Chapter 33
Ezra Bright knew exactly what to say at George’s grave now.
It was a hazy August day, and even Thornhill’s many sheep had not been able to keep up with the summer lushness.
Weeds arced everywhere. Clouds pillowed the sky; cricket-song blanketed the ground.
The house was starting to look a bit like the wishing tree’s rotted stump—covered in lichen and wearing away at the edges.
Several weather vanes had vanished from the turrets, their gold melted down and used to pay some tax or other.
Ezra couldn’t keep track. None of them could.
Lord Blackwood’s debts had piled too high.
There’d be no salvaging the estate. Biz had been less upset at this news than he’d anticipated, given how far she’d gone to save the place.
Much of this was thanks to the crates she was currently packing.
The ones marked LUXOR. Ezra doubted his mother’s old flat would be large enough to fit all the boxes, which was why they’d also rented the unit next door.
And another on the floor below for Celia’s family.
The cost of living by the Nile was significantly cheaper than watching trash float down the Thames.
Calamity would have all the fresh fish she could stand to eat.
It was a strategic move.
In more ways than one.
Ezra could finally see himself in Thornhill’s windows, thanks to the shine of his masque.
He didn’t know how to hide it, the way Vincent Cain had, and while he might pass it off as a costume at one or two of the Bright Young Things’ parties, there was no way he could stay in London.
Not without attracting the attention of the remaining Order members—who and how many, no one exactly knew.
Everett and Hugo had been returned to the Cotswolds house with more holes in their memories than a block of Swiss cheese.
They hadn’t even remembered what year it was, much less what had happened in the Valley of the Kings.
But there was still a gleam in Hugo’s eye when he regarded Ezra: It seemed that would never quite go away.
The Order, too, was resilient. The death of its Apex hadn’t seemed to matter much, in the scheme of things.
Pyramids don’t topple when you remove the capstone…
Instead there were two magicians now battling for dominance…
Ezra couldn’t help but be reminded of the myth about the Hydra, the monster who kept sprouting heads as Hercules chopped them off.
No, it was better to dismantle the Order from its base.
Brick by brick.
Relic by relic.
There were hundreds of ancient Egyptian relics trapped under glass cases in the British Museum’s secret wing.
Far more than any person could use. Much less carry.
Then there were the Mexican fire opals, other jewels plucked from the heart of India.
Jade elephants, sundials, tribal masks… The one or two more trips that Celia proposed had quickly turned into a nightly affair.
Instead of sipping cocktails and dancing until their shoes frayed, the couple had taken to breaking and entering into the Order’s vault of stolen powers.
So far, no British magicians had noticed, thanks to the fact that Ezra and Celia replaced the objects they took with imagined replicas.
They’d gotten away with quite a lot.
Over half the LUXOR crates were filled with relics ready to be returned to Ezra’s motherland.
There were other boxes, stamped with addresses to Dutch New Guinea and Hong Kong and other spots around the globe.
These were to be hand-delivered, of course.
His Majesty’s Royal Mail had nothing on Biz’s new thirst for adventure.
She drank a tea for every language she could get her hands on—not to mention the special stash of leaves they’d found in Vincent Cain’s town house.
The magician’s disappearance had sent ripples through London society.
Whenever Biz walked into a room with other Bright Young Things, she was met with pitying looks and low whispers.
They weren’t exactly prayers, like the kind Ezra’s mother had collected, but the sentiment was close enough.
She could hold on to their sympathy. She could use their gossip to become everything they envied: a woman who made her own way in the world.
And Ezra?
Well, he’d found his way too.
He knelt down by the remains of the wishing tree, where turkey tail fungi had taken over old roots.
This rot didn’t smell like the tombs of Egypt.
It was active—almost alive in its own right.
The two stone vases Biz had set in the center of the stump were tilting, ever so slightly.
One into the other. Someone had placed flowers for GEORGE DOUGLAS ELLINGTON…
only the hollyhocks were well past their prime, shedding brittle purple blossoms.
“I know you can’t hear me.” Ezra looked at his own empty vase.
“You went too far into the river… played the hero again. And I wish… I wish I’d had a chance to tell you a proper goodbye.
” A tear slid down his cheek, gathering on his chin and falling to the dead wood below.
“All my life, for as long as I can remember, something has been missing. I used to think this was because I was half the man you were—how could I live up to my perfect big brother?”
“Perfect? Bah!” A rough laugh carried over his shoulder. Thomas Ellington was still in his slippers and smoking jacket. His hands were tucked behind his back. “Perfection is for embroidery samplers and the Pythagorean theorem. Nothing else makes the cut. Not even gods.”
Ezra managed a smile. It seemed his father was in one of his rarer, lucid moods.
“It’s how I felt at the time,” he said.
His father watched another tear fall to the stump. “And how do you feel now?”
The question caught Ezra off guard, if only because he could never recall a time when Thomas Ellington had asked such a thing.
Even after he came back from the war, there were no pats on the back.
Yet his father was close now, the frayed edges of his slippers borderline with the rotting wood. Their shoulders almost touched.
“I know where I fit…” Ezra said softly. Something green and tender had begun to poke up between the vases. A shoot of the wishing tree! Was that possible after all these years? All this rot?
Thomas Ellington bent down by his sons’ memorials.
He watched the unfurling leaf with a shine in his eyes.
“When I was a young man, I used to believe there were such things as happy endings… that if I just went on one more expedition and unearthed one more relic, everything would change for the better. Finding your mother did change me… but not in the ways I was expecting. My debts did not dissolve. My marriage did not mend. I started to see all the damage the Order had done—and myself, as a part of it. That was when I decided fairy tales were bullshit.”
Even more green was coming up from the roots. The roots young Ezra had imagined held the sleeping queen… who’d held the earth together with her dreams. He wondered, now, how much of this made-up myth had come from the truth of his mother. The sacrifice she’d made to keep the dead in their place.
“I’m not so sure,” he told his father. “Why else would angels have wings?”
“Ah yes. Your dissertation. Biz was trying to explain it to me…” Thomas shook his head. “I don’t know how you’ll ever defend it to a group of Oxford scholars who aren’t Enlightened.”
Ezra didn’t know either. Perhaps it was enough to live with the truth himself—his wings had become a permanent fixture. None of the suits Vincent ordered for him would have fit anyway in the end.
“I’ve been considering a pivot,” he admitted. “Perhaps conducting a study on the damage of irresponsible looting practices.”
“I’d lose the word looting,” his father said. “Not because it’s not accurate, but because thieves don’t like to be called such to their faces.”
“Celia doesn’t seem to mind.”
Speak of the devil… He could see her through the dining room window, helping Biz pack a pair of candelabras into a crate. A smile snagged her lips when she caught him staring. Ezra felt the same tug, only deeper, where his heart sat beneath his breastbone.
“Yes, well, she’s a rare one,” Thomas Ellington admitted. “It’s good to see how happy she makes you.”
“Does that mean you’ve changed your mind about fairy tales?”
The shoots were growing into proper stems now, up to Ezra’s knees and even higher. The leaves were just as he remembered from the old tree—only much less sickly. The green was so fresh it made his eyes ache.
“I believe in magic,” his father said. “Magic is life. And life is messy, that’s for damn sure. You have to learn how to hold it all at once—to mourn one child and embrace another. To make your heart large enough to hold joy and pain and pride and rage and everything else in between.”
Ezra understood.
Here, by the rotting stump, under new springing leaves, on an estate that had never felt like home but still held so many of his most treasured childhood memories, his heart felt very, very large.
“I wanted so badly to bring George back to life,” he said to his father. “I tried.”
“Biz told me about that, how George saved her and Celia instead…” The lord drifted off, craning his neck as the fresh branches grew past it. Something strange glazed his eyes. “The old has gone and the new has come and the river runs on as it’s meant to.”
“I hope he’s happy, wherever he is.”
Hopes weren’t so different from wishes, where magic was concerned. Ezra knelt next to his father and grabbed his memorial vase before it could grow into the trunk. George’s was already halfway enveloped. An odd-looking knot was forming at the base where the stone had been swallowed.
“Thank you, brother.” The last word sat heavy in his throat, almost too heavy to say, but he wanted to get it out before the bark grew over George’s name. “Goodbye.”
By suppertime, there was a proper tree in the lawn.
Biz had proposed a picnic under it, because most of the dining room had been packed up into crates, but in the end the place felt too sacred for such a thing.
Even the sheep seemed to respect it, giving the trunk a wide berth.
So the family sat at their bare-bones table and ate—all together—for the first time in nearly a decade.
“Our last evening at Thornhill,” Biz said, spearing her fork into her lamb chop. She didn’t look particularly sad, but she did saw at the meat with extra vigor. Calamity watched the proceedings eagerly from atop a nearby crate. “Who would have thought?”
“Who’s buying the place?” Celia asked.
“Some poor American who wants to spend all his time and money here.” Ezra’s sister shrugged. “Well, not poor. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Celia echoed, looking around the massive dining room. Far more massive than her own former estate, or so she’d admitted to Ezra. He could tell, by the way her jaw twitched, that she was thinking of similar, earlier goodbyes. “I’m sorry we couldn’t find a way to save the place.”
“Yes, well.” Biz cut off another piece of lamb and bit it delicately from her fork.
“I think I may prefer being an adventuress to the neglected wife of a power-hungry magician.” Her eyes darted up to Ezra’s—almost apologetic, as they always were when the subject of Vincent was brought up.
“Though I will be sad to leave that gorgeous tree you grew. It’s even larger than the old one! ”
“It’s a beautiful memorial,” Celia added.
Ezra nodded, though he wanted it to be more than that.
Maybe the poor-rich American had children who would climb its branches…
or beg for a tree house. Maybe they would see the magic of the tree for what it was.
Maybe, when they were old enough, there would be no Order to quell such childhood fancies.
The evening light stretched long. They ate their lamb and talked about the upcoming journey to Luxor and where they would meet the mudlarks, who’d been indispensable in helping them smuggle stolen artifacts out of England.
Ezra had taken quite a liking to the scrawny children.
He hoped their magic, too, might be allowed to grow.
“It’s getting late,” Celia said, once the limbs of the new wishing tree finally disappeared into the evening dark. “Ezra and I should excuse ourselves.”
“What are you stealing tonight?” Biz wondered.
“A Fabergé egg,” Celia answered. “It belonged to the Russian royal family, apparently.”
“You mean the one that was brutally murdered?” Biz shuddered. “I might have a difficult time returning the egg to its rightful owner. There’s no way in hell I’m stepping foot in the Duat again.”
“There’s a rumor the youngest grand duchess survived,” Ezra said. “Perhaps you can try to track her down.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” his sister replied dryly.
“Hunt down elusive lost princess goes right after restore Qing dynasty vase and deliver that most definitely cursed diamond back to India and about a hundred other errands. Honestly, you two should take the night off. I’m drowning in restitutions here. ”
She waved a hand at the piles of crates looming in the entrance hall.
They were tall, yes, but in the end, only a fraction of what Britain’s magicians had taken for themselves over the years.
Whenever Ezra walked through the aisles of stolen relics, he was moved by the magnitude of what he was trying to do.
How even he—with all his mother’s magic and memories—felt like a floating dust mote when it came to repairing the damage that had been done.
Inside, outside, all around. So many men had been broken, and began breaking in turn.
Ezra had saved the world from Death, yes, but could he save it from itself?
The only way to find out was to try.
“Take the night off?” Celia laughed at the other young woman’s suggestion. “What, is there a party you’d like to go to?”
“Heavens, no,” Biz snorted. “I’d rather get shot again than pretend to be na?ve at one of Hugo’s Seek and Find parties. I don’t know how you suffered through them all those years.”
“With a lot of champagne and resentment,” she said sagely. “And petty thievery.”
“She’s moved on to bigger and better things.” Ezra smiled.
Celia beamed back. “Grand larceny,” she added cheerfully.
“I meant setting the world right.”
“That too.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I rather like playing Robin Hood with you.”
Biz clasped her hands together and made a happy noise with the back of her throat.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” Thomas Ellington muttered back at his mostly full plate, then squinted up at Ezra’s brilliantly gold face. “You’re not Jack.”
No.
He wasn’t.
He was Hekamaat Ezra Bright.
And he had work to do.