The Threads of Magic

by Alison Croggon

  “Stop it, Bottomly,” said the man who had spoken earlier. “The poor thing’s already confused enough.”

  Georgette blinked again, and politely averted her eyes from the levitating knuckles. The sprite popped back into sight. “Sorry, Helios,” it said.

  Helios smiled reassuringly at Georgette, and she gave a wavering smile back. He had golden hair, and was wearing a high top hat, a yellow waistcoat and a long red skirt. His eyes were deeply kind.

  “Better now?” said Amiable. “I’m sorry about the rain. It couldn’t be helped.”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Georgette.

  “Good,” said Amiable. “So how, may I ask, are you going to help us?”

  Everyone at the table, including the sprite, looked at her as if she had an answer. Georgette felt herself blushing again. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t even know if all this is real.”

  “I told you that was rude.” Amiable pouted.

  “Hush, Amiable,” said Missus Clay.

  By now Georgette was scarlet, but she sat up as straight as she could. “Did Amina ask you to rescue me?”

  “Missus Bemare to you,” said Amiable sharply, a flash of green fire in her eyes. “I’m still not sure that it wasn’t you that got Missus Bemare arrested by the Office for Witchcraft Extermination.”

  “Amin— Missus Bemare has been arrested?” said Georgette, shocked. “I would never in a thousand years do anything to hurt Am— Missus Bemare. Not for anything. She’s like … she’s like my mother.”

  “Missus Bemare was your wet-nurse,” Amiable snapped. “Do you think she had any choice about that?”

  “Darling, you’re embarrassing us,” said Helios.

  “Speak for yourself, sunboy,” said Amiable.

  “I don’t believe the Princess informed on Missus Bemare,” said Missus Clay. “There are many things at play in the city. Although it’s always possible that I’m wrong.”

  Georgette was quiet. Perhaps it was her fault, even if she hadn’t intended harm. She shouldn’t have gone to Amina for help. But there was no one else.

  “We should never let outsiders in,” said Amiable. “And this one’s a royal outsider…”

  The dark-skinned man next to Amiable patted her hand. “This is the safest place, Amy,” he said. “We talked it over with Amina, remember?”

  “I still think it’s wrong, Potier. But I got her here, didn’t I?”

  “Enough.” Missus Clay’s voice cut across the murmurs that were rising around the table. “For better or worse, and I hope for better, we decided to bring the Princess here. I think it is likely for the better.”

  Georgette’s heart was sinking into her boots. She had no idea why she had been brought to this place, or what these people expected of her. The only person who could guide her through this was Amina, and Amina wasn’t here. “How do you know she was taken?”

  “She sent word,” said Missus Clay. “Before she went into shutdown. Probably when they had her in the wagon, all in chains.”

  “She’s not back yet,” said a very short man who hadn’t yet spoken. “And nobody’s heard anything. It’s a bad sign. They probably took her to the torture chambers.”

  “Juin, the voice of doom,” said Potier mockingly. “Of course we’ve heard nothing. That’s protocol, isn’t it?”

  Georgette swallowed hard. She wasn’t supposed to, but she knew what happened in the torture chambers of the Office for Witchcraft Extermination.

  “If they’ve put her in the dungeons, I don’t think she can get out,” she said, so quietly that she was almost inaudible. “Nobody does. It’s too late…”

  “Missus Bemare is more than able to deal with prisons,” said Amiable scornfully. “We’re not worried about that.”

  “Oh.” Georgette remembered that Amina had said that Cardinal Lamir was a Spectre himself. “But isn’t the Cardinal a … a…?”

  “She’s more than a match for a Spectre,” said Amiable, and sniffed. “If he is a Spectre. Which he probably is.”

  “One Spectre, anyway,” said Missus Clay. “We must hope that she doesn’t have to deal with any more of them. My concern is that if Missus Bemare is forced to use her powers, it will expose us.”

  “And that’s bad,” said Juin, nodding gloomily. “That’s very bad indeed.”

  “Maybe it isn’t,” said Missus Clay. “Maybe it’s time we stepped out of the shadows. Maybe we’ve lived too long dominated by fear.”

  Bottomly, who had been playing knuckles all through the discussion, looked up at this and gave a tiny cheer. Georgette glanced at him involuntarily and he vanished at once, but almost immediately reappeared again. This time, Georgette remembered to avert her eyes.

  “It’s rules to disappear,” he said with a touch of defiance. “Ratterbags aren’t supposed to be seen.”

  “Of course it’s rules,” said Helios. He looked as if he were trying not to laugh. “But my name means the sun. I am supposed never to live in the shadows. And all my life, I have never lived anywhere else.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  AMINA SHUT HER EYES. THE TORTURER LIFTED HER middle finger from the arm of the chair and attached the pliers to her nail.

  Even after all the hours she had spent in this cell preparing herself, Amina didn’t feel quite ready. She plucked some stolen moments out of the flow of time.

  She wanted to think about her Aunt Tobia.

  Aunt Tobia had taught Amina the rules of magic when she was knee-high, counting them off on Amina’s stubby little fingers. “First,” she would say, “Do No Harm. Second: Everything Is Connected. Third: Never Use Magic for Selfish Ends.” Then she’d pause. “The Fourth Law. Well, that is more difficult. This is a law that takes a lifetime to understand. Fourth: You May Break the First Three Laws, But Only If You Follow Them With All Your Mind and All Your Heart.”

  Like all simple things, magic is deeply complex. Amina bent her mind to the Fourth Law.

  Amina’s craft came from a different tradition than from most of the witches in Clarel. Her Eradian ancestors were master weavers who had moved north on the trading routes hundreds of years before, bringing with them spices, amber, gold and silk. Some settled in Clarel, which was then an important trading centre. It was less important now, since the wealth had moved elsewhere, but the Eradian weavers of Clarel were still famous throughout Continentia. Every Eradian child was taught the secrets of textiles.

  Weaving the fibres of reality into new patterns: that, for both good and ill, is what magic is.

  “It can be hard to see, because it will often cloak itself in honey and spice, or wall off eyes with deceptive words,” Aunt Tobia had said once. “But if a witch makes horror where once there was beauty, and suffering where once there was pleasure, and shame where once there was innocence, then you will know it as bad magic. Beware the bad magic.”

  From the moment the Cardinal had entered the room, Amina could smell the bad magic in Lamir. It was rotting underneath his robes, like decomposing meat. Until that moment, Amina had never been completely sure if Lamir was a Spectre. It was a persistent rumour among witches, but it was always possible that Lamir was merely an ordinarily cruel and ambitious man.

  Her stolen moments were slipping past.

  Amina cleared her mind, permitting her thoughts to drift where they desired. She remembered the sweet golden air of a summer dawn. She remembered the first time she had ever kissed a boy she loved, the first kick of her daughter inside her womb. All moments of profound change, in which sadness was knitted up into joy. Joy. That was what she needed.

  At last. Now I know what to do.

  Amina re-entered the river of time and opened her eyes.

  The torturer was still lightly holding her middle finger. He was extending the moment of apprehension, letting his victim know that he was about to inflict unbearable agony. The iron clamp held her wrist to the arm of the chair. His eyes flickered to her face, again with that almost impercepti
ble smile.

  Amina smiled back, as radiantly as the early sun.

  The torturer blinked and hesitated, taken aback, and turned to Cardinal Lamir. As Amina smiled, the torture chamber filled with the golden light of dawn.

  Cardinal Lamir looked astonished, and Amina realized then that he hadn’t really believed that she was a witch at all. None of the poor souls who had been tormented in this chamber of horrors had been witches. Lamir had known that, and he had tortured them anyway. As the light poured out of her, Amina’s witch senses opened: she could hear voices, the vibrations of unimaginable suffering that had soaked over years and years into the naked stone walls. She felt a surge of bright, merciless fury.

  She concentrated briefly and the clamps on her arms and legs snapped open, releasing her. The torturer paled and stepped back, crooking his fingers by his temples in the sign against the evil eye. Her gaze swept over him with contempt and he became rigid and fell voicelessly, like a block of wood, to the floor.

  Lamir overcame his shock almost at once and began to shout for the guards. He lifted his hands, readying himself to cast some kind of spell. Amina almost choked on the magical aura around him. It was a corpse smell, a stench like death but much, much worse. Rot and decay are part of the natural way of things, the fertilizer that feeds the roses of next season; but this was death arrested, the decay that promises no roses… For an instant her rage faltered, as if the light inside her was being sucked into an enormous, ravenous vacuum.

  She didn’t have time to think. Every moment Lamir became more dangerous, and she had never before faced the magic of a Spectre. She lunged forward with all the force of her anger and punched Lamir on the nose.

  Amina was a big, well-muscled woman, and Lamir, although tall, had a skeletal build and the strength of one who never had to perform any physical task for himself. The last thing he expected was this kind of direct assault. He went down like a sack of turnips and didn’t move.

  She bent over the Cardinal with a shudder and touched his temple with her forefinger. The feel of his skin was obscene, loathsome, but she forced herself to concentrate. She could feel a pulse. She hadn’t quite destroyed his body.

  As she focused her mind, she felt his consciousness flicker. Lamir was coming back. She might have the power to wrestle with him, but she doubted it. Not on her own.

  Somebody was already rattling the bolt of the torture chamber. She wavered, wondering whether to take the risk of fighting the Cardinal. No, she couldn’t. Her first duty was to escape.

  Amina shut her eyes, remembering everything she loved. When she opened them, she was a rat. Her tunic had collapsed around her, like a tent.

  She just had time to wriggle out and hide under the chair before the cell door slammed open and the two guards came running in, pikes at the ready. They halted when they saw the two prone bodies and the empty chair, their mouths round “o”s of astonishment. One poked the tunic cautiously, as if it were a dead body that might spring into life at any moment, and the other knelt down and checked the Cardinal’s pulse.

  Amina scuttled behind them, hidden by the flickering shadows of torchlight, and out of the open door.

  And then she ran for her life.

  Chapter Thirty

  FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, ONI FELT SORRY FOR PIP. Her sympathy was mixed. She couldn’t help blaming Pip for getting them all into such trouble. It was his fault that her mother had been taken away by the Cardinal’s assassins, and his fault that El had vanished into a Rupture. If he hadn’t stolen the Heart, Oni would be asleep in her own apartment that she paid for with her own money. But she had never seen him look as forlorn as he was now.

  Missus Orphint made tea and disappeared to clean up Pip’s vomit. Oni noticed muffling candles were placed around the kitchen. In a safe house like Missus Orphint’s, where the walls were already thick with wards and charms, it was a sign of her anxiety.

  Pip sat twisting his hands in his lap, his head bowed, his tea untouched. Oni knew that he was trying not to cry in front of her. She wanted to cry herself. El was her dearest friend.

  They had liked each other from the start. When they were younger, other kids had called El names, teasing her for her short breath, or calling her “simple” or worse. Oni had always stood up for El, and in turn El stood up for Oni when she was teased for being a raggedy-arse weaver kid. They had fought side by side and laughed together; they had told each other their secrets, their fears and wishes and jokes. And now El was gone. It didn’t seem real.

  She couldn’t help worrying about her mother, too. She wasn’t as confident in Amina’s ability to escape the dungeons of the Office for Witchcraft Extermination as Missus Orphint seemed to be, and that made her feel disloyal. Amina was one of the most powerful witches in Clarel, everyone knew that. Well, all the witches knew that, anyway. In the ordinary way of things, she should be fine. But nothing was ordinary any more.

  Since Pip had turned up in the Crosseyes the day before – was it really only a day? – Oni’s world had fallen to pieces. Witches spoke about Spectres in secret behind muffling candles, because even to think of them was dangerous, but Oni had always regarded them as frightening stories, not real things that would affect her real life. Then Pip had taken the Heart out of his pocket and put it on the table in her little apartment, and Oni had known at once what it was. Every witch in Clarel knew about Old Missus Pledge and what she had done when she tried to destroy the Spectres.

  At the centre of everything, the heart of a dead boy, who had been trapped by a witch between life and death and made into a counterspell. And a grubby little thief called Pip.

  “Oni,” said Pip, breaking her thoughts. “What’s a Rupture?”

  “I don’t know a lot about this stuff,” she said. “Ma told me some things…”

  “Does it mean like … something breaking open? Like, one place breaking into another place? And that other place, that’s where El is, right?”

  Oni glanced over at him. He was staring straight ahead now, frowning. “Kind of,” she said cautiously. These were deep waters. “There’s this place, and the In Between, and then other places as well…”

  “So why can’t we go there and get her back?”

  “I don’t think it’s a place that you can just go to.”

  Pip was quiet for a few moments. “What if I make Clovis take me there?”

  “How would you do that?”

  More silence. “I don’t know. But maybe I could.”

  “Why didn’t you say he was talking to you?”

  Pip hunched his shoulders, scowling. “It didn’t seem important.”

  Oni knew that he felt guilty, so she didn’t push it. “Is he talking to you now?”

  “No,” said Pip. “Not a word. Not since El went.” He pulled the Heart out of his pocket and held it in front of his eyes. “Maybe he’s not inside this any more. The Heart’s just a thing now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like any other thing. Like a stick or an old shoe or something. It didn’t feel like that before. It felt alive. Maybe Clovis has gone away.”

  “I don’t think he can go away, because of what Old Missus Pledge did,” said Oni. “He’s locked in there.”

  Pip didn’t answer. He was staring at the Heart, and Oni knew he wasn’t listening to her. His expression changed, hardened: his eyes seemed to become shining surfaces, hiding whatever was behind them. He turned to Oni.

  “How much do you actually know about Spectres?”

  “A bit. What all witches know. Not a lot.”

  “Maybe you got it wrong. You’re a witch, and witches are evil. Probably even more evil than Spectres.”

  All the air went out of Oni as if he had punched her in the stomach. It seemed ages before she breathed it back in, and then she could barely see for rage.

  “How dare you say that? How dare you? When my own mother picked you up off the street when you might have died? When Missus Pledge gave you a home? When you’ve known me all
my life and you know how much I love El? When Ma is in the dungeons because you can’t keep your filthy hands off anything shiny?”

  Pip hunched his shoulders up, turning away from her, and she pulled him back roughly, still shaking with anger. “Look at me when you insult me,” she said. “Look at me.”

  He slowly dragged up his head and met her gaze, his expression still hard. Oni clenched her hand, wanting to punch him. And then something melted, and his eyes were red-rimmed and wet, desolate.

  Oni’s anger vanished at once, leaving in its wake an overwhelming tiredness. “Aren’t you going to say sorry?”

  Pip looked at his feet, and then up. He seemed like Pip again. “I’m sorry, Oni.”

  “You should be.”

  “I didn’t mean you or Amina,” said Pip. “But maybe there are evil witches, like in the stories. Maybe Old Missus Pledge was really evil.”

  “That’s not true!” said Oni hotly. “Old Missus Pledge was trying to get rid of the Spectres.”

  “Many witches at the time thought what she did was bad magic,” said Missus Orphint. Oni and Pip jumped, startled: they had been too intent on their argument to notice that Missus Orphint had been standing by the door, listening. She entered the kitchen, carrying a bucket, and tipped its contents outside the back door. “Arabella Pledge told me that her mother said that twisting blood magic was the worst thing she had ever done. Blood magic is for healing and life, and Old Missus Pledge said she made it into an abomination.”

  “But maybe it wasn’t wrong,” said Oni, in a small voice. “If it was to destroy the Spectres…”

  “It didn’t destroy them, though,” said Missus Orphint.

  “That’s only because she couldn’t finish the spell.”

  “Maybe. We’ll never know if it would have destroyed the Spectres unless we can find out how to use the spell.”

  “The Spectres seem to think it’s dangerous,” said Oni.

  “Maybe they know more about the Heart than we do.” Missus Orphint paused. “Old Missus Pledge used Spectre magic to make the Heart, Oni. Don’t forget that. If Clovis is terrified of witches, perhaps he has reason.”