Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  Gathering her wits, Ilsa steered them east to follow the river, but when she hazarded a glance over her shoulder, her heart started up a galloping rhythm. The four figures were following them.

  “Is it them?”

  “Can’t tell,” said Martha, picking up pace. “If we get across the bridge, there’s a pub on the other side. We can hide in there.”

  But it was a long way to the bridge, and there was nothing but a deserted fish market along the way. If Ilsa had been alone, she’d have made herself a blackbird and flown to safety, but all they could do was try to lose them. It felt like having her arms tied behind her back, in a knot Ilsa didn’t know how to slip. She kept hoping for the chatter of people trickling home from the theatre district, anyone who could help them, but the only sign they weren’t alone in the city was the sound of footsteps twenty paces behind them in the smog. Ilsa’s own feet threatened to betray her with every step; they were pounding over the slippery cobbles too fast, and not fast enough. Her breath came in jagged gasps, Martha’s an echo beside her, the footsteps behind them gaining with every minute. The bridge was still invisible in the night when the shapes of two men were illuminated under a streetlamp ahead.

  They had cornered them.

  “Martha…” she whispered. If she were a wolfhound, could she take them all down before they hurt her friend? If she were a hawk, could her talons blind them quick enough? And if they did – could she trust her friend to keep her secret? Without her magic, helplessness seized her.

  But Martha had survived as a human girl for nineteen years, and she dragged Ilsa under the cover of the fish market and into a maze of crates and pallets.

  “This way,” she murmured.

  At top speed, they wove a random path through the market with their pursuers on their heels. A left, a right, another right, until they had obscured themselves deep within the warehouse. When they stopped, and held their breath, there were no footsteps nearby. “Let’s hide in here,” said Martha, and she pushed Ilsa towards a narrow gap between two stacks of crates. “You first.”

  Panic seized her in a crushing grip at the sight of the crevice. “No! I can’t—”

  But with a firm shove from her friend, Ilsa was between the crates, and her wits failed her. The stacks on either side pressed in and down on her like living things. She pushed further into the gap, hoping to find it open at the other end, but she was met with a brick wall. The air felt thin and hot. Her ribs were tightening around her organs like a cage.

  A creak of wood. Martha’s head snapped towards the sound and her eyes widened. Ilsa could see nothing, but there must have been no time left to hide; Martha freed her hand from Ilsa’s and quickly slid an upended pallet across the gap between them so that Ilsa was hidden – and confined. Nausea swept over her. She thought up the most fearsome creature she could imagine, but she couldn’t summon the form, not from this cage; her body couldn’t shift when all it knew was how close the walls were. She was a heartbeat away from bursting from her hiding place in her own fragile skin when, between the slats of the crate, their pursuers came into view.

  They were not men.

  Their faces were almost unremarkable but for their eyes, which were pure, unbroken white. One had produced a strange sort of lamp, and in its glow their skin had a sheen to it, more like silk than sweat, and looked so bloodless it appeared silver.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” one said to their companion, who seized Martha by the arms, their fingers digging mercilessly into flesh. A third, a woman in men’s breeches, seized Martha’s chin. Before Ilsa could react, an arm restrained her from behind. Her whole body jerked in terror, then a gloved hand covered her mouth and someone pressed her tightly against them. It wasn’t possible. There couldn’t be anyone else in that tiny crevice. Her fear was playing tricks on her.

  “Bastards!” screamed Martha, kicking against the one who held her. “Get your hands off me!”

  “Yes, it looks like her,” said the female. “Do it.”

  Helpless, hidden, immobile, Ilsa could do nothing as the third being unsheathed a blade, and dragged it across Martha’s throat.

  4

  Ilsa tried to scream, but no sound escaped.

  The woman was sprayed with blood as Martha died, and Ilsa stood paralysed as her friend twitched and collapsed onto the floor. She barely understood her captor as he brought his mouth very close to her ear and murmured in a low voice: “Disguise yourself.”

  She tried to twist out of his grasp but he gripped her too tightly. He wasn’t a trick of her mind; some attack of nerves. Her mind fought even if her body couldn’t. Did he mean what she thought he did?

  “Fast. You can only fool them for a second.”

  She didn’t have a choice. She willed herself into the disguise of Jeanie from her boarding house, who had deep brown hair and heavy freckles. Meanwhile, the four beings stood around Martha’s body had become very still.

  Her captor whispered to her again. “I’m going to let you go now. Stay silent if you want to live.”

  Slowly, he lowered his hand from Ilsa’s mouth, and with a whisper of metal, drew a weapon. She barely kept from crying out as she pressed herself into the crates, as far from him as she could manage, but it seemed Ilsa wasn’t his target. He slipped past her more easily than he should have been able in the tiny space.

  “Something’s wrong,” said two of the others simultaneously, and their stillness gave way to a flurry of agitated movement.

  “We’ve been tricked.”

  “Where’s the other girl?”

  Four pairs of eyes suddenly swung to the gap where Ilsa and the stranger were concealed, but there was no time for them to attack. The stranger tossed aside the pallet that separated them, and slipped among the attackers so fast Ilsa did not see it. All she knew was that one minute they were hidden between the crates, the next, he had driven a long blade up through the woman’s abdomen, and the pallet was clattering to the floor.

  More blood mixed with Martha’s. Before the woman even hit the ground, the stranger knocked down the second with a sweeping kick and kept him there with a knee on his chest as he buried a throwing knife in the skull of a third. No one had so much as drawn their weapons before the last one standing was gutted, and dropped to his knees. The stranger raised himself to his full height and sank his blade into the chest of the one on the ground, who flailed like a pinned bug before going still.

  It was over in seconds. Ilsa squeezed through the gap and stumbled out of its reach, too stunned to run. She thought she had witnessed horrible things, but stood over five bodies – one of which was her closest friend’s – she learned how innocent she’d truly been. Two hazel eyes, so like her own, stared up from the bloody ground. Ilsa’s knees buckled and she sank against a crate.

  “Put your disguise back on,” said the stranger. He lifted one of the bodies like it weighed no more than a bag of flour, and threw it on top of another. He was piling them up; Martha lay untouched. “There’ll be more if we’re not fast.”

  Ilsa hadn’t realised she’d slipped back into her body. It took so little effort these days to maintain another form, but shock could still jolt her concentration. She became Jeanie again.

  “Wait here,” he said. “Don’t make a sound.”

  Before she could protest, he disappeared. Not like the little boy had, and not like she could, but in a way she recognised nonetheless. He was fast; too fast to see.

  He was back before it hit her – his pace marred a little by a wheelbarrow full of bricks. It was the way his long black coat fluttered behind him as he came to a standstill that jogged her memory.

  “You were in the theatre.”

  He glanced up from under his hood, and the light of the strange little lamp caught his features. He looked human; taller than most, and powerfully built, but human. He was young, his eyes were an unremarkable grey, his skin lightly tanned, and the hair that hung around his face was the same deep brown as Jeanie’s. He was handsome, even �
�� a model of normality. If she hadn’t seen the things he could do, she would never know to fear him.

  “I’ve been looking for you for three days,” he said, and he lifted the four bodies one by one and placed them on the wheelbarrow. The one he had sliced across the stomach was spilling his organs as he was moved, and Ilsa retched once, twice, and emptied the contents of her stomach onto the blood-soaked ground.

  When she lifted her head, trembling uncontrollably, the stranger was regarding her warily. “Gather yourself, please. If we’re not fast, we will only be caught by the others.”

  That shook her enough that she clambered to her feet and backed further away from the pool of blood seeping towards her. “Who are you?” she said, shooting a glance over her shoulder to find her best escape route.

  “My name is Fowler, my lady. I’ve been engaged to find you.” He had finished balancing his load on the barrow, cleared his throat and faced her purposefully. “I’m about to sink these bodies in the Thames. I’d like to do the same with your friend, but if you would rather I didn’t, we can leave her here.”

  “Leave her?” A chill spread through her. Nothing made sense. “No.”

  “The water, then?” he said sceptically.

  “No! We got to… I don’t know, fetch someone.” Ilsa didn’t recognise her own voice, choked and thin as it was.

  Fowler placed his hands on his hips and looked about in exasperation. “I see.” He took a step towards her and Ilsa took two back, stumbling slightly in her hast to keep some distance and raising a hand like she could ward him off with it. But Fowler only crouched over Martha, and gently lowered her eyelids. When he looked up, his expression was gentle but serious.

  “You need to come with me,” he said.

  Ilsa’s incredulity manifested in a laugh. She shook her head fiercely. “ I ain’t going nowhere with you.”

  Fowler sighed, and as he got to his feet he produced a length of cord. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  Ilsa realised what he meant to do the moment before it happened. In the space of a heartbeat, he stepped over Martha’s prone body and pinioned Ilsa’s wrists. She tried to yank them back but he didn’t give an inch to her straining, and bound her with quick, deft movements.

  “No,” she said, her voice hoarse, even as she noticed he was tying a hobble knot. “Don’t you dare—”

  “I promise I’m not going to hurt you. But I fear you might try to take flight. Quite literally.” There was a flash of humour in his eyes as he tied the other end of the cord to his belt, stashed the strange lamp in his coat pocket and took the wheelbarrow. Then he was walking swiftly back towards the river with his captive stumbling after him, and Ilsa saw her moment.

  She had joined the theatre business with a dire, crippling fear of having her wrists bound. Like being confined, it was something a younger, weaker Ilsa had been too familiar with. But there was no room for such squeamishness in her line of work, and besides, no magician’s assistant Ilsa knew had anything to fear from a hobble knot. Within three seconds, Ilsa had slipped her bonds and was running, not daring to look back.

  She didn’t get far. The stranger – Fowler – was before her again as though he had been blown into her path by a gale.

  “Well, that was unexpected,” he said. He might have found her at the theatre, but he clearly hadn’t watched the show.

  Ilsa turned on her heel, but she hadn’t got five yards before he was on her again, an iron arm around her waist, her arms pinned to her sides. She opened her mouth to scream, but terror had robbed her voice of any strength: the noise she made was pitiful.

  “Listen,” he said in a reasonable tone; still, Ilsa struggled. “They told me you might not understand, so I am prepared to explain as best I can, but now is not the time. All you need to know is this: your friend is dead because they mistook her for you.” As he spoke, he bound her a second time, but he’d learned from his mistake, and Ilsa’s vision swam as she watched him tie a knot no magician would bother learning. “Their comrades already know a mistake has been made, and I can guarantee they’re headed here right now. I’ve found you on behalf of people who care whether you live or die, and lucky for you, tonight is a rescue, not an assassination.”

  Martha was dead because of her? “I don’t believe you.”

  “No. I don’t suppose you do.”

  He gave a sharp tug on the rope, perhaps to demonstrate the knot’s robustness, or maybe to remind her he had the other end, and then resumed his business.

  They stopped at the river, by a gap between two moored fishing boats. Her captor guided her to sit against a nearby mooring post, and Ilsa didn’t resist. She knew other tricks, after all, and while he was busy weighting the bodies with bricks, she went to shrink her hands. They refused to move.

  Something else then. She thought up the form of a cat, but her body remained stubbornly Jeanie’s. She couldn’t even become herself.

  Ilsa’s panic rose, but it was the echo of an old panic; an old situation, in which her magic didn’t come when she called it. She was back in the attic at the orphanage. The walls were closing in and her shackled hands were shaking; she could feel the promise of full control dancing at the edge of her consciousness, but couldn’t grasp it. When her magic took her, a separation happened, the shifting feeling would hit her like an explosion and then she was something else. But it never saved her; she couldn’t maintain it. Once, when she was seven, she had become a bird and made it onto the roof, then shifted back into her human body by mistake. It was snowing. She was naked.

  But the day she escaped – that day she had cracked the code. For shifting wasn’t something that happened in the mind; thinking would not complete the process. She wasn’t supposed to think about the feeling; her body already knew what to do. A power inside her – a power she recognised from every accidental shift; that she could always hear but had never truly listened to – told her something she had known deep down all along; that her body was her own creation, not the tool but the material, and she could be whatever she wanted to be. The feeling overtook her, and for the first time she was an animal – a blackbird – by choice. To stay an animal, she just needed to remember what she already knew.

  There by the docks, Ilsa didn’t know it any more. Her focus was correct – she could feel the sensation rising in her body – but the power inside her wasn’t answering. Her magic was gone. A panicked noise escaped her, and Fowler looked over.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, taking in her horror and the twisting, writhing efforts of her hands. “You won’t be able to shift with those bonds on you.”

  Ilsa kept pulling on the cords that held her wrists. They were just leather; securely wound but fairly soft and pliable, and ordinary-looking. But the loss of her magic was in these bonds and not in her. Regardless of the source of her helplessness, whatever this man did next, she wouldn’t be able to stop it.

  Having weighted the bodies, he kicked them into the water as Ilsa tried to make sense of what he’d said. Somebody had sent him. The attackers had targeted her, or so it seemed. Martha was dead.

  Martha was dead.

  A sob escaped her. “They thought Martha was me?”

  “So it seems. Your friend could easily be a Ravenswood.”

  A Ravenswood? “I… I don’t understand.”

  “You often walk this way together?” he asked. Ilsa shook her head. “But you do, without her?”

  “Yes.” This was her usual route home, but if Martha hadn’t come to the theatre that night, Ilsa wouldn’t have seen her until morning.

  “Then that’s how the mistake was made. Oracles aren’t easily fooled, but with a little spontaneity one can stay a step ahead of them.” He dropped the next corpse, and Ilsa was spattered with Thames water.

  “Oracles.”

  “Our friends here.” He gestured to the last dead being before toeing him over the edge, followed by the barrow. “Let’s go.”

  He drew Ilsa to her feet and took her by the elbow.r />
  “No,” she growled, looking over her shoulder at the dark fish market where Martha still lay. Fowler didn’t answer her protest; he just lifted her over his shoulder and ran.

  She was lucky not to vomit again. Between his inhuman speed and the abrupt halting every time he needed to look or listen, her innards couldn’t keep up with him. By the time he dropped her unceremoniously on some wet slabs, she was bewildered, terrified and giddy beyond belief. The man wasn’t even short of breath.

  “You ain’t of this world,” she said. The truth of it chimed through her, rousing equal parts horror and excitement.

  “No,” he said. “But then, my lady, neither are you.”

  His words were a brief flash of ringing clarity; a moment of calm in perfect chaos, like the eye of a storm. The feeling dissipated when Fowler hushed her and drew his blade again. Fearing there were more Oracles – as he’d called them – nearby, Ilsa struggled onto her knees and forced her vision to right itself.

  They had come at least a mile from the fish market. There was no one else in sight, but directly above them loomed the twin turrets of Westminster Abbey, and across the wide intersection were more buildings, some with lamps burning within. Ilsa didn’t know what those buildings were, but surely if she could scream, someone would hear her.

  “What would you achieve?” said Fowler, as if he had read her mind; perhaps that was another of his talents. Before she was fully on her feet, he had scooped her up again, and then they were in a tiny quadrangle. Shadowy cloisters surrounded them on all sides, and the abbey above blocked what little starlight penetrated the smog and the cloud cover beyond. With his long knife in one hand, Fowler withdrew the lamp he had claimed.

  It was a luminescent stone, a little like a quartz crystal she had once seen in an occult shop. There was no flame, and no gas or oil to be seen. It surely hadn’t been glowing in his pocket, but in his hand, it shone from within with a bright white light – enough to reveal a fountain in the centre of the quadrangle.