Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  “Turns out I belong to a city I don’t know nothing ’bout. Cassia said if I asked nicely you might be the one to show me ’round.”

  “Did she now.” Eliot nearly managed to suppress a smirk, but his tone alone proved he didn’t believe her.

  “Well someone ought to,” she pressed.

  “Perhaps. But I have more important things to do than…” He made a vague gesture in the air that turned into rubbing his eyes. “Settle you in.”

  “You said you had jack to do.”

  He stilled, and looked up at her from between his fingers. “Did I?”

  “You specifically asked to be woken when you was needed.”

  He rolled his eyes petulantly, like it was most unfair to use his own words against him.

  “How am I s’posed to help you find Gedeon if I don’t know—” “Help?” His glare would have sent a more nervous person scurrying for the door. “You can’t possibly help.”

  Ilsa drew herself up and folded her arms. “You din’t think I’d spent my whole bloody life looking for my family to stop now, did you?”

  Eliot didn’t answer and Ilsa tamped down her frustration. She was well-practised in bending boys to her will, but this boy had no give. So she changed tack.

  “Alright, Cassia din’t say you’d take me ’round London.”

  “I’m shocked.”

  “She told me to ask you ’bout Gedeon.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What?”

  “You heard. The others act strange with you. You’re in everyone’s bad books, ain’t you? Why?”

  Eliot studied her, and smiled slowly. “Isn’t it obvious? They think I know where their prince is.”

  “Do you?”

  He blinked. “You’re awfully direct,” he bit out.

  “What else was I s’posed to ask?”

  “You want to know if I’ve been keeping a monumental secret from the people who rely on me, for over a month? You could have hesitated, just a touch.”

  “They believe it. And they know you better than me.”

  “Well observed,” he said darkly. “You might have a knack for this sort of thing after all.”

  If it demonstrated a knack to note that Eliot hadn’t answered the question, then perhaps she did. “And why’d they think that?”

  Eliot shrugged away from the doorframe with a sigh. “Because of the wolves,” he said. “I was their commander under Gedeon. I can’t fault anyone for finding it suspicious that twelve of them vanished in the night and I knew nothing about it.”

  You shall have to ask Alpha Hester who the wolves answer to these days.

  “Suspicious. Or incompetent. You are really young to be commanding anything.”

  Eliot drew up short and raised an eyebrow. “I see they didn’t teach you manners in the Otherworld,” he said.

  Ilsa stood her ground as he prowled to within reach of her. That fierce gaze studied her, but she was gratified to see him fail to come to any conclusions.

  “More to the point,” he said in a low voice. “Cassia’s not the only one who thought your brother told me everything.”

  He turned to the tea tray and poured a cup, but Ilsa had already seen his hurt.

  “You ain’t in charge of the wolves no more?”

  Eliot lowered himself gracefully into a chair and raised his cup in a salute. “Hence my becoming a man of leisure. Hester’s been admirably dedicated to her policy of refusing to lead us, but she made one exception when she used her authority to remove me from my post.”

  “Because she thinks you got something to do with this too.”

  Eliot’s free hand slipped his handsome silver watch from his pocket and flicked the case open and closed. Ilsa kept her face impassive, but she was certain this time that she had discovered Eliot’s tell. Whatever he said next would be a lie.

  “She never approved of me in the first place,” he said into his tea. “This matter was just an excuse.”

  So not about the missing wolves at all, then. She had believed him when he said the others thought he was involved in Gedeon’s disappearance. She had believed it before then. But there was something else between Hester and Eliot. Her cousin had other reasons not to trust him, and Eliot knew what they were.

  “And now you’re idle,” Ilsa baited.

  He was silent a moment. Ilsa was reminded again of cards; of waiting for her opponent to lay his bet.

  “Not exactly. I think I know a little of what Gedeon has been up to. Here.” He rose gracefully and indicated for Ilsa to follow him to a desk, where several newspapers were splayed. “Shortly after Gedeon vanished, there was a raid on a chemist in the Heart. Then another. A week later, another.” He lifted each story in turn and tossed them down in front of Ilsa. “Six in total. No money was taken. Most of the stock was untouched. Only vemanta was stolen. When the chemists replenished their stock, the raiders hit them all again.”

  “I never heard of vemanta,” said Ilsa. “What’s this got to do with Gedeon?”

  “I’m coming to that. No, you wouldn’t have heard of vemanta. Strange as it may seem, the flower we derive it from does not grow in the Otherworld, but I believe one can compare it to a poppy.”

  “Like opium, then.”

  “It’s almost exactly like opium,” said Eliot. “Available in any chemist, useful as a pain reliever or to help one sleep in small doses, but addictive. Do you know why someone would steal it all?”

  Ilsa picked up the topmost story and scanned it. Smash and grab. Locks forced. Windows broken. It seemed Sorcerer shop keepers had sophisticated, magic ways of raising the alarm when they were robbed, but it had done them no good. The thieves were fast, knew what they were looking for, and vanished before anyone arrived.

  “Someone with a habit?” said Ilsa. “I hear you’re really sleepy these days.”

  Eliot grimaced. “That’s some habit. And you don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?”

  “I’m still deciding,” she replied, staring at him straight on.

  One corner of Eliot’s mouth pulled up into a smirk. “You know what it means to be an Oracle, don’t you?”

  “Fyfe said something ’bout having books thrown at you.” Eliot didn’t have an answer for that. Ilsa shrugged. “I din’t get it neither.”

  “An Oracle’s magic is tremendously powerful yet impossibly difficult to wield. From the moment an Oracle is born, they See the whole past, the whole present, and the future as it will be at any given moment, of everything and everyone on earth, all at once.”

  Eliot paused, as if to give her a moment to consider it, and Ilsa was silent a while as she pretended to. “I still don’t get it.”

  “Because you and I can never truly conceive of what it’s like. We experience time as linear, and our perception is fixed in place – it’s limited to what information we can gather with our senses. Neither is true for an Oracle. An Oracle in Kensington, say, can See a kitchen of a lumberjack’s cottage in Northern Tuman—”

  “Where, now?”

  “—not just in this moment, but in every single moment of time for as long as that cottage has stood. They can See the spot where it was built before any non-Oracle knew the place existed, when it was the feeding ground of creatures long extinct.”

  “If that’s true, and they See everything, why ain’t they running the show?”

  Eliot smiled grimly. “Because they See it all at once, all the time, and they cannot shut it off. Imagine you’re standing in a crowded room. You close your eyes and you try to pick out a single voice, no louder or closer than any of the others, and you try to focus on it. Imagine simply trying to hear your own inner voice amidst all the noise. Oracles call it the Glare. A blinding, indiscriminate deluge of space and time. For most, it doesn’t mean power at all, it means madness.”

  “So what’s all this got to do with vemanta?”

  “Disorientation, sleeplessness, a loss of touch with reality. The hallucinations are the real kick in the teeth, if you ask me
. As if it’s not enough to be crushed under the weight of your Sight, flounder down there long enough and you won’t even know which visions are real any more. It’s no wonder so many of them choose to surrender their minds. Most surrender theirs to vemanta. Nothing dulls the mind, and thus an Oracle’s magic, quite like it.”

  Ilsa had never been more glad to know so little. It staggered her that the Oracles could believe in the sanctity of a magic that was so… broken.

  “So, Oracles robbed them chemists?” she said, puzzled.

  Eliot smiled knowingly. “No Oracle with a pressing need for a fix is capable of a methodical, sustained operation like this, but Gedeon is.”

  Ilsa frowned at the papers spread in front of her again. The more she learned of her brother, the less honourable he seemed. “Why would he be stealing vemanta?”

  “Control the vemanta, control the Oracles who need it. The Heart have had a monopoly on the city’s vemanta supply for decades and it’s made them very rich. They channel it mainly through their own chemists of course, to keep the money in the quarter, and sell just enough elsewhere to appease all the right people. These six chemists were all in the Heart. These” – he dropped another cluster of papers in front of her – “were in Whitechapel. Four more chemists, relieved of their supply. After the second lot of raids, they started redirecting their surplus there, and the same thing happened.” He returned to his chair and sank into it. “An Oracle with a habit is a minute fraction as useful as a sentient one, but far cheaper to buy, and with time and the right incentive, most will magic up the answers one needs. I assume that was Gedeon’s plan with these raids.”

  “But how d’you know it’s Gedeon what’s robbing these chemists?”

  “Because I gave him the idea.”

  Ilsa narrowed her eyes at him. “So you do know where he is.”

  Her expression of scorn was mirrored back at her. “It’s a years-old trick. I invented it when we were just boys and shared it with Gedeon. Create a scarcity of vemanta – block its sale, buy it up ourselves, steal it even – and win a little cooperation from some of the Oracles. We used it a couple of times, on a smaller scale, but Gedeon has gone all out this time. I’m positive this is his doing. If we can find where the vemanta is resurfacing, we can find him. There’s a chemist somewhere in this city who has cut a deal with Gedeon, and their Oracle patrons are at his mercy.”

  Ilsa studied him, then the mess of research piled on the desk. Aelius thought he was sleeping past noon. “You ain’t told the others this.”

  Eliot stilled. The pocket watch found its way back into his hand. Between his fingers, Ilsa spotted a fragment of an inscription: your Athena. “Do you trust them? Hester’s other lieutenants.”

  Ilsa hesitated. She weighed her options, but Eliot’s gaze – patient, expectant, and unambiguous – told her there was no point being coy. He knew she’d formed opinions. He wouldn’t believe they were all good. “I think I trust Fyfe,” she said slowly. Maybe she’d been pulled in by his kindness, but she could read his every emotion too easily to believe he could deceive her. The others… I ain’t sure.”

  “That makes two of us,” said Eliot, fingers tightening around the watch, and the hairs on the back of Ilsa’s neck prickled. He was lying. “I don’t need their help with this. Every strategy and scheme Gedeon has in his arsenal he learned from me, so I’m the one who knows how to react to whatever move he makes. The others… they’ll want to find Gedeon their way; the way that’s been failing since he vanished.

  “Besides,” he added under Ilsa’s continued scrutiny, “there’s nothing I have to say that the others will hear from me right now.”

  The last was probably true. But Eliot wasn’t telling her everything. Perhaps there was a reason for the others not to trust him, but if Ilsa was to figure out what it was, she needed more time with him.

  “So,” she said, “we just got to find which chemist.”

  “Very good,” he drawled. “And how, pray tell, do we do that?”

  Ilsa shot his condescension right back at him. “Well, in the Otherworld London, chemists make or buy their stock in bulk and decant it into tins and bottles and that. Then they put their own labels on the tins and bottles.”

  Understanding dawned in Eliot’s eyes. “Tins of vemanta are usually stamped on the base, right into the metal. If it was packaged elsewhere, we should be able to tell.” He gave her an evaluating look. But this time, when he shook his head like she was a puzzle, Ilsa thought it might be a puzzle he was starting to put together. “But there are too many chemists.”

  “Then we better make a start. His chemist is probably in Camden, right?”

  Eliot was pensive. “It wouldn’t be ridiculous to assume so. That’s how we’ve done it before. A few likely shops come to mind.”

  “So?”

  “So.” Eliot put his cup down slowly, and stood. “No time like the present.”

  “Guess you’re showing me ’round after all,” said Ilsa, bouncing tauntingly on the balls of her feet.

  Eliot swept up his jacket. He turned to look back as he prowled to the door and, to Ilsa’s bewilderment, smiled at her. “Would you look how that worked out.”

  III

  THE GREAT WHITE SHARK

  Carcharodon carcharias

  Of the family Lamnidae, from the Greek lamna, meaning fish of prey. Possessing a formidable sense of smell, the great white can scent its prey from a distance of up to three miles.

  14

  Eliot was adamant that Ilsa wear a disguise to leave the Zoo.

  “But why?” she protested, arms crossed. “How are the Oracles gonna get me in Camden?”

  The grand front entrance to the Zoo let them out to the north of the house, where Regent’s Canal formed a moat. Two wolves – in wolf form, and fiercely large – guarded a bridge across it. Eliot led Ilsa into the centre of the forecourt; the same spot she and Oren had taken flight from on her last excursion.

  “A disguise won’t stop the Oracles from knowing you’ve left the safety of the Zoo,” Eliot said. “That’s not the point. The point is you look like a Ravenswood. You’re the image of Lyander.”

  “So?”

  Eliot’s scowl deepened with each of Ilsa’s questions. “I thought Cassia told you everything,” he said accusingly, like her purpose was to rile him.

  “Clearly, she din’t.”

  Eliot ran an exasperated hand over his face. “Ilsa Ravenswood is a rumour, like Gedeon being missing. The news of your mother’s pregnancy was guarded closely. There are no secrets in a city full of Oracles and Whisperers, but there’s no need to hand anyone proof of what they think they know. Now…”

  Before she could mention that she had already walked from Westminster Abbey to Regent’s Park wearing her own face and that perhaps he was being overly cautious, Eliot shifted.

  When Ilsa had passed through the portal and learned of other Changelings, she had also learned that the way each of them shifted was unique. Her own motion when she changed was smooth, and rolled up her body from her feet to her head. Oren would fold in on himself then burst abruptly into a new form. She had seen wolves around the Zoo who shifted like an avalanche and those who shivered into new skins.

  Eliot was like lightning, so quick he made a snap sound. Ilsa had barely registered that the boy was now a hawk before he was above the house and away. She shifted herself and raced after him.

  They flew south – Ilsa revelling in the warm air tickling her feathers and taking in the sun-bright city below – and landed on the street in Bloomsbury, where she became a dark-haired, almond-eyed version of herself.

  “That why they hid me in the Otherworld? To keep me a rumour?”

  Ilsa was ready for Eliot to complain of more questions, but it was worse when he didn’t. Her tone had given away the hurt she couldn’t help feeling when she thought of ending up in the orphanage. He gave her an opaque look.

  “You know you were never supposed to be lost there,” he said quietly.<
br />
  Ilsa did know that. As easy as it would be, she could not blame anyone in the Witherward for thinking she was dead. The single architect of her years of misery at the orphanage was Miss Mitcham, and Ilsa hated that the woman could still cause her fresh pain, eight years on from her escape. The only way she would rise above it was to stop thinking of supposed to or should have. Nothing could be undone.

  Eliot self-consciously straightened his jacket, his brow knotted. “I know. It doesn’t help you,” he said, unwittingly knocking her off-kilter. To have her thoughts exposed, and by a boy who was such a mystery himself, was an uncomfortable shock.

  “Which way?” she said coolly.

  Eliot’s storm-blue gaze found hers again, and he looked like he might say something more, but he only inclined his head for her to follow, and started in the direction of Great Russell Street.

  “I was a baby when your family was killed,” Eliot continued after a few minutes’ silence. His voice was tentative. “But I think hiding you in the Otherworld was the only choice your parents had left. Your mother had made a decision to protect her son and it ended up killing her. I suppose when she had Gedeon, she saw what he’d been born into with new eyes, and she realised London had two choices: to eat itself slowly until nothing remained for any of us, or find a way for each faction to mind its own business if it chose. That was why she proposed the Principles.”

  “Right, ’bout those,” said Ilsa. “I read up on all the things you ain’t allowed to do, and you’re all doing them! The Principles say the factions can’t have armies, right? But the Zoo’s got the wolves, and the Oracles have got the acolytes. Captain Fowler’s a captain, and he din’t look like police to me.”

  “Law enforcement.” Eliot tilted his head, as if indulging in a daydream. “What a quaint idea. The thing the faction leaders who drafted the Principles knew at the time – the thing your mother knew – is that they are an exercise in finding the loophole. Take the army rule. The Docklands acolytes are just that; they’re dedicates. The Zoo invites wolves to join as members of a syndicate and earn a share of any profits we make in trade. There just isn’t trust enough to lay down the law and rest easy in the knowledge that your enemies will keep to it. If the Principles were an iron-clad and binding rulebook, no one would have agreed to them.” Eliot’s expression darkened. “She was trying to create some order. And the Sage used it and twisted it to unite anyone who favoured bloodlust against her.”