34
With a blow-by-blow of Gedeon’s movements as far as Ilsa knew them, and a manifest of the missing wolves, Fowler disappeared into the dawn with a promise of sending word on his progress soon.
Soon.
It was all they could get from him.
But every minute that they didn’t hear from Cadell Fowler felt like an hour, and “soon” became an eternity. When a messenger arrived from the Heart, with a note saying Lucius would “think about” Hester’s request – precisely the kind of non-news they had all feared – Ilsa was about ready to snap.
She was restlessly wandering the corridors, playing cards in hand, when she came across Oren in the meeting room.
Perhaps out of habit, he was in his usual seat. He had pulled the chair out and was facing the window, but didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular. Rather, he gazed into space, lost in thought and oblivious to her standing there.
She closed the door with a sharp click and Oren started.
“Hello,” said Ilsa.
“Hello.” Compulsively, he took out his glasses and started to polish them. After an awkward pause he added, “I expect this seat at the end is yours now.”
For a moment, Ilsa thought he meant Gedeon’s chair, but he was gesturing to the other end of the table; not the head, but equally set apart.
She sat, but she wasn’t sure what to say, and Oren continued to stare out the window. It was a minute or more before he broke the silence.
“I was told that Captain Fowler bound your wrists with Changeling leather when he found you,” he said. His tone was conversational but his face was taut and his fingers played with his shirtsleeves. “You didn’t mention it.”
“I made him do it twice, actually.” Oren blinked in bemusement, so Ilsa demonstrated her deftness with a disappearing card. She tried to sound light-hearted, but her voice came out weak when she added, “I ain’t easy to keep tied up these days.”
For a moment, Oren just stared, his expression unreadable. Then he nodded, just once, and began rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. “In that case, I am especially sorry that he bound you.”
Oren’s skin changed, and the markings he revealed made Ilsa’s blood run cold. Cords of scarring ran around both wrists. He rotated his forearms so she could see all of it and then, just as quickly, hid it all again. “As you know, Changeling leather is fairly soft, but tie it tight enough for long enough and it will wound as well as anything.”
Ilsa wanted to say something comforting but her mouth was dry.
So she put her cards down and pushed her sleeves up to her elbows. “You called London an experiment what failed.”
Oren blinked. “Yes.”
“But it’s still standing, ain’t it? So, it can’t have failed yet.”
She laid her palms on the table, then with a deep breath and half a thought she changed her naked flesh and showed Oren what was underneath; the scars that matched his own. “This place might still be better than the one I left behind,” she said. “Or it might not. But please don’t say you’ve given up on it.”
Oren stared blankly at her scars, then reached a hesitant hand towards hers, and took them in both of his. He ran the pads of his fingers over her ragged skin, like he could better read its stories that way. When he looked up at her over the rim of his glasses, something had come back to life in his eyes.
“It would be a shame to give you back your home just to see it laid to waste,” he said. “Nothing has failed yet,” he echoed.
“Well, that’s more like it.” Ilsa beamed and discreetly vanished her scars again.
“I’m sorry, Ilsa,” Oren said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t truthful about the amulet. I tied the fate of a dangerous artefact to yours, without knowing where it might lead.”
“You did what you thought was right,” said Ilsa. “It’s all any of us are doing. Was Hester angry?”
“Oh, yes,” he said mildly. “On many counts. But I gave her my reasons, and I stick by them. I told her the truth: that the only person I trusted to resist the lure of such power was myself, having suffered at its hands.”
“D’you think…” Ilsa hesitated. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but the truth of her own words made her wonder – they were all doing what they thought they needed to; what they thought was right. “If Gedeon knew what the amulet really was, what it did… d’you think he’d still use it?”
If Oren was taken aback by the question, it didn’t show. He gazed into the middle distance as he considered. “The boy I’ve known him to be would see the seventh Seer’s amulet tossed to the bottom of the ocean if he knew the suffering it caused – but I don’t know if that is who Gedeon is anymore.”
“What d’you mean?” said Ilsa, Oren’s uncertainty making her uneasy. “Who is he?”
“Well, I suppose the Gedeon I have known is a lot like you. Determined, forthright, self-assured.” His eyes glinted with amusement. “A little headstrong sometimes. But he hadn’t been himself for quite some time. He was thinking about his place and his power, and questioning everything.”
Ilsa looked up sharply. “How’d you know?”
“Because I am also a lot like you. I observe. I see things others don’t care to notice. This inter-faction conclave of his – it doesn’t surprise me. I don’t believe he wants to rule the way Hester and their forebears did.” He paused, shook his head, and fussed with his glasses again. “The only thing I had failed to see was how desperate he had become. He was withdrawn, distracted. I didn’t understand it at the time, but… I’m sorry to say, I think he was losing faith in us.”
Ilsa felt the sadness in Oren’s words wash over her, like Gedeon had turned his back on her too. “You don’t think that’s why he was going recruiting in Millwater?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“Then why’d he cancel it?”
Oren frowned slightly. “That was the day of the attack.”
Ilsa blinked to clear the confusion, and shook her head. “The attack was after. Aelius had only thought it was the same time, but he was double-crossed.”
“Aelius is mistaken,” Oren said. “The trip was scheduled for that evening.”
Ilsa shook her head. “But Cassia said so too.”
He regarded her mildly and reached for his notebook. “No matter. I have always believed the secret to a reliable mind is writing everything down. So let’s see.” He licked a finger and started skimming back through the pages. “Here it is. Gedeon to Millwater, seven pm on the twenty-ninth.” He laid the book on the table and turned it to face her.
“That’s the day of the attack alright,” murmured Ilsa. “But then why…”
The date.
The meeting room.
She gasped and leapt from her chair, startling Oren. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I – I have to go.”
He didn’t try to stop her as she wrenched the door open and hurtled for the stairs. Privacy; she needed privacy.
She was running so fast that when she met Fyfe rounding a corner, they collided hard enough to back him against the wall.
“Ilsa, why are you – gosh, you’re pale.”
“Fyfe,” she gasped, holding onto the front of his shirt. “Gedeon’s trip to Millwater. The one what got cancelled. You knew ’bout it?”
Fyfe frowned, his mouth opening and closing. “Well… yes, he mentioned it in passing. He said to keep it quiet.”
“What time was it?”
“I’m not sure I remember. Why do you—”
“Was it the morning or the evening?” she pressed frantically.
“Early. Definitely the morning. Ilsa, why—”
But Ilsa was already gone, hurtling for Gedeon’s room, where she couldn’t be caught by the wrong pair of eyes. She locked the door behind her, and dragged a chair in front of it just to be sure.
Panting, she sank to her knees and reached under the mattress with shaking fingers. She had kept the slip of paper
where she’d found it, under Gedeon’s bed, folded twice and tucked inside a book to keep it flat.
Stupid. She had been so stupid.
The diagram wasn’t about the amulet, it was about Gedeon’s cancelled trip.
Oren’s notebook told him that it had been scheduled for the day of the attack, approximately twelve hours after the rebels broke in. He would have written it down at the time; it was nearly impossible for him to be wrong.
And yet he had to be. Because Cassia and Aelius had pinned the timing of the trip as before the attack, and both had a crucial reason to remember it correctly; Cassia because the rebels robbed her and Gedeon of their chance to reconcile, and Aelius because he had arranged for extra wolves at the Zoo.
So Ilsa started matching lieutenants to the numbers and symbols. Oren’s, she knew. Cassia and Aelius could be narrowed down to two of three, but if the shape in the middle represented what she thought it did…
Sickness roiled in her gut as she pieced together an answer she desperately didn’t want to find; that the real reason Gedeon had fled the Zoo was that he had done some investigating of his own, and this diagram was the proof.
The symbol meant morning or evening, the number beside it was a date, and every one of them had been a trap.
IV
THE GREEN SEA TURTLE
Chelonia mydas
A marine reptile found in tropical and subtropical seas worldwide. Like all members of the family Cheloniidae, this turtle will only come ashore to mate and lay eggs. They are known to migrate many thousands of miles to return to the beach on which they hatched.
35
A fake trip. Six different times. Gedeon had invented the perfect opportunity to attack the Zoo; a few hours when he would be away, most of the wolves on guard with him. Then he’d quietly fed conflicting dates and times to his lieutenants to see who would leak to the Heart rebels.
And one of them had.
Sitting in the meeting room, staring at the oval table where they all would meet, the shape in the centre of the diagram had suddenly made sense. Hester, Eliot, Oren, Cassia, Aelius and Fyfe. Six lieutenants flanking their alpha. Gedeon’s place was between Hester and Cassia, at the bottom of the diagram. He had drawn the table as he saw it, and crossed off his lieutenants, his friends, as the mornings and evenings rolled by. The first had been Cassia, on the evening of the twenty-seventh. Perhaps he’d been most desperate to know, most afraid, that his traitor was the Sorcerer he loved.
Fyfe – who sat in the third seat on his right – had been the morning of the twenty-eighth, and Aelius, who sat next to him, that evening. Then Gedeon had stopped crossing off lieutenants. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, he found his traitor.
There was a thunk from the door as someone tried to enter, and Ilsa jumped. Her hands were still shaking uncontrollably as she stashed the diagram under her mattress.
“Ilsa?” came the call. It was Eliot.
She felt herself go to the door, move the chair, and turn the lock. She took several large steps back as he barrelled into the room.
“We’ve got him,” he said.
It was then she heard the commotion in the rest of the house. Footsteps rattled up and down the stairs. Hester was calling orders from somewhere.
But she couldn’t form the proper reaction.
“Did you hear me?” he said. “We found Gedeon. He stormed the portal and—”
“You’re a spy.”
It was little more than a whisper, but Eliot cut off, and they were plunged into silence. The footsteps faded away; Hester’s voice stopped echoing. And in that moment, taking in his shock and horror, Ilsa lost the dwindling hope that she was wrong.
“Ilsa—”
“You’re a traitor.”
“I’m not a traitor.” His voice was fierce, the denial real. He made to move towards her, but she backed away. He paused, a war raging behind his storm-blue eyes, and when he spoke again it was with new resolve. “It’s not like that—”
“You told the rebels when to attack,” she said, not lowering her voice when Eliot shot a harried glance at the hallway. “And Gedeon knows, don’t he? The other day when we spoke to Aelius, you realised what he’d done. That’s why you were so worked up.”
The longer Ilsa thought on it, the worse it got. The very night they’d met, he showed her how to leave the Zoo without being seen. He would have designed the guard duty himself. He had engineered that weakness, those fifteen seconds, so that he could meet with Camden’s enemies. He had told her everything he’d worked out about Gedeon’s movements before he had any reason to trust her, taking her into his confidence to earn hers. He’d tried to persuade her to stop looking for Gedeon – had told her that her brother was never coming back; wanted nothing to do with her – because he’d realised Gedeon knew, and it would cost him his skin. And what else had been a lie? That he was fighting to protect his people? That he ever wanted her at all?
“You” – an unnameable emotion turned her stomach – “you manipulated me.”
Rage and remorse hardened Eliot’s features. He was shaking his head, but the denial wasn’t real.
“You’re just like Alitz.”
Something in him snapped. The look he gave her was desolate and broken, the accusation one too far. “No,” he whispered. “Ilsa, I would never hurt you.”
“Right. Just my family.”
Before Eliot could respond, Oren appeared at the door.
“Downstairs, both of you,” he said, breathing heavily. “We need to move fast or we won’t catch him.”
Then he was gone again. Eliot made to follow, but Ilsa yanked him back by the arm and slammed the door.
“I should’ve known sooner,” she growled. “You din’t want me trusting the others. You did everything you could to stop me involving them, because you wanted to find him before anyone else did, in case he knew.”
“I wanted to find him first so I could explain!” He heaved a breath but it didn’t calm him. He ran a shaking hand through his hair, and when he spoke again, his voice was strained. “All I have ever wanted was to protect Camden. All that’s ever mattered to me is serving these people, this house, your family. I love Gedeon like a brother but he’s never understood. He can never know what I’ve given.”
Pain – the kind carved into his bones and impossible to heal – marred his features. Ilsa wanted to rage and swear at him, but she was too confounded. Was that what he was trying to do – simply confuse her?
“Gedeon needs me right now,” he said. Ilsa scoffed but he pressed on. “If we’ve found him, the Fortunatae have as well. I swear to you, Ilsa, I want to bring him back safe. What you do with me then… I don’t care.”
Through the fog in her mind, Ilsa tried to clock his tells, but there were none. Still, she took his lapels in her fists and slammed him against the wall with as much force as she could muster. His head cracked sharply against the plaster, but he gritted his teeth and swallowed the pain.
“If I even think you’re ’bout to do something stupid,” she said into his ear, “I’ll kill you myself. I’ll string you up by your innards and leave you like carrion for the birds. No trial, no damned explanation.”
“And if I don’t do anything stupid? If we make it through this, will you listen to the truth?” He brought his hand to her face. When Ilsa flinched away, she saw his heart break right there in his gaze. “I don’t want to lie to you any more.”
She let him go with another sharp shove for good measure. “If we make it through this, you can tell it to Gedeon,” she said, her voice cold and hard as steel. Her heart felt the same. She turned away and wrenched open the door. “I don’t give a damn what you got to say.”
* * *
Chaos reigned in the forecourt, and Hester was at the centre of it.
“Lieutenants, retrieve Gedeon and the wolves,” she bellowed. “And retrieve the amulet. Arm yourselves. We can expect Pyval Crespo is following Gedeon, and if there are more Whisperers it might be too ri
sky to shift. Don’t take wolves, they could just be turned against you. You all know where the armoury is. Fyfe—”
“Science weapons, I know.” He flashed his sister a grin and revealed the belt of dampeners slung around his hips.
Hester nodded, already turning away. “Wolves, double the guard at the Zoo and at the abbey. Let’s not take any chances.”
As the wolves began to organise, Ilsa spotted Fowler at the edge of the forecourt and weaved her way towards him, Eliot following. “What happened?”
“Your brother and his wolves have been hiding out on a cargo boat on the river,” said Fowler. “They’ve been docking for two days, then moving on. I finally caught up with them less than an hour ago, when they docked by the Trade House. I followed them to the abbey. By the time I got there, they had stormed the portal and passed through.” He nodded then at a group of wolves talking to Hester and Oren. Some were bloodied, and every one was dripping with sweat. The man at their front was the first person she had seen in the Witherward; the captain of the guard at Westminster Abbey. He seemed shell-shocked. “They say the prince’s party numbered thirteen Changelings and an Oracle.”
“So his new conclave aren’t with him,” said Eliot.
“That don’t mean they won’t follow through another portal,” said Ilsa.
“And the guard claim there wasn’t a breath to warn him,” added Fowler. “They were ready to fight their way through. They knew the wolves would try to stop them.”
Ilsa cornered Oren the second he was alone. She glanced over her shoulder, but no one was listening. Hester was across the forecourt, still shooting instructions.
“There’s a book what says the amulet could be replicated. It says you could make enough for a whole army.” Ilsa felt sick. Would each amulet need a different victim? Or five, to give the wearer every magic? Eliot had said Gedeon would be a fool not to use a tool like that to protect the Changelings. Did he still feel that way now they knew what the amulet really did? Her sickness compounded as she realised he might always have known. He had helped the rebels try to steal it. No doubt the amulet would have been passed to Alitz. “D’you think… d’you think Hester would try to do that?”
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