Wayward E-Book

Hannah Mathewson

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 650

Beschreibung

In a London lurking under the surface, magic, collusion and conspiracy stalk the streets in a rich new fantasy perfect for fans of Six of Crows and V.E. Schwab.Welcome to the Witherward, and to a London that is not quite like our own…Six opposing factions run the city, each with their own particular powers, peace is held only by fragile accords, and the magic-wielding sorcerers have problems in their own faction that threaten to tear them apart.As granddaughter of the High Sorcerer, Cassia Sims should be a powerful magician, but she's never been able to make her magic work properly, and is therefore denied entry to The Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers. Desperate to prove herself, she's drawn into a plot by her brother, Ollivan, to make himself head of the society, and on the way she finds a trap he set for his enemies: a cursed doll that absorbs any magic that is thrown at it. The doll escapes, rampaging through the streets of London, and Cassia must learn to work with her magic and her brother to prevent the destruction of the city

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for the Author

Also by Hannah Mathewson and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

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Acknowledgements

About the Author

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

“An impressive novel from Hannah Mathewson. Rich and intricate world-building evokes a London that is both familiar and unfamiliar. The reader is swept into a world that is sometimes unsettling, sometimes terrifying, but always exciting.”

JODI TAYLOR, AUTHOR OFJUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER

“Witherward is catnip for fans of complex characters and delightfully messy worlds. It delivers on a world of intricate factions and intrigue, without ever losing track of the vividly written living, breathing characters that are at the heart of it. This book broke my heart in the best ways.”

A.J. HACKWITH, AUTHOR OFTHE LIBRARY OF THE UNWRITTEN

“Mathewson has delivered a dazzling, fantastical adventure where magic awaits you on every page, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. With a magnificent world I’d love to get lost in, intriguing magic, and a wide cast of dynamic characters you can’t help but love, Witherward is a phenomenal and immensely fun debut that will leave readers wanting more.”

ADALYN GRACE, AUTHOR OFALL THE STARS AND TEETH

“Street-smart and wounded, Ilsa is a protagonist to cheer on as she navigates two Victorian Londons, both familiar and strange.”

MARIE BRENNAN, AUTHOR OFA NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS

Also by Hannah Mathewson and available from Titan Books

Witherward

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Wayward

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094459

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094466

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: May 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Hannah Mathewson 2022

Hannah Mathewson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

In loving memory of Uncle Matt

THE WHISPERERS

Whitechapel

LEADER: LORD JERICHO VOSS

MILITIA: THE STEWARDS

THE ORACLES

The Docklands

LEADER: THE SEER

MILITIA: THE ACOLYTES

THE WRAITHS

The North

LEADER: LADY JOSAVIE WRIKE

MILITIA: THE BLADES

THE SORCERERS

The Heart

LEADER: HIGH SORCERER FISK

MILITIA: THE ENFORCERS

THE CHANGELINGS

Camden Town

LEADER: ALPHA HESTER

MILITIA: THE WOLVES

THE PSI

The Underground

LEADER: THE TRINITY

MILITIA: THE CLOAKS

1

Ollivan was fired from Pendergast’s Occult Emporium at ten past nine in the morning, which he thought was leaving it a bit late.

The shop had been open for over an hour, but a persistent autumn rain was keeping the customers away. Mr Holt had retreated to the back room to manage his stock, or possibly to avoid Ollivan’s cheerful whistling, when the bell above the door finally chimed.

“She said it was a very old technique from Malaysia, used to bring one in closer communion with the spirit world,” the lady in green was telling her companion as they folded their umbrellas. “Before our very eyes, she put Louise in a trance. Just by touching her shoulder!”

At the counter, Ollivan went back to scribbling in the sales ledger, having determined that the women would not know real magic if it reached out and swept them into a waltz. The morning paper lay beside it, the front page similarly defiled. An illustration of Queen Victoria on some public duty that weekend now bore the note but where is the rat??? across it.

He was working on an unravelling – a spell used to undo another spell – for a particularly tricky ward he needed to put to rest. Get it wrong, and Ollivan would suffer gravely unpleasant consequences. Get it right, and the last few touches were finally falling into place.

“Hello there?”

It was the lady in green. She summoned Ollivan with a polite wave, and he put his pen down and weaved between the tables and shelves to join them.

“Beautiful day,” he said in greeting.

The customer turned her curious gaze to the window. Ollivan watched rivulets of rainwater roll down the glass, and his mind filled unstoppably with the scent of daffodils, and the unspoiled green of new leaves. It was a beautiful day; with any luck, his last on this hellish grey plane.

“I’ve been told,” the lady in green said, visibly preening, “that I have a true aptitude for precognition and that I could encourage it by burning sage or mugwort. Which would you suggest?”

Ollivan didn’t know where to start. “Precognition?”

“The talented medium Madam Rosalie told her so,” said the woman’s companion, and they exchanged satisfied smiles.

Ollivan looked at the woman in green again. Her eyes were brown, the pupils wide in the ‘atmospheric’ dimness of the shop; Mr Holt said the darkness gave the place an air of mysticism. If the customer was truly capable of precognition – a real Oracle – Ollivan would be able to tell from her eyes. And even if she was, no herb would help her. Only a Sorcerer, and not an Oracle, was capable of drawing out the magical properties of a substance, and he doubted the woman was one of those either.

“And how much did this medium charge you for knowledge of your gift?” he said.

“Well I—”

“Since you have the gift of precognition, perhaps you ought to have foreseen this charlatan spending your money with a swindler’s grin on their face.”

The woman started to turn red. A shuffling at the office door said Mr Holt had emerged into the shop.

“What a rude man you are,” her friend exclaimed. “It is none of your business how Fiona learned of her gift. She merely asked your advice on herbs.”

“Herbs.” Ollivan cast an eye over the shelves of bundled dry herbs and sticks of incense. “The only herb we stock with any magical properties to speak of is rosemary, and that won’t help except to counteract a nightmare tonic or encourage snow to stick, and either way you could buy it at a grocer’s for half the price.”

“Sage!” Mr Holt put a hand on Ollivan’s shoulder and pressed him to the side. The women continued to stare at Ollivan in open bewilderment as Mr Holt reached up and collected a bundle of sage from one of the shelves. “For clarity, ma’am. It ought to clear the obstacles of your gift and bring you stronger visions.” He handed the sage to the woman in green, who eyed what Ollivan knew to be nothing but overpriced seasoning suspiciously until Mr Holt added, “Consider it a gift.”

The women left.

“Ollivan.” Mr Holt sighed. “I’m letting you go.”

“I’m fired?” said Ollivan mildly.

Mr Holt ran a hand down his face. He was not skilled in confrontation. That much Ollivan had deduced from the fact he had kept a job there for the past year. “You are simply not suited to this type of salesmanship. Perhaps you are a sceptic about these matters” – Ollivan objected to that characterisation; it suggested faith and mystery and other things that had no place in the practice of magic – “but you’ve cost me too much business by not being able to put your own feelings aside.”

Ollivan couldn’t argue with that. The lady in green had only been the most recent of many. Last week Ollivan had almost brought a patron to tears in an argument over astrology. And before that, the man who had tried to lecture him about how a glamour was performed. Something about faeries and mind control, Ollivan couldn’t remember. He had glamoured the man’s shoes to appear tied together and watched him hobble needlessly down the street when he couldn’t unknot them.

Ollivan beamed his widest smile at Mr Holt and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry it had to end like this, Mr Holt. All the best in your future endeavours.”

Mr Holt blinked stupidly as Ollivan fetched his coat and hat from the hook by the door; he had forgotten his umbrella that morning, but it was alright. He was tearing his notes out of the sales ledger and tucking them away when his former boss came to his senses.

“Wait,” said Mr Holt, shuffling towards the back room. “Your pay.”

“No need,” Ollivan cut in. “I’m an undisciplined liability who has defaced nearly every page of your ledger and cost you good business at every chance I’ve had since you hired me. Keep your money. Buy some more herbs. You could make a nice stuffing.”

Mr Holt glanced warily at the sales ledger, then the shelves of bundled herbs, as Ollivan tipped his hat to the old man and stepped out of Pendergast’s Occult Emporium for the last time.

*   *   *

“You must write and tell me everything about Sorcerer magic,” says Fyfe. His voice is muffled by the shoulder of your coat. His skinny, too-long arms squeeze you tightly. You’ve promised him he’ll grow into them. You realise for the first time that you won’t be here to see it.

When Fyfe lets go, Aelius shakes your hand and beams his winning smile. “Knock them dead, my dear.”

“I will,” you promise.

And then you’ve said goodbye to everyone, and you’re certain, just for a moment, that this is a terrible mistake. Your friends assemble behind you, their warm, melancholy presence a magnet drawing you back.

But you don’t go back. You go forward.

2

THREE DAYS EARLIER

Cassia was furious with herself.

She had been standing before the gap in the hedge – the one that led to the rose garden – for nearly three minutes, waving her hands in front of it as she willed it to do her bidding.

But it wouldn’t.

Jasper had chosen this exercise for her because the intention behind the glamour was clear and visual: make the gap invisible. Make the hedge appear as one unbroken wall of new green, flush with spring. She didn’t need to work that hard to visualise it.

But her intention wasn’t the problem.

“What are you asking the glamour to do?” said Jasper from behind her. His voice was soft. Cassia had heard him draw breath to speak several times before braving the question. “You’re right to say the intention under your breath, it’s good control, but tell me in the exact wording.”

She let her arms fall to her sides in defeat. “Close the gap.”

“Good.” His tone was too positive; so infused with praise that Cassia’s frustration with herself must have been blindingly obvious. “Your intention is perfect. It couldn’t be simpler.”

Cassia flinched at his choice of words. Her shoulders grew heavier. It really could not be simpler.

Jasper was only trying to help, as always. In fact, he was one of the better tutors Cassia had had. He had never shown surprise at how rudimentary her skills were, having known she spent most of her childhood outside the Sorcerer quarter of London and without the influence of her own people. And he was patient, unlike her last tutor; an older man who, when all else failed, had threatened to encourage her progression with a strap.

But at the same time, studying with Jasper was torture. He was eighteen, only a year older than her, and yet his confidence in his magic emanated from him the way spellwork did from his fingers. He was, in Cassia’s grandfather’s words, a jewel in the crown of the Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers.

A society that had refused Cassia entry a year ago, and in three days’ time, would have an opportunity to turn her down again.

Not for the first time, she wished she wasn’t a Sorcerer at all. Changeling magic – the power to shift form – surely wasn’t this hard. Oracle magic was impossible to fail at, technically; they Saw the past, present, and future almost uncontrollably. Their first lessons in using their magic were in blocking it out. Wraiths had to learn how to pass through solid objects, but their heightened physical abilities came naturally to them, as did a Whisperer’s ability to read minds. And the Psi’s power was psychokinesis; the ability to move and control objects without touching them. Cassia wasn’t sure how one learned that, and it was probably very difficult at a high level, but it was still a single skill; the equivalent to a Sorcerer mastering just one spell.

She could have belonged to any of six incarnations of magic, and she belonged to the one who channelled and tamed raw power; who shaped something stronger and more wilful than themselves; gave form to something formless. Sorcerer magic was the most complex of the six, that was well known. And Cassia was starting to fear she just wasn’t talented enough to wield it.

Compulsively, she looked up at the townhouse looming above them, afraid that her progress – or lack thereof – was being seen from within. But she would never know if her mother watched her lessons and judged her progress, as every pane of glass in every window was enchanted to reflect a pink and perfect sunset, regardless of the weather or the time of day. It was one of the subtler magical adornments on their street. The house on their left vanished at certain angles. The one on the right had the crown of a colossal oak tree in place of a roof. On the mornings when Cassia awoke from dreams of giant wolves and transforming wings – the trappings of an altogether different magical childhood – all she had to do was look out of her window to be reminded that she was in the Sorcerer quarter of London now.

As if she could ever forget.

“The problem isn’t the intention,” she said, glowering at the gap in the hedge.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“If I intended to give this up and find a cup of tea, do you think I’d have more luck?”

Jasper grinned. “Not on my watch. Describe how it feels. Does your magic answer when you call it?”

“Yes.” Just to make sure, Cassia called it again. It took no more than a thought, and she felt it bloom in the centre of her abdomen, strong and eager.

Jasper hesitated. “And you’re directing it to your throat?”

“Yes,” snapped Cassia. She caught herself, meeting Jasper’s sharp blue eyes in apology. “I know how to perform a glamour.”

Magic was channelled in one of several ways; through the body, through an object or substance, or in words. Because a glamour only acted on a thing, rather than imbuing it with magic, the intention was grounded with the latter, and to do so, the Sorcerer directed their power to their throat.

Five-year-olds knew these principles of how to perform magic; it was the first thing a Sorcerer learned, prioritised over even their letters and arithmetic. Cassia had learned it herself, and had been chagrined by every tutor in the last two years who had asked her to recite her magical theory aloud.

Jasper, thankfully, did not, but Cassia could tell what he was thinking. Her intellectual grasp of Sorcerer magic was solid, her intention flawless. So what was wrong?

She hadn’t always been this hopeless. Before returning to the Heart – the name given to the Sorcerer quarter of London – she had cast spells more or less at will. Nothing complex, as she was untrained; her parents had arranged for a visiting tutor for years, but Cassia had been reluctant to practise and made very little progress. But since applying herself, it was as if the more her theory advanced, the less her magic showed itself. Occasionally, she could still pull off an enchantment without a hitch, but she was unable to predict or replicate it when it mattered. She had no idea what she was doing wrong.

“Would you mind just… turning around?” she said. “I can feel you watching me.”

Jasper smiled and cocked his head. “Of course I’m watching you. I’m your tutor.”

“I know, but it’s distracting. Please.”

Jasper quirked an eyebrow, but turned around.

“No peeking.”

“Cross my heart.”

Cassia watched him a moment to see if he would sneak a glance, then turned her attention back to the hedge. She raised her arms, aiming her open palms at the entrance to the rose garden. It wasn’t how the magic would act upon the hedge, but using one’s hands still helped guide the spell in the right direction.

She drew a deep breath and banished her previous frustrations, then she called her magic to rise. It did so obediently, pooling just below her ribs to be directed where she willed it. So far, so good. With the intention at the forefront of her mind – close the gap – she encouraged the warm, effervescent power to rise through her chest and into her throat.

Don’t let me down this time.

Cassia felt some resistance as her lips formed the spell, but she pushed through it, focusing on growing the sensation as she started murmuring the words.

“Close the gap,” said her mouth. Do it, do it, do it, implored her mind.

The magic left her lips as she repeated the mantra, a thinner, slower trickle than she had hoped for. No. She pushed uselessly with her hands, and then remembered that would do nothing. The intention slipped down under her anxiety; the clear image in her mind of an unbroken, lustrous hedge flickered, and a humiliating alternative forced its way in.

I can’t fail at this again, she pleaded, but her magic took no notice. Leaving a taste in her mouth that was vaguely vindictive, her magic began to work the glamour. The gap shimmered. Dead, black vines studded with thorns stretched across it and immediately started to crumble. As Cassia lowered her hands, she was hit by an irrational certainty that Jasper would tell his fellow Society members about this. About how weak she was.

“You can turn around now,” said Cassia weakly.

Jasper turned. She expected to see that unfailing patience, the hint of sympathy that made her cringe, but before he could stop himself, he laughed.

At that, Cassia chased the last of the magic inside her away with an angry internal hiss. She almost threatened it against ever coming back. Her hands balled into fists.

“Well, you’ve cast a glamour,” said Jasper, ceasing his laughter at the look on Cassia’s face. “It’s progress.”

“Progress.” She shot him a look. “You must be so proud.”

“It’s not that bad,” assured Jasper. He tried to lay the tip of an index finger against a thorn and watched it pass straight through, clearly without the impression of having injured himself. A good glamour acted upon all the senses. Cassia’s monstrosity was just an ugly mirage. “Well, the visual rendering is really quite convincing, if you ignore the… flaking.”

“Jasper, they could be the deadliest-looking thorns the gardener’s ever seen, and she still would never believe this was anything other than a glamour,” said Cassia, gesturing at the lush green hedge on either side. “Please let’s try something else. Won’t you teach me to ward the rose garden instead?”

“Wards?” Jasper scratched at his russet hair. “That’s, ah…”

Too advanced for you That was what he didn’t want to say. And he was probably right; wards protected against intrusion, interference, or magic, or alerted the spellcaster to any of the above. If they were not sturdy, they were useless. “Never mind, then,” Cassia said tonelessly.

“But why don’t you try unravelling a glamour instead?” he said hastily. “I think you can do it.”

She couldn’t. Jasper explained the correct intention for removing glamours, and even demonstrated it for her on a lilac he glamoured a vivid orange, but Cassia’s magic still refused to cooperate. Before she could inflict any will whatsoever on the mess of black thorns, they disintegrated entirely.

“Let’s call it your practice assignment, then. For tomorrow.” Jasper gave her a reassuring smile, the single dimple on one side wrinkling his pale cheek. “How is the spell for your initiation coming along?”

Anxiety tightened Cassia’s chest. Her second attempt to be initiated into the Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers was in three days’ time. She and the other hopefuls would demonstrate an enchantment of their choosing in front of the entire assembled Society who, if they were adequately impressed, would accept their new member with a vote of ‘ayes’. Those whose enchantments underwhelmed earned a cheer of ‘nays’, were awarded a children’s book of basic spells as a consolation prize and invited to try again in a year.

It was all supposed to be good fun, a sort of ice-breaker for new members. Only, if you were the only member of your family to have failed their first initiation, there was nothing fun about it.

High Sorcerer Fisk – the ruler of the Heart – would be there, of course, because Cassia’s luck dictated so and because this season’s initiation ceremony happened to be taking place on the same night the Society would vote in its new President.

She had been working herself to death not to embarrass herself. She had designed a beautiful spell; straightforward in intention but complex enough magically, just as Jasper said all the best spells were. It would be a crowd-pleaser, a signature people would remember when they saw her in the common room of the Wending Place, the Society clubhouse.

If it worked.

When Cassia thought forward to the night of the initiation test, she saw it going one of two ways. In the first, the spell plays off as she intends. She breathes a sigh of relief, gently, so they won’t guess she ever had a doubt, and smiles at her new brothers and sisters as the President calls for their votes and a chorus of ‘ayes!’ ring out across the ceremony hall.

In the second, the spell fails. The moment she knows all is lost stretches on as if she’ll be stuck in it forever. The hall is quiet for that endless moment; the one in which Cassia knows she’s failed and everyone else is about to know it too. It’s so quiet she can hear someone shuffle impatiently at the back of the crowd, near the fireplace. And then understanding seeps through the watching crowd like laughing gas. From the corner of her eye, she sees the Society Secretary, Jan Lenniker, whisper behind his hand to Iwan Goff, who covers his own mouth in an attempt to hide his smirk, but fails. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears. Heat rises in her cheeks. Everything they think of her is suddenly obviously true.

The details were sharper in the second scenario, the feelings more compelling when her mind wandered onto the night of the test. She had lived it before, after all.

“Fine,” lied Cassia in answer to Jasper’s question. “The spell’s coming along just fine. In fact, I think I’m almost ready.”

Jasper looked unconvinced and Cassia couldn’t blame him. “You’ll be brilliant, Cassia. I have every faith in you. You’re from a strong magical pedigree.”

A strong magical pedigree who had sent her away when she was five. She hadn’t been brought up among her own people, let alone enjoyed the influence of her family’s magic. And if the tutors they sent to train her were enough to make up for it, there was no way to know. Cassia’s magic made her different, so she had shunned it.

Jasper must have seen from the look on her face that it was the wrong thing to say.

“Listen,” he said hastily, “I don’t think here is the best place for you to practise. There’s a room at the Wending Place that’s become a junk room of sorts. Full of props left over from games, equipment for the summer festival, things like that. I cleared a proper space in there a few years ago and I use it as a sort of practice room when I’m trying something new. No one’s ever disturbed me there. It’s a complete secret.”

Cassia shook her head. Only the Society members – known to each other and wider society as the Successors – were allowed inside, unless by express permission of the President. “But I’m not a Successor.”

“Yet.”

“I’m not allowed in the Wending Place.”

“I can sneak you in,” he said, his lopsided grin widening. There was glint of mischief in that smile that Cassia had never seen before. Jasper was always perfectly sensible in their lessons, but perhaps that was only because he was working. “I think it would do you some good to have some real privacy when you practise, not just an overbearing tutor trying to stare at a fountain instead of at you.”

Cassia smiled. “You’re not overbearing, Jasper.” She said nothing of the comment about staring at her. She was worried he meant it exactly as it sounded.

She was fond of Jasper. She enjoyed spending time with him in their lessons, but she had always suspected he had other ideas when he had answered her mother’s advertisement for a tutor. Was it real affection that had made him want to see more of her? Or was it all an attempt – a second attempt – to ingratiate himself with their faction’s most powerful family?

She wanted Jasper as a friend. Too many of her peers were gracious to her face, then shot her sidelong glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. But Jasper existed on the fringes of them all. He moved through social circles as much as was expected of him, but never within them. He was studious, and somewhat solitary; well-spoken-of when he was spoken of at all. In short, she would never suspect him of gossip, and that was priceless to her. Cassia was the subject of such volumes of gossip that she feared she would get used to it.

Was she imagining that the way he was looking at her now threatened to ruin their friendship? If she gave him too much opportunity or confidence to do something neither of them could take back, could they still be friends? He had called the junk room a secret; his secret that he was sharing with her. It felt too… intimate.

And yet, the allure of a place to practise without fearing that her mother watched was too good to pass up.

She returned his smile. “It sounds perfect.”

3

If Ollivan hurried on his way to the boarding house, it was not because of the rain; he was in too good a mood to feel it. The only thing quickening his step was anticipation.

He paused only once, before the free library on Brompton Road. He was banned from entering, as he was banned from a great many places. But that was about to change.

“Nice coat, mister.”

Ollivan looked round. The street urchin on the step behind him was eleven or twelve, and covered in grime. He was tensed from head to toe from the chill.

“Have it,” said Ollivan, slipping the coat from his arms and handing it to the boy. He could feel the rain now, but it only made him want to chuckle.

The boy didn’t dare hesitate. He reached for the coat with both hands and darted away lest Ollivan change his mind.

He took the rest of the walk at a brisk stride, but he was still soaked through by the time he reached the boarding house. Mrs Flint, the owner, offered to dry his clothes in front of the kitchen range, but Ollivan cheerfully declined; he was changing into his best suit anyway. He forced his key into the rusty lock and kicked the base of his door as he pushed it open, as was his method to make the aged, warped thing budge. The room looked out on nothing but a brick wall across a narrow alley. It had never caught a glimpse of the sun, and was all the colder for it. The hairs on Ollivan’s arms stood on end as he swapped the buckets under the leak in the roof, and emptied the rainwater into the alley. He had promised himself not to fix the leak, or the lock, or the door. Settling in would be defeat, and Ollivan had not been defeated. He saluted to the door, the bucket, the miserable brick wall outside the window, and thought of how the months of discomfort had all been worth it.

Then he took his good suit from the wardrobe and beat the dust from the lapels, all the while whistling the tune still stuck in his head; a folk song he’d learned as a child about a woman who became a whale and ate all the people who’d wronged her.

When he was dressed, Ollivan stood before the dusty mirror and admired the effect. He was thinner than he’d been a year ago. Shop work earned him enough to keep a roof mostly over his head and feed him thrice a day, but it wasn’t the fare he had grown up with. He wondered what his family were dining on tonight. He wondered if it was duck.

Then he tidied every trace of himself out of the tiny room, left his final week’s rent on the bed, tucked his umbrella under his arm and the pages from Mr Holt’s sale ledger into his notebook, and left the boarding house, all the while whistling off-key.

4

TWO DAYS EARLIER

Cassia stood at the corner of Drusella Square, looking up at the forest of blackened turrets growing from the gothic mansion the Successors called their clubhouse. The building below was shrouded in enchanted ivy. Each dark leaf was a butterfly, their wings closing and opening in lazy synchrony, so that they shivered across the brickwork like ripples on a pond. It made the whole house appear alive.

And perhaps it was. The enchantment on the Wending Place was one of the oldest and least understood pieces of magic in London. It was said that the spell had outlived not only those who had cast it, but their entire ancestral lines, and in reward, had been granted dominion over itself.

If Cassia knew anything about magic, such a thing wasn’t possible, but generations of Successors had been swayed by the legend. The house played practical jokes. It was known as the Wending Place partly because the corridors had a habit of taking you to unexpected locations. It echoed with inexplicable noises, lost rooms, found them again on a different floor. It rearranged paintings, changed locks, cast shadows of doorways that weren’t there. In the entrance foyer was a famed record of every Successor who had gone missing and never been seen again, including one name crossed through; Juniper Henry had eventually stepped out of the water closet eighty-five years after going in, still nineteen years old and with no recollection of where she had been for decades.

But it was also called the Wending Place in reference to the journey of those who occupied it. The Society of Young Gifted Sorcerers was the avenue one walked between adolescence and adulthood, along which its members acquired the wisdom and self-confidence to go forth and conquer. In real terms, it was where the next generation of wealthy, elite Sorcerers made connections and built a reputation. Anybody who was anybody had been a member before they turned twenty-two and aged out of the Society and on to bigger things: politics, business, the old, esteemed institutes of learning on the continent. The nickname of the members, the Successors, was supposed to invoke coming into adulthood and taking the mantel from the previous generation. It was a little too on the nose for Cassia. She had grown up among the ruling family of Camden, who inherited their power and status in a way that was even harder to ignore than it was among the Sorcerer elite.

Cassia had a place in this world carved by her birth, and yet she was struggling to fit in to it. Staring down the Wending Place from the other side of Drusella Square was the Chambers of Alchemy, the offices from which High Sorcerer Jupitus Fisk reigned over the Heart. The Chambers was a veritable palace, built to Fisk’s liking when he first came to power fifty years previously. Unlike most of the buildings in the Heart, there was no obvious aesthetic enchantment on the façade, and yet the black marble had an uncanny depth; like looking down into a well and seeing nothing, but sensing a chasm that could swallow you whole.

They said looking the High Sorcerer in the eye carried the same feeling. Cassia could confirm this was true.

The square itself was crowned with an opulent fountain, the white paving stones cleaned almost to a shine, the streetlamps finished with gilded embellishments. The High Sorcerer liked his people to be reminded of how wealthy he had made them each time they returned to the Sorcerer quarter.

For on the western edge of Drusella Square, Westminster Bridge stretched across the Thames, the divider between factions. On one side, Cassia’s home quarter of the Heart, territory of the Sorcerers. On the other, Camden Town, the Changeling quarter. Militia of both factions – Heart enforcers and Camden wolves – attended the bridge, each with a guard point on their own bank.

From where Cassia waited, fifty paces away, the Sorcerer guard point did not look like much. One needed to be moving across the square to notice how the ward refracted the light, so that the bridge beyond appeared to hover, disconnected from the bank. Sorcerers could pass straight through it without feeling a thing, but Londoners of other magics would find themselves trapped in the ward like flies in a spider’s web, unless the enforcers at the border commanded the spell to let them pass. On the far bank, the Changelings accomplished their security with sand bags, a wooden barrier, and their own magic; half a dozen militia wore the forms of wolves with maws the size of Cassia’s head.

So it was all over the city. Six peoples occupied London – Sorcerers, Changelings, Wraiths, Whisperers, Oracles, and Psi – not as one community, but as isolated factions divided along brutal, ever-shifting borders. Everything west of Hyde Park and most of what lay south of the Thames was the Sorcerer territory. It met the Docklands, the Oracle territory, east of Tower Bridge. Just across the river from where Cassia stood, Camden Town came to a point, but widened as it stretched towards its northern border before Hampstead Heath. To Camden’s east lay Whitechapel, the Whisperer quarter, and above them both, the Wraiths occupied the territory of the North. Invisible on a street map of the city was the territory of the Psi; dozens of staircases across every quarter led below the cobbles and foundations, past the sewers and long-buried ruins, to the cavern known as the Underground.

It had been more or less the way in London since the Sorcerer empire of Callica had founded the city two thousand years ago. Then, they had tried to maintain power with a hierarchy of magical castes, sowing tribalism and mistrust among the four other factions as a means of control.

It had lasted until the celestial event known as the Shift; the advent of the Changelings. The sudden existence of a sixth people in London had thrown the city into chaos and led to widespread slaughter, and the fall of the Callicans. But the entrenched divides between the factions could not heal, only deepen. For centuries, the city navigated the ebb and flow of perilous peace and outright war.

A third age in the battle for London had begun around the time Cassia was born, when the faction leaders had agreed a set of rules known as the Principles. It was these accords that mandated the passing from territory to territory by way of the guard points, and threatened punishment to those who used their magic beyond their own people’s quarter. It was the faction rulers who enforced the Principles, and they who paid the cost if one of their own was caught breaking them.

Cassia had not crossed a guard point into Camden in nearly two years, not since the day she was collected from the home of the Changeling’s ruling family and brought to the Heart to receive a proper Sorcerer’s education, somewhere where she wouldn’t mark herself as different for doing so; where she could embrace her magic as she had always feared to while trying to be a Changeling.

She squinted at the opposite bank to see if she knew any of the wolves at the guard point. Were any of them among those who used to watch her with suspicion, or turned a blind eye if a Changeling cursed her on the streets of Camden? Were any of them the friends she never wrote to? Cassia had thought she had more chance of belonging in the Heart, among her own people, so she had put all the good of her life in Camden behind her with the bad. But it hadn’t worked out that neatly. At seventeen, she was a Sorcerer of seven years, but a Changeling of ten… and a true member of neither.

But she was not ready to give up. She would master her magic, she would join the Successors, and she would shed the mantle of ‘outsider’. She would become the person everyone expected High Sorcerer Jupitus Fisk’s granddaughter to be.

With her gaze turned to the Camden militia, Cassia was late to notice that someone had crossed the bridge and was on a collision course with her. With his nose in a newspaper, it seemed he hadn’t noticed her either. They were close enough to touch – Cassia stepping one way and then the other in an effort to anticipate his movements – before Virgil Pike looked up and jerked to a stop.

The blood drained from his face as he folded the paper. Virgil was two heads taller than her, with dark eyes, sharp cheekbones, and deep brown skin. His long fingers fumbled as he tucked the paper under his arm, beneath his jacket, where it sat nestled against a book.

“Good morning, Virgil.” She suppressed the urge to ask about his trip to the neighbouring quarter, because then he might ask why she was hovering outside the Wending Place. Waiting for Jasper Hawkes to sneak me in wouldn’t go over well with another Successor. It might even get her banned from joining.

“Cassia,” said Virgil in greeting. He didn’t meet her eye, his gaze roaming around them instead. Cassia recognised that look; she had seen it the first time she’d tried to talk to a Sorcerer her age, and many times since. It was her mother who had tactlessly informed her that many in the Heart thought her some kind of spy from Camden, or else just too inclined to sympathise with Changeling causes and Changeling concerns. The Heart enjoyed a good relationship with Camden, but it was not that good, and two thousand years of history had taught the people of London how volatile these alliances could be.

It was to be expected, yet every time it happened, Cassia’s heart sank. She and Virgil did not know each other well, and though he always came across as reserved – sullen even – she had heard people say that’s how he was with everyone. He had a handful of boisterous older sisters, which gossips liked to point to as the cause.

Then he fumbled the book tucked into his jacket, revealing a peek at the title, and the knot in Cassia’s chest released. Laughter burst from her.

“Goforth’s History of the Heart,” she said, and the whites of Virgil’s eyes expanded. Cassia waved a hand. “Oh, no. Please don’t fear, Virgil. I’m not going to tell my grandfather.”

Goforth was one of the histories that delved unreservedly into how Jupitus Fisk came to power; it had involved the disappearance of the previous High Sorcerer, and the unsolved murder of two of his advisors. The work was not explicitly banned in the Heart, but it wasn’t sold, and Cassia suspected those known to have read it crossed the militia on their way to work more often than usual. Jupitus preferred the histories that focused on his masterful trade deals and spun the signing of the Principles as his own great plan for peace.

So it was understandable that Virgil still assessed her warily. “One must consult a range of sources to get a balanced view of things,” he said, his tone probing.

“I agree,” she said, offering a smile. “And I’ve read it too.”

Virgil drew up in surprise. “You have?”

“It’s not quite so scandalous where I grew up.” Cassia regretted reminding him of it the second it left her mouth – as if the people of the Heart ever forgot – but if Virgil was put off, it didn’t show. He drew closer, and looked about them again.

“Have you also read Martinez?” he said quietly. “Because I think some of her insights regarding Fisk’s coup are uniquely—”

He looked up, gaze catching on something over Cassia’s head that made him frown. A beat later, she heard footsteps.

Jasper had rounded the corner and was slowing as he got closer. He stopped beside her, and Cassia thought she saw the muscles in his jaw tense and release. “Pike,” he said with forced cheer. “Good morning.”

Virgil returned no greeting, but the look he gave Jasper surpassed his usual sullenness. It promised venom. Jasper had the High Sorcerer’s favour, and it was wise not to continue their conversation in front of him, but this was more. He dragged his gaze back to Cassia, and drew breath to speak before settling on a nod and striding away, his arm curled protectively over the cargo under his jacket.

Jasper watched him go.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say he doesn’t like you,” said Cassia, and Jasper grinned.

“I think you might be right.”

“What was that all about?”

But Jasper was already shaking his head and taking her hand. “Come on. We can sneak in through the servants’ entrance.”

He took her around the side of the building, where a short set of steps led down to a nondescript door. Cassia paused.

“Is this a good idea?” Jasper frowned in question. “If I’m caught sneaking in, won’t it affect my chances to join?”

“You’re not going to get caught. Trust me.” He squeezed her hand, and Cassia wanted to. He was doing a kind thing for her. “All the members inside are far too occupied to notice us. You’ll see.”

The door led to the kitchens, which smelled tantalisingly like pastries; the breakfasts members were served at the Wending Place were whispered about among hopefuls as often as the prestige of being initiated. A young kitchen maid watched them cross to the interior door, but she only blushed and smiled when Jasper winked and tugged Cassia onwards.

Then they were in a main corridor, and Cassia tried to contain her awe. It wasn’t that the Wending Place was beautiful, though it was: the walls were panelled in dark wood carved with curling leaves and blooming flowers. The floorboards were ancient and worn, but polished to a liquid finish. But it was the atmosphere of ancient, living wonder. Her nose tickled with hallowed magic. A Sorcerer could sense any significant spell, but this was like swimming through champagne; the same feeling that rose in her when she called her magic, but flitting through the corridors and clinging to the walls. Even in the silence, it seemed to Cassia that she could hear the old place breathing.

And then a shriek went up, and a round of cheering. Cassia looked at Jasper, wide-eyed. He nodded towards the staircase and rolled his eyes.

“Come on.”

In a common room on the first floor, two dozen or so rowdy Successors crowded around, watching something on the floor. Cassia and Jasper stood half-hidden behind a heavy velvet curtain in the archway leading from the hall.

“What are they doing?” Cassia whispered.

“Wasting their youth?” said Jasper. “Dulling the misery of their empty lives?”

She couldn’t read his tone, but the smile he shot her rang false. Was this what Jasper thought of his peers?

Cassia craned around the curtain and started to piece together the game. The players had enchanted paper frogs to leap in some kind of race, while others magicked obstacles into their way. There were heats, and – most importantly, it seemed – a drinking component; the loser in every race was handed a glass of brown liquid to down in one.

Something squirmed in Cassia’s belly, but she wasn’t sure if it was anticipation or anxiety. She didn’t much like to drink, and she always felt a little lost in crowds, though she attributed that to not having found her crowd in the Heart yet. Once she made friends, drinking games and boisterous behaviour might not intimidate her so much. Besides, she was sure plenty more went on at the Wending Place than this. She understood they had a library, and visiting lecturers who gave talks on magic and history, and the virtues of future careers and pursuits.

She was aware of Jasper watching her watch the Successors, so she gave her best impression of mild intrigue, then told him to lead on.

He took her to a narrow corridor on the mansion’s top floor, with a single window at one end looking out onto a rain-damp roof. A door in the curved wall clearly led up a spiral stair to one of the turrets, and this is where Cassia assumed they were heading, so hidden was the second doorway. It blended in with the panelling; even if one spotted it, it looked like a cupboard of some sort, nothing but a void under the stairs. Yet Jasper produced a small iron key and fitted it into the lock.

“Do they know you have that?” Cassia asked, nodding to the key.

Jasper grinned. “Of course not. I used to sneak it in and out of the key safe, then I realised no one ever questioned why it was missing. Now, it’s mine.”

Cassia wondered again how well she knew Jasper, the studious, well-mannered tutor her grandfather liked so well.

As he jostled the key in the ancient lock, Cassia turned the other way to keep a lookout, and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She hadn’t immediately objected to the idea of sneaking into the Wending Place. Jasper had been so energised by the idea that she mainly didn’t want to let him down. But for the first time, she was afraid. She put it down to breaking the rules, until the door creaked behind her and the feeling intensified. She turned around as Jasper opened it, her apprehension telling her not to put her back to the growing chasm of darkness that appeared as the door opened wider.

“Is this a trick?” she blurted.

Jasper froze with his hand on the latch. “A trick?” he said, failing to mask a confusion that bordered on hurt.

“There’s a glamour or spell or something,” Cassia persisted, though she regretted opening her mouth at all. She gestured at the room with her chin. “Can’t you feel it?”

Jasper looked into the darkness and back at her, his earlier expression melting into delight. “Oh, it’s not a glamour.” Though his face was full of light, darkness limned his voice. “There’s a lot of magic in here. Look.”

But this magic felt strange. Fetid, souring, like wine turned to vinegar, food turned to poison. Perhaps she was on edge, the intense atmosphere of the Wending Place and the junk room, and her anxiety about sneaking in combining to play tricks on her. Jasper was holding the door patiently for her, so Cassia pushed the feeling down and stepped inside.

The room was a lot bigger than she’d expected. It might have been that her sense of the building was muddled, but she had a feeling it was a trick of the Wending Place; that the room existed in the enchanted space within the walls and between the floorboards. A large window in the slanting roof revealed grey slate tiles and a grey sky beyond, but darkness still clung to the corners. Jasper found a lamp, and turned the mechanism to activate the lump of clara stone within – a quartz-like mineral that could be enchanted to glow.

On one side of the room, rows of shelving stretched away into shadow, but on the other, a space had been cleared, an array of random objects pushed up against the wall or into piles. A spinning wheel. A miniature shadow puppet theatre. A collection of rocks and uncut gems in a wooden display case. An entire barrel of marbles.

“Sorry about the mess,” said Jasper, brushing his handkerchief along the windowsill and coughing when he stirred up a cloud.

“What is all this stuff?”

“Things I’ve found.” Jasper shrugged. “Things I’ve made.”

“Things you’ve…” Then Cassia understood what he meant when he said there was a lot of magic in this place. “These things are enchanted?”

His wicked grin was back. “Of course. What did you think I use the space for? It’s a laboratory. These are my experiments.”

Cassia wandered among the stacks of artefacts and bric-a-brac. There was a table crammed with glassware – beakers and boilers, some of them burned from use – shelves of bottles on the walls.

In one corner was a tailor’s dummy. It wore the uniform of the stewards, the Whisperers’ militia force. Except that the stewards’ uniforms were midnight blue. This uniform was only that shade when she looked at it straight on. In the corner of her eye, it flashed teal and purple. At certain angles it became a shadow that reached for her until her eyes flickered back to it. Turning her back on it and walking away felt like running to the safety of her bed in the middle of the night when she was six years old.

Sorcerers considered their magic to be a sacred gift from the stars, and so nothing was forbidden. Experimental magic was an essential cornerstone of Sorcerer academia. New spells were invented and recorded continuously, in the same way that technical, medical, and engineering advancements progressed too. But magic was not technology, nor medicine, nor engineering; it was infinitely more dangerous and volatile than any, and experimentation in the realms of spellwork, potion making, the enchantment of objects – there were unspoken lines dictating what was considered fair play, and what was spoken of in wary tones. Judging by the contents of the junk room – and the fact he kept it all a secret – what Jasper was doing was, by silent agreement, usually the purview of the most learned scholars at the most prestigious institutions. Cassia wasn’t even sure he was allowed to be testing his spells in secret.

He must have read some of these thoughts on her face. “This stuff isn’t regulated,” he said, a little defensively.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? Who’s going to correct you if you misstep?”

“I don’t need correcting,” he said, smiling.

“People die meddling in magic, Jasper—”

“Are you worried about me?”

Cassia understood his smile then. She understood the way he was moving closer. Perhaps this had been a bad idea after all.

“You’re right. It’s none of my business.”

The attempt to brush his comment off didn’t work. Jasper took her hand. Her instinct was to pull it free; her loneliness told her she didn’t want to. But Jasper only pushed the key into her palm and retreated.

“Stay as long as you want,” he said. “But, ah, try not to touch anything.”

And then Cassia was alone. She locked the door and stood in the centre of the room, listening. But the silence was absolute; the Wending Place had swallowed up the shrieks and cheers of the Successors downstairs like it had Juniper Henry. She couldn’t even hear the pigeons on the roof, though their wings cast the occasional shadow, and she wondered if there was an enchantment on the room to make it so. Either way, she could mess up a dozen spells and no one would come to investigate; her mother couldn’t knock on the door or look down on the rose garden from the window. Jasper was right; it was exactly what she needed.

There was nowhere clean to place her bag, so Cassia spread her handkerchief on the floor and set it down on top, then retrieved the jar from inside and put it in the space at the centre of the room. It was filled halfway with soil, and she had punched holes in the lid. Wedged into the soil was a small cutting from the rose garden. It was her prop for the spell she had been developing for her initiation; the one she was yet to successfully complete.

Cassia took several slow breaths to chase away the sick anxiety that filled her whenever she confronted the spell, or the initiation. It wouldn’t help her to grow frustrated before she even began. She took the lid off the jar and moved away.

A crowd-pleaser. Simple but visually impressive. That had been everyone’s advice, asked for or not, when it came to the initiation. There was a formula for success, that was the implication; to succeed, one simply needed to know it. And who knew it better than a dynasty heir like Cassia Sims?

She took out the slip of paper on which she’d written down the intention – bloom and grow – and some notes to help her visualise it. More complex spells could be written out on hazel wood paper, which had binding properties. The Sorcerer would enchant the paper to burn as they cast their spell, splitting the focus of their magic in a way that required a great amount of power, but purifying their intention into a single command.

Cassia had never performed such a spell; few Sorcerers her age were advanced enough in their talents. Cassia was merely using the notes as an aid, for the intention behind her spell was not as straightforward as some might assume. Grow was not all that descriptive, and that part had been the downfall of her first dozen attempts. She had once succeeded in swelling the cutting to the size of a small tree stump, shattering the jar before the thing withered without sprouting a single leaf.

So to help her clarify the command, Cassia had read half a dozen biology tomes, until she was confident she knew, scientifically, what she was asking for when she commanded the cutting to grow.

Then there was the trick of getting the resulting plant to bloom. Intense visualisation of the rosebush bursting into flower had caused more than one explosion. So Cassia had researched the way a rose plant moves through its annual cycle, to better understand how she was manipulating it. After eight weeks of practice and study, Cassia could name and identify eighteen species of rose, plus explain the mechanism of photosynthesis and the mathematics behind the arrangement of petals in a rose head, but still she had not enchanted a single starsforsaken cutting to grow into a rosebush and burst into flower.

And now she had two days left.

Jasper said she was overthinking it, that clear and visual intention was more powerful than knowing the specifics of what you were trying to achieve. But clear and visual intention was failing her, and she would try anything.

She fixed her eyes on the jar in the middle of the floor and summoned her magic, which rose within her as always. It’s there, she told herself. It’s strong enough. You’re strong enough.

Bloom and grow, she commanded the cutting. She didn’t need to say the words aloud, even under her breath. She was channelling her magic through her fingers and into the frail little twig in its jar of soil, where it would, hopefully, bind and stay.

The magic rose like smoke curling from a candle as Cassia directed it to her fingers. She knew the spell so well that the intention felt easy and clean. Bloom, grow, become a rosebush and flower. Muscle memory curled her hands into fists, turned them towards the sky, and unfurled her fingers like petals unfurling from a bud. Her hands couldn’t command the jar and its contents, only her magic could do that, but it helped her visualise what she wanted to achieve and that was vitally important.

A rosebush. A beautiful, blooming rosebush covered in vibrant red flowers.

The magic streamed from her fingers and enveloped the jar, the little cutting shivered, and Cassia’s breath hitched. Was this it? She banished her excitement and firmed up her intention. Bloom and grow. Bloom and grow.

A leaf. Then another. The cutting stretched for the opening of the jar, for freedom. White roots appeared in the soil, pressing up against the glass.

“Yes,” Cassia heard herself say. Her hands shook. But she had got this far before. She needed to maintain it.

It was as the first bud formed that Cassia realised she wasn’t alone.

“Are you doing magic?”

She screamed. Her magic spiked. The jar shattered, spilling dirt and rosebush everywhere. Her intention skittered away like a dream upon waking.

“Who’s there?”

She had locked the door. Was this magic? Trick walls and false silence? Her frightened gaze went to the unnerving stewards’ uniform in the corner. It hadn’t moved.

“I am,” replied a voice, childlike and lilting.

A shiver ran up Cassia’s spine. The voice was coming from the shadows between the shelves.

“Show yourself,” said Cassia. She backed towards her bag in the corner. The door key was inside.

The little voice laughed. “I can’t,” it said. “I’m a doll.”

“A doll.” Just a doll. It was an enchanted children’s toy. Cassia approached the voice, her mind soothed – embarrassed, even – but her heart still catching up. It beat so hard she was shaking.

“Where are you?” she said, looking up and down the domino rows of shelves.

“Here.”

The reply was inconclusive. Cassia picked an aisle and, turning sideways to fit, slipped between the shelves.

“I’m here,” the doll said again.

There. She turned towards the voice and jumped. A face was looking down at her from behind a jar of viscous red liquid, stretched and warped by the shape of the glass into something monstrous. But a protruding foot – small and booted, on a stubby, jointless leg – gave the doll away. Cassia pushed the jar aside and lifted the doll down.