To Alan’s relief, this involved neither cold nor stinging. They took him to a corridor on the third floor of the house, via a staircase with further elaborate carving adorning its railing. The corridor held three pairs of closed doors along the lengths of its walls and ended in a window.
Violet nodded down the corridor. “What do you see through the window?”
“Sky,” said Alan blankly. “Clouds—wait. Is it…” Something about that window made him queasy, as if it were suspended on a string and swinging slowly towards him and away. The longer he looked at it, the more the corridor seemed indecisive about its own length.
He squinted one eye shut, then the other. He took a few steps down the corridor. The cloud-fractured sky began to take on brownish hues, and the window frame itself blurred.
Three more steps and the window was a ghostly mirage. Beyond it Alan could clearly see several more feet of floorboards, ending in a panelled wall with a framed portrait and a low wooden plinth, atop which stood a curious carved contraption like a globe made of rings. Tucked at the corridor’s end was a side opening to a poky narrow staircase, leading down.
“The picture frame is maple wood, projecting an illusion,” said Edwin. He and Violet strode through the illusion too, though Edwin shut his eyes in order to do so.
Alan dutifully described the way the illusion had fallen apart as he neared it—“But I still didn’t feel anything. What’s it meant to hide? The staircase, or this?” He knelt to look more closely at the ringed globe. It was the size of a football, made of intricate wooden rings all set at angles to one another, marked with notches and small symbols, set on a solid round base. Around the base were engraved lines of writing.
“Both,” said Violet.
She moved a lever and the interlocking rings began to rotate. A simple tune rose into the air, as if somewhere at the centre was an unseen instrument with a hollow voice.
“I like that,” said Alan. A stab of unfairness hit him. If things had been different, would magic have been his birthright, his world? Instead he was a walking ward. Something that couldn’t help but turn magic away. Make it lesser.
Unfairness was part of the world’s fabric. Alan was used to it. It still made him angry every time.
“It’s an orrery,” said Edwin. “The music-box portion was broken, but we had Hettie Carroll around to look at it, and it was only that the gears needed cleaning.”
The melody swelled louder. Violet sang along. Her voice, strong and tuneful, seemed to fill the hollow at the heart of the orrery’s sound. And what she was singing, Alan realised, were the words written around the base.
“—nature burning bright as stars, to pay the dusk its due.”
Through the music came the sound of wood sliding against itself in a smooth groove. Alan stood and looked at the narrow, illusion-hidden staircase, which was now more inviting, somehow. Wider. Better lit.
“Come on,” said Violet, breaking off her song. “Now we know you work, we can start trying you out on things.”
“One canary, ready for service.”
The orrery kept playing behind them as they walked down the staircase. The song had the hummable simplicity of nursery rhymes. Alan would probably wake up tomorrow with it repeating in his skull.
He was tensed for any sort of magical nonsense—nobody ever told the canary what was going to happen in the mine—but the staircase was well behaved. It led down in a spiral, lit along the way by balls of glowing light set in the wall like lamps. After a few turns it unwound itself and they walked along an enclosed corridor that ended in yet another door. This one had no handle.
Violet cradled a spell, which came alive as visible lines of gold string in her hand. She rolled the spell into a brassy ball and then reached out to the door. The spell slid free and became a doorknob, and Violet twisted it and led them into what she called the spinet room.
It was a room of more doors.
It was small, octagonal, and with no windows; only five more knobless doors in addition to the one they’d passed through, all of different-coloured woods. The room was lit by several standing lamps of plain glass giving off the same too-clean glow as the magic in the staircase.
In the centre of the whole stood the spinet. Or so Alan assumed. It looked like a glossy brown piano that had met with an accident of geometry and turned into an off-centre triangle. The open lid gave it the unfortunate silhouette of a coffin. The keys were black, the panel just above them done in a pretty mosaic of paler and darker woods.
Edwin looked with barely contained eagerness from the spinet to Alan, to the doors, and then back to Alan, who swallowed a laugh.
“Go on then. If you don’t tell me everything about the wood, I suppose you’ll explode.”
A pause. Perhaps he’d misstepped. In his household that would barely count as a friendly hello, let alone a proper dig at someone, but Edwin Courcey was … touchy.
But Edwin’s face creased in something that was close to a smile. “You’re right, there’s no point going into detail. This is mostly a way station, in any case. It’s the only way we’ve found down into a double set of bedrooms that we’re having trouble with. But all of the woods here do have a magical property.” He pointed at one of the doors, a beautiful reddish shade. “That one’s jarrah. It’s so hard and durable they use it for paving roads, but it also sustains the effect of a spell.” He pointed out the other doors briefly: the one they’d walked through was mahogany, and the others were cedar, fir, ebony, and Brazilian rosewood.
“And that one?” Alan nodded at the dull brown door on the other side of the room, which Edwin hadn’t bothered to introduce.
“The spinet? It’s mostly cherry, but the sounding board is spruce—”
“No, the seventh door.”
“There isn’t a seventh door,” said Violet, but Edwin’s face was already transforming. This time his hand got all the way to grabbing Alan’s arm before he remembered his manners and snatched it back.
“You can see another one?”
Alan gazed steadily at the door. It didn’t waver or shift like the illusion had. It was inarguably there. And inarguably a door. “Yes?”
Edwin stared just as hard. His head twitched in surprise. “I had it for a moment. Violet?”
Violet pulled out the stool before the spinet and sat. She trailed her fingers down the span of the keys without pressing down. “That’s it,” she said, to nobody in particular, and then looked right at the same place. She winced. “Oh. Yes. It’s like trying to look at a light that’s too bright, but I’ve got it now I know it’s there.”
“Keep the house calm. I’m going to try to stabilise it.”
Out came his string. Edwin tried two or three quick spells, none of which made much difference to Violet’s squinting or his own frustrated head-jerks. Finally he built a slow, complicated pattern of string that pushed blue light around his hands like eddying water. He walked carefully towards the troublesome door and Alan went too, curious to see what he’d do.
They were within two yards of it when deep dread began to collect in Alan’s body. He remembered Violet at the first breakfast saying it’s not safe work, and now he believed it. Only the acute awareness that he needed to remain useful to these magicians stopped him from bolting right back through the mahogany door. But Edwin had stopped as well.