Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  Captain Fowler made his presence known at the gate while Ilsa slumped against the fencepost and closed her eyes. She was vaguely aware of words exchanged; of accusations by the captain as to why a carriage wasn’t sent.

  “If we had known you would traumatise her before you even reached the portal, we would have. Couldn’t you have hailed one?”

  “I would never trust a hackney driver in the current circumstances, especially with a wanted girl under my protection. My fee?”

  A heavy thump struck the ground too close. A shape blocked the sun that filtered through her eyelids. A huff of warm, wet air shocked her upright, and when she opened her eyes, it was into the maw of a humungous beast with black lips, ragged grey fur, and fangs as long as her fingers.

  A scream Ilsa didn’t have the strength to utter built in her throat. This was it. She had let her guard down but for a moment and this world was going to end her.

  “For pity’s sake, give her space,” said a female voice, and the beast obeyed. It was a wolf, Ilsa realised, as it moved away and its whole face came into vision. Nearly as tall as her at the shoulder and with unnatural eyes for a canine – blue-green and too intelligent – but a wolf. Probably one of the militia. Still, her heart hammered on. Real wolf or sentient human, those jaws could have snapped her neck if their owner chose. Ilsa tried her best to hold herself upright as the shock rushed out of her as quickly as it had come, but she must have failed, as the next thing she knew, a girl with cold hands was pulling her to her feet and guiding her towards the house.

  “Martha…”

  “My name is Cassia.”

  She craned over the girl’s shoulder. There were wolves everywhere; giant ones, most with scars and stories of violence etched into their fur, and all with their prying human eyes on her. And beyond them, on the other side of the closing gate, was Captain Fowler. He raised his hood, bowed curtly, and strode away.

  * * *

  She awoke slowly, and with a clear mind.

  Nothing was wrong, even as she became aware of the soft, unfamiliar linens, and the violet hue of the light. She sat up in bed and tried to make sense of her surroundings. She was alone, and it was dark. The curtains were drawn, but around the edges, moonlight crept in. Everything appeared normal, if not familiar, except for the dimmest glow emanating from the sconces along the walls. But even that didn’t alarm her. This, itself, was odd.

  She tried to remember how she had gotten there.

  There had been a bathtub, and a bottle of something that smelled of lavender. Ilsa had complained weakly, but a female voice had told her they needed to wash the blood off. But before that? A late summer’s day. A beautiful clear sky. A park – Regent’s Park – was right outside.

  And a teacup, with a syrupy, magenta liquid inside. The steam had been a deep blue, and sparkled like starlight. The girl said it would ease her worries and put her to sleep. She had called it magic.

  Ilsa had drunk it willingly – why?

  Because of the fish market. Because of the Oracles, and the stranger in the hood, and…

  Ilsa sucked in a breath like it was her first for days. Blood pounded in her ears. She wasn’t in London. She had gone through a portal to the devil’s realm. A world of Oracles and swift assassins and beasts as big and as fearsome as anything Ilsa could become. So many of them.

  And Martha. Martha was dead.

  She wrestled free of the sheets and scrambled out of bed. Her feet hit the floor hard and she tensed, afraid someone would come looking, but a plush carpet had absorbed most of the sound and the boards beneath didn’t protest. She was in the grand white mansion where Captain Fowler had left her, and as her eyes adjusted in the dim light, it was obvious.

  It wasn’t an ordinary room at all; it was the grandest room Ilsa had ever seen. Heavy, floor to ceiling curtains shrouded the windows on opposite walls of the wide space. They matched the sumptuous, floral pattern on the walls; in her human form, Ilsa could not have reached the decorative crown moulding at the top of them had she been wielding a broomstick. In the centre was the bed, big enough that half the girls in Ilsa’s boarding house could have slept top-to-tail and would have considered themselves lucky. Its painted frame was carved in a pattern of vines and accented in gold leaf, like a wedding cake piled with soft linens. There was a matching bureau, a wardrobe, a dressing table, and silk-upholstered armchairs before a marble fireplace, empty of coals in the late summer heat. Above her, a chandelier blossomed from an ornate ceiling rose. It was unlit, and in the moonlight and the violet of the sconces it threw a warped, surreal shadow across the ceiling, like a nightmare looming over her.

  As whatever she had drunk wore off, a chill went down her spine.

  It was afternoon when she arrived – how long had she been sleeping? Was she a prisoner now? The thought made her nauseated, and she cursed herself for not considering it sooner. The night – or day – before had promised answers, but had it promised safety?

  Only one thing was certain: she would not wait here to find out. She was in the Witherward now; she had answered the biggest question. There must be someone else in this city who could help her piece together the rest. Someone who had known her parents. Someone who hadn’t kidnapped her.

  Whoever had helped her bathe had put her in a nightgown, which wouldn’t do. Listening hard and treading lightly, Ilsa scoped about for her clothes, but there was no discarded heap of fabric in any of the places she knew to expect. This wasn’t the sort of room in which the occupant’s only good dress lay folded over the end of the bed on every day but wash day.

  So she tried the wardrobe, the hinges of which were mercifully silent as she pulled the doors open. But her clothes weren’t there either. It was stocked with fine and pristine summer clothes; dresses patterned in forget-me-nots and pastel stripes; white muslin blouses with lace collars and sleeves. Ilsa pushed down the urge to wipe her hands first and grabbed the plainest skirt – pale blue with no bustle – and a blouse and hastily dressed. As she buttoned the skirt at her waist, it became clear it was too big for her, but before Ilsa could root around for something to belt it, the fabric tightened around her all by itself. Panicked, she grappled with the waist with shaking fingers, trying to rip it off before she was suffocated by whatever dark magic was working on the garment. But the skirt was already inanimate again – and a perfect fit. Tentatively, she put on the blouse, holding her breath as the sleeves and collar did the same. What kind of magic could make a garment shift the way a Changeling did? What if these magic clothes could also supress her magic, like the cord Captain Fowler had used to bind her wrists?

  Well, she was about to find out.

  Ilsa went to the window and made a gap in the curtains just wide enough to see through. She was on the first floor overlooking a garden. The shadows of shrubbery and ornaments stood like sentinels clad in black against a silver, moon-drenched lawn. Around the edge of the garden ran a wall, heavy with blooming wisteria and taller than two of Ilsa, but that didn’t matter. She planned to fly clean over it.

  She had unlatched the window and was about to pull it open, shift into a sparrow, and be gone from here, when one of the black sentinels unfurled.

  Ilsa sucked in a breath. It was a wolf. As she watched, afraid to withdraw behind the curtain and catch the beast’s eye, another came into view from directly below, so silent it could have been a trick of the light. So close. If she broke the absolute silence of the moon-touched garden with the beating of her wings, or if the window creaked, they would hear her and be wolves no longer, but birds on her tail.

  Not the window then. If she could get to the ground floor, she could slip out and get as far away from the militia as she could before she grew wings. Ilsa unfurled her fingers from the latch and stepped away from the window with a slowness that belied her hammering heart, and as she turned to the door, she shifted. Her limbs pulled in towards her body and her skin prickled sharply as she grew fur. The breath was forced from her lungs as she was pressed down, dow
n into the smallest form she could become: a mouse. It had served her well for sneaking in the past, including slipping under doors when she did not wish to be caught using them.

  But Ilsa could not slip under this door. She struggled for a moment, head and shoulders wedged in the gap, paws grappling for purchase against the wood floor, but the space was far too small.

  She became human again in a heap on the floor, panic rising with every moment, and looked wistfully at the fireplace. Another Changeling could escape up the chimney; in a space that small, Ilsa was as likely to suffocate from fright as she was to reach the top. Her chest tightened just thinking of it.

  It tightened further as she got to her feet and wrapped her hand around the doorknob. She was leaving this room in her human form, or she was not leaving at all. The idea that they might have locked her in when she was capable of escaping in so many other ways had seemed pointless before, but now it was burrowing in Ilsa’s gut like it wanted to tear straight through her. She couldn’t be locked in, she thought as she turned the handle. She couldn’t be trapped in here.

  But the latch gave without a whisper and the door opened smoothly. Ilsa could have sunk to her knees with relief but instead she braced herself, waiting, ready to sprout wings should a canine beast barrel through the open door.

  But the hallway beyond the chamber was deserted. It was a cavernous space, wider than any room Ilsa had ever lived in, and made bigger still by the darkness lurking where the paltry midnight light didn’t reach, like the corridor might go on or up or outwards forever. Somewhere distant, a clock ticked on, but no floorboard creaked, no lights flickered. The household was sleeping, not guarding her like a prisoner.

  Still, Ilsa kept her wits about her as she crept softly down the corridor. She rounded a corner, and the moonlight streamed in through tall windows, and revealed the rest of the house to be just as fine as the chamber she had woken in. It illuminated filigreed consoles, marble busts, and crystal vases of fresh flowers. A row of portraits faced the windows, of a size that made Ilsa wonder how a person could paint when they could only see part of their work at one time. Regal giants looked down at her from the frames, sometimes in twos or threes, faces sober and refined, each draped in a red sash like the tags worn by the wolves. They were all relations; the generations of a family immortalised. As Ilsa went from one painting to the next, each subject wore the ghost of the last in their features.

  Every one of them made her uneasy, but it wasn’t until she was very near the end of the gallery, where the last few paintings lingered in shadow, that her sense of the uncanny peaked.

  She stopped before a portrait of a man and a woman; a plaque on the frame read Alpha Lyander and Thorne Nyberg and was dated eighteen years previously. The woman had a heart-shaped face and fair complexion. The artist had captured the way the light struck her thick, golden hair, and her hazel eyes had hues of caramel and vivid green. The man – her husband, Ilsa guessed – was also fair-haired, with a neat beard and moustache, and slightly sunken features. Ilsa’s attention was wrested by his eyes; their shape, their pronounced lids, the familiarity of them. His mouth was familiar too. As she studied the painting, Ilsa put her fingers to her own lips to feel their shape.

  But then, from the darkness in the corner of the corridor came a rumbling growl.

  Ilsa leapt back, pressing herself against the wall as another wolf – no, something feline and blacker than night – separated from the shadows. The muscled contours of a gigantic body unfurled gracefully as it rose. A long tail uncoiled, whispering against the floorboards as it did so, like a cobra readying to strike. Ilsa was frozen like a rabbit, unable to think, the faces in the painting still muddling her mind.

  The big cat bared its teeth at her as it stalked out of the dark, another low growl emanating from its throat. But then its human eyes – blue and unforgiving – took her measure in quick movements, and the teeth vanished. A second later, so did the cat, and in its place was the shadowed form of a young man.

  “Oh,” said the former panther. “I thought you were a Sorcerer.”

  Ilsa’s breath left her in a rush of relief. Before she had a chance to raise her guard again, the boy turned to disappear into the shadows without another word.

  “Wait! Where are you going?” she called after him. Ilsa saw him look over his shoulder, but she still couldn’t make him out properly in the gloom.

  “I prefer to contemplate the dead in solitude. You’re here now. It ruins the ambience.” His tone was callous and superior.

  “I—”

  “Apologise? I accept. Goodnight.”

  He made to leave a second time, and somehow, Ilsa found herself blurting the first thing that came to mind.

  “I’m escaping.”

  He halted. Ilsa thought she heard him sigh. When he turned around and emerged fully from the dark, the impression wasn’t much better than being set upon by the panther. Cold, storm-blue eyes looked out from a face carved in sharp lines, like his sculptor had made the first rough cuts and found a cruel perfection worth preserving. His hair had probably been combed neatly back from his face at one time – it had the gloss of oil where a shaft of moonlight caught the inky-black strands – but that time was long past. He had harassed and overhandled it; swept it to one side and let it fall across his forehead. It made Ilsa think of raven’s feathers, then of razor-sharp talons.

  His hands were buried in his pockets, giving nothing away, and the cuffs of his wrinkled shirt were rolled up to the elbow. Whatever the hour, he hadn’t slept yet.

  “Escaping,” he said, wearily.

  Ilsa readied herself to shift; she wouldn’t freeze a second time. “I’m a Changeling too,” she said. “You can’t stop me.”

  The tight set of his mouth relaxed into a smile. It was the kind a hyena might give its prey before it tore their gullet out. “You’re in one of the most heavily guarded buildings in London,” he said, strolling to the window and gesturing to the garden below. “I don’t need to stop you.”

  Still poised to fight or flee, Ilsa approached the window and looked down, though she knew what she would see. More enormous shapes shifted in the dark like shadow puppets. He was right; she was surrounded by soldiers with fearsome magic. Even with her own talent to match, she didn’t stand a chance of besting them.

  Her sudden flash of helplessness must have been plain, for the boy who looked like a blade lost his humour in an instant and reverted back to bored. “You shouldn’t be so easy to tease.” His callous gaze went back to the garden, then to the park beyond. “The wolves aren’t there to keep you in.” Ilsa shot him a look, and he rolled his eyes and reached to open the window. “You can cobble together a bird of some description I trust? Since you are a Changeling too.” He swept an arm in the direction of the open window, like an invitation. “Then grant both our wishes and be gone.”

  Ilsa hesitated, too overcome to grasp his game but sure there was one.

  “No?” the boy demanded.

  “For all I know, you want to see me torn to shreds by them wolves. You were baring your own teeth at me a moment ago – why should I believe a word you say?”

  In a flash, Ilsa knew her challenge would not go unmet. He hardened like ice, the look he gave her as searing as it was cold. It took all she had not to flinch away.

  “So you don’t trust me,” he said with another bitter smile. Ilsa missed the joke. “No matter. Come with me.”

  For reasons Ilsa couldn’t put her finger on, she knew she couldn’t be the first to relent, so when he turned on his heel and swept off down the corridor, she followed, trying to step lightly, quietly, as he did. Perhaps she could still turn this situation to her advantage; if she could parse some knowledge she could trust from this boy, it might aid her escape. If nothing else, she might discover what had brought him to that corridor, that painting, in the dead of night.

  After several twists and turns, the corridor opened on one side to look down over a grand entrance hall, slightly better
lit by the lamps burning low along the walls. Ilsa followed the boy down a wide staircase to a black and white marbled floor, so brilliantly polished that Ilsa felt as if she were looking down into its depths like a pool of clear, still water. Her companion peered warily around every doorframe as they crossed the hall and followed a passage to a set of doors leading to a terrace. Ilsa couldn’t help noticing how he turned the handle and pushed the door wide with the unique muscle memory of someone who knew how not to make a sound; pulling the door tight against the frame as he turned the handle; gripping it by the edge as he swung it open.

  He kept close to the wall of the house as he crossed the terrace, so Ilsa did too, stepping as he did until he crouched in a flower bed between a pair of blooming hydrangeas and beckoned her to join him. With nothing to lose and a surplus of curiosity, Ilsa lifted her skirts about her ankles and dropped to her knees in the flower bed beside him.

  “You wish to leave and you believe the wolves will stop you. Fine. Then watch.” He nodded to a shadowed corner of the garden and Ilsa followed his line of sight. She was prepared this time when a giant beast emerged from the shadows to prowl along the edge of the wall. The boy leaned close to her and spoke under his breath. “Ferrien keeps very regular time. He will complete every turn of the garden in just under two minutes, all night, every time he’s assigned to this watch. When he rounds the east wing, this stretch of wall before us will be beyond his sights.”

  He gestured past Ilsa to a pavilion near the west corner of the house, beyond which a second shape was moving like a spectre. With his other hand he produced an ornate silver watch from his trouser pocket and clicked it open. “Georgiana guards the west gate to the park. That lookout is a straight line, back and forth, and you’ll catch her eye if you make your move when she’s facing north.” Sure enough, the wolf at the west gate changed direction and doubled back on herself, and it was obvious she would see anything that moved across the lawn between them. “You only need to pass that topiary monstrosity before you’re in her blind spot, making your window of opportunity about fifteen seconds. Starting” – he held his watch so the moon shone brightly on its face and lifted his eyes to where Ferrien was disappearing behind the house – “now.”