“Violet, shield!” he said sharply.
The golden shimmer appeared like a fishing net flung forward over the whole party. A rather ragged net, unfortunately. Violet was at her best with illusion magic; she was still struggling to improve in other areas. Jack had no way to cram his own dusty education wholesale into her head, and most magic was a hell of a lot more complicated to teach and learn than firing a gun. Jack steeled himself to ignore the darting gaps in the spell. Nothing to be done. You worked with the arsenal you had.
He was about to retrieve his own pistol when a gangly figure darted into full view, both hands raised. Jack leapt down the steps and lashed out with his stick, aiming at one of those hands before it could begin a cradle, and landed a glancing blow.
A youthful yelp emerged. Familiar. Jack hesitated, pulling his second blow—which would have smashed a kneecap—even before the figure said, “Wait! My lord!”
“Oliver,” Jack barked. “What are you doing?”
“Oliver?” said Violet, behind him. The shield blinked out.
Maud and Violet and Dorothy came down into the kitchen. The insistent musical note decreased considerably in volume, presumably because Spinet’s mistress had arrived at the site of trouble.
Jack’s valet, now rubbing his wrist, looked shamefaced. “Mrs. Smith said she’d leave me a morsel of something, my lord. For when I got hungry in the night.”
When, not if. Freddy Oliver was seventeen and not done growing, and Violet’s food bill had probably doubled when he and Jack came to stay in Spinet House.
“Where’s your guidelight?”
“Snuffed it, when I heard—”
A rattle came as the kitchen door shook against its hinges. Leftover sparks of magic flared nervously in Oliver’s hands as if someone had blown a glow from dying embers. So this wasn’t a false alarm created by Oliver’s midnight hunger pangs, then.
“Someone’s trying to break in!”
“Thank you, Oliver. A formidable grasp of the obvious.”
“Pack up your temper, Hawthorn, this is hardly the time. The warding’s holding for now,” said Violet. “I can try something if it falls, but…”
“Good. Do that. Maud, Oliver.” Jack jerked his head and pushed his way back into the house. The other two followed him at a run up the servants’ stairs. Apologies tumbled from the boy’s mouth, and Jack shushed him with a wave.
“You’re lucky I didn’t break your fingers. Or shoot you. And you’ll owe Miss Debenham a new guidelight. What in the damned—does this stair go from ground to attic without pause?” The staircase had thankfully remained stairs, but they’d passed two boxed-in landings that should have led out into the house itself. “I want a window overlooking the kitchen entrance.”
“The house must still be skittish,” said Maud. “I suppose we can’t exactly complain that James Taverner was a fiend for security spells, all things considered.”
“These stairs respond best to staff, miss,” said Oliver. He cradled a light spell and let it brighten as he returned to the previous landing, where he rapped his knuckles politely on the wall. After a moment, a panel slid aside, and Oliver beckoned them into a sparsely furnished sitting room.
At Jack’s direction, Oliver cast a curtain-spell that would muffle sound as well as hide them from view, and they cracked open first physical curtains and then the window. Jack peered out and down.
A thinly veiled gibbous moon illuminated the scene below. Two figures, both with their faces obscured by the fog-masks that George’s conspirators seemed to favour. One stood a few feet from the kitchen door, methodically sending bolt after pale bolt of magic against it.
The other man was tucked in against the wall of the house, a spell hovering uncast between his hands. Protection and backup. Neither of them seemed to be making any effort to experiment, or do anything fiddly to unravel the warding, even though they must have realised how sophisticated it was. Blunt power only.
Jack described the scene, mostly to prevent Maud from shoving her own head out.
“Oliver, can you manage a location-fix clause on a fire spell? Or anything that will distract them? Hell, itching would do. You want it to arise in a specific spot, not come in a line from your hands. You’ll need to define the precise distance.”
Oliver gulped. Even at the best of times the boy looked like a cricket stump wobbling in the aftermath of a ball, and his reddish hair had gone hedgelike in the excitement. “Never tried one, my lord.”
“But you know—yes, that’s the clause.” Not quite, but Oliver was strong enough that he could afford some sloppiness in his cradles. “Give it a try, see if you can scare them off. But keeping the curtain up comes first. Miss Blyth can get off a few shots as long as they can’t see her.”
Maud nodded, looking just as excited. Jack felt old and tired. Giving combat orders to young people while heavy with fatigue was like reaching for a guidekeeper: another habit he’d fallen easily back into. He didn’t like it any more than the other.
“If—” Oliver started, but was interrupted by a redoubling of Spinet House’s alarm note.
No. Now it was two notes, an uneven chord.
Jack cursed. “Signal if they break through the door,” he said, and left them to it.
He hadn’t a complete tin ear. The new, prominent note was higher than the first. He found his way to the main staircase and heard footfalls ascending at a run. Violet looked angry and out of breath.
“So,” she panted. “The kitchen’s a diversion, do you think?”
Jack nodded. Violet pointed upwards and Jack let her lead the way. His leg had begun to hurt again. The second note softened to match the first when Violet stopped outside a room on the uppermost floor before the attic level. She hesitated with her fingertips on the door, which had neither lock nor handle.
“We haven’t fully puzzled this one out yet,” she admitted. “It’s one of the queerer ones.”
Many of Spinet’s queerer rooms were those hosting secret passageways to elsewhere in the house, so this didn’t make Jack feel any better about the prospect of a breakin. He had an unpleasant vision of fog-masked attackers creeping out of the wall in the sitting room where Maud and Oliver had all their attention on the window.
Jack leaned his stick against the wall and drew his gun instead. “Stay out of sight until we know what’s happening.”
Violet didn’t argue. Unlike Maud, she didn’t need to be browbeaten into letting Jack take the lead when they were in danger. Jack didn’t know if it was her history of taking direction on the stage or simply a matter of personality.
She said, “Don’t go too far into the room if you can help it. And—move like a knight.”
Before she could explain further, there was a click as the door catch released. Jack shoved it open and stepped through, gun raised in the other hand.
The room was small. It had no wallpaper, no rugs, not even any cushions or upholstery on the chair at the writing desk. It was all wood. The floor was an unsettling chessboard of dark and light, the same pattern running up the walls all the way to the ceiling. The floor, however, was decorated with shards of broken glass from the main window, and they winked in the light of a small lantern set down near the frame.