Ilsa’s eyes widened. “Cogna sent the messenger.”
“Yes. The apprentice moved you out of harm’s way before fleeing the temple with your brother. The only question you should be concerning yourself with is why. What use are you to them? That, I cannot help you with.”
“Then we’re done here,” said Ilsa. “We won’t take up no more of your time.”
Before they could depart, Jorn sighed heavily and rose from his chair. When he locked eyes with Fyfe, his expression was mercifully kinder. “Don’t be afraid of love, boy. It can wound deeply, but it is also a salve. You can have that one for free.”
Fyfe, with his unfailing good manners, seemed to take this as an apology, and offered his hand to shake Jorn’s. But when their fingers met, Jorn’s clamped tightly around Fyfe’s as if by their own accord. His eyes moved as if he were dreaming; his features slackened. It was only for a second before Fyfe pulled away in alarm, and the Oracle gasped.
“The avarice of men!” Jorn said fiercely. “Do you think you’re the first to want what was never yours to claim? Every few centuries your ilk abandon your experiments when you learn the truth. Transference is a forbidding and dangerous magic, Master Whitleaf. Your alpha cannot wield it!”
“Transference?” said Ilsa. Jorn was talking about Fyfe’s experiments; the machines designed to replicate Wraith and Whisperer magic.
“It is what the Prince of Camden seeks.”
Ilsa saw her own startled alarm in Fyfe’s wide eyes. They had stumbled on more answers than they had hoped for, but Ilsa felt only fear, not triumph.
“What d’you mean he can’t wield it?” Ilsa couldn’t stop herself from asking. “Will it hurt him?”
Jorn’s whirling eyes settled on her, his mouth pinched into a cruel smile. “More questions?”
“Please.” Ilsa extended her hand again, even as Fyfe made a move to protest. “Is Gedeon in danger?”
“I want a part of your future,” breathed Jorn. “I want your next mistake.”
“Take your pick,” muttered Ilsa.
Jorn’s words about transference still hung in the air, yet what she wouldn’t give to see inside his mind the way a Whisperer could; to pluck her next mistake from the future and squash it under her heel.
Even more so when Jorn looked up, his unruly eyebrows pulling together. He tried to begin several sentences before settling on one. “To be like you,” he said. “To be so helpless and so unburdened… h ow does it feel? Regret?”
“You got your question,” said Ilsa. “Now answer mine.”
“The price just went up,” said Jorn, grinning.
Ilsa let a sharp breath out through her nostrils and considered. How could she describe regret to someone who had never felt it? “It’s like you’re travelling, but you can’t ever visit the same place twice,” she said slowly. “You had a different future in your suitcase, a better one, but you left it on the platform. You want to jump off the train but it’s moving too fast.”
Jorn’s white-eyed gaze bore into her as he pondered her answer, but he was satisfied. “Gedeon Ravenswood’s desires will do only harm,” he said. “To himself. To the city. You must do everything you can to stop him.”
* * *
Ilsa wanted to beg Jorn to save her from her next mistake. There were some things she knew she could never go back and change – things she would get just one shot at – and this thought weighed heavily on her psyche as they left the ambassador’s house.
Thankfully, an impression was not one of these things.
She had been suspicious of Fyfe when they had talked about Eliot; she had told herself he was hiding something. Now, she knew what it was. Knew why Fyfe had defended Eliot when no one else did. Knew what had caused him to tense and blush at the mention of the boy’s name.
Fyfe was in love.
And Ilsa was skimming through her memories of every interaction between Fyfe and Eliot like some would-be, amateur Oracle. Did Eliot know? Should she have known? Would she have done anything differently if she had? She imagined Fyfe witnessing those moments she and Eliot had been alone and close enough to breathe each other’s breath, and her stomach cramped.
When Ilsa dragged herself back to the present moment, Fyfe was several paces ahead of her and walking at a furious pace, and she tensed. Perhaps Fyfe did know. Perhaps he had caught Ilsa looking at Eliot when she thought he wasn’t watching, the way Jorn must have seen Fyfe looking at him too. Was he avoiding her now because he couldn’t pretend ignorance any longer?
“Fyfe…” said Ilsa tentatively, and she hurried to catch him up. “Fyfe, wait.”
When she reached him, Fyfe was chewing his lip and muttering under his breath. He didn’t acknowledge her. She tugged feebly on his sleeve.
“Fyfe?”
“Yes!”
He stopped suddenly, and Ilsa ran into him. His mad gaze landed on her, and Ilsa realised he wasn’t thinking about Eliot at all, nor was he answering her. She’d seen that light go on before, in the Screeching Hen, right before he said something brilliant.
“I know why they tried to break into the crypt,” Fyfe said. “I know what Gedeon’s looking for.”
26
While Ilsa and Fyfe were in Whitechapel, Eliot had apparently been in the library.
“Eliot,” Fyfe called breathlessly. He was propelling himself up the spiral stairs to the balcony where Eliot was leaning on the rail, tome in hand. Ilsa was on his heels, struggling to contain her impatience.
She had given up trying to get Fyfe to tell her what he’d worked out. To his credit, he had tried, but they were nearly home before he had calmed his excitement, and even then, few of the words he had gasped at her – transference, legend and something about Wraiths – meant much to Ilsa.
“Did you find out who’s buried in the crypt?” he asked Eliot, so quickly the words tumbled together.
Eliot snapped his book closed. His curious gaze slid from Fyfe to Ilsa, where it lingered. She shot him a glare that said she knew what she looked like; cheeks red as apples, sweat trickling below her neckline. She lifted her hair off her neck, took a journal off the shelf and fanned herself with it.
Tall, excited Fyfe had walked home. Ilsa had jogged.
“I think so,” said Eliot, barely disguising a smirk as his eyes travelled over her. “There are about a dozen Seers down there.”
“Is one of them Hetepheres Emeryat?”
These were two of the words Ilsa had failed to understand the first and second time Fyfe had said them, but Eliot’s gaze snapped to Fyfe. He raised an eyebrow. “The seventh Seer?”
Fyfe made a wild gesture Ilsa thought was acquiescence. “Yes!” he said vehemently, and turned to Ilsa. “The seventh Seer’s amulet. That’s what the legend’s called. That’s what I was trying to say.”
Ilsa nodded. She was still catching her breath. “Right. What legend?”
“It’s a folk tale, really. Hester used to tell it to me when I was little, which means she probably told it to Gedeon too. Nearly two thousand years ago, when the city was founded, the Oracles built their temple by the river and brought the Seer of Esfa Kala to live there. She was only the seventh Seer to rule in the modern age, which is when Oracle customs changed and the Seer went from a leader to a slave. The previous six had all been denounced by their people in a matter of years and executed, so she was considered to be doomed to an untimely death.
“But when the different peoples of London were brought together, the Seer met a Wraith general who fell in love with her. Back then, the Wraiths were feared and even worshipped by the people of the other factions and he was the wealthiest and most powerful leader in all of London. He waged war on the Oracles to try to free his lover from her indenture, and slaughtered hundreds of them. Ironically, this bloodshed is what eventually brought a death sentence on the Seer. Her people blamed her for failing to protect them from the Wraiths.
“But before the sentence could be passed, the Wraith general’s grief and anguish led
him to swallow his pride and turn to a Sorcerer who was able to help him. He paid the Sorcerer in land and gold and anything the Wraiths had, making his people nearly destitute, and the Sorcerer crafted for him an amulet that would protect his lover when her people came to execute her. All he had to do was unfasten a clasp and put a drop of his blood inside the amulet.
“So he did, and he smuggled the amulet to his lover. The moment she let the chain fall around her neck, she was imbued with the Wraith’s power. She was still an Oracle, but with the unstoppable speed, strength, and senses of a Wraith.”
The hairs on Ilsa’s arms stood on end. An amulet that could replicate a Wraith’s power, just like Fyfe’s experiments.
“What the general failed to learn until too late,” Fyfe went on, “was that the amulet took the power of the person whose blood it held and gave it to the wearer. In making the Seer practically invincible, he had been made helpless. When she tore apart her prison with her bare hands, her people thought her a goddess, and she was restored to her position. When she learned that her new-found powers were stolen, she betrayed her lover, kept the amulet for herself and wrought vengeance against the Wraiths for the slaughter of her people to win their favour. The helpless, mortal general was burned at the stake, a sacrifice to the Oracle gods, but when he died, the amulet’s power was lost. The Seer grew sick and died as well.” Fyfe rubbed his hair. “Hester used to tell me the cosmos brought it on her as punishment for her sins. But, then, Hester also told me Wraiths eat Changeling children who misbehave. Who knows what happened.”
“Gedeon must have thought the amulet was buried with the Seer,” said Ilsa.
“It was,” said Eliot, turning both their heads. He had listened to Fyfe tell the story with stoic patience. “I mean, it might have been.” He ran a hand over his face, frustrated. “An hour ago, I would have said there was no way Gedeon would be acting on some fairy tale.”
“Legend,” corrected Fyfe.
“But… well, come with me.”
By a chair in a hidden nook up on the balcony, there was a pile of books. The top few lay open, and Ilsa picked one of them up. It was a history of magical artefacts, open on a page about the supposed existence of the legendary seventh Seer’s amulet.
“I saw some sections of the history shelves had been pillaged, including all the books I needed,” said Eliot. “At first I thought some raiders had helped themselves, but then I found them all here. All of them reference the legend or Hetepheres Emeryat, or the amulet itself.”
“How d’you know it was Gedeon what had them?” said Ilsa.
“Because he folds the pages when he reads.” She let out a small sound of disapproval as Eliot showed her the mangled corner of a page. “I know. Never lend him your books. Or anything, for that matter. The man is a bull in a china shop.”
“Please don’t use that phrase,” said Fyfe, a haunted look coming over him. “It was such an expensive dare.”
Eliot gently smoothed the page corner and put the book down.
“The question is,” said Fyfe, “what does Gedeon even want with this amulet? From a scientific standpoint, it’s an intriguing piece of magic, and certainly powerful but… it can’t be worth all this trouble.”
“Well.” Eliot shifted some of the books and held up a tome bound in green leather. “This fellow says that if the amulet could be studied, it would be a simple matter for another Sorcerer to replicate its magic.” He flicked through the book, glowering at it in a way Ilsa wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of. “Somebody must have hurt him, because he goes on for several pages in near impenetrable prose about an unstoppable army equipped with artefacts that could bestow the owner with the magic of all six peoples.”
“But the amulet steals magic,” said Fyfe, eyes wide with horror. Ilsa wondered if he was thinking of Hester. “Would Gedeon do such a thing?”
“For an unstoppable army? Even a single unit of unstoppable wolves to fight the rebels?” Eliot shook his head grimly. “He would be a fool not to. Tell me about Jorn.”
They filled him in, minus any details of Fyfe harbouring unrequited feelings for him.
“We got no way of knowing what Cogna’s up to,” Ilsa concluded. “I know you said Gedeon is stubborn, but this kid knows how to manipulate the present to get the future they want. P’raps Cogna and Gedeon ain’t looking for the amulet no more. P’raps Cogna’s steering Gedeon in a different direction.”
Eliot shook his head. “So we don’t know where Gedeon is, and even the Oracles don’t know where Cogna is, and they can’t find Gedeon either because he’s with this omnic, and they may or may not be after something that may or may not exist and either way, is also missing.”
“That’s about the crux of it,” said Fyfe. “You don’t know if the amulet even exists?”
Eliot tossed the book in his hand onto the pile with enough frustration to send them all toppling. “Like I said, there is probably an amulet, one that was entombed with the seventh Seer, but whether or not it’s a magical artefact, every historian claims something different. A lot of Sorcerers have said it isn’t possible, but I also found half a dozen insisting this crafter or that crafter was the one who made it. Most of them are claiming it was their own ancestor though, so who’s to say.”
“But that Hardwick fellow said whatever Gedeon was looking for wasn’t in the crypt,” said Fyfe.
“No, it isn’t. The only thing every account agrees on is that the amulet hasn’t been seen in over a thousand years. Gedeon must have gone to the temple purely because it was the only lead he had. I would have done the same.”
“But how’d it get out of the crypt?”
Eliot let out a breath. “There’s no saying. The Oracles have claimed at various points that the amulet was destroyed, that it never existed, and that it was stolen, probably according to whichever makes the least sense to the person asking.”
They fell into silence.
“So what do we do now?” said Fyfe, slumping against a bookcase.
Eliot glanced at Ilsa, who realised with a bittersweet pang that he was deferring to her. But she was spent. She could feel her brother slipping away from her with every idea they used up, and she wasn’t sure how many more she had left. When she didn’t speak, Eliot said, “We work on the assumption that Gedeon and Cogna are still looking for the amulet. Gedeon knew no more than we do when he tried to break into the temple, but he’s with a powerful Oracle now.”
“Then don’t they likely have it already?” said Ilsa.
Fyfe shook his head. “I doubt it. If the amulet has had a complicated history, it would take any Oracle a very long time to locate it, even an omnic. Jorn was able to find details of our past quickly because we were touching, but Cogna’s shooting in the dark.”
“Besides, Gedeon can’t stay hidden forever,” said Eliot. “Once he’s got what he wants, he’ll have to come back.”
Fyfe was encouraged by this, but Ilsa raised an eyebrow defiantly. “Why?”
Eliot scowled. “Why?” he said indignantly. “Because everything he has is here. We’re his home and his family.”
She wanted to remind him that Gedeon abandoned them all without so much as a note, but instead, she voiced the thought that had been circling since Fyfe first mentioned the amulet. “Aelius said Gedeon had worked out what the raiders were looking for here at the Zoo.”
Eliot gestured tiredly. “It’s the most plausible explanation.”
“But the raiders took Fyfe’s pocket forge. If it’s transference they were interested in, there’s plenty more tempting inventions in that lab.”
“Perhaps Aelius was wrong,” said Fyfe, though he didn’t sound convinced.
“And if he ain’t – why’d the Heart rebels think we got the amulet?”
“Ah,” said Eliot, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. “It’s occurred to me that there’s a way to find out. Fyfe, if you were a Sorcerer and you were looking for something, what’s the first—”
“I’d use a locating spell,” blurted Fyfe, eyes lighting up. “It’s hit-and-miss magic, but if someone knew what the amulet looked like, or what it was made of…”
“It was probably silver,” said Eliot, gesturing to the books Gedeon had collected. “And there are drawings in some of these books. They’re all similar.”
Fyfe shrugged. “It would be a start. If there was a connection between the amulet and something in the Zoo, a locating spell might be sending them here. Something made with the same hand, or the same material, or owned by someone who had the amulet. I’ve collected all kinds of Sorcerer spells and objects that I wanted to work on. I’ll comb through the lab.”
“Good idea.” Eliot glanced at Ilsa again, but she still wasn’t having any bright ideas. “You keep talking to everyone here,” he told her. “Ask them about the attack. I suppose I’ll comb through our correspondence with the Heart for anything that hints at the amulet; perhaps they got their information by non-magic means. But if there’s a chance they know something we don’t, it could help us find Gedeon. We have to find out what it is.”
They left the library and Fyfe skittered away to his lab. But as Ilsa turned to leave, Eliot grasped her by the hand. It was a gentle pressure, but her reflex was still to swing around and sock him. He caught her by the other arm.
“Easy.”
“Sorry. Old habits, and all.”
“So I remember you telling me,” he said, with a pointed glance at her clenched fist. “Still working on that, are you?”
Ilsa peeled her wrist free. “What d’you want?”
“To know what’s wrong.” Though his voice was soft, his gaze was stormy as ever. This time, all that intensity was on Ilsa’s side. It was for her. She toyed with the lace sleeve of her dress.
Witherward Page 32
