CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lio dug up Opal’s grave. He drove the stolen shovel into the Caelin Forest soil, the sound punctuating the autumn air with thuds and scrapes and severed roots. Around him plumed the scent of pine. The letter from Opal was crumpled in the dirt.
How ridiculous Sympathetic magic was. To imbue objects based on their unquantifiable meaning was an art both fiddly and imprecise, and it was nothing like the exactitudes of casting portals.
Only non-magical objects, though there were exceptions.
Only objects that had been touched physically by the caster, though there were exceptions.
It’s like spelling, Theodora had once said to him.
It doesn’t always make sense. You just have to learn it.
But Lio had tried to learn it just as he had tried, late in the evening in those first weeks in the tea shop, to use the letter to locate Opal; he had followed the Sympathy spell round and round like a fool, assuming that his work had been faulty.
Had Opal been upstairs, laughing, jogging about as if dangling yarn for a cat?
Lio, at last, collapsed against the bracken.
The grave was indeed empty.
Oh, he was an idiot.
The caw of ravens sounded above.
She’d named her pet after him.
‘Eliot,’ Opal had told him ten years earlier as they lay together in the summer shallows of the lilypond, ‘is a far lovelier name than Liutprand.’
And what had he said to her?
‘I do not care what name you find lovely, so long as it is mine.’
Rupert had disliked Dot from the first. He’d disliked her outdated haircut and her second-hand blouses and her stern face and ridiculous habit of always biting her fingernails.
He disliked her because Theodora had decided to apprentice her in magic and had given to her the room that had been his when his mother was nasty or drunk or didn’t want to look at him.
But, as he had watched Dot trudge away from the tea shop, he had felt keenly the young woman’s utter abandonment of him.
She disappeared as he watched through the living room window, her body awkward and slow as she tugged the carpet bag onto her shoulder, and he was more hurt than he would ever care to admit that the young woman had not even paused to glance back.
Now, Rupert placed another bowl of salt beside Belchamber.
Theodora had left. She had called out to Rupert before she had taken the portal.
The house that Rupert had always loved so dearly now felt cold.
Too big. Too quiet. Rupert sat beside the spirit in his attic bed, watching his small body tremor.
The boy felt the bitter cud of hatred choke him.
Theodora had been cruelly manipulated. This was the fault not of his mistress but, entirely, of Opal Weyer.
Rupert’s hands shook as he remembered Opal’s warped, cruel face.
How much it reminded him of his mother. He cried for a while up in the attic until, in the corner, he spotted that accursed bread knife.
He took it and climbed down from the attic and stowed the blade beneath his bed.
He practised his magic and failed at it.
He took a bath. He busied himself with the dusting of the living room, radio switched on and warbling about the weather.
He cooked leek soup and found himself, at some point, in an armchair in the dark of the abandoned Raven’s Attic.
In that room, he had hardly been a welder’s son.
He’d hardly been the boy who had abandoned his little brother.
He’d hardly been the sad creature screamed at by his mother until Dot gave half her arm to stop it.
In the Raven’s Attic, he had been special.
And all of that had been ruined. Dot was on her way home, where she would die before the winter was over. Theodora would soon be Salamander’s conduit. Belchamber had not yet healed. And Lio – Lio had left him, too.
The tea shop would be taken.
And Rupert would be alone.
And none of it was fair.
And as he kicked at the nearby table, he remembered a conversation that Belchamber had had with him the night his mother had thrown him out for good.
‘Of course you deserved better, Master Rupert. However, the decisions you make every day hereafter cannot be dictated by that desperate want for compensation. Sadly, it often does not matter what is fair.’
And oh, Rupert had tried to argue, but the spirit had sat beside him in the courtyard and pressed on.
‘Do not mistake me,’ said Belchamber, ‘if I came across Mrs Armstrong at the markets, I might have a mind to share a few honest sentiments with her. I might be inclined to say some words that might surprise even our Theodora.’ The spirit smiled at him.
‘However, Master Rupert, you possess a retaliatory streak that gives me pause. If I may be so bold to say: you have the disposition to deal out kindnesses as if you have invented your own private currency. I have spent a lot of time helping the wayward souls of this city, and I have seen the effects of this ethos.’
‘What do you mean?’ Rupert had asked. He had noticed the parental kindness in the little spirit’s eyes.
‘Miss Dorothy did not earn your compassion from the first,’ said Belchamber.
‘She owed you, in fact, because she took your room and apprenticeship, and so as compensation you were cold, and to your mind, that was fair. Miss Dorothy deserved your mistreatment even though she did not realise she had committed these crimes. You did not forgive her of your own accord; rather, through her actions, she earned the right to your warmth.’
Rupert hung his head. The spirit had understood him precisely.
‘Many people live this way,’ Belchamber went on, ‘but there is no joy in that kind of transactory love. You’ve had a hard go of it, that is true, but I’m afraid the world will not reimburse you for your hardships or your heartbreaks.
It is up to you to choose how you want to live and to decide what you want to learn. ’
The little spirit patted him gently on the hand.
‘What do you want your life to be? A tragedy or a triumph?’
Lio was thrown out of a pub in Arranfol.
He was barred from a restaurant in Beleust. He turned up in the library of his family estate in west Calléum, the enormous house located on the ancillary streets of Palé, an affluent town known for jewellery making and delicate pastries.
The King summered two streets away; Lio’s parents had met him multiple times and were on first-name terms with his niece, Assandra.
‘Darling Robert,’ his father cried. ‘Whatever is the matter?’
Liutprand Lashkari Senior brought his son a large mug of black tea and brandy, and called the housekeeper for chicken and walnut sandwiches. Lio pretended to fall asleep on the sofa for several hours before finishing the bottle, scoffing some biscuits and disappearing once more.
He went back to Alliaster. He tried to make it into the studio of Justine Allonse.
He would burn the sketches of Opal. He would destroy the whole bloody place, but when he broke the windows and found his way into the room, it was empty.
He went to the factory. To the university.
To the office of the Minister for Sorcerie and Magic. All traces of Theodora were gone.
He went back to his apartment in Kolldin, stood across the street and peered in, but another man lived there now.
He went back to the offices of the magazine where he had been an editor, but a young woman with red hair sat at his desk.
He bounced back and forth for an indiscriminate period until he collapsed on the grass at Penn Park. At last, he morosely moseyed along the Lourdes until the sun rose and he found himself shivering before the spires of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.
Grow up, Dot!
Lio had watched each syllable slice her. It had felt good until it had felt despicable.
He took a seat on a bench beside a street vendor selling little pastries topped with pistachios and clotted cream.
The wind was cold. Maple leaves dotted the pavement and were scuffled by the shoes of tourists, one or two of whom glanced cautiously at him.
It was, perhaps, nine o’clock in the morning.
Lio’s eyes landed on a vendor across the way.
A short woman tied an apron around her waist and propped up a weathered board advertising fried cockles for 75 coppers per stick.
Seafarthing’s Best! read the sign, and in a rush of shame and inspiration, Lio thought: There, at least, is something I could do.
Lio closed his eyes, heart aching, and began to mutter in a dialect older than his own species. A warm wind tumbled in and so began the ringing of wind chimes and children’s chanting, and up kicked the smell of woodsmoke, incense, gunpowder and lime. A burst of light shot out and he was gone.