CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
At last, Theodora spoke as if in her own words.
‘We opened the shop. I went back to Salamander. I went back again and again, and I was so smug in the beginning. I took name after name, Edwina, Maz, Kae?s, Theodora. I paid off this police officer and that politician. I thought I was so hidden.
‘I had no idea of his real intentions. All of the revenue from his department store and his packet spells, all of his experiments, the invention of the conduence charm: it all leads back to the same place. Salamander wants to be the supreme scholar of magic. He wants not only the full power of his own magic, but the ability to study and experiment with everyone else’s at his leisure. ’
Theodora took a moment. She rubbed her eyes. She glanced around at each of them, Dot, Lio, Rupert and Belchamber, sat upon the floor of the hidden attic bedroom.
‘I believe the conduence charm was born of his daemotion,’ said Theodora. ‘He did not have the full use of his magic, so he needed to take it from others.’
‘And now that he’s perfected it,’ said Dot without emotion, ‘he wants to amend Article Thirteen and take the rest of his power back?’
Theodora nodded. She glanced about at Rupert and Lio. Neither met her eye.
‘Go on with the story,’ muttered Lio. ‘I don’t care about Salamander.’
‘Well,’ said Theodora, ‘Rupert turned up a couple of years after I signed the deed to the shop and I gave him a job.
I was twenty-two, then. You were ten, Rupe.
So very young. We had customers. I built a name for myself, but a business is a business, and I had debts that were growing.
A year later, on a day when Belchamber and Rupert were out, a knock came. I opened the door and there stood Opal.
‘I was sick all over the doorstep. Had I not watched her die? She was so much older. Her hair was dull and she was dressed in tatters but quite suddenly, I wasn’t a murderer. The only person I had ever loved was alive.
‘Yet, in spite of it all, I felt a glimmer of disappointment.
That was the emotion that confused me the most. I pulled Opal inside and she told me the truth of what happened: that Agytha, with her talent for healing, had saved her.
It seemed so obvious in hindsight. I fled, Lio fled, Agytha rushed in and Cate had lied to the coven and dug a false grave, and when I scried the camp and saw the tombstone, I had believed it.
I was out of my mind, so wracked with guilt and shame.
But of course Cate lied about Opal being dead.
What else could she have done? The witches of the coven would have turned on her for her hypocrisy.
Had their ex-spouses and deserter friends and runaway children not been strung up for the same crime Opal had been planning to commit?
No one leaves the witches of Acanthi. Not alive.
‘Agytha loved Opal. She healed her, and Cate begged Opal to hide away but Opal had no interest in doing so. She fled during the burial; told me I had inspired her. False funerals were the final thing we had in common.
‘Where did she go in those intervening years? I still do not know. The coven disintegrated. Cate’s lie backfired. Eventually they all turned against her, so disgusted that Cate had sacrificed her own child to her extreme control of the coven.
‘It was five years between that night and Opal turning up at the tea shop.’ Theodora’s eyes flicked to Lio.
It was the same number of years the young man had searched for her.
‘Cate had chased her all over the world. She had tried, I believe, at one point to rebuild Acanthi, and failed. Opal has, for some time, been Cate’s focus. ’
‘So, Cate was never looking for you?’ asked Lio, clearing his throat.
‘No,’ said Theodora. ‘Not until you led them here, and Cate realised I had hidden Opal away with my wards. I now understand that she was trying to lure me out simply to talk with Opal. I did not know this at the time, of course. Let the Lunaria shine through my eyes and show you all – I thought Cate meant to murder her. I thought Opal needed my protection.’
For a moment, the witch looked out the window.
Dot felt utterly absent from her body – distantly, she knew that the wound upon her arm was aching and that her head throbbed, but on she listened with no intention to interrupt.
‘It is clear now,’ Theodora went on, ‘that her mother, her Aunty Moira and her Aunty Agytha had searched for almost a decade not to violently punish Opal, but to apologise.’
Lio scoffed. ‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘It’s true,’ said Theodora, and though Lio shook his head bitterly and Rupert watched her, glum, heartbroken, she went on.
‘Cate, I think, simply wishes to atone for what she did.
Otherwise she would have attacked us the moment she entered the tea shop.
But alas, all those years ago when Opal turned up on my doorstep, deranged, begging me to protect her from her vicious mother, I believed her.
Opal told me how she had, out of desperation and terror, sold her magic, escaped the police, gone to the north, come back, kissed this man, stalked that woman.
She was different. Paranoid. And her magic was weaker than it should have been.
The poppies she used to chew when we were little were now powders and even as she stood in my door, I could smell it.
‘But I was the cause of her misery, wasn’t I?
So, when she begged me to let her in, I did.
When she begged me to hide her from Cate, I did.
She told me to keep her a secret from Rupert and Belchamber, and I said yes.
I told her that I would rather go to my grave than betray her again. Oh, she laughed when I said that.’
The witch took a breath.
‘I never wanted her in the attic, but Opal said “make a wall here”, “put a wardrobe there”, “I’ll come and go by the window”.
I should have refused, but her oddities were a home to me and in an attempt to atone for what I had done, I bought her an icebox and built a bathroom, and I locked the attic when I was gone, and beneath this trapdoor I was Theodora, but up here I was the girl from the forest again.
‘I told myself she needed me, but I took up the smock of Justine Allonse simply to have somewhere else to be on a Saturday evening. I worked more and more. I made excuses to leave, yet when I was away from her, I panicked for her safety. Opal assured me almost daily that, if it weren’t for the tea shop, her mother would have found her and slaughtered her.
‘Within a year, she went to Salamander. Stupidly, I had confided in her about my debt and told her all about the city’s true king, the daemon.
Opal is one of those strange people who is so intelligent that they are quite daft; she is reckless, easily bored, too pretty, constantly seeking novelty or amusement to her own detriment.
Everything has always come easily to Opal, but she has never had a talent.
Not like mine for wards or Lio’s for portals.
I never realised she was so hungry for it – couldn’t imagine her doing something so perverse as to fall in with Salamander so that she might steal another’s magic.
‘I was not utterly oblivious. I knew she snuck out each night. However, I told myself, she deserved amusement. I told myself that the moment Acanthi turned up, she could slip back in. I never wanted to be her gaoler.’
Theodora pulled her knees to her chest, her eyes swimming.
‘Yet, when she came home covered in tattoos – we were twenty-four then – I shouted at her for the first time. And she? Oh, she was scathing of me. So scathing and convincing that I began to question my very own logic. “Don’t you know what I’ve bargained for myself?
” Opal said. “Now my magic can be special as well.” Salamander exploited that sore spot – Opal had no idea that the conduence could not give her a talent.
‘She became drunk more often than not. She oscillated wildly between boundless affection for me and vicious criticism.
If she thought that I had slighted her, she would explode; then, she would hate herself for it and she would sit on my bed and cry and apologise and tell me how unwell she was, how miserable, how trapped, how much she loved me, how special I was, how kind and lovely and perfect.
‘On her worst days, she told me in no uncertain terms that I had utterly ruined her life. That it was no wonder my parents did not want me, and I believed her.
‘I became Professor Edythe Evans-Pritchard and Minister Bianca De León and Grand Magician Valiente, but my life was already ruined.
I stopped sleeping. The silver I accrued disappeared quicker and quicker.
Like you, Dorothy, I came from nothing, and like most people who do, I regarded my work ethic as my saviour.
‘In real time, I watched Opal become more and more addled. There was nothing I could do to stop the daemon. If I had contacted the United Allies, they would have extinguished Salamander without a moment’s hesitation, but then my contract would have passed to Marcidus.
‘I decided that I was going to wait until the precise moment I paid back my debt, and then rush to the powers that be. I was in the ear of the King, the ministers, the diplomats and emperors of commerce who frequented my club, everything cleverly poised for the perfect moment I could end him.
‘But all the while, Salamander schemed away. His goal is to amend Article Thirteen: restrict the humans’ magic, but give back the spirits’.
He wants to reverse his daemotion, and, with every charitable act and flowery newspaper piece, he convinces the whole country that he has learned his lesson and deserves his power back. ’
Theodora leaned against the wall and stared, for a moment, at the ceiling. Her voice sounded dry – she had been talking for a long time.