He deserved to pay for it. But Alan did not.
“I will pledge you myself, for the length of my life. Please.”
And felt himself begin to fill again.
Jack could have yelled, or wept. Relief choked his voice. “Don’t you dare perturb this, gutter-brat. For once in your damn life, you will let me help you.”
No panic drove this magic. It had to be deliberate, and Jack didn’t have Edwin’s months of practice breaking free of the mould of their training. A request would have to be enough.
He thought, Wake up and be well, and released his magic in a trickle that became a fierce surge.
Alan’s head jerked and his eyes flew open, twin puddles of reflected moonlight. Before Jack could speak, Alan pushed himself to sit up. He looked bewildered but his arms barely shook. His skin warmed in Jack’s grip.
Jack’s gladness mingled with that of the Hall. Alan had bowed to the bees, and Alan had saved the heir to this land, and the blood in Alan’s veins had their fingerprints, their magic, all over it now. Good. Good.
Alan looked around, squinting in the dim light. Sometime in the last minute the others had gathered and were standing close by, watching but not interfering. Jack hadn’t noticed.
“Fuckin’ell,” Alan slurred. “Don’t tell me I was out cold for the exciting bits again?”
His gaze moved to Jack’s hand still gripping his wrist. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and touched his sternum as if it ached, and his eyes widened.
“Jack—”
“Nothing owing,” said Jack.
32
In the end it took more time to convince Edwin that he was not obliged to single-handedly teach every magician at the gala a new approach to magic before sunrise than it did to persuade said magicians to break with equinox tradition and leave Cheetham Hall early. Jack’s mother managed both of these feats without dropping her smile. That was a kind of magic that Jack had never bothered to learn.
Perhaps it helped that the foundations of magic were already in pieces. Breaking a tradition that was mostly about eating and drinking and dancing for a solid twelve hours seemed nothing in comparison.
“It started as more than that,” said Dufay, “the equinox is important,” and then wandered away without explaining further.
“This is Flora Sutton’s diaries all over again,” muttered Edwin.
It was a little past midnight. The last guests had left. They had all begun to drift towards their own rooms but had found themselves lingering in the main downstairs hall as if chewing distractedly over an unfinished argument. The Hall’s remaining magic seemed able to manage guidelights, once Lady Cheetham had shooed the servants off to their own beds with instructions that the cleanup could wait until the full light of day. The grounds of the estate were dark now. Only moonlit; only starlit, although some of that thin cloud cover had begun to drift back into place.
They’d moved the corpses off the lake, at least. Soon enough that ice would begin to melt.
Edwin continued, “She has some dense pages about different kinds of magic being more suited to different seasons—I really thought it was based in agriculture, but I can tell that—”
“Edwin,” said Jack. “You will not turn the remainder of this night into a theoretical magic lesson. Take your blood loss and go to bed.”
“But—”
“Come on,” said Robin firmly. He hadn’t left Edwin’s side, or stopped looking narrowly at him as though he might yet swoon. Or die. Jack wondered what tightrope of possibility and probability they’d walked that night, what path they’d found between Robin’s visions.
Edwin’s two symbolic deaths, and the halt before the third. His brother experiencing the third in his place. It did have a grisly fairy-tale shape to it.
Robin persuaded Edwin away to the wing that held their rooms, and Maud and Violet followed soon after. Alan, too, slipped up the main stairs; he caught his gaze on Jack’s but didn’t say anything.
Jack stood for a while in the shadowed marble of the entrance hall. He could hear movement distantly—small, friendly noises of footsteps and voices and things being moved and locked and settled. A winding-down. Jack didn’t feel wound down. He felt as though he could walk the boundaries of this place for the next six hours, acknowledging and accepting the tremors of pain beneath his feet at what had taken place here tonight. Blood spilled, and lives taken.
He’d left his mother and Dufay to explain things to his father, and had no idea what shape that conversation would take. He was holding his long-trained respect and his half-formed adult opinion of Lord Cheetham like a carved statue that cast different silhouettes depending on which way the light struck it. There would be long, strange, difficult days to come. Jack was not precisely looking forward to them. But they were owed, and Jack would pay what he owed.
Freddy Oliver had gone back to the village with his mother, at Jack’s urging. Jack was already removing his tailcoat—he wasn’t going to sleep, but perhaps he might read—when he let himself into his own rooms.
His guidelight slipped across the room to the keeper by the bed, where it increased in brightness and took on a golden tinge until the room was cosily lit.
On the way there, it illuminated Alan.
The part of Jack that enjoyed being right and was generally convinced of his own rightness tried to tell him that he wasn’t surprised. But he was. Every large and dreadful thing that had ever happened to him in his life he had worked his way through, afterwards, alone.
It was a new experience, to want his solitude and then find someone intruding on it and be glad. A small gladness, like a mouthful of good wine, but world-shaking in its novelty. Not since Elsie died had there been someone whose company Jack preferred to his own.
Playing cards were arranged in a half-started game on the rug. Alan ignored them as he stood from his cross-legged seat. His own guidelight wavered and then blinked out; it would be in the bracket outside the door, waiting for him to leave.
Jack did not want him to leave.
They gazed at each other for a few moments. Alan was still wearing the top half of a maid’s uniform, and riding breeches beneath. Jack risked Oliver’s future ire by tossing his tailcoat across the chair drawn up to the writing desk and began to work on his cufflinks.
Finally Alan said, “I have to write about that party. Thank God I’m good at fiction.”
Alan, the journalist, had downstairs efficiently dragged a description of what had happened while he was unconscious out of three different sources, all of whom had noticed and dwelled upon different things to Jack.
“Make it stretch,” Jack suggested. “Use it as inspiration for the next Roman story as well.”
Alan’s glance was long and considering enough for the back of Jack’s neck to prickle.
“Nothing titillating about a frozen lake and several murders,” said Alan, but Jack recognised the tone. It was the opening sally. Jack, who’d made that dig about Whitechapel fishmongers when Alan first walked back into his life, was being invited to haggle.
So Jack smiled. “How about a daring young man in disguise as a parlour maid—his secret discovered—blackmailed into unspeakable acts by the heir to the estate—”
“I think I might steer clear of manor-house stories for a while. Besides,” he said, suddenly frank, “wouldn’t it feel odd? To read one of my books and know you’d inspired it?”