“Elsie,” Jack said, scrambling to pull her into his lap. “Elsie,” as her breathing shallowed and her pulse, already rapid, became a whisper. The Hall could feel her slipping. Jack reached frantically for his magic and bent at the waist to retch when he found only the jagged edges of where it had been. “Take whatever you need from me,” he snarled. “Save her. Do it.”
The Hall tried. This, too, it hadn’t done for centuries. It found the hooks of its own power, the land’s power, buried deep inside its heir; and it pulled. And pulled again.
This magic was not meant for fine work on human bodies, beyond worm-chewing them gratefully to enrich the soil. It had never tried to mend. But it held Elsie Alston steady. Held her living. And Jack Alston sat beneath the Lady’s Oak with his arms a cage of agony around his sister, his mouth swollen with secrets, and endured.
Away past the birch grove, all of Cheetham Hall’s front windows shattered at once.
Finally, the alarm was raised. People spilled from the Hall like ants from a nest, exchanging cries, growing rapidly aware of those who were missing.
Those who were found, before long, bloodlessly pale and shivering in sleep, curled into each other like dead leaves: but alive, alive, for now.
2
SPINET HOUSE, 1909
Jack awoke in the small hours of the morning with his tongue hot in his mouth, a savage twist of a dream fading from his mind, and music in his ears.
The dream was nothing new. The music meant that someone was trying to break into Spinet House. Again.
He muttered a curse and threw back the covers. The music was growing steadily louder—not that it could be described as music, really. It was a single note, unbroken, as if played by a bow drawn ceaselessly back and forth across the world’s largest violin.
Jack tapped the brass guidekeeper on the nightstand without thinking, then slapped the wood with annoyance. He almost never had slips like that. He hadn’t for years. He’d shed the mannerisms of his past, all those actions that came unthinkingly to magicians. He’d burned them out of himself. It had taken time and bloody-minded effort.
And then three months ago an unmagical girl had accosted him on a ship, inserted herself inconveniently into his life, and forced him back into magical society and magical conspiracy. Back into contact with his family and his past.
The point was: Jack Alston had no magic, and Spinet House owed him no allegiance. The guidelight didn’t move according to his unspoken will. It stayed where it was, a softly wavering yellow light like a long-wicked candle. Jack donned slippers and dressing gown, took the pistol from the nightstand, checked it, and slipped it into the gown pocket. His right calf cramped in sharp protest. He stretched and shook it until only a dull ache remained.
His walking stick leaned against the wall by the door, waiting for him, and not because of the pain in his leg. That pain was unpredictable. This—the attempted incursion into Spinet House by anonymous enemies—was, depressingly, less so. They’d all begun keeping weapons to hand.
Only as Jack opened the door and crossed the threshold of the room did his guidelight detach from its keeper and come to hover above his shoulder. The corridor was empty, but he could hear approaching footsteps. His grip on the stick loosened when the stairs disgorged Maud and Violet into view.
“Violet,” called Jack. “Where should we be?”
“Oh, for—shush, Hawthorn, I almost had it!” Violet called back. Jack walked down the hall to join them. Both girls were clad in dressing gowns with their hair plaited back for sleep. Their guidelights illuminated the smooth yellow of Violet’s tresses and the longer, thicker, more mussed brown of Maud’s.
“Ground floor.” Violet held a tuning fork in her hand. “It’s low enough that—oh, Dorothy, there you are. What do you think?”
Spinet House’s senior parlour maid, hurrying toward them down the corridor leading to the servants’ stair, sang in a choir on her evenings off. Aside from Violet, she had the best ear in the house.
“Kitchen entrance, miss,” she said.
Violet struck the fork on her own forearm, held it to her ear, and nodded. “That was my guess. Shall we?”
Maud, being Maud, went to lead the way. She held a small pearl-handled revolver. In a world full of magicians laying siege to their abode and trying to steal something from them, Maud had pointed out, unmagical people could do worse than to carry unmagical weapons.
Her brother Robin had bought her the gun. Jack had taught her to use it.
Now Jack blocked Maud with his stick and raised his eyebrows.
“Hawthorn, really,” said Maud.
“I have your word, and I will make it an oath if you don’t behave,” said Jack.
“He will too,” said Violet. “Stay in the middle, darling, or I’ll have Dorothy shut you in a cupboard.”
“Traitor,” said Maud, with a peek of dimple, but she fell behind Jack and let him lead the cautious way down.
The ache in Jack’s leg was no more than a soft throb by now, though it seemed to pulse along with the persistent note in his ears. It flared tightly when the stairs, with no warning, tilted beneath their feet and turned from flat, carpeted wood to an outright slope. Jack swallowed an unpleasant leap of acid in his throat as Maud—and her pistol—collided with his back. Maud gave a muffed squawk.
“Grab hold!” said Violet.
The entire party took grim hold of the banister with their free hands. Jack concentrated on not slipping any farther down what was now something like a fairground slide, and also bracing himself for any of the women behind him to lose their balance and create an unfortunate human landslide. The soles of his bloody house slippers weren’t exactly designed for grip.
“Violet,” he said through his teeth.
“The poor thing’s skittish. Little wonder. Give me a moment.”
Jack risked a glance back over his shoulder. Violet had her free hand on a wood panel of the wall and her forehead on her hand. She might have been singing, or whispering. Jack couldn’t hear above the music, which was starting to feel unpleasantly as though it were emanating from the centre of Jack’s own skull.
Slowly, the floor beneath their feet tilted back into stairs. Jack got them moving and down to the ground floor before Spinet House’s capricious carpentry could interfere further.
The kitchen was at the back of the house. The floor creaked musically as they made their way through the largest dining room, through the butler’s pantry, and down a short service corridor to the top of two flagstone steps. The dark expanse of the kitchen was still warmed by the ashes of the main cooking fire, which was still used despite the large modern stoves that lined one wall of the kitchen. Hints of moonlight sang off the copper of hanging saucepans.
Jack lifted a hand and paused before stepping down through the doorway. Hair prickled along his arms. The external kitchen door appeared to be closed, and the high windows showed nothing but the dark of night. He should have left his guidelight behind. Nothing to announce your entrance and ruin a reconnoitre like a gleam of yellow light.
Was that a hint of movement in the shadows? And—
Jack jerked back into the shelter of the passageway, treading on someone’s foot. A supple line of red light lashed across the room, bright enough to carve aftereffects in his sight and leave him blinking. It snapped to nothing against the doorframe.