Chapter One #2
Nettlestone Hall perched over Hallow, a town built almost entirely out of museums and bookshops and universities dedicated to magical learning.
The gray cobblestone streets wound around turrets crowned with more gargoyles than anywhere else on the whole of the earth.
They were a favorite in the witching world, perched on rooftops and spelled to wake and gobble up any wayward spells that might threaten the inhabitants beneath.
Small or massive, sleek or round, they watched over the witches below.
Farther below the cliff and the gathered gargoyles, Hallow’s leather-bound tomes sat on shelves, waited in windows to tempt passersby.
Curiosities were displayed, signs enticed people to visit the Museum of Hexes, the Library of Magical Grimoires, the university collection of fourteenth-century spells, all clustered together on winding stone roads crossed with ornate bridges.
As well as a truly terrifying Museum of Dolls.
Visiting Oxford professors felt right at home in Hallow, as it was said that the old city was based on Hallow. Curators from the London Museum of Magic also felt at home here. Ostensibly.
As she had still not seen Aidan Carnahan, Earl of Coventry, in some time, Sorcha was only guessing.
She was not searching. Not even now, as she passed the bakery where she routinely delivered a cartload of scones. Because ancient tomes and cavernous libraries and professors who corrected your grammar notwithstanding, even witch scholars ate bread. So much bread. And raspberry scones.
So many scones.
Honestly, they ought to try eating some greens now and again. A pear. Fish cakes.
They were lucky Aesop loved baking them, because after approximately a thousand, Sorcha decided she would never bake another again.
One of the professors had wept, convinced he would never finish his research papers without a pot of bergamot black tea and a raspberry scone every day precisely at a quarter past four.
Aesop was hailed as a hero. Bouquets of flowers were sent to Nettlestone every day for a week.
He had loved it, weaving a crown for his horns and tiny crowns for the cats and the three-legged dog who would only let Aesop scratch his ears.
Not even Sorcha was allowed. (Something she was still put out about, as she had been the one to pull him out of that thicket.
It had not been a pleasant ordeal. For either of them.)
The Autumn Equinox Festival days loomed, and so tonight Hallow was decorated with pennants and wheat dollies tied with red ribbons, baskets of grapes and apples and pears on every corner. Evil-eye beads hung in windows, some as large as dinner plates.
It was a time of hard work in the fields, making wine and ale and eating more bread than a person ought to consume.
Celebrating the second harvest entailed far more pleasure than the last harvest, which was all about blisters on the hands and rushing to pick the blackberries from the hedges before they were claimed by the pooka.
On the mainland, they fought the devil for the blackberry harvest. Sorcha had never seen a devil, but she had seen a pooka, with its skeletal horse head and burning ember eyes.
But this evening it was only red ribbons and tea carts painted like gingerbread houses and torches burning in decorative iron cages shaped like ivy leaves.
Where Hallow could not decorate with a gargoyle, it decorated with ivy leaves.
She could not help glancing inside the bookshops, opened late and glowing with the light of oil lamps, inside tiny, hidden museums, for Aidan Carnahan, the irritating Earl of Coventry.
Not that she expected to see him. It had been weeks.
Not that she had noticed.
Very much.
It wasn’t her fault that they had shared one searing kiss that had altered her topography. Rivers ran through dry bedrock; fields bloomed. Mountains crumbled and re-formed.
All because of one kiss.
It was rather inconvenient.
One unexpected moment between exasperated glances, between her biting remarks meant to distract him from his work. As his work had involved trying to arrest her friend Briar, Sorcha had no remorse on that front.
Which had made the kiss all the more surprising.
They had been picking their way through the wild rosebushes overrunning Lyonesse due to a curse he had been hunting.
White petals glowed, drifting in every sea breeze.
Thorns gleamed. It had been rather beautiful in its own way, before the roses began to press at the windows and the doors, trapping the witches in Haven and Hallow—choking their mouths with petals, binding them with thorny vines.
Consuming, consuming. Every bird on the island had sent her frantic images of lovely white tea roses, warnings from hawks and robins and phoenixes.
Even a Stymphalian marsh bird, and they feared nothing and no one.
But before that, just before that: the kiss.
Rose-scented and dangerous.
So deliciously dangerous.
Aidan’s mouth on hers, rough, just a little bit stern. Seeking, taking. Unearthing reactions inside her body, the way he found old artifacts and brought them out to be admired. She had never felt like that before. Necessary. Consumed.
And then he was gone.
And every day since, and every night, the image of him was conjured behind her eyelids, entirely unbidden.
Mostly unbidden.
The curator with the tousled brown hair, the furrowed brow, as he chased serious thought after serious thought.
Strong, muscled forearms she would not have associated with someone associated with the London Museum of Magic.
A neatly trimmed beard most definitely not associated with earls or the aristocracy at large.
Even on a secret island of witches, London fashions tended to rule.
And she imagined the museum had a great many Rules.
She did not particularly care for rules.
It had made teasing him so very easy.
Even so, she had felt as if she understood him, a little, even if he clearly did not understand her.
That was hardly new. Most people, Briar, Pippa, and her grandmother notwithstanding, were routinely baffled by her.
And Sorcha herself generally understood wild dogs and marsh birds and goats better than most witches. Better than most people altogether.
Except for serious, polite Aidan, who knew how to properly greet a dowager at Almack’s Assembly but also how to wrestle a piece of baneful magic and how to take down an Iron Crow, who were feared by most witches for their flexible moral compasses and extremely dubious talents of magical thievery.
Aidan had been on Lyonesse hunting a moon amulet stolen by Briar’s sister, Petal.
Petal tended to attract trouble to Briar’s doorstep and then skip away untouched.
She had brought Aidan, the museum curator, and an Iron Crow, Ethan Swansea, as well as a curse.
Not with any real malice, only with her particular lack of forethought.
And that Crow, the most feared Captain Swansea, had taken a shine to the quiet, stubborn Briar, and Briar to him.
So in the end, Briar did not mind the trouble much.
Aidan, Sorcha was certain, felt differently.
London witches liked to visit Lyonesse as a vacation to the seaside but they did not often linger.
And someone like Aidan, who spent most of his waking hours in an old building stuffed with amulets and broken swords and bits of crockery possibly used by King Arthur, was not the type to walk the beach barefoot, eating gooseberry ices.
He was focused, clever, respectful. Even to Briar, who was a green witch under suspicion whom no one else bothered to be polite to, and he was even polite to Ethan—who was, let’s be clear, a bit of a criminal—and to Sorcha, who was… well, Sorcha.
It was refreshing. Curious.
And then he was just…gone.
She might have sent her paper birds on the search. Only the once.
Very well, twice. But her birds did not travel to London, and so there was little use in it.
Then she had given herself a good shake, remembered that drinking red wine on a belly filled only with raspberries and mushrooms foraged on a forest walk was a Very Bad Idea and decided to pretend she had never sent her birds, nor, indeed, ever met a certain earl.
She had met many earls in her day. She could not possibly be expected to remember them all.
And she had left both her Debrett’s Peerage and her Witch’s Debrett’s in London and so could not refresh her memory.
Again, not that she had tried. It hardly signified.
She was not in Hallow now to look for Aidan Carnahan.
And she could not afford to be distracted, not with her crown of paper birds still circling her, waiting for her to follow. And nothing made that fact more obvious than the tattered poster tacked to a narrow shop selling magical inks.
Wanted: The Red Cloak.
But tonight her cloak was white.
She had made sure of it.