by ‘You think there’s a surviving will?’ Jay’s voice oozed scepticism.
‘There could be. There really could be. People’s wills are a great source of historical info, especially from the early modern period. It’s the one kind of document anyone with any property at all would create, and since they were important they tended to be cared for. Lots of last-will-and-testaments have survived, relatively speaking. And Cicily was an Elvyng. We know that family line has survived, and if they’ve managed to hang on to the same house all these centuries, surely they’ve hung onto a lot of family papers too.’
Jay began to look revived. And thoughtful.
‘The difficulty is getting hold of them,’ I said. ‘I already conducted a search of the Academy’s attics and didn’t find anything like that.’
‘Attics?’ said Jay, and the scepticism was back.
No, not scepticism. Exasperation.
‘Why would they keep papers like that in an attic?’ said Jay.
I shrugged. ‘Lots of old families don’t really value that kind of thing, or they just don’t really know what they have. A lot of it gets passed down in boxes, and it goes in the attic with the rest of grandma’s stuff that you don’t know what to do with but feel too guilty to throw out.’
‘Likely true,’ said Jay. ‘But this is the Elvyng family. They know the value of everything.’
‘Point,’ I conceded.
‘There’s an archive in the cellar,’ he continued. ‘It’s a repository for all the records, documents and so on pertaining to the academy’s history and its students — you know the kind of thing. But since it’s specially designed to keep fragile paperwork from succumbing to the ravages of time — and since this is the fabulously wealthy Elvyngs and they have stuff like that book box I’d still give my left arm for — I think they know how to keep old documents intact.’
I felt a rising excitement — and a commensurate puzzlement. ‘Totally conceivable that they’d have ancient family papers somewhere in there, I grant you, and you’re a genius. One question, though. How the hell do you know all that?’
‘I’m alumni.’
‘You… studied there?’
Jay inclined his head. He had the grace to look faintly abashed. ‘Um, they have the best musical programme in the country… I did a six-year stint there before the University.’
I swallowed my envy with only a little difficulty. ‘Excellent,’ I managed. ‘Sometime you should tell me every single detail about what that was like, but in the meantime: how do we extract paperwork from this mythical archive?’
‘Easy,’ said Jay. He’d taken something out of his wallet while he spoke, and now waved it around. I gathered that it was an Elvyng Alumni card of some sort. ‘I’ll submit a research request.’
‘You can do that?’
Jay nodded, already pushing me out of the way of the computer. ‘This doubles as a library card.’
And back came the envy.
We had an answer far more quickly than I’d dared to hope. Jay’s request was processed within an hour, and when he opened up the email he found it contained an attachment.
‘Dear Mr. Patel,’ Jay read. ‘Your request for yada yada has been received, blah blah… ah! They’ve found it.’
He opened the attachment, and up came a scanned facsimile of Cicily Werewode’s last will and testament.
The document was in surprisingly good shape considering it was five hundred years old. Testament to the Elvyngs’ magickal conveniences, no doubt. But since it was written in tiny, crabbed script, it bordered upon illegible.
‘We’re going to need Val for this,’ said I.
‘She has a plus one buff to Deciphering?’ Jay said.
The only response I could offer was a blank look. ‘What?’
‘It’s a gaming joke — never mind.’
‘It’s just the effect of long, long practice.’
‘Rude,’ said Jay as I forwarded the email to Val. ‘She’s not much older than you.’
‘I know, but she’s spent every minute of her Society career in the library, nosing through old documents.’
‘While you’ve spent yours…?’
‘Heroically swiping artefacts of indescribable value from the hands of the unworthy.’ We were en route by then, heading away from our cosy study carrel back to Val’s desk. Where, of course, she was. As always. ‘Val! Check your email.’
Val ceased her perusal of an unidentifiable tome of some antiquity, and glowered at us. She’d surrounded herself with stacks of books tall enough almost to obscure her entirely. ‘I don’t do email when I am reading.’
‘I know, but you’ll want to see this one right away. Promise.’ I couldn’t sit and wait for her to read it; I was too excited. I stood instead, barely suppressing the impulse to bounce on my toes. Nervous energy does that to me. What would the will say? Would it hold the answers we needed? It had to. I was getting heartily sick of going in circles.
Val closed her tome, carefully and grudgingly, and removed her reading spectacles. Once she had her phone in hand and our email on her screen, though, her attitude changed in a flash. As I’d known it would. ‘Her will?’ she said, looking sharply at me. ‘Ves, you sorceress of mystery, how did you get this?’
‘Nothing to do with me,’ I said, pointing at the Jay who was trying to skulk unnoticed behind me. ‘Seems we have an Elvyng Academy alumnus among us.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Val. ‘Why didn’t I know that?’
‘He appears to be embarrassed by it,’ I said, but Val wasn’t listening. Cicily Werewode’s will had absorbed her utterly.
‘I’m not embarrassed,’ Jay muttered.
‘No? With your personal history, most people would have the town crier out about it. Fae ancestry and the most prestigious school of magick in Britain on your CV?’
‘Thank you for appreciating that I’m not an obnoxious prat.’
‘No. Incredibly, scarily hard-working, though. When did you have time for games?’
‘Somewhere between two and three in the morning, when my eyes were bleeding too much to read any more.’
‘Most people would consider that a good time to go to sleep.’
‘At the risk of sounding like said obnoxious prat, most people didn’t go to the Elvyng Academy.’
‘Touché.’ I saluted.
‘I— didn’t mean to cast aspersions upon your work ethic—’ Jay backpedalled furiously.
‘And I am mortally offended, but I’ll forgive you purely for using the phrase cast aspersions upon.’
‘Hush,’ said Val absently.
We hushed.
About three minutes later, she looked up. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, and looked back at her phone, as though the words of the will might have changed in those few seconds. ‘Cicily left all her worldly possessions to her son, Godfrey Elvyng.’
‘That’s it?’ I caught myself leaning over the desk to get a look at the phone, as though it might say something else if I took a look at it.
‘That’s it,’ said Val. ‘No sign in here that she had any other children, or siblings either.’
‘No mention of her father or grandfather either?’
‘Not a one.’
‘Well,’ I said numbly. ‘Curse it.’
There went our theory.
‘She could still have given her books to a relative, before she died,’ Jay said. ‘Maybe not so close as a sibling. A cousin?’
‘Could have,’ I sighed, sinking into a chair. ‘But if she did, it’s of no use to us. We’ve no way to find them.’
‘Or her father.’
‘Ditto.’
‘Well, but,’ said Val. She’d put the phone down, and now stared instead at a point some way over my head. I recognised her thinking face. ‘What if she didn’t?’
‘Didn’t what?’
‘Give away her books. What if she didn’t have any other relatives, just the Elvyngs? What if her son did inherit everything — including her work on alchemy?’
I sat up a bit, thinking. ‘The family might not have kept her journals, if they didn’t know there was anything valuable in them.’
‘What if they did?’
I blinked. ‘What?’
‘Listen. With the academic species of mystery, you run into a lot of dead ends. Sometimes it’s just ill luck; there really isn’t a paper trail to wherever you’re trying to go. But sometimes, it means you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Consider. We concluded that the Elvyngs never took Cicily’s work seriously, or that they never knew about it at all. And that supposition sent us off looking for the other people in her life. But what if we were wrong?’
‘They knew?’ said Jay. ‘Her son knew?’
‘What she was doing, and that it had value. Yes. He might even have helped her, for all we know. So he inherited all of her possessions; what happened then?’
‘Then— then the Elvyngs had the secret of the argent,’ I said.
‘If Cicily succeeded, yes. They at least had whatever progress she had made by the time of her death, and could have built on it afterwards.’
‘You’re suggesting they’ve had this secret since at least, what, the early seventeenth century.’
‘They might have. How do we know otherwise?’
‘We don’t. We— why would they hide the fact? Why wouldn’t they shout it from the rafters?’
Val’s smile was a bit twisted. ‘Capitalism?’
I thought about the Elvyng Emporium, and its stock of indescribable wonders. ‘They could be argent-powered,’ I said slowly. ‘Some of those things they sell. Certainly some of the things they use. If it was hidden, how would anybody know? And if nobody knew, how would anyone compete?’
‘They do have remarkably potent charms,’ Jay agreed. ‘And a long history of unusually powerful magicians.’
My eyes grew big. ‘Forget your earlier conspiracy theory, Jay. This is the real stuff!’
