  Pip was frowning at the floor. “I feel like I shouldn’t tell,” he said.

  “Well then, try your luck on the street.”

  At last, with deep reluctance, Pip told Oni about the Heart, how he had accidentally stolen it from men he had thought were out-of-towners but who turned out to be nobles. He didn’t tell her that he thought it had moved when he picked it up, or of his conviction that it was somehow alive. As he spoke, Oni went very still.

  “It’s a bad thing,” said El, shuddering again. “I could feel it. I couldn’t sleep with it in the house. It gave me awful dreams. That’s how I knew we had to get rid of it.”

  “And where is it now?” said Oni.

  “The thing? I told Pip to throw it in the river. You did, didn’t you?”

  Pip didn’t answer. He thought that El would likely punch him if he said he had kept it.

  “Don’t tell me you still have it? Pipistrel, I told you, it’s evil, it’s bad luck.” El was almost crying, and her chest began to heave jerkily, as it did when she was agitated.

  “Show me,” said Oni.

  “I can’t,” said Pip. “It would be wrong.”

  “Show me.” Oni was staring at him, her eyes burning.

  Slowly Pip reached under his clothes and took out the Heart. It was warm to his fingers, warmer even than his own skin. It fitted pleasingly in his palm, smooth and leathery. It was uncanny, that was certain, but he didn’t feel the same revulsion towards it that El did. It was magic, he was sure, but he didn’t think it was evil.

  El flinched and turned away, but Oni breathed in sharply. She bit her lip and reached out and touched the Heart with the tip of her finger, stroking it gently.

  “Oh my,” she said. “Oh, the poor, poor thing.”

  Pip looked at her curiously, his annoyance forgotten. “You know what it is?”

  Oni sat back, biting her lip. She looked shaken. “I think you’re in trouble, Pip. If I’m right. I might be wrong, though.”

  “So what is it?” El stole a look at the Heart, and then turned away. “It’s horrible, I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  Oni was silent for a long time, her face troubled.

  “You might as well tell us,” said Pip, putting the Heart away. “We ought to know.”

  “I don’t know if I can trust you, Pip.” Pip opened his mouth, about to protest indignantly, but she held up her finger. “No, I don’t mean that I think you’re a snitch or nothing like that. It’s more…” She trailed off.

  “More what?”

  “We got to talk to Ma.”

  “Your ma? Why? Could she help?” El turned around.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about us. Stuff you shouldn’t know. For your sake, as well as ours.”

  “What are you talking about?” El looked offended. “I’d never do you down. You know that. Don’t you? All these years…”

  “It’s not just me, El. If it was just about me, I wouldn’t worry – well, not much. But it isn’t.” Oni paused again, frowning. “I got to go back to work, but we should meet up later and go to see Ma. Maybe meet me at Linkpin Square at the sixth bell. Don’t you poke your noses out of this door until then, not one inch, and leave out the back alley. I just hope to the gods that no one saw us coming here.”

  “We was careful,” said Pip. “I’m as certain as I can be that no one followed us. You said I was being silly. You said—”

  “Yes, I get it,” said Oni crossly. “You were right.”

  Now Oni was annoyed.

  Chapter Eleven

  AS THE SUN DIPPED BEHIND THE CITY BUILDINGS, EL and Pip headed by indirect ways for Linkpin Square. “Square” was a grand name for a triangle where three alleys met: it was a tiny patch of weedy ground overshadowed by dank tenements. It was twilight by the time they arrived, but they felt hideously exposed as they waited in the darkest doorway they could find, their necks prickling as if unseen eyes were watching them from the blank windows above.

  Oni was late. El had begun to grow anxious, worrying that the assassin had tracked her friend down, and maybe had already cut her throat, and her breath came in little gasps. Pip hated it when El got like that, and he was ready to punch Oni by the time she finally arrived. Oni ignored his reproaches, saying shortly that she couldn’t help it, and that it would be better to keep moving instead of wasting time arguing.

  From Linkpin Square they made their way to the Old Palace. It took them longer than it normally would: they doubled back on their tracks and hid behind low walls, listening for stray footsteps, and once they made a short cut via an abandoned building, slipping in through a broken window. Pip was using all the tricks he knew but travelling with two others made him feel horribly visible. He was pretty sure, all the same, that nobody saw when they wriggled through a gap in the railings and dived into the overgrown park at the back of the Old Palace.

  Once they were inside the grounds, Oni led them unerringly to her mother’s kitchen garden where they climbed over the wall and knocked on the door.

  Oni’s mother wasn’t pleased to see them, and told them to come back the next day.

  “Ma, it’s important,” said Oni. “Else I wouldn’t have come.”

  “It’s Georgie’s day.”

  Oni swore. “So what?”

  “So you can’t be here.”

  “I told you, Ma, it’s important.”

  “How important?”

  Oni looked over her shoulder, as if she thought the shadows might be listening, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can’t say, Ma,” she said. “Not out loud.”

  Her mother’s jaw tightened. Oni met her eyes stubbornly, and at last she sighed and held open the door. “All right,” she said. “But be quick.”

  She let them into her kitchen: a large, whitewashed room flagged with red clay tiles that stayed cool even in the fiercest heat of summer. At one end was a hearth with a roasting spit next to a covered oven, and at the other were rows of mullioned windows over a wooden workbench. The windows looked out onto the walled garden where Oni’s mother grew all her vegetables and fruits. The eaves were heavy with dried herbs and bunches of garlic, and on the walls were shelves of bright preserves and relishes and pickles. In the middle was a long scrubbed table, with a bench against the wall and a miscellany of chairs.

  Pip and El had visited this kitchen often over the years. They knew Oni’s mother well enough to call her by her first name, Amina, although most people called her Missus Bemare. The Missus was a sign of respect more than anything else: no one seemed to know if she had ever been married. Oni’s father was called Guilliame Tylova and lived in the Tailors’ Quarter. Oni visited him now and then, to check how he was.

  “Nobody knows what he does,” said Oni once, when El asked about him. “He alwa
ys has plenty of money though. Ma says she doesn’t quite know why she ended up with him, except that he was very handsome at the time. And then she got me, and who could regret that?”

  Amina gestured for them to sit down. She wouldn’t let them speak until she had lit several dark yellow candles with an unfamiliar, sharp scent and set them around the table, muttering under her breath. Pip raised his eyebrows at Oni.

  “We don’t want to be overheard,” she said. “So shut up until she’s ready.”

  El was watching with fascination, her eyes wide. “It’s witchcraft, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Is your ma a witch?”

  “I said, shut up,” said Oni.

  “No need to be rude,” said Pip.

  “You don’t know how rude you’re being,” said Oni. “So shut up.”

  After that Pip and El buttoned their mouths. Pip shifted uncomfortably. Something strange was happening with the Heart: he could feel it getting colder and colder in his pocket.

  At last Amina seemed satisfied, and she sat down with them at the table, clasping her hands in front of her.

  “So you’d better have a good story.”

  Pip then told Amina what he had told Oni: how he had found the Heart, and how he was sure that an assassin had murdered Olibrandis. Amina listened in complete silence.

  “There was a box?” she said, when he had finished.

  “Yes, a silver box.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  He was beginning to get tired of talking about it. “Well, Ollie said it had excellent chasing and repoussage work, and it had amethysts and garnets that weren’t worth much. It had a red dragon in the coat of arms; Ollie said it was the Old Royals.”

  “I wish you hadn’t sold it.”

  “We was hungry,” said El. “We didn’t have nothing else.”

  “You had better show me the Heart.”

  When Pip touched the Heart, it was so cold he winced. As he put it on the table he noticed that it had a faint mist of condensation on its surface. Amina stared at it in silence, but she didn’t touch it. She didn’t look horrified or disgusted. Most of all, thought Pip, she looked sorry for it.