Witherward
Page 23
Ilsa blinked. “But you weren’t going far! You din’t have to be separated.”
“It wasn’t the distance. There were those in the Heart already suspicious of my return. To split myself between the two would have meant belonging neither here nor there. It was hard enough being the only Sorcerer in Camden.” There was an understanding between them then that only experience could bring. Cassia flashed that painful smile again. “I needn’t have worried. The night I came back to the Zoo, everyone was looking for him. He was about to become alpha and he wasn’t ready. Hester and Oren were putting him through hours of instruction every day. They were frantic that he was missing. I was about to join the search, but when I got to my room, I found a note on the bed telling me to meet him in the park. He had stolen away with pockets full of the sweet buns he had known I would miss – like a child. He wanted to know everything. It was as if no time had passed at all.”
Cassia’s eyes met hers with a sudden intensity. “He spoke of you often, Ilsa. They used to tell him as a child that you were out there and he would have his little sister back one day, before that woman told us you were dead. It was an unbearable sorrow to him. He never stopped mourning you.”
As if from a distance, Ilsa marvelled at how she was still capable of feeling such pain. Gedeon had mourned her. He mourned her still. It was too much; she pushed the feeling down and cleared her throat. “And Eliot?”
Cassia sighed. “We were never the closest of friends. We were both quiet and introverted. We were both too serious to relax around one another. I always thought I was difficult to get to know, but Eliot couldn’t make a friend if he were shackled to a willing volunteer. We needed Gedeon to bring us together. But that wasn’t the problem.” Her eyes glazed over and she turned to the window. “In the years I was gone, everything changed for Eliot. His father disappeared. Did you know?” Ilsa shook her head, her mind flashing back to that first night in the park. The torment she’d seen when she asked about Eliot’s father. “Oftentimes, when someone is assassinated by the Order of Shadows, that’s all that happens.”
“Assassinated? You mean for money?”
Cassia nodded. “The Order of Shadows is the Wraith guild of mercenaries that Captain Fowler belongs to. They’re as powerful as any of the factions. They might even be as large. They never act against anyone unless there’s a fee involved but… well, one can’t fault them for playing to their strengths as Wraiths.
“Anyway, assassination was the verdict, but sadly Eliot and his family will never know for sure. And we’ve no clue as to why. I understand how hard that must be, but he’s been taking it out on all of us ever since. Myself, especially. He’s mistrusting of everyone. I think he must believe the contract was from someone within the Zoo, and as an outsider” – she hissed the word – “I’m an easy target for his suspicions.”
Ilsa’s sudden sympathy for Eliot was uncomfortable. She couldn’t excuse his making Cassia feel like an outsider, but she knew what not knowing was like; how it had permeated her being and led her to keep others at a distance. If she had been like Eliot as a child – shy, quiet, instead of outgoing and charismatic – would she have grown to be just like him?
When Cassia continued, her voice was cold and brittle. “He’s been a miserable thing since losing his father. Impossible to reach. I tried at first, but it was no use. The little goodwill Eliot ever extended, he reserved for Gedeon, and it vanished with him. I suppose it takes no great stretch of the imagination to see Eliot’s keeping his secrets.”
Ilsa suppressed a sigh. Cassia had told her to talk to Eliot, then Eliot had told her to talk to Cassia, when really it was clear they needed to talk to each other. “P’raps he is,” she said. “But there’s only one person whose fault this definitely is, and that’s Gedeon. I know I don’t know him, but it don’t seem a very honourable thing to up and vanish when he’s got all of Camden relying on him.”
Cassia blinked at her, shaking her head. “You’ve got him wrong,” she said, turning her attention to the flask. Ilsa waited for her to go on, but whatever defence Cassia had in mind, she couldn’t muster the words.
“Put me right then,” said Ilsa. “Help me understand it. Did he say nothing to you just before he left? Anything that seemed… I don’t know, strange?”
Cassia was silent as she dipped a thermometer into the potion and watched the mercury rise. “Everything about those days was strange. Gedeon wasn’t himself. But I’m sorry, Ilsa, I’m not the person to ask. Gedeon and I… we argued a couple of days before the attack, and he barely spoke to me after that.”
Ilsa’s heart sank. Had no one spent time with him before he left? “What’d you fight over?”
Cassia’s hand shook as she removed the thermometer. Her eyes were glassy. “The stupidest thing.” She sighed. She tried to gather herself, but failed, and the tears began falling. “He had planned a trip to Millwater. It’s a Changeling town an hour or so upriver. He said he wanted to recruit some new wolves. He was taking a lot of the wolves on guard rotation at the Zoo. It seemed foolish to me that we should be left so poorly guarded when the rebel Sorcerers had been attacking. That was all. And in the end, it all came to nothing because” – she turned her back on Ilsa, and dried her tears with her handkerchief. When she turned around, it was with renewed composure – “well, the trip was cancelled at the last minute. We’d argued for nothing. And when the rebels did come two days later, it made no difference how heavily guarded we were. The worst still happened.”
“But it was days after the attack that Gedeon left, weren’t it?”
“A week, I believe.”
“Din’t you make up?” Ilsa didn’t add that it sounded like an awfully petty squabble to hold a grudge over.
Cassia sighed. “I thought we did. He came to my room one night, very late, and apologised. He told me I was blameless. When I fell asleep, all was well between us, but when I woke up…” Her gaze stretched towards an invisible distance. “I haven’t seen him since that night.”
Ilsa’s heart hurt for her. The Sorcerer fell silent, her gaze on the window, and Ilsa suddenly felt like she was intruding. She was about to take her leave when Cassia spoke again.
“Which is worse, Ilsa? To be bereaved, or abandoned? For a person you love to be taken from you, or for him to leave, without a word, of his own accord?”
“I thought I knew,” said Ilsa with a weak smile. “Then you brought me here, and I don’t know how I feel ’bout none of it.”
As Ilsa made to leave, she brushed past the other girl. Cassia’s fingers reached for hers, squeezed ever so lightly, and let go.
19
Cassia’s tell was more subtle than Eliot’s, but she too, was hiding something.
It was the slightest hitch in her voice – a feigned lightness – that had raised the hairs on Ilsa’s neck. It didn’t take a card player to spot the lie; the picture Cassia painted of her argument with Gedeon didn’t add up. She hadn’t heard the full story, but what she had learned from Cassia suggested a new and potentially crucial conclusion:
Something had been eating at Gedeon before the attack.
But did Cassia know what it was? It was hard to even glance at the girl without seeing the pain of the things Gedeon had done. If he hadn’t broken her heart with his secrets – if Cassia truly knew more than she was letting on – did that mean it was all an act?
And if it wasn’t, how could Gedeon do such a thing? To disappear before morning like a dream. Even one of the wolves had left word for the girl he loved, but their leader hadn’t. Did it show the strength of his dedication to whatever secret plan was in motion – or was it only thoughtless cruelty?
You’ve got him wrong.
On the way back to her room Ilsa paused by the last portrait in the long gallery. The slant of the setting sun fell across the Prince of Camden’s golden hair.
He looked every bit the beatific, charismatic young man Cassia had painted him to be. To imagine him as cruel was unthinkable.
But could she believe she belonged to them?
It was unfathomable to her. The history of London Ilsa knew was of William the Conqueror, the Great Fire, the Gunpowder Plot. That her own ancestors had a place in the history of this London, that such a thing could be true of a former street urchin, was so far removed from her own life that she may as well have been looking at illustrations in a storybook.
But were these likenesses any more truthful? That’s all they were; just paintings. Vanity pieces commissioned by their subjects to cast them in the flattering glow of glory and renown. She scrutinised the portrait of Gedeon again. Nowhere in those clever, courageous eyes was a reckless nineteen-year-old who had fled from his post and left chaos behind him. The first time she had stood here, looking upon her brother’s face had made her feel he was just beyond her grasp, a hair’s breadth from her fingertips. Now he felt remote, unreachable.
Ilsa turned on her heel, spurred by a sudden flair of frustration and an inkling of how to solve it. An oil painting hanging in a gilded frame of a marbled hallway could not bring the real Gedeon closer. And as sharp and sensible as Cassia may be, she wouldn’t be the first girl to be blinded by love, so neither could she.
No one in the Zoo could.
The sun had dipped below the horizon when Ilsa cracked open the window of a deserted corridor above the terrace. Venture downstairs, and she would certainly be seen, so she shifted into a sparrow, slipped through the window, and dropped into the hydrangeas at the edge of the terrace.
The wolf on the perimeter was nowhere in sight; the one by the west gate was about to turn south. Technically, Eliot had been telling the truth when he said the wolves weren’t there to keep anyone in, and Ilsa knew that now. But she also knew she wasn’t supposed to leave the safety of the Zoo without a guard, and being cossetted like a princess of Camden was the last thing she wanted tonight. She wasn’t a princess; she was a Changeling who had survived alone for seventeen years. So, with a glance back at the house to check no one was watching, she scuttled across the lawn before either wolf could see her and launched herself over the wall.
She would head northeast, she decided, towards Camden as she’d known it in the Otherworld. Perhaps away from the Zoo and the volatile south tip of the quarter – by the Trade House, the river, and the abbey – there would be fewer militia. So she flew in a wide circle around the Zoo, occasionally taking cover in a tree to check no wolf was watching. But dusk had descended like a sheet of black gossamer, and a single sparrow was near invisible in the gloom. Buoyant from her seamless escape, Ilsa glided over the canal and landed on her human legs just beyond the northeast corner of the Zoo, a sly smile on her lips. She looked back towards the house – just as three off-duty militiawomen eating supper by the canal looked up and froze in surprise.
“Oh bloody—”
“Muh whaydee?” said one around a bite of her apple.
Ilsa took off again, this time on falcon’s wings. She heard her name being called, the splash of something that might have been an apple thrown into the canal. They were following her, three trained wolves, maybe more by now. Speed wouldn’t help her. Only anonymity would give her a chance, so she nose-dived between two rows of houses on the High Street.
It was a mistake; the High Street was not quiet, as she’d expected at this time of the evening, but bustling with people. Vendors and shoppers, performers and dancers. A street party was in full swing, and in the thrill of the chase, Ilsa hadn’t even heard the music. Now she was plummeting into the thick of it, with no time left to change course.
She shrank herself, slipping impossibly between the party-goers and landing hard, but on her feet, in the form of a tabby cat.
“Look out!” Somebody’s tankard of ale followed her down as he tottered to keep his balance without stepping on her. A woman shrieked as he grasped her skirt for support, and as they both went tumbling – she changing into a bird and neatly missing the ground, he landing face down in his spilled ale to a roar of approving laughter – Ilsa darted away on light paws.
She made for the edge of the street where the crowds were thinner, slipping between feet and hooves and paws. She caught flashes of black and white stripes, rainbow feathers, long, chestnut fur. Every once in a while, a cheer swelled up from somewhere else in the crowd, part shouts and clapping, but also made up of howls and whinnies and growls. Ilsa felt the buzz in her bloodstream kick up a notch as she hopped up onto a barrel to see if she was still being followed. But there were too many people. It would be impossible to tell if the wolves were coming, and a tabby cat disguise wouldn’t save her from discovery. They would be scanning the crowd – human and beast alike – for her distinctive hazel eyes.
Ilsa scanned about for a better vantage point, ears pricking when her eyes alighted on it. She grew wings again, dodging other Changelings in the carnival forms of tropical birds: scarlet and golden and green. Past the bunting and strings of lanterns, up onto the rooftop of a butcher’s shop, where she crouched low, shifted into a human disguise – with mousy hair and a face to match – and gazed down at the scene below her.
Changelings, it seemed, were their own entertainment. Interspersed with the feasting and dancing, the revellers joined in all sorts of games. Shrieks of laughter were coming from a circle where a precarious sculpture of counter-balanced monkeys was forming, each new joiner climbing over the heads and limbs of the others to form the next row. From the numerous spectators nursing small hurts, Ilsa could guess this wasn’t the first attempt.
At the visibly drunker end of the street, two hulking gorillas wrestled as bets were placed among the spectators. Ilsa’s eyes grew wide. No party she had ever attended had included competitive fighting among the entertainments, but then again, no party she had ever been to had been held among Changelings. The mind became a duller, more instinctive thing in the body of an animal. Ilsa conceded that if she were a gorilla – a drunken one at that – she might find it fun to wrestle someone too. She wondered what Alitz would make of it.
But the biggest event was unfolding in a space in the middle of the street. Revellers were taking turns to walk into the centre of the circle and showcase their most impressive transformations. As Ilsa watched, a hooked-nosed, greying woman stepped forward, and with a surprisingly wicked grin, folded in on herself until she was a tangle of smooth scales on the floor. Amidst the shrieks of delight and alarm, the tangle writhed grotesquely, and from its folds emerged the black eyes and triangular head of a python. As she raised her head, swaying uncannily and flicking her black tongue, she began to unfurl. The murmurs grew louder and turned into gasps as coils of the snake kept revealing themselves, like scarves out of a magician’s cuff, until all twenty feet of her was uncoiled in the middle of the street. She raised her emerald head higher and took a serpentine bow to the raucous applause of the party-goers.
Next was an unassuming man who cracked his neck one way, then the other, screwed up his face in concentration, and transformed himself into a pure white peacock, unlike any Ilsa had ever seen.
Since coming to the Witherward, she had confirmed much of what she’d learned for herself about her magic, including the fact that a Changeling could only become an animal as it existed in nature. Bigger, if they were gifted with their magic, and as beautiful and fast and strong as they could muster, but they could not create, or amalgamate, only imitate. The albino peacock below wasn’t just a showcase of the
man’s magic, but of his history and experience; the things he’d seen and learned. He drew an awed gasp from the mesmerised crowd as he spread his tail feathers in an arc, and was mobbed with questions when he stepped out of the circle.
The crowd began to rumble with thunderous shouts and applause as they parted to make way for a third competitor. Into the circle, arms raised in pride as she played the crowd, stepped a stocky, matronly woman of about fifty. She did a lap in front of the spectators, shouting encouragement as they chanted her name.
“Millie! Millie! Millie!”
Ilsa couldn’t help but lean forward over the edge of the roof to get a better look as Millie took her place in the centre of the circle. A few of the onlookers encouraged the rest to step back as they pressed in, kids pulled into arms and behind legs to keep them from approaching.
And then Millie shifted. She fell to all fours as she swelled with a motion like bread rising. At the point Ilsa thought her skin might burst, it hardened and darkened to a wrinkled, grey hide. The lower part of her face appeared to melt and drip as it elongated, all in a flash.
Within a single second, Ilsa knew what she was witnessing. Within two, Millie was an elephant.
The roar of the crowd couldn’t drown out her trumpeting as she raised her trunk triumphantly. Ilsa barely suppressed the urge to join in the applause, but she could see them now – six large hunting dogs with noses to the ground. The wolves were on the street, combing their way through the crowd, and they knew her scent. She wouldn’t be safe on the roof for long; they would have hawks in the air soon, if they didn’t already. But between sneaking out and finding the party, Ilsa was on too much of a high to be escorted home now. She still had a mission to fulfil before that happened.