CHAPTER TEN
It was Lio’s fourth night sleeping in the cramped room at the end of the hall, and still he had not found Theodora again.
He had, however, found the rotting apple left beneath the kitchen sink, had glared at the constellations of mould left to bloom across the bathroom tiles, and had met, to his horror, the family of mice who had eaten through the wainscoting and left droppings across the floorboards.
The house was revolting. Yet what choice had he but to stay?
After the witch had plucked him and the strange, blonde girl from the Lourdes, Theodora had made her feelings quite clear.
Lio had been collapsed and coughing up river water in the courtyard when she had stood over him and said, ‘If you utter a single word to Belchamber, to Rupert, to that girl, to anyone at all about my life before I took up this name, I will drag you back to the river and drown you myself.’
Lio had wanted to be snide or clever in his retort, but as he was lying beside the parched hydrangeas all he managed was, ‘These need watering.’
‘How did Acanthi find you?’
She was so different to the girl he had known – her hair shorter, her countenance calmer.
She held herself almost too proudly, arms crossed, back arched, staring down at him as if she were, in fact, really an empress of a city-wide syndicate as he had heard whispered.
Somewhere beneath it all was an echo of the girl from the forest; the one who had been scared of beetles and who always sneezed a little too loudly.
‘Your portals should have lost them.’
‘Is that a buried compliment?’ asked Lio.
He watched Theodora’s mouth twitch and that subtle movement of annoyance prompted so much nostalgia in him that he was momentarily catapulted back in time. They had once taken a test on portal crafting. It had been the only time he’d ever beaten her.
‘How long have they been following you?’
‘Since I arrived in the city,’ lied Lio.
‘They have a Sympathetic link to you?’
Lio almost betrayed himself by reaching for his inner pocket. That was where the letter sat, presumably soggy and staining the fabric with ink.
‘No.’
‘They clearly have some way to find you, and until I banish them from Alliaster, this tea shop may be the only place on the continent where you are safe from them.’
‘Do you not have wards out in the city?’ asked Lio. ‘Can you not recalibrate them to include me?’
‘How very Lio of you, expecting the world to reinvent itself at your leisure.’
‘I simply mean—’
‘The city’s wards are too diluted to protect you from Acanthi,’ said Theodora. ‘Not if they have some significant link to you. I won’t cast you out, but I won’t be responsible for your death, Liutprand. Stay if you want, or don’t.’
Before he could open his mouth again, Theodora was gone and a tin-coloured spirit hovered in her place.
The spirit showed Lio up the stairs to the room at the end of the third-storey hall where a small bed had been made up on a rollaway mattress.
It was a storage room, stuffed with broken objects, cauldrons, quills and chairs.
Lio joined them. He shut the door behind himself and let out a ragged breath, so relieved and surprised at his sudden safety that he had quite forgotten to thank the spirit.
Lio dwelled on this somewhat – he considered himself a gentleman – until an hour later when he heaved himself out of the bathtub and, gazing around the filthy space of grimy brass and soap scum against the clawfoot nooks, he realised he had nothing with which to dry himself.
Naked, cold and tired, he opened the door a fraction and called down the hall, ‘Excuse me, Belchamber?’
The spirit materialised.
‘Where are the towels?’
‘Ah,’ said Belchamber. ‘My mistress advised me to remove them.’
‘Whyever for?’
‘She did not say,’ said Belchamber, ‘Although, she did mention that when Miss Dorothy or Master Rupert wish to bathe, the towels are to be returned.’
‘And for myself?’
‘I do not wish to repeat the words she said about you, sir.’
There came a chuckle, and then someone beyond the door said, ‘Here.’
Lio angled himself to peer through the crack. A red-haired boy was there, holding a worn cotton towel and a pair of pyjamas.
‘Sense prevails,’ said Lio. He thanked the boy and stuck his arm out to take the items. It was only after he put on the worn flannel pyjamas – which, due to his lanky Ghistian limbs and broad shoulders, were much too short and exposed his ankles and half of his calves – did he realise that they must have been the boy’s own.
In the days that followed, Lio came to know the house.
There were five levels in all. In the basement was the workshop, from which he had been noticeably barred.
On the ground floor was the tea shop proper, which the customers entered from Wren Court; there was also a courtyard, the hall from which the Raven’s Attic was accessed, a storeroom, and a side door off Ethel Avenue where the post was delivered.
The second storey contained the living room and kitchen; the third, the bedrooms; and, finally, the highest level was the attic where the witch slept, which, unlike his singular barring from the basement, seemed to be off-limits to all of the house’s inhabitants, excluding Belchamber and the witch herself.
The boy, Rupert, was a kind of assistant to the witch and was aways skittering in and out, ferrying ingredients or undertaking errands.
If Rupert opened the third door on the ground floor, out came the raucous warble of jazz.
This was the way to the Raven’s Attic, located in the Commerce District on the other side of the city.
If the boy went through the north-facing door from the ground-floor hall, however, in tumbled the sounds of the tea shop – low conversation, clinking plates, babbling kettles.
Lio spent most of his first morning sitting at the top of the stairs, sickly from the river water, his hand clasping a chipped cup of black tea as he watched Rupert ferry crates of spells through this door and that, carrying packages, swapping costumes.
Lio, when he could, swiped questions at Rupert like a cat waiting for a pair of legs to pass.
‘How many jobs does she have you do?’
‘How long have you been her assistant?’
‘Do you assist with the wards?’
Although the boy seemed to have a family of his own, he often kipped overnight in the living room.
Not infrequently, Rupert would work into the early morning at the Raven’s Attic, steal a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in the house and then rise to open the tea shop at eight o’clock.
Other nights, he was unaccounted for entirely.
Lio washed his clothes in the kitchen sink and learned to avoid the mouse droppings beside the stairs. He reread the ruined letter from his coat pocket. He had a task here and, by some stroke of good fortune, he had situated himself perfectly to complete it.
Subtly, Lio began to search Theodora’s house.
However, almost every door was locked to him and no matter how many days went past, Theodora was nowhere to be found.
And so there Lio was, on the fourth night, perched by the living room windows, rereading the letter with its achingly familiar script.
The letter that had told him to return to Alliaster and had snatched him away from his apartment in Kolldin before he had even thought to say goodbye to it.
Lio found himself gazing at Wren Court below, spying on the spirits occasionally slinking along the footpath.
The first he saw was coated in royal blue fur and cartwheeling like the spokes of a penny-farthing.
Then waddled past a series of melon-sized eggs from which legs and arms had sprouted.
Then came a spirit that looked like an enormous dragonfly.
Then, a spirit that looked like the moon, deflating.
Alliaster was so different to Kolldin, the capital of Kremora, the foreign city where Lio had spent the past five years.
He had collapsed there, just about, after his half a decade of morosely moseying across the continent and beyond, reading bad poetry in dismal cafés and searching uselessly for his first love.
Although the spirits in Alliaster had returned in dribs and drabs after the war, there was a tension to them that did not exist in Kolldin.
Kremora was one of the United Allies and had been among Calléum’s enemies during the war.
The spirits in that country were a touch arrogant, Lio thought.
They took favourites among the humans, cursed this politician or enchanted that botanic garden.
The spirits here, however, were skittish.
He watched now a large, oozing, green-coloured spirit nervously glancing over his shoulder.
Something strange was going on in this city, and it made Lio uneasy.
He pocketed his letter and climbed up the stairs to bed.
The next day, Lio made a show of borrowing books to read and complaining about his injuries.
He picked out the cleanest knife, fork and spoon from the kitchen drawer, scrubbed them both and kept them in his cupboard bedroom for his own use.
Belchamber made several meals a day for Dot but when Lio searched for the ingredients he’d spied on her plates – cream, chicken, thick buttered bread – they were nowhere.
He found, instead, two large sacks of potatoes and carrots beside the empty icebox.
These he boiled for himself for the next two days until he was so sick of them that he went to the third storey landing and yelled up at the witch’s attic room door: ‘Go on and drown me then, Theodora! Surely that would be kinder than this.’
‘She’s not up there,’ called Rupert from the landing below. ‘She’s Maz Bircham today at the factory on Stirrup Street.’
‘Factory?’
‘Bircham & Bel Paper Goods.’
‘Why ever does she own a factory?’ demanded Lio. ‘She has the King drinking in her club three days a week! What benefit could she possibly gain?’