CHAPTER FIVE
Lio found the tea shop the day he arrived in Alliaster, inky bruises blooming beneath his eyes despite his best efforts to magic them away.
He was, notwithstanding his talent for portals, a haphazard Magician.
Regardless, he had managed to set his broken nose himself using a hand mirror in his deluxe room at the Parnassions.
Lio had chosen the extravagant hotel after reading about it in the paper, in an article penned by some mouldering journalist who lamented the ruining of the establishment by the new rich and their rollicking parties in the uppermost suites, which consisted of twenty-somethings dressing up as circus performers or babes in cloth diapers or archaic peoples in togas dancing away the memory of the war.
The Tower of étienne, with its aged granite column and recent iron reinforcements, could be seen from his window.
It had once featured a statue of Saint Penelope atop its honorific peak, but She had crumbled hundreds of years earlier and now it was Her absence that gazed across the city at him.
The bathroom had polished chequered tiles and a showerhead the size of a dinner plate.
Lio had scrubbed himself clean in the lion-foot tub, taken up the fine pyjamas laid out beside the goosedown pillows and slept until the afternoon.
When he arrived at the tea shop, he showed only a few signs of wear from the days he had spent hopping through his myriad portals.
His nose and neck had darkened from the sun.
His beard needed to be trimmed. Lio thought little of this.
He was dressed finely, as he usually was, and he stepped straight into the tea shop expecting a warm reception from a friendly acquaintance long lost.
Yet, before Lio could even open his mouth, he was thrust right back out the door. The sign changed to read:
Hoot Dear Ashtepo’s
At once, the windows were covered in newspaper.
Yet, the scent of woodsmoke, incense, gunpowder and lilac lingered, resolving any doubt left within him that despite the altering of the sign, this was indeed her tea shop.
Further attempts to enter the establishment on the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue were made in vain.
The handle would not budge. His letters slid right back out from underneath the door.
Theodora, of course, was not her real name.
He had known her long before she had taken it.
Lio had with Theodora the curious bond that classmates often share long after they are separated and scattered across the globe: a mutually intimate experience of the awkwardness of puberty, the collective cringes of social blunders inflicted on and before each other, and the common remembrance of a specific time and place in a world uncoloured by the tragedy of adulthood.
He tried to find her next in the manor house of a locally famous art collector.
Here, she went by the name Justine Allonse: a painter from a family of esteemed oil colourists.
Two of her works hung in the hallway. The first, a wash of muted oils that stippled an image of a caged sparrow – forlorn, peering out from the gaol bars – titled Before the Blood.
The second painting was of an open field and a dark-haired little girl, formed of striking blues and whites and yellows. It was called Opal.
Lio scowled at the name.
For it was Opal’s grave that he had sought in the forest. And yet, it was Opal’s handwriting on the letter that had uprooted his life and led him to the manor house, to find paintings by a person he used to know.
Lio was led up to the studio by a young servant with flaxen hair but, when he arrived, the room was empty. A steaming mug of coffee sat beside the canvas. The smell of magic, mingling with turpentine and paint, faded in the air.
The witch had heard him climbing the stairs.
Lio found her next at the Royal Institute of Alliaster.
Here, she was Doctor Edythe Evans-Pritchard.
He took a seat at the back of the amphitheatre, surrounded by the bright young offspring of the Calléan gentry, all of them clothed in cashmere, chewing on pipes, complaining that the spring cold dragged on too long.
Lio might have been one of them, had it not been for his parents’ greed – had they not sent him into the forest to learn his magic illegally while men marginally older than him were sent off to the trenches in Kremora or the Bay of Arranfol.
His parents had not wanted a cog of war for a son; they had wanted a secret Magician whose spells would improve their prospects and business ventures. How had that turned out?
Lio’s rumination was interrupted when Doctor Evans-Pritchard entered briskly through the door. He straightened in his seat and regretted it immediately, for she spotted him and walked right back out.
He found the witch again at the Ollianne Shrine on the western peak of the city, where she was an attendant to the resident spirits.
At first, she seemed to have no name at all but, after some pressing, a rain spirit revealed that here she was Edwina Benedict.
She wore green robes and left bowls of salt beside the altars and prayed and rang the bells and, when she saw Lio approaching, stepped behind a statue and vanished altogether.
Lio even ventured, little by little, into the districts of Alliaster that did not belong to Theodora: the Enclaves, the Spirits’ District, the Armourers’ District and the Apexes.
Lio found no hints of her. Instead, he found alleys of opium-addled souls with dirt-stained feet and missing eyes and hands, most of them returned soldiers licking powders out of packet spells, the azure envelopes poking out of their pockets.
The spells were fakes, all of them, sold by the daemon who ruled the city from below.
Lio considered himself a worldly man and, as such, he not infrequently found himself reading the foreign correspondence regarding Calléum.
His interest in his home country had persisted despite the decade he had spent away from it, living in faraway Kolldin.
The broadsheets had not mentioned Theodora, of course; they did not need to.
Lio had heard his own whispers during the wayward years of his early twenties when he was searching the continent for another woman far more precious to him.
What arrogance was it that the girl he had known from the forest – the woman who now called herself Theodora – would come here to Salamander’s city?
He found her as Maz Bircham at the factory on Stirrup Street.
He found her as Minister Bianca De León, Member of Parliament.
He even found her as Grand Magician Valiente, sorceress to the King of Calléum.
But each and every time he located Theodora, whether outside the Stirrup Street factory, within the jazz club opposite Parliament House or entering the lobby of the Royal Palace, she disappeared the moment he glimpsed her, leaving behind, always, the lingering scent of magic.