“So what did you do?”
“Nothing.” She frowned down at Alan. Light caught on tear tracks, dried on her cheeks. “It settled down. Eventually. I think it went back into the house.”
“I’m not touching him with the allstone,” snapped Jack. “Even if it is where that magic came from. For all we know, it’ll make it worse.”
Absorption of magic. He closed his eyes and, fumblingly, reached for the Hall. Instead of stretching a disused muscle it now felt like straining one taxed to the point of trembling. But he tried.
Will you take it from him? Take it into the ley lines, like Dufay’s. Let it be taken in and untwisted. Fae magic into land magic.
He didn’t know if he was feeling anything or just wishing that he did. Was Alan’s body relaxing? Were his breaths coming more evenly?
Violet touched Alan’s shoulder hesitantly. She frowned, but didn’t take her fingers away.
“I don’t know. It feels different—”
“Lord Hawthorn.”
A loud throat-clearing sounded, with impatience suggesting it had been going for some time.
Jack looked up. Richard Prest, the Deputy Chief Minister of the Assembly, stood there, along with another two men of similar age. One of them kept glancing at Walter Courcey’s and Mrs. Vaughn’s bodies as if they might leap up at any moment.
Some of the audience had decided it was now safe to stop being an audience and demand answers.
“Lord Hawthorn,” Prest repeated, frosty as his own misting breath. “I trust you will explain what the blazes has happened here, and where our magic has gone.”
Prest swept an illustrative arm out over the lake. Hands were moving in cradles everywhere, with no spells coming to life. At least two rows of people were crowded up against the edge of the stage, waiting with demanding eagerness to see how their leaders were going to fix this. Jack found his parents, their heads bent together in conversation that had the look of the few arguments of theirs he’d ever seen: his father abrasive and loud with anger, and his mother becoming increasingly calm and implacable in response. Dufay was still with them.
“You can all go—”
“Violet,” said Jack, cutting her off. Much as he sympathised with her habit of stripping men with her tongue and would normally have sat back and enjoyed it, there were still plenty of ways for this night to go wrong. They’d need all the goodwill they could scrape together.
Alan’s eyes were still closed. Violet’s hand was tight on his shoulder. He could have been a boy in a fairy tale, fallen through a broken mirror and cursed with endless sleep. Jack had wealth and title and could do nothing for him at all.
Jack stood. He wanted to take the world between his hands and snap it like a dry branch, and Prest had handily presented himself for snapping.
“Our magic?” he growled. “Our magic was a gift of the fae, as you of the Assembly knew when you granted my cousin George and his allies your blessing to find the Last Contract. And now they have taken a magician’s life and used that death to pull that gift back into the stone from whence it came.”
“It’s all in there?” said one of the men. His cheeks were nearly crimson with emotion above his greying moustache. “Then we shall have it back.”
And he strode with purpose towards the allstone, which still lay abandoned on the ice where Jack had left it.
“Don’t be a damned fool!” Jack tried to shove forward to stop him, but his bad leg cramped sharply with the sudden movement. He stopped with a curse to shake it out.
Meanwhile, Prest had hurried after his colleague and eagerly elbowed the man out of the way. “Leave it to me, Terrence. It’s my responsibility. After all, I will soon be—ah, there we are—”
Prest straightened. The look on his face was already melting from hunger to horror.
“I—” he said.
Magic choked the air. Quite literally choked: the back of Jack’s tongue was alive with a coppery taste and fizzing so hard it was like a new secret-bind being laid. Soon it became like trying to breathe in sparkling water. Jack’s lungs stabbed and ached. Violet was having a violent sneezing fit. A large cluster of magicians, emboldened by the fact that several of their leaders had broken the unspoken barrier and walked onto the stage, were milling close as if to do the same. Most of them were now coughing.
Between Jack’s eyes and the unveiled sky, the night took on an oily shimmer that pulsed in soft waves, like wind billowing a gauze so thin it was almost invisible. Jack’s ears popped painfully and then went dull and pressured, his blood thundering up to his face as if he’d been hanging upside down for several minutes.
And then finally—it felt like finally, though surely it had been only seconds since Prest picked up the allstone—the shimmer began to thicken.
Breathing became even more laborious; Jack couldn’t tell if the spots of light in his vision were magic or an imminent swoon. The air around and above them was puckering like a skin on hot milk, gathering and thickening and darkening along what Jack couldn’t help but think of as an enormous seam, and he remembered all over again that this was the magic of beings whose reality was not a human reality. Who had removed themselves entirely from this world and, presumably, gone to another.
“Prest!” Jack shouted with a difficult lungful of breath. “Drop the bloody thing!”
There was no sign that Prest heard him. One of the noises that Jack was hearing now, past the painful pressure that dulled his ears, was the violent chatter of the man’s teeth. Prest gripped the allstone as if it were the only thing keeping him alive.
Perhaps it was. Jack didn’t care. Maud had probably reached her limit on shooting people, but Jack hadn’t. He could—
“Give us a hand, Hawthorn,” said Robin.
Jack turned in time for Robin to pass him Edwin’s arm and half of Edwin’s weight. The makeshift bandages were stained dark brown now, and Edwin’s eyes were open and as bright as needles.
Then Robin strode calmly into that invisible storm of chaotic magic and punched the Deputy Chief Minister in the head.
As in the Barrel, he delivered it beautifully. Prest was out cold before he hit the icy stage.
The air returned to normal with the suddenness of snapped elastic.
The allstone rolled a little way and then stopped. It was the wrong shape to get too far.
Edwin, hand clawed around Jack’s arm, gave a tiny hiccuping laugh. Jack understood why. As serious as the situation was, it was also taking on a faint resemblance to a game of rugby where the only rules anyone could remember were tackle and grab.
Robin, the rugby star, made no attempt to pick up the ball. He stood guard. He looked at the milling magicians who had prudently paused in their attempt to rush the stage and recover their stolen power.
“I think we’ll all leave the silver lump full of dangerous magic alone for now,” Robin said firmly.
“Did anybody bring a cork-lined box?” Edwin murmured. “Or do we wrap it in someone’s skirt?”
“Perhaps we can still take it to the oak,” Jack said. “The land might take this magic as well.”
“I … don’t like the idea,” said Edwin. “It was worse for Prest than it was for Bastoke, and I don’t think it was because Bastoke’s the stronger magician. There’s more magic in it now. It’s still filling up. It would have begun with all the magicians here tonight, but there are so many more of them in Britain. And if the ley lines absorb it, who says we ever get it back?”