All Good Things

by Emma Newman

  He nodded. “Right. And you did that door thing with sorcery?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re, like, a proper Sorcerer now?”

  She laughed. “Hardly! It took me hours and I reckon she’d have done it without thinking.” She pointed to a table covered in books and scraps of paper. “Those books Max got me are awesome, but it’s like trying to translate a story written in a foreign language using a few chaotic dictionaries. I think I’m more a code-breaker than a Sorcerer.”

  He went over to her. She looked so tired and strung out. He could see how heavily it all weighed upon her. “You look exhausted,” he said. “Have you got any sleep?”

  She yawned. “No. How can I sleep with that bastard on the throne? It’s just a matter of time before he fucks with me again. I know it.”

  “If you don’t sleep, you’ll make mistakes. I reckon that’s dangerous in sorcery. And Will can’t find you here, can he? And if he does, I’m here now. It doesn’t matter what he throws at you. He might be King of the Fae but I’m Lord Fucking Iron, and he can jog on if he thinks he can get through me.”

  Cathy laughed. “Is ‘Lord Fucking Iron’ your new title? With added badassitude?”

  He grinned. “Check it out. I am the ultimate badass!”

  “State of the badass art!” Cathy said, and then kissed him.

  He was so shocked he didn’t respond at first, and then he was pulling her closer and deepening the kiss. An electric thrill ran through him as her hands moved across his back.

  But then she pulled back. “Whoa. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry,” Sam whispered.

  “I’m just tired,” she said, blushing. “My brain isn’t in gear. You’re right, I should get some sleep.”

  “I liked it,” he said. “Maybe we should do it again.”

  She got up, her blush deepening to an impressive scarlet. “I’m going to get some sleep.” She stepped over the books and then turned back towards him. “I liked it too,” she said with a shy smile. “But I need to focus on all of this. If I sleep in Beatrice’s old room, will you be close by?”

  “I won’t leave this tower.”

  “Thanks. I sleep better when you’re nearby,” she said, and headed off, leaving him and his pounding heart alone.

  • • •

  Lucy woke with the same headache she’d gone to sleep with and it was still there by the evening. If anything, it was getting worse.

  At least she had some actual clothes to wear, which were fine as long as she didn’t think too hard about the fact that they belonged to a woman murdered in the very tower they’d slept in. That thought alone would have been enough to keep her wide awake, without the churning guilt and torn loyalties. Somehow she’d slept, despite the fact they were sleeping on a mattress on the floor that she and Tom had dragged over from the nearby abandoned mansion.

  She kept to herself as she dithered over when to betray them. And even now, even when it was certain they were all working to destroy the Nether and condemn everyone there to death, she still felt reluctant. She couldn’t stand how she was helping Will after all the things he’d done. She hated how Tom was merrily getting involved with the sorcery, treating it like one of those damn crossword puzzles he did late at night to help him wind down. He seemed incapable of thinking it all through. How would they all survive when thrust into the masses with the rest of the mundanes? Perhaps he was depending on her family’s great wealth to sustain them.

  It wasn’t much consolation when she considered that they’d never have to face up to that anyway. Once this was all over, Will would owe her a great debt and she would see to it that the entirety of America would be given independence, not just her family. She would go back home, as she’d always planned to, and try her best to forget about Tom. Cathy would be Queen of the Fae, but Lucy was certain Will would protect her from any revenge.

  He couldn’t protect her from her own feelings, though. Was this the kind of person she wanted to be? But then every time she wavered, thinking she couldn’t possibly do this, she remembered her parents and siblings and all the good they did back home. She imagined them getting old and frail and watching them die.

  There was no way she was going to let that happen.

  “Lucy?”

  Tom found her staring out of the arrow-slit window at the silver sky beyond. “How’s it going?”

  “We’ve made good progress, actually. Cat’s a natural. She thinks she can do it. There are some details to work out, but it’s feasible.” He pulled a blanket from their makeshift bed and came over to drape it around her shoulders. “I haven’t seen you for a few hours. I wanted to make sure you were all right. I know you’re upset.”

  “What have you been doing?” She didn’t want to talk about herself. She was too scared of giving something away.

  “Helping Cat decipher some of the symbols. Some of them have similarities to the Coptic alphabet. I have a passable knowledge of that.”

  Lucy couldn’t help but smile at his modesty. When Tom said he had a “passable knowledge” of something, it usually meant he’d be able to give a university professor a run for their money. “Is she close to figuring it all out?”

  He nodded. “I need to get back, but I was worried you’d been left alone to stew about it all. Would you like to come and join in?”

  “I have a terrible headache,” she said. “And I don’t think I have much to contribute. You go ahead.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Tom said. “I know you’re worried about your family, but we’d still be special to Lord Poppy, I’m sure of it. Even if we don’t have the Nether anymore, I’m sure he’d be able to prolong life and protect us from disease, in the way the magic in the property anchors does. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sure there will be a solution.”

  She mustered a smile for him, but he had no idea its root was a sudden, bitter appreciation of his imperial sense of superiority. Only an Albion man, privileged to the extent he was, would be certain the Fae would even remember they existed when the potential pool of entertaining mortals opened up to several billion.

  “We’re just at the top of the tower if you need us,” he said. “Press the dome on the bottom of the painting’s frame to open the Way.”

  She watched him leave. It was time.

  After checking that everyone was occupied, she went down the stairs and out the tower and hurried across to the mansion, hoping that everyone was too busy to look out of the arrow slits as she ran.

  Once she was inside, Lucy pressed herself against the wall, catching her breath as she argued with herself. It had to be done. She headed straight for the bedroom they’d taken the mattress from, knowing there was a mirror there. After closing the bedroom door, she cleaned off the dust until she could see her reflection. White-lipped and wearing the billowing white dress, she looked like a ghost in the drab room. Lucy pulled the pendant out from under the fabric, grateful that the long chain it was strung onto was so thin that no one had noticed it. She took one last look at the sparkling oak leaf and then pressed it against the glass. It rippled for a moment, distorting her reflection, until the throne room came into view with the King walking towards her. She bowed her head, awestruck once more, despite everything else she felt about him. “Your majesty.”

  “I’ve been waiting.”

  “It’s been difficult to find an opportunity to slip away. I’m in an abandoned mansion in the Nether. A few hundred metres away there’s a tower that used to belong to a Sorcerer. Cathy and all the others are there now, and Tom says she’s close to working out how to destroy the Nether.”

  “And Lord Iron?”

  “He’s there with an Arbiter and a weird gargoyle thing, too.”

  The King frowned. “Tell me about the tower.”

  “It’s warded against practically everything,” Lucy said. “Cathy fixed it so we could all go inside, but it’s still warded against the Fae and any other Arbiters. I don’t think you’ll be able
to send anyone in there.”

  “I don’t need to,” the King said. “She will come to me.”

  “Well, it has to be quick. She’s taken to sorcery and they’re all gunning for this.”

  “Leave this Way open and go back to the tower. Make sure they think you’re supporting their plan. I may have need of you later.”

  Lucy felt sick. She’d gone through so much to free herself and her family from men like this and now she was following orders from one. A King, no less. What bitter irony. She nodded, hating herself, trying so hard to remember that this was for the greater good.

  “Lucy, I know this is difficult for you,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing. And when this is all done and Cathy is my Queen and her passions redirected, I won’t forget what you’ve done.”

  Neither will I, she thought. I’ll have to live with this for the rest of my life.

  30

  Cathy rubbed her eyes. Four hours of sleep wasn’t enough, but as soon as she’d woken up, she’d been unable to drift back off. There was too much to do, and she feared there wasn’t enough time to do it before Will made his next move.

  Sam had come to the top of the tower to see how she was getting on. Cathy welcomed the chance to talk her work through, finding it easier to spot errors in her reasoning if she explained it to someone else. She’d shown him how the lenses were set up to enable Beatrice to inscribe formulae onto different places without having to leave the tower, drawing upon the same magic as opening a Way. Then she pointed out the different parts of the formula that Beatrice had partially written out before she died.

  “And…all this makes sense to you?” Sam asked, incredulous.

  “Yeah,” Cathy said. “At least, I think I know what it all means, but there’s no one to ask if I’ve got it right. Which is scary.” She paused as her chest tightened with the thought of what she was trying to do. How many ways it could go wrong. And how many ways it could still go wrong, even if she got the sorcery part right.

  “Talk me through it,” Sam said.

  He knew how stressed she was. He wasn’t mollycoddling her, or giving her platitudes, or trying to muscle in. She wanted to hug him for it but then she might want to kiss him again, so she stayed focused on the formula, trying to ignore how his proximity was making her feel.

  “Okay, so it’s made of several parts, and references things in the negative, which I was confused by at first but I think I’ve got it now. I think it’s two phases, one in which things are broken, and then the second phase in which the descriptions of those broken states are placed in the final formula. Basically, this really big formula here,” she ran her finger along Beatrice’s elegant script painted across the largest pane of glass, “is based on the…um…the expression of the Split Worlds. I don’t know what it should be called. I think the original contains references to the seven forges, a very specific place in each one. Because I know where yours is, and where the one near Bath is, thanks to Max, I’ve cracked the code used to express them. That’s important, because sorcery needs a mind and will behind it. If a random person off the street wrote this out, nothing would happen. Now, because I know how all these work, I can open a way to each of the forges. As far as I can tell, the first phase involves going to each of the forges and breaking the connection to Exilium there. Then describing each one as broken and inserting them into the bigger formula here. That clause is the one that would have killed me once the ritual was done.”

  “Shit! Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I recognise this bit here, from the warded formula she taught me. It’s an expression of me, bracketed by this part here, which means broken or ended. It was really useful, actually, it helped me figure out the different phases and needing to break those seven points of contact.”

  Sam shook his head. “I don’t get it. Surely she’d have realised you’d call me as soon as you knew she was going to kill you and that I’d pull out?”

  Cathy shrugged. “She sent you to the forge so you wouldn’t have known until after it was all finished. I should have seen it coming. Of course she wouldn’t want me to be a proper Sorcerer. Why make more of the people who caused all this mess in the first place? She was just keeping us sweet whilst it was convenient.”

  “You can take that clause out without screwing it all up, though, right?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “So why did Beatrice send me to the forge in Bath?”

  “Ah! Yes, so, going back to the different phases…there’s a specific place in each forge which I need to work a formula on. As far as I can tell, it’s to break a ward against…you.”

  “Eh?”

  Cathy grinned. “Yeah, it threw me at first, but reading around it, I think what must have happened is that the first Lord or Lady Iron—or at least, the one who was around when the world was split—helped the Sorcerers set it up. Then once that bit was done, the Sorcerers warded the point where the iron meets Mundanus. Not to keep you away, just to stop you from changing it, so you can’t break those roads you told me about.”

  Sam nodded. “That makes sense. I bet it’s the seal I saw under the anvil. So you’ll break that and then I’ll add some carbon to the iron and do whatever I can to make it impure. I’ll just need some charcoal for that; it should be easy if we start with my forge or the one in Bath. Will the worlds start going cockeyed when we break the first cable?”

  “No. The Sorcerers were massively overcautious. Only one of these separation points needs to exist to keep the worlds apart, but they built in six redundancies. It’s clever, I suppose; if one Sorcerer became corrupted, that one man couldn’t unsplit the worlds. That’s why Beatrice had to kill all of them. Max has removed enough of Rupert’s recent memories that he won’t know to keep watch over the Mercia forge until it’s too late. So we need to destroy all of them, but things won’t really kick off until the last one is gone.”

  “So we’re sorted then.”

  “Nearly. There are two problems. The first is that the final formula is incomplete and I need to work out the right way to close it, once all the rest of the ritual is done. I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities, but I’m already punching above my weight here. The second is that the only way to warn people in the Nether—that I can think of, anyway—isn’t perfect. I thought we’d have more time. I’m scared it won’t work at all, and I’m scared that even if it does, people will still get hurt.”

  “This is the Letterboxer plan?”

  She nodded. The letter told people to stay at home over the next twenty-four hours and thanks to the addresses they’d found in the Agency files, she knew where every household within an anchor property was, and had worked out a formula to send the letters to all of them at once. The plan was horribly flawed. Only those at home would receive it, and there was no way to tell if it would cause panic or be written off as a prank without actually going to one of the Nether cities to see. Those away from home wouldn’t even get the warning. “I can’t think of a better solution.”

  “Neither can I,” Sam said. “I don’t think there’s a way to do something this big and this fundamental without putting some people at risk. That sounds horrible but…”

  Cathy sighed, feeling exhausted. “Yeah. It’s all horrible, when you think about it. How Arbiters are made. What happens in the Nether. The insanity of the Elemental Court. The Fae…shit, are we really doing the right thing?”

  “We know doing nothing is just as bad,” Sam said. “Worse, when it comes to Mundanus. So I guess you’re going to be working on closing the formula for a while?”

  She nodded. “And practising what I need to write over the seals in the forges. We work through them systematically until the last anchor road cable thing is broken, then I finish it all off. Then…then it’s done.”

  “Can King Fuckwit fight any of this, once it’s started? Do I need to go and kick his ass first?”

  She smirked. “I know you want an excuse, but no, I don’t think so, because his crown is p
art of this magic. The Sorcerers were top of this food chain. If anything, I think it will be easier for us, because the other three crowns aren’t in use. I reckon that works against Will. They wouldn’t have made four unless four were needed.” A piece of the puzzle suddenly clicked into place. “That’s why he’s so obsessed with me being the Queen! The crown must be making him fixate on it, to strengthen the magic.”

  Sam shook his head. “That’s not the only reason.”

  Cathy frowned. “He doesn’t love me.”

  Sam looked into her eyes. “It’s not hard, you know. Even a twat like him would be able to do something as easy as that. And if this doesn’t go to plan, it isn’t all on you. We’re just doing the best we can with a shitty situation. For what it’s worth, though, I think you can pull this off.”

  She could feel a sense of strength and security radiating from him. When she found out what Will had done to her, she’d been certain she’d never be able to trust a man again. But Sam was different. He wouldn’t do anything like that to her, and, critically, he was literally incapable of it. With him, everything was straightforward and simple in a way it never could be with a man from the Nether.

  What was she doing, thinking about her friend this way, now of all times? But then he was moving closer to her and she was reaching across to close the embrace.

  “Catherine!”

  At first Cathy thought the female voice had come up from the room below. Both she and Sam froze.

  “Catherine, are you in there?”

  The voice was all too familiar. A shiver ran down her back. “That’s my sister, I’m sure of it,” she said, scrabbling to her feet to go to the broken window.

  Elizabeth was standing on the path between the mansion and the tower, dressed in a black mourning gown. “Catherine, you must come and speak to me immediately!”

  Cathy stepped back before Elizabeth spotted her, bumping into Sam, who’d come over to look. “How can she be here? No one else knows where this place is!”