Chapter 33
CHAPTER
Thirty-Three
Before Thea, before Jasper could react, Zofka move first. ‘You don’t deserve to call her sister,’ she snarled, hurling her arms up and out.
Thea had seen Zofka’s magic before; as a kitchen-witch, anything that came from her stove, her ovens, was deliciously bewitching.
She had a way with flour and sugar that could cure a cold, ease a heartbreak or alter a mood.
Thea had even seen the way ingredients responded to Zofka; she could reverse the direction of a spill with a flick of her fingers.
But Thea had never seen her channel magic like this before.
The Gingerbread House, being a café built entirely from enchanted panes of gingerbread biscuit, responded to Zofka’s magical outburst.
It exploded.
The glazed roof blew off, sending gigantic sugar-plums rolling through the street, half of them going until they dropped down the void. With a rush of air, as if the café had sucked in a breath, the sugar windows shattered.
Jasper lunged at Thea, knocking her chair over backwards as he braced above her, protecting her from the flying shards of sugar, each one dagger-sharp. ‘Thank you,’ she gasped, drinking in his dark blue gaze as he stared back at her. Wondering. Wanting.
All the magical folk that had crammed into the café fled, diving out of the gaping holes where the windows had been. Shape-shifters that could fly and jump shifted forms to exit faster.
The walls of gingerbread creaked and groaned as the tapestry of fate manifested around Thea. ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ Jasper said grimly, rolling off Thea as he began his own working, severing threads as quickly as Heloise knotted them. Preventing her from escaping.
Zofka threw up her arms and the gingerbread walls snapped.
With a grunt of exertion, Zofka sent them charging towards Heloise, the biscuit crumbling as Zofka reshaped her walls into smaller panels.
Panting under the effort, Zofka clenched her fingers into fists, making the panels reform around Heloise, containing her in a gingerbread prison.
Thea sat up.
Jasper swiftly knotted a tangle of fate around the construction. ‘That should hold her for a short time.’
‘Zofka, sit down.’ Gretel sounded more overwrought than Thea had ever heard. Thea and Talibah whirled round to see Zofka wobbling in place, an exhausted smile on her mouth. She allowed Gretel to push her down onto a chair.
Thea stared at the ruins of the Gingerbread House. ‘What did you do?’ she whispered, horrified.
Piped icing dribbled across the floor, melting into a small river that carried broken gingerbread chairs and tables out into the street.
Zofka flapped a hand, seeming remarkably unconcerned. ‘It’s fine, we were due for a remodel anyway.’
A low rumbling sounded. It heralded Rose, who stuck her head around the last remaining piece of the Gingerbread House: its front door. ‘That nasty little worm’s back, and he’s brought his friends with him.’
Pan Novak marched through the Magic Quarter, surrounded by Hunters, enough to render himself unreachable. They were an army walking into battle, pistols loaded, swords raised.
Once, witnessing this sight would have terrified Thea.
Now, in the wake of her returned memories, she saw Pan Novak for who he really was: insignificant.
He might have been handling the commercial side of the Quarter’s demise, but Thea had spent enough of her adolescence being manipulated by her sister to see Heloise’s work behind this.
Pan Novak was merely dancing on her strings.
‘I see you’ve got your memories back.’ Paní Dagmar appeared in front of Thea, peering into her eyes with a smile that buried her eyes in wrinkles. ‘Didn’t I tell you that your name was Theodora?’ she cackled.
Snapping from her reverie, Thea laughed, embracing the ancient witch, her dear friend in Prague when they’d lived here, the first time around.
Some five hundred years ago. ‘Of course – you were Jasper’s friend still living here in the Quarter!
All those times I thought you were just pestering my customers for spell ingredients. ’ She shook her head, wondering.
Paní Dagmar cackled again. ‘Well, I had to keep an eye on you.’
‘Though you can’t blame me for doubting you . . .’ Thea frowned. ‘Why do you keep calling Rose “Daffodil”?’
Paní Dagmar lowered her voice. ‘Why else? She detests it.’
They laughed together before Thea sobered. ‘What are you doing out here? Go inside, it’s freezing and—’ She fell silent as Pan Novak threw up a hand and his army halted.
‘You have all been found in breach of the law,’ Pan Novak said.
His smile was most unpleasant. It was no surprise he’d allied himself with Heloise; they bore the same sick satisfaction from others’ misfortune.
Once Thea had watched from behind a tree as Heloise had toyed with a frog’s threads, making it contort and shudder in pain.
She could imagine Pan Novak inflicting the same poison on a vulnerable target.
‘You are harbouring dangerous magic that presents a threat to the good people of Prague. I come bearing warrants for each one of your arrests.’
A second ominous rumble sounded.
Pan Novak stood fast, even as a couple of the Hunters shuffled, casting uncertain glances at each other.
‘I warn you, if you resist, we will shoot to kill,’ Pan Novak finished.
Thea spread her fingers, ready to reach for the threads of fate, to take out Pan Novak first, but there were too many Hunters, their weapons pointed at the people she loved most. Zofka and Talibah and Paní Dagmar, and Gretel and Rose and Zdenka and Fleur and even Wojslav.
And Jasper. Who had been forever at her side, protecting her even when she did not remember him.
Even while she loathed him and courted another.
‘Not yet, hold for the plan,’ he murmured, at her side, always.
Her fingers itched to entwine with his, to stand with him as one, as they always had.
Until she had broken, and he hadn’t been able to fix her.
Now her heart was raw, but it was no longer an open wound.
‘Now!’ Jasper yelled.
Figures appeared through the dense snowfall, standing on rooftops like statues. They flanked each side of the street. Weather-witches. Raising their arms as one, their magic whirled through the Quarter as Pan Novak and the Hunters eyed them with increasing suspicion.
The temperature dropped. Ice ran along the street, crackling as it devoured everything standing in its path.
Zofka and Gretel leapt back, behind the Gingerbread House doorway to avoid the ice. Zdenka, over by the Rose Basket, was too late, and lost one of their boots. Three of the Hunters were later, and the weather-witches took advantage: ice rushed up their shoes and stockings, freezing them in place.
‘Enough.’ Pan Novak’s voice knifed through the chaos. ‘Any more of this shall be met with a prolonged interrogation in a cell.’ He flashed that thin-lipped smile for the first time that night, sending a chill over Thea. ‘And I will personally ensure that it will not be . . . pleasant.’
‘We refuse to yield to you,’ Jasper said calmly.
Thea was wondering what else he and the other magical folk had concocted in the meeting she’d skipped, when she heard a deep intake of breath.
She glanced back at Zofka, who was an alarming shade of milk after she’d blasted her own café apart, supported by both Gretel and Talibah, but it hadn’t sounded like any of them.
Her gaze travelled higher and higher still.
Up to the apothecary rooftop, where her weathervane dragon had grown again since she’d last noticed it.
If it wasn’t night-time, it would have cast half the Quarter into shadow.
It was your weathervane, Jasper had told her just an hour earlier.
It was a gift. She hadn’t believed him then, but she remembered now.
Guessing what was coming, she grinned at Pan Novak.
Paní Dagmar gave a dark little chuckle. Rose and Zofka and Thea herself had often wondered what kind of witch Paní Dagmar was; her haberdashery offered no clues, and much of what she said was passed off as eccentricities.
Including her age. Of course, now Thea remembered meeting Paní Dagmar five hundred years ago, and the weathervane she’d gifted Thea as she’d come into her rare, complex strain of magic: transmogrification.
The weathervane was linked to Thea’s moods. And right now, she was feeling defensive and very, very angry.
A colossal roar seized the entire Magic Quarter and shook it to its bones. Long and loud and filled with the promise of teeth and talons. If anyone made a sound, Thea couldn’t hear them over the sheer volume of her weathervane dragon. But it was not magic the residents of this Quarter feared.
‘Aim your pistols,’ Pan Novak shouted when it drew to a close.
Thea and Jasper braced, strands faintly glowing around them as they fell into that shared vision.
Thea had quite forgotten what it felt like, to wield power together, to work as a unit rather than fight against it.
No wonder she had always struggled when she’d believed herself human; surrounding herself in a fog of distrust and suspicion had muted her power.
A guttural growling sounded. It was chased by a metallic creaking, like a carriage axle that required oiling, only louder.
Pan Novak and those Hunters who were not frozen in place wheeled around, searching for the threat.
One slipped on a patch of ice, delivering him straight to the mouth of the void.
His scream lasted mere seconds, cut the instant the void claimed him.
A couple of Hunters began shooting in a panic.
Thea wielded fate, paying with little dreams she’d once had, small memories she didn’t mind losing, felling half the bullets.
Her power came quicker and quicker, with the kind of speed she’d once envied from Jasper.
Now she outwove even him, relishing in reclaiming that lost part of herself.
Other bullets were intercepted by weather-witches flinging up a wall of ice, thick enough for the bullets to lodge there instead of in the magical folk ducking behind.
Paní Dagmar caught the last ones, turning them into metallic moths that swarmed the Hunters, flying into their faces and attempting to crawl into their mouths.
Nobody looked up.
Until a great cleaving noise came from above. Like an ancient oak pulling its roots free. Thea’s eyes widened despite herself. Stiltskin’s Apothecary rocked in its foundations as the weathervane dragon broke free from its mount and took its first heavy, juddering step over the roof.
The blood drained from Pan Novak’s face. A couple of Hunters’ pistols fired as they jumped back, their bullets pinging into the cobblestones, into the void.
Creaking as it did on a blustery day, the weathervane dragon uncoiled its immense neck, rolling its head down to look at Pan Novak.
‘Is it going to eat him?’ Zofka whispered.
The head of the dragon slunk down, its neck close enough that Thea could have raised a hand and touched its sleek iron scales.
Its head came to a stop directly in front of Pan Novak, a hair’s breadth away.
Pan Novak glared back at it, though his legs were trembling.
‘You do not frighten me,’ he said in a low, dangerous voice.
The dragon roared again. Louder, longer, more venomous than the last roar.
It shattered the ice coating the street, making icicles drop from branches like daggers.
Thea threw up her arms, pressing her hands against her ears like everyone else, and still it deafened her for one blistering moment – until the Quarter distorted and the roar turned soundless.
Jasper’s fingers were moving quickly, knitting together threads only he and Thea could see as he protected the magical folk’s hearing.
Magic Hunters dropped to their knees in rows, like toy soldiers being knocked over.
When the roar ended, their hearing returned. A crimson bead ran down either side of Pan Novak’s face. He calmly wiped the blood from his ears, as several lines of Hunters staggered away.
The weathervane dragon shrank down, its iron bulk vanishing before their eyes until it could have fit on Thea’s palm.
She dashed to picked it up. It was a robin with beady eyes and feathers so intricate, she could hardly believe it was made from metal.
Then again, it was not from metal alone.
‘Thank you,’ she told both the robin and Paní Dagmar, who looked frailer now; it had not been Thea’s mood alone that had caused her weathervane to launch a counterattack.
With a metallic chirp, the robin spread its wings and flew back up onto the apothecary roof, where it perched atop the weathervane.
‘You have no idea what you have just done.’ Pan Novak’s voice was flat, his eyes lifeless as he stared at the magical folk still thronging the Quarter either side of the void, watching the remaining half of the Hunters like prey.
‘Oh, no,’ Jasper muttered darkly, casting a concerned glance at Thea. ‘Heloise’s bonds are—’
The gingerbread prison collapsed, and Heloise stepped free.