Witherward

by Hannah Mathewson

  Ilsa glanced at Oren, who said, “The child asked that I fetch you, and only you, or they’d hurt this woman.” He gestured to Miss Mitcham. “I told them you would come of your own accord.”

  Ilsa folded her arms. “You found a bit of jewellery in a different universe with your magic bloody powers, and you couldn’t figure out I don’t care nothing for that woman?” Cogna’s little knife-wielding hand dropped to their side. “You want something from me? Be a dear and cut her throat. Then we’ll talk.”

  Miss Mitcham gave a shriek and cowered, but Cogna gaped, wide-eyed.

  “I wasn’t actually going to hurt her.” It came out like a squeak. “I just needed your attention.”

  “Then give it here.” She held her hand out for the knife and wished that she hadn’t left hers buried in a Sorcerer. It wasn’t that she wanted to slaughter the woman in cold blood, but the sight of her, in this place… something inside her had been stretching since she got here, and had finally snapped. She saw that her outstretched hand was trembling.

  “Ilsa,” said Oren, and Ilsa felt a hand on her shoulder. She shook him off.

  “Ilsa?” Miss Mitcham’s bloodshot eyes roamed over her, unsure. It was a look that hollowed Ilsa out in a way she didn’t think was possible. “Is it really you?”

  The woman had chained her to that very cot, sometimes for days at a time, had beaten her, bled her, made her believe she was a demon – and now she was looking at her like they had become strangers.

  They could never be strangers. Not after what Miss Mitcham put her through. She deserved more. Tears. Screams. Something.

  “Hello, miss,” Ilsa said, somehow rendering a calm she didn’t feel. She moved towards them, and Cogna hastily sheathed the knife. “D’you notice I brought some friends with me. They’re from the devil’s realm too.”

  Miss Mitcham wept and crossed herself. Another loud crash sounded from downstairs, followed by a groan as the building faltered. They all glanced nervously at the ceiling.

  “You better tell me what you want,” Ilsa said to Cogna, but she wasn’t heard. Cogna’s eyes were on Oren, Oren’s were on the thing in Cogna’s hand – the thing they’d come for. The little Oracle had already retrieved the wooden wolf from the floorboard where Ilsa had hidden it all those years ago.

  “S’alright, kid,” said Ilsa, “we’re all on the same side.” But she wasn’t sure she believed it. Oren looked like he was readying himself to use force on the child.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Tarenvale,” said Cogna, one hand twitching towards their knife. Even with the child’s Sight, it would not be a fair fight if it came to it. “You cannot have it. The amulet is not for you.”

  “I don’t believe you intended it for Gedeon either,” said Oren.

  “No, I did not,” Cogna sighed, “though I regret that I lied to him. The amulet is for you, Ilsa Ravenswood.”

  Ilsa started in surprise. “Beg your pardon?”

  “I can’t say for sure that the amulet is key,” said Cogna, “but I have known for some time that you are. When I Saw that the Prince of Camden was coming for the amulet, I took it as a sign.”

  Cogna cut off as a sound like bending wood resonated from below. The sudden swell of voices was unmistakable; everybody was getting out.

  “Gedeon Ravenswood is not the one who saves the city,” Cogna told Ilsa, “you are. I have Seen it. Others have Seen it before me. Please, Mr Tarenvale. You mustn’t interfere.”

  Cogna wedged their knife into the wolf and, squeezing those opalescent eyes shut and leaning away, smashed the knife against the wall, breaking the wolf into several pieces.

  Ilsa didn’t get to see what happened next.

  “Cogna!” someone roared from below. “Time to go!”

  It was Gedeon. He was on the second floor, mere feet away. Without thinking, Ilsa bolted from the attic and half-ran, half-fell down the stairs.

  From the second floor, the extent of the damage was obvious. Part of the exterior wall was missing, and smoke – real smoke, the kind that came from fire – hung thick in the air.

  “Gedeon?” Ilsa choked.

  “Cogna?” He appeared from through the smoke, his clothes torn, bloody and soaked through from the ceaseless rain. He squinted at her. “You.”

  “Gedeon.”

  He frowned at her face, at her sodden, indistinguishable hair. Something halfway between incredulity and understanding crossed his features, and transformed into anger and misery. Before Ilsa could say another word, he had drawn his sword and gripped her by the neck.

  “Take it off,” he growled. “That disguise. Take it off!”

  They both lost their footing as the house shook, and were thrown against the wall. Gedeon struggled to his knees and was looming over her, his grip still around her throat.

  “It’s no disguise,” gasped Ilsa.

  She could see him better from nearer the floor, below the smoke, and he could see her better too. The eyes that were a little wider than his mother’s; the lids a little heavier, like his father’s. The cheekbones that would always be sharper than Lyander’s, on account of an adolescence of malnutrition, days without food on the streets of the Otherworld.

  Slowly, the hand at her throat softened. His fingers floated over her skin and grazed her cheek, like he had to feel her there to know she was real. The frown never left his face as he pressed back on his haunches.

  “You’re dead,” he said.

  “No, she’s somewhat hard to kill,” said a voice.

  Ilsa and Gedeon spun. Pyval Crespo had braved the crumbling stairs and stood behind them, a dagger in one hand and a pistol in the other. The latter was pointed at Gedeon’s chest.

  Ilsa hardened her mind. She had practised alone daily since the last time she’d gone up against the Sage’s twisted assistant. Though she felt Pyval test the edge of her consciousness, felt his nightmare void creeping into the corner of her vision, her mind was sharp and human, and her determination was fierce. She would not let him take control of her again.

  “Pyval,” said Gedeon, his bravado returning as he shifted himself between the man and Ilsa. “You know, it’s hard to stab a man in the back when he has an omnic at his side. Cogna figured you out just in time. You can tell Alitz Dicer all her supporters are dead.”

  Pyval braced himself against the wall as the house shifted again.

  “Yes, we should have realised sooner that you were expecting us.” He cast a glance at Ilsa. “We also did not anticipate your friends showing up, since you abandoned them all so heartlessly.”

  Gedeon cocked his head and looked from Pyval to Ilsa. He didn’t know. He hadn’t seen any of them.

  Pyval’s grip on his knife shifted, catching Ilsa’s attention. She knew that knife, had seen it before.

  No, she had seen one just like it. Its twin.

  “Bill,” she said through gritted teeth, fury swelling until it threatened to burst out of her. She thought she couldn’t hate him any more. “You were the one who killed him.”

  Pyval’s face twisted, halfway between a grimace and a smile. “He was only supposed to be bait,” he called over the groaning house. “If you hadn’t brought Tarenvale and that Sorcerer bitch with you, I might have spared him.”

  Gedeon’s grip on his sword had tightened the moment Pyval mentioned Cassia. As its blade drew Ilsa’s attention, so did the familiar pouch strapped to his belt. Fyfe had one just like it.

  “Wait, I’m lost,” said Gedeon conversationally. “You tried to kill my sister?”

  “The Sage wished not to.” With the men fixated on one another, Ilsa went entirely unnoticed as she made her move. “She does not like to act too rashly. When your obliviously trusting lieutenants told her of the message from the Docklands, she thought a Ravenswood pup raised away from the litter might prove a useful tool one day. That is, until she met her.” Pyval sneered and cocked his pistol. “Hold it there, princess! I said from the first you’d be too hard to control.”

  Ilsa had crept fro
m behind Gedeon, and been caught. Thankfully, while part of being a magician’s assistant was knowing how to go unseen, it was equally important to know how to be noticed. Pyval’s gun swung from Ilsa to Gedeon and back again, torn between two targets.

  It was just the hesitation she had needed. Ilsa raised her hands so he saw they were empty; that she wasn’t a threat. As he levelled his weapon and his attention back on Gedeon, she whispered, in a voice only her brother could hear: “Nothing up my sleeve.”

  Gedeon glanced her way, as she had hoped he would, and she indicated her formerly empty hand – and the small blue pellet she had lifted from his pouch.

  Just like magic.

  Gedeon took his cue, falling to all fours and disappearing under a coat of sandy fur and a ragged, golden mane. He was twice the size of a real lion, as tall as Ilsa at the shoulder.

  Simultaneously, Ilsa tossed the pellet. It exploded in a swell of dark blue smoke. There was no time for Pyval to notice his magic was missing before one massive paw slashed across his chest, and he was thrown down the stairs.

  A scream went up from the attic, and Gedeon transformed again. “Cogna!”

  They ran back to the attic. Cogna lay immobile – dead, perhaps – on the floor among the fragments of Ilsa’s wolf. Oren stood over them, a pendant of ruby and silver clutched in one hand. Miss Mitcham was cowering from the scene and muttering the Lord’s Prayer.

  Gedeon knelt beside Cogna and searched for a pulse. “Oren!” he shouted. “What have you done?”

  “Forgive me, Gedeon,” Oren said, reaching for the back of his belt, underneath his jacket. “I must.”

  Ilsa expected a weapon – Oren was carrying several of them – and gasped when she saw what he had been hiding underneath his jacket.

  All the confusion and second-guessing. All the waiting to see whether the rebels would come again. But they had never stolen Fyfe’s pocket forge.

  Oren had.

  Gedeon must have recognised it, for he left Cogna and launched himself across the attic, toppling a stack of crates. “No, Oren! What are you doing?”

  Ilsa blocked his path. His wide, harried gaze swung to her in confusion, and Ilsa shook her head. “It’s what’s right,” she said, hearing the roar of flame as the forge came to life. “That amulet stole his magic and made him a helpless prisoner, Gedeon. It’s bad magic. He’s got to destroy it.”

  In a flash, the attic filled with livid red light. Ilsa turned, an arm raised to cover her eyes. The amulet was glowing as Oren held the flame to it, and trembling horribly like a living thing. Even more light burst from the it, blinding Ilsa, and she heard it hit the floor as Oren dropped it. She closed her eyes, but the red light shone right through the lids. A long moment passed before the glow receded, and when Ilsa dared look again, the attic was even darker than before.

  “Did it work?” she said. She scrambled forward, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. There on the floor, with the chain still attached to it, was a smouldering pool of silver swirled with ruby. The metal was dull; the ruby clouded. As Ilsa watched, fascinated, it dried to a caked powder.

  The seventh Seer’s amulet was gone.

  Gedeon let out a growl of rage. “I don’t understand you, Oren! You have never been afraid to do what is necessary.” He gestured at Cogna, lying prone on the floor.

  Oren blinked at Gedeon like he hadn’t understood him.

  “Shortly after your ancestor, Morgan Ravenswood, led the liberation and claimed Camden for the Changelings, she had a daughter with a man named Carlin. She chose to name her Ravenswood.”

  “I know this,” said Gedeon, sounding unfortunately like a petulant child.

  “But do you know why? Do you know why your name has endured through fourteen generations? Why your mother also passed on her family name to you and Ilsa? Why she took such drastic steps to ensure someone in her family survived? It is a pledge Morgan made, to devote not only her life to the freedom and safety of her people, but the lives of her entire line, in perpetuity. Your name is important to Camden because it is an emblem of stability and strength. It is a promise to the Changelings that there is someone who will endure so that they may endure. Who will die, if necessary, so they may live.” His voice dropped to a whisper at the end, and he drew a breath. Ilsa did not need to guess what that promise had meant to Oren personally. She understood hope. “Yes, I do what is necessary. But I do it, Gedeon, so that you don’t have to. Your people must respect you and trust in you. And if you became the type of monster this amulet demanded you become, they would not.

  “So I have done what is necessary.” He levelled his sure, steady gaze at Gedeon. “And I would do it again.”

  Ilsa was knocked off her feet. Not by the shaking house, but by Pyval bursting through the door. He clutched his chest and leaned heavily on the doorjamb, but he was still breathing, and still brandishing his pistol.

  “No!” he cried, glaring wide-eyed at what had become of the amulet. He raised his gun at Oren. “You fool! You half-breed fool!”

  With a miserable howl, Pyval fired. Oren made the smallest sound of surprise as blood started to seep through his shirt, right above his heart.

  “Oren!” bellowed Gedeon as the Whisperer turned his gun on him.

  Ilsa didn’t think. Thinking was never what she had needed to do; she had been in this very attic when she learned that. This is where fear had drowned out her instincts and stopped her from hearing that power inside her, the one that had always known what she was supposed to do.

  She had escaped, but she had never been free. Fear had stopped her from using her magic her whole life. But something about being back here was calling up that power inside her. It was telling her, in a voice she could always hear but had never listened to, to remember what she already knew.

  So Ilsa didn’t think, she shifted.

  Even over the rumble of the crumbling house, the thud of her paws hitting the floor resounded through the attic, as did the roar that burst uncontrollably from her throat as she launched herself at Pyval.

  He slammed into the wall, Ilsa’s claws at his throat. He howled as she dragged her paw down his neck and slashed open his chest. He thrashed, then slumped against the wall, twitching. Blood was seeping from between his lips when Ilsa shifted, her hands still on his mangled, bloody chest. “That’s for Bill Blume,” she whispered as she watched the light go out of Pyval’s eyes.

  Ilsa shoved at him as she turned away, not even looking back as she heard his corpse thud to the floor. He did not deserve her attention. Instead, she crouched next to Oren. Gedeon was on his other side, one hand cradling the man’s head.

  Oren was breathing rapidly, each gasp ripping from him with a small moan of pain. There was nothing controlled about the abyss behind his eyes now. Ilsa pressed her hands against the hole in his chest like she could hold the blood in, and he smiled.

  “Not this time,” he breathed.

  His hands joined hers on his chest. One closed gently around her wrist as the scars on his own rose like phantoms; he hadn’t the strength to hide them any longer. In the other hand was the pocket forge. “A remarkable thing,” he said, eyes on hers, before he became still.

  “Oren?” His eyes were still open, but there was nothing behind them anymore.

  People were calling her, calling Gedeon. She didn’t want to look away from Oren’s face – serene again, the way she would remember it – but from the corner of her eye she saw Gedeon climb to his feet and lift Cogna over his shoulder. The child must have been alive, at least.

  “Leave him, Ilsa!” shouted Gedeon, his tone fierce but his face desolate and tear-streaked. “He’s gone!”

  She brushed her bloody fingertips over Oren’s eyes, closing them, and then she took the pocket forge and let Gedeon pull her to her feet and towards the door. He was descending the staircase when she remembered.

  Miss Mitcham was a ball in the corner, her knees pulled up to her chin. She had a rosary, and she rubbed the beads between her fingers as she
prayed.

  Just like reaching for Cogna’s knife, Ilsa didn’t want to go to her; she didn’t want to offer her hand. It just happened. Her voice was her own at least, bright and brave, as she said: “Come with me, miss. We got to get out.”

  Miss Mitcham stared in horror at Ilsa’s outstretched hand. “I’m not going anywhere with you, devil!” she cried, and hugged herself tighter.

  The floorboards beneath her shifted, Miss Mitcham cowered as the tiles above her came loose, and Ilsa felt something for the woman she would never have imagined possible: pity.

  “Your loss, miss.”

  She retreated to the door and looked back. She searched the loathsome woman’s face for any sign of a change of heart, a moment of humanity, even if it only lasted long enough for Ilsa to save her life. But all that was there was pure loathing; a loathing she would cling to through a painful, unseemly death.

  “It’s all your loss,” she said, and she left her there, just as she wanted.

  V

  THE HONEY BEE

  Apis mellifera

  The honey bee is but a part of the superorganism that is the colony. Only the queen is of vital importance; as such she is fiercely protected.

  38

  When Ilsa, Gedeon, and the unconscious Cogna got clear of the orphanage – no more than a minute before half of it crumpled to rubble with a sound that shook the earth – there was no hovering about. Kennington Road was swarming with Otherworlders; perhaps two hundred or more. Shivering, wide-eyed children were everywhere. Cadell Fowler stood in the fray, holding a grubby eight-year-old by the collar and scowling. Though the evidence he had any authority over the situation was slim, Ilsa surmised he had been left in charge of the children.

  “Wait here,” she said to Gedeon, and she became invisible and made a dash for the captain. With the chaos as cover, she put four fingers in her mouth and whistled hard.

  “Partner up!”

  The orphans filtered through the bystanders towards her and Fowler like water through muslin. In fifteen seconds, they had whipped themselves into an ordered line, two by two and holding hands, just the way they used to in Ilsa’s time.