Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

43. “I am what I will”

Chapter 43

“I am what I will”

The coach was still and quiet when I awakened: no growling vibration of the wheels over cobblestone streets; no hollow rhythm of horse-hooves.

I heard only the soft sounds of the night—the mumbled calls of an owl; the night breeze whispering in the branches of an evergreen—the faint, occasional creak of one of the swaying carriage lanterns caught in the stirring of the same wind.

But the lanterns were dark now, and the only light was the silver sheen of the moon. Perhaps it was that moonlight through the edge of the curtain which awakened me. For it to still have been night, I could not have been asleep long.

Or perhaps it was Victor’s touch that roused me slowly, drawing me from my dreams of him and back to the waking world: his warm fingertips were brushing lightly over my throat with the idle flexing of his hand, and as my eyes rose to seek his gaze I found him deep in some dark contemplation, his black brows lowered over his burning eyes as he seemed to stare down an unseen rival through the curtain of the carriage window, holding me safe while I lay with my head in his lap, his steel mask shining with a ghostly pallor by the light of the moon.

Victor. I willed his name into the back of his mind, softly, raising my hand to touch his.

He grunted quietly, stirred from his brooding reverie, and as he looked down to me—his broad chest relaxing with a low sigh, his thumb brushing across my cheek—I watched the fury in his eyes quiet, and I wondered if he smiled.

“It’s the masquerade ball that’s on your mind,” I whispered, “isn’t it.” I wondered what had made me so certain. The dimly remembered omen of some strange dream, maybe, the rest of the vision now vanished. “The Eve of May. The Eve of the Equinox now, I suppose.”

He nodded, and I closed my eyes as he caressed my face again. “But there is time—no matter how that mule endeavors to reschedule my would-be doomsday.” He paused then, the harshness in his voice assuaging. “How do you feel, Elizabeth?”

“About the Eve of?—”

“No. How do you feel ?” his deep voice rumbled, devoid of any sardonic twist at its edge: he spoke with such gravity that his words shut out even the looming threat of time and his own impending doom, and made my pleasure seem in that moment the most vital matter in all the world.

And, in truth, I had not yet considered it—not yet put it into ordered thoughts, or conscious words—because it felt so entirely natural now to be overcome by the dark, shivering thrill of him, to sink willingly into the uncanny indulgence of surrendering to his art. “Warm, sir,” I sighed with a smile in response to him, slowly searching for the words. “Relaxed. Comfortable. Fulfilled. Possessed, in the best of ways: I can still feel your art inside me,” I felt and I heard a low, satisfied vibration in his chest as I spoke, “your touch on my mind—through my body—in my heart.”

This pleased him: his hand wrapped around mine, entrapping me gently in his heat and strength. “And this satisfies you, Elizabeth?”

“Quite, sir.”

He smiled now , I knew; I needed not see his face to feel it in his shadow.

“And I had a strange dream?—”

“To be expected,” he replied. “Continue.”

“I could scarcely remember it at first, but it’s coming back to me, little by little.” I paused, letting him massage my hand in his, shifting closer in against him as I watched the unchanging death’s-head grin of his mask in the moonlight. “I was very pale,” I began, speaking slowly. “I cannot say how I knew, but I was pale like the moon in a storm-grey sky, my hair and my dress silver-white, and lain across me was a garland of living flowers. And you were holding me, your arms wrapped around me from behind as I let myself lean in against you, but when I opened my eyes, I saw—your arm, sir?—”

“My arm?”

“The black cloth of your sleeve was falling away like a discarded shroud, falling in shriveling ashes on the wind, as if it were burning without flame—as if the dreary decay of time had taken it all at once—and your arm beneath it was as black as if it were charred by the fires of Hell—skinless, fleshless—blackened bones, lashed together by fraying charcoal tendons and yet as strong and as certain as ever, and held close and safe in so macabre, so intimate an embrace, I looked over my shoulder, parting my lips in anticipation of your kiss, and I saw your face—the face of a black skull.”

“It frightened you?”

“No, sir.” As I paused, I felt the full weight of his regard settle into me, the intensity of his fascination. “You were yourself yet,” I continued, “and I knew you—I touched you—I kissed you. Nothing that you are—nothing that you might be, or become—nothing of you now could turn me away, because all of it would be you nonetheless.”

At once he gathered me up somehow, and I rose to meet him from where I had lain on his lap; we needed no further words to understand: in the moonlit coach we were in each other’s arms again, my head resting on his broad shoulder as he caressed my back, until even this was too tormenting a separation: it galled me to feel the edge of the armor beneath his robes, and I drew back to stroke my hand across the metal of that grim mask, reaching into the shadows of his hood for the strap and the latch, unfastening and opening and leaning in to kiss him, long and slow and deep, until the shadow of a dark cloud across the dimming moon drifted us back from the warmth of each other’s lips.

“Where are we, sir?” I asked him quietly, my hand leaving the heat of his broad chest to reach for the curtain of the nearest carriage window: our location had not seemed to matter until now, and even now I was unsure that it did.

“Just outside Hargrave’s coach-house.”

I nodded, letting the curtain fall back down, straightening my clothes and my hair as best I could within the close quarters of the carriage; he settled the metal base of his mask back in place, resting it on the support of his sturdy collarbone and fastening it closed at the side—but not until I noticed him watching me, and I caught a rare, surreptitious glimpse of his smile before it was hidden behind steel.

So simple a thing, so human a thing, made intimate by the knowledge that the sight of it was mine alone.

“If you still wish, Elizabeth, for us to reclaim Simon Buckingham’s strongbox from your chamber tonight?—”

“For me to reclaim it, sir. Unless you think there any particular danger in it, I should like to go alone. It does, after all, contain evidence against you—dim though you have determined the possibility to be for anyone to recognize it or put it to use—and thus it would serve us better, I think, not to allow your presence to draw undue attention to the retrieval of it. I ought to go alone.”

He grunted in reply, stretching his massive shoulders back in something like a mild shrug. “I doubt any member of the Order would hold peril for you now—there is nothing and no one among them that your sorcery cannot overmaster.”

“You flatter me.”

His scarred fingers touched the pulse in my throat, pressing only firmly enough to turn my face toward him, his eyes gazing deeply and fixedly into mine. “No,” he whispered after a moment, and I thought that something in the fire of his dark eyes seemed satisfied, even proud. “I do not overestimate your art at all. Nonetheless, should you need assistance, do not hesitate to summon my phantom.”

“The same death’s-head, sir,” I said, slowly, the similarity only then coming fully to mind. “My dream—and your phantom, though the skull of the latter is white like the moon, and seems to appear only as the image fades away. Some illusion of my Sight, I imagine.”

“Yes. You See in me, now and again, the ghost of what I might have been—had I resigned my life to run its mundane course.”

Absolon was gone, I supposed; Victor leaned over to open the door from the inside, taking my hand and helping me down into the light of the moon. There was something uncanny about it all: no cloaked driver, no black horses; only Victor’s stately, funereal old coach parked outside of Hargrave’s carriage-house, the sight lines from the mansion’s windows obscured by the nighttime silhouettes of oak, ash, and yew.

I squeezed his hand as I looked back to him, holding it in both of my own as my small fingertips touched the coarse ridges of his scars. “I shan’t be long.”

“Then I shall await you below. Return down the passageway from the library; it is the most efficient route, and likely the least-watched. As I said: if you need me, summon me. And if my phantom presence alone does not suffice,” his voice darkened, “I will break down Hargrave’s door.”

And that was all I could imagine, as I climbed up the stairs inside the darkened house: Victor coming back to me, ramming down the door, the rushing falls of his black Hessian boots heavy and alive behind me on the stairs; Victor haunting me, the shadow of his influence spreading somehow from the very trees to gather in every dim corner, and I fantasized that the little light of my candle would catch somewhere the glint of the fearsome eyes, the cruel steel mask—and my heart would not quaver, but steady and fill.

It had begun to rain, I thought, and then I wondered how I knew: had I always been able to hear the rain on Hargrave’s roof from the stair? Or were my senses now heightened, whether by virtue of the strengthening of my shadow or the infusion of Victor’s own art into my marrow, my blood, my heart?

For he was with me yet, his shadow still warming me from within—that much I could not mistake. I could no longer feel that raw, dank chill that had always seeped through these drab old walls in the rain. Yes, I was filled again with the sense and sensation of him, as I had been when he partially possessed me to save my life; little wonder, then, that the feeling fixated my mind upon the thought of him?—

And it was this state of abstraction that made me late to note the strangeness of the shifting light from the hall at the top of the stairs, the sounds of voices and footsteps ahead and above. I froze where I was, halfway up the staircase, watching, listening—so closely had I begun to concentrate on the mystery of what lay ahead that the candle in my hand guttered as I flinched at an unexpected sound: the first of what became three solemn peals of Hargrave’s great clock on the first floor as it tolled the hour.

Three o’clock in the morning, and there were voices in the hall that led to my chamber.

I blew out my candle at once and set it down, waiting in the new shadows, attempting to fan away with my hand the curling wisp of smoke before it rose into the sight of whatever trespassers lay ahead. Immediately I thought of summoning Victor, but scarcely had I begun to create him in my mind when a sudden terror broke my concentration, the horror of it sinking into the pit of my stomach like a stone:

“There was a light from the stairway just now,” I heard a man’s voice say—a vaguely familiar voice I could not quite place. “And then it went out.”

My breath caught as I braced myself against the wall with a damp palm, uncertain whether to flee back down the stairs or to remain as still and silent as I could.

“That’s all?” came a second voice: another man, his tone urgent.

“No. I—I can feel him,” the first voice stuttered. “I can sense him. He’s—oh, God—he’s coming?—”

“Who’s coming? D’Arco?”

“He’s—he’s here.”

But Victor was not here, and I knew it all too well.

The first man sensed Victor, but he sensed him in me .

“Here? On the stairs? Where?” The second man was frustrated now, losing patience with the first; I heard footsteps again, and a muffled scratch and creak like heavy furniture being moved. “Rothfield,” he continued, “for the sake of the Order, pull yourself together, man!”

Rothfield.

That was why I nearly recognized him: Rothfield was the first voice, and all that I knew of him came back to me: Augustus Rothfield with the monocle and the black goatee, Victor’s former apprentice, who nearly lost his eye in some manner of strife with a disprite—who was healed by Victor, and haunted by his own enhanced Sight ever since—who scarcely suppressed his fear of his former professor when he walked with me on my first descent to Victor’s lair.

“No,” I heard Rothfield’s voice reply to the other, “you find yourself a new watchman. I know what I feel, I don’t intend to wait here for D’Arco to find me, and I couldn’t give a damn anymore if you find that amulet in her room or not!”

If you find that amulet in her room .

Fury began to rise within me: for the sake of the Order , had Rothfield’s companion and tormentor said? Then my fellow-members of the Esoteric Order of Magisophists were in my chamber. Now, in the small hours of the black morning the Order had broken into my chamber, in search of the Talisman of Thoth.

And on that darkened staircase, with the heat of my rising ire, I felt some vital part of myself surge past its fraying bonds. Perhaps indeed I ought to have stayed upon the stairs and summoned Victor’s phantom, but in the rage of the moment I could think only that I had no time—that I needed somehow to catch them in their trespass—that I wished to behold the expression on Rothfield’s face when I alone emerged from the darkness of the stairs.

I picked up the skirts of my dress. I wondered what they made of the tap of my little shoes on the stairs, when they had expected the groan of old wood under Victor’s black boots.

“Elizabeth? Elizabeth B-Buckingham?” Rothfield’s eyes were wide, his monocle magnifying his shock and horror. “Why are you—how did you—you’ve—changed,” he managed, swallowing as I strode forward.

I did not walk to him, nor to his companion—a taller man I did not recognize, with an unsteady lip and sandy blond hair and some manner of ceremonial robes that both suited and fit him poorly—because, having felt the satisfaction of their fear, I did not mean to dignify them with further concern: my heartbeat quickened as I walked, my pulse beginning to throb in my ears; my eyes were on the light in the hall ahead, and I stared disbelief as it poured from the open doorway of my chamber, silhouetting a skeletal shape I recognized as the chair from my dressing table.

One of its legs looked broken.

“You’ve changed too, Rothfield,” I said as I passed him by, my voice quavering along with every fiber of my body, taut with my effort to hold myself firm. “We were friends, I foolishly believed, so far as our acquaintance went. And now—this.”

Then I heard myself inhale with a sharp hiss, instinctively recoiling as if I had been struck: Rothfield had touched my arm, merely touched me as I passed, but even such inconsequential contact felt now like a dire violation.

“You don’t understand, Mrs. Buckingham,” I remember that he said to me; I remember turning to him as he spoke, turning away from the sight of the pillow from my bed being thrown out the door of my chamber and into the hall, exhaling feathers through an open gash in its fabric as it collided softly with the broken chair. “Mrs. Buckingham, listen, Iris Everly and I tried to stop them?—”

“Then you mustn’t have tried very hard!”

And then I remember little more than a deep shiver rising up my spine—a surge of heat engulfing my senses—the dull, heavy shuffle and thump of Rothfield staggering into the hallway wall and slumping to the floor, the slow impact rattling the old pictures in their frames.

Never before had my senses felt at once so heightened and so drained, so diffused; I was halfway between the stairway and my chamber, my head hung and my heaving chest bent, my gripping hands braced on my knees, and I was only dimly aware of the voices behind me; I thought that Rothfield was groaning, his friend in the ill-fitting robes by turns cursing me and muttering something I did not understand, but all that I allowed myself to imagine was the sensation of myself whole and vital again, the feeling of all that was mine returning back into myself, and I willed it to be true.

I felt my shadow gather.

I knew that feeling, because I had felt it in Victor, and I could not mistake it now that I felt it in myself.

My shadow gathered back into me, swelling my strength, and I raised my head and ran.

In a few strides I closed the distance, slowing as I passed my broken chair and my slashed pillow and the limp roll of my rug, willing my art to darken and spread as I stepped through the open door with no more sound or ceremony than the deliberate, certain taps of my little shoes.

How I wished that I could darken that doorway as Victor always did, eclipse them like a midday moon, blot out the light. I was no mountain of a man, no standing rock in the wild sea; but what I lacked in physical stature I could fill with the fury burning in my silence.

They stopped.

All three of the men ransacking my room stood rooted in place, slack-jawed and white-faced. My bed had been pulled away from the wall, and one of the Order men had his hand buried to the wrist in the hole in the side of the mattress I had once opened to hide the Talisman; another was rooting through my dressing table, some of the bottles and vessels of Victor’s herbs and concoctions lying broken at his feet; the third was at my bookshelf, and most of my books—my own, and those lent to me by Victor—already lay sprawled and rifled on the floor in wanton disarray.

The only movement was in the changing of the shadows as the flame in their lone oil lamp guttered for my arrival.

The only sounds were the patter of rain on the window and Rothfield’s muffled moans from the hall.

“It’s three o’clock,” I breathed, unwilling to give Rothfield and his friend the pleasure of overhearing my words. “Did you expect to find me here asleep when you broke in? Or have you been prowling after my comings and goings, anticipating my absence?”

“We’re here,” the man by the bookcase began, slamming shut the old volume in his hand with a puff of dust and dropping it to the floor with a sickly thump, “because there were two break-ins—Townsend’s classroom and Karvonen’s laboratory—and the Council of the Order decided that?—”

“—That they ought to make it three break-ins,” I heard my voice lash at him, “for good measure?”

“An amulet was stolen?—”

My eyes narrowed as I felt the sensation of my art seethe and spread; all of my last capacity for restraint focused on the clarity of a pair of measured, clipped words: “Get out.”

The other two men, nearer to the door, obeyed my command, scrambling around the disrupted bed and over the broken jars and bottles, nearly tripping over their own feet as I heard them hurry through the open doorway behind me, the second one throwing it shut behind him with a crash.

The oil lamp shivered again for the impact. The sound of their running footfalls faded from the hall.

And then the two of us were alone in my ruined room.

My eyes took the measure of the man before me: he was older than the two who had fled, and something about the fine jacket, waistcoat, and watch-chain he wore afforded me a fleeting flicker of grim amusement: here, I thought, was a man who found himself too dignified to stoop to the impropriety of being seen in shirt-sleeves as he raided a woman’s chamber in the dead of night.

“D’Arco’s apprentice,” he murmured as I approached.

“Indeed.” I stepped over the rack of fireplace tools where it lay overturned on the soot-streaked floor. Someone had dug through the hearth for the damned Talisman.

“D’Arco sent you to steal an amulet,” the man at my bookshelf continued, “didn’t he? You were at the time under his power, perhaps—compelled, blackmailed, or mesmerized—and it may be that you don’t remember?—”

I did not know what infuriated me more: the assumption that Victor would do such a thing to me, or the notion that I deserved to have my cold little room and my meager belongings torn apart for the mere suspicion of my guilt, or the implication that—due, I presumed, to the outworn fables told of my supposedly gentler sex—I must necessarily be a victim rather than a willful villain, a pure blank page to be overwritten and corrupted, incapable of transgression on my own.

“Who sent you ,” I interrupted, “to conduct a burglary rather than an interview?”

“As a professor of the Order,” he enunciated, something deeply unpleasant in the condescension of his nasal tone, “I took it upon myself. With Lord Hargrave’s blessing.”

So brightly flared the embers of my fury that this revelation, meant (I supposed) to shock and unsettle me, stirred me not at all—except to strengthen my resolve. “Then run back to Hargrave, and tell him you found nothing: no Talisman of Thoth to heroically rescue for him?—”

“A mere novice of the Order has no business so much as speaking its name!”

“No Talisman of Thoth ,” I repeated with emphasis, “to hide in your pocket while you solemnly shake your head and show Hargrave your empty hands.”

I watched the muscles of his jaw clench, his breath quicken, his hand curl into a loose fist at his side—I felt a mild shift in equilibrium, like a vague, distant tremor through the floor, a subtle sense of heaviness in the air.

Was that all? I waited half a moment, then half a moment longer, feeling the heat of my shadow unfurl, uncontested.

But there was no more from him. Almost imperceptibly, his jaw quivered.

That was the depth of his art.

“Tell me where it is,” he said as I stepped toward him again.

“It’s not here.”

“And tell me how you stole it. Mrs. Buckingham, this is your last chance.”

A shard of glass from one of the broken flasks crackled beneath the sole of my shoe as my eyes rose to meet his. “My last chance for what?”

“To admit your guilt, atone for your crimes against your superiors and against the values instilled in you by this community, restore the Talisman to its rightful owner, and appeal—through my mercy—for a reconsideration of what will otherwise become your inevitable expulsion from the Order. Your last chance, Mrs. Buckingham, to cleanse yourself of D’Arco’s vile devilry, his malign influence, and realign your magic with the Order’s righteous light. And your last chance, may I remind you, to retain the generous gift of your room and board?—”

Now I laughed: no demure, polite titter but full laughter, low and bitter and wild, so sudden that even to my own ear it sounded almost mad. “And in your wisdom, professor of the Order ,” I cared not one whit to know his name, “do you truly think I am about to beg you to restore to me this room, this little guest chamber that was once my home, now that you have yourself plundered and defiled it? And do you think I agree without question that the Talisman of Thoth ought by rights be Hargrave’s, now that I have come to learn how my innocence of its power was seized as opportunity, and that I unknowingly sold him what might have become my own immortality—eternal life!—for so paltry a price as room and board ?”

He winced to know that I knew; a poor, weak vibration troubled the floor beneath my shoes.

“And if,” I continued, “you imagine that your threats, or your insinuation of my supposed mindless subservience, or your disparagement of the man who has only ever shown me kindness—who has saved my life two, perhaps three times over—if you imagine this will endear me to your cause, then you are a damnable fool, professor , and an entire mockery of your title!”

“Insolent novice ,” he sneered, “you realize, do you not, that if I wished to contain and curtail your infernal sorcery, hold you here until the Council arrives?—”

At once my mind flew to the memory of Victor’s book, the story of his ecclesiastical assailants in the forest clearing, who sought via the drawing of a sigil to banish him as if he were an infernal spirit—perhaps to kill him outright. Did this professor of the Order mean to seal me, to banish me somehow? Could he do such a thing, this man whose weak power of earth could scarcely unsettle a wooden floor?

I had no desire to take the chance, and no sympathy to spare him from my art.

North Wind , I began in silence—I had some vague notion as I faced him that I was facing the north—and within my mind, before my Sight, I willed the deep violet-black spark of my faerie fire to ignite and erupt from the floor before me, the line of its burning trace arcing to my right.

“And how very like one of D’Arco’s disciples,” he droned on, assured of his own tiresome righteousness, “to simply ignore the accusation of wrongdoing, as if that would make the transgression itself go away. Have you no alibi, Mrs. Buckingham? Nothing at all to offer for your own defense? Would you say that this is how an honest, upstanding woman behaves?”

East Wind, South Wind, West Wind.

The ring of my faerie fire encircled me, burning dark and strong in the heat of my silence.

I was not the one who stole the Talisman from Karvonen’s laboratory, it is true—in fact, it was I who recovered it from Greycliff, even if I then harbored it in secret before destroying it to save Victor’s life as he lay dying on the library floor—yet I felt no compulsion to explain myself: not at this man’s command, not under duress; all that led to that transcendent moment in Victor’s library was mine, mine and Victor’s alone, sacred and sensual and true, and I did not give a damn whether the Order thought me guilty.

I did not care anymore what the Order made of me at all.

Air before me; fire at my right hand.

“If you have defenses, Mrs. Buckingham, I cannot feel them. Those who are as strong in the light as am I are insensible to the mockeries of darkness.”

Perhaps, in a sense, he was accidentally correct: my circle as I was casting it was not to protect me from him—not for the purpose of defense.

Earth behind me; water at my left hand.

From the unchanging look on his face, the man before me knew nothing of what I had done. How unsurprising that his Sight was poor, his senses dull.

“Then keep your silence of shame, Novice Sorceress ,” he said with an air of triumph. “Having provided me, in your refusal to cooperate, with what is tantamount to an admission of your guilt in the theft of the Talisman, prepare yourself to be tried before the Council regarding your certain expulsion from the Order?—”

“—No.”

“No?” He smirked, a tight smile pulling at that insufferably smug mouth. “Then pray tell, Mrs. Buckingham: why not?”

“Because I have no interest in providing you with the pleasure of observing such a scene.”

I saw in his eyes a tentative glimmer of hope: some part of him still thought I would concede, yet he knew better now than to let down his guard.

“Because with you as my witness, professor, I hereby renounce my association with the Esoteric Order of Magisophists.”

“You—” His eyes narrowed, his brows furrowing, as if he genuinely could not comprehend my words. “That’s—not how it works. That isn’t how it works. Mrs. Buckingham, no one has ever left the Order of his own volition?—”

“Then I shall be the first. And as I have said it—as I have willed it to be—so it is already done. I have quit the Order. I will take my things now and go, and you will not stop me.”

“As if you had anywhere to turn,” I heard him mutter under his breath.

“Whether I do or do not, this place is no longer my home. I will take my things and go,” I repeated. “And you will stand aside, because you cannot stop me.”

“And who are you— what are you,” he seethed, “to command me ? To so arrogantly presume your novice power superior to that of a professor of the Order; to declare that the world is how you will it to become?”

“I’m Elizabeth Buckingham,” I said; the circle around me that he could not see flared with its violet-black flame, “and I am what I will.”

I am what I will.

The words resounded in my own ears, indomitable and defiant, coursing with a thrill through my marrow, and in my heart and my memory I heard the deep rumble of Victor’s voice from my last private lesson in the back of my mind:

What ought I to say, sir? I had asked Victor when I completed the elements of my circle, and he replied to me: What you will. It is your proclamation of your own sorcery, Elizabeth; your spell of the self, your signature upon your art. And with it, your will is done.

I was to determine one day my own proclamation of will , my declaration of my sorcery to the world beneath the moon and the worlds beneath the earth?—

But my mind at once whipped back from this reverie at the sound of my adversary’s voice. He was casting, this professor of the Order who stood before me in the wreckage of my room, casting a spell in some manner entirely alien to me: despite his incantation I could scarcely feel him, I could hardly sense his art in any way that I understood; all I felt was a dry thinness, a brittleness, as if his gutless words alone were meant to make some substitute for the heart and the senses and the soul. Words are never nothing, it is true, but with nothing behind their names, nothing to signify nor to bring into the world, they have only half their power—and his were empty, recited as if read aloud by a poor player belaboring his hour on the stage, hollow and measured and passionless.

He began to focus on me, his eyes keen and intent, and I realized both that he meant to begin some manner of attack and that, my circle complete, I did not know precisely how to project my art toward him.

And so I did what came naturally: I imagined. I imagined my shadow spreading, igniting, surging with faerie fire, and in that dark inferno this professor of the Order lay overcome before my little shoes, lying as still and sprawled as my neglected books?—

“—And may this teach you,” he sneered; if he had said more before that, I had not heard it, “the power of the Order of Magisophists!”

At those words my own instinct loosed my surging art upon the world, nearly making me swoon with the force of it, but I willed myself to stand, to overcome, to conquer—the sound of the rain on the window faded—the professor’s voice faded—and for that strange, singular moment, it sounded to my ears as if the clear call of my own voice split the world:

“ I am what I will! ”

I felt a pulse of fiery heat burn though my body, making my spine shiver in a flash of fleeting vertigo and my skin break into a quick, sudden sweat; I heard the sound of a man’s choked groan and a dull crash, and as the soft, arhythmic drumming of the rain on the windowpane returned—as the vision of my deep faerie fire faded into the stuttering shadows of the oil lamp, its wild flame slowly steadying itself as my own heaving chest calmed—I came to understand that what I witnessed before me was no longer the exclusive province of my Sight, but a part now of the breathing world: the professor of the Order lay at my feet, senseless and silent, as I drew my shadow back to me again. I noted idly that I thought he lay utterly still, no sign even of the rise and fall of his back, though I did not watch long: I had no time nor interest to consider whether the possibility that he were dead brought me any manner of regret along with my sense of satisfaction, my deep relief. I wondered, as I moved my books away from him to replace them on the shelf—a right and necessary thing to do, it seemed to me at the time; a small yet pointed restoration of his defilement—how long it might take him to recover, if he were alive yet, and how long therefore I had to gather what I would. And yet this concern, too, I found mattered little to me: I had triumphed, I had defended myself and what was mine from an invader, and I would not diminish myself nor my art by slinking hurriedly away as if I—and not he—were the petty criminal.

And so it was with a certain pride and dignity that I methodically searched my former chamber—so much as one can remain dignified while bending down to peer at the dusty space beneath the disrupted bed, and while sorting with care through the broken things on the floor, and checking every dark crevice and corner for Simon’s strongbox and book, for Victor’s water-stained grimoire—and for the small, carved box that Victor had given me, that once had contained my lost hairpins.

Perhaps it was a foolishly sentimental caprice that caused me to look for that last item first, but the search did not take me long. As I took another step toward my dressing table, my foot sprang back at once from what I felt beneath it: nearly had I trod underfoot the very thing I sought—or at least, one part of it. I knelt down on the soot-streaked floor, my silent, sudden tears falling into the black ash to the sound of the rain, and I picked up and cradled the two halves of Victor’s box in my hands with the same delicate futility that one caresses a fallen songbird found on the ground outside a windowpane. The hinge of the box was broken and split partially out of the wood, entirely separating the upper half from the lower; I rubbed my thumb across the carving of Victor’s emblem, trying to wipe the green elixir from the broken flask out of the etched lines of the sun’s rays.

It was only a thing , I knew—an early token of Victor’s heart—and now that I knew he loved me, now that I knew his kiss and his touch, I ought not to have mourned that little box so much. Yet as I laid its pieces gently on what had been my bed—the bed where I had slept dreaming of him, my hand on his grimoire—I could not help that it felt like a death.

It cast a pall over the rest, and robbed my triumph of its joy; my tears ebbed only slowly, almost too watery even for the new-gathering heat of my rage.

Simon’s book and metal box I found not far from the insensible body of the professor—had he suspected some connection between the two, or merely taken an interest in the potential value of each?—though I was too melancholy even to wonder whether I had nearly been too late to recover them. Victor’s old grimoire I found near the fireplace, rifled through but largely undamaged beyond its usual state, as if either its contents or the sense of its permeation by Victor’s shadow caused whoever found it beneath my pillow to want to see it burn.

To these four items, set together on my bed, I added a few more books and scrolls—those borrowed from Victor, and my own favorite volumes of poetry—as well as my nightdress and some other clothes. This was the limit of what I could carry for myself, and I untucked from my mattress the bedsheet upon which they lay, pulling it up and around them and tying it at the top to bundle them tightly together: in part for privacy’s sake, as I did not need for the Order members in the hall to guess the importance of Simon’s strongbox, and in part to avoid the disaster of my selections spilling in all directions should I stumble while carrying them. It was a strategy I had learned living on the cold streets of London, when I had the happy occasion of enough possessions to warrant binding them together.

And now I was again without a home—why the sheet-bundle came to mind, I imagined—though I hoped not for long.

Yet I would brave even the streets again sooner than submit to the indignity now afforded to me here.

I thought that I heard the professor of the Order groan, but I found then that the timing of this tortured utterance matched my steps as I picked up the oil lantern and strode to the door: the sound was no more than the complaint of the old floorboards beneath my feet. I turned back before reaching the threshold, but not for the sake of the man I had felled: I took one last, long look at that cold guest chamber I had come to know so well, my vision softened by unfallen tears of indignation and wistful sorrow, and in silence I clutched my bundle tighter and bid my room good-bye.

Closing my eyes, I waited for the heat of my ire and the unquiet fire of my shadow to dry my tears.

And then I turned, balanced my burden on my knee for a moment as I shut the door behind me—and nearly walked straight into Iris Everly in the hallway.

“Elizabeth!” she hissed in an urgent whisper nearly under her breath, her eyes wide; behind her I could no longer see Rothfield nor his robed companion. “Rothfield and Norton went for help; I don’t know when they’ll be back—what did you do, Elizabeth? You feel like—you feel like him —what did you do?”

I needed not ask who he was, nor did I feel the need to answer, but only to say: “I came home to find my chamber ransacked, and accordingly I have left the Order.”

“Left the Order!” Iris quietly exclaimed, as if the second of my two statements were more shocking than the first. “Oh, Elizabeth, you don’t know what you’d be giving up, were you to do such a regretful thing—is Doctor Reeve still in there? Perhaps he might help you understand?—”

“—Yes, he helped me understand all too well: he claimed to have led the late-night break-in and robbery with Hargrave’s blessing, then attempted some manner of sorcery on me, and I defended myself in the way that I knew how.” I hefted my bundle in my arms. “I’ve left already, Iris.”

“ He put you up to this, didn’t he? D’Arco,” she paused, as if even the whispered word stung her lips somehow, “that fiendish brute! Did he force you somehow? Did you do all this upon some cruel assignment from him? Elizabeth, if you need help escaping him—we can’t do a lot, I’m afraid, but we can try to?—”

I chuckled bitterly at that. “I did it for myself. A fiendish brute called Reeve, if that is his name, is lying senseless in my chamber. Doctor D’Arco doesn’t know, or he would be here—I assure you of it—and there would be little even all the Order together could do.”

“But—what you did to Rothfield—and if you did the same to Doctor Reeve—” She tried to walk a wide berth around me, and I knew she was angling slowly toward the door of my room. “Elizabeth, don’t you regret using your powers for…”

“I regret nothing. My only disappointment is that, given that we were friends, you would be so quick to trust the Order’s word over my own. That you would be so indifferent,” I pushed my broken chair out of the way, a few feathers from my pillow fluttering down to the hallway floor, “to what they did.”

If Iris said anything more, I did not hear it. I did not wish to. Burdened by my load of possessions but unbowed, I walked away and into Hargrave’s library—the room adjacent to what had been my own—finding, to my twinned relief and suspicion, that its door was not locked. I did not stop to consider why this should be, nor why the door to the underground was similarly unlatched and unguarded: I only stepped through the lonely library and descended the familiar dark stairway down into the stony earth, as surely and efficiently as I could.