Chapter Three Simran #2
Simran whirled around, but it was too late to react. The stranger bore down on her, slamming her to the ground. Her head hit the singed floorboards with an audible crack. She felt the shock of it reverberate through her shoulders, her spine, her hips. Then all she felt was his hands pinning her.
“A witch from India,” he said, and the Elsewhere-name blurred and scratched at the insides of her skull.
“I thought maybe you’d be different this time, that you’d found your own way out of your tale, but your scent is the same.
I followed you, witch, your copper and your winter moss, your bitter snow-blood scent, his honey strangeness on you, and here you are.
The skin changes, but you stay the same under it.
” He leaned closer. “I smell the knight on you,” he said. “It’s begun.”
She struggled under him. He was immovable. One arm was in his grasp at the wrist, but the other was pinned against her side.
Her left hand was the one pinned. Thank fuck it was her left hand. She squirmed, finding the shape of her dressing gown pocket.
“I know all about you,” he said. “I know all your names.” He pinned her harder. She scrabbled in the pocket and metal met her fingertips. Frightened, triumphant, she grasped it.
“You shouldn’t fight me,” he went on, pale eyes fixed on her. “I know all your tricks, your enchantments, your magics.”
“Not all of them,” she said, and fired her pistol into his stomach.
The shock of the gunshot knocked her back against the floor hard and made him spasm above her, an awful, wrenching noise escaping his mouth. She scrambled out from under him, hot metal in her hand. The torn rug and burnt floorboards were splashed with blood, and Simran’s hands ached.
She cocked the pistol to kill him—and froze as he began to laugh.
There was no pain in his voice. His laugh was deep and pleased.
“I told you I don’t need a doctor,” he said. “But I admit the blood is inconvenient.”
On his forehead a symbol flared, glowing a virulent red: a single empty circle. His face had been bare before, she was sure—and as she watched, the symbol faded to nothing.
She tasted a tale on the air, hot pennies on her tongue, the musk of iron-rich blood. She didn’t know him—not like she’d known the knight—but she knew what he was. She couldn’t help but know.
“You’re an incarnate,” she spat out.
He shook his head.
“You understand so little,” he said. “Yourself. Me. The ink you stitch into people’s skin.” He took another step forward.
She shot him again in the chest. He jerked back but stayed on his feet, gaze darkening with anger. The circle flared again, blood-metal flowering on Simran’s tongue in response.
“No,” she said decisively. “I’m sure. You’re definitely an incarnate.
” Her hands shook around the pistol, but she didn’t need to keep her hands steady any longer.
Every hidden spell in the walls and ceiling began to shine, fireless smoke rising from their surfaces.
The stranger winced as her magic seared out of her wards, clasping him in golden tendrils.
Let him try and break all the magic she’d written and bled into this room; this scriptorium where she’d worked her arts for more than a year.
Perhaps some would say she was arrogant and overconfident, but she didn’t care.
She was a scribe and a witch, and she was damnably good at being both.
Inside her and beyond her skin, her magic burned hotter than sunlight.
He turned his head back, forth, wrenching against her magic. The circle on his forehead flared again. Simran pushed, all her strength pouring from her, and the stranger flinched and stopped trying to fight.
His gaze fixed on her again. His expression calmed. He held his hands out, palms open.
“Fine, witch,” he said. “Whatever you wish. But you should have let me kill you. One day you will weep bitterly, because I did not. You would have been happier if you’d allowed it.”
The magic coalesced around him, golden around his face, turning his shadow to glowing stardust. Another breath, and he was gone—banished from her home.
The scriptorium was silent. On the walls, Simran’s wards dimmed.
Simran took four careful steps to her desk. Placed the pistol down.
“You can come out now, Hari,” she said faintly.
Then she collapsed to the ground.
She woke with Hari leaning over her. A cold wind was blowing in through the open door. Simran cleared her throat, trying to find her voice through the cotton-wool weight in her own skull.
“Why is the door…?” Simran began.
“That’s my fault. I climbed out of the bedroom window and went to get some help,” Hari said.
“If I’d known you were going to get rid of him I would have gone out the front door obviously, but—anyway, it doesn’t matter.
When I ran back up the stairs, the door wasn’t locked so I just left it.
Lydia’s coming in a second anyway and—oh shit, did you burn the floor? ”
“Not on purpose,” Simran said grouchily. She sat up, wincing. Her magic was depleted. She felt wrung out, dull, and very human.
Hari was still taking the damage in, his eyes narrowed as his gaze swept over the burnt floor, the torn rug. His focus finally landed on a hole in the wall.
“Did you shoot him?” he asked. He knew about the pistol she kept in her desk. They’d argued about it before.
No good comes from weapons like that, Sim. They’ve only got one kind of tale in them, and it’s one where someone ends up dead.
And what do you think witchcraft is, Hari? A gentle hug?
“I did,” Simran said, turning away from the troubled light in Hari’s eyes. “But I didn’t kill him.” She should have. She’d tried. “I banished him instead.”
Hari lowered his voice.
“Did he get any of the ink?”
Simran shook her head. It was fair of Hari to assume the stranger had come for the limni ink. It was the only valuable thing in their whole flat.
“Right.” Hari exhaled. “Do you think he’ll be back?”
“If he tries to get back here on foot it’ll take a while.
” She’d traced the traps on her walls using ash from a lusterless copse of woodland at a crossroads beyond London, where green trees met an ever-burning pit of factory fires.
That was where the intruder had landed. He’d have a hell of a time traveling back from there, buffeted by winds of soot and navigating dying woodland.
“But who knows what else he can do. Maybe he’s a witch too. Is Maleficium all right?”
“I think she’s scarred me for life,” Hari said. “But yes, your demon from the bowels of hell is fine. I left her in the cupboard.”
“Are you going to let her out?”
He shuddered.
“Maybe when she stops hissing,” he said.
There was a light thud of footsteps approaching. Simran turned her head to the door.
Lydia Chen, Simran and Hari’s landlady, stood at the top of the stairs.
She was dressed like she’d just risen from her bed, in practical sandals over socks, a thick quilted coat, a single lantern bird perched on her shoulder.
She was middle-aged, skin lightly brown and her hair more black than silver, pinned back now in a hasty bun.
Lydia had always been good in a crisis, and her expression now was calm. Her eyes scanned the room, moving from Simran to the singed floorboards to the fading glow of spells on the walls.
“Well,” said Lydia. “You’re going to need to pay to fix this damage, Simran, make no mistake. I told you not to put magic in the floorboards, didn’t I?”
“That magic saved my life.”
“And I’m glad to see you not dead,” Lydia said.
“But I’d be even gladder if you’d painted your trap into the rug you own.
I’ll never get those burn marks out. I’ll have to take stock of the damage properly later.
” She crossed the room and peered down at Simran.
The lantern bird rustled, preening itself. “And you?” she asked.
“My damage? I’m all right,” said Simran. “Could you help me up?”
Hari and Lydia got her up onto the sofa. Lydia’s forehead was creased, her mouth thin and troubled.
“Did he come for the ink? Or did he follow a curse and find you at the end of it?” Lydia demanded.
“I didn’t curse him,” Simran said. “If I had, I would have made sure he couldn’t find me.”
“He didn’t take any ink,” Hari said. He was by her desk, holding her unopened box of limni ink. “All’s well.”
Lydia’s frown only deepened. Simran understood. If the man had gotten what he’d wanted, it was likely he wouldn’t return. But he’d been trapped and banished with nothing to show for it. There was a big chance he’d come back, if only for revenge.
Simran owed Lydia. She and Hari had met Lydia at a molly-house in their early days in the city, when Simran had been all sharp knees and a sharper tongue, and Hari was still wearing his hair long, just in case he wanted to go home to his parents, who refused to see him for the man he was.
Simran and Hari were friends. When they’d met as two lonely queer and Elsewhere-born children being raised in the same town outside London, they’d needed each other—but they’d liked each other too, and it was the liking that had made them leave home together to forge a new life.
They’d both been lost in London, na?ve and young and desperately in need of a guiding hand.
Lydia had been chain-smoking, levelheaded, and unbearably kind.
She was a cunning woman, a wielder of good magic and blessings.
There was no one wiser in London than Lydia, who knew every cunning folk worth their salt, and gathered London’s Elsewhere communities around her like kin.
She’d looked at the two of them, and truly seen them, and welcomed them with open arms.
She’d introduced Hari to a few of the other trans boys and girls at the molly-house—“We’re your family now,” she’d told him—lent Simran the money for her first scribe needles, and offered them the flat at a rent they could actually afford.
Lydia was the reason Simran had a scriptorium, a warm bed, and a life she was loath to lose. So Simran meant it when she leaned forward and vowed, coldly, “I’ll find him and deal with him. He won’t cause any more trouble. I’ll see to that.”
Lydia sighed, her face softening. “Witches,” she said. “You’re all the same—vengeful to the core.”
Her lantern bird rustled in agreement.
Cunning folk usually had little patience for witches. Simran understood that. Cunning folk were benevolent, where witches were not. But Lydia had never been dismissive of Simran, and she didn’t seem inclined to start now. The hand she placed on Simran’s shoulder was firm and grounding.
“You could move,” she said. “Berry’s got a spare room in her flat. She’d be glad of the company.”
You don’t need to hunt this man down, Lydia didn’t say. But Simran understood.
“Please look after Hari for me,” she said. “I won’t be gone more than a week.”
Simran freed Maleficium after Lydia left, and bribed the rather angry cat with slivers of baked ham. Hari made two cups of tea and sat on the floor beside her.
Hari drank deep, but Simran couldn’t touch her tea. Her stomach was squirming.
“He wasn’t here for the ink,” said Simran.
“What did he want, then?”
She didn’t reply. He wants me because I’m an incarnate, she thought of saying. But that was a thing she’d never shared with Hari and never wanted to.
“He mentioned Bess,” said Simran finally.
His hands tightened around his mug.
“Ah,” he said.
Hari had grown up with her. There were only very specific things she’d kept from him; her incarnate status was one of them. But Bess wasn’t a secret. He knew Bess was an incarnate.
Bess was the one who’d helped Simran become a witch.
“Hari,” she said. “I think he’s done something to her. I think… I think I’m going to have to visit home.”
Hari exhaled and closed his eyes.
“Well, hell,” he said. “I guess we’re going to Gore.”