A ribbon of darkness lashed out and struck her in the side. She roared, her legs buckling, pain burning across her ribs. Another hit her in the back, agony racing up and down her spine as her nerves sang from the blow.
Demon, said a voice. Devil’s get. The darkness shivered, and Ilsa knew what lurked there.
She pulled herself into a ball as she took another blow to the head, tail tucked tight to her body, ears flat against her skull. She would never be free. She would never be safe. She screwed her eyes shut, but she could still see it all; the attic, the woman with the switch.
And there, at the corner of her vision, Pyval, flickering like a flame. Was he doing this to her? Or had her own terror taken over?
Another lash. Another sting of pain. But she could make it end. Pyval danced in the void, never in one place, but if she focused her gaze, she could hold him in the corner of her vision. Then, maybe…
She pulled herself onto four legs. She couldn’t see the drawing room, couldn’t even convince herself it was there, but she could picture it. She could imagine this horror wasn’t real. Pyval had been stood beside the couch, opposite the French windows, and if she kept her gaze elsewhere, he always hovered in the same spot in the void. She had nothing else to go on, but she leapt. Pyval raised an arm in defence, but Ilsa was defending herself too. It was instinct, and she struck without a thought.
Someone roared. Miss Mitcham, the pain, the attic all vanished, and the light rushed in. Ilsa was on the floor, her skirts pooled around her, her back to the wall. She felt her ribs, her face. She was uninjured, but the heedless dread wouldn’t vanish.
Pyval hissed. He was clutching his arm, blood seeping through his fingers. Alitz was watching him impassively. Fyfe appeared at the door of the drawing room, eyes wide with horror at the scene within. Ilsa pushed herself up on shaking legs, and Fyfe dashed to help her.
“I din’t mean to bite him,” she murmured, stunned. “I was just trying to make it stop.”
She had only wanted to knock him out of his concentration. She didn’t even remember opening her jaws.
Across the room, the Whisperers were engaged in a fierce, silent exchange. Alitz tore her seething gaze away from her assistant long enough address them. “He needs stitches,” she said, her tone as unreadable as ever. “Would you be so good as to fetch a healer?”
Fyfe hesitated, a supporting hand still on Ilsa’s arm and a distrustful frown aimed at Pyval. But when the Whisperer removed his hand from his injured arm, and blood gushed from the wound onto the floor, Fyfe snapped to his senses.
He dragged Ilsa from the room with him.
“Are you alright?”
Ilsa nodded. “Fine. Go find a healer.” She smiled weakly. “My lessons with Alitz will be really awkward if he bleeds out.”
“I’ll be right back.”
But Ilsa didn’t wait for Fyfe to return. She made for her room – the sounds of servants and wolves responding to the emergency echoing around her – locked the door, and lay down on the bed.
Only then did she let the tears come.
* * *
Ilsa woke gasping for air, fistfuls of bed linen gripped in both hands.
Night had fallen, and she hastened out of bed to turn up the lamps; to reassure herself she wasn’t still dreaming. But though the nightmare faded with the light, the memory of the waking moments she had spent in that void continued to assault her.
The Zoo trusted Alitz, and Alitz trusted Pyval. And whatever it had cost her, she now had a crystal clear idea of the worst things a Whisperer could do to her, and how helpless she was to stop them when she used her own magic.
But did that make terrorising her a kindness? Had Pyval even meant to conjure the worst memories Ilsa had, or had she done that herself? Did she need to stop being a coward and confront her training head-on, or was it right to put her foot down and refuse to be taught by him?
She couldn’t trust her instincts when it came to Pyval; they were muddied by fear.
The lights weren’t dousing her persisting sense of unease, and if Ilsa just sat she would descend into panic, so she decided to take a walk. If no one was in the kitchen, she would make herself some tea.
But she didn’t get as far as the kitchen. At the top of the stairs descending to the entrance hall, a different room – a different idea – ensnared her.
She had not set foot in her brother’s chambers since that first time; the day she’d realised so much of what she’d hoped for was already gone. The same stillness permeated the room; the same uncanny sense that someone had just stepped out and left their life behind only a moment before.
Though it was clear someone still came in here to clean, no one had drawn the curtains, and another clear night filled the rooms with soft moonlight. Ilsa trod lightly through the sitting room and the study, into the bedchamber, her footfalls whispering on the wood floors and a strange calm finally fighting back the dread.
These rooms had been her parents’ once, and then her brother’s, and they enveloped her in a feeling she couldn’t work out. All she knew was that the memories she’d seen in the void couldn’t reach her here, that nothing the likes of Pyval Crespo did could hurt.
So she pulled back the covers, climbed into bed, and fell into a dreamless sleep.
21
For several days, the incident during Ilsa’s lesson haunted her. Spikes of panic would creep up when she least expected them; flashes of being back in that void.
But Ilsa hadn’t survived the traumas of her childhood just for a reminder of them to bring her to her knees, and she had found a way to quash the panic. She would go to the master chamber, the room that belonged to her brother, and lie on the four-poster bed, and let the scents of furniture polish and gardenias fill her nostrils.
Without deciding to, she had started treating the rooms as her own. Cassia had refused to step foot in them since Gedeon had vanished – which explained why she had stood stiffly beyond the door the day Aelius showed Ilsa around – so after the first night that she’d slept there without anyone stopping her, Ilsa gathered a few belongings from her chamber – Bill’s scarf; the tattered velvet bag she found herself unable to throw away; and her folding knife and playing cards from inside – and arranged them on top of Gedeon’s dresser. She scooped up the small stack of books she had pilfered from the library and put them next to the four-poster, in easy reach when she was lying there at night.
At first, she resisted the urge to open drawers and peruse shelves, but by the second day, she had talked herself out of such restraint. She had heard so much about her brother, but the space where he lived; it would be like hearing about him in his own words. More importantly, it might even hold some clues.
She began in his study. If there was anything in the rooms that would help her track her brother, this struck Ilsa as the best bet, so she went straight to the desk, where a number of letters, receipts, and a heavy ledger still lay. As she rifled through them, Ilsa imagined Gedeon sitting where she sat, and going about his duties thinking she was dead. Cassia had said it was an unbearable sorrow to him, and even as she upturned nothing useful at his desk, she found renewed purpose in her mission; she was on the trail of what she’d been missing, but Gedeon still didn’t know it yet. She had to find him for his sake as much as her own.
When she was certain there were no clues at the desk, she poked through the bookshelves, pulling each volume out by the spine to see if anything fell from the secret spaces between, or from inside the pages. When she had exhausted that possibility, she went through the drawers of his bedside table – he slept on the left – then the liquor cabinet – he favoured an imported rye – then the shelves of his wardrobe. She dipped her hands into the pockets of his jackets – noting the lingering scent of grass and apples, of him – and though she learned a great deal, she found nothing.
Nothing, until she lifted the lid of a chest beside the bed. Its contents were a mess of unremarkable bric-a-brac, but on top was an object Ilsa felt
rather than saw; a wooden toy in the shape of a wolf.
It had been eight years since Ilsa had seen her toy wolf, but she recalled it clearly enough to know that this one was identical. Had Gedeon known, perhaps, that she had one like it? Reverently, she tipped Gedeon’s wolf upside down to hear that familiar rattle – but there was no sound. The wolves weren’t quite identical: Gedeon’s didn’t appear to be hollow. She imagined a scene: matching toys presented to the little prince and his newborn sister. One for a growing boy, one to make appealing noises for a baby.
Someone who had loved her before she was born had dreamed of such a thing. They probably didn’t imagine their gifts would be received in a shop cellar, or that everyone present would soon be dead or fleeing for their lives; that the twin wolves would be in different worlds before the day was out. Ilsa shook her head to scatter the thoughts and gently placed the wolf back on top of the clutter, closing the lid.
Such sentimentality would get her nowhere. She stood in the centre of the room with her hands on her hips. “We all got secrets, Gedeon,” she murmured. “Where d’you hide yours?”
When she had lived with Mrs Holmes, Blume’s landlady, the woman had made the mistake of teaching Ilsa how to read. She was forever after pinching volumes from Mrs Holmes’s small collection of fiction and reading them by candlelight when she was meant to be asleep. She couldn’t disguise the scent of a candle just extinguished, but she stopped the books from being confiscated by stashing them hastily beneath the mattress. So, with dwindling hope, she got down on her knees and sank her arms as far as they would go between the mattress and the bedframe.
She swept her arms back and forth, feeling for something, anything, and thought she must be imagining things the first time her fingertips brushed a single sheet of thin paper. Gedeon was no doubt taller than her, with longer arms, and she had to reach to close her fingertips around the paper, but she managed it.
It was a page torn from a notebook, stained with blotches of ink and folded in half. On the inside, a diagram had been untidily scrawled.
Ilsa’s hands shook and she fought to tamp down the surge of excitement.
How could she be sure Gedeon himself had written this? And even if he had, was it relevant to his disappearance? But, most importantly, what could it possibly mean? The numbers weren’t in order. The suns and moons, clumsily drawn, didn’t appear to be either. And what was the shape in the middle? It didn’t look like it was intended to be a circle. Was it a map of some kind? And why did the numbers and symbols on the right-hand side have crosses beside them?
Ilsa found a use for Alitz’s damned calming exercises; she needed to clear her mind, to think her thoughts one at a time. So she counted her breaths until she felt her heart rate slow, and focused on what was in front of her.
For a start, it must have been under the mattress as a way of keeping it hidden, and it was under Gedeon’s mattress, so she would do the sensible thing and assume he wrote it. It must have been here since before he disappeared. He left it behind, so he must not have needed it anymore, and he had hidden it, so he didn’t intend it for anybody.
Ilsa lost her calm and methodical train of thought. This was a secret. A thing perhaps only Gedeon and Ilsa knew. She couldn’t tamp down the thrill it gave her, to hold a small piece of her brother’s story, a piece the likes of Cassia and Eliot had never seen. But why? Because Gedeon hadn’t trusted them? If she took this slip of paper to Eliot, or Cassia, or Fyfe, would her brother have thought she was making a mistake?
Perhaps it wasn’t that type of secret. It could be something innocuous, like a prop for a game. Or something intimate, like a thing he scribbled down in the night when it came to him in a dream.
Or perhaps it could tell her where her brother was.
Even as the possibility danced in her mind, Ilsa didn’t truly believe it. Gedeon had been gone for weeks. There was no telling how long it had even been there; perhaps it had been years. Perhaps it was good for nothing but kindling.
But that didn’t mean Ilsa couldn’t discover what it meant.
If she took it to one of the others, and they explained it away with some memory or story of Gedeon, Ilsa would only be reminded of how everyone knew her brother but her. And perhaps it was childish that that had started to hurt, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted a secret of Gedeon’s that was only hers to know.
So when someone knocked on the sitting room door and entered, Ilsa hastily folded the diagram again until it was about the size of a playing card, and, with an unnecessary but nonetheless perfect flourish, she secreted it up her sleeve just as Fyfe appeared in the bedchamber.
He looked from her hands to her face and back again, expression blank with confusion. “What did you just do?”
“Magic.”
Fyfe narrowed his eyes, the natural investigator in him unsatisfied.
“Stage magic,” Ilsa conceded with a shrug. Hoping she could fool him, she did the trick in reverse. “See, nothing up my sleeve,” she said in her stage voice, and with a little sleight of hand, her handkerchief appeared between her fingers.
Fyfe’s face lit up. “Remarkable! Can you show me?”
Ilsa crossed her arms. “Not if you ain’t going into the business. Magician’s code. But I can show you something else. Want to learn to make yourself invisible?”
Fyfe’s scepticism returned, but it was mixed with curiosity. “No one can make themselves invisible. Not even Wraiths.”
Ilsa flicked a curl over her shoulder. “Well I can. Come here.”
She took him by the hand and led him out into the hallway – away from the scene of her snooping – where she let him in on the secrets of being a good magician’s assistant that she had shown Eliot; like how to hold yourself so you appear unremarkable, and how to move without attracting attention. They pretended the hallway was a street, and Fyfe practised following Ilsa while looking like just another pedestrian when she turned around.
“But you need to make yourself shorter too. And plainer.”
He smiled at her and puffed up. “I knew you thought I was handsome.” Ilsa punched him in the arm. “Shorter. Plainer.” He shot her a sheepish look. “You might want to stand back.”
Fyfe shifted like he was being attacked by bees. He flinched and jerked like every changing muscle was a nasty sting. Ilsa had never imagined it could be necessary to move so much. It was like the form Fyfe was searching for was a suit of overalls three sizes too small, and he had to thrash to concertina himself in. His features cycled through a hall of mirrors, no face quite right and each wearing a frown of concentration. Ilsa let out an involuntary yelp when his limbs elongated and he shot up by two feet, arms windmilling for balance.
She smothered a giggle with everything she had. “Wrong way, Fyfe.”
“I wasn’t finished.”
He almost fell again in the pandemonium of shrinking, his hair flashing alternately bright orange and silver blonde. He kept muttering something that sounded like ouch, and Ilsa couldn’t blame him. It was uncomfortable to grow too extremely short – or too extremely anything – and Fyfe was now no more than four feet. With another dangerous flurry, he stopped shifting at around Ilsa’s height, planting his feet and holding his arms out like he couldn’t be sure his body was through with its games.
For all his face had been put through, it looked the same. His nose was rounder where it had been pointed and his forehead had shrunk so that his black curls fell into his eyes, but that was it. He was wincing, and Ilsa worried he was still in pain, but on closer inspection, it was just several severe, incessant twitches.
“Well,” said Ilsa, tapping her lip to hide her smile, “it’s the sneaking bit what’s more important, anyhow.”
“It’s alright. I know I’m an awful shifter,” said Fyfe, breaking into a grin. “You can laugh.”
Ilsa did. She laughed like she hadn’t done since Martha had died, until her stomach hurt and she was crying. She did impressions of Fyfe shifting until he was lau
ghing through tears too, and begging her to stop.
It turned out Fyfe didn’t need his magic to master Ilsa’s trick. For a conspicuously tall and frenetic boy, he was a natural talent at being invisible. He had tricks Ilsa had never even thought of; a faraway look to appear lost in thought; a way of holding his hands that made an onlooker forget they were useful for anything. Where Fyfe fell behind, he changed the game to make up the difference.
When Ilsa had nothing left to teach him, they wandered in the direction of his lab. There was a question threatening to bubble out of her, and she knew it wasn’t entirely about finding Gedeon that she was compelled to ask it.
“Fyfe, what d’you think of Eliot?”
He caught a blush so quickly Ilsa wondered if he had lost control of his shifting altogether and was becoming a flamingo. “What do I think of him?”
“You know, d’you like him? D’you think he’s a good person?”
Fyfe’s shoulders were suddenly very tense and Ilsa’s suspicions were piqued. Had she discovered his tell? The thought of Fyfe being untruthful with her was so much worse than Eliot or Cassia; he had always seemed so unguarded.
“Yes, I think he’s a good person. Being reserved doesn’t make him a villain.”
“Reserved is generous,” said Ilsa, even as she thought of the flashes of warmth and playfulness she’d seen when the façade cracked. There was a side to Eliot the others didn’t know, and it gave her a peculiar jolt of happiness to have what felt like a particularly precious secret. Ilsa hadn’t even known secrets could be happy.
“Well, Gedeon’s disappearance has been difficult, but especially for Eliot. You would never guess, knowing Eliot and knowing Gedeon, but—” Fyfe cut off, forlorn. “Oh. I suppose you don’t know Gedeon. But they’re unlikely friends to say the least. Gedeon is outgoing and easy with everyone. He’s likeable. But being likeable isn’t the same as being good. I mean, of course Gedeon’s good. I just mean that Eliot…” He noticed he was rambling and his blush spread to his ears. At least Fyfe had seen the good in Eliot too. That part didn’t feel like it should be a secret. “I know the others think he’s in on this Gedeon business, especially Cassia, but… well, even I’m not sure I believe Gedeon would do something like this without telling Eliot. He leans on him. He always has. All Gedeon’s best ideas are Eliot’s. But if it’s true, if he does know where Gedeon is and he’s not saying… well, I believe he has his reasons.” He seemed to think better of himself, and added quietly, “I don’t mean any disrespect to Cassia. She’s entitled to her opinion of him. But I think she’s wrong.”
Witherward Page 26
