“A month.” Lady Salisbury seems like a different person in this flickering light. Downstairs, she was warm and cheerful, if a bit sad. Now she’s woebegone and mournful. This room feels too full of people who aren’t here anymore. Her son, her daughter—apparently lost before the girl had a chance to get old—and a curly-haired man in an Air Force uniform looking down from a large photograph over the bed. “My husband,” she says. She’s caught me staring at the portrait. “Gone ten years now.”
I nod, not sure whether I should offer condolences.
“Did Jamie tell you he was leaving?” Baz’s pen is poised over the notepad.
“No … But there were signs.” She lays her hand on his wrist, stopping his pen. “Let’s go back downstairs. The light is better.”
We follow her back down to the sitting room, past more family photos.
There’s one hanging over the staircase—the same blond girl as a teenager. I stop. “She looks familiar,” I say. “I think I’ve seen a painting of her.”
“At Watford,” Baz says, over my shoulder. “In the Catacombs.”
Neither of us mention that it weeps.
Lady Salisbury doesn’t smile. “Yes,” she says. “Lucy was a student there.” She walks ahead of us down the stairs. “I think I will make tea after all.”
“It’s been hard for Jamie,” Lady Salisbury says. She insisted that Baz sit next to me on the sofa. “That chair won’t wobble for me; it knows better.” And she’s given me a third slice of cake. （I can’t believe she made this herself.
It’s four layers deep.） “He’s never quite fit into magickal society.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“Well, Jamie was a different sort of learner … He didn’t learn to read until quite late, and he’s never been fond of reading aloud. His tongue would tie itself in knots.”
I can sympathize. “So he did badly at Watford?”
“In those days,” she says, “a reading disorder would keep you out of Watford.”
I sit up straight, jamming my wings against the sofa. “Even if you were a magician? With your own wand?”
“Even then,” she says.
I look at Baz for confirmation. His face is grim but unsurprised.
Lady Salisbury goes on: “Jamie’s older sister went to Watford and learned magic, while Jamie stayed home with us and went to Normal schools. He learned a bit of magic, some household spells—but it was embarrassing for him, and eventually he stopped trying to get better at it.”
She’s turning her cup in her hands, looking down at her tea. “We thought he’d made peace with it. He never had many magickal friends, and after his sister … well, ran away, there was no one to compare himself to. Jamie went to Normal schools, he married a Normal girl. I thought he’d let it go, magic.”
She’s quiet again. Baz and I don’t try to fill the silence. What could I say — “That’s easier said than done” ? “Even when you’re terrible with words” ?
“But since his divorce,” she says, “I don’t know … He spends too much time online. He’s got a cousin, a magician, who sends him conspiracy theories. Speciesist claptrap, most of it. I thought Jamie knew it was a lot of balls—” She looks up, abruptly. “Oh, excuse my language, boys. Anyway, I thought Jamie was repeating all of this nonsense just to get a rise out of me at the dinner table.”
“What sort of conspiracy theories?” Baz asks.
“Siegfried and Roy, it’s hardly worth saying out loud. ‘Did you know the government is manufacturing gryphons?’ ‘Did you know that Silicon Valley is controlled by vampires?’”
Baz freezes, rattling his teacup on its saucer. Lady Salisbury keeps talking.
“A few months ago,” she says, “he started to fixate more and more on these Chosen One prophecies—you know how it is, everyone’s a Greatest Mage expert these days.”
“It seems we’ve been left out of those conversations,” Baz says, fully recovered.
“Oh.” Lady Salisbury looks from him to me, and chuckles. “I suppose you would be. Well”—she waves her hand—“you’re not missing much.”
I’m scrubbing at my hair; it’s probably driving Baz mental, but I can’t seem to stop. “Is this, like, something that most magicians believe now?
That’s there’s a new Greatest Mage?”