Chapter Six
CHAPTER
Six
The Magic Quarter was lined with gourds.
Hollowed ones, snarling in carved faces that glowed with a dark green flicker not even the rising wind could snuff out.
Witch light. Zofka was not the sole witch living here that felt the cold threat of persecution breathing down her neck.
It had been a hundred years since the height of the witch trials that had scourged Europe, but all witches lived with that legacy.
Magic Hunters still existed. These modern-day Hunters were not fuelled by paranoia and religious fervour, but a mission to keep power sitting on thrones and ruling empires, stopping magical communities from forming and growing too powerful.
Becoming a threat to the way they liked their world run.
This was why magic needed to remain a secret.
The gourds growled a warning as Thea passed them. Something told her that Pan Novak would not take this new addition to the Quarter well. They needed to shut him out before he shut them down or had them arrested for treason. The Magic Quarter was a tinderbox and Pan Novak had just struck a flint.
A nearby tree howled a lament as Thea pulled her velvet cloak tighter around herself, hurrying back to her apothecary.
She’d been for a long walk through the woods, ruminating on Malek’s strange request, on Jasper’s concern over the wards, as if he was out of his depth for a change, and her head was full, her thoughts wheeling like gulls through a storm.
Thea kept seeing the girl’s face. She had refused to take time from her, and nothing had happened.
All those dreams and memories and life she’d taken to balance the scales while fate-weaving .
. . Had she ever needed to take them? Or was Jasper hiding something?
She needed to test this theory. The next time she fate-wove, she resolved not to take a price again.
Buckets of roses hissed at Thea as she passed the Rose Basket; usually Rose removed their thorns, but these were spiteful. Even the weathervane perched atop the apothecary roof was keeping a wary eye out in the form of a hunting eagle: the Magic Quarter was raising its shields.
A curl of parchment pinned to Thea’s door distracted her. Could it be a note from Malek? She had not heard from him in several days, and she kept dwelling on him and his dimple in pockets of idle time.
Her smile hardened as she neared. In the darkness, she hadn’t seen what was beneath the note: a raven had been nailed to her door. Thea froze in place, horror seizing her body and mind.
The raven’s eyes sprang open.
Thea wasn’t aware she’d made a sound until Talibah came running across the street and was suddenly at her side, holding her.
‘It’s still alive,’ Thea whispered hoarsely, unable to look away from the poor creature. Voicing this aloud made Thea snap out of her own nightmare and rush to support the raven, murmuring soothing words as Talibah slid out the long, jagged nail.
They took it inside the apothecary, locking and bolting the door as Talibah bustled about, finding a suitable box and soft cloth to keep the messenger raven comfortable while Thea sat on the bottom step of her spiral staircase and cleaned its wound before bandaging it up tightly.
It was a small puncture, but deep; the nail had run straight through its fragile body, piercing gods knew what in its path.
Determination bled through Thea’s sadness: she would save it.
As Thea felt for the threads, the apothecary glimmered, alive with the tapestry of fate.
The raven’s threads were worn thin, ragged.
Thea twined more threads around them, reinforcing them until the raven’s fate shone brighter, taking a memory of her own as payment: the memory of reading the first chapters of Eudora and the Ship’s Captain last night.
‘Have you read the note?’
Talibah’s voice summoned Thea back to the present. She placed the raven into the box Talibah was holding out, tucking the creature under several layers of soft cloths to keep it warm. ‘I have.’
Talibah ripped the note into pieces. ‘I am coming for you.’ She scoffed.
‘Drivel. Written by weak people who detest anyone with greater power than them. There was a reason this was pinned to your door and not said to your face. A reason why they inflicted their hatred on a poor, defenceless creature.’ Talibah sank onto the step beside Thea.
Weariness was etched into the fine lines around her eyes.
Thea reached for a nearby slab of soap, filled with plump mallow root, lavender flowers and fallen starlight, and slipped it into Talibah’s pocket. ‘This means the wards are failing us.’
‘I agree,’ Thea said.
Talibah rested her head on Thea’s shoulder.
They both looked down on the raven. Its eyes were closed but the shallow rise and fall of its chest marked it as sleeping.
Thea softly stroked its beak. It was beetle-black and shiny as enamel.
‘I came to Prague because I’d heard rumours about this place,’ Talibah said.
‘That there was a Magic Quarter who welcomed magic and magical folk. People who were different. Now I wonder if we’ve been na?ve all these years, if the threat had been here all along, biding its time.
A wolf snapping its jaws at a paddock of sheep, patiently salivating until it finds a way through the gates. ’
‘I’d pay to hear you call Rose a sheep to her face,’ Thea said drily.
‘Do you ever wonder what drew you to Prague before you lost your memories?’ Talibah turned her curiosity onto Thea.
‘All the time.’ Thea stroked the raven’s wing.
‘I don’t know if I’d already been living in the city or if I’d been elsewhere, searching for a new home, and found it in Prague.
I don’t even know if I want to know what drove me to give it all up, who I was back then that led me down this path.
But we can’t think like that,’ she said firmly.
‘We belong here as much as we do anywhere. It’s the people who believe there is no place for outsiders, for magic and immigrants and people who live and love differently to them, that are the problem, not us, do you hear me? ’
‘I hear you.’ Talibah tilted her head, considering. An echo of a smile played with the edges of her mouth. ‘You can be quite fierce, you know. I hope that man with the dimple knows what he’s getting himself into.’
Thea let out a surprised laugh. Then a groan. ‘That’s a whole other problem.’
‘I did think I’d spotted him coming inside the other day,’ Talibah said. ‘Is it a problem that you wish to discuss?’ she asked carefully.
Thea’s finger stilled on the raven wing. ‘He’s asked me to fate-weave for him,’ she admitted.
‘Ah.’
‘It’s an unusual request; I need to figure out how I’m going to fulfil it.’ Thea tugged her hair back. ‘It’s not important right now.’ The raven’s heartbeat was weak, thready. She’d never attempted to wrench something back from the brink of death before. ‘What shall we call this poor fellow?’
Talibah glanced at the raven. ‘He was badly wounded—’
‘He’s going to be fine,’ Thea said stubbornly.
‘And you?’ Talibah tucked a loose strand of Thea’s hair behind her ear. ‘I would sleep better if you were nearby, safe with me at the bookshop. Whoever did this targeted you, Thea, and if the wards are faltering, you need to be on your guard.’
‘I can’t leave now.’ Thea stared down at the raven. ‘Giving into my fear would be easy, but it would make it harder to return. Besides, I refuse to be chased out of my own home.’ A new, sudden fear pierced her.
‘What is it? You’ve gone pale . . .’
Thea thrust the raven’s box at Talibah, picked up her skirts and ran to the stairs that led to her private quarters.
Talibah called her name, sharp with alarm, but horror was pounding a new beat through Thea’s pulse, the spell in place of her heart faltering as she crashed through her door.
Fear swelled and swelled, swallowing her whole, until something moved in the corner of her eye.
Thea half collapsed to the floor in relief, pulling Cinnamon onto her lap as Talibah ran in with the raven box. ‘I was so worried.’ Thea’s voice wobbled, betraying her.
Talibah gently set the raven down and met Thea on the floor, gathering her into her arms. Cinnamon’s nose twitched happily at all the attention. ‘I hope you don’t snore,’ Talibah told Thea, ‘because I’m not going anywhere tonight.’
Thea had been certain she was in for a sleepless night.
But she hadn’t reckoned on Talibah, who told her stories and secrets until the candles burned low.
‘I lost my heart in Arabia,’ Talibah whispered in her melodic voice, unwinding her headscarf and changing into one of Thea’s nightgowns, as she told the tale Thea loved best. ‘To a man who guided me deep into the desert, with windswept hair, whose laugh remains my favourite sound to this day. I’ll never forget the look on Amir’s face as he stared out across those red sands after we’d climbed a rock arch together.
I loved him deeper with each passing day, but it wasn’t enough to stay. It’s never enough to stay.’
‘When will you visit him again?’ Sometimes, Talibah made the trip to Arabia.
Other times, they journeyed to a different point on the atlas and met there, in places with names that tasted like spices and desert winds.
Thea couldn’t imagine finding the other half of her heart and soul only to spend years apart, but love worked in a hundred different ways.
Talibah hesitated. ‘When I don’t need to worry about leaving you and Zofka here.’
‘Do you ever consider going to live with Amir?’ Thea asked, even as the very notion made her chest ache.
‘All the time. Each time I think this will be the last visit, that this time I will stay, that this time he will not wish to travel any more, but we are twin souls, destined to wander the world. I am only grateful that occasionally, the stars align and our ships pass in the night.’
Thea sighed wistfully. ‘It’s terribly romantic.’
Talibah’s laugh was low, tinged with that pain, that love that she carried every day. ‘All the best love stories ache the most.’
‘If I get my heart back, I hope that I’ll fall in love.
But sometimes I lie awake at night, convinced that I gave my memories up because I’d already found love and it proved too painful.
’ Perhaps an old love, turned sour. Or the most painful kind of love that existed, the one that was never to be returned, leaving you with sweet agony burning in your chest each time you crossed paths.
‘I’m still combing the stacks for anything that might help,’ Talibah said softly. ‘I want you to know, Zofka and I will never stop searching for how to return your memories.’
Thea found Talibah’s hand and squeezed it.
‘I know.’ But it had been seven years: if they were going to find a way, they would have found it by now.
Thea had long since given up. ‘Maybe I’ve never fallen in love and my love story is yet to come.
I hope it will be sweet and easy, like falling into a meadow of wildflowers. ’
‘I wish that for you, too,’ Talibah said.
She did not say that life was rarely like that, that it was big and hard and could be every bit as terrible as it was wonderful.
She didn’t need to voice what they both knew as they fell into silence, listening for the raven’s breath, though it was too small to hear.
‘Sometimes I worry that I’ve missed my chance,’ Thea confessed as the candles guttered, leaving them at the mercy of the moon, traipsing in and out of the clouds – Thea slept with her windows flung open, to hear the rustle of the trees and count the stars.
‘That maybe the opportunity to seize my heart back opened up but I didn’t take that leap.
Now I’m in my thirties and if I want that love, that family of my own’ – she clenched her bedsheets either side of her, battling the emotion rising in her throat – ‘it’s almost too late. ’
Talibah propped herself up on one elbow.
A lost beam of moonlight fell over her face as she regarded Thea.
‘There is no one right way to do things,’ she said seriously.
‘Life looks different for everybody and just because something you want hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it won’t.
There are a thousand different stories waiting in your life, Thea, and you still have time to tell whichever one you want. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’
Thea relaxed. ‘How did you grow to be so wise?’
Talibah laid back on the neighbouring pillow. ‘It’s all the books I read.’
Death stalked Thea’s dreams that night. Hunting her soul with his sharp hunger and sharper scythe, her lost heart beating from its box, summoning her to find it. When Death gazed down upon her, he held her heart-box. And he wore Jasper’s face.
Thea awoke the following morning to floorboards bathed in golden sunlight, Talibah’s hair like spilled silk. Thea lay there, caught between the realms of sleep and waking, confused by what had roused her until she heard it once more: a soft cawing.
The raven had lived through the night.