Chapter 18
I fumbled my lantern, catching it just before it struck the floor.
Havelock was asleep in what looked like a highly uncomfortable slump, his shoulder leaned against the arm of the couch and his head resting on his shoulder, dark hair spilling onto his sleeve.
His hand was open and dangling as if to accept something, and one leg was folded beneath him.
He had clearly been reading when he fell asleep, for there was a book lying on the floor below his hand, pages folded beneath its weight.
I would have fled immediately had I not noticed that he was wounded. “Havelock!” I cried, starting forward, but he didn’t wake. I was too frightened to touch him, so I picked up a book from one of the shelves and threw it at him.
I hadn’t been aiming for his head but the wall beside him; still I managed to clip his glasses, knocking them askew, which was enough to waken him with a start. He blinked at me and murmured something that sounded like “Ri?”
“You’re bleeding!” I cried, because I didn’t know how else to describe what I was seeing—blood was the least of it.
He took no notice of the horror that was his left leg.
It looked like the leg of that monstrous creature I had glimpsed twice now, Havelock’s other form.
It was a curve of darkness, flickering as if ember-lit from within, and yet from some angles it appeared almost normal.
In addition to this, the leg was injured.
Blood trickled from a deep gash by his knee and pooled on the floor.
Recognition came over his face, and he looked from me to the open trapdoor, his expression darkening. He touched one of his earrings and murmured a word.
I was whirling on my heel as soon as I understood, but I was too late, and the flagstone crashed shut, sealing me down there with him.
I turned back to him, holding the lantern between us as if it might ward him off. This was where my curiosity had led me: into the heart of the monster’s lair. What a fool I had been to imagine I should involve myself in the affairs of magicians!
“What are you going to do to me?” I croaked.
“Do?” he repeated, his forehead wrinkling.
“Turn you into a sparrow and see what your charming pets make of you. Oh, don’t look at me like that.
I’m not going to do anything. That panther was lurking up there.
I’d rather he didn’t make himself at home.
” His face went blank, and then he raised his elbow just in time to meet an explosive sneeze.
“Oh—sorry.” My hand holding the lantern trembled with relief. “He must have followed me.”
Havelock tried to rise, but his face contorted, and he fell back into the couch in a boneless slump. He’d passed out from the pain, or had lost too much blood.
“Look at the state of you!” I exclaimed, coming forward slowly, as I would with a wounded street cat likely to lash out at me.
He was barefoot in billowy linen shirtsleeves and loose trousers—again looking like he’d raided some theatre company’s costume department, though the effect was more otherworldly than ridiculous.
The left trouser leg had been rolled up, as if he’d made some attempt to treat whatever ungodly thing was happening to him.
His strange and disorderly appearance reminded me of the chaos of the upper floors, and my irritation overrode my fear.
I removed the blush-coloured scarf—one of the former tenant’s—that I’d taken to wearing around my neck and began wrapping it around his leg.
It was hard to see that part of him—my vision swam with dizziness when I stared too hard.
I blinked and tried to focus on the scarf. I looped it around his knee, pulling each loop as taut as I could.
“What are you doing here?” he said, and I jumped. He’d awoken again and was watching me.
For some reason, I didn’t even think of lying. “I was looking for Vortigern’s book. I planned to give it to Valérie so that we could be rid of her.”
“But I told you I don’t have it.” The confusion in his voice was what convinced me he wasn’t lying—surely he would have been angry if he’d actually had the thing. He didn’t ask why I had decided to betray him, which made me feel oddly guilty, more so than if he’d berated me.
And yet what did I owe Havelock Renard? Nothing.
“I don’t know why I’m helping you,” I muttered. And really, it was ludicrous—just thirty seconds before, I’d been certain he was about to blast me apart with some enchantment. Not to mention that not only did he live in a monster’s lair, he looked like one.
“You seem like someone who must always be helping,” he murmured to the ceiling, wincing as I worked. “If you aren’t lecturing strangers.”
This unexpected perceptiveness only made me more angry with him. “You aren’t a stranger anymore,” I said. “Unfortunately. And I—” I froze, the scarf slipping from my hands as I stared at him in sudden horror. “What happened to your face?”
He squinted at me. “What? Oh. It must be the beauty spell. What’s different?”
“You—your eye. They were both brown before. Now one’s green.” Not only green, but it seemed a different shape than the brown one, and more heavy-lidded, so that now he looked as if he had a squint.
“Ah,” he said. “That one’s been flickering on and off for days. I’m not surprised. I shouldn’t have tried splicing second-order magic with first.”
It took me a moment to make sense of this. “You cast a spell on yourself?”
He blushed, then glared at me, as if to make up for it. “Why not? Is it not better to experiment on myself than subject someone else to the spells, if one should go awry?”
This display of ethics was too discrepant to be believable. “You’re experimenting with beauty spells?” I said. “Is that not a frivolous use of a dark magician’s time?”
“Dark magician?” He looked piqued. “There is only one kind of magician. The use to which some of us put our abilities could perhaps be categorized thus, but magic has only one source.”
He looked about to launch into one of his pedantic speeches, so I said quickly, “I only meant that I’m surprised the great Witch King would bother beautifying himself.”
“Beauty spells are of an order magicians call phantasmic,” he said.
“As opposed to grounded and illusionary enchantments. That just means that they are inherently unstable. No one has ever cast a flawless beauty spell, and indeed, they are among the most dangerous spells of all, the most likely to go awry. A magician might cast a beauty spell on Tuesday and the same spell again on Wednesday and achieve opposite results. Theorists suggest it’s because beauty is inherently subjective and variable through time, unlike, say, a spell for warming one’s hands. It can’t be pinned down.”
I would get a speech no matter what, it seemed. He had grown animated as he spoke about magic, his drawn face gaining colour, waving his hands about in a way that made me jittery, given the enchantments he wore on his fingers. “And you find this—interesting?” I said slowly.
He looked at me as if I were another species. “I’m close to perfecting the spell.”
“No, you’re not,” I said definitively. His features had already been unusual; now he looked like he was wearing someone else’s eye.
He waved a ringed hand, and again I suppressed the urge to duck. “I test each enchantment a feature at a time. It’s more efficient that way—less magic.”
“Right now you just look like death,” I said. “Stop moving around.”
He examined me. I saw none of that cold confidence now; his mistrust of me made him look younger than he was.
I think because it was so ridiculous, a lion nervously eyeing a bee.
Finally, he sighed and leaned his head back, his dark hair spilling across the back of the couch.
I found myself studying the sharp angle of his jaw and Adam’s apple, which made me annoyed with myself.
The jaw probably wasn’t even his, anyhow.
I returned my attention to what I was doing, tying the scarf off with a knot. I’d covered his leg, obscuring the horror lurking beneath, though not his foot, which was flickering and diaphanous. I hurriedly withdrew my hands.
“I think that worked,” I said dubiously. “You’re not bleeding now, anyway. Would you care to explain what the hell is happening to you?”
“I’m not sure I can explain,” he said, still gazing up at the ceiling, his voice distant. “I only know that I’ve been spending too much time in the Rivenwood. Ri was right.” This last was muttered.
“I don’t understand the Rivenwood at all,” I told him, which I meant only as a statement of fact.
I had no desire to learn more about the place, which had looked, in the brief glimpse I’d had of it, like the template upon which every dark forest in every dark fairy tale had been based. I kept wishing that I could forget it.
“Most people don’t,” he said. “Including magicians. We only know it’s a fallen world, a world of magic, and that it was corrupted, somehow, by that same magic. Nobody lives there anymore but spectres.”
I looked him up and down. “And magicians?”
“The most popular theory is that modern magicians are all descended from a handful of refugees who fled from the world we now call the Rivenwood many centuries ago, as it collapsed. These refugees carried the seed of magic inside them from their world, and sometimes it surfaces in their descendants.”
I swallowed. “And spectres?”
“Spectres are magicians,” he said. “Or what’s left of them. Those who aren’t careful.”
I was appalled. “Magicians, you—you turn into—that?”
“Not always. Many of the spectres of the Rivenwood are ancient, remnants of the people who once lived there. But the longer a magician spends in the Rivenwood, and the deeper they go, the more its magic gets inside them. Eventually, some lose their ability to take human form entirely. They remain in the woods and prey upon other magicians.” He gestured at his leg. “One took me by surprise.”
“Then magic is—some sort of poison?” I said.