Clearly, Lady Salisbury wasn’t a fan of the Mage. Which could mean she’s sensible and progressive—or could mean she’s petty and corrupt. (For my own family, it’s a bit “all of the above.”) She might just miss the old days, when families like mine and hers ran things. Whatever else, her cake is very good. Snow is inhaling his.
“So,” Lady Salisbury says, sitting back in the sofa, “did Malcolm send you to talk to me? Is he frustrated with the Coven as well?”
“Oh,” I say. “Well. No. My father—”
“We took this on ourselves,” Simon cuts in. (If ever someone was emboldened by baked goods.) He takes a moment to swallow. “When I heard that there were people claiming to be the Greatest Mage, you know, you can see why I’d be concerned.”
Lady Salisbury is smiling sadly at him again. “Many still believe that title belongs to you, Mr. Snow.”
Simon’s face is wide open. “No. That was never me.”
“But you’re the most powerful mage—”
“No. Not anymore.”
I know that Simon is a hopeless liar, but I wish he wouldn’t tell people the truth so easily. There’s no harm in letting them believe he’s still powerful.
“Probably I was never a magician,” he goes on. “The Mage was just using me.”
“But they say you gave yourself flaming dragon wings…”
“Pfft,” he says. “They don’t flame.”
“So you do have wings.” There’s a light in her eyes. She leans over her plate. “May I see them?”
I try to object. “I don’t think—”
But Simon is already shuffling off my grey mac. He’s handed Lady Salisbury his plate. “Sure. I’d love an excuse to take off this coat.”
You look very smart in that coat, I think.
“You look very smart in that coat,” Lady Salisbury says. “But you must get tired of hiding them—” She sets both plates on the table to cover her mouth. “Oh!”
Simon’s wings are free. He spreads them some, careful not to stab Lady Salisbury, who looks genuinely dazzled.
“They’re splendid,” she says. “Much bigger than I was expecting. And the loveliest shade of red. May I touch them?” She’s already touching the wing closest to her. Simon flinches, and she pulls her hand back. “Oh, I see, I’m so sorry.” She smiles again. “I understand why you keep them hidden from the Normals, but these are tremendous. Can you fly with them?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Oh, that’s remarkable. Did you teach yourself?”
“I must have.”
“Imagine!” She holds a hand to her chest. “I’ve always wanted to fly.” She turns to me. “Haven’t you always wanted to fly, Basilton?”
I have flown. With Simon. “Yes,” I say.
“There are no good spells for it,” she says with real disappointment. “The most you can do is float around like a week-old party balloon.”
“That’s true,” I agree.
She looks down at Simon’s mostly eaten cake. “Here, let me cut you another slice. You, too, Basilton, hand me your plate.”
“I have plenty.”
“Rubbish. Look at you. You could use some shoring up at the foundation.” She serves herself some, too.
“You can call him Baz,” Simon says.
“Is that so?” She smiles at me.
“Yes,” I say.
“All right.” She nods. “So, Simon and Baz, you’ve taken it on yourself to investigate this Chosen One conspiracy.”
“I know we look like children,” I say, “but we have good heads on our shoulders, and Simon has spent his whole life defending the World of Mages.”
“You don’t look like children to me. You look like veterans. And I’m grateful to have someone who’s willing to listen. The Coven laughed at me. They sent your aunt to convince me it was vampires who took my son. There hasn’t been a vampire attack since—” She looks at me, dismayed. “Oh, darling, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. Please go on.”
“I know Jamie is alive,” she says. “He’s in danger—but he’s still out there.”
“You have a feeling?” Simon asks. “Mother’s intuition?”
“No. I cast a spell.”
SIMON
I feel like a creeper, walking into a strange woman’s bedroom—but that’s where Lady Salisbury takes us. On the second floor of her house. It’s darker up here. Cooler. Her room is huge, with a little sitting area and kind of a shrine by the lace-curtained window. There’s a table with two lit candles—one burning brightly and one sputtering like it’s about to go out. Each candle is surrounded by photographs: a fair-haired boy on the side that burns bright; a girl on the side that gutters.
“You ‘Lit a candle’ for him,” Baz says, awed. “That’s an enormous spell.”
“I’ve cast it twice,” Lady Salisbury says. “A mother whose child is in danger can lift a car.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Look…” She leads us to the table. “Both candles still burn. It’s a comfort to me.” She lifts a picture of a thickly built man wearing a Queen T-shirt. “That’s Jamie,” she says. “I took this photo last year, on his thirty-eighth birthday.”
I was expecting him to be younger, I don’t know why.
Baz pulls a notebook from his pocket, and it gives me a pang. Penny should be here. She still hasn’t texted me back. I don’t blame her—I know I owe her a proper apology, but I still don’t know what else I owe her. Everything I said was true. I’m done with the World of Mages.
“How long has your son been missing?” Baz asks.
“A month.” Lady Salisbury seems like a different person in this flickering light. Downstairs, she was warm and cheerful, if a bit sad. Now she’s woebegone and mournful. This room feels too full of people who aren’t here anymore. Her son, her daughter—apparently lost before the girl had a chance to get old—and a curly-haired man in an Air Force uniform looking down from a large photograph over the bed. “My husband,” she says. She’s caught me staring at the portrait. “Gone ten years now.”
I nod, not sure whether I should offer condolences.
“Did Jamie tell you he was leaving?” Baz’s pen is poised over the notepad.
“No … But there were signs.” She lays her hand on his wrist, stopping his pen. “Let’s go back downstairs. The light is better.”
We follow her back down to the sitting room, past more family photos. There’s one hanging over the staircase—the same blond girl as a teenager. I stop. “She looks familiar,” I say. “I think I’ve seen a painting of her.”
“At Watford,” Baz says, over my shoulder. “In the Catacombs.”
Neither of us mention that it weeps.
Lady Salisbury doesn’t smile. “Yes,” she says. “Lucy was a student there.” She walks ahead of us down the stairs. “I think I will make tea after all.”
* * *
“It’s been hard for Jamie,” Lady Salisbury says. She insisted that Baz sit next to me on the sofa. “That chair won’t wobble for me; it knows better.” And she’s given me a third slice of cake. (I can’t believe she made this herself. It’s four layers deep.) “He’s never quite fit into magickal society.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“Well, Jamie was a different sort of learner … He didn’t learn to read until quite late, and he’s never been fond of reading aloud. His tongue would tie itself in knots.”
I can sympathize. “So he did badly at Watford?”
“In those days,” she says, “a reading disorder would keep you out of Watford.”
I sit up straight, jamming my wings against the sofa. “Even if you were a magician? With your own wand?”
“Even then,” she says.
I look at Baz for confirmation. His face is grim but unsurprised.
Lady Salisbury goes on: “Jamie’s older sister went to Watford and learned magic, while Jamie stayed home with us and went to Normal schools. He learned a bit o
f magic, some household spells—but it was embarrassing for him, and eventually he stopped trying to get better at it.”
She’s turning her cup in her hands, looking down at her tea. “We thought he’d made peace with it. He never had many magickal friends, and after his sister … well, ran away, there was no one to compare himself to. Jamie went to Normal schools, he married a Normal girl. I thought he’d let it go, magic.”
She’s quiet again. Baz and I don’t try to fill the silence. What could I say—“That’s easier said than done”? “Even when you’re terrible with words”?
“But since his divorce,” she says, “I don’t know … He spends too much time online. He’s got a cousin, a magician, who sends him conspiracy theories. Speciesist claptrap, most of it. I thought Jamie knew it was a lot of balls—” She looks up, abruptly. “Oh, excuse my language, boys. Anyway, I thought Jamie was repeating all of this nonsense just to get a rise out of me at the dinner table.”
“What sort of conspiracy theories?” Baz asks.
“Siegfried and Roy, it’s hardly worth saying out loud. ‘Did you know the government is manufacturing gryphons?’ ‘Did you know that Silicon Valley is controlled by vampires?’”
Baz freezes, rattling his teacup on its saucer. Lady Salisbury keeps talking.
“A few months ago,” she says, “he started to fixate more and more on these Chosen One prophecies—you know how it is, everyone’s a Greatest Mage expert these days.”
“It seems we’ve been left out of those conversations,” Baz says, fully recovered.
“Oh.” Lady Salisbury looks from him to me, and chuckles. “I suppose you would be. Well”—she waves her hand—“you’re not missing much.”
I’m scrubbing at my hair; it’s probably driving Baz mental, but I can’t seem to stop. “Is this, like, something that most magicians believe now? That’s there’s a new Greatest Mage?”
“I think it’s more a thing that most magicians like to gossip about,” she says. “The various candidates, the evidence for and against, who’s having a cocktail party where you can meet one of them … Plenty of mages are still loyal to you, Simon.”
“To me?”
“Oh, yes”—she smiles—“‘Snowvians.’”
“No,” I say. “That’s not a thing.”
“They think you’ll get your powers back and rise higher than ever.”
“Hmm,” Baz says, looking down his nose at me. “I think I might be a Snowvian.”
“I’m a bit of a Snowvian myself.” Lady Salisbury smiles at him.
“No…” I say. “Just, no.”
“Well,” she goes on, “there’s another school of thought that says the time hasn’t come yet for the Greatest Mage, and that when that person does come, it will be obvious.”
I huff. “Doesn’t anyone think that maybe all of this is bollocks?”
Baz elbows me.
“Excuse my language,” I tack on. “But maybe there is no Chosen One. Maybe the prophecies were made by people like the Mage who just wanted to take advantage of everyone.”
Lady Salisbury doesn’t look convinced.
Baz looks even less convinced. “We can’t just stop believing in prophecies. Our whole culture is built on them. Watford itself was prophesied.”
“How do we know that?” I ask.
“They taught us about it at Watford,” he says.
“Penny would call that circular reasoning. I’m guilty of it all the time.”
At the mention of Penelope, Baz looks back at his notebook. “So … Jamie was interested in the Chosen One theories?”
“Yes,” Lady Salisbury says, “I think in a way he was especially interested because he’d been so removed from the World of Mages. This was something he could participate in, just like everyone else. As I said, I didn’t think Jamie was taking any of it seriously, but maybe you can’t spend so much time engaging with nonsense without taking it seriously…” Lady Salisbury presses her fingers to her forehead, like she has a headache coming on. “One name started to come up more and more … Smith Smith-Richards.”
“That’s a hell of a name,” I say.
“I have cousins who are Smiths,” Baz says, “but I’ve never heard of a Smith-Richards.”
“No one seems to have heard of him until recently,” she says. “Born in Yorkshire apparently.”
“I see.” Baz is writing that down. “And what made Smith-Richards stand out? To your son?”
Lady Salisbury looks so genuinely troubled, I think she might start to cry. Properly this time. She looks away from us. “Smith Smith-Richards is promising people magic.”
BAZ
“Magic?” Snow and I both say at once.
Lady Salisbury pulls a tissue from her cardigan pocket and wipes her eyes. “Yes.”
“He’s giving them magic?” Simon asks, and I know he’s thinking of those days when he pushed his magic into me—it shouldn’t have been possible. Or perhaps he’s thinking of the Mage’s last moments, when the man tried to drain Simon’s magic into himself. Would it have worked?
“Not exactly,” she says. “Smith-Richards claims to be healing their magic. Helping them realize their true potential.”
“And your son believed this?” I ask.
“He didn’t at first,” she says, “or he acted like he didn’t. But Smith-Richards’s name kept coming up. Jamie started to get very agitated talking about the other Greatest Mage contenders. He’d say they were swindlers, obvious frauds—that only Smith Smith-Richards was saying anything interesting…”
She wipes her eyes again. “Jamie started going out more,” she says, “in the evenings. Before all this, he’d spend every night upstairs, on his computer. I tried to tell myself that it was a good thing, him getting out a bit, meeting new people—but it made my blood run cold …
“Finally,” she says, “I confronted him. Oh, we had such a row!” She smiles ruefully at us, blinking away tears. “Me asking him if he was getting too involved in all this Chosen One hullabaloo, and him telling me he’s an adult who can do what he likes. Me saying I was worried, and him saying…”
Lady Salisbury looks down at her teacup again and slowly shakes her head. “Well. He said I didn’t want him to be a success. That I liked him being a failure because it kept him here with me.
“‘Mum,’ he said, ‘what if Smith can fix my magic?’
“‘Your magic isn’t broken!’ I told him, and I meant it! Jamie isn’t broken.” She looks at Simon and me, like she’s pleading for someone to believe her. “It’s always been more nuanced than that. Magic didn’t come easily to him, and then he wasn’t trained, and then he built up all of these behavioural ways to cope with it … Maybe he just didn’t have much access to magic in the first place! Call it genetics or call it circumstance. It happens. Sometimes it’s a trickle, and sometimes it’s a stream.”
“Sometimes it’s a spark,” I say, “and sometimes it’s a fire.”
“Exactly!” she says fiercely. Then her gaze falls to her lap. “Well, he didn’t want to hear that. He stormed up to his room. A few days later, he left for one of his meetings and didn’t come back.”
“No note?” I ask.
“No note,” Lady Salisbury says. “I’ve tried every spell I can think of to find him. It’s like he’s being hidden behind a curtain. His candle burns, I know he’s out there…” She reaches a hand towards us. “But I can’t see him or feel him.” She closes her fist. “It’s like summoning air.”
“Have you talked to Smith-Richards?”
She scoffs. “It was easy enough to find his meetings, but I was turned away. The magician at the door said they’re trying to maintain an ‘atmosphere of support and optimism.’ That’s when I went to the Coven. Now, there’s an organization that doesn’t know its arse from its elbow. All of the Mage’s cronies are out, which means no one has five minutes of institutional memory. They’re still plumbing the depths of his corruption; who knows when they’ll hit bottom!”
She looks at us again, like she’s remembering herself. “I apologize. I must sound like an old coot. The Coven thought so. Even my friends think so. They think Jamie was always a lost cause, and that he finally met a bad end. They feel sorry for me, but they don’t take me seriously.”
“We’re taking you seriously,” Simon says.
And it’s true, we are.
Lady Salisbury may be an old coot. But there’s something shady happening here, and I have a feeling my stepmother is caught up in it.
Didn’t Mordelia say Daphne was away working on her magic?
My stepmother is the limpest mage I know. She doesn’t use magic for anything. When she wants to cast a spell, she has to go and get her wand out of a drawer, the same drawer where we keep extra batteries and rubber bands.
When the Humdrum sucked all the magic out of our house in Hampshire, Daphne joked about staying there anyway.
I know she just barely made it through Watford. She told me she only got the grades she did because she was good at written tests and diligent about homework.
She’s even talked about sending Mordelia to Normal school—“because they’re more academically competitive.” I thought she was kidding, but maybe she doesn’t want to put Mordelia through it. Mordelia’s a bright girl. She could be a star at some Normal school. At Watford, she’ll be known for what she can’t do.
I thought Daphne was at peace with herself. That she accepted her place in the world. It could be worse: She’s married to a wealthy farmer who worships the ground she walks on. She has a big house and a bunch of noisy friends. She has healthy kids.
I didn’t think she cared about magic.
Maybe I was wrong.
“We want to help,” I say to Lady Salisbury. “Tell us everything you know about Smith Smith-Richards.”
28
LADY RUTH
I watch them from the window after we say good-bye.
Any Way the Wind Blows Page 15
