by Emma Newman
Cathy nodded. “Okay then. And once you’ve taught me the Fae Charms to go into those clauses, just writing it on whilst I cast those makes it work?”
Beatrice held up a finger. “All sorcerous magic requires intent behind it. If Mrs M wrote this onto herself, it would have no effect, even if she knew the Fae components. These symbols are the language of human will. Without that will behind it, it is just writing. When you study sorcery, you must also be a student of concentration, of the focusing of intent. They are just as important.”
“I’ll make sure I understand it all completely, then after I write it on myself, I’ll get it tattooed.”
Beatrice looked appalled. “That would be very unwise. I would never advocate any sort of permanent warding on the body.”
“Okay. But what if this smudges? Or I get wet and my clothes rub it off?”
“I will show you how to make a robust form of ink for warding. But it will only last as long as it should.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t you see? The Charm to express you in this formula would be worked on a particular day, and who knows how you will change over the next week, the next month, the next year? The only way for this ward to be truly permanent would be for you to refresh it, often. We never stay the same, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Trying to hold yourself to who you are now for the sake of maintaining this protection would be unwise.”
“But the Fae magic is only notated. If I refresh the Charm myself, why not make the rest of the formula permanent?”
“Are you so certain that you will always need to be protected against Iris magic? What if you needed to use it one day? What if you found yourself in a situation where you required Lord Iris’s assistance? What if you were to reconcile with your husband and his family?”
Cathy snorted. “That’s never going to happen.”
“Iris magic is very useful. Warded against it, you cannot wield it or any artefacts with that magic bound into them.”
Thoughts of that choker returned and Cathy grinned. “Good.”
Beatrice shook her head. “You are very young.”
“Fuck the Irises,” Cathy said as she saw Sam heading across the garden towards the forge. “Can you set me more exercises? I want to learn everything.”
“I do not have time to teach you all of my sorcerous knowledge. I will show you as much of the basics as I can.”
“Thanks.” Cathy stood, stretched, and felt the pull of her bed. But she needed to talk to Sam before she could rest.
7
Cathy could hear the heavy clang of Sam at work in the forge way before she got there. She was wearing one of his coats and an old pair of Mrs M’s wellies but she’d left the umbrella back in the house. She wanted to feel the snow on her hair and skin.
“Hi,” she said at the doorway to the forge. Sam paused his arm halfway up to the next strike and turned to face her. He was wearing just a T-shirt and jeans beneath his blacksmith’s apron, thanks to the heat of the furnace behind him. Sweat had made the grime of his work collect in rivulets describing the curves of his muscles. Cathy studied them as he laid down the hammer and thrust the piece of iron he was working into the plunge bucket.
“Bloody hell, Cathy, there are umbrellas up at the house, you know!” He hurried over to pull her towards the fire. “You’re shivering!”
“I know, it’s wonderful. I’ve never been in proper snow before. It doesn’t tend to settle in Bath. There was nothing but rain when I was a student. And in the Nether, there’s obviously no weather at all.” She shuddered and tried to push that dreary silver sky from her mind. “What are you making?”
Sam wiped his face on the cloth he kept by the sink in the corner, then washed the back of his neck as she squeezed out a trickle of water from her ponytail. “Haven’t decided yet. I was practicing a technique.”
“How about a spear for Lord Iris’s heart?”
“Does he even have one?”
“Probably not.” She warmed her hands with the heat from the furnace and then hung her coat from one of the huge hooks on the wall as she tried to work out what to say to Sam. “So…I spent some time with Beatrice yesterday.”
Sam came over to stand next to her, holding his own hands out to the flames level with hers, flexing his fingers as he often did after working the metal. She could see calluses, and dirt under his nails. They couldn’t be more different to Will’s soft, manicured hands. “Did you two get along?”
“I’m not sure Beatrice could ‘get along’ with anyone. We had some interesting conversations. We need to talk about her plan.”
Sam swiped back a lock of damp hair from his forehead. “She told you about it?” When she nodded, he asked, “After you swore that oath?”
“Yeah. It was…weird.”
Sam started to form a word, then paused, started to move his lips again, and then sighed. “Tea. Tea first.” He went over to the shelf next to the sink and filled the small kettle. He took off the apron and hung it up before rinsing out a mug and plucking another from a higher shelf. Cathy couldn’t help admiring the broadness of his shoulders, the way his torso slimmed to his waist. She looked away, back to the furnace, silently chiding herself as the kettle boiled. He poured the water over teabags he’d dropped into the mugs and turned to face her. “Jammie Dodger?”
She laughed. “What?”
“Jammie Dodger,” he repeated, smiling. “You know, the biscuit?” He grabbed a tin from the top of the nearby fridge and pulled off the lid, holding out the contents to her. There were pale biscuits made of two layers with jam sandwiched between them, glimpsed through a heart-shaped hole at the top. She took one, inspecting it.
“Shit, you’ve never had a Jammie Dodger?”
She shook her head. “Bourbons, custard creams, and…um…jaffa cakes. Not these.”
“Please tell me you’ve had chocolate digestives?”
“No. Should I have? I didn’t get round to trying those.”
He slapped a hand over his heart and acted like he’d been wounded. “Oh, Cathy, it’s just too sad. I’ll ask Mrs M to get some. And Rich Tea, too. For dunking. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Cathy smiled. She nibbled on the biscuit experimentally as he swirled the teabags around and finished making the tea. By the time the cup was being handed to her she was brushing the crumbs off her fingers. Wordlessly, Sam came back with the tin and she took another. He shook the tin and when she looked up at him he waggled his eyebrows with a grin and looked back down. She took another and he seemed satisfied.
“When I was a kid, I used to eat the top layer first, then the jam, then the bottom layer,” he said, coming back to her side with tea mug in one hand, biscuit in the other.
They munched the biscuits in companionable silence, the crackling of the flames filling the air for them. Cathy considered how safe and relaxed she felt with Sam. Far more relaxed than she’d ever felt with Will. Here, with Sam, there were no expectations pressing upon her. No pressure to please him. She took a slurp of tea and it was noisier than she intended. Trying not to laugh, she saw Sam’s smile from the corner of her eye and then he slurped so loudly it sounded like bathwater going down the plughole. He smacked his lips and said, “Ahhhhh, there’s lovely,” and then grinned at her. She grinned back.
“So, Beatrice is teaching me a ward,” Cathy said, wanting to say something positive before they tackled the really tricky stuff. “I’ve still got a couple of bits to learn, and I need to practise it, but it means I’ll finally be safe.”
Sam’s face fell. “You’ll always be safe with me.”
“But I can’t stay here forever.”
Sam looked down at his shoes. “You could if you wanted to.”
“That’s…” Cathy suddenly felt she had to choose her words very carefully, as if she’d stumbled into some sort of emotional minefield and could blow everything up with a careless step. “That’s really kind of you, Sam, but staying here because it isn�
��t safe to leave isn’t…a choice. I’m not saying I don’t like being here—I do—it’s that…I’d rather stay here because I don’t want to be anywhere else, rather than because I can’t be anywhere else.”
He nodded. “Yeah. You’re right.”
Cathy wanted to say something about the way she feared he was unwittingly using her to fill the gap left by his wife, but she couldn’t think of a way to raise it without sounding horrible. “Look, things are already changing. Beatrice is teaching me some things that I thought would be much harder but they’re not. Soon I won’t have to depend on you to keep me safe from Will and that is officially a Really Good Thing, okay? Because I don’t want any of that crap to mess our friendship up. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
His smile was still a little sad, but she was satisfied that he knew where they both stood. “Okay, so you should know that she’s teaching me about her hybrid magic in return for me trying to bring you onside. But I’m not here to do that. I want to talk it all through with you. Not persuade you.”
He nodded. “Maybe I misunderstood,” Sam said, in a tone that suggested that wasn’t true at all. “But the way she talked about it, she believes the Sorcerers split the world into Mundanus and Exilium and that made the Fae go insane, and is making the Elemental Court into total arseholes. Present company excluded.”
“I thought the Fae were arseholes before they were even put into Exilium,” Cathy added. “In fact, I thought that was the whole reason why! I can’t speak for the Elemental Court. I don’t really know anything about them, apart from the bits you’ve told me.”
“Oh, they are definitely arseholes,” Sam said. “More tea? This is a two-mug discussion at least.”
She nodded and watched him refill the kettle. “Beatrice talks about undoing the Sorcerers’ work like it’s the only option. Are we sure that it is?”
“As far as I can tell, it is,” Sam said as he rinsed their mugs. “I haven’t handled the Elemental Court very well, I admit that, but even if I had, it wouldn’t change the fact that they’re heartless bastards. And they’re insanely shortsighted. They just can’t see how bad an impact they have on the world. No, that’s not right—they know it intellectually but they just don’t care. I don’t know how to make them care. It’s like some bit of them is just missing.”
“Can’t we persuade Beatrice to…adjust the members of the Elemental Court? Shit, that sounds so fucking dodgy, I can’t believe I’m even saying it!”
“Don’t feel bad; I already asked her that, before you arrived,” Sam replied. “I asked her if she could just give them a conscience or something. She said Fae magic doesn’t work well enough on the Elemental Court. She said she tried it, before I was born, but it always failed.”
Cathy wondered if some part of their soul had been cleaved away, something similar to what had been done to Max. Sam’s soul seemed intact, though. And if Beatrice had already rejected that option, it was academic anyway. “And the members of the Elemental Court are definitely the root of all the planet’s environmental problems?”
“Oh yeah,” Sam said grimly, dropping new teabags into the mugs and pouring in the boiled water. “I’ve got all the evidence. I just can’t find a way to use it well enough.”
“Is this because of being in the Elemental Court, or just a cultural thing, though?” Cathy asked. “If there’s anything I learned from the Nether it’s that once people take control they don’t give it up, and they don’t let anyone close unless they’re cut from the same cloth. But then, I suppose you disprove that.”
Sam shrugged. “Sort of. Amir—my predecessor—woke up, somehow. He deliberately chose someone who wouldn’t be like him. But that was because he was killing people he knew, by accident, and his potential heirs were doing that too. He was doing all sorts of terrible stuff around the world and just didn’t give a fuck about it. I don’t know if the Court is the way it is because it’s a self-selecting group of arseholes, or if the splitting of the worlds is making them mad, like Beatrice thinks. All I know is that short of removing them all from power—which would be bloody hard even if I was the sort of person that was happy to go around murdering people for the greater good—I can’t see how anything is going to change. None of them are going to pick someone like me to take over from them.” He made the tea and handed her mug over. “But the thought of the Fae coming into Mundanus…shit. It makes me feel sick, you know?”
“Me too, but we have to do something,” she said, more to rally herself than to express her frustration.
“Yeah, but…the Fae? Seriously? I cannot think of any situation in which they would make things better.”
“Beatrice thinks that they will get better if things are put back to what they were before the world was split. But it’s a leap of faith, isn’t it? That’s what this comes down to. Do we believe that Beatrice is telling the truth?”
“Is there any way to find out?”
Cathy shrugged. “I don’t know if the Sorcerers were into writing stuff like that down. And anyway, we can’t trust anyone when it comes to this. The Sorcerers were complete fucks. We both know that. And I would be the most unsurprised person in the worlds if I found out that Beatrice was right and they were split to give a few blokes a lot of power. I mean, we see it in the Nether, we see it in Mundanus. It’s not outlandish to believe they did it just for their own gains.”
“But look at the Fae,” Sam said. “We both know they are just as bad. We’ve both seen what they do to people. I feel like we’re stuck in a river with bloody crocodiles on one side and hungry lions on the other and Beatrice is saying the best way for us to survive is draining the river.” Cathy squinted at him. He squinted back. “Okay,” he finally said, “that wasn’t the best way to describe it, but you know what I mean!”
“Yeah…” Cathy dumped her mug in the sink. She was so tired. Tired from lack of sleep and from being emotionally wrung out several times over. So much guilt and fear.
And anger. It was still there, beneath it all, that rage driving her on, because the Nether was still there, still holding so many prisoner to its ideals. The Agency and the horrors the gargoyle had told her about were still there and hundreds of servants in houses across Albion were still effectively slaves. How many wives had been beaten last night? How many men had forced themselves on women they considered their property whilst she’d been here, hiding away, blubbing on the sofa? “But it’s not like we’re just some bloody rabbits stuck in the river hoping we won’t get eaten and that’s the way we’re thinking. Lord Poppy was really scary and horrible to you before you were Lord Iron, but what about when you went there and kicked his ass? I’m assuming that actually happened, right? You didn’t just make that up?”
“That really happened,” he said.
“And I’m not the same person who got screwed over by Poppy either. I’m learning sorcery. And I know that it isn’t like that for everyone else and that they’ll be at just as much risk as we were, but the point is that we’re sitting here, worrying about what to do and whether to believe Beatrice like…like we’re stupid children hoping that we’re listening to the right grownup to tell us what to do. You are Lord Iron and you break their magic. And once I’ve learned more, I’ll be able to protect places and people too. We can’t do anything to stop the Elemental Court as things stand now. But we can do a lot to protect people from the Fae.” She paused. Was she really arguing to rejoin the worlds?
Sam placed his mug in the sink next to hers. “Okay. So what you’re saying is that things are fucked now. They could get more fucked, but we could maybe make sure they are less fucked than otherwise.”
She nodded. “But I’m biased, Sam. I want to see the end of the Nether. I want to take that power bubble from the Patroons and I want the people there to be free to choose how they live. And we already agree that the Elemental Court has to change too. Else we’re all screwed. And Beatrice might be telling the truth and it might all rebalance and get better. Of course, she could be i
n cahoots with all of the Fae and tricking us into freeing them so they can torment the entirety of humanity. Shit, that actually sounds quite plausible.”
“Jesus,” Sam whispered. “I hate this. I might be Lord Iron but I don’t know anything about this sort of stuff. Not really.”
“But we know she needs you to do this,” Cathy said. “And it’s got to be for an esoteric reason. Something you have to do, actively, otherwise she’d have used sorcerous magic to get what she wanted instead of having to take the time to persuade you.”
“She wants to know where the forges are,” Sam said. “There are seven of them apparently, and they connect to Exilium in a really freaky way. There are these…cables, big enough to walk on, that go from the forges to Exilium. I walked on one from my forge to Exilium that time I kicked Poppy’s arse. Maybe she wants to break them?”
“I reckon that if a map of their locations was all Beatrice needed from you, she’d know that by now,” Cathy said. “She’s ruthless. She’d torture you, mundane medieval style, to get it out of you.”
Sam nodded with a grim frown. “I know I can do…weird shit. But I can’t see how any of it can be any use. And anyway, it doesn’t solve our problem.”
