Witherward E-Book

Hannah Mathewson

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 696

Beschreibung

Welcome to the Witherward, and to a London that is not quite like our own. Here, it's summertime in February, the Underground is a cavern of wonders and magic fills the streets. But this London is a city divided, split between six rival magical factions, each with their own extraordinary talents – and the alpha of the Changelings, Gedeon Ravenswood, has gone rogue, threatening the fragile accords that have held London together for decades.Ilsa is a shapeshifting Changeling who has spent the first seventeen years of her life marooned in the wrong London, where real magic is reviled as the devil's work. Abandoned at birth, she has scratched out a living first as a pickpocket and then as a stage magician's assistant, dazzling audiences by secretly using her Changeling talents to perform impossible illusions. When she's dragged through a portal into the Witherward, Ilsa finally feels like she belongs.But her new home is on the brink of civil war, and Ilsa is pulled into the fray. Beset by enemies on all sides, surrounded by supposed Changeling allies wearing faces that may not be their own, Ilsa must use all the tricks up her sleeve simply to stay alive.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

I The Cuckoo

1

2

3

4

II The Grey Wolf

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

III The Great White Shark

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

IV The Green Sea Turtle

35

36

37

V The Honey Bee

38

39

40

41

42

Acknowledgements

About 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 OF JUST 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 OF THE 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 OF ALL THE STARS AND TEETH

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.co.uk,

Goodreads,

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

Witherward

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094435

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094442

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: February 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, 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 2021. All Rights Reserved.

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.

For my parents, for welcoming me home

THE WHISPERERS

Whitechapel

LEADER: LORD JERICHO VOSS

MILITIA: THE STEWARDS

THE SORCERERS

The Heart

LEADER: HIGH SORCERER LUCIUS

MILITIA: THE ENFORCERS

THE ORACLES

The Docklands

LEADER: THE SEER

MILITIA: THE ACOLYTES

THE ORDER OF SHADOWS

GUILDMASTER: EWAN GRIMM

THE WRAITHS

The North

LEADER: LADY JOSAVIE WRIKE

MILITIA: THE BLADES

THE CHANGELINGS

Camden Town

LEADER: ALPHA HESTER (WARDEN)

MILITIA: THE WOLVES

THE PSI

The Underground

LEADER: THE TRINITY

MILITIA: THE CLOAKS

I

THE CUCKOO

Cuculus canorus

A woodland bird found in Europe, Asia and Africa, the cuckoo is a symbol in many cultures of desire and longing. The female lays eggs that match those of another species in colour and pattern, and deposits them into the host’s nest.

1

Ilsa did not need to pick pockets any more, but some people deserved it.

And the heckler at her shoulder had it coming. It wasn’t just that the boy looked hungry, and his upturned cap was nearly empty of change. Or that he was only trying to entertain, even if his card tricks were well worn. It wasn’t even that, as a fellow performer, Ilsa felt his blushes every time the man booed.

It was that he was distracting her.

She had squeezed to the front of the small street crowd so she could be sure of anything untoward in the boy’s technique. Rarely, once in a hundred days perhaps, she would spot something that shouldn’t be. A man moving too quickly through a crowd. A girl who noticed Ilsa and Martha whispering about her from fifty paces away. A teacup hitting the café floor with a smash, then being whole a moment later.

It was hardly worth her vigilance, but if there were other people in London with peculiar talents, then they were to be found among magicians, and so Ilsa would scrutinise every single one.

This little magician was no older than ten or eleven, and his pack of cards was too large in his hands. His levitating card was clumsy, and its method on show, if you knew where to look. He made cutting the aces harder than it needed to be, but when it worked, the crowd didn’t seem to mind.

But whether his next sleight of hand was standard, Ilsa couldn’t be sure. The man to her right raised his hands to cup his mouth, and hissed loudly, obstructing her view and snagging her attention. For that, he was losing his wallet.

Martha sighed loudly; she was losing patience. But when Ilsa winked and indicated the man’s fat pocket, a finger’s breadth from her hand, the other girl’s eyes twinkled.

For Martha, unlike Ilsa, was not a reformed thief – she was a practising one. She smiled sweetly at the couple behind Ilsa as she repositioned herself to obscure their view, and when she nudged Ilsa’s elbow to indicate the all-clear, Ilsa dropped her hand deftly into the heckler’s pocket.

Her fingers closed around a wallet, and without hesitation, she lifted it smoothly and softly, and deposited it into her own bag. A serendipitous spatter of applause from the crowd was distraction enough for the girls to slip casually to the side. They were nearly away when Ilsa’s attention was drawn back to the boy, and the cause of the clapping.

He was performing a simple snap change. The three of spades was gripped between his thumb and forefinger. He snapped his fingers and it became the jack of diamonds. Ilsa could do the trick perfectly herself: the performer would hold one card hidden behind the other, and swap them when he or she snapped their fingers. But as Ilsa continued to watch, the jack of diamonds became the ace of clubs, then the seven of diamonds, then the king of hearts, and so on. As Martha tugged impatiently on her coat sleeve, Ilsa watched the boy produce eight, twelve, fifteen different cards, snapping his fingers again and again until nearly a whole deck had flashed by.

It wasn’t possible. To hold even three or four cards as if they were one was a delicate enough act, but to manipulate that many with two fingers and thumb? With a crowd surrounding him on three sides? It was no card trick she had ever seen before.

Her breath hitched. Perhaps the boy wasn’t ordinary. Perhaps he was like her.

The owner of the wallet now in Ilsa’s purse was shifting as if he’d noticed something awry. Any moment now, his hands would go to his pockets.

“Ilsa,” Martha hissed urgently, but Ilsa couldn’t move. The boy finished his act by tossing the entire deck into the air and letting his cards rain down on the audience. She tried to keep her eyes fixed on a single card as it descended, but amidst the motion of the crowd as they patted themselves down and searched around their feet, she lost it – and all fifty-one others.

The realisation among the punters was slow, and met with nervous laughter. The cards had vanished. The crowd had seen them – heard them – fall all around, and now they weren’t there. It was too unreal to be a trick, and not fantastic enough to be real magic.

Or so the crowd thought. Ilsa, on the other hand, had seen real magic. She had performed it herself. As the onlookers dispersed – Martha slipping away with them as their victim looked frantically about – Ilsa cornered the boy magician. He was scooping up his cap, in a hurry to leave, but she stalled him by fumbling in her bag and gathering some stolen change.

“That weren’t just a card trick, was it?” she said. The boy blinked in surprise but didn’t answer. His hands shook as he collapsed his tiny folding table. “I know it weren’t. I know what you did.” It wasn’t true. She was mystified. But she could see her chance disappearing, and she was desperate.

“Please—” she began, but he was already running. If he vanished, she might never know, so she gripped her skirt in one hand and took off after him.

The afternoon matinees were letting out, and the West End streets were teeming with people. Ilsa couldn’t move quickly, but neither could the boy. He took the first turn he came to, and as Ilsa rounded the corner after him, she saw him dash into a narrow alley.

She had been him once. She had hidden from both coppers and other thieves – not to mention pimps and drunkards – in the secret corners of these streets, and she knew that unless he planned to climb the wall and sneak into the Beringer Hotel, the alley was a dead end.

With soft breaths and softer footsteps, she approached the corner. But he must have heard her anyway, because he bolted from the alley and nearly escaped again. Ilsa snatched at his jacket collar, nearly missing, and yanked him backwards hard enough that he lost his footing. His folding table clattered on the cobblestones.

“—the bloody ’ell off me!” he yelled as he struggled.

“Who are you? Where’re you from?” She stood him upright and shook him as though the answers might fall out. “I got some money. Please.”

“Ilsa?”

Ilsa jumped and spun around, but she kept her hold on the kid. Martha stood in the entrance to the alley, gripping the wall for support, her cheeks flushed from the effort of the chase. Her brow was knitted in confusion as she looked from Ilsa to the boy she was accosting and back again. “What’re you—”

Martha’s eyes grew wide and she cut off just as Ilsa felt the boy slip from her grasp. She made to grab him – only he’d vanished as completely as his pack of cards. Her fingers clutched at nothing. The alley was deserted save for the two of them.

Ilsa didn’t have time to process this; she knew what was coming next. She lunged for her friend and clapped a hand to the other girl’s mouth before Martha could let out a cry. “Don’t go bringing no coppers down on us, Martha. Not when I got some fella’s wallet in my bag.”

Martha made a smothered shriek of protest and pointed to where the kid had vanished.

“It’s a trick,” Ilsa lied. “Not even a clever one. I do it myself, every night of the show.”

Martha wrenched her hand away. “That weren’t no trick,” she said, eyes sparkling with unguarded awe, and a hint of fear. “Madam Rosalie told me about beings like that. It was a spirit messenger! From the beyond!”

Ilsa cringed. She knew better than to discount such possibilities, but if Madam Rosalie was correct then it was entirely by accident, as the woman was a charlatan. Ilsa had told Martha so, and Martha had rolled her eyes and called her a sceptic. She couldn’t guess how closely Ilsa had studied the medium. How she’d watched the woman’s ‘niece’ – Ilsa had no doubt the girl was in the medium’s pay – shift slyly in front of the trick wall of their parlour to let a draft gutter the candle flames at the precise moment. How she could tell from the set of Rosalie’s fingers that she was guiding the planchette across the Ouija board as her guests gasped.

Martha’s revered medium was one of the hundreds of dead ends Ilsa had reached in her search for answers. And while she hadn’t ruled out the existence of spirit messengers or those who could build a bridge to the beyond, Ilsa knew that she wasn’t communing with the dead. And that meant there was more magic in the world than the likes of Madam Rosalie liked to pretend.

Martha didn’t miss the look on her face. “You still don’t believe!” She pointed to the spot where the boy had vanished. “Well, what do you think just happened?” Then her gaze turned suspicious. “And why’d you take off after him, anyhow?”

Ilsa took Martha’s arm and tugged her away from the alley, but she was just trying to buy herself time to put together a lie.

Martha was a confidante and a true friend; the first girl she had come to ally with when she moved in across the way from her in a bottom-of-the-barrel boarding house. Two years older than Ilsa, Martha had taken it upon herself to watch out for the new arrival, and had inserted herself into Ilsa’s life the day she arrived.

“Where’re your family?” she’d asked, poking through the sad contents of the carpet bag containing everything Ilsa owned.

“Don’t have none.”

“I’m an orphan too,” said Martha with a grin so cheery that Ilsa could see right through it. She knew they were alike even before the other girl had plonked herself down on the narrow bed and shared her story. They had both lived on the streets; Martha after her mother had died, and Ilsa when she had run away from the orphanage where she had grown up. They had both picked pockets to scrape by, and been good enough at it to avoid the pimps. Those were the hardships she knew Martha could relate to, but the strangest of Ilsa’s secrets? Those, she couldn’t bring herself to share.

Because Ilsa had her own ideas about what they had just witnessed. Ideas she loathed but couldn’t shake. They had been planted in her mind by the woman who had raised her, the matron of the orphanage Ilsa had fled from at the age of nine.

Devil’s get, she’d called Ilsa.

Any desire to tell Martha the truth fled at the sight of Ilsa’s memories. To the matron, mysticism and mediums were nearly the pinnacle of evil, second only to Ilsa – a child of the devil’s earthly realm, told this back when she was too small to question what even the cruellest of adults said. She thought it was from the Bible, like everything else the matron subscribed to, but when she’d worked up the courage to talk to a priest, he’d known of no concept like the devil’s earthly realm.

Ilsa knew she wasn’t evil. She didn’t go to church, nor study the Bible, and she cursed, and lied; and yes, perhaps she had stolen from a man that very day just to be petty, but those were the worst of her sins. And yet the suspicion that there was some truth in the awful things the matron had hissed at her – Demon. Devil’s get – clawed at the back of her mind. At the heart of Ilsa’s search for answers, it was the theory she needed to prove or disprove. For if there was no such thing as the devil’s earthly realm, then what was she? And if there was… what was she then?

Martha was still waiting for an answer and Ilsa wanted to give her the truth, but every time she thought of confiding in her friend, the very worst possibilities reared their heads. Martha would tell and the wrong person would find out. Miss Mitcham would hear of it and track Ilsa down. Most of all she could not stand to think that Martha herself would be afraid of her if she learned the true nature of Ilsa’s magic.

“Thought I knew him, was all,” Ilsa lied, her heart heavy.

“Break a leg,” said Martha a short while later when they stopped outside the Isolde Theatre. “The shop”, they called it when they were pretending they had more respectable jobs. Martha’s shop was the busy thoroughfares of Soho, where she stumbled into drunkards, batted her lashes, and helped herself to their belongings. “Oh lord, Ilsa. Let me fix your hair.” She started pushing pins back into place around Ilsa’s ears.

“I’ll redo it inside. Yours is worse,” Ilsa warned her. Their nearly identical golden-blonde hair often had them mistaken for sisters, but Martha’s was finer, and right then it was bursting from its pins in a halo of wispy curls.

Martha snorted a laugh. “Ain’t no one going to notice.”

Ilsa knew Martha would forget about the boy. She would tell her friends she saw a spirit messenger, they would shriek and ask questions, someone would suggest a séance, and then the story would fall into myth like every other, to be recounted piecemeal by a friend’s sister’s husband’s cousin next time something supernatural happened.

But pickpocketing came with real dangers, like the gaol. Ilsa squeezed Martha’s hand and kissed her on the cheek. Every time she saw her off, she wondered if this was the night she wouldn’t return. She had tried to get her work at the Isolde more than once, but the manager, Mr Johnston, must have suspected her for a thief, or perhaps even a prostitute, because he found her “unsuitable”. Instead, she persuaded Martha to take scraps from her plate on the weeks when she couldn’t afford meals at the house. They managed that way. They were both better fed sharing two plates a day than they had been as street urchins.

“Be safe, Martha,” she said. The other girl shot her a weak grin and hurried on down the street. When she had vanished in the crowd, Ilsa swallowed her fears for her, went into the theatre and slipped backstage.

2

Ilsa could put Martha out of her mind, but the boy who had vanished from between her fingers was not easily forgotten.

Her years of chasing clues had helped her recognise when she needed to charm someone. She was usually sweeter; asked better questions. But she had panicked.

She could make herself disappear if she wanted to, but not into thin air like the boy had. Nor could she vanish a pack of cards. Perhaps the boy would have known nothing of who she was or what she could do, but Ilsa ached to be sure. Seventeen years was too long to wonder.

She hurried into the makeshift dressing room in the hope of letting Mr Blume in on her encounter before they went onstage. Blume – or The Great Balthazar as he was known professionally – was Ilsa’s exception; the one person in the world who knew her secret. In the five years they had been working together, he’d never treated her like a monster. Ilsa recalled the matron of the orphanage’s nails drawing blood from her arm as she was dragged to her punishment, and felt a rush of affection for the once-great magician.

He was trying to straighten his ascot when she entered, but he was only making it worse. The half-empty bottle of scotch on the vanity in front of him told her why. Ilsa sighed.

“Here, sir. Let me.” She pulled up a stool in front of him and started fixing his ascot, his waistcoat, his hair. He’d had enough practice at holding his liquor. He never stumbled or swayed, and if she could make him presentable, only the slurring would give him away.

“I saw a boy disappear today,” she said as she smoothed his collar. His pale blue eyes narrowed.

“A magic trick?”

“It weren’t no magic trick I’ve ever seen,” said Ilsa, and she told him about the impossible snap change; about confronting the boy and seeing him vanish. “I was holding him by the shoulders, and then I was holding air. Just like that.” Above them, the variety show they shared the billing with was wrapping up. A comedy duo descended from the stage and Ilsa paused until they passed. “You ever seen anything like that?”

Blume must have seen hope on her face, and Ilsa saw her answer on his. He believed in real magic, for he had seen things too, but he shook his head.

Deflated, she ducked behind the screen and changed into her costume. As a twelve-year-old, she had worn little trousers with a red tailcoat and top hat, like a miniature ringmaster in a circus. But as she’d turned into a woman, Mr Johnston had insisted on tighter, shorter, more provocative attire: a satin bodice, with a bead skirt barely touching her thighs, and a plume of red feathers hiding her bottom. It was thoroughly indecent, and Ilsa was glad. Anything to distract from what she was really doing on stage.

As she fastened her garters and helped herself to a finger of Blume’s scotch, he wondered aloud about the disappearing boy.

“To be that young,” he said. “Do you think he was born with his talents, as you were?”

“Yes. He must’ve been.” She had more questions than she did answers, but of one thing Ilsa was sure: she’d had no say in what she could do. Yes, she had practised her talents to master them, but she would never have suffered the way she did as a child if she’d been given a choice.

“In any case, he must have practised,” said Blume quietly. Below stage was beginning to fill with other performers. They were all preoccupied with shop talk and props, but Blume still lowered his voice and leaned closer – close enough that Ilsa could smell the whisky on his breath. “Perhaps with a teacher of sorts. This card trick you speak of… if you don’t mind me saying, Ilsa dear, you had no such technique at his age.”

She didn’t mind him saying. In fact, she was thinking the same thing. She had been performing magic “tricks” on the street when Blume found her, but without an ounce of the young magician’s finesse. If the boy had been trained, there had to be others. Her heart raced at the thought. “I’m gonna find him after the show. I got to.”

Blume nodded, and mumbled solemnly. Not out of drunkenness, but to spare her feelings. He knew, as did Ilsa, that in a city of millions, the odds of rediscovering one boy – one disappearing boy – were as slim as the likelihood that his debts would ever be paid off. But it was the first hint of real magic Ilsa had seen in months.

*   *   *

As The Great Balthazar took the stage, Ilsa slipped into the back of the auditorium, the noise of applause and the flare of the theatre lights providing cover. Not that anyone ever noticed the magician’s assistant’s entrance. Ilsa’s talent made sure of that.

“Good ladies and gentlemen! Thank you for gracing me with your patronage this evening, my fine, fine guests.” Balthazar let out a long, contented sigh, and that was the moment Ilsa realised he was a sentimental drunk tonight; the worst kind. “Almost sober” was best, of course. “Surly” gave him an enigmatic stage presence if they were lucky. But “sentimental” unsettled the crowds. It didn’t fit with the awe and mysticism they expected of a magic show. His greeting was met with a thick silence.

“I hope you have joined me tonight with an open mind. A courageous mind! For you may find yourself entertained, but you may also feel fear” – Ilsa held her breath as he conjured a flame with the gas lighter hidden in his coat sleeve, and breathed again when the trick played out safely – “trepidation” – that was Lighting’s cue to insert red filters – “and dread.” He slipped the trick knives from the hidden pockets of his tailcoat and threw one, then the other at the wheel he would later strap Ilsa to. “There is danger on this stage, be assured. But, thank God, I have only slaughtered two assistants this year.”

He was improvising, but Ilsa took that as her cue. As the audience laughed half-heartedly, she transformed. A force pressed in on her from every angle and shrank her; the pressure almost too much to bear, but over in an instant. Her skin prickled sharply as feathers erupted from it. Her hands blunted, her elbows pivoted grotesquely, and she spread wings.

The first time she had finally become a bird, Ilsa had been nauseated by the feeling. Eight years later, she had grown to appreciate it. It was the proof of what her body could do, a pittance of a price to pay for a thing so powerful: her freedom. Her power to cheat the laws of the universe at their own game.

As Balthazar raised a large black cloth like a bullfighter, she soared, unseen, to the ceiling of the auditorium, and prepared to make her grand entrance over the heads of the audience.

“Allow me to introduce my current partner in crime while she is still breathing. My dearest Ilsa, where are you?”

She swooped to the stage, straight at Balthazar and his outstretched cloth. Darkness descended when the material fluttered over her tiny dove form. But she was no longer a bird. The audience gasped when the fabric fell on the figure of a woman – gasps that turned to riotous applause when the magician swept the cloth away, and Ilsa raised her arms triumphantly and beamed her biggest smile into the blackness beyond the lights.

As far as they would ever know, it was the second most astonishing magic trick in all of London.

The first was yet to come.

3

Delivery was everything. Even with The Great Balthazar’s impossible illusions and show-stealing assistant, they would never threaten the box-office of London’s best magic shows. They were the one act in town every critic agreed on: awkward and lacklustre, Balthazar’s days were numbered.

And it meant Ilsa’s were too. She was regularly offered better pay by better magicians who hoped to lure both the captivating assistant and Blume’s methods onto another stage. Little did they know, Ilsa was his method. Not only that, but she was all the charisma and allure of his act. She was everything that kept him on the billing. Blume needed her, but the real reason they would go down together was this: Ilsa would go back to picking pockets before she told another living soul what she could do.

She held a smile on her face and feigned gusto, as always, as The Great Balthazar fumbled and slurred his way through the set. He drew belongings from his top hat and returned them to their bemused owners in the audience; things Ilsa had slipped from their pockets in the foyer. He sawed her in half. He made her “vanish”, and she would become a mouse, and scuttle unseen to the other side of the stage to reappear. Ilsa’s skills let them perform the illusions in a way no other act could: over and over in rapid succession. She would bounce around the stage and the auditorium like a rubber ball. It was her favourite part of every evening.

They ran through their mix of standard magician’s tricks and real sorcery to middling applause, but as the audience sensed the big finish looming, the excitement in the auditorium crackled. This was what they came for: the most unforgettable magic trick they would ever see.

As Balthazar began his monologue about mystic teleportation, Ilsa hid herself beneath a hooded cloak and shifted again. Rival magician’s spies had been known to crop up in the corridors as Ilsa was getting into position, and so they enlisted some of Mr Johnston’s men as sentinels. One acted as a bodyguard to the cloaked, anonymous figure who climbed from below stage to the door of the box. He left her at the near end of the corridor, while another stood guard at the opposite end. When Ilsa was alone, she shed the cloak, and underneath she wore The Great Balthazar’s red beard and gangly limbs; his straight, proud nose and his finely wrinkled skin.

She straightened her white gloves and smoothed her emerald waistcoat. It took a great deal of concentration to shift her clothing, but this too, she had perfected – it was better than leaving a duplicate of Blume’s costume lying around the dressing room. Then she took the compact mirror from her breast pocket and checked her accuracy. From a distance, blanched by the spotlight, the minute twitches that cursed all her borrowed faces would be invisible. Nevertheless, she massaged her jaw in a futile attempt to smooth them away. The twitching aside, it was perfect.

All apart from the eyes. Blume’s were blue; Ilsa’s were not.

It had taken a lifetime to perfect, and a great deal of observation, but Ilsa could perform magic on every other part of her body. She could grow her hair until it trailed along the floor. She could fatten herself until she was too heavy to stand. She could – and it was a point of pride – be an anatomically correct man, thanks to threepence, a fellow street urchin named Tom, and a deal that would have cost her one hundred Hail Marys back at the orphanage.

But whether she was The Great Balthazar, Queen Victoria, a dove, a bloodhound, or a ferret, her eyes were always stubbornly, distinctively hazel.

Ilsa tucked the mirror away and was listening for her cue when she felt a prickle on the back of her neck. She spun around, stomach plummeting, expecting to find someone behind her – but the corridor was deserted. She peered this way and that, listening hard, but even as she proved to her eyes and ears that she was alone, another sense told her otherwise.

Ilsa knew when she was being watched. It was something one learned fast when swiping coin purses and pocket watches on crowded streets. Yet even as the hairs on her neck stood higher, the uncanny surety growing, she was unprepared when she finally saw him. He appeared in the corner of her vision as he emerged right from the wall: a man in a long black coat, with a flash of metal at his belt. In the sliver of time it took her to turn her head, he disappeared around the corner with the speed of a bullet leaving a gun.

Another child of the devil’s realm. This time, Ilsa wouldn’t miss her chance.

The audience gasped; Balthazar had fallen through the trapdoor in a cloud of smoke. Ilsa was meant to emerge in the box across the auditorium, but instead, she was chasing the stranger towards the lobby.

She didn’t get far. As the tail of his long coat vanished through the first set of doors, Ilsa caught a glimpse of her sentinel on the other side. He barely seemed to register what was happening. Perhaps he thought the flash of a coat zipping by was a new part of the act, but if Ilsa followed, too much would be revealed.

She couldn’t leave the corridor looking like The Great Balthazar, and she couldn’t leave the corridor looking like anyone else. The only way out was to finish the trick.

It had been less than ten seconds since Balthazar had vanished, but that was long enough for the auditorium to fill with murmured voices. She had already damaged their finale, so she returned to the door of the box, took a steadying breath, and stepped through as if nothing had happened.

*   *   *

As far as Mr Johnston was concerned, Ilsa wasn’t part of the finale. As he lambasted Blume about the blunder, she stood silently to one side and felt the magician’s quiet rage hang thick in the air.

His anger was stoking Ilsa’s own, so much so that any guilt she might have felt for doing wrong went skittering away. He ought to see how it felt to see his livelihood fail through no fault of his own.

“This bloody farce of a magic show is poor enough as it is, Blume,” spat Johnston. He was pacing about the dressing room as Blume sat at the table, his second post-show drink cupped in his fist. “If you had any respect for your standing engagement here—”

“I have every respect, Mr Johnston. These things happen in the theatre.”

“They happen” – Johnston advanced on Blume and flung the tumbler from his hand. Ilsa tensed as it shattered against the wall – “when their performer is too sodding drunk to do any better! This is your very last warning, do you understand?”

Blume’s eyes bore into Ilsa’s skull as Johnston left. The unspoken tension that plagued their relationship was palpable. Both of their careers relied on the other, and it wasn’t a comfortable state of affairs for anybody.

“What happened?” he said in a low voice, producing another tumbler from a chest near the vanity. “Where were you?”

“I’m truly sorry I was late, but we both know you got no right to be angry. This ain’t the first time the show’s got messed up, and I don’t mean by me,” said Ilsa, reining in her frustration as much as she could manage. It was difficult; losing first the boy, then the man in the long coat had shortened her fuse.

“No right?” he hissed. “Answer the question!”

Ilsa opted for a half-truth; he wouldn’t be kind about it if she mentioned the boy again. “Someone got into the corridor. I din’t see who. I was distracted. It won’t happen again.”

“A spy?” Ilsa shrugged dismissively. He didn’t deserve to know. “And why didn’t Bert see anything?”

“Did you ask him? P’raps he did.” Blume narrowed his eyes at her, and she stared him down. “Before you go telling me to get my act together, sir, consider this: if that trick’d come off, it would’ve been the only solid note we hit tonight, and it would’ve been because of me.”

“Because of you,” he slurred. “Aren’t we a team?”

Ilsa gritted her teeth, turning to gather her coat and bag so he wouldn’t see. When she got to the door, she looked over her shoulder at him, then wished she hadn’t. Blume was slumped low in his chair because he couldn’t hold himself up. The expression she had taken for anger was concentration as he tried to keep a grasp on the conversation. Something part-way between pity and disgust dissolved her anger, leaving her tired. “You ain’t a very good teammate, Mr Blume.”

He called after her as she left, each cry more remorseful than the last. Ilsa blocked them out. He deserved to stew a while.

Most nights, when Ilsa left through the stage door, she ducked into the next alley and shifted into a man; the tall, brawny type of man who wouldn’t have trouble walking home alone at night. But not tonight, because Martha was waiting for her outside the stage door, and a deep bruise was forming along her cheekbone. Ilsa’s stomach lurched.

“Martha?” There were finger marks on her neck. Her lower lip was swollen, and had been bleeding. As Ilsa took hold of her, she started to tear up.

“Ilsa, I’m sorry. I didn’t know where to go and my feet just carried me here.” Her voice shook. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Don’t say that. You were right to come find me.”

She herded her in the direction of home, and between her tears Martha told her what had happened.

“I thought it was a clean lift, but I’d only got ten paces when I heard him shout. I din’t even look back. I just ran. He was drunk, and he was with his friends and… I should’ve dropped the wallet, only—” She let out a sob. Ilsa pressed her arm tighter around her and bit her cheek to hold in her anger. “Only I’ve had no luck all night, and I’m out of change, Ilsa.”

Ilsa tried not to picture the scene – an alley, a group of men and Martha on the ground, boots in her ribs – but it was all too familiar. Ilsa had taken her fair share of beatings as a street urchin, and witnessed plenty more. She remembered all the fates she had once pictured for herself – a knife in the gut; a brutish john who liked to make a woman hurt; shackles and the workhouse – and felt a pang of remorse for the way she left things with Blume.

As they reached the river, the buzz of Soho gave way to the lapping of water below the balustrade. The phantoms of ships’ bells sounded faintly from downriver. Half a dozen seagulls cawed over the remnants of a heel of bread, scattering like shadows in a candle flame when they girls cut too close. Martha had cried herself calm, and Ilsa had just resolved to approach Mr Johnston about a job for her again when her companion froze in her tracks.

Ilsa followed her line of sight. The mist off the Thames was mingling with the smog, and through it four figures were lurking by their next turn. There was no doubt they were looking in the girls’ direction.

Others might have brushed off their trepidation in that well-mannered way that got women into trouble, but Ilsa and Martha knew better than to trust in human decency. It was why Ilsa tended to disguise herself as a man when she walked home at night.

Gathering her wits, Ilsa steered them east to follow the river, but when she hazarded a glance over her shoulder, her heart started up a galloping rhythm. The four figures were following them.

“Is it them?”

“Can’t tell,” said Martha, picking up pace. “If we get across the bridge, there’s a pub on the other side. We can hide in there.”

But it was a long way to the bridge, and there was nothing but a deserted fish market along the way. If Ilsa had been alone, she’d have made herself a blackbird and flown to safety, but all they could do was try to lose them. It felt like having her arms tied behind her back, in a knot Ilsa didn’t know how to slip. She kept hoping for the chatter of people trickling home from the theatre district, anyone who could help them, but the only sign they weren’t alone in the city was the sound of footsteps twenty paces behind them in the smog. Ilsa’s own feet threatened to betray her with every step; they were pounding over the slippery cobbles too fast, and not fast enough. Her breath came in jagged gasps, Martha’s an echo beside her, the footsteps behind them gaining with every minute. The bridge was still invisible in the night when the shapes of two men were illuminated under a streetlamp ahead.

They had cornered them.

“Martha…” she whispered. If she were a wolfhound, could she take them all down before they hurt her friend? If she were a hawk, could her talons blind them quick enough? And if they did – could she trust her friend to keep her secret? Without her magic, helplessness seized her.

But Martha had survived as a human girl for nineteen years, and she dragged Ilsa under the cover of the fish market and into a maze of crates and pallets.

“This way,” she murmured.

At top speed, they wove a random path through the market with their pursuers on their heels. A left, a right, another right, until they had obscured themselves deep within the warehouse. When they stopped, and held their breath, there were no footsteps nearby. “Let’s hide in here,” said Martha, and she pushed Ilsa towards a narrow gap between two stacks of crates. “You first.”

Panic seized her in a crushing grip at the sight of the crevice. “No! I can’t—”

But with a firm shove from her friend, Ilsa was between the crates, and her wits failed her. The stacks on either side pressed in and down on her like living things. She pushed further into the gap, hoping to find it open at the other end, but she was met with a brick wall. The air felt thin and hot. Her ribs were tightening around her organs like a cage.

A creak of wood. Martha’s head snapped towards the sound and her eyes widened. Ilsa could see nothing, but there must have been no time left to hide; Martha freed her hand from Ilsa’s and quickly slid an upended pallet across the gap between them so that Ilsa was hidden – and confined. Nausea swept over her. She thought up the most fearsome creature she could imagine, but she couldn’t summon the form, not from this cage; her body couldn’t shift when all it knew was how close the walls were. She was a heartbeat away from bursting from her hiding place in her own fragile skin when, between the slats of the crate, their pursuers came into view.

They were not men.

Their faces were almost unremarkable but for their eyes, which were pure, unbroken white. One had produced a strange sort of lamp, and in its glow their skin had a sheen to it, more like silk than sweat, and looked so bloodless it appeared silver.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” one said to their companion, who seized Martha by the arms, their fingers digging mercilessly into flesh. A third, a woman in men’s breeches, seized Martha’s chin. Before Ilsa could react, an arm restrained her from behind. Her whole body jerked in terror, then a gloved hand covered her mouth and someone pressed her tightly against them. It wasn’t possible. There couldn’t be anyone else in that tiny crevice. Her fear was playing tricks on her.

“Bastards!” screamed Martha, kicking against the one who held her. “Get your hands off me!”

“Yes, it looks like her,” said the female. “Do it.”

Helpless, hidden, immobile, Ilsa could do nothing as the third being unsheathed a blade, and dragged it across Martha’s throat.

4

Ilsa tried to scream, but no sound escaped.

The woman was sprayed with blood as Martha died, and Ilsa stood paralysed as her friend twitched and collapsed onto the floor. She barely understood her captor as he brought his mouth very close to her ear and murmured in a low voice: “Disguise yourself.”

She tried to twist out of his grasp but he gripped her too tightly. He wasn’t a trick of her mind; some attack of nerves. Her mind fought even if her body couldn’t. Did he mean what she thought he did?

“Fast. You can only fool them for a second.”

She didn’t have a choice. She willed herself into the disguise of Jeanie from her boarding house, who had deep brown hair and heavy freckles. Meanwhile, the four beings stood around Martha’s body had become very still.

Her captor whispered to her again. “I’m going to let you go now. Stay silent if you want to live.”

Slowly, he lowered his hand from Ilsa’s mouth, and with a whisper of metal, drew a weapon. She barely kept from crying out as she pressed herself into the crates, as far from him as she could manage, but it seemed Ilsa wasn’t his target. He slipped past her more easily than he should have been able in the tiny space.

“Something’s wrong,” said two of the others simultaneously, and their stillness gave way to a flurry of agitated movement.

“We’ve been tricked.”

“Where’s the other girl?”

Four pairs of eyes suddenly swung to the gap where Ilsa and the stranger were concealed, but there was no time for them to attack. The stranger tossed aside the pallet that separated them, and slipped among the attackers so fast Ilsa did not see it. All she knew was that one minute they were hidden between the crates, the next, he had driven a long blade up through the woman’s abdomen, and the pallet was clattering to the floor.

More blood mixed with Martha’s. Before the woman even hit the ground, the stranger knocked down the second with a sweeping kick and kept him there with a knee on his chest as he buried a throwing knife in the skull of a third. No one had so much as drawn their weapons before the last one standing was gutted, and dropped to his knees. The stranger raised himself to his full height and sank his blade into the chest of the one on the ground, who flailed like a pinned bug before going still.

It was over in seconds. Ilsa squeezed through the gap and stumbled out of its reach, too stunned to run. She thought she had witnessed horrible things, but stood over five bodies – one of which was her closest friend’s – she learned how innocent she’d truly been. Two hazel eyes, so like her own, stared up from the bloody ground. Ilsa’s knees buckled and she sank against a crate.

“Put your disguise back on,” said the stranger. He lifted one of the bodies like it weighed no more than a bag of flour, and threw it on top of another. He was piling them up; Martha lay untouched. “There’ll be more if we’re not fast.”

Ilsa hadn’t realised she’d slipped back into her body. It took so little effort these days to maintain another form, but shock could still jolt her concentration. She became Jeanie again.

“Wait here,” he said. “Don’t make a sound.”

Before she could protest, he disappeared. Not like the little boy had, and not like she could, but in a way she recognised nonetheless. He was fast; too fast to see.

He was back before it hit her – his pace marred a little by a wheelbarrow full of bricks. It was the way his long black coat fluttered behind him as he came to a standstill that jogged her memory.

“You were in the theatre.”

He glanced up from under his hood, and the light of the strange little lamp caught his features. He looked human; taller than most, and powerfully built, but human. He was young, his eyes were an unremarkable grey, his skin lightly tanned, and the hair that hung around his face was the same deep brown as Jeanie’s. He was handsome, even – a model of normality. If she hadn’t seen the things he could do, she would never know to fear him.

“I’ve been looking for you for three days,” he said, and he lifted the four bodies one by one and placed them on the wheelbarrow. The one he had sliced across the stomach was spilling his organs as he was moved, and Ilsa retched once, twice, and emptied the contents of her stomach onto the blood-soaked ground.

When she lifted her head, trembling uncontrollably, the stranger was regarding her warily. “Gather yourself, please. If we’re not fast, we will only be caught by the others.”

That shook her enough that she clambered to her feet and backed further away from the pool of blood seeping towards her. “Who are you?” she said, shooting a glance over her shoulder to find her best escape route.

“My name is Fowler, my lady. I’ve been engaged to find you.” He had finished balancing his load on the barrow, cleared his throat and faced her purposefully. “I’m about to sink these bodies in the Thames. I’d like to do the same with your friend, but if you would rather I didn’t, we can leave her here.”

“Leave her?” A chill spread through her. Nothing made sense. “No.”

“The water, then?” he said sceptically.

“No! We got to… I don’t know, fetch someone.” Ilsa didn’t recognise her own voice, choked and thin as it was.

Fowler placed his hands on his hips and looked about in exasperation. “I see.” He took a step towards her and Ilsa took two back, stumbling slightly in her hast to keep some distance and raising a hand like she could ward him off with it. But Fowler only crouched over Martha, and gently lowered her eyelids. When he looked up, his expression was gentle but serious.

“You need to come with me,” he said.

Ilsa’s incredulity manifested in a laugh. She shook her head fiercely. “ I ain’t going nowhere with you.”

Fowler sighed, and as he got to his feet he produced a length of cord. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

Ilsa realised what he meant to do the moment before it happened. In the space of a heartbeat, he stepped over Martha’s prone body and pinioned Ilsa’s wrists. She tried to yank them back but he didn’t give an inch to her straining, and bound her with quick, deft movements.

“No,” she said, her voice hoarse, even as she noticed he was tying a hobble knot. “Don’t you dare—”

“I promise I’m not going to hurt you. But I fear you might try to take flight. Quite literally.” There was a flash of humour in his eyes as he tied the other end of the cord to his belt, stashed the strange lamp in his coat pocket and took the wheelbarrow. Then he was walking swiftly back towards the river with his captive stumbling after him, and Ilsa saw her moment.

She had joined the theatre business with a dire, crippling fear of having her wrists bound. Like being confined, it was something a younger, weaker Ilsa had been too familiar with. But there was no room for such squeamishness in her line of work, and besides, no magician’s assistant Ilsa knew had anything to fear from a hobble knot. Within three seconds, Ilsa had slipped her bonds and was running, not daring to look back.

She didn’t get far. The stranger – Fowler – was before her again as though he had been blown into her path by a gale.

“Well, that was unexpected,” he said. He might have found her at the theatre, but he clearly hadn’t watched the show.

Ilsa turned on her heel, but she hadn’t got five yards before he was on her again, an iron arm around her waist, her arms pinned to her sides. She opened her mouth to scream, but terror had robbed her voice of any strength: the noise she made was pitiful.

“Listen,” he said in a reasonable tone; still, Ilsa struggled. “They told me you might not understand, so I am prepared to explain as best I can, but now is not the time. All you need to know is this: your friend is dead because they mistook her for you.” As he spoke, he bound her a second time, but he’d learned from his mistake, and Ilsa’s vision swam as she watched him tie a knot no magician would bother learning. “Their comrades already know a mistake has been made, and I can guarantee they’re headed here right now. I’ve found you on behalf of people who care whether you live or die, and lucky for you, tonight is a rescue, not an assassination.”

Martha was dead because of her? “I don’t believe you.”

“No. I don’t suppose you do.”

He gave a sharp tug on the rope, perhaps to demonstrate the knot’s robustness, or maybe to remind her he had the other end, and then resumed his business.

They stopped at the river, by a gap between two moored fishing boats. Her captor guided her to sit against a nearby mooring post, and Ilsa didn’t resist. She knew other tricks, after all, and while he was busy weighting the bodies with bricks, she went to shrink her hands. They refused to move.

Something else then. She thought up the form of a cat, but her body remained stubbornly Jeanie’s. She couldn’t even become herself.

Ilsa’s panic rose, but it was the echo of an old panic; an old situation, in which her magic didn’t come when she called it. She was back in the attic at the orphanage. The walls were closing in and her shackled hands were shaking; she could feel the promise of full control dancing at the edge of her consciousness, but couldn’t grasp it. When her magic took her, a separation happened, the shifting feeling would hit her like an explosion and then she was something else. But it never saved her; she couldn’t maintain it. Once, when she was seven, she had become a bird and made it onto the roof, then shifted back into her human body by mistake. It was snowing. She was naked.

But the day she escaped – that day she had cracked the code. For shifting wasn’t something that happened in the mind; thinking would not complete the process. She wasn’t supposed to think about the feeling; her body already knew what to do. A power inside her – a power she recognised from every accidental shift; that she could always hear but had never truly listened to – told her something she had known deep down all along; that her body was her own creation, not the tool but the material, and she could be whatever she wanted to be. The feeling overtook her, and for the first time she was an animal – a blackbird – by choice. To stay an animal, she just needed to remember what she already knew.

There by the docks, Ilsa didn’t know it any more. Her focus was correct – she could feel the sensation rising in her body – but the power inside her wasn’t answering. Her magic was gone. A panicked noise escaped her, and Fowler looked over.

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking in her horror and the twisting, writhing efforts of her hands. “You won’t be able to shift with those bonds on you.”

Ilsa kept pulling on the cords that held her wrists. They were just leather; securely wound but fairly soft and pliable, and ordinary-looking. But the loss of her magic was in these bonds and not in her. Regardless of the source of her helplessness, whatever this man did next, she wouldn’t be able to stop it.

Having weighted the bodies, he kicked them into the water as Ilsa tried to make sense of what he’d said. Somebody had sent him. The attackers had targeted her, or so it seemed. Martha was dead.

Martha was dead.

A sob escaped her. “They thought Martha was me?”

“So it seems. Your friend could easily be a Ravenswood.”

A Ravenswood? “I… I don’t understand.”

“You often walk this way together?” he asked. Ilsa shook her head. “But you do, without her?”

“Yes.” This was her usual route home, but if Martha hadn’t come to the theatre that night, Ilsa wouldn’t have seen her until morning.

“Then that’s how the mistake was made. Oracles aren’t easily fooled, but with a little spontaneity one can stay a step ahead of them.” He dropped the next corpse, and Ilsa was spattered with Thames water.

“Oracles.”

“Our friends here.” He gestured to the last dead being before toeing him over the edge, followed by the barrow. “Let’s go.”

He drew Ilsa to her feet and took her by the elbow.

“No,” she growled, looking over her shoulder at the dark fish market where Martha still lay. Fowler didn’t answer her protest; he just lifted her over his shoulder and ran.

She was lucky not to vomit again. Between his inhuman speed and the abrupt halting every time he needed to look or listen, her innards couldn’t keep up with him. By the time he dropped her unceremoniously on some wet slabs, she was bewildered, terrified and giddy beyond belief. The man wasn’t even short of breath.

“You ain’t of this world,” she said. The truth of it chimed through her, rousing equal parts horror and excitement.

“No,” he said. “But then, my lady, neither are you.”

His words were a brief flash of ringing clarity; a moment of calm in perfect chaos, like the eye of a storm. The feeling dissipated when Fowler hushed her and drew his blade again. Fearing there were more Oracles – as he’d called them – nearby, Ilsa struggled onto her knees and forced her vision to right itself.

They had come at least a mile from the fish market. There was no one else in sight, but directly above them loomed the twin turrets of Westminster Abbey, and across the wide intersection were more buildings, some with lamps burning within. Ilsa didn’t know what those buildings were, but surely if she could scream, someone would hear her.

“What would you achieve?” said Fowler, as if he had read her mind; perhaps that was another of his talents. Before she was fully on her feet, he had scooped her up again, and then they were in a tiny quadrangle. Shadowy cloisters surrounded them on all sides, and the abbey above blocked what little starlight penetrated the smog and the cloud cover beyond. With his long knife in one hand, Fowler withdrew the lamp he had claimed.

It was a luminescent stone, a little like a quartz crystal she had once seen in an occult shop. There was no flame, and no gas or oil to be seen. It surely hadn’t been glowing in his pocket, but in his hand, it shone from within with a bright white light – enough to reveal a fountain in the centre of the quadrangle.

“Tell me where you’re taking me,” she demanded.

“Home.” He raised the stone higher and shone it about the cloisters to be sure they were alone, then he approached the fountain and sank a gloved hand into the shallow water. “Your people tell me you have alpha blood, and you’re in danger here. A lot of it, I would wager, if the rumours are true.”

Not a word of his explanation made sense, but the word home played on a yearning deep inside her.

“And the way to this place is in this courtyard?”

He was circling the fountain, and when his hand met with something concealed beneath the surface, he glanced up at her and almost smiled. There was a trembling, groaning sound of metal and stone shifting as he turned some sort of wheel beneath the surface, and Ilsa stepped back, out of the way of the passage opening in the ground beneath her. The head of the fountain itself was revolving as the slabs around it fell away like dominoes to become a spiral staircase leading down into the earth. When Fowler had completed a full revolution of the fountain, he was stood on the topmost step.

So, it was true. The devil’s earthly realm was real, and here underneath Westminster Abbey was its gate. Ilsa heard a sound from the gaping, black entry – the hiss of a draft, or was it the whispering of a demon or ghoul? She didn’t want to find out. “I won’t go down there.”

Her captor’s jaw set, and he let out a slow breath. It was the only sign that she was trying his patience. When he spoke, his voice was patient and calm. “The portal only appears to lead down.”

Still, Ilsa shook her head. With three slow strides, he came to stand in front of her, and took her bound wrists in his hands.

“I will be met with questions if I turn up in your quarter with a Changeling as a prisoner, so I need to untie you. When I do, I would appreciate it if you would not make me manhandle you down that staircase.”

“Them things what killed Martha, and this evil magic you’ve tied me with, and you