CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was the eldritch hour – the sixty minutes between three and four o’clock in the morning when the night was deep and the earth remembered her childhood.
Theodora sat in the alcove of her attic room window backdropped by the starry, night-time city.
She wore the parliamentary robe of Minister De León over the gown of Doctor Edyth Evans-Pritchard, and visible upon her wrist was a smear of paint from the palette of Justine Allonse.
In her hands was a scrying glass and, through it, Theodora watched the witches of Acanthi.
Cate and Moira were inside their linen tent and Theodora, due to the design of Acanthi’s own wards, could not spot any discernible landmarks which might reveal their location.
Moira was asleep against the tent pole, her hands on her belly, her head tipped forward.
Her deep breathing filled the room with a methodical wheeze.
This was the woman who Opal had called ‘Aunty’.
Agytha, too, shared that epithet, though Theodora was certain that the two were at best barely related.
Agytha Meikle was Cate’s fourth cousin, perhaps twice removed, and Moira O’Cleary had been the village Cunning Woman in whatever conservative West Calléan town Cate had been born in.
Still, Theodora looked at her and heard the half-forgotten cry of ‘Aunty Moira’. She heard a similar echo now looking at Cate through the scrying, haunted by the memory of her most beloved friend calling that woman ‘Mother’.
As if Cate had heard her very thoughts, her eyes snapped upward.
Theodora almost dropped the scrying glass.
‘Is that you?’ asked Cate to the darkness of the tent, her eyes boring into Theodora as if she could see her. ‘Ah, it is Theodora spying on me. That’s what you like to be called, isn’t it?’
Moira did not stir.
Theodora’s heart tremored but she held the glass steady.
‘I sense some surprise,’ said Cate. ‘You might be almost thirty, but I am twice your age. After all, who was it who taught you the scrying in the first place?’
There came a long pause as Cate stared patiently up at her.
‘Your wards are clever,’ Cate went on. ‘Even when you were young, they were clever. But they are not clever enough to keep me from discovering what you have done. She—’
Theodora smashed the glass against the floor. Shards of mirror splintered and for a moment she recalled that night – the bread knife, the blood. The wrong body ambushed. Her bare feet against bracken and twigs. Her calves sinking into the lilypond.
A mocking voice rose from the darkness.
‘Seven years, that.’
‘You don’t believe in luck,’ said Theodora, closing her eyes.
‘I do,’ said the voice. ‘It was luck that brought Dorothy to you.’
A tapping then came at the window, and Theodora looked up to see a raven. She flicked the latch open and in it flew. The raven landed on her knee.
‘Hello, Eliot,’ said Theodora, stroking its head. She took the scrap of paper from the raven’s leg, unfurled it, read it and sent it up in flame.
‘What did the spirits say?’ asked the voice.
‘More of the same,’ said Theodora.
‘So, your conscience is absolved, then, and we can proceed with your plan as intended. No use in wasting more time. You saw her use immediately; it was you who suggested it.’
Theodora leaned her head against the window.
‘You should have never told her she would be dead before her twenty-fourth birthday.’
‘I told her the truth,’ said Theodora. ‘Dorothy will be dead before her twenty-fourth birthday. Long before.’