He didn’t notice her approach, what with his wallowing. It would have been easier if he’d looked up, said hello, started the conversation maybe.
Instead, Ilsa was lumped with breaking the ice.
“What’d she say?”
Gedeon’s head shot up. Several emotions – surprise, pleasure, bashfulness – crossed his features before his melancholy frown returned.
“Nothing that should be repeated in polite company,” he said.
“Din’t no one tell you? I’m as common as they come.”
“I’m getting that.” A smirk touched his lips. “It’s rather charming.”
There was a weighty silence. Ilsa wanted to tell him Cassia would come around, but she wasn’t sure it was true. She also wanted to ask how stupid he had to be to risk losing her this way. From what she knew of Cassia, pretty stupid, and from what she knew of her brother, it was highly possible.
Gedeon got to his feet and beckoned for her to follow him through the garden. “They tell me you grew up in that place.”
“That’s right,” said Ilsa. She decided to spare him the details for now.
Gedeon stopped suddenly. He took hold of her shoulders, turned her to face him and pressed a tentative kiss to her forehead. Ilsa smelled apples and cut grass.
“I’m so sorry, Ilsa,” he said into her hair. Ilsa jolted to hear Gedeon speak her name. She had spent so long imagining this that it all felt a little like she still was. “That I did not find you. That I accepted that you were dead. I should have tried harder. You deserved better than that life.”
Swiftly, and very briefly, she wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek to his chest. She didn’t know him; she knew that. She just wanted to know how it felt to be held by her brother. When she pulled away, Gedeon’s cheeks had turned pink.
“All them kids deserve better than that,” Ilsa said. “It’s the way the dice fell. If I start thinking how unfair it all is, I’ll go mad.”
Gedeon studied her admiringly and nodded.
“’Sides,” she went on, “turns out I din’t need you to find me. I found you first.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder and Gedeon grinned.
“Before I forget,” he said, the smile sliding off his face, “there’s a furious missive on my desk from the Underground.”
“Ah.”
“They’re claiming you broke nearly every tenet of the Principles.”
“That’s an exaggeration!”
“But not a lie?” Ilsa chewed the inside of her cheek. “Ilsa, do you know that they can respond however they choose and the Principles won’t protect you? They seem interested in Fyfe’s dampener technology so I think I can negotiate, but you could have started a war.”
“You’re one to talk,” Ilsa muttered under her breath.
Gedeon laughed wryly and shook his head. “Please don’t take after me. We’ll be in so much trouble, you and I.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ilsa. “I mean it. I ain’t had to live by the rules for a long time. I din’t take it seriously.”
“And now?”
Now? Ilsa had people who would pay for her mistakes. She couldn’t pretend the rules weren’t hers to follow, however unjust they seemed. “Now I’m gonna. Cross my heart, it ain’t gonna happen again.”
“I appreciate it,” said Gedeon solemnly, and Ilsa saw the leader in him; a man who made her want to make him proud, and not just because he was her brother.
They wandered in silence through the garden until they were among the roses. By the conservatory, Fyfe was explaining something about biology and soil to Cogna. Aelius sat watching. He had healed enough to shift back into his younger body. No one would ever have known.
“Speaking of unfair.” She nodded towards the Oracle. “I know they’re as good as doomed back in the Docklands, but you need to take Cogna back.”
Gedeon scowled. “But I like Cogna.”
Ilsa could tell him Cogna had lied to him, but it would raise questions she didn’t want to answer. “Enough to have Oracles coming at us ’til we’re extinct?” she said instead.
Gedeon slumped onto a bench with a dramatic sigh. “The Docklands do not care about Cogna,” he said. “They fear Cogna. As long as the child’s not working against them, they’ll tire eventually.”
“But if Cogna stays here, how d’you s’pect to convince the Oracles—”
“There are some complicated spells involved in glamouring a corpse,” said Gedeon abruptly, “but I think Cassia can handle it. And Fyfe’s more morbid interests have given him connections at a mortuary.”
Ilsa folded her arms. “I don’t see how neither of those things helps us.”
He grinned. “Oh, we’re sending Cogna back, alright. In a coffin. I shall attach a note saying ‘sorry’ to the lid and I’m sixty per cent certain this whole kidnapping saga will blow over.”
Ilsa gaped. She didn’t know him well enough to tell if he was serious. “They’ll know,” she said.
“Ah.” He wagged a finger at her. “But they can’t See Cogna. They won’t even try to check.”
“That’s still the stupidest plan I ever heard.”
Gedeon winked. “But you have to agree it has a roguish charm.”
He took in her total lack of amusement and sighed. “We have bigger problems, Ilsa. For all we know, every member of the Fortunatae was at that orphanage, and are now all dead. All but the one who matters.”
Alitz. Ilsa hadn’t really expected to find her in the fray, but in the night, she had dreamed that she had. She had dreamed it was the Sage’s throat she had torn out in that attic.
Then, in the morning, she had found Georgiana and asked her if the wolves kept records.
“What kind of records?” she asked, frowning.
“Like reports of incidents and deaths and that.”
“When anything like that happens, we write a written report for the commander.” She shrugged. “The alpha sees them weekly, but I don’t know what happens to them after that.”
She took Ilsa to Liesel, who told them to ask Cassia, who directed them to a corner of the library where Georgiana helped Ilsa search decades of wolves’ reports until she found what she was looking for.
Alitz had implied that the incident she once described – the death of an abusive husband and the Whitechapel steward who had tried to protect the man’s wife – was recent, or perhaps Ilsa had just assumed. But after learning the Sage’s identity, a vague hunch had taken hold.
And she was right. It had taken her the whole morning and three cups of tea, but Ilsa finally found the report from fifty years ago. The wolf who had recorded the incident had been thorough, and perhaps a little emotional, as they described the tragedy. How the woman had approached the border, lip bleeding and nose broken, and begged the stewards to keep her husband from her. How the stewards had refused her husband entry to Whitechapel. How he had appealed to the wolves, but they had sided with the stewards.
But then the accounts diverged. The wolf wrote that the man had indeed shifted into a bear and charged the guard point, but as the wolves had rushed to tackle him, one of the stewards had reached out with their magic and subdued him. Heedless to the danger having passed, a second steward had raised his gun and shot the bear dead.
The author didn’t know who struck first after that – the wolves or the stewards – only that the single casualty of the fight had not been at the hands of either militia, but the dead man’s wife, who had taken his killer between her teeth and torn his throat out. The wolf’s handwriting shook as they recorded that the dead steward’s young daughter had been sent to fetch him home for tea. The fighting had stopped when the child ran out into the fray. She had knelt in the street with her father’s head in her lap, sobbing as he bled out.
His name was Amadeo Dicer.
Ilsa wondered at how Alitz remembered it differently. In her eyes, her father had been a hero, guilty of nothing but defending himself and the woman who ultimately took his
life. Could the wolf who reported on the tragedy be mistaken? Or had Amadeo killed a man who posed no threat to him?
Ilsa couldn’t know if what Alitz had suffered as a child made her choose the path she had gone down – the massacre she had ordered over three decades later – or whether watching her father die like that solidified a hate Amadeo himself had nurtured in her.
But whatever had happened that day, and whatever it had done to Alitz, Ilsa knew none of the people who were dead because of the Sage had been responsible. Not her parents, nor Hester’s father, nor the grandfather and aunt she never knew. Not Oren, or Bill Blume. Alitz’s quarrel was with a distraught widow who was probably in the grave.
But now Ilsa’s was with Alitz.
She decided she would tell her brother what she’d discovered that morning, but not yet. The revelation that Alitz was the Sage had wounded Ilsa, but Gedeon had learned that the person who had slaughtered most of his family was someone he had known and trusted his whole life. She didn’t want to inflict what she was feeling on him too; the sense of injustice, the futility of everything that had been lost, and the fear of the way her own hate was eating at her.
Gedeon was staring off across the lawn. No doubt his thoughts were also on Alitz. Perhaps he was thinking not of the past, but of what the Sage’s next move would be.
“The matter with the Oracles is done with,” he said. “I don’t believe the Seer ever planned to shackle themselves to the Fortunatae. They broke the Principles against the Heart when they aided the rebels in the raid, possibly against Whitechapel too for the Fortunatae’s part in this. And whilst the Principles are foggy on the legality of allying with insurgents in retaliation for kidnapping, if the Seer has any sense at all, they’ll want to call this one even. They can’t afford to hold a grudge over a fake kidnapping any more than Camden can afford to worry about it.”
Ilsa gingerly perched next to him. “If you’re trying to reassure me—”
“I’m not.” He braced his forearms on his knees, his levity vanishing. “I want you to know what kind of city you have inherited… so that you will know I understand if you say you don’t want it.”
She studied him; he was definitely serious now. “You want to know if I want to go back.”
“We can find a flat for you. Even hire a housekeeper.” He scratched the back of his neck. “You missed out on a life here. You have no obligation to be involved in what’s to come.”
“Can I take Fyfe?”
“Absolutely not. He’s too useful.”
“Can we share him?”
Gedeon considered. “You can have him on Sundays.” His brow crinkled. “Is that a yes, then? You would like to go back?”
Ilsa chewed her cheek. Gedeon seemed hopeful that she was only playing around and, for the most part, she was. She had found everything she had been looking for her whole life in the Witherward, and she had lost everything she had cared for in the Otherworld.
But she still didn’t know who to believe about this broken, violent city; Eliot, who said London was a battleground and a graveyard, or Fowler, who saw the city for what it could be. If she went back to the Otherworld, perhaps she could start a new life there, and never have to kill another person, and never get shot again or mauled by a big cat. But she could visit. She could still have a family.
And she could find Eliot.
A movement in the house caught her eye. Hester watched them from the window. Gedeon said she had no obligations here, but she did. She had made one when she woke that morning on the couch in Hester’s sitting room and decided she would not tell anyone what her cousin had done. She would keep her secret, and Eliot’s, and Elijah Quillon’s. Gedeon had learned of Alitz’s betrayal, and that was enough. Besides, with Eliot gone, Ilsa didn’t believe that Hester had any means or incentive to do anything more to hurt the Zoo. And if she was wrong about that…
“If I ain’t mistaken,” she said, “you’re down two lieutenants.”
Gedeon grinned unrestrainedly and slapped his forehead. “Stars! How could I forget?”
“So you should probably stop promising to let me out of here when it’s so obvious you need me.”
“You are already proving yourself indispensable.” Gedeon stood and offered her his hand. “Ilsa, I retract my offer. I can’t possibly let you leave.”
And Ilsa couldn’t possibly go. Somebody needed to keep an eye on their cousin. For Hester’s own sake. For Gedeon.
For Camden.
Because Ilsa belonged here.
Her brother made his way over to Fyfe and the others, and Ilsa watched him crack a joke, watched Aelius chuckle and retort, as if nothing had happened and no time had passed at all. The boy was an enigma – audacious, selfish maybe, blustering through his life and those around him like a tornado – but Ilsa needed a new challenge; a new mystery to solve.
He called her over. The heavens were opening. Aelius, Fyfe, and Cogna were retreating to the conservatory. Ilsa dashed from the garden just as the first raindrops landed on the enchanted roses.
By June, their petals would be laced with frost.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first and most heartfelt thanks are to my agent, Zoë Plant, for loving this book as much as I do and being the champion Witherward needed, and to everyone else at the Bent Agency for their work and support. Thank you to my editor, Cat Camacho, for adding new shades and surprising turns, but mainly for the note “needs more Captain Fowler”; we all know it was the right thing to do. Thanks also to everyone at Titan, particularly David Lancett, and Julia Lloyd for her beautiful cover design, and to Louise Pearce who copy-edited the book.
To the friends and writers who read early drafts of Witherward and helped me believe I was on to a winner: Emma Fraser, Kellen Playford, Troy Balmayer, Sara Crawford, James Lovegrove, and my little sister Ellie (thank you for wrestling with the chaotic energy of your own notes every time we talked about it).
Thank you to my parents. I was unemployed while drafting Witherward, and you gave me a place to live and work. It’s not a stretch to say this couldn’t have happened otherwise. To my brother Sam – people should pay you to cheer them on (I don’t mean me) – and the friends and family who let me talk at them about my book. I love you all, but I still don’t care that you don’t care! Thank you, Jack, for always believing I am doing my best, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Becoming a published author has been a fourteen-year exercise in how to fail; a skill I have no doubt I will continue to hone. The lesson is tedious and repetitive. On the best days it’s uncomfortable; on the worst it’s an existential crisis. But most of all it is lonely, and yet it is impossible to accomplish alone. So thank you to every friend, colleague, and passing acquaintance who believed me when I told them this would happen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Debut author Hannah Mathewson has had short stories published by The Molotov Cocktail and The Fiction Desk, who presented her with the Writer’s Award for her contribution to their anthology, Separations. She is based in Reading. Witherward is her first novel. She tweets @HannahOClock.
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