Good Witches Don't Steal (Academy of Shadowed Magic Book 4)

by S. W. Clarke

  “Valerian,” I said. “Do you know how to prepare it?”

  “Sure. After that day in the library, I asked Fernwhirl all about its properties and uses. But its preparation depends on what you need it for. What do you need it for?”

  “Ghosts,” I said. “I need it for ghosts.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Gods.”

  “If they exist, I’ll need their favor, too.” I unclasped my cloak, slung it on the floor across the room. “So if I bring you some valerian tonight, you’ll help me prepare it?”

  She stood still, even her wings unmoving. “You’ve figured out where the thief’s blade is, haven’t you?”

  I kicked off my shoes. “More or less.”

  “Where?”

  “The Edinburgh vaults.”

  “But I thought it was in a close. Rathmore said—”

  I pulled my hair down, raked my fingers through the curls. “It’s a long story, but he was right. I did need to go into a close.”

  “Oh,” she said, clearly not understanding. And then, from nowhere, she said, “I’ll go with you. To the vaults.”

  I turned around, and my annoyance melted into softness when I saw her wide-open face. She didn’t fully understand, but she would go anyway. A pang of guilt pierced the fog of my sleepiness; Eva cared so much, even though I’d let her in on so little over the past year.

  I would rectify that. I didn’t know when, but I would.

  For now, sleep. I sighed onto my bed. “If I die down there, or go insane, then I give you permission to come after me. Preferably with Aidan and Liara in tow. But otherwise…no.”

  “And why not?”

  I slipped under the covers with all my clothes still on from the day before, my eyelids leaded weights. My body automatically curled around Loki. “Because if we both die, no one will be around to save the kids.”

  “What kids?” her voice said, distant now as I dropped away into sleep.

  Eva would have loved them, the ghost children. Once I told her about them, she would never stop trying to help them. To free them. And if I didn’t succeed in destroying the labyrinth, she would be relentless. She would be their advocate.

  I didn’t answer her, but I did dream about them down there in Mary King's Close. Playing with Loki, laughing, the little soldier boy standing guard the whole while.

  They were among hundreds of souls trapped in a labyrinth with no entrances and no exits.

  No entrances and no exits.

  In sleep, my brain slid two puzzle pieces together, slotting them with a click. It gave me the answer to the question that had been scalding the insides of my head since I’d left that prison:

  Where was Callum Rathmore?

  He was inside the Shade’s labyrinth. And the Shade’s labyrinth was Falaichte.

  By the next morning, I knew what I had to do. And I knew when I had to do it.

  The early spring air brought a bite as my first-years mounted their horses in the ring outside the stables. Each of them did so with ease, swinging up on their first try.

  “We’re having a test today,” I announced. “Get your groans out.”

  They did so from atop their horses, some of whom stomped and flicked their tails as though in communion.

  “I do have good news.” I began walking around the inner circle. “You’ve already passed the first part of the test: mounting from a standstill. Now you’re going to mount at a trot.”

  Hesitation filled the air. They didn’t dismount like they should have.

  My hands went out. “Well? The sun’s only going to burn brighter the longer we’re out here.”

  “But,” said one of the guys, “we’ve only just begun to learn mounting at a walk.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A month ago.”

  More silence. More hesitation.

  “None of us will pass if it’s at a trot,” one of the girls finally said, her voice carrying the smallest quaver. She wasn’t one to complain, or to speak much at all. She fell a lot, and she usually did exactly what I told her to.

  I stopped, couldn’t help my smile. They were challenging me. And in that way, I knew how Callum Rathmore had felt back when he’d been my teacher. Sometimes it wasn’t about learning the mechanics. Those you could figure out on your own time, just by practicing.

  Back in high school, I’d always been too withdrawn to speak up. The only times I’d challenged anyone were when I felt threatened. Uncertain. Afraid. I’d pretended I didn’t care about school—about anything at all—but I did. I really, really did.

  I forced my smile away. “So you’re telling me the test is too advanced?”

  “Yes,” a third student said. “At a walk, maybe. But not at a trot.”

  “So”—I clasped my hands behind my back—“you’re all telling me you refuse to do it?”

  They didn’t answer. That wasn’t a line they were willing to cross in words, but they were doing so with their silence.

  I let out a long breath, my eyes traveling over each of them. It was time to be Sincere Clem. Teacher Clem. “I’m proud of you for knowing that, and for saying it. Mounting at a trot would probably have sent a few of you to the infirmary, and you would have a very unhappy Nurse Neverwink on your hands.”

  A few looked skeptical. The others were just confused.

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “today will be our last class. This was your final test, and you’ve all aced it.”

  “We didn’t even do anything,” the first guy blurted.

  “You did exactly what was best for you,” I said. “You can learn to mount at a trot later. You don’t need me—you just need you and the horse and some bruises. Trust me: there’ll be a lot of bruises.”

  “But why is it our last class?” a girl said. “It’s only April.”

  “I have to go away for a while. And besides, my work’s done here. Anything beyond today and I’d just get sick of your eager little faces.” I twirled a finger at them. “Now, I want you all to mount at the speed you can go. But if you haven’t got dirt on your ass by the end of class, you’re not doing it right.”

  I slipped away before the hour was over. None of them noticed; they just kept on practicing. End-of-the-year hugs weren’t my thing, anyway.

  When I came to the meadow, I was surprised to find Umbra already under our favorite tree. Her eyes were closed, her legs crossed, and she had a peace I’d rarely seen.

  The grass betrayed me, and her eyes opened as I came near. “Clementine. You’re early.”

  “So are you.” I unclipped my cloak, spread it like a blanket before I sat down. “Were you praying to the gods?”

  “The twelve gods?” One side of her mouth quirked. “There are so very many. I wouldn’t know which to start with.”

  “Do you believe they exist?” It was Quartermistress Farrow who’d first mentioned them to me; she was an avid believer. How else, she’d said, could you explain how humans could use magic?

  “I don’t believe or disbelieve.” Umbra’s hands folded in her lap. “I have no evidence for their existence.”

  “That sounds like you disbelieve.”

  “Let’s say I’m open to the possibility. Life has surprised me so many times before.”

  I exhaled a soft laugh, the whole film reel of the night I met Maeve Umbra running through my brain in a second and a half.

  Then I straightened my back. “I’m ready for the last test.”

  She did the same. “Do you feel ready?”

  “No,” I said, relieved she’d asked. “But I don’t have a choice. I know where the blade is, and I know I have to get it. I have to go tonight.”

  She nodded, slow and empathetic. “That is the way of things, isn’t it? We don’t just simply become ready. We do what we must, and we are ready when we must be.”

  “Yeah.” She was absolutely right, and I appreciated that she’d said it, but my queasy stomach forced me to add, “I guess.”

  I knew what the test would be. I knew I didn’t want it.
<
br />   All the same, I needed it.

  “All right.” She adjusted herself to face me directly, and I did the same. “We’ll begin.”

  With a snap of my fingers, the enshroudment spread up my body, enclosing me in a second.

  “Tell me,” Umbra said in a low, unignorable voice, “what happened the night your mother and sister disappeared.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Half an hour later, I stood up drenched, sweat running down my spine, dotting my hairline. My vision wavered, and my hand went out to a tree trunk.

  I was spent.

  “I’ll admit this,” Umbra said, soft and fatigued. Her forehead was beaded, too. “I wasn’t sure you could do it.”

  I wasn’t sure, either. My gaze steadied over the meadow, and I let out a long breath. “That’s the thing about being ready, isn’t it?”

  She gave a sharp, amused exhale from her seat on the grass. “Keep quoting my wisdom at me and I’ll reconsider passing you.”

  “As if you had a choice.” My fingers dug into the tree’s bark. I had held the enshroudment through it all, and I didn’t need Umbra’s approval to see what was obvious: no emotion could thwart my concentration.

  Even the story of the worst day of my life.

  “You’re right,” Umbra said. “I don’t have a choice. You’re simply marvelous.”

  In the silence that followed, I didn’t know what to say. The headmistress had never spoon-fed me honey like that. So I bent, gathering up my cloak, and met eyes with her. “I guess that’s it until next year.”

  When I turned away, she called my name—but not “Clem” or “child.” She said, “Clementine.”

  I turned back around, found her eyes wet and large. I suspected if I had been anyone else—someone softer—she would have been reaching her hand out for me. But as it was, she kept them in her lap.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “for what happened to your mother and sister.”

  “You and every counselor the state ever mandated for me.”

  Her fingers went out, touching the grass between us. A request for me to sit back down.

  I didn’t know why I sat. Maybe she’d trained me well enough over the years to think of her requests as commands, as periods instead of question marks. It definitely wasn’t because she was the only person who now knew the truth of that night.

  When I was seated, her head tilted, observing me like my features were new to her and also delightful. Finally, she said, “I wish I could teach you more.”

  “You can,” I said. “Unless you don’t think I’ll be coming back from Edinburgh.”

  “Life has taught me that every time you see a person, you should treat it as the gift it is.” She smoothed a wrinkle in the lap of her robes. “I’m sorry, Clementine, for the times I haven’t treated you as you deserved.”

  At once, the memory of her cornering me in her antechamber, admonishing me, rushed back. I pressed it aside. “It doesn’t matter now. All that matters is Edinburgh.”

  “Right. Of course.” She set the heel of her palm to one eye, rubbed. Maybe she really didn’t think I would survive this. “And you’re prepared?”

  “No.” I shrugged. “But we do what we have to when we have to do it.”

  She nodded, eyes on the ground between us. She inhaled, then her eyes lifted to mine, full of intent. “I hope you know, I’ve come to think of you like my own daughter.”

  A band I hadn’t known existed tightened around my chest, shrinking my air. And a strange old feeling rose in me; for as much as I wanted it, it made me uncomfortable. But not like it used to.

  I swallowed. And in a motion that surprised me even as it happened, my hand went out into the space between us, palm up. Offering.

  Umbra’s eyebrows lifted, her eyes shifting between my own and my hand. And then, with slow, steady grace, she placed her hand in mine, the mottled fingers clasping. “I do have one last thing to tell you before you go,” she said.

  “My skirt’s rolled up too high?”

  Her eyes flashed, the briefest smile appearing. “It is, but you’re incorrigible on that front. Clementine, the moonstone around your neck—I sense it will matter more than you know. Remember, it was your mother’s gift to you.”

  My hand went to it automatically, thumb rubbing over the smooth stone. Whether because of Umbra’s words or because of the memory of my mom, I wasn’t sure, but the band released its hold on my chest. “How?”

  “It’s just a feeling.” She squeezed my hand. “Come back from Edinburgh and find me. We’ll have tea and biscuits.”

  When she let my hand go, I stared at her as she rose. There was a finality about this conversation, as though she knew something I didn’t. “You still haven’t taught me everything you know,” I said, rising. “That was your promise.”

  She swept her cloak around her, clasping it with a wink. “Haven’t I?”

  I threw out a hand to indicate the grounds around us. “I can’t throw an enchantment over miles.”

  “Oh, that.” She flicked a hand as we began walking. “That’s like asking me to teach you to bake a cake when you’ve already mastered muffins.”

  When we arrived at the steps to her home, she was Headmistress Umbra again, that strange combination of gravity and flippancy. And it was only as she turned away without so much as a hug that I realized she and I had something in common I’d never had the wherewithal to see.

  Vulnerability was hard for her, too.

  I rubbed my fingers together. For as much as it had taken for me to offer my hand, it had probably taken her as much to accept the offer.

  “Headmistress,” I called out, “if you think of me like your daughter, does that mean I can invite myself up for sandwiches and tea?”

  She glanced back with a half-smile. “Absolutely not. This is prime naptime for old ladies.”

  I watched as she ascended the steps to her house, the wisp of her cloak disappearing around the tree’s great trunk. And it came to me all at once.

  That old feeling I’d experienced when Umbra had told me she thought of me like her daughter—it was how I’d used to feel when my own mother told me she loved me.

  Back then, it hadn’t been uncomfortable.

  When I stepped into Umbra’s empty antechamber a few minutes later, my eyes rose—as they always did—to the wisps hovering near the ceiling.

  For the first time, I knew exactly what they were. Trapped souls from the fifteenth century, the Shade’s experiments. For whatever reason, Umbra was their guardian. Their caretaker. And now I knew why and how they had whispered to me.

  But as their words returned to mind, I still didn’t understand why they had once called this “the ancient place.” Or why they believed I was returning to a spot I had never stood before.

  Though now that I knew about what lay under my feet, I had a feeling I was closer to the answer than ever.

  It occurred to me as I began pacing the edge of the room, approaching the sun painted into the floor, that I had grown comfortable with my life being a snarl of mysteries. After seven years spent not knowing whether I’d keep on being an orphan or adopted into someone’s family, I guess I’d been prepared for it. I had long ago learned how to live with uncertainty. To bit by bit pull away the snarl until the truth was revealed.

  When I set my toe to the center of the sun, the spot depressed, and out slid the stairs up to Umbra’s office. An old secret.

  But—as I kept walking the edge of the room, approaching the far side—I wondered if it was connected to a new secret.

  I followed the story of the Battle of the Ages to the far side, day shifting to night in the tale at my feet. And directly opposite the round, blazing sun sat a round, silver moon. When I came to it, I remembered this part: the final standoff with the witch in the forest, where the great mage and a legion of fae allies defeated the Shade. Condemned her to Hell.

  It had been nighttime then. And as my toe extended toward the moon, pressing it down, I had a sen
se of which hour of the night it had occurred. That ghostly, horrific hour when I wasn’t supposed to show my face. When I had once been kidnapped. When the Shade gained some foothold in the world.

  The witching hour.

  As the moon depressed in a perfect circle, sliding stone sounded around the edge of the room. When I glanced over my shoulder, a section of the floor had disappeared, and whatever lay down there was wide open to me.

  I approached the head of the stone staircase with a flame already lit in my palm, staring down into blackness. No magical torches were lit now. Nobody was there at all.

  I began my descent, my shoes and breath the only noise, until I passed out of the light of the antechamber and into the darkness and one of the magical torches whooshed to life on the wall. Its color, like all of Umbra’s magical lighting, was odd—an iridescent yellow-white, like the very center of a flame.

  The torch’s cone of light revealed the base of the stairs, where the hallway began. And when I reached the bottom, another torch came on, heralding my way deeper in.

  I only had to walk to the end of the hallway. I only had to make a left at the junction and then open the first door on my left, where I had seen Umbra and Neverwink bring Milonakis. Where I had seen Umbra lift a jar off a shelf and use a mortar and pestle to grind up the valerian.

  I just needed that jar.

  But along the way, I passed three doors. The striations of the old wood came into the strange white light as the torches lit, and I stared at them as I walked slowly past, still holding my own flame in my hand—the same hand that itched to extinguish the flame and reach for one of the latches.

  Umbra thought of me like a daughter. She didn’t want me down here, and for the first time since I’d met her years ago, I had begun to trust she had a good reason for that.

  She cared about me. About my well-being.

  So I let my hand itch. I kept walking, ignoring the doors as old Clementine never would have done, until I reached the junction. When I turned left, I found the correct door—cracked open—and caught a glimpse of the shelves of jars inside.