Chapter 31 #4
Banshee lunged forward again, nearly getting her claws into His Majesty’s other ear. The big cat hissed, and then—I struggled to believe my eyes—turned tail and fled into the shadows.
“Banshee!” I shouted, but the creature ignored me completely and chased after His Majesty, her fur so fluffed she looked almost as large as the black-and-white cat.
I ran for the stairs, dragging élise behind me. Nobody paid us any mind—no doubt they assumed I was fleeing out of terror, which was certainly part of it. I couldn’t do anything to help Havelock—and yet, if my theory was correct, I could save us all.
I glimpsed a flicker of uncanny emberlight from the corner of my eye, and I knew that Havelock had shed his human form and flown at the apprentices, or perhaps at Valérie.
I hoped, with a viciousness that was quite unlike me, that he tore her to pieces, but I had a terrible suspicion that she had planned this attack too carefully to be caught by surprise.
After all, it was clear that she knew her brother better than he knew her.
I felt an ache for him. I didn’t know if Valérie had once loved Havelock as a sister should and the Rivenwood had destroyed that love, or if she had always been this way at her core and he simply hadn’t wanted to see it—nor did I know which was worse.
élise was shouting something, which I ignored. When at last we regained the main floor, the entire building shuddered and we fell against the wall—one of the enchantments had shaken the place to its foundations.
“Where are you going?” élise shrieked as I dashed towards the oven.
She planted her feet and tried to wrench me in the direction of the door and the relative safety of the street beyond.
We tussled briefly, as if we were children again, but I had usually won our tussles, perhaps due to my broader shoulders, and managed to yank her off-balance.
“Agnes, what—”
“The oven!” I yelled, unable to be more articulate. I didn’t particularly want to bring élise with me into this new peril, and yet leaving her behind felt equally dangerous.
“Have you lost your mind!” élise yelled back, but I dragged her up and over the lip of the stone ledge nonetheless, and never was there greater evidence of her trust in me than the fact that she let me.
“Vortigern’s Artefact is in the oven,” I finally managed. “It’s directly above where Valérie was standing—she thought the compass was directing her to one of the lower floors, but it can’t be, élise—I’ve catalogued all the Artefacts down there.”
I narrowed my eyes, searching. The oven was only high enough to stand in if I hunched over, and full of shadow.
To my delight, one of the spiders had fallen into élise’s hair, and it retained some of its illumination, though this seemed to be fading now that it had left the basement.
I plucked it from her head—élise screamed, batting at her hair—and held it aloft, cupped between my hands.
There! Against the south wall of the oven, I could just make out the imprint of Banshee’s body where she was wont to curl up in the ashes. Banshee, who was drawn to danger and loved the smell of magic, had claimed this, of all places, as her personal nest.
I couldn’t say it was my deductive skill that had enabled me to work it out, and it certainly wasn’t my knowledge of magic. No, it was Banshee. She’d led me to it—her quirks and habits, which I knew as well as my own, as I did those of all my cats.
I babbled all this to élise, who was still yanking at her hair and moaning about spiders—neither of us was truly listening to the other.
“Havelock must have tried to burn it,” I said, setting the poor spider down—it staggered off as if drunk—so that I could feel along the edge of the oven, turning my hands black from the soot almost instantly. “If Vortigern enchanted it to make it appear useless—if her magic was greater than his—”
I broke off—my hand had snagged on something. I gave a cry of triumph as I pulled the book free.
It was a small thing, perhaps half the size of an ordinary book, clearly an antiquity but too well-preserved, at first glance, to be as old as any Artefact of Vortigern’s.
The cover was badly singed but the rest was mostly intact.
I flipped through it, but the pages were empty.
No Property of the great magician Alice Vortigern written on the inside cover, nor any diary entries recounting eventful days of strolling through the Rivenwood or crafting any number of appallingly dangerous spells.
“The pastry,” I said wonderingly as another piece slid into place.
“Havelock thought it was because of a Renaissance Artefact, but it was this all along. The magic has leaked into the oven, and every night it turns back time to when the baker was here. It’s ridiculous that it should do so every midnight, but old magic often behaves strangely, Havelock said.
The rules warp. Then he is stealing Claude’s wares, just as Claude complained about—he’s doing it from the future! ”
I tried to imagine how it might have happened. Had Havelock been thinking about Claude while he sat by the fire with the book in his hands? Was that how the spell worked? One had to think about the moment in time they wanted to return to?
I didn’t have to wonder which moment in time I should return to. I already knew, because Havelock had told me.
I spoke the incantation Havelock had taught me for releasing magic from its vessel, thinking hard about the date. Was that how it was supposed to work? When nothing happened, I spoke the date out loud.
Nothing.
“Agnes,” élise said, tugging on my arm. “Just leave it—it was a good theory, but the spell probably doesn’t work anymore. It can bring us pastry, but that’s it. Let’s gather the cats and get as far away from here as possible.”
Despair overwhelmed me. I needed to save Havelock, as well as the cats—I needed to save all of us.
I had thought for one glorious moment that I’d found the solution, and yet here I was, crouched ridiculously in an oven, covered in ash, all my courage and determination just an impotent thing inside me, of no use to anyone.
And yet, wasn’t I used to the feeling by now?
How many times had I told myself that I could make things better, only to have the world remind me how small I was, a leaf in a vast river whose currents were governed by forces I could barely understand?
Perhaps magicians like Havelock or Valérie could shape those currents, but I could not.
I could barely even keep the shelter going before Havelock came along, barely protect the cats in my care from meeting a variety of unhappy ends.
And every year the cycle began again: more cats, more suffering, and me flailing about with my checklists, trying to rescue them all, not realizing that I was being drowned by the current we were all caught in.
Tears trickled down my cheeks, and I let élise pull me out of the oven and into the shop, where I realized that the world had fallen silent.