by To my surprise, when we entered the illustrious Academy building we found the entrance hall full of people. And I do mean full. They weren’t students either, or they didn’t look like it. Most were at least my age or older, and only about half were human. The rest were fae of various tribes and cultures, including a couple of spriggans, a troll, and a willowy silver-haired man who would’ve looked right at home in the kingdoms of the Yllanfalen. I’d expect to see such a rabble pouring through the doors of the Emporium, but what were they doing here at the Academy?
A petite woman with a blonde ponytail and a thousand-watt smile spotted us as we came in, and leapt to clear room for Val’s chair. ‘Are you here for the tour?’ she asked us.
‘N—’ began Val.
‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘We’d love to join the tour.’ Not only were tours sometimes surprisingly informative, but the general chaos they caused was also perfect for surreptitiously sneaking off. Nobody would notice if a tour of twenty-plus people suddenly shrank by, say, one or two.
‘Great!’ said the tour guide, displaying enough energy for twelve people as she herded us all into a roughly organised group, and took up a position at the front. She placed Val front and centre, which was both considerate and convenient. We got a clear view of everything, even in the crowd.
The Academy building was not quite what I had pictured. It was small, relatively speaking, and I had no trouble believing that it had once been a private residence. The walls were built from that lovely, dark-red brick they favoured in the 1500s, at least those who could afford it; those things were painstakingly crafted by hand, after all. The leaded windows looked original, and the place had the eccentric, poky structure of antiquity; none of the clear, open spaces and featureless décor one would expect to find in a modern educational establishment. The Elvyngs hadn’t stinted on ornaments, either. Oil paintings hung in ornate frames upon every wall, probably depicting former scions of their line, and I spotted more than one artefact of great age and value prominently upon display.
They must have good security at the Elvyng Academy — and a charming confidence in the rectitude of their students.
Hopefully the security wasn’t going to get in my way later. I had nothing like so much faith in my own rectitude. Oh, not that I was planning to walk off with a fourteenth-century enchanted music box (tempted though I might be). But a little sneaking and stealthing might well be in order.
‘Welcome to the Elvyng Academy!’ roared our tour guide, and the low babble of chatter and rustling of fidgeting people slowly ceased. ‘Over the next half-hour I’ll be showing you the highlights of this remarkable, early sixteenth-century building, home to generations of the brightest minds in magick. The Elvyng family’s contributions to magick are deservedly legendary, and you’ll be hearing all about those today.
‘It is the summer holidays so most classes are suspended this week. There may be one or two study groups still in session, so I must ask you please to keep the chatter to a minimum as we proceed. Okay?’ Tour Guide Lady beamed upon us.
We were an obedient tour group, for nobody spoke.
‘Okay, let’s begin!’ Tour Guide Lady led us out of the main hall and into a kind of salon, its contents correct for the sixteenth century: heavy, English oak chests and cabinet chairs, tapestries, etc. More paintings, the largest of which we halted in front of.
‘The Elvyng family legacy began with Ambrose Elvyng in the late fourteen hundreds,’ said Tour Guide Lady. I caught a glimpse of her nametag. Denise. ‘An early pioneer of the arts of charm-binding, he’s said to have been among the first to lastingly imbue inanimate objects with magickal properties. Isn’t that impressive? But it was his son, Wauter Elvyng, and his daughter Godlefe who founded the Elvyng Academy…’
Blah blah blah. I stopped listening, having already read much of this information off the internet. Keeping half an ear open for any mention of Cicily or the Werewodes, I devoted myself to a surreptitious study of the contents of an impromptu bookcase set up atop a heavy oak chest behind Denise. Between two weighty bookends of imbued crystal were half a dozen reasonably aged-looking books.
Great Expectations, Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre…
Novels.
I suppose it was too much to hope that a book titled Magickal Silver and How to Make it would be lying there waiting for me, but was an interesting magickal tome or two just too much to ask of the Elvyngs?
Feeling obscurely piqued, I folded my arms.
‘What about Cicily Werewode?’ Val said, firmly interrupting Denise as she streamed smoothly onto the next topic. ‘She married Degare Elvyng, didn’t she?’
‘I believe so,’ beamed Denise.
‘What can you tell us about connections between the Elvyng family and the Werewodes?’ said Val.
Denise’s smile faltered. ‘Uh, there are no known connections with a family of that name, but I believe there is a portrait of Cicily Elvyng in the house. Perhaps in one of the bedchambers?
‘We would like to see that,’ declared Val.
Denise’s smile returned. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be included as part of this tour. Now! If you’ll follow me into the conservatory…’
Val shot me a meaningful look. Probably it said, so much for your bright idea of joining the tour.
‘Sorry,’ I mouthed.
Val shook her head, rolled her eyes, and made an awkward jerking motion in the direction of the upstairs. Then she sailed after the vanishing crowd of tourists.
Oh. Right.
Val couldn’t hope to sneak away without her absence being noted; not after she’d been given so prominent a position at the front of the tour, and being the only person in a wheelchair at that. But I could.
Portrait of Cicily Werewode. Right.
I waited until the rest of my tour group had disappeared through the far door after Denise, then quietly retreated back the way we’d come in. I’d glimpsed a set of stairs leading off one of the passageways we had passed through, which to my relief proved easy to find again (this is me we’re talking about, here. If anyone could get lost in the space of two rooms and a couple of passageways it would be me). I stole up to the first floor, blessing my random choice to wear flat, sneaking sandals instead of the heels I’d briefly considered. Thanks to the summer holidays, I encountered no one as I wandered into room after room.
I soon concluded I was still on the wrong floor. If any of these chambers had been bedrooms once, they were classrooms now, and none of them featured portraits on the walls. It took me ten minutes to find more staircases up, and I began to feel a little nervous of the time. How long would the tour take? Would anybody notice I was no longer in the group? Val could cover for me, but still… I darted up more stairs, and found myself at last on a floor with a certain air of neglect about it. Dustier than the floors below, and much less decorated, it looked little used and little valued; the deep blue carpets covering the floors were faded and threadbare, and nothing had benefited from a coat of paint in a while.
It was also much more cramped. I was entering the roof space, I judged, for the ceilings were lower and sloping. Servants were probably housed here, once, and now? Storage space. The kind of place boxes of old papers might be kept. And old, forgotten bedchambers nobody now had a use for.
I opened a door at random — and stopped, arrested. I’d found a bedchamber, but so small it bordered upon classifiable as a garret. The furniture, simple and inexpensive, included a narrow bed with faded green tapestry curtains, a lone oak chest, and a couple of blue plastic chairs incongruously dumped in a corner.
A portrait hung by the window. Circular, mean in proportion and poorly maintained, the image was darkened with age and dirt; however, the subject matter shone through to my interested eye. It showed a woman’s face in profile, her pale hair crimped and braided according to the fashions of the fifteen hundreds. The portrait itself excited no especial remark, being a merely workmanlike piece of art; but the subject matter had me across the room in seconds, examining it more closely with breathless interest.
The woman was not human.
Or, not only human. The shape of her face was human enough, and though only her head, neck and shoulders were depicted, nothing suggested she was of other than ordinary human stature. But that hair was unusual: still pale blonde, despite the layers of grime coating the image. Were it cleaned, the woman’s hair would likely prove to be silvery in hue. Her eyes, too, could pass for blue, but were shaded with amethyst. I couldn’t have said what else it was about her that gave her ancestry away; something about her bone structure, perhaps, or even just some species of intuition with which we’re all occasionally blessed. But like the willowy man I’d seen below, the woman in the painting would not have looked too out of place among the Yllanfalen.
The Elvyngs had an Yllanfalen ancestress.
And somehow, I knew in my heart that this was Cicily Werewode. The era was right, the clothes she wore, everything.
‘Cicily,’ I breathed, lightly touching the carved oak frame. What was she doing, exiled all the way up here? Why was her husband so celebrated, and not she? Doubt washed over me. Were we right to think that Cicily Werewode had been onto something with her ancestress’s work? Or that she had continued to pursue it even after marriage? Perhaps she wasn’t, or hadn’t. Perhaps she had got married and given everything else up, as so many women had chosen to — or been obliged to.
But her obvious Yllanfalen ancestry suggested otherwise. I paused, thoughts awhirl, as disparate pieces of this puzzle swirled around my mind.
The Yllanfalen. At least one of their kingdoms — my mother’s, at present — had a magickal silver artefact that was of paramount importance to their culture. The lyre was so old, nobody really knew where it had come from, save that a mythical king out of legend was said to have created it. Well; had he used mined magickal silver, or had he — or someone of his court — created the silver, too? The possibility hadn’t crossed my mind before. But in my (admittedly not exhaustive) experience, the Yllanfalen were the only people who seemed to remember the Silver at all.
Mary Werewode. If Cicily had Yllanfal blood, had Mary also? How closely linked were the Werewodes to the Yllanfalen?
Mary and her moon-bathing. Moonsilver.
Skysilver? What had Mum actually called the stuff?
Both, I realised. She’d spoken of both. The lyre she talked of as made from “moonsilver”, and the syrinx pipes — like my own — were “skysilver”. I hadn’t asked what those things were, at the time, nor what the difference between them was supposed to be. But perhaps there was no difference. The names were a matter of legend only, they sounded good in a story — but in essence they were both the substance we were now calling (rather drearily, in contrast) magickal silver.
Hmm.
Had Mary Werewode favoured silver because she was Yllanfalen? That would explain why she had gone in so different a direction to every other alchemist of her era, eschewing mere gold in favour of a “Silver” far more valuable, to those who realised it. But most didn’t, hence the lack of respect in which she and her work were held.
Cicily had realised it. Had her husband? Had any of the Elvyngs? I’d never heard that the Elvyng family had any Yllanfalen connections. The influence of Cicily’s other heritage had long since disappeared.
I chewed a fingernail, my eyes still fixed to the strange, pale face of Cicily Werewode. Had the sixteenth-century Elvyngs had any idea what Cicily was talking about, or not? Had any of them taken her work seriously? Had she been permitted to pursue it at all? If so, where were the results of it now?
These were questions that urgently needed answering.
Then again, maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe alchemy alone wasn’t the answer. Maybe we needed to go looking for the Silver among the Yllanfalen.
Moved by some strange (and reprehensible) impulse, I stretched out my hand once more, and let my fingertips lightly rest upon the surface of the canvas. One does not, ordinarily, go about feeling up delicate articles of great age; even the slightest interference can damage them. I cannot say why I so violated all such principles this time; only that I felt an odd desire to link myself with the enigmatic figure of Cicily Werewode, even if only for a moment.
And what a moment for my fingers to fizz.
Fffupht. Magick spurted. I snatched my hand away, but too late: a ripple of eerie light flooded Cicily’s face, momentarily obscuring her features. When it faded, it left traces behind: a faint glimmer here and there, like motes of moonlight woven in her pale hair.
The dirt of centuries was gone. Cicily’s face smiled at me, clear and vivid, fresh as the day her image was captured in paints.
I waited, breathless with anticipation. But the seconds ticked by and nothing else happened, save that the light faded from Cicily Werewode’s hair.
I turned away at last, reluctant to leave so alluring, so vibrant a woman alone in this dingy little garret.
