“Stop bloody waffling and get on with it, Hawthorn,” came a loud Somerset voice from the crowd. “The wife’s not enjoying this cold.”
Thank God for Pete Manning. Jack turned to direct his best facsimile of his usual arrogant stare at where the man’s voice had come from, and felt instantly better. Politics. Very well. George had been right about spectacle serving a purpose. Jack might have spent years building himself a shell of uncaring about other people’s opinions, but ceremony needed a voice.
Jack nodded Robin out of the way. Perhaps it would be more impressive if he attempted a levitation spell, like George had with the coin, to hold the allstone aloft.
No. Sod it. It could stay on the ground.
He had no magical amplification for his voice, either, but the crowd hushed quickly and he felt the intense pull of their listening.
“I don’t know precisely what George Bastoke told you. But here is the truth: This stone is the Last Contract between the magicians of this land and the fae, and it contained—contains—all the magic they left for us, to be used by the few in the service of the many. That magic has been pulled out of you and is being pulled from every magician in Britain.” He paused, not sure if he should say the next part, but he owed more than half-truths. And the secret-bind wouldn’t get in the way here. “I do not know if it can be returned or regenerated. I do not believe it can. And as it is now, it can only be wielded by one person, and—such a thing should not exist. Even if it could be controlled.”
They’d felt the lake crack. They’d seen what happened when Prest picked it up. The spectacle was already on Jack’s side there.
Still. Politics was politics, after all.
Jack said, as dry and lordly as he could: “Would anyone like to express a dissenting opinion?”
Several someones got halfway there, Jack could see. Lord Cheetham certainly looked as though he were thinking about it. But Jack stared his father down, and Lord Cheetham slowly shook his head.
So.
“Now what?” Jack asked Dufay. It was more her party than his.
“I suppose one member of each family—”
“Oh, damn the bloodlines,” said Violet suddenly. She stood from Alan’s side and came up next to Hawthorn, all of her stage presence pulled around her like a brilliant cloak. “This is a fairy tale. It’s all symbols. All we need is three. Come on, Edwin.”
Edwin stepped up as if he’d been waiting for the cue. He was still pale, but far more alive.
“Lady Dufay?” said Edwin. “We wish to return the gifts of the dawn. We have not upheld our end of the Last Contract, and this magic … no longer suits the society that we have become, headed by people who hunger for power to its own ends, instead of its use in safeguarding. We have changed too much. It’s not your fault.”
Jack would never have thought to put it that way. But Dufay’s expression had hints of an ancient, bewildered pain, and he knew that Edwin was right. The fae had assumed that mortal society would remain exactly as it had been when they left. But the distance between those who had power and those who had none had widened, and the willingness of leaders to take responsibility—for land, for their own actions, for anyone else—had withered.
If it had ever been there at all.
Dufay said, “And if the darkness is coming for you?”
“You mean this wasn’t it?” said Violet.
Edwin was unshaken. “Then we will need our own stars to see by. You told us that and we didn’t listen.” He took a breath. With his thin pallor and his own blue eyes he looked, fleetingly, far closer to a relation of Dufay than Jack ever had. He looked halfway fae himself.
Edwin said, “We, the magicians of this land, accept only the wages of the dusk. Everyone bears their own cost.”
It sounded right. Scoop out the rot, Jack thought, and hope there’s enough left to heal.
“I accept,” said the Lady of the Allstone.
There was a long pause. The allstone itself did nothing at all.
“Now what?” said Jack.
“Unmake it,” said Dufay. “I can’t. It was—of me—for too long. And the wages of the dusk are not mine to draw on.”
“Unmake.…” Edwin swallowed. “Yes. All right.”
“Wait,” said Violet. “Breaking the contract—we’re not going to suddenly thaw the lake? Should we clear everyone off?”
“No,” said Edwin. “Hawthorn didn’t use this magic at all, did he?”
This time he closed his eyes only a moment. No inky storm clouds boiled around him, and no golden lightning tore through their reality. But the spell gathering around his fingers was the Barrel’s destruction in miniature.
Edwin Courcey picked up the Last Contract and it turned to dust in his hand.
From the dust rose a pillar of light that soared higher than the eye could follow, almost too bright to look at where it lay against the stars, like a slick of brilliant water catching sunlight where it crossed dark stone. It happened before Jack could finish a breath.
And when he did finish it, he was knocked back and off his feet. It felt like a giant hand, an unstoppable wind. It blasted out from the silver pillar, which was even now shimmering into nothing like a firework—like dust, in truth.
Nobody was left standing. The wind, too, died quickly.
And then there was stillness.
Jack looked around. A post-theatre kind of crowd noise was rising, although instead of the theatre lights coming up at the end of a play or a symphony, the opposite had happened. The tree-strung colours were gone, and even the bright lanterns that contained the Hall’s diverted guidelights were dimmer. He wondered how much of Cheetham Hall’s magic, that mingling of the two forms, would now be gone.
Everyone was climbing to their feet.
Everyone but Alan, who continued to lie unmoving.
Jack went over and knelt by Alan’s side. It was more like a collapse of his knees. His chest was tight with anguish and he felt unmoored in time, as several of his memories fought to overlay themselves on this scene. The first time he ever saw this man, lying unconscious on the floor of an ocean liner’s suite, having drunk from tainted whisky meant for Jack. Alan asleep in Jack’s townhouse with his memory straining to pull itself back together.
Elsie curled up beneath the Lady’s Oak, near death from building a wall around their broken magic to protect him. Then, Jack had called on the Hall for help dragging her back from the brink of death. It was the last act of magic that he had performed until this night—and like tonight’s, it had been a magic performed entirely from instinct, running along a path older and deeper than any fae bargain.
He’d said, Take whatever you need from me.
Jack took hold of Alan’s cold wrist and reached out his awareness one more time to the land, swollen and alive, beneath them.
This time he said, “Lend me what I need.”
Despite everything he’d said to Edwin, he wasn’t at all sure that this would work. For anyone, but especially for him. Breaking the contract had been so bone-shaking and final. And of all the magicians in Britain, surely Jack least deserved to call on the wages of the dusk. Jack who’d run away. Jack who’d selfishly heeded only his own wounds.