Chapter 25 #3
He drew one leg up and leaned against it. “If you don’t wish to discuss it, please forget I brought it up.”
I shook my head. I didn’t mind telling him; part of me was even relieved he’d asked.
“It was his heart,” I said. “He was thirty years old. Whose heart gives out at thirty? The doctors were astonished.” I gave a huff of laughter.
“ ‘Exceptionally rare,’ they said. ‘One in a million.’ His heart was too small—or too small in one spot, a bad spot; I still don’t understand it exactly.
I don’t know how nobody noticed it. But then, they said that even if someone had, there would have been no difference. There wasn’t anything—”
I was beginning to ramble, and stopped myself.
I watched the embers breathe in the hearth, realizing that it had been some time since I’d spoken about Robin.
It was an odd feeling, as if I were unearthing something that, in the time since I’d last checked on it, had been covered over by a layer of moss and fallen leaves.
Not gone, but no longer as stark as it once had been.
“It was sudden,” Havelock said.
I let out my breath. “He’d gone to pick up our laundry. I told him not to stop at the baker’s. He was always spending too much at the baker’s.” My hand tightened on my knee. “That was the last thing I said to him. A lecture about bread.”
I stopped, because the memory was nearly as painful as what had come after—it was something I could blame myself for, unlike Robin’s death. “I’ve always wished I’d said something else,” I finished at last.
Havelock shifted, resting his head against the stones. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said, forcing my hand to relax. “Perhaps you and Valérie can still make amends. After she no longer has this Artefact to obsess over.”
“No,” he said, watching the flames. “She’s often said I’ve spent too much time in the Rivenwood. But in truth, it’s taken more of her.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I didn’t know what was worse—to lose someone suddenly and without warning, or to be losing someone always, a continual process, as magic wore away at the person they were.
“Why hasn’t Valérie attacked again?” I said. “You moved the shop back. She knows where you are now, and she got past your wards once.”
“Because she’s plotting something. Even if she could attack again, she would never be so uncouth as to be predictable.”
I watched him. He was leaning against the fire-warmed stones, fingers woven together over his knee, looking more at ease than I’d ever seen him.
“Where have you been disappearing to?” I said. “Have you been spending all this time in the Rivenwood?”
“You must think I want to turn myself into a monster. No—I’ve been tracking down Valérie’s apprentices and undoing their enchantments. I stopped the fire at the chocolatier’s from spreading any farther than it did. It was enchanted flame, not something humans could have put out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, delighted, because this was exactly what I had guessed he’d been up to.
“I didn’t quite catch that. Surely you didn’t mean to imply you’d done anything so public-spirited, but meant to say that you stood by and gloated as the shop burned and chaos spread through the city, as a proper dark magician would. ”
“Even dark magicians need a place to live,” he said.
“This is my city. I won’t have them burning it to the ground.
You shouldn’t look at me as if I’ve been off rescuing kittens for you.
I’ve killed a dozen of her apprentices.” He played absently with one of his rings, a frown forming between his eyes.
“Most of her followers are little more than husks. Spectres wearing human skins. The weaker the magician, the more easily they’re consumed. ”
If he had been trying to dampen my glee, he succeeded.
As much as he mocked my moralizing, I didn’t see much reason to condemn the deaths of those so careless about the lives of others; the whole business only seemed insoluble and terribly sad.
But anyone whose line of work exposes them to the range of mistreatment inflicted upon living creatures, human or otherwise, is used to cohabitating with this feeling, and getting on with things anyway.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t the world end three years ago?”
He stilled for a brief moment in the act of placing another log on the fire. “Perhaps my spell failed—isn’t that what most people think?” With a flick of his fingers and a murmured word, flames leapt up from the embers. “I was spectacularly obtuse at nineteen.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Naturally you don’t. You’ve come to believe the most generous explanation—that I stopped it somehow. Most likely in a display of heroic sacrifice.”
“In my experience, most people deserve generosity,” I replied. “Particularly those determined to believe they don’t.”
“I won’t argue with you,” he said. “It would be as productive as trying to convince your felines of the merits of vegetables. And in one sense, you’re right.
I stopped it. I was able to reverse the spell, with no small amount of difficulty.
Given that no magician had ever invented an apocalypse enchantment before, nobody had ever created a spell for stopping one, so I had no templates to follow.
My Artefacts weren’t any better organized back then than they are now, and it took some time for me to locate the only one that could have helped—a lantern enchanted by Vortigern to absorb magic and unravel spells.
The only Artefact of Vortigern’s I ever owned—to my knowledge, anyhow. ”
“The lantern absorbs magic?” I repeated. My head was spinning a little. The woman had created a book that could turn back time, and a lantern that could end an apocalypse? What was next, a salt shaker that could raise the dead?
Magicians! I thought, with a familiar feeling of weariness at the power they had over the lives of ordinary people.
Havelock nodded. “I thought that if I wove it with a brightening spell, I could banish the darkness that had fallen over the world, and reverse the spell Valérie had unleashed.”
“Like a sunrise,” I said, unable to stop myself from smiling. It was like something out of myth, like the story of the witch who created the night by weaving it on her loom.
“I never had a chance to try my theory,” he continued, turning away from me to gaze into the fire. “On the third night of the world’s ending, I made my way up Mount Royal to cast the enchantment from a height, but before I could, I was accosted by a stranger, and the lantern was stolen.”
“A magician?”
“I assumed so. I was being hunted by magicians from all over the world during those dark days. There’s an old folk belief among magicians that enchantments can be ended by killing whoever created them.
It’s not true, but some people still believe it.
This stranger couldn’t kill me, but they managed to make off with the one thing I thought could end the darkness. ”
When he spoke again, he seemed to choose each word carefully, as if he’d given them a great deal of thought.
“It was for the best, though. The lantern wasn’t designed to undo an enchantment of that scale.
I would simply have wasted Vortigern’s spell—like most Artefacts, it could be cast just once.
And it would have delayed me from realizing the truth. ”
“And that was?”
“That it was up to me,” he said simply. “I had made the spell to end the world, and I had to unmake it. I couldn’t rely on Vortigern or anyone else.
I had to travel to the Fourth Fathom of the Rivenwood, where I could gather magic powerful enough to create a twelve-layer spell of partitioning.
A spell that was strong enough to save us all. ”
So that was why he’d visited the Fourth Fathom, travelling deeper into the Rivenwood than most magicians ever ventured, and sacrificing a piece of himself—who knew how large—in the process.
Yet it had been his responsibility in the first place, even if it hadn’t been his fault, and so I did not condescend to him by praising him for it.
I looked up from the fire to find him watching me with an unreadable expression.
I wondered if he expected me to lecture him, or perhaps be overcome with awe or horror at the harrowing tale.
Before I could do either, though, I noticed Thoreau pawing at the bars of his cage.
“Excuse me,” I said, then rose and unlocked the cage door.
Havelock gave a quiet laugh. “We’re talking about the apocalypse, and all you can think about is your cats.”
“I didn’t stop caring for them when the world was ending,” I said drily. “So you can’t expect me to be distracted by the memory of it.”
He watched as I exchanged Thoreau’s blanket for a fresh one. “I was right. You never rest, do you?”
“I suppose not,” I said absently, lifting Thoreau and cradling him in my arms.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh—nothing out of the ordinary. One of our newcomers came in with a bad case of fleas. They’ve spread to at least three of the others, including Thoreau. It’s worse for him, because they trouble his arthritis. He has difficulty sleeping.”
I scratched the old cat’s chin, and he leaned into me, burrowing into the warmth of my arms. “I’ve treated them, but it will take a day or two for every flea to die off.”
“Charming creatures,” Havelock said. “If they aren’t clawing your leg or leaving dead things scattered about, they’re spreading parasites.”
I frowned. “Who clawed your leg?”
“That white-pawed demon, of course.”
I resumed massaging Thoreau’s scrawny back. I disliked seeing the old cat in any amount of discomfort; it made me feel I had failed him.
“Here,” Havelock said. He touched one of his rings and murmured an incantation. A wind fluttered over us, and over the cat cages, smelling of something sharp and peppery.
“That should do it,” he said. “It’s a spell for ridding a place of pests. Pity it doesn’t work on certain felines. Good night.”
And then, as if what he’d done had been a mere trifle—no doubt it seemed that way to him—he disappeared into the back room.
With shaking hands, I checked Thoreau’s fur. Not only had the fleas vanished, but so had the itchy red welts that had covered his skin. The cat gave a contented stretch, yawning. I returned him to his cage, and he curled up in his blanket nest.
Naturally, my response to all this was to start crying.
I watched Thoreau sleeping more peacefully than he had in days, then checked the other cats.
But it seemed every flea in the shelter had been blasted into dust, or perhaps Havelock had sent them off to the Rivenwood, to feast upon whatever furred things lurked among those ruins and dark forests.
I wiped my eyes. Then I marched over to the back room.
I threw back the trapdoor, not bothering to be quiet about it, and stomped down the stairs. Havelock was standing at his worktable, tidying things or fussing with one of his experiments. He looked up at me in surprise as I came towards him.
“Agnes?” he said, tilting his head. “Should I—?”
But whatever quip he was about to deliver, I didn’t give him a chance. I threw my arms around him and kissed him.
At first, he might have been turned to stone. But then his lips parted slightly, and his hand came up and rested against the curve of my neck just below my ear, his rings brushing against my skin. Just as he did this, I became aware of what I was doing, and let him go.
I was still crying a little, unfortunately, and I let out an embarrassingly unbecoming sniffle into the stark silence. I dashed my hand over my eyes, then turned and marched back upstairs, leaving him standing there, knocked slightly off-balance amongst the detritus of his worktable.