Chapter 8 #3
I blinked at the window she’d vanished through. How far would the enchantment take her? Would it lift her into the storm and drop her again with the next blanket of snow? What sort of range did a magician’s power have? One mile? Two?
I pondered the matter with the same blank absorption with which I’d considered the price of parsnips.
The magician came towards me then, moving with an impossible grace that put me in mind of the shadow-monster—where had the thing gone? Clearly it was his creature, to be summoned at his whim. I scrabbled backwards on my hands, but I only collided with the cages.
He stopped a pace or two away, though, staring at me. “Agnes,” he said. “You’re here.”
I hadn’t any idea how to respond to this odd remark, because where else would I be?
Still, it was such a contrast to what I had been expecting—namely, being levitated into the air or perhaps fed to another shadow-monster—and spoken in such an ordinary tone that I went numb with relief, and even allowed him to help me to my feet.
His palm was warm, and embers of lightning still clung to it, which popped against my skin.
When I drew my hand back, one was sticking to me, and I hurriedly shook it off.
“How did you know my name?” was the first question that rose to my lips. An inane one—I answered it myself. “Of course—Yannick.”
“Yannick,” he agreed, still staring at me with a furrowed brow, as if I were the renowned dark magician who had just defeated her enemy in a whirlwind of magic.
“Is she gone?” I said. Really I wanted the two of them gone together, and a part of me hoped the woman would reappear and drag him off with her, so that I could lock the door and board the windows behind them.
But I wasn’t foolish enough to think it would be so simple, nor to assume that I—and the cats—would survive another battle of magic unscathed.
She had tried to tear the shelter apart and he had stopped her, so that made him the lesser of two monsters, cold comfort as that was.
“For the moment.” Like Valérie, he spoke with a Parisian accent. “Knowing my magnificently quarrelsome sister, we’ve maybe ten minutes before she frees herself and starts shaking the building again like a child with a new toy.”
“Sister?” I repeated. “Sister! She tried to kill you!”
“She knows I’m more capable than she is,” he said, seeming lost in thought.
“But—” Perhaps I was misunderstanding, and throwing lightning bolts at each other was the equivalent of friendly horseplay for magicians, but it had certainly looked like attempted murder to me, or at best a careless sort of malevolence.
I shook my head, trying to clear my mind. Even through the veil of shock, I found myself seizing upon the problem and grasping for practical solutions to throw at it. “Can you use these?” I poked at the leather pouch on the floor with my toe, not wanting to touch it.
“What?” he said. He was rubbing a hand through his hair absently, only making it into more of a bird’s nest than it already was. “Oh—those are just hexes. It was all I had time to grab. They won’t be enough.”
“They—” My throat was dry, and the word broke at the end. I became aware, in a way I somehow hadn’t been before, that I was talking to a magician. “They made her levitate.”
He waved a hand, as if this were nothing. “Ah! I have it.”
He darted to the trapdoor, and then, too quickly—far too quickly—he was back, and he was wearing a cloak.
It was a fine thing, charcoal grey with theatrical flourishes, like nothing I’d ever seen in a shop, but the effect was ruined somewhat by the pyjamas underneath, as well as his bare feet, which combined to give an impression closer to an escaped hospital patient than the most feared magician in a century.
I was shivering, which meant that the shock was either wearing off or worsening, I couldn’t tell. “What is that supposed to do?”
“I’ve woven several spells into this cloak,” he said. He approached one of the windows, murmured a word, and it was filled with glass again. “Each of the pockets has one, as does the lining. And—” He paused, glancing down at himself. “Three of the buttons. I haven’t got to the others yet.”
He began to detail the spells in an enthusiastic tone, oblivious to my complete lack of interest, and I heard not one word he said. Finally I gave voice to the only clear thought in my head at that moment. “You are not Havelock Renard.”
“Who am I, then?” He looked amused. “Alveric of Erl? Well, I suppose in one sense you’re right. People tell all sorts of silly stories about me, so I doubt I’m the person you’re imagining.”
I let my breath out. “The apocalypse. Three years ago. That wasn’t you, then.”
He made no reply, only murmured to another of the windows, which repaired itself in a heartbeat. Maybe he didn’t like the word apocalypse. After all, the world hadn’t truly ended, it had only looked like it was going to, in the way that it can look like rain.
“It was,” I murmured. “You almost ended the world. You, standing right there.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said, looking oddly flustered. “Who on earth are you, anyway? I thought Yannick rented the shop to a charity.”
“He did!” I gesticulated at the cages, where the poor cats hunched in various states of fury and terror. We had forty-five now; a surge in adoptions had dropped the number briefly to forty-one before we’d taken in a frostbitten mother with kittens.
“Cats?” He gave me an appalled look, as if he had never heard of anything more ludicrous.
“It would be a charitable act to do away with the vermin, and you’ve filled my shop with them?
Has Yannick lost his mind? Oh, I suppose it’s no concern of his if the place is infested with fleas—he doesn’t live here.
” He made an exasperated sound and went back to rubbing his hair.
Vermin was such an insult, and so unexpected in that moment, that I could only splutter in response. And though I knew it was not what I should have been giving my attention to, still I found myself snapping, “I’ll have you know that every one of these cats has regular flea treatments.”
He wasn’t listening to me. “What have you done to the place?” he said, frowning as he turned to take it all in.
I couldn’t see what he was so offended about.
We’d moved the tables, which had been scattered haphazardly about the shop, to form an L-shape against the south wall.
The cat cages were stacked neatly atop them.
The scarves had been given to the cats or folded neatly and put away.
Besides that and the addition of several filing cabinets, we’d changed only the light, replacing broken fixtures and adding several standing lamps to give the place a warm glow.
“Apart from sweeping up an inch of dust?” I said. “Very little. We’ve made it look less like a haunted house, I suppose.”
He shook his head. “We’ll move it,” he muttered to himself. “Yes—that’s the only way.”
“Move it?” To my dismay, I could think of only one way to interpret this, and it involved more magic. “Move the shelter?”
He grimaced, seeming to dislike the reminder that I’d sullied his shop with cats. “It will take a good deal of magic, but it’s nothing I haven’t prepared for. I suspected she’d track me down eventually.”
I could have asked any of the dozen questions that flitted through my mind at that: How had Valérie tracked him down in the first place? What did she want from him, and why didn’t he simply give it to her? But one thought rose above the others.
“Fant?me,” I murmured. “He ran outside, and Lynx after him—I can’t leave them.”
I sprang towards the door, which had been blasted open. But he was suddenly before me, having moved with the inhuman grace of a gust of wind, as if, just for a moment, he’d become shadow himself.
“Are you mad?” he demanded as I fell back from him in terror.
“I’ve no idea how far I blasted Valérie.
What do you think she will do to you if she comes upon you wandering the streets?
She will suspect you know where I’ve gone, and never let you go until you tell her.
As magicians go, Valérie is less charitable than I. ”
“She—” My voice faltered. I couldn’t stop picturing his monster, all claws and shadow. “You almost ended the world.”
“Yes,” he said.
I took a step backwards, away from the door and the winter night beyond.
“Wise choice,” he said.
He went back to the windows, rooting around in the pockets of his cloak and drawing out more coins, tiny silver ones this time. He placed one on each sill.
“These hold magic from the Third Fathom of the Rivenwood,” he said, sounding pleased with himself. “And I’ve left the weaving of conveyance unfinished—I should be able to stretch it to encompass the entire shop, and thread the other shop into the pattern.”
He kept babbling this sort of nonsense at me as he paced around the shelter, laying his talismans along the walls and in the corners. Once I was certain his back was turned, I darted through the door.
“Agnes,” he cried after me, which made me stumble in surprise—I still wasn’t used to the fact that a magician knew my name.
Not “a magician”—Havelock Renard, I made myself think, because it was not possible to doubt it any longer. That is Havelock Renard, in his pyjamas or not, and if you had any sense, you would keep running and not look back.
On my feet I wore only the socks I’d been sleeping in, and within seconds the snow was sending splinters of cold up my legs.
Fortunately, Fant?me had not gone far—he was sitting on the window ledge of the next shop, and began mewling piteously as soon as he saw me.
I scooped him up, calling for Lynx. I floundered about in the snow, which was past my knees, for an indeterminate amount of time—likely no more than five minutes, but that feels much longer when one is expecting to be blasted apart by a malevolent magician at any moment.
At last I found the black cat crouched beneath a staircase in the alley three doors over.
She yowled at me, her fur so fluffed she was almost round.
I could tell she would require extensive coaxing to emerge of her own accord, and I had no time.
So, regretting that I could not be more gentle, I grabbed her by the scruff and hauled her out.
She raked me with her claws for that, but I grimly maintained my grip and sprinted back to the shelter.
I became afraid, suddenly, that I’d find some other shop there instead. And then a wave of hysteria threatened to overwhelm me again, as I realized I was worrying that Havelock Renard would not be waiting for me.
But when I crossed the threshold, the shelter was still there, cats and all, and Havelock stood drumming his fingers on the counter, though it was clear he’d finished preparing his spell some time ago.
He was watching me with an odd look that seemed half reproachful and half assessing, but there was also something perplexed about it, as if he hadn’t the slightest idea what to make of me.
This was more than a little unnerving: Why should Havelock Renard bother to make anything of me at all?
Then he spoke a word, and the world split in two.