Chapter 31
CHAPTER
Thirty-One
I can’t be Jasper’s wife,’ Thea told her trusty old teapot, painted a bright cherry-red with its cracked handle that hadn’t yet given way.
The teapot steamed. But all the lavender and camomile and soothing fairy’s tears she’d crammed into it couldn’t ease her relentless mind. She poured a second cup, then a third.
Sitting in a little rocking chair in the furthest corner of her growing space, between her anxious apple tree and a couple of cherry trees that crept closer, bouncing in their pots when she wasn’t looking, Thea rocked and sipped tea and stared up at the snow falling onto her glass roof.
Perhaps she was better off not knowing what she’d forgotten. Maybe life would be happier that way. Thea stopped rocking.
Jasper had told her that his daughter died and she knew from Zofka that he was a widower but Thea was very much alive. Though if she had been Jasper’s wife, she supposed with her missing memories and lists of names that didn’t belong to her, she was lost enough to him.
She put her teacup down on the nearest table. It missed, shattering on the floor. The cherry trees curled their leaves away, the apple tree shaking in panic, but Thea scarcely noticed. Had that been her daughter?
She surged to her feet. Enough was enough: she was sick of Jasper’s half-truths, of battling her own cursed mind. It was time to get her memories back. And if Jasper refused to do so, she would simply have to find a way around that. Luckily, he was not the only fate-weaver she happened to know.
Dipping a quill into her favourite sapphire ink, she penned a quick note to the person she wanted to speak to least. The person that might just hold all the answers.
Maybe Thea could save the Quarter herself, right the wrongs she’d caused when she’d broken the wards.
And if she was the reason that the Quarter was being threatened, if she learnt why, maybe she could fix that, too.
I wish to speak with you.
Meet me on Prague Bridge, after sundown.
After whistling for a raven, she tied the note around its ankle. ‘Take this to Heloise. Do not enter the Crossroads, but wait for her outside, do you understand?’
The raven croaked in acknowledgement and flew out of the window.
Waiting for a response, though she was not sure one would come, Thea wandered upstairs, where she seized her Compendium of Magic, searching for anything she’d missed. Anything that might help save the Quarter. Her eyes fell on the last entries of the love story penned into the margins:
The walls of my life are closing in on me. I am beginning to fear I shall never evade them. The sole time I feel free, I feel myself, is with him. My love. We traded rings today, wisps of gold that encircle our fingers. When I wear mine, I feel his heartbeat.
She snapped the book shut. It was just a coincidence.
Taking it upstairs, she made herself some hot chocolate, even though she’d already drunk enough tea to send her running to the chamber pot every other minute.
Clasping the warm cup in both hands, she sat on the edge of her bed, looking at the Compendium.
It stared back at her. She flipped it back open and reread the last entry penned by the mysterious previous apprentice of the apothecary:
We ran away together. We had no choice, but if I had to make a choice, I would choose him, always and forever. A thousand times over, I would choose him.
Thea knocked her hot chocolate over one of her yellow knitted blankets.
Cursing, she mopped it up with a shaking hand before forcing herself to read on, ignoring how the words seemed to echo Heloise’s when she’d confronted Thea on the bridge.
We all missed you so very much after you ran away.
Sensing her disquiet, Cinnamon hopped onto the bed and nestled into her side.
Our first home together. Could there be any more beautiful words in any language?
I think not. It is smaller, simpler than what I am accustomed to, and yet I think it the nicest place I have ever seen.
We are inseparable, day and night. He cooks for me.
I collect bunches of wildflowers until our cottage blooms. These woodlands that surround us are quieter than the wild forests where we met, yet they possess a certain elegance.
Here, nature is not a force to be feared, a magic to tame, but a quiet walk beside a frothing brook, hand in hand.
The hedgehogs and badgers and foxes I feed each twilight.
The blossoming violets outside our windows.
Only the people are strange. But we have each other, and that is all we shall ever need.
Thea couldn’t finish her hot chocolate. She turned on her side and lay on her bed, words and thoughts floating around her like clouds. Too insubstantial to hold onto, to understand, but thick enough to disorientate her.
Zofka sent breakfast. Then a mid-morning snack, which was shortly followed by lunch, with a mid-afternoon snack arriving not an hour later.
Thea collected each one to prevent the kitchen-witch from fretting, though she didn’t have the stomach to eat.
The reprieve that Heloise had given them was running down the clock.
The apothecary’s shelves rumbled as if it was hungry, enticing Thea with scents of warm sugar biscuits, fried cheese and potato dumplings, hot toast puddled with butter, and rich hot chocolate by turns.
It only coaxed her into her kitchen when she caught Cinnamon sniffing, his whiskers trembling.
When she got up to fetch him some vegetables, cutting carrots and broccoli into a bowl for her rabbit, she noticed that Talibah, too, had sent her goodies: a new stack of romance novels waited on the doorstop.
She brought them inside, though she still had plenty to read; with the whirl of threats and danger and business that autumn and now winter had brought, she still hadn’t started Eudora and the Ship’s Captain.
A note poked out of the cover of the topmost book:
Jasper has called everyone together this evening, to start our counter-attack. I’ll let you know what the plan is if you don’t come.
With love, Talibah
Thea retreated upstairs in case Jasper happened by the apothecary, though she doubted he’d dare.
She had no wish to have everyone blaming her for the demise of the Magic Quarter.
Especially since they were right: the void was a raging reminder of her biggest mistake.
Besides, she had her own plans for how to save the Quarter, and as soon as the sun went down, she would act.
Curling up on her bed, with Cinnamon’s head resting on her stomach, Thea slept at last. When she next woke, sunset was bleeding across the sky. Heloise’s reprieve was over.
Thea lurched up. Her head already filling with noise instead of memories, with questions and worries that howled like a hunting wolf.
She’d always believed she worried so much, thought too hard, because her mind was overcompensating for her lack of memories, her missing heart.
Now she wasn’t sure what to believe. Perhaps she was like Zofka, who couldn’t keep still, only it was her thoughts rather than her body that refused to calm.
A flurry of shadow cut through the snowfall, manifesting at Thea’s window. She hurried to let the raven in. She didn’t want to read anything anyone might have sent her, especially if it came from Jasper, but she’d never leave a raven out in the cold.
Biscuit cawed happily as he fluttered through the window and landed on the bedside table, folding his wings back and lowering his beak for gentle scritches. Thea relieved him of his note as she rubbed his stomach with a knuckle:
I am sorrier than you’ll ever know that I cannot give you the answers you need. Stay home, I shall re-forge the wards under the light of the full winter’s moon tonight. I will not allow Heloise to enter the Quarter, you have my solemn vow that I shall do whatever it takes to keep you safe.
Forever yours,
Jasper
More ravens crowded behind Biscuit, bearing notes from Talibah and Zofka, appraising her of their plans to fight back against the foe that Thea had exposed them all to.
Heloise’s words whispered around her skull, haunting her: I want to raze your precious Magic Quarter to the ground, and drag you screaming away from your friends’ corpses.
No matter what past she might have once held, Thea would never ignore that Zofka and Talibah were her present-day family, and she couldn’t risk their lives.
Nor could she allow Heloise to march on the Quarter and decimate it; regardless of how Rose, Fleur, Zdenka, Wojslav and all the others felt about her, she’d grown fond of them over the years.
Thea would face her so-claimed sister herself.
She pulled on her forest-green velvet cloak and stole out into the winter’s night like a wraith, ignoring Jasper’s note.
A pot had been left on her doorstep with strict instructions to Eat me!
in Zofka’s looping script, but there was no time to take it inside now.
She needed to hurry before she lost all nerve, her decision, her desperation for the truth weighing her cloak and soul down.
The future of the Magic Quarter rested on her shoulders now.
She hurried up the street, keeping to the shadows, far from the void that seemed to be widening by the hour, devouring a little more of the Quarter bit by bit.
Crunching a path through the snow, she kept her hood low, evading the weather-witches that were monitoring the void, the pixies sitting in the lowest branches of the oaks, keeping a watchful eye out, and Jasper.
He stood beside the Crypt, with its turret of ravens, the dark-winged birds flying in and out like inky quills. His back was turned to her, he seemed to be commanding a group of magical folk as he held that same gleaming object he’d removed from his vault.