Chapter 35
Even in her half-asleep state, élise noticed something was wrong.
I couldn’t speak, for one thing, only shake my head when she mumbled questions at me.
I was able to support her weight all the way to the bakery, and then I found a loose brick and smashed the glass in the door—I wondered why I’d been so worried about the problem before.
Now I barely thought about it, even as the broken glass jabbed my arm, sending a trickle of blood down my sleeve.
élise and I clambered into the oven—one at a time, for its cavernous entrance was half blocked by the proofing cabinet of sourdough—and I spoke the incantation again.
But when I poked my head back into the bakery, there were the pies on their racks and the storm pelting the windows with hail.
Worse, from the floor above came a groan followed by a thumping sound, as of a large and ungainly person rising from their bed.
“It has to work,” I said frantically. The black kitten sniffed at a pile of ashes, within which was a half-disintegrated roll, and gave a worried chirp.
“Is it one way?” élise mumbled. She was leaning against the stone wall of the oven, oblivious to the ash staining her dress.
“Havelock said there and back.” I pressed my sooty hands into my hair, increasingly desperate. “There and back. I’m certain of it.”
“Agnes, it’s old,” élise said. “Maybe it—maybe the spell isn’t strong enough to take us back.”
“He said there and back,” I murmured. Some part of me recognized the logic in élise’s words, but the larger part refused to believe that Havelock—Havelock!
—could be wrong about anything related to magic.
I said the incantation again, and again.
Nothing changed—the hail pounded, the shop remained a bakery.
I needed to return to the cats, and to Havelock, whom we had abandoned just as Valérie and her apprentices blasted him with every dark enchantment he’d ever hoarded in his damn shop.
And then a different longing hit me, the need to abandon the entire ridiculous quest and run into the street, to catch Robin and tell him—what? There was nothing I could say that would save him. But I could hold him again, and abruptly there was nothing I wanted but that.
The competing desires buffeted me like waves, threatening to drown me.
The kitten, meanwhile, was washing her paw. When she’d finished, she shook the paw and set it down gingerly, seeming to dislike the soot of the oven. She sniffed at the proofing cabinet—the sourdough had risen since we’d left, warmed by the heat retained in the brickwork—and then vanished.
I stared dumbly, shock erasing the panicked ruminations. It had looked as if the cat had stepped into one of the loaves, and I started forward as if to rescue her from being drowned in sourdough. But then I realized.
“It’s the way home,” I cried. “élise—the spell worked, but it’s smaller than it was before. The way back to our time, I mean. But the kitten found it—she found a gap!”
“A gap?” élise repeated. “Agnes, that makes even less sense than—”
I wasn’t listening. “I should have known,” I murmured. “She’s a cat, and cats always find a gap.”
I gave a laugh that was far too loud, and went on, and on—I leaned against the wall of the oven, unable to stop. Rather than being astonished by my discovery, élise only let out a low groan and said, “Goddamn you, Havelock, this whole thing just gets madder and—”
Before she could finish, I was dragging her forward, still giggling in sharp bursts, and into the proofing cabinet.
At the last second, I squeezed my eyes shut, certain I would end up on the floor of the bakery covered in sourdough, but the cabinet vanished, and élise and I spilled out of the oven and onto the floor, élise landing on her rear and I flat on my back.
Yet even as I stared up into the worried face of the kitten, who looked appalled by my gracelessness, as if there were nothing difficult at all about stepping through a gap in time, I thought that it still hadn’t worked, and we were truly stuck in the old bakery.
It seemed for a moment as if the counter were still filled with pies, the air laced with sugar, but then I blinked, and the cages were back, as were the yowls of their occupants.
I was dizzy, and I saw flickering lights again, which faded as I focused on the flagstones beneath my feet and the ashy smell of magic.
I left élise on the floor by the oven—not as unkind as it sounds; I could not bring her into danger in her current state—and sprinted towards the trapdoor with the lantern clutched in my hand.
The air was filled with dust from the fallen plaster, but I could also smell smoke.
Had I come back too late? I’d wished to return to the very moment I’d left, but maybe the enchantment hadn’t understood.
The smoke was worse in Havelock’s workshop, which meant I caught only glimpses of the chaos that had descended upon the place.
Regular tremors shook the building, and flames crackled somewhere, the smell of magic and burning wood thick in the air.
I could make out at least two bodies lying motionless amidst the rubble and overturned furniture, and another magician who looked, horrifically, as if she’d been entombed in an enormous spider’s nest on the ceiling, but I could not identify if any were Valérie.
As I paused on the landing, a magician hiding behind one of the cabinets threw a lion at me—this was more puzzling in retrospect than it was in the moment, when my only thought was getting out of the way of the thing—but fortunately the beast seemed more illusion than substance, or perhaps the magician had cast the enchantment poorly.
It came racing across the floor, snarling and far too swift, but then merely scrabbled at the lowest stair before flickering in and out of existence.
Havelock had been backed up against the stairs leading to the lower floors, and somehow he’d dragged one of the cabinets in front of him, which had been sliced through diagonally as if by the talons of some enormous raptor.
“Havelock!” I cried, tears running down my face. He’s alive, was all I could think for a moment, before I remembered I had a role to play in all this, absurdly, and could not simply cower there, waiting for it to end.
I would have liked to have thrown the lantern at him, but I didn’t trust my aim, so instead I ran up the stairs, dodging some uncanny bird that swooped at me and leaping over a hole that had been blasted in a stair. When I was parallel to where he stood, I jumped, landing gracelessly at his side.
He turned towards me, pale and verklempt, and then his eyes widened in astonishment.
I tripped, coughing on the smoke, and a tremor shook the floor, sending me crashing into him—probably a good thing, for the wall behind us abruptly exploded, hit by some enchantment. I thrust the lantern into his hand.
He actually began to laugh, even as dust rained down upon us and one of the floor beams above cracked and splintered. I had to shake him to return him to his senses.
“I will never again complain of the uncanniness of your cats,” he said, his voice hoarse from the smoke. “For they are only taking after their minder.”
“Havelock!” I cried.
“Yes, yes.” He lifted the lantern almost reverently and stood, then murmured the spell to unleash the magic. Somehow, his quiet words cut through the chaos and noise like the reverberation of a gong.
A wave erupted from the lantern. At least, that is the closest I can come to describing it.
It was cold, but pleasantly so, and had the soft, spongey texture of wool.
It was as dark and glimmering as the ocean under a sky of stars.
It washed over the workshop and then withdrew, and as it did, it carried things away with it: the lion, wisps of flame shaped into beads of light, the outlines of the glowing spiders, though not the spiders themselves.
I did not understand it all, for what I glimpsed was exceedingly strange—I also saw windows to other places, landscapes of looming mountains and coppery desert, as well as the ghostly outlines of people, dancing or talking or weeping, as if they’d been cast there by a film projector.
All swept away by the enchantment like a tide retreating with a miscellany of small treasures, shells, and driftwood.
And while it was strange, it was also impossibly beautiful.
Havelock stood at the centre, the lantern light against his face, his hand slightly extended and his brow furrowed as he guided the magic he had unleashed.
When the wave finally receded back into the lantern, all of it fitting neatly inside the tiny dimensions, I drew in a gasping breath, but the feeling of being plunged into cold water was already fading, leaving only gooseflesh behind.
Valérie lay at Havelock’s feet, her eyes closed and her face turned to one side, like a sailor washed ashore after a shipwreck.
She breathed but she also seemed strangely grey, as if the colour had been drawn out of her.
“There,” Havelock said quietly. He added, “I’m sorry, Ri.”
I didn’t know what he was apologizing for, because I did not fully comprehend what the spell had done.
All I knew was that the fighting had stopped and Valérie was defeated.
Just as important, the place no longer seemed to be on fire.
The shop gave a groan, followed by a deafening grinding noise, and then it seemed to settle into an equilibrium, emitting only occasional creaks like exasperated grunts.
Perhaps these events had not been the strangest it had endured in its long lifespan.
Havelock didn’t go to Valérie, though. He set the lantern down upon his worktable—it continued to glow gently, seemingly unchanged from before—and came to my side, pulling me firmly if a little stiffly into his arms, as if he weren’t entirely clear on the mechanics.
He could not have known why I was crying, and so hard that my body shook, or possibly he’d guessed, but he held me without speaking.
We sat there in the sudden dark of his shop—the spiderlight had gone out—until concern for élise, as well as the outraged yowling of the cats, forced me to my feet with the tears still wet on my face, and back up into the light of the shelter.