Alchemy and Argent

‘Nancy Drew,’ I breathed. ‘I’ve read every single title there ever was.’

‘So?’ said Jay.

‘Every Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie. All of them.’

‘Reading detective stories doesn’t make you a detective, Ves.’

‘No. But it can make you want to be a detective, and suddenly I do.’

‘Wish granted.’

‘Cordelia Vesper, Book Detective.’

‘You already have a job, had you forgotten?’

I ignored this.

‘Merlin’s Grimoire,’ said Val. Upon our return Home, we’d gone first to Milady’s tower, second to breakfast, and had then, inevitably, rattled down to the library. Jay had voted for a few hours’ sleep first. Lightweight.

‘Isn’t it exciting?’ I beamed.

Val looked monumentally unimpressed. ‘It sounds like a fool’s errand.’

‘No!’

‘Like Ms. Elvyng has no intention of parting with her hard-won and priceless argent, but instead of being so rude as to say so, she’s sent us on a goose chase.’

‘She has all that proof of the book’s existence,’ I objected, gesturing at the laptop sitting on the corner of her enormous desk. Crystobel had been prompt in sending everything over. Val’s email was bristling with scanned paperwork.

‘Could be faked.’

‘That would be a lot of effort to go to just to avoid having to say no,’ I said. ‘Besides, when did she have time to prepare it? We only spoke to her a few hours ago.’

‘Maybe she set up this whole thing. Maybe she knew you’d be on her tail, and prepared a red herring especially.’

‘Val. Much as I respect a sound conspiracy theory, that’s usually my province. Your job is good sense.’

Val’s gaze flicked to Jay, then back to me. ‘Do you have any idea how many impossible books I’ve gone hunting for?’

‘Um. A few?’ I hazarded.

‘Quite a few. Books that somebody swore had existed, at one time or another. Books that could change everything, if only we could get a look at their contents. None of them ever worked out, Ves.’

And I saw the problem. Val had hoped, over and over again, and been disappointed. Some irrepressible part of her was hoping again; hoping that this incredible tome might be the one that was real. That it might have survived the destructive passage of centuries. That we might be able to reclaim it.

She didn’t want to hope, because she didn’t want the disappointment.

‘How about this,’ I said. ‘We’ll hope for the impossible things. You can go on being the Voice of Reason, or even the Voice of Crazy Conspiracy Theories. I’ll step aside. I don’t mind.’

‘We might need a bit of help, though,’ Jay said. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

That won him a scowl. ‘Right, ask the library lady, because she knows everything about all books known to man or beast. If I knew about this one, don’t you think I would have moved heaven and earth to get it already?’

‘Three weeks ago, we knew of no source of raw argent,’ Jay said. ‘Three months ago, we didn’t even know argent existed.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Nothing’s impossible.’

Val grunted.

‘We get to read it, Val,’ I said. ‘Imagine.’

‘I am imagining.’ Sourly said.

‘I promise to find it,’ I said solemnly. ‘And if I don’t, you can have my crystal chest and all of its contents.’

‘Including the regenerating tea cup?’ said Val.

‘Yes.’

‘And the endless chocolate pot?’

I swallowed. ‘Yes.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Lies.’

‘Truth. We need that argent, and I want a look at that book.’

She heaved a great sigh — and then set aside her objections in the twinkling of an eye. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Jay, you’re on police duty. Get in touch. See if you can get them to send over any police reports they have on the theft. Pull Milady’s influence if you have to.’

‘But why would—’ began Jay.

Val glared.

‘Right.’ He shot up from his chair, and left.

‘Ves, media duty. News reports. Gossip pages. Obscure treatises upon the arcane. We’ll need every reference to Merlin’s Grimoire that’s ever been made, especially any that intersect with mentions of the Elvyng family. Plus, if you find any mention of bad blood between the Elvyngs and any other family or group, highlight that too.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ I got up from my chair. ‘And what are you going to do?’

‘Me? I’m going to deep dive into the magickal dark web.’ Val stretched, cracked her knuckles, and opened up her laptop. ‘Somebody had the gumption and the know-how to steal from the Elvyngs, and get away with it. I rather fear we’re dealing with a considerable power.’

It took us ten minutes to trudge our way through to a road, by the end of which time I had mud up to my knees and I couldn’t feel my toes. ‘Isn’t it meant to be summer?’ I groused, trying in vain to shake the cold, sludgy grime out of my sandals.

Jay made no answer. He glanced up and down the road, which was a beautiful construct of white stone. The tree-cover having thinned somewhat, it shone silver under the moon. ‘I think this way,’ he said, picking a direction at what looked to me like random.

Being Jay, though, he was perfectly right. Soon enough, the walls of a town appeared on the horizon, with clustered houses behind it. Built from the same white stone as the road, the town looked a creation of pure magick, like it had coalesced out of moonlight itself, and would vanish with the rising of the sun.

Hell, this was fairyland. For all I knew, that’s exactly what it was.

‘Hoping that’s Everynden,’ I said.

‘The maps showed no other towns in the vicinity of that henge,’ said Jay. ‘Though being two hundred years out of date, who knows.’

‘And the mines are where in relation to the town?’

‘Somewhere around here,’ said Jay, and fell over.

I ran to his side. ‘Jay! Curse it, we should have something sensible out here, like lights.’

No answer. I searched the darkened ground for his prone form, and found nothing but empty air.

‘Jay?’

He hadn’t fallen over. He had disappeared.

‘Jay!’ I yelled. ‘This is a bad habit of yours!’

‘Sorry,’ he said from behind me, and I leapt a foot or so in the air.

‘And to think I used to like the night-time,’ I said plaintively. ‘Where did you go?’

All I could see of him was a tall, shadowed figure with threads of moonlight in his hair — and a glowing nugget of argent in the hand he held up. ‘Remember Torvaston’s tower?’

‘It was only the other week.’

‘And how the snuffbox worked?’

‘Like a passport to his majesty’s bedchamber.’

‘I don’t know if that’s a passive property of this argent stuff, or only a popular use for it, but thanks to this burny nugget of argent I appear to have found the mines.’ He held out a hand, which I tentatively took.

One step, two, and… three steps. Four. It took five or six before I realised we’d travelled from the grasslands outside Everynden into somewhere else. An underground somewhere, if the sudden, crisp chill in the air and the dampness against my bare arms was anything to go by.

‘I wonder if her queenship knew it would do that,’ I said.

‘Conspiracy theory says yes,’ said Jay.  

‘Top marks!’

Down below, even the moonlight failed us. We were entombed in the kind of utter darkness that blind, screaming panics are made of, and I engaged in a touch of unseemly haste as I summoned a little light-wisp to save us. White radiance flared. I sent the wisp floating high, and took a moment to collect myself as I looked around.

If you’ve ever visited natural cave formations, you’ll have some idea of what we saw. It wasn’t one of those vast, echoing kinds, the sort it would take half an hour to cross. Just a little one, with walls of mottled stone smoothed by endless years and the soft trickle of running water seeping in from somewhere above.

Here and there, deep holes had been hacked into the stone. Whatever had been removed from these jagged channels had left the faintest, silvery gleam behind, and my heart leapt.

‘Look,’ I said, trotting over to the nearest of these, and gingerly laying my hand against that silver tracery. It didn’t burn me, not the way the pure argent had, but I felt a sharp thrumming, as of lingering potential. Memory? Magick? The argent may be gone, but it had left something of itself behind. Something Mary Werewode had learned to capitalise upon.

Jay began a circuit of the cave, the soft sounds of his footsteps drifting back to me. ‘I don’t see any new argent, er, growing, or whatever it does,’ he reported.

‘This can’t be the entire mine, though,’ I answered. ‘Surely just a small part of it? And what about the moonlight?’

‘I see I have guests,’ said a new voice, and I once again jumped half out of my skin.

I whirled about, but saw no one. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Can you not guess?’ It was a woman’s voice, pitched a little low, and perfectly composed. My eyes narrowed. I’d heard it before, and recently too.

‘Ms. Elvyng?’ I ventured.

She laughed, and came at last into view, traversing some hidden bend in the tunnels we had yet to discover. ‘Sharp,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘Somehow I knew the two of you would be troublesome.’

I looked around for Jay, and found him drawing nearer to me. Unease prickled, and I despised the gut-dropping sense of uncertainty that briefly robbed me of all the sharp wits she had just praised. This we had not anticipated. What would she do? Was the argent a secret worth killing for?

She stopped a few feet before us, amusement still curving her lips and brightening her eyes. ‘You look white,’ she said to me. ‘And braced for combat,’ she added, looking then at Jay. ‘Come now, you can hardly imagine I would harm you, and I hope you won’t be so rude as to offer violence to me. The Society has better manners, no?’

‘We are trespassing,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes, and I’d be inclined to escort you out. Only I cannot imagine how you could possibly have contrived to enter here without the queen’s permission.’

‘She didn’t precisely give permission,’ I admitted. ‘But that’s because she didn’t tell us about this place. She did give us a… clue, however.’

Jay held up the nugget of argent. ‘Which, as it turns out, was also an entry ticket.’

Crystobel Elvyng nodded. ‘You know, the Society has a reputation for persistence. Wit. Expertise. To a degree frequently decried as highly inconvenient, and I find I now understand what they mean. It isn’t precisely ideal that you’ve nosed your way into this particular secret.’

‘We have good reason,’ I said quickly.

‘Which is what, exactly? I am afraid this partnership is not open to new members at this time.’

‘Partnership?’

‘The Yllanfalen own the mines. We own the secret of dredging new argent from within them. It is an arrangement which suits us both.’

‘We have zero designs on your secrets.’ It cost me to say that, for this was a secret I badly wanted to be let into. Who wouldn’t? But the goal was not the process; it was the product we wanted.

‘Just on the argent,’ I added.

Crystobel Elvyng raised one elegant brow. ‘I don’t precisely follow.’

‘If you have a supply of raw argent, we’re buying,’ Jay said.

‘Well,’ I amended. ‘Most probably the Court at Mandridore will do most of the buying.’

Crystobel Elvyng looked from me to Jay and back again, no longer amused. A frown of mild puzzlement creased her brow. I noticed she wore heavy, protective gloves, and a collection of stoppered glass vials hung from a belt around her waist. She’d been working down here? ‘Why don’t you tell me exactly what it is you’re trying to do?’

A little later, we sat at our ease in an adjacent chamber, surrounded by glimmering chunks of the mysterious argent we’d spent so many weeks searching for. A break in the otherwise uninterrupted stone of the cavernous ceiling permitted a few stray beams of moonlight to filter down, and in the channel below, pale moonsilver formed in the rock walls.

I sat upon a low, smooth stone, Jay beside me, watching as Crystobel went through a range of incomprehensible motions involving the contents of those same vials. ‘To be truthful,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t precisely know how or why it works. None of us do, at this distance of time, for Mary stopped speaking to us long ago. I only know a certain range of motions that must be gone through, and conditions that must be maintained, in order to keep this process going. These,’ she said, looking severely at me, ‘we will not be sharing.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said, though it wasn’t. My scholar’s heart, ever avaricious for secrets, ached for more information, and I knew Val would be spitting chips. ‘But can you supply the project?’

‘I can make no concrete promises. As you may be able to tell, the argent does not form quickly, nor in great quantities.’

‘I don’t know that we need masses of it,’ I said. ‘That’s a question for Orlando.’

She didn’t ask who Orlando was. Doubtless she knew him by reputation already. ‘When I came to see you,’ she said, glancing briefly at us, ‘I had expected the Society would be open with me about its reasons for pursuing information about Cicily — and, as I suspected, my argent.’

‘Fair,’ I allowed.

‘It’s a sensitive project,’ said Jay, when I said nothing else. ‘We, um, haven’t always known who we can trust with the full details.’

‘There are those who would gladly co-opt the whole thing for their own gain,’ I added, thinking very much of Fenella Beaumont as I spoke. She’d said as much, last time we had seen her. Ancestria Magicka will be the ones to restore magick to Britain.

‘And you thought we might be just such a type?’ said Crystobel.

‘No. But we didn’t know that you were not. And you know, we were hoping the most prominent magickal family in England might not be keeping the most important secret in magick all to themselves.’

She inclined her head, and stoppered the last of her vials. I’d strained my eyes trying to get a glimpse of their contents, but besides vague impressions of colour and an occasional glimmer of magick, I’d discerned nothing of use. ‘I suppose my behaviour has been similarly suspicious towards you,’ she allowed. ‘Or I might have attempted a negotiation before. As it was, I could have no better idea of your motives than you had of mine.’

‘The Society could be a collection of soulless, money-grubbing thieves,’ I agreed.

‘Some might say that it is,’ said Jay.

True. Some might, indeed.

‘But you say not?’ said Crystobel.

‘Emphatically not. We’re the good guys.’

Crystobel gave a small smile. ‘Well, then,’ said she, stripping off her gloves. ‘I believe I will have two conditions.’

I straightened, sensing a challenge. Conditions. That boded either excitingly or appallingly, depending on what kind of a woman Crystobel Elvyng really was. ‘Oh?’

‘It is impossible to do otherwise than support this particular of the Society’s aims, and as such my family will supply your argentine needs — within reason — free of cost. If the following conditions are met.’

Free? I sat up even straighter. That either meant Crystobel was a woman of extraordinary generosity — in which case, I felt even guiltier for distrusting her so much before — or, she had one hell of a set of conditions for us.

‘One,’ she said. ‘The Society will not publicise any part of this process. Indeed, I prefer that the world at large continues in utter ignorance that it even exists.’

An obvious enough request, and not too unreasonable. It would be better if such a secret wasn’t left in the hands of a single family; that was hardly fair. But it wasn’t our business to interfere in a private pact between the Elvyngs and the Yllanfalen. Besides, if (when?) we succeeded with our goal, these traces of argent would no longer be half so necessary. There’d be more than magick enough in Britain, for everything good and marvellous anyone might wish to do.

‘Two,’ she went on. ‘I want Merlin’s grimoire.’

‘What?’ I blurted.

She just looked at me.

‘Merlin,’ I repeated. ‘Merlin’s grimoire.’

‘A reasonable trade, I think?’

‘But,’ I said, and stopped, my brain reeling. ‘But—’

‘There never was a Merlin,’ said Jay. ‘And therefore, there can be no Merlin’s grimoire.’

‘That is a debatable point.’

Jay and I, mutually thunderstruck, stared at Crystobel.

Jay recovered first. ‘It’s an impossible task.’

‘Can’t we just pay for the argent?’ I pleaded. Even if it cost half the earth — which it would — that would be a more achievable price to pay than an impossible artefact.

‘Money I can get,’ said Crystobel. ‘I do not especially need more.’

I got a grip. ‘You must realise how crazy this sounds,’ I said, and I wondered at myself, for was I not usually the one enthusiastically promoting the craziest of ideas? ‘If you can offer us some proof that this artefact exists—’

‘I know it exists,’ said Crystobel calmly. ‘My family used to own it.’

‘Um,’ I said.

‘Used to?’ prompted Jay.

‘It was stolen from us. Four years ago. The police were never able to recover it.’ She smiled when I opened my mouth to speak, and added, ‘Yes, I can offer proof. There is a purchase receipt, my father’s property, listing its acquisition at a private auction. I also possess some photographs of the piece, and copies of one or two pages, plus an official valuation of the book for insurance purposes.’

I’d run out of objections that ran along the lines of but that’s impossible. ‘Merlin,’ I croaked. ‘Cannot be.’

Crystobel shrugged one shoulder. ‘Truthfully, I am less concerned with the precise identity of the book’s author than I am with the contents. Whether or not it was penned by the real Merlin, or merely someone using the name, it is priceless and irreplaceable. Its contents are responsible for many of the magicks and wonders upon which our family depends, and I must have it back.’

‘We aren’t detectives,’ said Jay bluntly. ‘If the police couldn’t get it back for you, why do you imagine we can?’

‘Are you not?’ was all Crystobel said. The pointed look she cast around the cave illustrated her thinking clearly enough: official detectives we might not be, but we had demonstrated a talent for digging up secrets. Even ancient ones.

I admit to feeling a flicker of excitement begin to unfurl. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I give you fair warning. If we find this grimoire, we are going to read it.’

‘There’s no stopping her,’ Jay agreed. ‘I know. I’ve tried.’

Crystobel grinned. ‘If you get me my book back, you’re welcome to read it. And I’ll give you all the argent you need.’

That settled it. I love her.

‘When you say “soon”, do you mean “before Crystobel Elvyng could conceivably do anything else to impede us”?’ I said.

‘Precisely. If the Elvyngs possess such knowledge yet have not chosen to make it public, we can always employ the defence of ignorance. But not if we engage in the kind of delay that might lead to intentions becoming known, and measures taken to prevent unauthorised explorations or inconvenient discoveries.’

‘The mines don’t belong to them, after all,’ I said. ‘Presumably they are still the property of the Yllanfalen.’

‘Whether they might have an agreement with Aylligranir, or are operating independently and without the queen’s knowledge, might prove an interesting point,’ agreed Milady. ‘But not yet a relevant one.’

‘Speaking of Aylligranir,’ I said. ‘Did they send the moonsilver that they promised?’

‘It arrived,’ said Milady. ‘I am not sure what her majesty intended by it.’

‘Why is that?’

‘In itself, it is insignificant. The sample is only an inch wide, and unworked.’

‘Unworked.’ I drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair, thinking. ‘Unworked. How much moonsilver, or argent, is left in the world, would you think?’

‘All of it, surely,’ said Jay. ‘It cannot be destroyed, that we know of.’

‘Yes — and the examples of it that we’ve seen or heard of have all been finished articles, or in other words, very much worked. How much unworked argent is likely to be left, hundreds of years after all the known mines ran empty?’

‘Not… much,’ said Jay.

‘Exactly. So how does Aylligranir have even a small piece of the raw stuff?’

‘Either they have a stash of the raw metal put by, and have somehow managed to preserve it into the twenty-first century,’ said Jay. ‘Or…’

‘Or they have a source,’ I finished. ‘Like the mines. We gave her majesty a fairly comprehensive account of our purpose in seeking argent, Milady. I thought at the time that she was peculiarly uninterested and unhelpful, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps this unworked piece is a hint.’

‘Why a hint?’ said Jay. ‘Why not just say, oh, we happen to have a renewable source of exactly what you’re looking for, why don’t I send you a catalogue?’

I shrugged. ‘Is that what you would have done, in her shoes? Not everyone can be trusted, even those employed by the Society. We could have been anybody, with any motive. A likely story is proof of nothing.’ I thought of Miranda as I spoke, and Ancestria Magicka. Her majesty of Aylligranir probably wasn’t unwise to work around the subject, considering the extraordinary value — and power — of the substance in question.

‘Take the argent with you,’ said Milady, wisely skipping over the question entirely. I swear, one of these days I will drive myself mad with my wacky theories. ‘House, if you would?’

The wall rippled. Something unspeakable oozed out of it and dribbled towards the floor, followed by a nugget of something pale silver and gleaming.

‘I feel like House isn’t a huge fan of summer,’ I murmured.

‘It is maintenance season,’ said Milady. ‘We’ve had builders in all week.’

‘That would suck,’ I agreed. Like a trip to a particularly aggressive beautician: unpleasant as a process, but the results would be worth it. Hopefully.

Val had scooped up the argent, and sat examining it, having cleaned the physical expression of House’s displeasure off it with a tissue. ‘It feels interesting,’ she said, and passed it to me. ‘I never saw it in its raw state before.’

The moment it touched my palm, I yelped, and dropped it. ‘Ouch,’ I hissed, shaking my hand to dislodge the pain. ‘It burns, but like… ice.’ The stuff had left a silvery, moon-coloured burn-mark on my skin, rather attractive if one forgot the pain that came with it. Which I wasn’t.

Val stared at me, and held up her own hands. Both were unmarked. ‘Sparking again, Ves?’

‘I don’t think so…’ I stared balefully at the innocuous lump, lying there on the carpet all innocent-looking. ‘Jay, you carry it.’

‘Thanks,’ he said dryly, but when he bent to pick it up, he emerged unscathed. The argent lay in his palm, meek and harmless.

‘I can’t tell if it passionately loves me or violently hates me,’ I muttered.

Jay looked at me. ‘Like the lyre.’

‘The lyre is something else again.’ I rose from my chair. ‘We’d best get going. It’s getting late.’

‘One thing,’ said Jay, following suit. ‘We had enough trouble getting into Aylligranir before. How are we going to reach Everynden?’

‘This is a problem I would be delighted to solve for you,’ said Milady. ‘Had I the means.’

In other words: good luck.

‘Right,’ said Jay, heading for the door. ‘Back later, then.’ He stopped. ‘Wait. Val, can I raid the maps?’

‘Don’t leave them out of order.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘So,’ I said, shortly afterwards. ‘How do you even do this? Can you only travel to henges you’ve been to, or that you know the location of?’

For some reason, Jay laughed. ‘Sometimes I wish that was true, but no. It’s quite possible to end up in a henge that probably hasn’t been visited in living memory, and is marked on zero maps.’

I raised a brow in his general direction. ‘And you know that how?’

He coughed. ‘Let’s say I’ve had a mishap or two in my time.’

We were down in the cellar, stationed in the centre of House’s private henge, waiting while the Winds of the Ways curled their way up out of nothing. ‘So you… what?’ I prompted. ‘Aim? Cross your fingers and hope for the best?’

‘Something like that. If I know roughly where a henge is stationed, I can shoot for it. Doesn’t always work out as intended.’ His eyes had a faraway look, focused on whatever mysterious, arcane processes went on when Jay took to the Ways. ‘The most recent map Val’s got of Aylligranir is a couple of hundred years old, but henges and towns don’t move about much, so it should be good enough. We’re going back to the same henge we used before, that’ll get us back to the entrance. Then there’s a henge marked inside of Aylligranir, pretty close to Everynden.’

‘Still doesn’t get us past the border,’ I pointed out. Even I knew that Waymastery didn’t work into the Yllanfalen kingdoms. They’d blocked passage from outside henges long ago, whenever it was they decided they’d had about enough of the outside worlds.

‘One problem at a time.’

No time for more, as the Winds reached howling potency and swept us away. I kept my face down, clinging to Jay, as we soared in a rush through a thousand miles — might as well have been — and came down in a cool, moonlit glade somewhere in the Dales.

Back, then, through the hills, a whole new landscape at this hour, scarcely recognisable as the same countryside we had trekked through only a day or two ago. The moon, nearing full, bathed everything in a pale, soothing glamour, and cast stark shadows behind every bush and tree. I breathed the cool air, savouring the balmy night winds, though we were still clammy with perspiration by the time we arrived back at the hillside that divided us from Aylligranir. No sunbathing today, nor moonbathing either. I felt a sense of suppressed urgency, as though time raced against us; if we did not find a way to Everynden now, today, this instant, some window of opportunity would close, some door slam in our faces, and it would all be over.

‘Now what?’ I said, pacing through the bone-dry grass. I eyed the darkened slope balefully, as though it had personally arrayed itself in our way.

‘So,’ said Jay, and to my puzzlement he sat down in the grass, cross-legged, and facing the emphatically closed door into Aylligranir. ‘I told you my mother petitioned the Yllanfalen on my behalf, right?’

Giddy gods. For weeks I’d wished for storytime-with-Jay, to little avail, and now he wanted to get chatty? ‘Yes,’ I said dubiously. ‘I recall.’

‘Some of the kingdoms granted an audience, even if they didn’t grant her request. And one time, she told me an interesting story.’

‘The queen?’

‘My mother. While she was there, she saw someone appear, apparently out of thin air, upon a wave of faerie music. Nobody would tell her how it was done. She thought the Yllanfalen had developed a way of transportation via music itself, but I think it might have been a bit different from that.’

‘I hate to rush you, but could we skip to the relevant bit?’

‘This is the relevant bit. I think that person was a Waymaster, using a sunk henge my mother couldn’t see.’

‘Uh huh. And the music?’

‘Exactly. Was the music incidental, or was it an intrinsic part of the process?’

‘Still not really seeing your point.’

‘The henges inside the Yllanfalen kingdoms are only blocked to outsiders. Right? They have to be functional for the kingdom’s own citizens, supposing they have Waymasters left to use them. So how is that accomplished? What twist of magick is required by Yllanfalen Waymasters to use those henges?’

‘Musical?’ I said, light dawning.

‘Probably? Virtually everything they do involves music in some form or another. So, if we can find a way to blend Waymastery magick with Yllanfalen music-magick, maybe we can jump from here to the henge near Everynden.’

I released the hillside from my baleful scrutiny, and turned it upon Jay instead. ‘And you didn’t mention this two days ago because of why?’ We’d spent hours failing to get in, and Jay had left me to figure out a way inside. While he napped.

‘Did you know there’s a book about the ethics and legalities of Waymastery? It’s this thick.’ Jay made a space about three inches wide with his fingers. ‘One does not force one’s way into blocked henges, especially if they’re inside closed fae enclaves. It isn’t a thing to be done lightly.’

‘So why now, Mr. Play-by-the-rules?’

‘Well,’ said Jay. ‘If Milady thinks this is worth a gamble, so do I.’

‘I’ll get you your Team Rulebreaker cap and badge tomorrow,’ I promised.

‘And I shall wear them proudly, at least for the thirty seconds or so before the Ministry shows up to arrest me.’ He rose from his seat upon the grass, and advanced upon me. Considering enough of him was in shadow that I couldn’t see his face, I found this somewhat intimidating.

I stepped back. ‘So, um, what’s my role in this delightfully crazy venture? You’re the Waymaster, and the Yllanfalen musical talent.’

‘And you’re the one with the third ingredient that seems to be important in this context, that being moonsilver.’

‘You’ve got the moonsilver. Or, I hope you do.’

Jay opened his palm. The nugget of raw argent glimmered there, like a bubble of moonlight. ‘I meant your pipes.’

‘Those are skysilver pipes, thank you. Can we please get our fanciful fae terminology right?’

‘Whatever. Most of the Yllanfalen we met in your mother’s kingdom had a set of pipes, whether moonsilver or not. Coincidence? And you’ve got a headful of Yllanfalen pop songs, to boot.’

‘So you want me to play while you…’ I waved a hand vaguely. ‘Do whirly things?’

‘Please.’ He was still advancing.

I stepped back again. ‘Jay, what are you doing.’

‘I can’t spirit you away out of thin air.’

‘I thought that was exactly what you were going to do.’

‘I do need to hang onto you. And since your hands are going to be busy, I guess you get a hug.’

‘Oh.’ I stopped retreating. ‘Um, okay…’ I tried not to feel weird as Jay’s arm slid around my waist, and took a firm grip of my hip. In fairness, his thoughts were obviously far from the facts of physical me, for he was already calling up his whirly magicks; arcane winds stirred my hair.

I took out my pipes, and hesitated. What exactly was I meant to do? I wasn’t a musical magician, not like the Yllanfalen. Or Jay. Any potency my modest musical efforts possessed came from the pipes, not from me. Surely that couldn’t be enough, or any one of the incredibly few Waymasters left in Britain who happened to be in possession of a priceless set of ancient skysilver pipes could pop in and out whenever they liked…

Well, okay. This almost unthinkably rare confluence of circumstances did not constitute a grave security problem, now did it? No such person existed. Just me and Jay, Team Improbable.

I played. Not the lullaby. Was it one o’clock still, or two? Three? Fatigue plagued me but little yet, probably the effects of excitement and adrenalin. I felt it, though, weighing upon my limbs, slowing my thoughts. It wouldn’t take much to convince my brain — and Jay’s — that now would be a great time to fall asleep for eight hours or so. I skipped over the sprite-song, too, not wanting to attract Flow’s notice at this time.

‘Jay,’ I said, breaking off playing. ‘We’re breaking and entering!’

‘Keep playing,’ he muttered.

I played a bit more. ‘What, this isn’t the jail-worthy kind so it’s okay?’

‘Something like that. Keep playing.’

Something was happening. Winds swirled, ice-cold and smelling, incongruously, of wet earth. My feet came off the floor, and suddenly I was grateful for Jay’s grip on me, for I felt untethered otherwise, like I might have flown away into the ether, never to be seen again.

‘Nearly—’ Jay gasped.

A bell tolled somewhere, a mournful sound that sent a chill down my half-frozen spine.

Then the half-frozen feeling spread to my feet, for suddenly I was up to my ankles in sodden mud, and the shadowed hillside was gone.

‘I think,’ said Jay, looking down at his own begrimed feet. ‘I think we did it.’

I looked around, to no real effect. Tree-cover loomed over our heads, too night-darkened to determine details, and too thick to permit much more than an occasional beam of moonlight to filter down. I discerned the vague outline of a craggy block of stone somewhere near my left knee; a section of a henge?

‘And that,’ said Jay, releasing me and taking an experimental step, ‘has to be absolutely the only time we ever do that.’

I snorted. ‘Uh huh.’

‘I’m serious. What we just did was not okay. We broke one fixed magickal law and contravened a slew of ethical agreements.’

I patted his shoulder. ‘Milady won’t let us go to prison.’

‘I think you rely a bit too much on Milady’s influence.’

‘It’s been working for me for ten years. Right, which way?’

‘How should I know?’ said Jay.

Oh, boy.

I didn’t bother texting Val this time. I called her. If that meant dragging her out of the library and whichever book she was absorbed in, so be it.

‘Yes?’ she said, after three rings. The word had a dangerous edge to it.

‘Valentine Argentein,’ I said.

‘Ves! You found him?’

‘Val, you are not going to believe this.’

While Jay nipped back into the academy to return the painting — my having reluctantly let it go — I rushed through an only slightly garbled account of everything we had just experienced.

‘Slow down,’ said Val more than once, and I tried, but my heart was galloping and my fingers were zapping with magick and I was fit to burst with excitement.

‘She’s a painting,’ Val said at one point. ‘A painting? She, Cicily Werewode, is a painting? Ves, have you gone off your rocker?’

And later, ‘You pretended to be Mary Werewode and she bought it? Has she gone off her rocker?’

At length we got around to: ‘Valentine Argentein is a gods-damned place. That makes so much sense you have no idea.’

‘It… does?’

‘It was driving me crazy, this supposed author that vanished into thin air. But I was wrong to interpret the name as the author, not the title. The book has the air of a personal journal about it, that’s the thing. It’s hand-written, and so is what now turns out to be the title, but I previously interpreted as the name of the writer. As a work it’s informally arranged, only loosely coherent, and pretty impenetrable. And I now have no earthly idea who penned it, but maybe that doesn’t matter. The only problem is…’ I heard a rustling of papers, and otherwise silence for a while. ‘I don’t think there’s any real mention of Valentine Argentein in the book, excepting the title. So if the book isn’t really about this place Argentein, what’s it for?’

‘What else is in it, besides that one bit about magycke silver or whatever it was?’

‘A whole lot of confused ramblings. I wonder…’ Silence, and more rustling.

I ventured upon a tentative point of my own. ‘Is this maybe what the Lorekeeper was talking about? Some kind of code?’

‘Could be. Could be. It doesn’t make a lot of sense as it is, certainly, and it’s hard to imagine why anyone would bother writing down such gibberish if it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Get Cicily’s journal back from the cryptographers. There’s nothing to find there.’

‘And give ‘em this. Right. Begs the question, though: where’s this mysterious source of Mary Werewode’s work?’

‘I got the impression it’s in Argentein.’

‘She didn’t give you any clues as to where that is?’

‘Not really. She’s a faded excuse for a person, kept blanking on us. And while I’d love to take the portrait with us and keep pumping her for information, we can’t exactly abscond with it.’

‘No,’ Val sighed. ‘I suppose you can’t.’

Her dejection echoed my own. ‘I have two ideas.’

‘Tell me.’

‘One, she seemed to think she could talk to Mary Werewode, who of course must have died long before she was born. Unless she didn’t. We think there must be a chatty portrait of Mary somewhere about, and Cicily must have got hold of it.’

‘Right. Where’s the portrait?’

‘No clue.’

‘Excellent. Idea number two?’

I hesitated. ‘I’m speculating,’ I cautioned.

‘What else is new.’

‘Fair. Look, Cicily mentioned her grandfather. She thought she might be talking to him, too.’

‘Her grandfather, the Yllanfalen?’

‘Right. The one that came from Everynden, where the Moonsilver Mines were.’

A pause. ‘You think Argentein might refer to those mines?’

‘Total guess,’ I said. ‘But yes. Yes, I do.’

‘But they were emptied by Cicily’s time, no?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Not following.’

‘Cicily mentioned the “source”, with a weird emphasis, like it should mean something to Mary. Well, the mines were the age-old source of moonsilver, or argent. What better place to put your secret moonsilver lab than an abandoned mineshaft that was once bristling with the stuff? Maybe there are traces of it still there. Maybe there’s an atmosphere, a memory — something. I don’t know, I may be talking rubbish, but it…’

‘Makes a weird kind of sense,’ Val finished. ‘I’ve another thought.’

‘Hit me with it.’

‘What if…’ she hesitated. ‘We have no idea what process they might have gone through to produce their argent, right? Except that Crystobel thinks it wasn’t alchemy.’

‘Right.’

‘Nothing in Cicily’s journal. Nothing in any of Mary’s letters that might hint at it, even allowing for deliberate obfuscation and bizarre code. In other words, we have no evidence that such a process exists.’

It was my turn to say, ‘Not following.’

‘Maybe it doesn’t exist. Crystobel told the truth. You can’t manufacture argent.’

‘But Cicily said—’

‘Cicily didn’t deny the existence of a source of argent. That doesn’t mean it has anything to do with alchemy.’

‘She— I did ask her if she’d discovered the secret of argent, or if her son had, and she said no. That there was no need, because it was Mary’s own work…’

‘But she never said there was an alchemical secret?’

‘She… no, she didn’t.’

‘Maybe because there wasn’t. Whatever they did, it wasn’t alchemy, or not in the way we’ve been thinking. They weren’t reciting mumbo-jumbo over blocks of silver, or immersing them in chemical solutions. They weren’t waving magick wands over them or drowning them in charms. They weren’t transmuting anything, in short.’ Val was talking faster and faster, working herself up to one of her genius crescendos. ‘Ves, what if you’re right?’

‘I like being right,’ I said — doubtfully, being still far behind wherever Val’s scintillating intellect had taken her. ‘What am I right about this time?’

‘The mines. Maybe they weren’t transmuting some base substance into argent. Maybe they found a way to — to restart the mines.’

‘Restart the—’ I stopped, because she was right. I’d spoken just a moment ago about a lingering atmosphere, or a memory. Entrenched magick. An entire network of mineshafts bristling with argent must have held an entire ocean of magick, so to speak, before we’d finally chipped away the last block. But what of the rock that remained? What if it could be… encouraged? Enchanted?

‘Moon-bathing,’ I said, apropos of nothing. ‘The portrait activated under moonlight, with a bit of magickal fizz to help it along.’

‘Okay. Maybe Mary’s moon-bathing wasn’t about restoring her own youth. Maybe she was talking about the mines.’

‘We need to go there.’

‘At night.’

‘Right.’

‘Ves, one thing though.’ More rustling. ‘The Elvyngs. If they know about this, then anything you find down there is likely to be under their control.’

‘Got it.’

‘You realise what that means?’

‘Opposition.’

‘To say the least. They won’t welcome anyone’s snooping. It’s a literally priceless secret.’

I paused, and thought. My instinct was, as always, to barrel in and look around and figure out the details once we got there. But Val had a point. Jay would be dead set against such foolhardiness, and for once I knew he’d be right without having to be talked into it. So then, what? How to proceed?

‘I think it’s time to pass the buck,’ I decided.

‘Mm. Get back here. I’ll see if I can rouse Milady.’

‘Milady sleeps?’ The idea, for some reason, astonished me. Maybe because one doesn’t picture a disembodied voice having physical needs like the rest of us.

‘Who knows?’ Upon which enlightening comment, Val hung up the phone.

An hour later (or so) saw us huddled in Milady’s tower, us being me, Jay and Val. At that elevation, the air was stiflingly hot, even past midnight. Insufficient windows had a lot to do with that, and since its principal occupant must be impervious to either heat or cold, nobody bothered with incidental practicalities like trying to keep it at a habitable temperature. I sat wilting in the chair House had politely set for me (the thing bulged out of the wall in a gloriously grotesque display, if House ever gets tired of hosting the Society I think it has a career in horror films). Fanning oneself with one’s own hand really doesn’t achieve much, but you probably knew that.

Val looked as cool as ever, reclining at her ease in her poison-green chair. I was somewhat relieved to notice beads of sweat upon Jay’s brow, and an appearance one might (if one were as ruthless as Val) term reminiscent of a “wrung-out dishcloth”. In the face of Val’s effortless cool, it was nice not to be the only person dripping all over the place.

Anyway.

Milady had heard our three-way report calmly, and fallen into one of her thoughtful silences. I’d had ample time to scrutinise both of my companions, plus the floor, the ceiling, the walls and the rose-damask upholstery of House’s choice of chair (stylish, House, can I keep it?) before Milady finally spoke.

‘Delicate,’ she mused. ‘I do not think I have encountered so thorny a problem in some time.’

‘See?’ I said, feeling vindicated. ‘The way forward is by no means clear.’

‘Oh, I believe it is,’ said Milady.

All right, then.

‘There can be no doubt that the mines must be investigated, if there is the smallest possibility that they might be able to furnish us with what we need. The modulator must be our priority.’

‘Agreed,’ I said, and Jay nodded.

‘As a second point of some importance. Have any of you uncovered any concrete evidence that the Elvyng family is aware of Cicily’s secret, and that they continue to exploit it?’

I had to think about that for a moment. So twisty and turny had been our path to this discovery, I’d forgotten what evidence we’d found — and which of our theories had been based wholly on speculation. ‘There’s Cicily’s last will and testament,’ I offered. ‘When she “died”, she certainly left all of her papers, including presumably any books, to her Elvyng son. And he probably inherited her enchanted portrait, too.’

‘But,’ said Jay, ‘that may no longer be relevant. If Crystobel Elvyng was right, and Cicily had nothing to do with the argent in the end, then her personal papers aren’t relevant now.’

‘True.’

‘And Mary Werewode may have left no books either,’ said Val. ‘Cicily’s behaviour strongly suggests she communicated with her ancestress directly, or near enough. We previously assumed there must have been extant books or letters only because we were not yet aware of the painting issue.’

‘The paintings are interesting,’ said Milady. ‘Jay, what do you know of those?’

Jay’s knowledge had already been offered up as part of our report. He’d betrayed some small discomfort during that part of our narration, which I put down to a degree of guilt over having snooped through prohibited books. But at Milady’s words, he cast a sideways glance at me, and shifted in his chair. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, transparent as glass. ‘I’ve already told you everything.’

‘Come, Jay. This is important.’

Jay gave a tiny sigh. ‘They teach it, at the academy. Only the theory, naturally there are no practicals. But they regard it as a functional art.’

‘You didn’t mention that before,’ I said.

Hence the sideways glance — guilt at keeping secrets from me. He did it again. ‘We were bound to the deepest secrecy,’ he said. ‘Such classes would certainly be closed down, if the Ministry got wind of them.’

‘So you didn’t stealth through the secret archives for forbidden books?’ I felt obscurely disappointed.

Jay coughed. ‘Well… I did that, too.’

‘My hero.’ I beamed.

‘To be fair, every self-respecting Academy student did. I suspect the professors knew, too. A ruthless zeal for knowledge is kind of a prerequisite for attendance.’

‘Makes one wonder about the other paintings at the academy, doesn’t it?’ said Val, wisely cutting in on this rambling sideline.

‘Rather,’ I agreed. ‘I wonder if they have Mary’s.’

‘Returning to the question of evidence,’ said Milady. ‘Do you know them to possess any images of Mary Werewode?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Anything else that might offer proof of their knowledge of her work?’

‘No,’ I said, but I was looking at Jay. So was Val. He was the only one of us who had any depth of knowledge about the academy, after all.

‘Don’t look at me,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘I attended the academy, but that gives me zero special knowledge of the family, or any of their private doings.’

‘Crystobel Elvyng’s visit here is suggestive of some special interest in the subject of the argent,’ I said. ‘But that is not proof of prior knowledge, either. We know of no absolute reason why Cicily might have hidden something so important from her family-by-marriage, nor any absolute reason why she might have shared it. So in short, I don’t think we have anything concrete.’

‘In that case,’ said Milady, ‘I believe we will take a small gamble.’

‘Small?’ I echoed. ‘

‘If you are not too tired, I believe an excursion to the mines cannot be undertaken too soon.’

Excitement flared in my eager little heart, and I sat up, my heat-related sufferings forgotten. I hadn’t truly expected Milady to give us the go-ahead to explore the mines. She had to navigate some delicate political waters, after all, and making an enemy of the Elvyng family could do the Society no good.

But she really, really wanted that modulator.

So did I.

‘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.’

‘At night,’ he repeated.

‘Remember the glimmer-of-moonlight thing I mentioned? And Mary Werewode and her moon-bathing and moonsilver and all of that. Giddy gods know why, but there is a pattern there — you said so yourself, Jay! — and I’m really curious to know what might happen if I “mess with” her painting when the moon’s up.’

‘The Elvyng Academy is not open at night,’ said Jay.

‘I know that.’

‘So that makes it a case of actual breaking and entering.’

‘I know.’

‘Which is an actual crime.’

‘Not if you aren’t stealing anything.’

‘I’m… pretty sure it’s still a crime, Ves, even if you aren’t a burglar.’

‘It’ll only be for a few minutes.’

‘Right, because it’s the duration that determines the severity of the offence.’

I looked, rather pleadingly, at Val.

She watched our back-and-forth with a small smile. ‘I don’t know,’ she said when she caught my eye, and shook her head. ‘Watching you try to justify yourself to, of all people, Jay? I’m liking it.’

‘Hey,’ said Jay. ‘Of all people?’

Val could hardly explain that Jay was both new and supposedly my responsibility, or had been for most of his time with the Society so far. Superiors I’d withstood without blinking; I’d even circumvented Milady’s orders on occasion, if I felt a deep enough need to do so. I’d never worked so hard to gain anyone’s approval as I did Jay’s. Don’t ask me why; I don’t understand it myself.

Maybe I am just wicked, and his very strait-laced nature operates upon me like the proverbial red flag to a bull.

Maybe it’s the simple fact that he is usually right, and this irks me because I am evil.

I rushed on. ‘If we do it tonight, we could have answers by the morning—’

‘We?’ said Jay, with that ominous, shadowy frown he has when he’s really unhappy about something. I could practically hear thunder rumbling in the distance.

‘Okay, me,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ll go alone, if you’ll just help me get there and back.’

‘No.’

‘You can wait outside.’

‘No. Ves, I don’t—’ He stopped, and actually rubbed his temples in frustration. ‘Ves, remarkable as you are, I have no idea how you haven’t ended up in prison yet.’

I scoffed at this. ‘I don’t make a habit of breaking and entering.’

‘Once would be enough.’

‘Only if you get caught?’

‘Which, of course, you never could.’

‘Jay. Look. I hear you, and you’re right, but do you have a better idea? Because we’ve been following the library trail for weeks on end, and all we’ve got to show for it is a tangled mess of dead-end clues.’

Jay looked, apparently for confirmation, at Val, who spread her hands in an I-can’t-help-you gesture. ‘More or less the case,’ she said. ‘There might be a breakthrough ahead, but…’

‘There also might not,’ I finished. ‘At this point, I would put money on not.’

Val nodded. ‘I hate to say it, but if Ves is in any way right about that painting, it should be explored.’

I beamed triumphantly at Jay.

But he shook his head. ‘I don’t actually dispute that. But breaking into other people’s houses, at night or at any other time, is not okay, no matter the motive.’

‘I—’ I began.

‘Nor is it wise,’ he said severely, frowning at me.

‘So about that better idea?’ I said.

To my infinite surprise and delight, he said: ‘I do, actually, have a better idea.’

A few hours later saw us on Elvyng property once more. Not breaking and entering.

‘You know, if I’d realised you still had slumber party privileges at the Academy we could have skipped the entire breaking-and-entering conversation,’ I said as we approached the main doors (Jay having walked me quickly, quickly past the Emporium).

‘It’s not the sort of thing one happens to mention,’ Jay answered, and rang the bell.

As though anything with the Elvyngs is merely ordinary. The bell, in this instance, was represented by a small, oval panel of magick-charged gem set innocuously into the great stone frame. Labradorite, by the looks of it: pallid but glimmering with colours. I hadn’t noticed it before, because when I had arrived earlier with Val, the doors had been open to the public.

All Jay had to do was wave a palm in front of the panel. A glitter of magick rippled over its surface, and — I kid you not — an actual, socking enormous bell tolled from somewhere within. I judge its size from the depth and resonance of the bell’s tone: it sounded like the kind that usually crowns the tops of cathedral spires.

‘I bet that’s popular in the middle of the night,’ I commented, wide-eyed.

‘People don’t usually ring the bell in the middle of the night,’ Jay pointed out. Quite rightly, considering that he added, ‘Anyone trying to visit at 3am is either in possession of a key, or is here to rob the place.’

I blushed, for without Jay’s surprise sleepover credentials that’s exactly what I would have done. Well, not the robbing part. Just the sneaking in without an invitation part.

We did not have to wait long. Soon after the last, echoing sounds of the great bell died away, the heavy oak door unlatched, and swung slowly open. I peeked inside, expecting to see somebody effecting this opening, but I saw no one.

Like I said, nothing about Elvyng could be ordinary.

Jay sauntered in at his ease, and wasted no time looking around for a welcoming party. The doors slid smoothly shut behind us — audibly locking and bolting themselves, to my mild consternation — and I followed as Jay walked straight through the hall, down a corridor, up a flight of stairs and knocked at a door at the top. Zero hesitation. He knew the place like the back of his hand.

‘Come in,’ called someone within.

The voice — quite low for a female, and smooth — proved to belong to a woman of about Jay’s age, or maybe a year or two younger. We’d found the music room: small though the chamber was, space had somehow been found for a gloriously shiny grand piano, a row of guitars, two violins and a collection of bright, silvery pipes that immediately drew my eye. I didn’t see anything quite like my own syrinx set, but one or two were close.

Jay’s academy contact sat at a desk in the corner, its surface covered in sheet music and notepaper. She looked up as we came in, grinned at Jay, and eyed me with frank curiosity. She had sleek, black hair worn loose, skin a couple of shades lighter than Jay’s, and fabulous brown eyes almost amber in colour. ‘Jay,’ she said, her gaze flicking again to me. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Been busy,’ he murmured, smiling back. ‘You know how that goes.’

‘Still incapable of taking a day off?’

‘Like you were ever any better.’

‘Family curse.’ The lady grinned.

‘I prefer “trait”,’ Jay retorted. ‘Er, this is Cordelia Vesper, my associate at the Society. Ves, this is my sister Rina. She’s a music professor at the Academy.’

I looked at Rina with fresh interest. She looked to be in her late twenties, which probably made her the sibling closest to him in age.

Rina came over to me and shook my hand. I didn’t miss the enquiring look she directed at Jay as she stepped back. Was she silently asking as to the purport of our mission, or was she silently enquiring about me?

Smoothly, Jay let it pass. ‘Thanks for letting us in,’ he said.

She nodded, watching his face, but being Jay he was impassive. ‘I’ve had a room fixed up for you, though why you want to be in the attic is beyond me. I don’t think anyone cleans up there more than once in a blue moon.’

She was fishing for details, so that meant Jay hadn’t really told her anything. Interesting. ‘We appreciate it,’ I told her. ‘It’s a great help.’

Rina nodded, plainly mystified, but too polite to push for details. ‘You didn’t want your old dorm?’ she said to Jay, with a trace of a smile.

‘I imagined it otherwise occupied by now.’

‘Was, but it hasn’t yet been reassigned for the upcoming year. It’ll be empty, if you want to take a look.’

‘That’s fine.’ Jay shook his head. ‘We’ll let you get back to your work, and go get started.’

‘Started?’ she echoed, looking from Jay to me.

Jay waved this off, already making for the door. I hesitated, for surely she deserved some kind of an inkling as to what we were doing? But I vaguely realised I had strayed into Sibling Rivalry territory, an area I was hopelessly ill-equipped to cope with, and decided to leave well alone.

‘Aren’t you going to tell her anything?’ I said once we were fairly out of earshot.

‘About what?’ he said, without slowing down.

‘About what we’re doing here?’ I prodded.

‘Nope.’

‘Come on. She’s doing us a huge favour.’

‘How is that relevant?’

‘Jay. What did you tell her?’

‘I said I was in the area, looking for somewhere to stay, and wanted to… revisit old haunts.’

Whether or not a music professor was allowed to invite friends to stay overnight, I didn’t choose to speculate. If she was bending the rules, she seemed happy to do so.

‘How obliging of her to swallow such a transparent story.’

‘She’ll get her revenge at some point.’

‘And what am I supposed to be doing?’

‘Er.’

‘I hope you didn’t let her think I’d be spending the night here with you.’

‘The idea that an attractive, intelligent woman might want to spend the night with me wouldn’t enter her head,’ he said, stopping at the top of what I hoped was the final flight of stairs. ‘Nor yours, apparently.’

‘I–’ I began.

‘Which way did you go from here?’

I swallowed my objections. Stop digging, Ves. ‘I think it was this way.’ I turned left, towards a dusty and faded velvet-clad chair that looked vaguely familiar. ‘Aha!’ I crowed, elated, for there was a door I definitely knew, and when I pushed it open, there was the tiny garret I recalled. Still dusty and smelling of mildew. And there on the wall was—

An empty space, the picture hook still protruding from the wall.

‘It’s gone,’ I gasped.

‘I feel we need confirmation,’ I said.

Val nodded. ‘We are running too much on speculation. I’d like evidence.’

‘House thought Crystobel was telling the truth,’ I said. Which wasn’t evidence, but we all trusted house.

‘I do not doubt House’s instincts,’ Val said. ‘Or whatever they are. But what did Crystobel actually say?’

‘She said that little has survived from Cicily’s life,’ I said. ‘Define “little”.’

Val nodded. ‘”Little” could still include the books we’re hoping for.’

‘And regarding Cicily’s work, um,’ I thought back. ‘She said Cicily’s work was unrealised at the time of her death — which I took to mean nothing ever came of it at all. But perhaps it was completed after her death.’

‘By her son,’ Val agreed. ‘For example.’ Her hands were moving; she was stroking the arms of her new chair. Was there argent built into its frame? Was that why its levitation charms were so much better than either Val or I could manage?

‘Still isn’t evidence,’ I sighed.

‘We need something concrete,’ Val agreed.

‘She said argent couldn’t be manufactured—’ I said.

‘No,’ said Val. ‘She said there was nothing in alchemy that would do it. That is not the same thing at all.’

‘Giddy gods. You mean we might have been on the wrong track since the beginning?’ Why was I even surprised? We’d never found any proof of anybody’s making any form of alchemy work, ever.

‘Would that even be unusual?’ said Val.

She had a point.

‘If only we had something more… material,’ I mused.

‘I’ve always preferred paper to hot air,’ Val agreed.

When Jay realised both of us were looking at him, he visibly balked. As in, he took a whole step back, and raised his hands. ‘Hey. There’s only so far alumni status will get me.’

‘And how far is that?’ I asked.

‘Um.’

‘How about sending in a bulk request for anything attributed to Cicily Werewode-Elvyng?’

‘Surely they would never allow it.’

‘That’s sort of the point.’

Jay blinked. ‘Oh. Right.’

Val opened up her laptop, and turned it about to face Jay. ‘Here. Use this.’

As Jay clicked and typed, I thought. Our suspicions were huge, bordering upon crazy. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. ‘Crystobel Elvyng,’ I said aloud. ‘Why did she really come here?’

Val directed a narrow-eyed look at the wall, deep in thought, but said nothing.

‘I mean, if there was really nothing for us to find, she could have just had her secretary phone you, or send an email. Why bother coming all this way in person?’ I had to kick myself for not having thought of that before.

Now I was thinking differently. Why had she come here, if not to discourage us from digging any further into her family’s most lucrative secrets?

‘It still isn’t evidence,’ said Val.

No. We couldn’t take a conspiracy theory to Milady and expect to be taken seriously. And Milady couldn’t take a bundle of suppositions, surmises and suspicions to the Elvyngs and expect to be taken seriously.

Hell, at this point we had nothing. Real evidence that Cicily Werewode, or her descendants, succeeded at creating the magickal silver, by alchemy or any other art? No. Evidence that she’d ever written down, or shared those processes if she had? No again. Proof that the Elvyngs had inherited her legacy? Well, only the will — and it made no reference to what Godfrey Elvyng’s inheritance had consisted of.

I suffered a moment’s gnawing, gut-dropping panic when I realised we could be wrong on all points. Cicily might have dabbled in alchemy as a very young woman, and stopped. The Elvyngs might be protecting quite different secrets. We could be chasing nothing but wishes and dreams.

But there were too many small links and subtle clues to really believe that. Cicily’s possession of Mary Werewode’s work, for one, and Mary had been a known enthusiast for strange arts such as alchemy. Cicily’s Yllanfalen grandfather, for another, and the fact that he’d come from the very same town that once boasted the Moonsilver Mines.

Valentine Argentein, and the discovery that argent not only meant “silver” but specifically magickal silver, at least in some circles. And somehow, Crystobel Elvyng had known this. We hadn’t come across the term argent anywhere else.

I rubbed my temples, frustrated. So many hints, so many maybes. Enough to keep us digging; not enough to give us any real answers.

‘If only we could talk to Cicily,’ I sighed.

‘Her ghost?’ Val raised both eyebrows at me. ‘You’ve been spending way too much time with Zareen.’

‘Or, not enough. I wish she was here.’ Not solely for the purposes of the mission. I’d been missing Zar. Watching her break had been hard; I couldn’t begin to imagine what life was like inside her head, with the powers she possessed. She’d always seemed untouchable before. A powerhouse of a woman, always full of energy, and a brightness I now realised had sometimes been forced. Brittle.

‘Not every ghost can be fished up out of history,’ Val said. ‘Most of them go quietly on to wherever they’re supposed to go.’

True. The kind we had been hobnobbing with lately had been… different. Bound, mostly, to the houses they’d lived in — or been taken to. Some of them through their own will, some of them trapped there.

I dashed off a quick text to Zar (Hey scary lady, how’s the holiday?), even as my mind wandered back to the portrait of Cicily Werewode. Something about it teased at me, kept returning to my mind. Maybe it was the faint note of melancholy inherent in her expression, or the sadness of her exile in a tiny garret room of her own house. Why had they stashed her up there? Especially if our suspicions were correct: that would make Cicily Werewode the most important figure in Elvyng history.

With which idea, I’d answered my own question. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t share Cicily’s (possible) achievements with the world, they couldn’t prominently celebrate her connection with their family, either.

‘Denied,’ said Jay, looking up from Val’s laptop.

I went around the desk and bent over his shoulder. The Elvyng Archives are unable to satisfy your request. Apologies, etc.

‘What does that mean?’ I said. ‘Could that mean they’re already checked out, or something?’

Jay shook his head. ‘If that’s the case they put you on a wait list, and send an estimate of how long you’ll have to wait to get the books. And if they don’t have anything on the subject you’re interested in, or the document’s been lost, they’ll say something like We have not been able to match your request to any extant resources in our archive. This, I haven’t seen before.’

I straightened up, pleased but also frustrated. Yes, this stonewalling was suggestive. They didn’t want anyone poking too far into Cicily’s business. Asking for her will was one thing, considering how little telling information it contained. Asking for all her private papers was another.

‘How did her journal end up in York?’ I said, struck suddenly by the thought. ‘Why isn’t that also buried in the Elvyng Archives?’

Val frowned in thought, and tapped her favourite pen against her lips. ‘It dates from before her marriage,’ she said. ‘So in theory, the Elvyngs have no real right to claim it.’

Jay said, ‘But she must have given it away before her death, or it would have gone to her son with the rest of her personal things. And thence into the Academy Archives.’

‘So who did she give it to?’ I said. ‘And why?’

‘And how did it end up in York,’ Val echoed, retrieving her laptop from Jay. ‘I’m going to send a query about its provenance. They might be able to tell us who donated it to their library.’

We were back to the question of Cicily’s relatives again, and I simply couldn’t stand it.

‘No,’ I said.

Val looked up. ‘No? No what?’

‘No to everything! I am done with running in circles after Cicily’s non-existent paper trail. If there’s anything there to be discovered at all, the Elvyngs will stonewall us forever, and anything Cicily might have given to some other relative is untraceable. The whole thing is hopeless and we’re wasting our time.’

Val stopped typing. ‘I don’t disagree, but it’s what we’ve got. Do you have a better idea?’

‘I have a different idea,’ I said. ‘Forget Cicily’s obscure familial connections, and forget the Elvyngs. Let them keep their secrets, if they must. Why don’t we just ask Cicily herself?’

Jay and Val stared at me.

‘Um,’ said Jay. ‘Are we back to that thing about Zareen and Cicily’s ghost? Because it’s a crazy long shot there’s even a ghost left to talk to—’

‘It isn’t about that,’ I said.

Val sat back, folded her arms, and gave me the narrow-eyed look. ‘I believe I see a Patented Vesper-Classic Crazy Plan aloft on the horizon.’

‘Coming in fast,’ I agreed, beaming. ‘Wanna hear it?’

‘Do we have a choice?’ muttered Jay.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Listen, there’s something I haven’t told you.’ I held up both my hands, and wiggled my fingers. ‘There are one or two, er, lingering effects going on with me after that whole Vales of Wonder thing—’

‘Is this about those zappy little spurts of magick?’ said Val.

‘How did you know about those?’

‘Five days ago you left a scorch mark on the cover of The Life and Work of The Great Alchemist Nicolas Flamel.’

‘I did?’ I gasped. ‘And you didn’t have me cleaning the latrines in penance?’

Val tilted her head. ‘It isn’t a great book.’

‘Well. Those zappy little spurts can be useful, for all that they’re involuntary. When I was at the Academy I touched the portrait of Cicily Werewode—’

‘What?’ snapped Jay.

‘Only a tiny bit! I didn’t harm it, I swear.’

Jay rolled his eyes, but mercifully said no more.

‘Anyway, my fingers did that fizzy thing, but instead of scorching the painting — thankfully — it, um, cleaned it.’

‘Cleaned…?’ said Jay, his brows shooting up.

I nodded emphatically. ‘Cleaned off all the centuries of dirt until it looked new-painted. And there was a sheen of moonlight in her hair, and — and something else. I hardly know. Only I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the painting ever since. Something in her eyes nags at me. It’s like she was looking right at me, trying to tell me something.’

‘That’s extremely interesting,’ said Jay, and while I thought I heard a shade of sarcasm about the words, he did look impressed. At least, that’s how I chose to interpret that intent, searching look he directed at me. ‘How exactly does it help us?’

‘Jay, I can’t say how, but… what if she was trying to communicate with me? That painting isn’t normal. I have no idea how, but I believe some part of Cicily Werewode lingers there, and why would she if she didn’t have something to do?’

‘Her ghost, again? In a painting?’

I shook my head. ‘No. Well… probably not. I don’t know, Jay. I just have a… hunch.’

He grinned. ‘Like a Milady-in-training.’

‘I can only hope to be that awesome someday, though by preference I’d like to hang on to my corporeal form.’

He gave a tiny sigh. ‘So. Let’s see if I’m getting the hang of the Ves Crazy Plan. You think that portrait will somehow answer all the lingering questions we’ve run into about Cicily Werewode, the work she did, and where it went.’

‘Right!’

‘And you’d like to test this by…’ he paused in thought, looking me up and down as though he might see signs of my intentions emblazoned upon my dress. ‘Submitting an official, formal request to borrow the painting, via official, formal channels? No. That would be far too obvious, and besides it would—’

‘Take ages,’ I said. ‘Val, you remember the debacle of the Greendale journals?’

Val put her face in her hands, and groaned. ‘Four months. Four. Every single conceivable run-around…’

I nodded. ‘We don’t have weeks or months to spend jumping through the interminable hoops they call bureaucracy. You see that, Jay, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ he allowed, inclining his head. ‘And while I hate to admit it, the chances of such a request being approved are pretty slim, especially now that Crystobel Elvyng’s made it her business to try to stall us.’

‘Exactly!’

‘So there is nothing to be done but to sneak in and mess with their painting without their knowledge.’

‘It’s for the good of magick,’ I said gravely. ‘If we can pull this off, the Elvyngs won’t need to rely on magickal silver or argent or whatever anymore. There’ll be plenty of magick, for everything.’

‘Supposing that they are relying on argent,’ said Jay, with annoying but perfectly correct pedantry. ‘And then their business will collapse, because the very best of their wares today will become the very least we can do in the future.’

I waved this away. ‘They’ll adapt, and make even more amazing stuff.’

Jay checked the time. ‘Right. If we leave now, we can have this next exciting, law-defying adventure over by teatime.’

‘Well…’ I said.

Jay looked at me. ‘There’s more? Say there isn’t more.’

‘Um, I think we have to do it at night.’

‘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!’

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.’

‘We need to go back to the Elvyngs,’ I said to Jay perhaps half an hour later, when we were once more on the right side — the human side — of the boundary between Yorkshire and Aylligranir. ‘Bet you a year’s salary Cicily had some moonsilver paraphernalia from her father, and another year’s salary the Elvyngs have hung onto it.’

‘No bet,’ said Jay. ‘It’s too obvious.’

He offered nothing else, only walked along beside me, collar turned up against the drizzle of summer rain that now watered the hillside. He’d been quiet ever since our first introduction to the queen, and remained so now.

I’d had to wrestle with myself. I’d been so tempted to excuse myself on some small pretext, dash back to the library and find out who Jay’s Yllanfalen grandfather was. I told myself I’d be doing it for him: that I could, someday when he changed his mind, hand him the answer to this family puzzle. He would be pleased. Right?

But that wasn’t the real reason I was tempted, or it wasn’t the whole reason. My cursed curiosity had got hold of that little mystery and refused to let go.

And I didn’t quite understand Jay’s thinking. How could he not want to know? How could he be within seconds of finding out who he was, and pass it up?

The man puzzled me. Exceedingly.

I took out my phone, by way of distracting myself, and typed furiously. Val needed to know everything we’d learned, and quickly.

I ended with:

Hoping we have a cryptographer at Home?

I got a response within seconds, the prompt buzzing of my phone making me jump.

Val said: Yes. Also we have Crystobel Elvyng at Home.

‘Whaaaat,’ I gasped, and showed Jay. ‘Quick, Whirly Wizard. To the library!’

‘I know this is going to sound weird,’ he said. ‘Coming from me, that is, instead of you. But do you suppose we could eat first?’

‘Note to self,’ I said, looking uselessly around at the rolling hillside notably unadorned with cafe or shop. ‘Do not starve the Waymaster. Erm, you don’t happen to know of a village hereabouts, do you?’

Jay merely pointed.

‘Right.’ I set off down the hill in the direction indicated, heading for cake and glory, and Jay trudged manfully along beside me.

We were not much more than an hour delayed before we reached home. I’d stuffed Jay with a stack of sandwiches and scones and myself with a piece of cake — just the one, I occasionally have some sense of proportion I swear — and thus revived, he’d managed the return trip smoothly enough. We emerged in the preserved henge in the cellar at Home, and I clattered straight up the stairs.

Jay followed at a more sedate — weary? — pace. As such, I had thirty whole seconds to stare my fill at Crystobel Elvyng before he caught up with me.

She was seated in the library with Val. Not languishing in front of the head librarian’s big, imposing desk, the way most of us do. The matriarch of the Elvyng dynasty merited the red carpet treatment. There’s a handsome fireplace with a brick surround in the main hall of the library, flanked by a pair of silver brocade chairs. I don’t think I have ever seen a fire lit in that hearth; there is no earthly way Val would risk the books like that, however cold it may be. I have never seen the chairs used, either.

Until today. Val had taken possession of one, and her august guest sat at her ease in the other.

I received a peculiar impression of there being a third presence in the room, which was probably House. The building mostly leaves us to get on with things, but once in a while it takes an interest.

I couldn’t blame it for taking an interest in Crystobel Elvyng. She’s about my age, or only a little older; mid-thirties at the most. She has all the poise of a much older woman, though. In pictures she tends to appear exquisitely well-dressed, and positively oozes confidence.

Comes of growing up entrenched in privilege, I suppose. She’d been an Elvyng since the moment of her birth, and in the magickal world, they’re the next best thing to royalty. Better, in some ways.

It’s a matter of power. They’re all remarkably well-endowed with it (though as a minor point of interest, they have yet to produce a Waymaster). They are also incredibly rich, of course. In what world will the perfect mix of wealth and power not confer fame and glory upon the wielder? Not this one, anyway.

For my part, I have a horrible fascination with their entire lifestyle. Which puts me on a par with most of the rest of magickal Britain, I suppose.

After years of admiring her from afar, now I beheld Crystobel Elvyng relaxing in the best chair in Val’s library, and I did not know what to think. If she could only have managed to be ordinary looking, she might be more believable as a real, breathing human like the rest of us. But of course, she isn’t. Whether Cicily’s  Yllanfalen heritage has bred true down the centuries, or whether she is just lucky, she has excellent features, clear skin the colour of peaches in milk, and a wealth of honey-brown hair. On that day, she was wearing a cerulean velvet coat I might cheerfully have killed for, and boots to match.

Jay came up behind me while I was taking in this scene, and having devoted about three seconds to his own observations, he whispered in my ear: ‘Crushing on Crystobel?’

‘That or experiencing an unjustified and irrational resentment,’ I whispered back. ‘Cannot currently decide which.’

‘They’re just people,’ he said. ‘Like you and me.’

‘That’s not what the papers say.’

Jay raised a brow. ‘Since when do you care what the papers say?’

‘I don’t care, exactly. But it’s difficult to help being a little bit influenced. I feel like we’re in the presence of a minor goddess, and I cannot decide whether she deserves all that reverence.’

‘Nobody does. Problem solved.’ Jay flashed me a quick smile, and moved past me into the library.

Val looked up. ‘Aha, Jay — Ves with you?’

‘Here,’ I said, stepping forward with what I hoped was my usual insouciant manner. I didn’t want to feel self-conscious just because we had a celebrity in the House. I’d managed not to be too much of an idiot when I’d met Baron Alban; why was Crystobel Elvyng different?

Because you identify with Crystobel in ways you never had to with Alban.

She was too much like me, while also being incredibly, impossibly different.

But she was smiling at both of us, and either she was an excellent actress or she was genuinely pleased to meet us. I refused to speculate as to which it was.

Introductions over, Crystobel looked keenly at Jay and me in turn, and said: ‘I understand you are interested in one of our ancestors.’

The royal “we”, I thought, and mentally kicked myself.

‘Cicily Werewode-Elvyng,’ I confirmed. ‘Did you know she was part Yllanfalen?’

She raised her brows at that. ‘Of course. Some of our family’s most celebrated abilities are attributed to that lineage.’

If that were true, I wondered why Cicily’s portrait had been stuffed out of sight in a disused garret bedroom in her own gorgeous manor house. Considering I had been wandering around up there without permission or supervision, it was impossible to ask.

I thought, though, of Hylldirion’s long, long list of Yllanfalen-human children, and wondered.

‘I don’t suppose you have any more of Cicily’s writings among your family’s papers?’ I asked. Val had probably already posed the question, but I had no way of knowing that for certain. Had she told Crystobel what, in particular, we were looking for, or why we were interested? I hoped not. I didn’t mind sharing those details with the queen of Aylligranir, but the Elvyngs had… different priorities.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Crystobel, with a gentle smile. ‘Unfortunately, little of Cicily’s life has survived. We have a few letters of hers, which I have given into your librarian’s care, but they do not discuss much of any great importance. I would not like to raise your expectations falsely.’

I glanced at Val, who minutely shook her head. The letters contained nothing relevant.

Curse it.

But I was intrigued. How was it that Cicily’s possessions had been lost? And in that case, how had that single book of Cicily’s ended up in the York archives?

Was Crystobel telling the truth? I had no reason to think otherwise.

Still…

‘May I ask why Cicily is of interest to the Society?’ said Crystobel, still with that pleasant smile.

I looked at Val. She hadn’t spilt the beans, then, and I did not want to.

‘We will be at greater liberty to discuss that once our ideas receive some confirmation,’ said Val, smoothly but firmly. ‘At present we are only speculating.’

Crystobel nodded, but then said: ‘Is it about the argent? If so, I feel I must give you fair warning. Cicily’s work, while interesting, was unrealised at the time of her death.’

‘Argent?’ repeated Val.

‘It has had a few names down the years, hasn’t it?’ said Crystobel. ‘The Yllanfalen call it, I believe, moonsilver?’

It figured she’d know something of it, what with the family link.

Crystobel went on. ‘I would be sorry to see so vital an organisation as the Society waste your valuable time on a wild goose chase, so I feel bound to add: there is nothing in alchemy to permit the manufacture of the substance known variously as argent, or moonsilver.’

‘Thank you for the warning,’ said Val, when neither Jay nor I said anything.

Crystobel evidently considered this the close of the interview, for with her ever-present smile, she got up from the best chair in the library and held out her hand to me.

I took it, and shook it. She had a good handshake: brisk, but not perfunctory. Business-like, without feeling impersonal.

She was almost a foot taller than me. I looked up at her, conscious of a few wistful feelings, and one or two others.

Crush, Jay’s voice echoed in my head, and maybe he was a tiny bit right.

‘Thank you for your time,’ I heard myself say, and a smile — hopefully not a grimace — did something to my face.

‘It was my pleasure,’ murmured Crystobel.

A few moments later, having taken similarly gracious leave of Val and Jay, Crystobel Elvyng was gone.