“Edwin here hates anything that doesn’t make logical sense.”
“I own a magical house, Violet,” snapped Edwin. “I know their magic works by different rules. Sometimes no rules at all. By emotions.”
“Emotions! The enemy,” stage-whispered Violet.
Edwin had his hands splayed over the diagrams. His nail beds were pale, as if even this non-argument was the equivalent of someone throwing furniture around and raging. But he looked at Alan and said, in a level, tutorly voice, “The magic of those old estates and lands—it’s like a different language. But the Taverners made this house, only half a century ago, and they put all the magic in themselves. Most of what we’ve unearthed so far does have a logic to it. Not that it helps, necessarily.”
Violet said, “It’s like being invited to play cards at a table where everyone else knows the rules and you have to work them out as you go. But you … if magic really has less effect on you…”
“You want me to be a cheat’s mirror,” said Alan. “Let you see some of the cards, so you aren’t fleeced while you’re learning the rules.”
“Exactly,” said Violet.
It made sense. Alan had been trying to let all this detail glide over him, alert only for anything that he needed to tuck away for later, but he was interested despite himself. And wary all over again. He wondered what a magical house thought of a perturbator who was about to be used to pry into its secrets.
“And the stakes aren’t low,” said Violet, as if following his worries. She nodded to a wall of the parlour that backed onto the garden. “We tried to fold that wall out into a balcony, because there’s a painting in the master bedroom which shows it. Edwin did an opening-spell and it slid half the floorboards apart instead. He nearly broke his neck when it dumped him in the cellar.”
“I’m almost certain the cello and the double bass are key,” said Edwin. “I don’t suppose you play anything that comes with a bow?”
“Sorry,” said Alan. “Didn’t have time for music lessons, what with all the fencing and elocution and watercolour painting.”
Edwin blinked.
Violet grinned. “Maud and I are both respectable on the piano, but there’s not a fiddler amongst us. I know musicians and Edwin knows magicians, but we don’t want to drag anyone into this business who isn’t involved already.”
And here Alan was. Involved. He pulled the rosary from his pocket and told them what his ma had said about the family devils and the use of the rosary to banish them. Edwin’s eyes went wide, then narrowed in furious thought, and he pulled out a pen that began taking notes on its own while he fired questions at Alan about his childhood, any magic he might have accidentally used, and how it felt to handle the rosary. The answer to most of which was “I don’t remember.”
Edwin paused awkwardly, halfway to taking the rosary from Alan’s hands, as if hearing a voice reminding him to be polite. “May I?”
“What?” Alan was staring at the moving pen. Perhaps he could ask for one of those as part of his fee. But it was only taking dictation; the act of forming words with his hand was part of how Alan slowed his thoughts enough to arrange them into meaningful sentences. A neat thing, though. “Oh. Here.”
Edwin put the rosary on the desk, then gave Alan a hopeful look that was almost a smile.
“Now, this,” he said, “is a beautiful bit of magic.”
He pulled from his pocket a loop of twine and a solid beeswax disc the size of an egg, with the honeycomb pattern intact, set in a circular frame of pale wood.
“Violet, do you know where I put Mrs. Sutton’s wood monograph?”
“I never know where you put anything,” said Violet, but she began to sort through a stack of books.
Edwin cradled the string about his fingers until all his fingertips glowed dark blue. Ink-stained like Alan’s own. He touched first the wax and then his hovering pen, and the blue magic disappeared at once. Dropping the string, he touched the cross of the rosary to the centre of the wax for a few seconds. Then he carefully isolated two of the smaller beads and touched those to the wax in turn.
Alan waited for something dramatic to happen to his family heirloom. Nothing did.
Edwin gave an impatient twitch and picked up the paper on which the pen had, Alan realised, been writing. The words BEECH and ROWAN were there in a thick hand with Germanic flourishes to the letters.
“It … knows the wood?” Alan said. “How?”
It seemed a pointless question the moment it left his mouth—how did any of this work? Surely the answer was just going to be magic. But Edwin gave an approving nod that reminded Alan of Mr. Voight at the charity school, who would load Alan up with books every week and only wince a little when they came back smudged with ashes or with the pages torn.
“It’s a Holzprobierer. A wood-taster. It’s German-made, so Taverner must have found someone to layer a specific translation-spell over it.” Edwin set it on the desk and the pen wrote WALNUT.
“Here’s your monograph,” said Violet, handing over a small booklet not much larger than Alan’s Roman pamphlets.
“Rowan. Rowan. I don’t think we’ve seen it anywhere in Spinet.” Edwin flipped to the back of the book, and then began to leaf through more slowly.
“Flora Sutton exchanged a lot of letters with the Taverners,” said Violet to Alan. “She specialised in living plants; they specialised in what you could do with the wood. They learned a lot from each other. And Mrs. Sutton organised it and wrote it down.”
“Here,” said Edwin. “Only one entry for rowan wood. A warding against magic. See: all the old tales. Hm. Usually she gives more detail than that.”
“So it’s turned Alan here into a sort of walking ward?” said Violet.
“Beech is a common magical concentrator. This frame is beech.” He touched the wood-taster, then ran the rosary through his fingers. “More magic and less magic. It seems rather pointless to use the two of them together. I’ll have to do some reading.”
A sudden hot sting of sensation struck Alan’s upper arm. He flinched and slapped at it as if a wasp might have snuck into the room.
“Ow,” said Violet mildly. She sucked the tip of her thumb. “It’s not just a ward, if it can turn magic back around on the caster like that.”
“And you keep telling me not to treat people as experimental apparatus,” said Edwin. But he was so obviously itching to give it a go himself that Alan, with a show of long suffering, stretched his arms out palm-forward. Edwin said, “Tell me exactly what it feels like,” and picked up his string. This one was a pale green spell that sent a sensation of icy water flooding over Alan’s body, which came out in immediate goose bumps. He shook himself, feeling unpleasantly like a dog emerging from a winter pond.
“Bloody cold. Is what that feels like.”
“That didn’t rebound on me.” Edwin frowned. “What did you do differently?”
“I’m not doing anything,” said Alan through his teeth. “How is this helping to find hiding places in the house?”
Edwin sighed and looked at Violet. “Let’s try him on something where we know the effect already.”