Chapter Six
Six
No one was very sure why the witches of Erlsley had chosen to congregate their shopfronts and offices at the top of the steep, clambering curve of Victorian tenement architecture known as Crawgate, out on the northern edge of town.
There was a theory going around that the street name had once been pronounced Crowgate, referencing, back in some period or other of medieval gloom, the hordes of querulous black birds that would gather to pick at the rotting bodies of criminals left on gibbets at the top of the rise and so, y’know…
There was another, less lurid theory. That it was a bloody long walk down Crawgate to the cross with Heath Street at the bottom for any halfway decent shops and the nearest tram stop into the center, and so the rents were dirt cheap.
“Couldn’t possibly comment either way,” Wolfbane Sally Bethune had told him when, newly arrived in the city, he’d asked her about it. “Wise women are the keepers of secrets, young man. We don’t go just spilling them to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who shows up looking all earnest and edible.”
She hooted out loud with laughter, leaned in with a lecherous gleam in her eye and a toothy grin.
Slapped one long-nailed hand lingeringly on his thigh and treated him to a view of her crinkly but still quite remarkable cleavage.
Like a lot of witches he’d met, she carried around with her an air of ribald arousal that her messy, gray-threaded dark hair and corpulent, middle-aged frame did nothing much to dispel.
She made him stand her another double brandy to add to the one already on her breath, over and above the cost of the spell he was supposed to be buying from her in the first place, rambled on about her exploits as a woodswoman and spell-spinner and friend to pixies, and eventually took him upstairs to fuck his brains out.
He woke the next morning to a screaming head, a stained and empty bed, and the cost of the room added to his tab.
That was four years ago. He’d been going to her for spell-work ever since.
“Enchantment, you see,” she was known to chortle whenever the story came up. “Once you’ve had a taste of weird sister, there’s no going back. You’re forever bound.”
Though, curiously, she’d never once attempted to lay a hand on him again.
In contrast to her unkempt and witchy looks, Sal kept an austere set of rooms on Crawgate at Number 37, above a shop of potions, remedies, and occult jewelry run by one of her less serious-minded colleagues and titled above its windows in peeling copperplate Ziroonderel’s Cauldron—Waken to the New Age.
Duncan supposed it was about as good an exhortation for the times as any he’d seen anywhere else.
He paused by the display window to get his breath back from the climb, gazed in for a moment at the assortment of talismans and incense candles and polished crystals that wakening to the new age apparently required.
He pushed the electric buzzer on the entrance to thirty-seven next door.
Heard it ring somewhere deeper in the building.
The door creaked stealthily open.
No visible human agency he could detect.
That was new—whether just for effect, or some sign of Sally’s burgeoning powers, he had no clue.
He shrugged it off, took the poorly illuminated flight of stairs upward.
On the middle of the first flight, a lean black cat arched its back at his approach, made no attempt to get out of his way, and pinned him with its slit jade gaze as he went past. He affected not to notice.
On the half landing turn to the next flight, something small and bat winged dropped right out of the heights of the stairwell, brushed his face in the gloom, and flitted away.
Fucking witches.
He found Wolfbane Sally waiting on the landing above, in a spill of light from the open doorway of her apartment. She was still in her dressing gown.
“Going to tell me how you did that?” he asked.
“Did what?” Grinning. The gown notwithstanding, she had her face on. Shadowy eyes, carnal red mouth—a stray fleck of lippy on one upper canine, like a spot of gore.
“With the door. How did you open it from up here?”
“I’m a witch, darling. Come on, get in here. I’ve just made some tea. Tell me all about this next little poppet you’re out to save.”
“How did you kn—”
This time, she just rolled her eyes, went back inside, and left the door ajar for him. He stood on the landing for a few moments gathering himself, then followed.
“I’m not here just for that,” he said, closing the door behind him.
“No,” she agreed, voice close and tickling intimate in his ear. “You want to know if there’s anything I can do about little Ellie Furlough.”
He turned about sharply, found himself alone in the shadowy entry hall, at least as far as his eyes could tell. Tiny spike of cold on the nape of his neck at the realization. Then he heard her again, voice pitched louder this time, more emphatic, coming from the brightness at the end of the hall.
“And, of course, we both already know the answer to that one, don’t we?”
He followed the sound down the hall and into the light—Sally’s reception room, where she sat on the threadbare sofa in front of a low table, slopping tea from a curious pot-bellied iron teapot into two enamel mugs that looked as if they’d seen use on the Somme.
“Do you have to do that?” he snapped.
“Do what?” she asked mildly. “Leave my voice in the hall, or tell you uncomfortable truths you don’t want to hear? Sit down, for Hecate’s sake, Duncan! You look like a virgin in a knocking shop, stood there like that. You don’t want milk or sugar in this, do you?”
He shook his head, took the proffered mug, and sank into the armchair opposite. Stared into the teak-colored depths of the tea, the cauldron rise of steam off the surface.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“You can’t know!”
“Yes, I can. It’s what I do for a living. And unless you’re keeping back some important details, I have a very clear picture indeed of what happened to both you and Ellie.”
She paused, looked keenly at him—he wasn’t sure if it was deliberate. He’d never told her about the vision of his home that had triggered the fight at Kettley Cross, and he wondered if she could somehow detect that reticence in him. But he’d come clean on everything else.
“Darling, you crossed Huldu nobility. Put a Forest scion within inches of death in front of his peers, maybe actually killed him for all we know. It’s a heart’s blood curse, and it’s all over you.
I can still smell it from here. Damn thing’s like a bee sting, it’s real suicide magic, Duncan.
Little Ellie copped the weight of it, but you were the target, the crux, and you still are.
Until your heart stops beating, she’s stuck with it. ”
“What about if his fucking heart stopped?”
She sighed—maybe at the violence in his voice, maybe for something altogether broader and more general in the state of the world. The compassion in her eyes hurt to look at.
He looked away instead.
“His heart may well already have stopped,” the witch said gently.
“You certainly seem to have put enough iron into him. In which case, it would merely be a matter of scouring the whole Forest for his corpse, finding it, de-warding it, digging it up, then cutting out the heart and eating a portion of it. Which would doubtless kill you anyway, given the way they steep and ooze in death. Even a live Faerie heart would be pretty hard to choke down for a human. They say Arthur Pendragon managed it once—but then again he’s a myth, and so is that story.
And anyway, if you believe the legends, he was Faerie kin in the first place.
What I’m saying, Duncan—there is no path to this. What’s done is done.”
“Could you not at least go to see her?”
“Would I be welcomed there if I did? From what you told me, these are respectable people.” Light irony on the last two words. “Not sure they want to see a weird sister show up on the doorstep asking after their precious daughter.”
It was fair comment. Witches weren’t much better regarded these days than they ever had been.
They still inhabited much the same gray area they’d been left in a couple of centuries back, when the Witchcraft Act passed into law under Walpole.
For the best part of two hundred years, you weren’t allowed to hunt, persecute, or harm anyone on the basis that they were a witch, but nor were you allowed to claim that you were one, much less offer services as one, on pain of prosecution for fraud.
Witches were simply not supposed to exist.
Then again, nor were forest-dwelling Faeries, or millennial oaks that erupted fully formed from the ground overnight.
Fresh legislation was apparently under review, but the legacy of two hundred years’ genteel disbelief had Parliament paralyzed, endlessly consulting supposed experts—none of them actual witches—and dragging its heels for all it was worth.
In the meantime, in the absence of clear legal guidance, a rattled society fell back on tried-and-tested responses.
Like the suffragettes, like the upstart women entering universities in the closing decades of the last century, witches were tolerated…
just about. They practiced their craft, were not prosecuted for it, but they also weathered the standard blanket of distaste, mistrust, harassment, easy contempt covering for real fear, and occasional outbursts of actual violent abuse thrown in.
Numerous practitioners had been assaulted, almost all had been threatened more than once, and one or two, famously, had been murdered.
Duncan looked at her again. “Sal, please. As a favor to me. Will you go?”
“Oh, Duncan. That’s adorable.”
“I’ll pay you, whatever you ask. I’ll write to Ellie’s mother, get her written permission for the visit. I’ll go with you, keep you from harm.”