CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
It was Theodora who cast the portal, but Dot who led them through.
Someone had scooped up Belchamber from the water.
Lio, probably. Someone clasped onto her right arm.
Archie, probably. Dot knew only her own feet slipping up the wet tiled roof.
Later, she would not understand how she did it: her body broken, severed and cauterised.
She should have collapsed. But there was the boy, dead, in Theodora’s arms, and Dot could hardly spare a moment’s consideration for herself.
Dot took Rupert’s hand, his fingers already losing their warmth, slowly casting away the last echoes of him.
The sound of his voice. They would never hear it again.
He was a memory, now, fading, doomed to be warped slightly by every recollection. His blue eyes. His height. Little by little she would forget him, just as she had forgotten Emily.
Dot tugged Theodora into the portal.
They landed on grass with a soft, dull thud.
They were on a hillside overlooking a valley.
Behind them was a little white cottage. Theodora buckled, still clinging to the body.
Belchamber stirred and clambered down from Lio’s arms. His eyes were bright.
The magic, it seemed, was gone from him.
The spirit hung his head. Lio turned from the others.
Archie rubbed his own eyes with rough fingertips.
Dot merely stared. First, at the boy and then at the place where her middle finger should have been, and then around at the rooftops peeking out of the valley below them, blanketed with willows.
A door opened.
Sodden footsteps.
A man called out.
Then, he was in front of them. Grey hair, dark skin, a wide nose and clever eyes. He wore spectacles. He was wrapped in a cardigan, and he stared at Theodora.
‘Tessa?’
The cottage was cramped. The windows were small.
The library Theodora had once described was no more than a corner nook with a spray of books stacked upon a side table.
Dampness hung in the air, but the living room fire was warm upon their sodden clothes, and the cohort hovered awkwardly around it, except for Dot, who had at last felt the onslaught of her fatigue.
She curled up on the sofa, her eyes barely open.
The man in the cardigan made them the bitter, north Calléan tea. None of them drank it.
‘I put him on the bed,’ said Theodora, voice hollow. ‘In my old room. I put a charm on him, to slow the – to stop the body—’
Theodora stopped speaking. She watched the fire with no expression at all.
‘Tessa,’ said the man.
Theodora did not look at him.
‘Tell me now,’ he said, stepping before her. She was taller than him. ‘Why is there a dead boy in my guest room?’
‘Mr Blythe?’ said Belchamber, weakly.
‘Stephen will do.’
‘Mr Stephen,’ said Belchamber. ‘We are terribly sorry to intrude on your home, but the boy in the next room – he was something of a little brother to Tessa.’
Stephen made to scoff. Belchamber spoke faster.
‘He was killed by a witch from the same coven that abducted your daughter. We’ve nowhere safe to go, and we must collect ourselves. Might you oblige us for just a night or two? We will reimburse you, of course.’
‘Compensation?’ asked Stephen Blythe, glancing at Theodora’s drawn face and then at Dot’s bloodied hands. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Just don’t track mud on the carpet.’
Soup was placed before them, but no one ate.
Blankets and old clothes were lent to all.
Belchamber slept. Lio left – out the door and off, he had muttered, to wander the willows.
Theodora tended to Dot’s finger; the witch had been the one to cauterise it up on the roof as the Ancient Spirit’s magic had ripped through Dot.
Now, Theodora smeared the burned skin with antiseptic ointment.
She fed Dot a potion for the pain and to quicken the healing.
Most of the ambergris had been lost with the tea shop, but Archie dug out two tiny packets of it from his coat pockets, and the witch went down to the village market and brought back chantarelle and cockles and pinched the remaining ingredients from the neighbour’s herb garden to brew the tonic.
The affliction reached over Dot’s shoulder now, stretching along her collarbone and to the top of her rib cage.
Dot dozed, and when she woke, the sky through the cottage windows was inky and the ancient magic surged again.
‘Ah!’ Dot cried, feeling the wash of terrible cold.
‘What, love?’ Archie’s hand was on hers. Theodora and Lio were nowhere; Belchamber’s eyes peeped open.
‘Opal,’ said Dot, reaching for the warmth within.
She rocked left and right, writhing with the cold lances, balancing them with the warm human magic.
‘She’s drawing on the magic. It’s the same as when she flooded the city.
I think – I think the rain is falling again in Alliaster, but not quite as strong. ’
‘We are far from the capital,’ said Belchamber. ‘Her link with you is weakened. Whatever Opal is doing, she must be doing it slower now.’
Dot closed her eyes. At some point, the magic died down and she fell again to sleep; at some point, it kicked back up and she balanced again.
For hours, Dot existed in this limbo, rocking back and forth, sleeping, waking, balancing.
She did not dare check the growth of the scales across her chest. The moon was rising.
Archie was asleep and so was Belchamber.
Deeper within the cottage, Stephen slept; deeper still, was the body of the red-haired boy who liked chamomile tea.
‘What is the point?’ Dot whispered, still balancing the magic.
No one answered.
Theodora was sat at the kitchen table when Stephen entered. Through the windows, the moon was high against the stark willows. The rest of the broken cohort were elsewhere, dozing or staring at the walls or quietly crying.
He crossed to the cupboard and took down a speckled mug. The long-forgotten familiarity of the sight stung her.
Here was her dad at last, his hands around that same old mug, a half-remembered relic from a childhood long mourned.
Stephen looked so old. His jaw was soft.
His eyebrows were grey. He looked just like her grandfather, and Theodora thought, with a rush of anxiety: What had happened to her grandad? What about her aunties and cousins?
‘Where’s Mum?’ asked Theodora at last.
‘Gone,’ said Stephen. ‘Diphtheria took her three years ago.’
Theodora closed her eyes.
She had thought that she could not feel any worse. She had been wrong.
‘Didn’t think you cared.’
‘Of course I cared,’ said Theodora in a hush, opening her eyes again.
‘If you did, you would have been here,’ said Stephen, spooning sugar into his cup. ‘She’s buried by the lilacs.’
‘Her favourite,’ said Theodora.
A silence came. She watched him pour his tea. Theodora’s silk blouse and bandaged chest were still soaked from the rain and smeared with blood and dirt. A faraway part of her realised that she was shivering, yet she could not ask for a blanket. Her father did not offer her one.
‘What is all of this, Tessa?’ he said at last. ‘Are you on that opium stuff?’
‘What?’
‘You need money from me.’
‘Of course not,’ said Theodora. ‘I didn’t even mean to come here. I cast the portal wrong.’
Stephen shook his head and folded his arms. He leaned against the kitchen counter, the table between them. ‘My Tessa would have telephoned. Do you have any idea what you put your mother through, running off like you did?’
‘You had a funeral,’ said Theodora.
‘Did you expect us to wait for you to bury our Justine—’
‘I don’t mean Mum,’ said Theodora. ‘For me, you had one.’
‘I had one for my daughter,’ said Stephen. ‘You are not her.’
Lio stared into the fire. It was three o’clock in the morning, the witching hour, and beside him, his soup was cold.
His pant legs were muddy from wandering uselessly through the willows.
Archie dozed in an armchair. Dot had fallen asleep upon the couch.
Theodora had sat in the kitchen for a long time before, at last, returning to the sitting room, checking Dot’s wounds, and taking the final armchair.
She had offered it to Lio; he had refused.
And so Lio sat against the cold slate floor.
He relished the discomfort.
It stopped him from screaming or crying as he saw in the flame the flashes of Opal driving the knife into Rupert. Of Opal, eighteen and radiant, laughing with him, cuddling him, slipping into his tent to make love to him, and it was all he could do to not be sick.
All of this – Dot’s mutilation, the tea shop’s destruction, Rupert’s death – was his fault.
Because he had been the one to reach for that letter from Opal.
Because he had, his whole adult life, convinced himself that Opal was the only woman who could ever love him.
That was why he had been so horrible to Dot, wasn’t it? Oh, how she’d held a mirror up to him. Lio scrubbed his fingers through his hair, and not for the first time did he take out the notebook – now sodden – where he’d copied down the runes for memory removal.
He could end it all.
The pain would be gone.
The guilt would be gone.
Lio could live the rest of his days in peaceful amnesia. Yet – he glanced up at the archway leading to the room where Rupert now lay – the boy deserved to be remembered.
Lio turned back to the sad little fireplace. What a wretch he was. A mistake in human flesh. He never wanted another human being to look at him again.
Rupert.
The boy’s magic had been snuffed out before it had even ignited.
Lio had not liked the tea shop at first, but it was Rupert who made it bearable, through the hours he spent crafting spells with him, playing cards with him, listening to the wireless.
Lio keeled over onto the cold slate floor and sobbed.
It was almost sunrise, and Belchamber sat in the imaginary library, in the old armchair, beneath the window that cast shadows like gaol bars.
His body was frail and his magic was weak but the hold of Opal’s addled spell had been extinguished at last on the rooftop.
His body and mind were his own again, although they were aching and weak, and still he could taste the distant memory of Salamander’s power as it channelled through Opal Weyer.
When Belchamber was not sleeping, he was helping. He cooked dinner. He saw to Dot’s bandages. He forced Theodora, at last, into a clean shirt. He made a tincture for Archie’s shock.
Tragedy does funny things to us all. It makes one either utterly useless or incessantly helpful, and no one can ever know which it will be until it strikes. Belchamber was, of course, the latter. His own wounds could wait.
It was not until that last of the heartbroken party was finally asleep that the spirit took up the armchair and had a quiet moment to himself.
Only once he was certain that no one could hear him did he let out a small cry, no louder than a whisper, for the sweet red-haired lad whom he, too, had helped raise.
Dot’s world was a ship’s hull, rocking back and forth against a violent storm that grew more terrible with each bucking wave.
She saw flashes of the sea, and then the cottage, waking and sleeping and all the while balancing her magic.
At some point, the nausea began. She broke out in cold sweats and warm flushes.
Hours must have gone by. Her energy dwindled.
Soon, it was just her fingers tapping, but somehow that was enough to balance the magic.
‘There we go,’ came a gentle voice. ‘Drink this, Dorothy.’
And the familiar taste of tonic went down her throat.
Then, what seemed like years later, Dot’s eyes opened.
Pink sky filtered through the living room window and Dot shivered, her body damp with sweat.
Archie slept in the armchair. Belchamber and Lio were on the floor, propped up on cushions.
Dot grabbed for her tonic, which had been decanted into an old jam jar.
Her amputated finger bumped the glass. A rush of cold shot up from the wound, and she almost fainted.
Dot took a moment. She gently clasped the jar with her afflicted hand instead, unscrewed it and drank down the whole thing.
Then, she spotted Theodora’s raven-black hair outside the window.
Dot, with immense effort, rose and tiptoed around the sleeping bodies.
From the coffee table, she picked up a paper bag of bread sticks.
She took up a blanket from the basket by the door, wrapped it painfully around herself – for she kept bumping her right hand as she went – and stepped into the morning light.
The damp air washed over her, and the stone of the porch was cold beneath her feet. Theodora did not have her coat on. Dot sat beside her, pulled the blanket over Theodora too and offered her a bread stick.
Theodora did not move.
‘Thank you for making the tonic,’ said Dot.
‘Do not thank me.’
‘Theo—’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Whyever not?’
‘My name is Tessa,’ said the witch.
Dot had no response for this. Theodora sniffed and rubbed her eyes and then, after a moment, took a bread stick.
They sat in silence in the brisk cold of the autumn morning.
The door to the cottage opened, and Lio poked his head out at them.
His eyes were red. After some hesitation, he came over and sat on Theodora’s other side, his head in his hands.
The three did not talk.
But after a while, Dot offered Lio the bread sticks and he too took one and they looked out over the valley and at the morning mist and the hills peeking out from the fog like islands across a moody sea.
Dot, Theodora and Lio remained like that for a long time, each blaming themselves in their own way for the death of the boy whose body lay in the room that had once belonged to a girl named Tessa.