Chapter 18 #2
“Not exactly. Magic is a living thing.”
“So are rattlesnakes,” I said, still unable to believe it. “Sensible people stay away from them.”
“And devote their time to collecting city pests?”
I didn’t see that there was much to joke about, given what we had been discussing.
I rose and seated myself warily on the edge of the couch.
Havelock’s frame wasn’t intimidating, at least; he was only a few inches taller than me, and was lean rather than muscular, in a way that was less suggestive of deprivation than a tendency to forget about food.
“And yet you keep going back there,” I said. “Despite what it’s doing to you.”
“You sound like Yannick. The shop had to be moved back—I couldn’t very well leave a crater in the heart of the city. There wasn’t time to barter for the magic I needed. You and those beasts made it essential that I act with haste, so that I could place new wards upon both my shops.”
I frowned, not understanding. “What do the cats have to do with anything?”
“Don’t you—” He pushed himself up, and his expression changed. He glanced down at his leg and moved it experimentally. “That—that feels better.”
“I imagine it would. You’re not bleeding out anymore.”
“I wasn’t going to bleed out. But wounds suffered in the Rivenwood take time to close, and—I suppose the dressing has sped the process.”
He had stiffened, as if now that the pain had lessened he was aware of the intimacy of what I’d done, and of my presence there, in his private chambers, sitting on what I realized was probably his bed.
He began to redden, which was unfortunate, for I’ve often found others’ discomfort contagious, and my own face flushed.
He reached down to adjust the scarf, and I snatched his hand away with a cry, thinking he meant to remove it.
He stared at me and my face heated yet again—not because I’d touched him, but because my reaction proved I cared more than I’d let on whether he bled to death, which was frankly as much of a surprise to me.
“You dropped your book,” I said, desperate for a distraction. I picked it up—another novel, though the cover was too worn for me to make out anything other than the words House of. “Looks like you lost your page.”
“No matter.” He took it from me and laid it on the table. “I’ve read that one a dozen times.”
I puzzled over this. He’d been sitting here, injured and alone, and he’d decided to read an old book?
“Well?” I said into the dreadfully awkward silence. “I asked what the cats have to do with any of this.”
“The cats,” he repeated. His accent made the word sound clipped, or perhaps that was just his dislike. “Well, they have the tracking spell on them too. Didn’t Yannick tell you?”
“The tracking spell?” It came out almost as a shout.
Havelock started and drew back from me. “You didn’t—?”
“Of course I didn’t!” I was definitely shouting now. “You put a tracking spell on me?”
“Why on earth would I do that? You think I care about the whereabouts of a load of mangy ferals and their painfully earnest minder? Valérie cast it—that’s why she was able to find me, and eventually undo my old wards. You led her to my shop.”
“We did not!” I exclaimed. “Why would Valérie enchant a cat shelter?”
Havelock looked as if he were about to make one of his sarcastic remarks—I was beginning to learn the signs, that sardonic glint in his eye and slight head tilt. But then he seemed to deflate, as if realizing the situation was too ridiculous to be ridiculed. “I have no idea.”
“Thank you!” I said. “She would have had to cast it on us when we were in the old shop, wouldn’t she? How would she have known—” I froze as a thought struck me like an Arctic wave.
“It may have been accidental,” Havelock said.
“I’m told she started a duel with another magician a month or two ago—a man I’ve had dealings with in the past. When he wouldn’t tell her my whereabouts, she tried to put a tracking spell on him, so she would know if he visited me.
He was able to shake it off, but perhaps it rebounded on you somehow. ”
I forced myself to ask my next question. “Would this spell have compelled the magician to visit your shop?”
“No. That sort of magic isn’t possible.” He paused, his gaze growing distant. “Unless the spell was old, but that—”
“Old?”
“Old spells are unpredictable. They can warp or stretch, or take on new facets. People think that magic spells can break, but in fact magic is more like water. One can contain it in vessels, but it always wants to shift, to flow. I was unpicking the workings of a medieval summoning spell last week, and found it just as likely to repel as to…”
“Wonderful,” I murmured faintly, not listening to him as he rambled on. “Just wonderful. Not only do I have a spell on me, it’s a mutated spell. How comforting.”
He narrowed his eyes, and I forgot for a moment how strangely easy it felt, talking to him. But he only said, “What happened?”
I explained how, in the weeks following the duel that had damaged the old shelter, I’d been drawn to Rue des Hirondelles time and again—too often, I realized now, for mere coincidence.
“Yes,” he said when I’d finished. “It sounds like she enchanted you. What wonderful luck! Her spell couldn’t have rebounded on a maker of ice cream or fine wines. No, it found a woman who makes my eyes itch by her proximity alone.”
I realized his eyes did look red and glanced down at myself—I was wearing one of my old sweaters, which I rarely took the lint brush to.
“Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t work out whether I should thank him.
The idea of doing so was absurd, and yet I’d endangered him by moving there—inadvertently, of course—and he hadn’t thrown me out, or subjected me to some cruel form of punishment, which didn’t exactly accord with his reputation.
I realized I no longer believed in his reputation, though that didn’t mean I understood him, or thought him good.
Goodness was hardly defined by not being the cause of an apocalypse.
And anyhow, Havelock’s quarrel with his sister had been the reason I’d lost my home. Did I really owe him any thanks, even if the quarrel wasn’t of his making?
For some reason, though, the question that surfaced through all this doubt was “What does your face look like under all the spells you’ve put on yourself?”
“I don’t have a face. I’m actually a handful of cobwebs mixed with moonlight, like all dark magicians.”
I scowled, suppressing an unexpected snort. “I’m being serious.”
“Are you ever anything else?” He paused. “I have only the one spell on me at present.”
So he had always looked like a handful of mismatched puzzle pieces.
I glanced around the room, which, now that I was able to focus on it, seemed specially designed to maximize comfort.
In addition to the couch there were two wide, squashy armchairs, and lamps perched on various tables and bookshelves.
Wool rugs were scattered about, a few heaped in a pile in front of the fire, as if Havelock were in the habit of curling up there when the fancy took him.
On the whole, it was more like the manifestation of some librarian’s fantasy than a dark magician’s lair.
“Yannick thinks you store your most powerful spells down here,” I said.
“Yes. He leaves me alone that way.”
I gave a huff of laughter. “He said the trapdoor was locked.”
“I never bothered with a locking spell. I just told him it was, and he never tested it.”
So Yannick was afraid of Havelock, at least a little. “Why is Valérie so convinced you have this book?”
“The first thing you must understand about my sister is that she is an insufferable egotist,” he said.
“The surest way to stump her is to ask about the last time she was wrong about something. She claims she’s been following the book’s trail for years.
She tracked it to a collector who sold it back in the ’90s to a reclusive American magician called Walker Clem.
He died without heirs, and his Artefacts were inadvertently donated to a museum.
A few years ago, I was able to purchase his collection from the museum once they worked out they were magical Artefacts, not an old man’s collection of antique curios—they were only too happy to be rid of them.
But Vortigern’s book was not among the Artefacts. ”
“Are you certain?”
“Of course,” he said, looking offended. “I would have recognized it.”
I considered this. “Where did you put Clem’s collection?”
“Oh—” He waved a hand. “No particular place. I remember he had a collection of poison enchantments that mimic ordinary illnesses when cast, which I took apart and stored in one of the cabinets. They were nasty things, but fascinating in their own way, and strengthened by five-layer hexes—”
Just as I thought. “Did the collection contain any books?” I cut in, because I could see he was building up a head of steam again.
“Vortigern’s wouldn’t necessarily look like a grimoire, yes?
It could be a guidebook to mushrooms of the Acadian forest or a treatise on ridge and furrow farming.
If an Artefact is just a vessel to store magic, surely there are Artefacts that don’t look particularly interesting but contain powerful spells. ”
“I would have sensed Vortigern’s enchantment,” he said. “Her spells have a distinct signature.”
“Are there spells for hiding other spells?”
He was fiddling with one of his rings, gazing into the distance with a slight frown between his eyes. “Yes, but—”
“And given that you didn’t learn of the potential importance of Clem’s collection until later, when Valérie came looking for it, you might not have examined everything closely.”
He didn’t reply for a moment. Absently, he removed the ring he’d been toying with and tossed it on the table. I leapt back in my seat with a muffled shriek, bringing my hands up.
He gazed at me in surprise. “What are you doing?”
“It’s not going to—” The ring—studded with black opals in the shape of a crescent moon—simply lay there, and I suddenly felt foolish. “It’s not going to go off?”
“It’s not a gun,” he said. “Anyway, I spent the enchantment it contained. Most Artefacts can be used only once—it takes a powerful magician to fold in a recursive enchantment. Even then, the magic has to be replenished regularly.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved.
He was eyeing me in an odd way, as if I were a character in one of his novels who’d wandered in from a different story. “Even if I do have Vortigern’s book,” he continued slowly, “I can’t give it to Valérie. You don’t understand the horrors she would unleash with it.”
This was interesting. He no longer sounded so convinced he didn’t have the thing somewhere in his rat’s nest of a magic shop.
Had he always known it was a possibility, despite his protestations?
He struck me as the type who, given half the chance, would go out of his way to ignore truths he didn’t wish to deal with.
“We could destroy it, then,” I said. “And send Valérie the pieces as evidence. In any case, our first step is finding Clem’s Artefacts.” I stood, brushing my skirts off, as has become my habit, even when I haven’t had a cat sitting on me.
“I told you,” he said, “I don’t know where—”
“Where you put them, yes. It’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”
He stared at me, then opened his mouth to make some objection. I didn’t let him.
“Yes, I said ridiculous. A magician who can’t keep track of his spells. It’s like a baker losing track of his sugar. What is the point of having a magic shop if you never do your inventory?” I paused. “Do you even know what that word means?”
“Sanctimonious and condescending,” he said. “I wish you’d left me to bleed out; I’d be spared your tedious lectures.”
I turned to leave. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Why did that sound like a threat?” he called after me. “You’re going to sic those fleabags on me if I don’t hand over my ledger?”
I doubted he had a ledger, or if he did, that he knew where it was in all that chaos. Perhaps I was underestimating him—I certainly hoped so. In any case, I’d frightened myself, talking to him as I had. I didn’t understand why I was so confident that he wouldn’t enchant me in some horrible way.
So instead of responding, I settled for a mysterious silence. He didn’t aim any curses at my back, though I’d no doubt he was glaring at me, nor did he turn me into a paper clip, and the trapdoor opened easily when I pushed on it.