Chapter 7
Chapter
Achilles was perched above Lucy’s front door, sulking under the eaves to stay out of the rain. He cawed in greeting as we walked up the garden path, sailing down to Lucy’s shoulder and eyeing my basket with obvious curiosity. The basket rattled against my hip.
Inside, the roof was leaking. Rain dripped through the thatch into a small puddle on the honey-wood floor.
“Thought I fixed that last time,” Lucy grumbled, and spun her wrist. The thatch in the roof rustled as it knit itself together around the hole.
I set the pterodactyl’s basket on the table as Lucy enchanted a fire in the stone hearth. I sighed with pleasure as I stripped off my wet socks and hung them to dry.
Lucy’s cottage smelled like lavender and honey, no matter the season. The floors were always swept clean, and her walls and ceiling beams were garlanded with bundles of dried flowers from her garden. Her shelves boasted a few books but not a bone or fossil among them.
She’d traded three of her mother’s diamond necklaces for the cottage and surrounding land. I was there; the farmer’s eyes had bulged alarmingly when seventeen-year-old Lucy, freshly disinherited, stood on his doorstep and offered him a fortune in jewels.
The cottage, with its small main room and even smaller bedroom, was a far cry from her father’s manor.
The only vestiges of that first life were the two small portraits she’d stolen when she fled home and came to Lyme Regis for good.
The paintings hung in twin dark-oiled frames over her hearth: one of the late Viscountess Marienne Murray, née Radcliffe—Lucy’s mother—and one of Edgar.
The viscount in the frame wasn’t far from the one I’d first met, with his boyhood platinum locks and the too-large ears about which Henry had mercilessly teased. During his visit last summer, Edgar had tried to convince Lucy to replace the portrait with a more flattering one.
“I like it,” Lucy had said, patting his shoulder. “Keeps you humble. Lord knows something should.” Even he had to laugh at that; our Edgar had never been one for modesty.
The table across from Lucy’s hearth took up the bulk of the main room. It looked quite similar to my own work desk, covered in papers and dried inkpots. Achilles had followed us inside and hopped up beside the wicker basket, cocking his head in obvious interest. The basket rocked.
Lucy cleared the papers, but my eye caught on Latin. My own prejudice immediately assumed it must be the name of some flora or fauna. But Libertas Magicae—freedom of magic—wasn’t a species. It was a rallying cry. The slogan of the Prometheans.
I picked it up, skimming quickly. The condition of magic…the blessing of the Lord our God…as to render us unequal.
“New pamphlet?”
Lucy nodded. “A woman in Exeter died trying to quick-fill a reliq on commission. Fainted and never woke up.” She exhaled. “Her children were starving. Skin and bones, from all accounts. Poor woman just needed a little coin.” Her eyes flashed fury, but I heard the anguish in the crack of her voice.
“But that doesn’t even work, right?”
We were taught from childhood catechisms that magic was exhaled with breath. From first breath to the last is magic, so the saying went.
I wasn’t an expert on current theomagical doctrine, but the fundamental notion was that reliqs, when worn directly against the skin, captured this holy breath.
Technically, you could wear more than one reliq, but the charge would be divided between them. The quantity of magic a person produced was finite, though not exactly fixed; maybe you generated a tiny bit more magic some days, a little less on others.
Charlatans sometimes claimed reliqs could be quick-filled by breathing faster through hyperventilation or strenuous exercise, or by wearing multiple reliqs.
Some of the worst offenders even pretended to sell manifold reliqs—because if a back-alley quack did find the Holy Grail of reliquemistry, they’d sell it for only a couple shillings.
Ha. But, like this poor woman, there were always some who were desperate enough to believe.
Lucy narrowed her eyes. “Does it matter? It was her only option.”
I shrugged. “Guess not.” I skimmed through the rest of her draft. “This is good, though. You make her story very sympathetic.”
Lucy arched a brow. “I’m not making anything. I’m just telling the truth, so people know what happened.”
“Good thing ‘the truth’ supports your cause, huh?”
“Don’t be so cynical.” Lucy snatched the paper and bundled it with the others, clasping them to her chest, as if to protect them from me.
“I’m not! It’s a good tactic, and you know it, too, or you wouldn’t be trying to turn her into a martyr with that pamphlet of yours.”
Lucy’s scowl deepened, and then she exhaled, nostrils flaring.
“You’re right. And I feel terrible about it.” She sat down across from me, tapping her fingers. “But the London council is planning demonstrations to support Edgar’s rate-increase bill, and this might be just the heat we need to light a fire under folks, and get them into the streets.”
“Yes, really singe their arses.”
Lucy laughed. I was forgiven.
For all the times Lucy had to listen to me drone on about fossils and scientific papers, I had listened to her talk about the myriad evils of the reliquary system. “The cruel economy of magic,” she called it once. I told her that definitely needed to go in a pamphlet.
Lucy and Edgar’s mother had been a witch, and their father an unrepentant villain. Randall Murray had let his viscountess die rather than call the physiomagician, taunting his wife to save herself, if she could, with her own “foul witch magic.”
So maybe it was no surprise both Murrays grew into reformers: Edgar, in his political career, and Lucy, with the Prometheans. They’d both seen firsthand what could happen when the powerful controlled another’s magic.
Edgar, of course, had to pretend to condemn the Prometheans’ methods, and call for reform through politics rather than protest. But secretly he was one of the London council’s most generous funders.
Lucy had divulged many Promethean secrets like that over the years.
Code names. Tactics. Pamphlet distribution channels.
Printing schedules. She trusted me, because she knew I’d keep her secrets safe—one, because I loved her, but two, because I couldn’t be bothered to care to remember the details, even under torture.
Lucy’s passion—reforming the reliquary system to be more just—was a noble goal, and a worthy cause. It simply wasn’t mine.
Even the raven leaned forward as I untied the leather holding the basket shut.
The pterodactyl, nestled in its towel, looked up and chirped. The filaments around its neck, now dried, were soft and feathery. It could almost pass for a fledgling bird, except for those leathery, folded wings.
Achilles cawed, hopping across the tabletop, his own black wings beginning to spread.
“Don’t be jealous, Achilles. Go to your perch,” Lucy said firmly, and the raven rose and flew as commanded. He cawed again and turned his back to us, spreading tail feathers wide and sulking.
The pterodactyl nipped at my finger with his toothed beak. I chuckled and stroked between his eyes.
“He’s bright,” Lucy said. “Look at how his eye follows you. He knows you already. He’ll grow to be as smart as Achilles, I’d wager. You should have no trouble training him.”
I looked at her in alarm. Training him? I’d thought I only had to keep him alive.
We were straying quite far from geomagical territory now.
A geomagician might correspond or even collaborate with naturalists and biomagicians, trading books and research and observations.
Buckland was actually quite well-versed in current biomagical research, and he’d often urged me to invest more energy in the studies of living creatures to inform my own work.
But I had never wanted to be a biomagician. I once had a dog, as a girl, and I quite liked her, but beyond that, I had no interest in the magic of living animals. I cared only so far as they could tell me about the dead.
“Now put your wrist at the stomach, under the chest,” Lucy instructed, and for some mad reason, I did.
He didn’t hesitate; he stepped right up as if it were a branch, then twisted his head to show those golden eyes and the scaled ridge above them.
Lucy went to the kitchen and returned with something fluffy and yellow and striped red.
I gasped. “Is that a chick?”
“Yes. Don’t tell me you’re squeamish,” she huffed when I recoiled. “Didn’t you once boil a drowned fox to examine its pelvis?”
I fed the pterodactyl, feeling only a little ill as a pale chicken foot disappeared down his gullet, and tried not to be charmed when he made a soft purring sound and settled onto his feet contentedly, as if my wrist were the nicest nest in the world.