by ‘Crystobel Elvyng,’ I hissed. ‘She’s been here.’
Jay held up his hands. ‘Hang on. Maybe there’s another explanation.’
‘If so, that would have to be a huge coincidence.’
‘Coincidences do happen. That’s why there’s a word for it.’
‘All right.’
‘And why would Crystobel take it away?’
‘She knows I was up here, and didn’t want us to examine it further.’
‘How would she know that?’
I opened my mouth, and paused. ‘Um. Someone saw me?’
Jay shrugged. ‘Or it has nothing to do with Crystobel.’
‘Why would people randomly move paintings around?’
‘Not at random. I can’t say I paid much attention to the relative positions of the Academy’s paintings in my day, but there are rather a lot of them. And they’re sensitive to light damage, as you well know. The more prominent positions also tend to be well-lit, and no painting can be safely left in strong light for long.’
‘I still think it’s a huge coincidence.’
‘Take heart. I might be proved wrong, and you can hare after the perfidious Crystobel after all, Wand raised to destroy.’
I didn’t miss his use of the singular pronoun. This was one wild escapade I’d be going on alone. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Where do you suppose it might have been taken to?’
‘Somewhere more prominent,’ said Jay, turning on his heel as he spoke, and marching out of the garret again. Back down the stairs we went, down and down — and found the portrait, inevitably, in the main hallway, right over the fireplace.
‘We walked straight past it,’ I said, tasting bitter chagrin. ‘What’s worse, it might even be our fault that it’s been moved down here. Val was asking the tour guide about Cicily, and she was the one who told us about the portrait. They’re probably responding to visitor interest.’
‘I’ll get you a hair shirt to wear when we get back,’ Jay promised. ‘In the meantime: what was it you were planning to do with it?’
We stood in front of the fireplace in the darkened hall, both of us staring dumbly up at Cicily’s face. We hadn’t wanted to advertise our presence by switching on lights, and Cicily looked eerier than ever in the faint, harsh glow emitted by our phone screens. She’d seemed welcoming before, but now…
I shrugged off the thought. ‘We need to take her outside,’ I said, and before Jay could (wisely) stop me, I’d reached up and plucked the portrait off the wall.
I paused for a breathless second, just in case some kind of magickal alarm sounded and brought a vengeful Rina Patel bursting in upon us (not to mention my new favourite nemesis, Crystobel).
When nothing happened, I turned triumphantly to the front door. ‘Open, please,’ I said, either to Jay or to the door, whichever felt disposed to answer.
As it happens, it was the door. Jay moved to open it for me, but already it was in creaking motion, and moonlight came streaming in.
Once outside, I stood looking up at the serene heavens. It was just about fully dark, and the clear skies were bathed in moonglow. ‘It would be a bit more perfect were it full moon,’ I said. ‘But three-quarters ought to do.’ Carefully, carefully — do not drop it, Cordelia Vesper, or there will never be enough hair-shirts in the world for you — I turned the painting face up to the moonlight, wrapping all ten fingers around the frame. ‘Come on,’ I muttered. ‘Time to fizz.’
‘Fizz?’ said Jay, watching over my shoulder.
‘Those jazzy little sparks Val spoke of. Now’s the time.’ I shook the painting a little, rubbed the frame with my fingers (it worked for Aladdin’s lamp, why not a sixteenth century painting?), and even hummed a couple of bars of Syllphyllan.
To no avail. Not so much as a flicker of a response did Cicily give, and the moonlight was gone from her hair.
Jay looked around. ‘I hate to rush you, but if we’re caught standing out here with an irreplaceable painting, I don’t know who is going to believe we weren’t trying to steal it.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said absently. ‘Rina will save you.’
Jay snorted. ‘We’d more likely get her fired.’
I searched Cicily’s face for clues, and stared into her limpid blue eyes. ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘You had something to say, I know it. Speak to me.’
She didn’t. But something else happened. It began as a spark in the depths of those eyes, distant as a star, so faint I held my breath for fear of scaring it away again. The glimmer grew, and spread, until her eyes were bright with life and — I could swear — comprehension. Recognition.
‘Ves,’ Jay breathed in awe. ‘You appear to be onto something.’
‘Thank you, doubting Thomas.’ I whispered the words, still unwilling to risk disrupting whatever delicate process was underway. A faint blush of health returned to her oil-painted cheeks, a sheen of something no artist, however talented, could ever capture: life itself. A soft night-breeze ruffled my hair, and Cicily’s also stirred in the wind.
‘This is not a ghost,’ Jay said.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘She’s far too alive.’
And she was, yet also still a construct of canvas and oils. My fingers were fizzing in earnest by then, and I couldn’t have said whether that, too, was a coincidence, or whether the wayward magick in me responded to some peculiar property of the painting. Either way, Cicily Werewode’s beautiful Yllanfalen eyes blinked once, twice; and then she spoke.
‘Who…?’ she whispered, her voice distant and echoing, as though she spoke from very far away.
Then she said, ‘Mary? Is that you?’
I swallowed. ‘It— it is not Mary. It’s—’
‘Grandfather?’ said Cicily.
Did she hear me at all?
‘Why’s she trying to talk to Mary?’ Jay hissed in my ear. ‘Mary Werewode died long before she was born.’
A fair question. ‘Maybe a different Mary,’ I suggested. ‘It’s been a common name since approximately forever.’
‘Coincidence? Again?’
I knew he was teasing me, but I wavered. And caved. ‘No. You’re right. That’s too many coincidences. It has to be the same Mary.’
‘There’s no other possible explanation,’ Jay agreed, and I heard the grin in his words.
Ignoring Jay, I touched a forefinger to the painting’s surface, although not right over Cicily’s face. ‘Cicily,’ I said. ‘Can you hear me?’
Her strange, animated face blinked again, her mouth an ‘O’ of dismay. Her eyes moved, narrowed, as though she were trying to see out of the painting. ‘Mary?’ she said again.
‘It is not Mary. I am… Cordelia.’ “Ves” would not sound like a name to her, and I didn’t want to add to her confusion.
‘Cor…’ she whispered, faintly, as though drawing farther off.
‘Cordelia! Yes!’ I was gripping the painting’s frame too hard in my excitement; I forced myself to relax, until the white faded from my knuckles. It wouldn’t do to rend the thing to bits out of sheer enthusiasm.
‘I do not know any Cordelia.’ The words barely reached my ears, so soft-spoken they were. Her eyes drifted shut, opened, shut again.
‘Wait,’ I said, panicked. ‘All right, it’s Mary. Mary Werewode.’
The eyes opened once more, and looked directly at me. Sharp. Keen. I quailed a little, caught out in a puerile lie — but she was still awake.
‘You are different,’ she said.
‘Many years have passed.’
‘How many?’ Moonlight rode a wave of her hair, vanishing with a glitter.
‘Over four hundred years.’
Cicily fell silent, probably with astonishment.
Jay, however, spoke. ‘Ves,’ he said, in a low, urgent tone which took me by surprise. ‘This is not good magick.’
‘Good magick? There is no such thing as good or bad magick, Jay. Zareen should have been enough to teach you that.’
He shook his head. ‘Then call it unobjectionable and questionable magick, if you will, and this is deeply questionable.’
‘Why?’ I kept a close eye on Cicily, unsure whether she followed or cared for our conversation. She gave no sign of doing either.
‘I’ve… heard of this.’
‘This?’ I gave the painting a tiny, illustrative shake.
‘Yes. It’s a kind of— of trap. It isn’t a ghost, not exactly, and she’s not bound to the painting in the same way that Millie’s bound into the walls of her farmhouse. It’s similar, but not—’
‘Jay, spit it out. Please.’
‘It’s done while the subject is still alive.’
‘What.’
‘Or it was. I need hardly add that it’s completely, totally banned now, even on a voluntary subject.’
‘Voluntary?’
‘Some people sought the procedure. After all, if your living essence is bound into a very long-lived item like a painting, then you don’t die.’
I stared at the semblance of Cicily Werewode, my skin crawling at the idea. She hadn’t died. Not because she or her ancestors had discovered the mythical elixir of immortality, but because she’d resigned her living, breathing personhood in favour of the cramped confines of a painting about six inches across.
Willingly? Or not?
‘Cicily,’ I said grimly. ‘Cicily Werewode. How did this portrait come to exist?’
No answer. Was this the first time in centuries that Cicily, such as she was, had spoken? Long stupor had made her vague, sleepy.
I swallowed. ‘She looks so young.’
‘Doesn’t necessarily mean she was young when this was done to her. A person’s living essence has little to do with the age of their physical shell, after all, and the artist could paint her any way she liked.’
‘Is she… is she a whole person, in there? Or more like — like an echo?’
Jay shrugged. ‘My knowledge is limited. I can’t answer that.’
‘Why haven’t I ever heard of it?’
A pause. Possibly an embarrassed pause. ‘I shouldn’t have, either,’ Jay admitted. ‘It’s not only banned, all books on the subject are banned from circulation, too. They tend to be under lock and key… I’d forgotten all about it until just now.’
A lock and key which had served as little bar to a younger, very curious Jay, I surmised. The (questionable) fruits of attending so prestigious an academy — or had he gone delving in the archives of the Hidden University? Despite myself, I was a little bit impressed. I’d never have thought that strait-laced Jay’s thirst for knowledge might have ever overpowered his caution.
Then again, where had that extreme caution come from? Perhaps he’d been caught, sometime in the past. Perhaps he’d had good reason to swear off similar transgressions for the future.
I filed the thought away. Now wasn’t the time for pestering for details.
‘This is creepy as hell,’ I muttered. ‘Seriously, I thought hanging around with Zareen was the creepiest my life was ever going to get.’
‘It ought to be. I’d really like to think nobody’s done this in at least a couple of centuries.’
But was it wrong, when performed for a willing subject? Everyone ought to have the right to make such a choice, surely.
I remembered the trace of melancholy I thought I’d seen in Cicily’s face, and I wondered.
‘Right,’ I said, giving myself a mental shake. ‘We’re getting side-tracked. We’ll have to report this to Milady; I don’t know if something needs to be done here.’
‘Bet you anything you like there’s a similar portrait of Mary Werewode out there somewhere,’ said Jay.
‘Yes,’ I hissed. ‘Not a book, but a Mary-painting. That’s why she’s trying to talk to Mary.’
‘I am now just a little gutted over how many hours we’ve spent searching for written records.’
‘We? I’ve spent three weeks looking for books that never existed. You’ve been on the job for about thirty-six hours.’
‘Have I ever mentioned how deeply I admire your dedication?’ said Jay.
‘If I thought you meant it, I’d be flattered.’
‘Maybe I do.’
‘Still getting side tracked,’ I said. ‘We’re here about argent, not paintings.’
‘Or flattery. My bad.’
Something happened when I said that word, argent. One of my fizzes, to say the least: magick sparked in a rush, so potent I feared I’d set the frame on fire. Magick and moonlight rippled over the canvas’s surface, briefly obscuring Cicily’s face in a haze of pale silver.
Sudden enlightenment dawned. I turned the painting over, and saw nothing on the back but a plain wooden backing. Nonetheless, I knew without doubt. ‘This thing is painted on argent,’ I whispered. ‘The frame is probably full of the stuff, too.’
‘I bet argent would make the entire person-preserving process a lot easier,’ said Jay grimly. ‘Maybe the Elvyngs aren’t wrong to keep a lid on it.’
I doubted that had much to do with their motive, but what did I know? Perhaps they were acting out of a sense of civic responsibility as much as out of greed. People were complex.
Anyway. ‘Cicily Werewode-Elvyng,’ I said, more loudly. ‘Did you discover the secret of argent?’
The soft lights had faded by then, leaving her image clear once more. She looked enlivened, her eyes brighter, her cheeks flushed with a glow of healthful colour. The effects of moonlight? Magick? Argent? Some combination of all three?
‘I did not,’ she said, distant still, but more clearly.
My heart sank a little. Crystobel Elvyng had indeed been telling the truth.
Jay spoke up. ‘What about your son?’
Cicily’s head shook, side to side, in a gentle negative.
That surprised me — and dismayed me. What, had Crystobel been right about everything?
‘Why not?’ said Jay.
Her brow creased in mild puzzlement. ‘What need had we?’ said she. ‘Twas your own work, Mary. Why do you now ask this of me?’
‘Mary—?’ I said, thunderstruck. Mary had discovered it, all the way back in the thirteen hundreds? Crazy, moon-bathing Mary? No wonder we’d struck out on finding further accounts of Cicily’s work. Having penned her early journals, she’d stopped investigating after all — not because she got married, but because she realised her great-great-great-grandmother had already succeeded. And her husband’s family had benefited spectacularly from the find.
But how had that secret been kept from everyone else? Had Mary’s reputation for eccentricity been enough?
‘Now for the billion-pound question,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Cicily, I have lost my work. The years have stolen it away. Where is it, my beloved great-granddaughter? I would have it restored to me.’
Cicily, to my extreme surprise, laughed. Naturally she had a high, tinkling laugh, sweet like a soft summer breeze. For heaven’s sake. ‘Have you, then, forgot?’
‘Yes. I am seven hundred years old, and very forgetful.’
‘Then you must go back to the source, must not you?’
‘The source?’ This received no response, and to my alarm the vagueness was creeping back into Cicily’s eyes. I received the chilling impression that not quite a whole person lingered here, if ever she had been. Time had cracked and weathered her, and what was left was but a fraction of her former self.
‘Cicily,’ I said urgently. ‘Where is the source? I have forgotten that, too.’
The brow creased again, gently. ‘Argentein?’ she said.
My heart thrilled. Argentein! A link with the mysterious Valentine! ‘Who is—’ I began, and stopped.
Jay realised it the same moment I did. ‘Valentine Argentein,’ he gasped. ‘It isn’t a person. It’s a place.’
‘Giddy sodding gods.’
