CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Lio confined himself to the cramped room he once again shared with Rupert.
He was sore all over, weak and coughing endlessly into his handkerchief.
By the time Lio had finally found Archie, he had been sodden and feverish and he just about collapsed on the old man.
Now, Lio kept to his borrowed bed and listened to the house beyond.
The change in Theodora was clear. He heard it in the thud of the witch’s boots bounding up and down the stairs, in her hummed incantations as she fortified the wards of the tea shop and in her grand proclamations that, at last, there was hope for Dot.
Lio once or twice peered in on Dot as she practised magic in the courtyard.
Theodora brought her various objects, bowls of hot and cold water, feathers, bowling balls, packet spells, cauldrons and even, at one point, opera glasses.
The girl’s magic was weak, but you would never know it to see how happy she was.
She would live, after all, so long as she was diligent and strengthened her human magic.
‘When will it develop a scent?’ Lio heard Dot ask one morning.
‘Your human magic is in its infancy,’ said Theodora. ‘Let it learn who and what it is first.’
Afterward, the witch caught him lingering in the hallway.
Theodora paused. She steadily looked at him, and then she closed the door to the courtyard, and said, ‘I am sorry, Lio. For all my mistreatment of you in this house, I never meant you any real harm. Not in these past months.’ Theodora took a breath. ‘Nor when we were eighteen.’
Theodora’s eyes were brighter. Her smile, easier.
Here she was at last, the girl he remembered from the forest.
‘You know I never blamed you for that,’ said Lio, hands in his pockets.
‘I was quite furious with you, of course, but I—’ He coughed for a long while and then, at length, went on.
‘I could never shake the way you looked at me that night. You were scared for me. You were so remorseful. You made a mistake. I knew that plainly, even then.’
‘Oh Saints,’ said Theodora, watching him. He coughed again. ‘You’re as bad as Dorothy. It was my lie that ruined your life.’
‘Cate ruined my life,’ said Lio. Then he thought for a moment. ‘Actually, no. It wasn’t Cate. It was Opal. I don’t know how I didn’t realise at the time, but now that I look back, I can remember her cruelties. She manipulated me, too. You know I considered changing my name?’
‘To what?’ asked Theodora.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Lio, shaking his head. ‘The point is, now I see the truth. Oh, I am a fool.’
Lio slowly climbed the stairs.
‘You are not a fool,’ said Theodora. ‘You knew straight away that my empire was a sham. Before you even found the debt letter, you knew. You are, and have always been, clever.’
‘Is that a compliment?’ asked Lio. He sat on the top step.
‘Don’t get used to it, Robert. Dorothy will live, so I am feeling more sentimental than usual.’
Lio laughed. He blew his nose and then he said, a little sadly, ‘You know, we could have been friends back in Caelin Forest.’
‘I despised you,’ said Theodora.
‘And I, you,’ said Lio. ‘Opal loved you more than me, and I knew it.’
‘Opal never loved anyone,’ said Theodora.
‘Maybe.’ Lio roughly wiped his eyes and Theodora climbed up the stairs and sat beside him. She handed him a fresh handkerchief out of her pocket and he took it.
‘Part of the reason I didn’t throw Opal out was because of you,’ said Theodora.
‘Every day, Opal became more bitter and vindictive. Dorothy had to excavate her anger from some buried part of herself to even find her human magic, but Opal? She is fury, made manifest. She felt the world owed her; felt that she deserved to dole out her cruelty to whomever she wanted. If I wasn’t her plaything, I think she would have found you, Lio.
I think you would have been the one with a girl in the attic. ’
Cate and Moira were camped on the roof of Hemmington’s department store.
This was the daemon’s domain. They had cast spell after spell; they had even set their own wards, but still Opal had hidden away in the fortress of polished glass and gilt railings.
Cate’s daughter was a creature of the forest. She had grown up barefoot among the fallen twigs and toadstools. What had this city done to her?
The witch sat on the edge of the building, staring out at Alliaster’s horrible smoke, the city’s spires like daggers’ edges ready to spear any young and innocent body that touched them.
She wove her threads all the while, knotting them, untying them, retying them, the outcome changing only ever in fibrous differences.
She Saw the contract, the elevator, and then was barrelled over with that old vision once more.
The knife wet with blood. Her daughter’s slain body .
. . How her threads tortured her with that false prophecy. Cate set down the scarlet yarn.
Then, Cate sensed for the second time that a young woman was scrying her.
‘What do you want?’ asked Cate, and Moira realised quickly that Cate was not speaking to her.
‘For Opal to get help,’ said Theodora through the scrying. ‘She needs to be saved from him.’
‘You cannot manipulate me again,’ said Cate, closing her eyes.
‘Opal sought out Salamander of her own accord,’ said Theodora. ‘Cate, perhaps you can still save her from all of this.’
‘And how would that assist you?’ asked Cate, staring down over the patrons cascading in and out of the department store. ‘Opal’s words were correct in that horrible place you built to cage her. You lie as easily as you breathe.’
‘Please,’ said Theodora, ‘hear what I am saying.’
‘No,’ said Cate, ‘I trust my daughter, and she hates you.’
‘What do your threads tell you?’ pleaded Theodora.
‘That Opal will be safe? That she will be happy once Salamander captures me and takes my shop? That you can break into Hemmington’s and simply whisk her back to the forest and she will love you again?
All she wants is to be special, Cate, and Salamander’s third-in-charge is powerful.
Casimir will not let Opal overthrow him easily. ’
‘I have seen him,’ said Cate. ‘The one with the dark eyes and the tattoos.’
Catherine Weyer’s Sight had always been foggy when it came to Opal, but she closed her eyes now and pictured this Casimir, holding a thin stack of paper. Opal’s contract.
‘I want to be free from this,’ said Theodora’s voice on the wind. ‘Your daughter is violent and vengeful, just as you were once, and she is on a knife’s edge of making the same kind of mistake that started all of this.’
‘Opal would never do what I did,’ said Cate darkly.
‘She could,’ came Theodora’s voice.
Cate shook her head.
‘I have nothing more to say to you.’
‘Cate,’ said Theodora quickly. ‘My heart is broken for Agytha. I did not mean to hurt her. I am so incredibly sorry for all of it, but, please—’
‘I do not care,’ said Cate. She threw out a hand and the connection was lost, and somewhere in the house on the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue, a scrying glass broke all over Theodora’s bedroom floor.
Opal watched the spirits of the factory. She spent most of her time here, assisting, overseeing the production of packet spells and cheap linen nightgowns and motor car wheels, and anything inexpensive and swift to produce.
She had a bedroom, of course, and once she had left the tea shop at last she finally began using it.
It was a cramped space behind the bistro at the very top of Hemmington’s department store.
There was a cold labyrinth of worker dorms tucked back there, with a library and a billiards table.
Hers was a sparse enclosure, save for the trinkets and sketches and clothes she had taken from the attic.
She thought of the girl with whom she had once swum in the lilypond, and the ache of misery and regret was so much that Opal began to pick at the charmed tattoos upon her chest. When the conduence took over, the shrieking of her thoughts would disappear.
Magic, pure and intoxicating, coursed through her veins and with it came a sense of calm, and away from her seeped the memory of the bread knife buried into her back and the betrayal of her beloved friend.
As if Opal were sleepwalking, Salamander’s power would take over her.
It was so different from the magic of the forest. This was a chemical, unearthly magic that left her feeling slimy, cold and used.
Still, she felt powerful and that was all she cared about now.
After Salamander used her, Opal often woke in strange places, her body sore.
She would climb out of the pond at Penn Park or peel herself off the lobby floor of this or that hotel.
The waking was the worst. It made her feel thin, breakable, and with vague flashes of memories of what the daemon had made her do.
Sometimes, she felt regret.
At her darkest, she missed the forest. She missed sweet, stupid Lio and her once beloved friend and even her stern mother. She did not miss the people they were now; no, she missed the people she had thought they were.
What choice had Opal but to turn into this creature?
With dark and hateful eyes, she watched the spirits of the factory.
Most of them had not seen sunlight since the day Salamander cut the conduence into their skin.
Five years, for some. Much longer for others.
The papers, the protesters, the lobbyists had whined for years about the Mass Exodus: the spirits who fled Calléum in droves after the insult of Article 13.
Opal scoffed. Little did the do-gooders know how many of those ‘lost spirits’ were here, in factories across the Apexes, the Enclaves, the Armourers’ District and beyond, slaving away for Salamander, producing faux packet spells filled with sodium bicarbonate, with powdered sugar, with opium.
Every now and then Salamander instructed them to throw in a real one – a good luck charm, a ward for influenza, a good night’s sleep.
It was to keep the punters guessing, Opal supposed. To keep them hooked.
‘It will not take long,’ came the voice of Marcidus. The spirit appeared on the balcony beside her. ‘The witch’s empire falters. Casimir is one of the few friends she has left.’
‘Salamander trusts him too much,’ said Opal.
‘Salamander trusts himself,’ said the pink, amorphous spirit. ‘Casimir is weak. I have taken his contract. I used those pretty papers to remind him what will happen if Salamander falls. Casimir knows who his master will be, should he do anything silly.’
‘You know, Marcidus,’ said Opal, ‘I would never do anything silly.’ She looked sideways at the spirit. Marcidus was known for flirting with beautiful human women. Her fingers trailed through her hair.
Marcidus laughed at her.
‘The conduence has addled more than just your mind, Miss Weyer. You are as appealing to me as Casimir.’
Opal glanced back at the office windows and caught her reflection. She startled at it. When had her face become so angular? Her hair so matted?
‘Why come to me, Miss Weyer?’ Salamander had asked her, that very first time she had visited his lair. ‘Why scheme and plot and turn against a woman you have loved as family?’
‘I do not want to plot against her,’ Opal had said. ‘She took my mother’s attention from me. She used that to supersede me in magic. She is the one who turned. It isn’t fair that I was born without a talent.’
Salamander, whose long, slimy body perched on the brim of the tank, had smiled at that.
‘What do you want, Opal Weyer?’
‘Everything,’ Opal had said hungrily. ‘I want to be better at magic than her. I want to build something better than she did. I want to be the opposite of bored for the first time in my life.’
Salamander handed her a short contract.
‘You want a talent, Miss Weyer? Work for me and I will give you one.’
In her arrogance, she did not read it. She did not know to ask what a conduence charm was. With each passing year, her dysfunction and anger and dependence on the conduence deepened. Some faraway part of her knew this. Some closer part ignored it.
Once Opal superseded Casimir, she would find a way to reverse it.
It would not be difficult now, with Casimir’s recent failures.
Once Salamander amended the Prohibition, he would make her the Prime Minister, or the Queen, or place her in some vibrant and interesting station, and the girl from the forest who had betrayed her, the girl now called Theodora, whose love of her was shallow and self-serving, would be reduced to nothing. Her tea shop, gone. Her talent, gone.
Yet, a tiny voice in Opal’s head hissed, Do you truly want that?
Opal shook the thought away, and the itchy, vile magic of the conduence applauded her. All she needed, now, was to abduct Dorothy Walcott and hand her over to the daemon.
There came a tapping on the glass behind her. Opal turned and saw Eliot at the window. Opal yanked it open, and he landed on her hand just as the chemical glow of the conduence began pulsing at the edge of her vision.
‘Miss Weyer,’ hissed Salamander’s voice. ‘It’s time.’
Opal smiled. ‘Theodora’ would soon find what Opal had left behind at the tea shop.
Lio had played his part. As had her mother, in the end, taking down wards across the city. That only left one fatal piece.
‘How does it all work anyway?’ Opal had once asked, laying against the rug in Theodora’s room.
‘The wards are made up of three elements,’ said the girl from the forest, as she painted in watercolour.
‘The wards within the tea shop. The wards without the tea shop. And the final keystone ward which binds it all together, but that’s between me and Belchamber.
Even if I die, so long as Belchamber keeps his side of the bargain, the wards cannot fall entirely. Why do you ask?’
Because Salamander had wanted to know, hadn’t he?
Because the woman had a talent for wards, and because the daemon wanted to use them, and as soon as he fused the witch’s talent with his own magic, he would turn the tea shop into an impenetrable zoological gaol.
He would sell spirits, Magicians, children – any creature of curious magical capacity.
He would do whatever his depraved, scientific mind wanted, with absolutely no consequences.
Did Opal really want to see the tea shop used that way?
That final keystone ward was strictly between Theodora and Belchamber.
Opal scoffed. Now she knew what the witch had meant by that.
No matter. It was all soon to end. That little girl from the forest, who had vomited after skinning rabbits, who Opal had fallen asleep watching, who Opal had loved and had been betrayed by more than any other person alive, would soon be broken and beautifully bound to her forever.