12. The Winter Oak
Chapter 12
The Winter Oak
“Oh, Elizabeth, it’s you! It’s really you!”
Beneath the shelter of one of the great winter-bare oak trees of Hargrave’s grounds—the shade , I might have said, were the day bright and clear enough for shadows—I set a tasseled bookmark to keep my page and looked up from my reading with a smile, brushing the bits of bark off my back from where I had rested it against the trunk: with her pale skirts grasped in her hands, Iris hurried toward me across the brown grass.
The season of the Yuletide and Christmastime had made Hargrave’s house rather quieter than usual, the comings and goings of the Order fewer, and there were moments I felt as if I were the sole remaining boarder in a school that had emptied for the holidays, left behind on account of having nowhere to which to return—a situation which was, after all, very near to the case. But I did not give it time to trouble me: I devoted myself to my studies, redoubling my efforts to read all of the burgeoning assortment of books and scrolls Victor assigned to me between his sorcery classes, which continued on despite the season.
But early now in the new year the Order was returning to its orderly nature, Magisophists reconvening at Hargrave’s mansion to resume their sagely yet benign nodding at one another’s increasingly esoteric musings—and Iris stepped carefully over a tree root as she drew nearer, her eyes wide.
“Rothfield told me this morning about a terrible accident a little while ago in your sorcery class—he still has a friend or two there, I suppose—and I could not be satisfied until I knew if you were all right. Are you all right, Elizabeth?”
“Quite all right, thank you; I’m sorry not to have told you sooner—I didn’t know that you knew what happened, and thought I ought not to trouble you.”
I laid Victor’s book down on a knotted root and rose as she approached; she reached to clasp my hands in friendly greeting and concern. “No matter, no matter at all;” she smiled, “when I heard what happened, I feared the—oh.”
As her hands touched mine, they stiffened, and I sensed plainly that she quelled the instinct to draw them back, as if willing herself to endure some real or anticipated smart.
“Is something the matter, Iris?”
“No—no, nothing whatsoever. It is I who should apologize now, if I seemed for the moment taken aback. I forgot that I should feel him so strongly in you, though it is only natural that I should,” her words came at a more hurried clip than I had remembered, “now that you are apprenticed to him and spending time in his company. I mean no offense, but he has a?—”
“A strong and rather memorable shadow. That is what it seems to be called. An emanation of his art that seems to linger like dusk on the sea.”
She nodded, parting her lips as if to speak and then closing them again, perhaps thinking better of her choice. “Does it trouble you,” she began again, “to be in his presence?”
“The touch of his shadow is a constant perturbation,” I replied, “sometimes more, sometimes less so. I imagine myself growing accustomed to it, only to feel the pang of its disquiet again.”
“But he is kind to you, at least? I hope?”
I pressed my lips together into something that might be called a smile. “I don’t know that kind is quite the word. He is not a gentle man—not given to pleasantries. When he found that Greycliff had awakened—one Lord Greycliff was the only significant injury during the incident, as far as I can tell—I don’t remember that Doctor D’Arco so much as asked him how he felt. Yet he attended Greycliff quite seriously, I think, despite his own dark humor; and cured him, or nearly so, after his own fashion—hard and abrupt though he may be.”
“Greycliff….” Iris’s voice trailed off, her gaze drifting as if in thought—but only for a moment, before she looked to me with renewed concern. “Surely not that John Brighton? A pale man with a scar?”
I nodded.
“He was cast out of the Order by Doctor Karvonen. Caught in Karvonen’s laboratory, rummaging through the alchemical artifacts. Rothfield once told me of another two, associated somehow with D’Arco, cast out for fighting between themselves—I can’t remember their proper names, but a grim young Hindustani fellow in a black cloak, and the Marvelous Manfredini.”
“The Marvelous Manfredini? You mean the stage magician? From the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly?”
“I couldn’t imagine there might be two. A middle-aged man with longish hair; rather flashy dresser. Smells of good cigars. They were both expelled from the Order a while ago—before your time.”
Despite my surprise and amusement, I made quite sure not to laugh: Reinhardt—whom I thought an odd character, with the sly, greasy charm of a traveling elixir salesman—little resembled the dashing young Manfredini of the playbills, the latter with a sharp bow tie and his wand jauntily tipping his top hat, prone women hovering indifferently over the stage behind him. Yet, there was upon consideration some vague facial resemblance, and between Iris’s description and his rivalry with Walker, it could be none other. “Deep Walker and Luther Reinhardt. I suppose the second looks different without the hat.”
Her brows furrowed into a puzzled look. “You’ve seen them, then?”
“I’ve sat between them as they shot murderous looks at each other behind my back, and so far lived to tell as much. When Doctor D’Arco went to confront the disprite, they strode with him at his either side, with Greycliff and the others further behind.”
“They’re both still in class? And Greycliff, besides? Elizabeth,” she put a hand on my shoulder, a kind of affronted incredulity mingled with the sincere concern in her wide eyes, “I’m so sorry to sound so critical—I know you must be proud, and I am no less excited for you, to be chosen so soon for an apprenticeship—but this Doctor D’Arco,” she enunciated the name carefully, “is harboring outcasts. Men who have violated the most basic tenets of our Esoteric Order of Magisophists. And in doing so, D’Arco disdains and mocks those tenets himself. Be careful please, Elizab?—”
“—I should have been more careful,” I interrupted, feeling my pulse sharpen.
“Don’t blame yourself,” she said softly, drawing her hand away with a gentle, rueful smile. “You couldn’t have known, after all.”
“Not that. I mean,” I closed my eyes, speaking quietly and evenly, mastering myself though the air of the overcast winter’s day seemed to warm, “that in my eagerness, perhaps I have said too much.”
Had I just defended him?
Had my blood risen for this man—if mortal man he was—who wrestled demons with his bare hands, and bent the forces of the world to his will, and (so I imagined) could conceivably banish whoever defied him to some dark depths of the next world? What primitive, capricious defense of his position could a Novice Sorceress presume?
A thin winter wind sifted through the naked branches of the oak, stirring in the evergreen foliage of the great yew trees nearby: I inhaled deeply, grateful for the bracing chill of the air.
Presume , I repeated my last word in my head, and in my imagination it took on Victor’s voice. Then echoed in my mind Greycliff’s reply: All magic is presumption .
“Don’t breathe a word of what I said, please, Iris.”
“Heavens, no! Not a word.”
“Thank you. I could not bear for Doctor D’Arco to be censured somehow by the Order on my account.”
I had defended him. There need be no more question. Albeit gently—I meant no ill toward Iris, my friend—in my will, and by my words, I had defended Doctor D’Arco.
Against the very Order itself.
“Though you have my word of secrecy, as I said—I do not think,” she chose her words with caution, “that, even should the word have got out, any harm would come to him from the Order. He enjoys a sort of carte blanche : if they could rid him entirely from their society,” she paused, “they would have, and likely long ago. But so might the sailor advise the tempest to trouble him some other day. D’Arco knows they will not, and likely cannot, cross him: I would not call it fear, precisely, on the Order’s part, though the legends surrounding Doctor D’Arco are many, and mostly unpleasant—perhaps more of a justified vigilance and a grudging respect. And so he comes and goes as he pleases, and does as he wills. Some say the Order benefits from the protection of his presence; others say he brings more trouble with him than he dispels. Most avoid him altogether, so much as they can.”
“I should like to hear a few of those legends, sometime.”
“You need only ask.” Iris smiled, as if to ensure that our small strife, brief though it was, had passed. “But if I may ask first,” she looked to the closed book resting on the root, “what sorts of things does he have you read?”
“All sorts,” I replied with a small, conciliatory smile—though I knew from the outset that, this time, I meant to err on the side of revealing too little information rather than too much. And, certainly, in those two words I had told her the utmost truth: he had assigned to me various practical grimoires and treatises on occult philosophy, as I had expected. Yet there were other texts, no less of interest to my personal sensibilities, for whose practical use I could not account: a collection of folk ballads, a volume on the trees and foliage of the British Isles, an anthology of poetry from earlier in this century (the same age as most of the books in my own collection), and Goethe’s Faust . “This one,” I continued, picking up the volume she had already observed me reading—one of the oldest of the codexes he gave me, the one with the stiff pages warped by water long since dried, “he told me to open outside, beneath the trees. It’s been mostly instructions for summoning, at least so far. I’m not quite halfway through.”
“May I?”
She reached out an open hand, and I paused.
“Better if I hold it,” I said at last, fraught with a strange, growing feeling of unease at the prospect of letting it leave my grasp. “It feels very much like him, and I know the sense of him disturbs you.”
She nodded and stepped closer, and I turned some pages for her, until she slowly shook her head. “The diagrams are rather fascinating—some seem so similar to those I know from my own theurgical study—but the language is incomprehensible to me.”
“I suppose some of the words are a bit antiquated.”
“Antiquated or not, I should love to be able to read any form of an Italianate language.”
“As should I,” I replied slowly as I closed the book, my mind quickening to understand the mystery of why she should state such a thing now. A leaf of parchment fell from the old volume, and I reached down quickly to pick it up before the wind got the chance to spirit it away, tucking it back under the weather-beaten cover. “Why do you mention it?”
“Your book, Elizabeth.” She watched me with concern, speaking slowly. “It’s written in a language unfamiliar to me. I thought it looked like something Italian, maybe, and thought it wonderful to be able to read such a thing. That’s all.”
“Oh—of course,” I forced an embarrassed-seeming smile, though beneath the pleasant veneer, my mind raced. I strove first to dismiss the subject; to buy myself time. “Foolish of me. After Greycliff’s accident in class, I suppose I have too much on my mind. Indeed—if you don’t mind my asking,” I sighed inwardly in relief: here was a subject more intriguing to Iris, I hoped, than the strange matter at hand of the old grimoire, “what was Greycliff looking for in Doctor Karvonen’s alchemical artifacts? It must’ve been something he wanted badly, to risk expulsion from the Order.”
“I’m not a proper alchemist, and I don’t know enough about Greycliff to know what he would want—other than what almost anyone would want, of course. The Lapis Philosophorum, whatever form one imagines it might take. The great goal of alchemical work. I don’t imagine Karvonen really has it, or,” she raised her brows, “he probably wouldn’t still be here.”
“The stone that turns base metals into gold?”
“Yes, in legend and reputation, but that’s likely a metaphor. It might be a tablet with some formula for enlightenment—or an elixir that grants eternal life. They say Greycliff was caught holding some kind of Egyptian amulet, which I can only venture he might have thought a part of that somehow. The sort of thing people seek out sometimes when they think they’ll find a shortcut to breaking a curse.”
“I see,” I replied—I could venture nothing more useful, not now with the sound of my own surging pulse in my ears. “How strange.”
The amulet. The amulet! Greycliff could not have been caught holding my so-called Talisman of Thoth, surely—the timing was all wrong—but one like it. Perhaps one like it. Alchemy. Greycliff’s curse, whatever it was, that he mentioned to me in passing once he rose from the ash of the stone floor. Eternal life.
“Indeed. But I should be going; my next class begins soon. You must go your own way, Elizabeth, of course, but—do take care. I would say that your fellow sorcerers may not be as they appear, but… I worry more that they may indeed be as they seem. Shadows and all.”
I took her implication, but said no more of it: we bid each other a friendly farewell, and (if I am to be entirely honest with myself) at our parting I felt some sense of relief. It was not that I had come to dislike her, nor that I did not wish to see her, but that—perverse though surely some would name it—every dispassionate admonition to dare no danger seemed more and more to me a fetter for my champing will.
A fetter, and a challenge. A test of conviction. A bond to break.
As Iris’s form grew smaller in the distance before the specter of Lord Hargrave’s house atop the slope of hill, I sat down again with my back to the same oak.
Never before had I felt such energizing anticipation to open a book.
I wiped a hand on my skirts, the light sweat of my palm cool for the pale winter wind—and then, as my finger began to separate the pages where I had set my bookmark, I paused to collect my thoughts.
What appeared as some form of Italian to Iris had appeared as English to me, or perhaps French, and I realized, to my discomfort, that I could not remember for certain. I knew only that it was a language I could read quickly, and could retain, because I so vividly remembered the meaning of all that I had read: the casting of circles, the drawing of seals for summoning, the power of names and of spoken spells repeated thrice.
And yet, attempting now, I strained to quote it—to recollect any of the words themselves.
With the old book in my lap, my finger still held in place between the pages, the wind came up again, and I remembered the fallen leaf of parchment I had saved from the ground. Better to read that first, I thought to myself, and I drew it forth from inside the cover.
It was not parchment after all, but paper. Like the rest of the volume, it was inked by hand, but this was no monkish book-lettering: the handwriting was modern, the letters formed by a bold hand, forceful and efficient yet not without some curt nod to aesthetic style.
E.B. , it began, my initials larger and drawn with a certain flair, as if to make up for the omission of the rest of my name,
Upon reaching this point in your reading, summon me. You shall choose the place, time, and means. V.
The language was English: of this much I was certain. Yet I regretted that I could not be certain of the place in the book from whence the note had fallen, other than to say it was a point I had not yet reached.
I slipped it back inside the cover for now, drew a breath of the cold air, and opened the old grimoire to my mark.
I could read it—that is to say, the words on the page formed an impression in my mind, a meaning I understood, and this upon no more than a glance.
And yet, could this be called reading, when every time my eye slowed on the page to study the words—the shapes of the letters and the sounds I thought they ought to make—they became entirely foreign, unintelligible, and I knew that this language was none of my own?
But does not the spell of reading always dissipate when one studies a sentence letter by letter, and—finding each character to be on its own a voiceless, arcane sign—the meaning of the whole shudders, threatening to crumble away?
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the furrowed bark of the great oak. This was comforting: there was a presence of spirit in the tree, despite even its barren winter sleep, and in my senses it merged with the eerie feeling of him —of Victor—imbued so thoroughly and deeply through the warped pages of the grimoire. The feeling—and the scent of him, if I were to allow myself to acknowledge my recognition such a thing. The book had the closeness of the air of his grand subterranean halls, the tinge of melting wax, and the earthy, masculine warmth of his presence.
I shivered lightly, opening my eyes again: it was the chill breeze, or the memory of the touch of his shadow; I did not know which, but I looked over my shoulder at the bark of the oak to divest myself of the unaccountable notion that he was behind me again, haunting my very nerves as I sat alone among the trees.
And then I thought of his note in the book, and smiled a little at my own sudden spark of inspiration.
If the sense of him so haunted me, let me summon him now . Though the time and place did not seem entirely suitable—afternoon out of doors, within sight of both the road beyond the great iron gate and the house up the hill, and only a thin breath of London fog to obscure my shape—they would serve me better than missing the moment.
I needed no poker this time to draw a circle, no ash from the hearth, no water from my washstand ewer. Here by the winter oak I had already all I needed: the book, the feeling , my imagination and my will.
I stood, adopting a stance not of entreaty but of command; I removed my gloves and held the grimoire before me, pressed between my palms, feeling the cracked leather cover against my skin.
“Victor D’Arco,” I whispered as I let my eyes fall closed. I focused on the sense of him, the depth of his enfolding shadow, the uncanny vertigo sinking through my chest—I made myself feel him as if he were before me; I drew a deep breath for the scent.
“Victor D’Arco.” In my mind’s eye I created him: the burning eyes, the flash of the steel mask under his hood, the broad chest and shoulders and the scarred olive skin of his hands, the great black mantle stirring in the cold wind.
“Victor D’Arco,” I repeated, and then uttered the words I knew that I had used to summon him before, simple and plain though they were: “Show yourself, if you’re here.”
So deeply did I focus on his image in my mind, on the memory of his magic through my body, that I scarcely heard the sound of the dry, forgotten oak leaves of autumn whirling once in a breath of wind against the tree.
“Unorthodox,” I heard—or thought I heard—a familiar, deep voice in the back of my mind. “And commendably effective. Yet I would advise, in the future, against the use of if . Expect me, Elizabeth. Leave me no option.”
“Show yourself,” I replied, my eyes still closed. “You stand before me.”
“As you will,” his voice rumbled, and I opened my eyes, slowly. “Well done.”
“Victor.” It was him, unmistakably him; a tall, muscular shadow woven seemingly of night itself, stifling the overcast light of what was left of the day. Yet his form was dim somehow—unreal, like the shuddering world in the heat above a candle flame. “Your phantom?”
He nodded. I felt the cold wind blow through him.
“I don’t understand,” I spoke softly—I did not know whether his voice was in the air itself or only in my mind, and I did not wish to direct attention to us by speaking too loudly, if any drew close enough to hear—“how this book works.”
“And yet you have read nearly half of it, and might have finished—or, at least, come to my note where I had placed it—if not for the interruption. Your acquaintance rather spoiled the surprise.”
I felt my eyes widen. “You were watching? Or listening?” He had haunted me indeed, his phantom lingering somewhere unseen, beyond the reach of my senses—perhaps the notion would have more deeply unsettled me, had I not grown so instantly preoccupied with the question of how such a thing had come to pass, and whether it should have so easily escaped my notice. “Were you here this whole time?”
“Physically speaking, I have been underground, as often I am of late. I regret that I do not so often nowadays feel the summer breeze in the green leaves, nor touch the naked sculptures winter makes of deciduous trees—yet the interior earth has its own grandeur. The trees there grow down, rather than up, but they are the same trees, after all.”
“Then some part of you was… inside the tree, somehow? Through its roots underground?”
“In a manner of speaking. A willing tree, aligned with the sorcerer, can be a powerful conduit of both the senses and the art.” His image stepped closer, and I felt his presence, albeit faintly: a shadow of a shadow. “You will recall that I advised you to open this particular book amid the trees. This was to serve both parts of my purpose, as it did, for a while. I meant for you to have a means to read this grimoire—it is, though not without error, on a level above nearly every other book of sorcery written before or after it. And I meant, in the interest of hastening the building of your endurance, to expose you at length to a more subtle aspect of my art, below the threshold of your perception.”
“Then you succeeded, sir, at least in part: outside of the sense of your shadow in the book, and what I took for the sense of the tree itself, I felt nothing distinctly out of the ordinary. I should’ve liked to have known beforehand of your methods,” I searched for his eyes, obscured by the shade of his hood, “but I suppose it would have altered their effect.”
He said nothing, but as my eyes fell and I shifted my hands on the book I felt the gravity of his gaze, and I knew that he watched me with expectation. I opened the grimoire to a page I had read before, but the words were foreign now, entirely unfamiliar.
I sighed in disappointment: I could read none of it.
And then, strangely, I felt the covers press together, and I realized that his spectral hands were on the grimoire beside my hands of flesh and bone, closing the book in my grasp. “You did not know,” his voice intoned, “what you could not do. That state has its own magic.”
“It seems a rather passive form of will.”
This amused and, I think, pleased him: I heard his laughter, low and deep and distant, in itself an ominous sound. “Then, knowing what you presume now to know—how would you proceed?”
“I want to read the rest of the book, sir. I want to resume and finish what we began—and if I must will myself past my own new doubt, then so I shall. There is still some daylight left.”
“Open the grimoire again,” he replied, the notion of his voice in my mind beginning to fade, “when you feel the moment come.”
“I suppose it would be easier, at this point, if I were simply to go back to your library and meet you there—in person, I mean.”
“Correct. But as you said: there is still some daylight left.”
His phantom vanished slowly, dissipating into the wind and the thin fog, and as the last of his darkness drifted away, the same wind ushered a chill through my bones: I thought I saw, where his masked and hooded face had been, a drift of white mist in the shape of a death’s-head—I remembered with a shiver that first summoning, the nightmare of the moon-white skull beneath his hood—but I blinked, and it was gone.
I returned to the trunk of the oak and sat down with the book again in my lap, leaning back until I felt the rough bark against my shoulders and my spine, the sensation scarcely dulled by the black fabric of my dress. Though I tried to relax, the feeling was different this time: the presence of what I had deemed some natural spirit, the animating principle of the tree itself, had been a comfort. Yet now I could not escape the knowledge that I rested against an entity whose consciousness was—obscurely, in some manner whose theory I could not articulate—partially his .
With a long exhalation I let my left hand fall slowly from the grimoire, coming to rest on the sinuous deformation of a twisted root by my side. I had wanted this, and moments ago, I had asked him for this: to read the rest of the book. To allow, consciously this time, his art to merge again with mine.
Why now should I feel, in the animal depths of my mind, that creeping dread of his impending touch? Had that vision of the moon-pale skull so deeply unsettled me?
And terrible though it seemed, what, after all, should that vision change? If it revealed him to me as some incarnate specter, disprite, ghoul, ghost—would it matter so very much? The notion had crossed my mind so many times that he could be anyone—any thing —beneath the robes, behind the mask.
Why indeed should I fear the touch of his sorcery now, when I had trusted him in all the rest—enough, even, to stand in his defense?
I tilted my head back against the trunk, watching the grey sky through the skeletal fingers of the winter oak. And as I waited for the correct moment, trusting in myself to know it when it had come, I closed my eyes.
Waiting, anticipating, I imagined the long roots drinking in his shadow, drawing it up through the darkness of the earth, and I wondered if this time I would feel his art soak through the tree into my body?—
But with focus, with concentration, I realized that I sensed already a twinge of that uneasy feeling of falling—the bottomless sense of a warping world, too deep and too vast. While I thought that I had waited, his subtle art, as he had called it, was already sifting through my blood.
I allowed myself only the vague whisper of a sigh as I settled closer against the tree, pressing both of my hands to the worn cover of the grimoire where it lay in my lap. As I had summoned his phantom by feel and by vision, created his shadow and scent and form in my mind to will him to fulfill what I had shaped, so did I summon now the sensation of reading that book as I had before—the ease of my gaze on the page, the effortless blurring of the words into thought, and thought into memory.
I can read this book, I told myself, until I believed it to be true. With him, I will read this book.
Laying open the weathered volume to my tasseled bookmark, I opened my eyes in expectation.
I wondered if he could feel me smile.
And while the pale light of the afternoon endured, I read his old, water-stained grimoire, turning each crackling leaf with care, not daring to pause to consider the language of the words—or perhaps it is more correct to say that he read it to me, though voicelessly somehow, the mystery of his silent sorcery resting below the threshold of my mind.
The hours passed like mere moments; we finished the last page as the dim sun sank beneath the trails of fog, and the sharpened chill of the air against my skin threatened snow. I closed the book, standing at once: I would have liked much better to linger, but from the road came a bestial sound that made me start. Only a horse, after all—I watched as a carriage passed by the great iron gates, its swinging oil lantern a will o’ the wisp in the cold twilight—but it reminded me of the time. Twilight was upon me. More even than the gathering darkness and the sense of impending snow, I did not think it wise anymore to remain long out of doors at the faerie hour.
“Will you walk with me, Victor?” I whispered, touching my fingers to the bark of the oak as I looked to the darkening path up the hill before me. “Until I get to the house?”
A foolish consternation, I realized as I walked from tree to towering tree along the path: these were his sentinels. I was guarded here, as I was in his great hall; he would not risk me thus. Nonetheless, in the eerie twilight of winter I looked ahead to the candle-glow in the windows, eager for a warm, simple meal and an early bed. I found myself weary as if with a long exertion—had he said he wished to build my endurance?—and I did not intend to arrive late to his morning class again.
That night I slipped the old grimoire under my pillow—it seemed too important, too intimate somehow, to trust even to a shelf in my locked bedroom—snuffed out my candle, and fell at once into a strange dream of a landscape I had never seen, and did not know: the twilight had darkened to a clear, warm dusk, the sky full of stars mirrored in the lights of a town far below me. I must have been atop a hill, and I thought that I was leaning over some manner of ancient stone fortification, awaiting the shifting of the late summer wind, and with it the sound and the scent of the distant sea in the rising moonlight.
I was alone, and the night was alive.
The salt wind off the water billowed in my black cloak, throwing back my hood, and from the corner of my eye I caught sight of my reflection in the polished stone of the battlement at my side: I had broad shoulders, strong hands, long black hair flying free beneath the silver light of the full moon.
I wore no mask, but I could not see my face.