by I exchanged looks with both my colleagues, still too busy processing whatever my thoughts might be to say much.
‘Well,’ said Val after a while.
‘Mm,’ said I. ‘Why was she here?’
‘I sent a request for info,’ said Val. ‘To her secretary. I didn’t particularly expect an answer.’
But Crystobel Elvyng herself had responded, with an in-person visit. Prompted by what? Graciousness? Respect for the Society’s work?
Could be anything.
‘What did you think, House?’ I said.
I waited, but no real response came. If House had formed an opinion either of Crystobel herself, or of anything she had said, it wasn’t sharing.
‘I have one question,’ said Jay. ‘Why was she calling it argent? Where did that name come from?’
I nodded. ‘Curious to hear a brand-new name for the stuff, from someone who claims to have no special information about it.’
‘To be fair, she didn’t say that she had no special knowledge,’ said Val. ‘Only that Cicily’s work was a dead end.’
‘Truth or lie?’
Val shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
A gut feeling socked me in the innards. Truth.
Oof.
‘House thinks she was speaking the truth,’ I said, though I did not need to. Judging from the looks on Val’s and Jay’s faces, they’d both felt the same thing I had.
‘Thanks, House,’ said Jay weakly.
The door creaked.
‘So it’s a dead end?’ I said, frustration rising. Curse it, weeks of research followed by days of gadding about and it was all a wild goose chase?
‘Maybe,’ said Val slowly. ‘Maybe not.’ She sat tapping the end of a pen against her pursed lips, eyes faraway.
I knew better than to interrupt when Val was thinking.
‘Chair,’ she said at last, quite politely.
Her new, spring-green chair obediently extracted itself from behind her desk and sailed over. She transferred into it and floated slowly away, heading for the nearest wall-to-wall bank of shelves. Not to retrieve any books, it seemed, but merely to stare at them. Some people derive comfort and clarity from long walks in the fresh air, or a stiff drink, or a cake (guilty). Val gets those things from being near her books. I watched as she stretched out one hand, and ran her fingertips gently over the spines of several precious, beautiful old tomes. ‘Argent,’ she said.
‘Argentein,’ I said.
‘Moonsilver and moon-bathing,’ added Jay.
Val’s chair spun around so fast I feared she might fall out. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There are patterns. Links. The moon, and argent. The Yllanfalen. The Werewodes. Werewode, not Elvyng.’
‘Maybe Cicily’s marriage is incidental,’ I agreed. ‘Hell, maybe her Yllanfalen father is irrelevant, moonsilver notwithstanding. Maybe this has been a Werewode party all along.’
Val looked hard at me. ‘But then, where are Cicily’s writings? Or Mary’s? Why has so little of either of their work survived?’
‘Thought,’ said Jay, a touch diffidently.
‘You don’t need permission to speak, Jay,’ I told him. ‘This isn’t school.’
He merely flickered a brow at that. I hoped the fleeting expression didn’t mean he thought I was an idiot for pointing it out. ‘Crystobel said that the Elvyngs have little that belonged to Cicily, right?’
‘Right.’
‘And we’ve failed to find any further trace of the Werewode name ourselves. Not in this library, not in the Magickal Archives of the City of York, not in the library of Aylligranir.’
‘Right?’ I struggled to see where Jay was going.
‘And from what Crystobel’s words implied, they’ve probably already scoured the rest of the magickal archives worth their salt and found nothing either. And they’d have been thorough, with such a prize on offer.’
‘So you’re saying there’s nothing to find?’
‘No. Well,’ he amended, ‘that could be the case. But think a second, Ves. What do most Society agents spend at least half our time doing?’
‘Retrieving artefacts,’ I said promptly.
‘From where?’
‘Jay, could you please just spit it out?’ I was beginning to feel like I was taking some kind of exam, and without much hope of passing.
‘The chalice we fished out of a museum in Wales,’ he said obscurely. ‘It’s a piece of magickal history lost in the non-magickal world. And there’s oceans of it still out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered. We are bringing it all in, one piece at a time — as we discover where they are.’
I straightened, electrified. ‘Giddy gods. You mean Cicily’s journal—’
‘Might have been fished up out of some estate auction or library sale and ended up in the York Archives,’ he said, nodding.
‘While the rest of her books haven’t been!’
‘Right! If they exist, maybe they’re lying on the shelves in some ordinary library.’
‘Why, though?’ said Val. ‘Why wouldn’t the Elvyngs have kept her work?’
‘The long-ago Elvyngs of the fifteen and sixteen hundreds?’ I said. ‘If they did not respect her work — and they certainly wouldn’t have if she was writing it in absurd-sounding code — then why would her descendants keep it?’
‘Or,’ said Jay. ‘Cicily wanted to hide it from those she feared might abuse it, and gave her books away herself.’
I beamed at him. ‘Oh, Jay, is that your first conspiracy theory? I am so proud of you.’
He grinned back. ‘Your inspiring influence is paying off.’
I bowed, chuffed to bits. He was really coming along.
‘Anyway,’ said Val sternly, though I definitely saw a glimmer of amusement. ‘You may be onto something, Jay. If Cicily thought she had something significant, but did not want her husband’s family to have it, she might have bequeathed her personal effects to her nearest relative in the Werewode line.’
‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘Okay, so, we find out about the Werewodes’ other descendants and maybe we can trace those books?’
‘Maybe they’re all together,’ said Jay hopefully. ‘Cicily seems to have had access to at least one of Mary’s journals. Maybe she had more.’
I bounced a bit on my toes. ‘I love a good breakthrough!’
‘Get going on it,’ said Val to the two of us. ‘Me, I am going to see what I can find about this argent business. And maybe that Argentein fellow too.’
Have you ever tried to trace your family history? If you have, you’ll know the procedure has certain limitations.
History’s rather big, and seven hundred years is a really long time. Captain Obvious, I know, but the relative numbers of written records that have survived from as far back as the fourteenth century are minimal. Time does terrible things to organic substances. Also, a lack of cohesive and centralised social structures in those earlier eras meant that many of the records we now take for granted — births, deaths, etc — were never created in the first place.
For these reasons, Jay and I soon gave up on tracing Mary Werewode’s line. The only reason we knew her for an ancestor of Cicily’s at all was because Cicily wrote about it — in the one book of hers we’ve managed to find. Tracking down any more of Mary’s descendants quickly proved futile.
Cicily Werewode isn’t that much better. She may have lived two hundred years later than her batshit crazy great-great-grandmother, but that didn’t help us a great deal either. We aren’t exactly overwhelmed with surviving papers from the sixteenth century.
We ended up scouring twentieth-century death records for anyone of the name of Werewode who’d died in the Yorkshire area in the past century or so. The idea was to track those people’s lines back as far as possible, and so on, which is damnably imprecise. After all, people can move a long, long way in five hundred years; the descendants of Cicily’s own parents or siblings could be far from Yorkshire by now. They could be on the other side of the world.
We did not get very far, for the simple reason that the Werewode family seems to have died out.
‘No one of that name,’ I regretfully concluded, after trying every variant I could think of (Werewood, Wherewode, Weirwode, and so on) in every online records depository I know of.
‘They’re all dead?’ said Jay. ‘Is that what that means?’
‘It could mean that the line has died out somewhere in the past five hundred years,’ I answered. ‘It could also mean that the name changed somewhere in that time. If Cicily had a brother, for example, he might have married and had long issue, all with the Werewode name. But if she only had a sister, that sister might also have married and had long issue, but under her husband’s name.’
‘Which we can’t find,’ Jay said. ‘Because there are no records about Cicily’s life back in fifteen-something.’
I looked at him. ‘You weren’t under the impression this might be easy, were you?’
‘I got a little excited,’ he admitted. ‘Back there when we were brainstorming. It seemed like we were within a stone’s throw of an answer.’
‘It always does, when you get a bright idea. Then you have to do the grunt work.’ I closed down the thirty or so browser tabs I had open, and pushed my chair back from the computer. We were holed up in a study nook in one of the library’s antechambers, alone thankfully, with all the firepower that a fast internet connection could give us. Nonetheless, we were getting nowhere. I’d have to rethink.
‘Is it always like this?’ said Jay.
‘What? Library missions? Pretty much. I could easily spend a week digging through the internet looking for this one family line, and end up with nothing. That’s how it goes. Lots of dead ends.’
Jay muttered something, of which I distinguished the words drive me crazy.
I grinned. ‘It can drive me a bit crazy too, eventually, which is probably why I’ve ended up doing field work most of the time. But on the plus side, there’s little to compare to the thrill of suddenly finding your answer, against all the odds, buried in some obscure document at the bottom of some forgotten archive. That, I believe, is what keeps Val going. And she’s tireless. If anyone can trace the real Valentine Argentein, it’s her.’
Jay nodded along like a man but partially convinced. ‘Where does that leave us?’ he said. ‘We’re stopping?’
‘Yes. I don’t really want to sink a week into this project. That kind of time, we’d have to be pretty sure of finding the answers we want. And we aren’t. I mean, it’s still quite possible that Mary Werewode was just crazy and Cicily was just deluded. Crystobel Elvyng could be absolutely right: we’re on a wild goose chase.’
‘You obviously don’t think so.’
‘It would be fairer to say I’m hoping not. But I’m influenced by Val’s instincts here. If she thinks there’s something worth digging for, I’d bet you my rainbow crystal chest that she’s right. Do you have any idea what kind of track record she has with this stuff?’
‘An impressive one.’
‘To say the least. Nonetheless, this isn’t really my forte anymore, and it certainly isn’t yours. There has to be a better way to find what we’re after.’ I sat and thought.
So did Jay.
Nothing bubbled up.
‘Right, let’s think about it another way,’ I said. ‘Roleplay. We’re Cicily Werewode. We’ve spent a lifetime raising Elvyng children and secretly studying alchemy in our spare time. Our husband never took our work seriously so we soon stopped talking to him about it. And when we finally discovered something of value — something that made it real — we could have gone crowing in triumph to our doubting marital relatives and showed them what we’d done, but maybe we had some lingering resentment for their failure to support us before—’
‘And their distrust of our Yllanfalen heritage,’ Jay put in. ‘We’ve had to behave like a proper human lady magician and not pursue projects more befitting of strange fae magick, and that was terribly unfair. They don’t deserve to have what we’ve found. And they’d only milk it for cash if they did.’
I waited a moment until I was sure Jay had finished, watching him slightly wild-eyed. He was really getting into that part. I wondered fleetingly if his father had experienced any of that kind of distrust over his half-fae blood. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So we’ve decided to hide it from them, and we do that successfully for… some time. Then what?’
‘We decide to hide our journals and records by giving them to our trusted relatives.’
‘Why? Was the work finished? That doesn’t strike me as a project that would ever be quite done with. There would always be something else to research, something new to try. It’s a life’s work kind of project.’
‘Deathbed, then,’ said Jay. ‘We’re dying. We need someone to bequeath our “silly, womanly scrawl” to. We want to make sure they go beyond the reach of the Elvyngs, but without exciting their suspicion or evoking their avarice.’
‘We can’t bequeath them to our children because they are all Elvyngs. So we choose… a niece, perhaps. Emily Werewode, beloved daughter of our brother George, to whom we have always been close, and who always expressed a flattering interest in everything we did—’ I stopped. ‘Would we though? Jay, who else was close to Cicily and beyond the reach of the Elvyngs?’
Jay thought. ‘Her father? And any other Yllanfalen relatives she may have had on his side?’
‘Could’ve been them.’
‘But— but there was nothing about her, or written by her, in the library at Aylligranir.’
‘Probably nothing, but even if the Lorekeeper was telling the truth about that, it’s not decisive. It’s the palace library, doubtless the best library in the kingdom, but Cicily wouldn’t have left her books to the monarch. She’d have left them to her father, or — or a half-sibling of her own.’
‘And they came from Everynden,’ said Jay slowly. ‘The location of the fabled Moonsilver Mines, but which were long since empty by then.’
‘Her father might have been very interested in her work. Could even have helped her with it.’
‘Then why didn’t she mention him in her journal? She wrote only about Mary Werewode’s work.’
‘Maybe she didn’t know her father yet, at the age of twenty. Maybe she hadn’t yet shared her work with him. Maybe she just didn’t want to write about him — or she did, but she did it in a code we haven’t yet deciphered. Could be anything. We’ll probably never know.’
‘Great,’ said Jay, sagging in his chair. ‘I’m calling this the Case of the Endless Dead Ends.’
‘It’s not a dead end!’ I said. ‘We can’t guess who she left her books to because it could have gone either way; human relatives or Yllanfalen. But we might be able to find out.’
