Modern Magick

‘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.

Hylldirion looked at me oddly, but Jay snickered. I’d got around the problem of how to store my own valuables by way of misdirection. Instead of having a safe, or a big, fancy chest with a big, inviting lock on it — anything obvious that begged to be investigated by a chancer of a thief — I had a cracked old chamber pot. No one would ever think to look in there for something worth stealing.

‘Never mind,’ I told the Lorekeeper.

Course, if you know the magickal password — so to speak — my shabby old chamber pot miraculously turns back into its true shape: a crystal chest full of goodies.

So if I could protect my valuables by disguising them as a repellent article of no interest to anyone, the alchemists of the past could certainly have protected their own valuable findings by disguising them as inanities — or the ramblings of a madwoman.

My thoughts flew to Cicily Werewode’s journal, and Mary Werewode’s moonbathing.

‘Do you have reason to think that’s what was going on?’ I looked hard at our new friend the Lorekeeper, who seemed to be enjoying our ignorance far more than I liked.

‘What, exactly?’ said Hylldirion mildly.

I took a breath. ‘That the alchemists of the past, the ones with enough magickal ability to interest us, were using some kind of code to record their findings.’

‘It is plausible, is it not?’ said the Lorekeeper.

‘More so than that nothing has survived at all.’

‘Indeed.’

‘So, then,’ said Jay, leaning forward. ‘Was there a universal code, understood among most alchemists, or did each one develop their own?’

‘Both,’ said Hylldirion. ‘Some terms were commonly used. Among regular or non-magickal alchemists, such terms as fool’s gold, horn silver, dragon’s blood and pearl ash — you will likely have heard some of them, even today. The focus of magickal alchemy, of course, was jewels more than metals; some sought to create such articles as sun’s glow, which seems to have referred either to sunstone or to diamonds, or blush of love, which meant rubies.’

So far, so familiar. I’d learned from my own research that many magicians or witches who practiced alchemy sought to create jewels, though not just any jewels: the magick-wreathed kind from which prized Wands are made. Why do you think I got in so much trouble for losing the Sunstone Wand? (and I did). Those things are not plentiful.

As far as I knew, they’d failed as surely as the likes of Flamel failed at making gold out of lead.

‘Some of them, of course, likely had their own terms between smaller groups of researchers,’ said Hylldirion. ‘On which point, I cannot assist you further. Alchemy was never my area of expertise.’ Or interest, his tone implied.

Well, few people had ever taken much interest in so batty an art. That was the whole problem.

‘Lorekeeper,’ I said. ‘Is it your opinion that anybody has ever succeeded in producing or creating magickal silver? By transmutation, or something else?’

‘I would be very surprised,’ he said, without hesitation.

I wanted to ask why, but Jay intervened with a question of his own. ‘What is magickal silver?’ he said. ‘Is it literally silver, or not?’

That was a good question, one I had briefly explored but been unable to answer. Our library, at least, had little to offer on the subject. The stuff had, perhaps, never been prevalent enough, at least in our Britain, to merit much study. Or perhaps its potential had never really been understood.

‘It is not silver,’ said the Lorekeeper. ‘In terms of its physical make-up it has little in common with real silver. It is only silver-coloured. What is it made from? How is it formed? These questions I cannot answer. I do not know that anybody can. The alchemists of old termed it a distillation of the elements of air and water, which may go some way towards explaining the names the Yllanfalen have historically used. That, of course, is a discredited notion these days.’

Yes, the world has moved on from the idea that the four elements have much to do with anything, even in magick. But that didn’t necessarily mean there was not a kernel of truth lurking somewhere in there.

I filed the idea away.

‘Regarding jewels,’ I offered. ‘I understand the ones we value to be identical in composition to any other, only they are said to form in areas of great magickal intensity, and thus absorb a degree of it before they are extracted. This seems to be a widely accepted explanation. But if magickal silver is not silver, then I suppose the same can’t be true.’

Hylldirion spread his hands. ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps yes, and some aspect of that process of absorption has a transformative effect on the base metal. Who can say? Without extensive study, we must rely on speculation, and such studies have never been conducted.’

I sighed, beginning to feel dejected. Here in the heart of Yllanfalen power, I had hoped to uncover some genuine insights; they, after all, were the one people I knew to have incorporated their moonsilver quite deeply into their culture. But it seemed the Queen’s Lorekeeper knew little more than we did.

Still, the clue about the code was of use. I’d send that snippet of information to Val at my earliest opportunity, and see what she made of it.

A scroll drifted past Hylldirion’s head, wandered off to the far side of the library, and then came back again.

‘Thank you,’ said the Lorekeeper, accepting and unfurling it. A slender thing when rolled up, it went on and on and on when unrolled, comprising far more parchment than seemed possible. I watched in dumbfounded silence as Hylldirion browsed through several reams of it.

‘Werewode, was it not?’ he murmured, without looking up.

‘Mary Werewode, in the late thirteen hundreds,’ I confirmed. ‘And Cicily Werewode, who married, at my guess, somewhere in the fifteen-eighties.’

‘There would not be a marriage record,’ said Hylldirion. ‘Because there would not be a marriage, or certainly not a sanctioned one. Not at that time. If your Mary or Cicily were born of a union between one of my people and one of yours, it would have been an illicit one.’

I felt disappointment again. ‘So you will have no way of knowing?’

‘Well.’ Hylldirion paused in his perusal of the scroll. ‘If there was a birth, and presumably there must have been, that might have been a matter of record. And here we are.’ He laid the paper, very carefully, over the surface of his desk.

Jay and I leaned over it.

In tiny, crabbed scrawl I read: Margaret Werewode, and the date 1538.

Cicily’s mother? It had to be. The timing was perfect.

‘So Mary was probably human but Cicily only partially so,’ I said, excitement rising again. ‘I knew it!’

‘What is that scroll?’ said Jay, in a tone that made me look quickly at him. He was unreadable, but I saw a certain tension in him.

The Lorekeeper said calmly: ‘It is a register of all children born to Yllanfalen and human pairings.’

I stared at the endless scroll, aghast. ‘But it goes on forever.’

‘The records date back rather more than a thousand years.’

‘Oh! A mere nothing.’

Jay did not speak. Looking at him again, I could guess at his thoughts, even if they did not show on his face. Somewhere on that scroll, his father’s name must be written — and, presumably, the name of his Yllanfalen grandfather.

Would he ask? I waited, giving him time to decide.

He said nothing.

The name of Cicily’s grandfather was there: Igryr of Everynden. ‘What is Everynden?’ I asked, pointing at the entry.

‘It is one of the towns of Aylligranir.’

I nodded, thinking. So Cicily was part Yllanfalen; was that why she had taken such an interest in her great-great-grandmother’s work? Had she inherited the Yllanfalen fascination with magickal silver?

That did not altogether follow, by itself. I began to wonder how much she had known her grandfather, this Igryr of Everynden — and whether he had shown her anything. Given her anything.

Something precious and rare, for the granddaughter he should not have had. An heirloom. A silvery one.

It wasn’t so far-fetched. Magickal silver had never been plentiful, but five hundred years ago it had been somewhat more so than it was today. A Curiosity or a small Artefact made from magickal silver, given into her care by her mysterious and magickal ancestor? That would kick off a strong interest in the substance, no doubt; especially if she could also connect it with her great-grandmother’s journals.

Who would have it now?

If anyone, the Elvyngs.

‘One last question,’ I said to Hylldirion. ‘You haven’t got any famous magickal alchemists in your kingdom’s history, by any chance?’

‘I should think it highly improbable that anybody would have thought it worth their while to bother,’ said the Lorekeeper.

That response rather took me aback. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘Because…’ The Lorekeeper looked thoughtfully at me, then at Jay, apparently struggling with a decision of some kind. ‘There would have been no need,’ he said finally. ‘There are several instances of powerful artefacts wrought from moonsilver holding a high place in the culture of some one or other of the Yllanfalen kingdoms, and that is not a coincidence. Our culture has historically prized the silver most highly, for its beauty and its properties. And we were able to do so because we had what was once a significant source. The Moonsilver Mines were once the property of all of the Yllanfalen monarchs, until they ran dry of silver in the late fourteenth century. They have been of little interest to anyone, since.’

Something about his demeanour tipped me off: there was more.

‘Just where were those mines?’ said Jay, glancing at me.

Hylldirion smiled. ‘Everynden.’

It really wasn’t plain, at least not to my eye. I stared and stared at Jay, and saw the same features as ever. The same human features. They were good, no doubt about that: finely etched, sculpted cheekbones, strong jaw, all the hallmarks of what might be considered solid good looks.

But he was human. Not a hint of a fae glamour about him; none of the unusual tints or beautiful, slightly alien cast to the features that might mark him as part fae. None of the things that had stood out so clearly in Cicily Werewode’s portrait.

But the Lorekeeper disagreed. ‘You haven’t the eyes,’ he said to me, not unkindly. ‘It’s clear enough to me. And to Her Majesty, no doubt.’

‘Jay?’ I squeaked.

He flashed me a tight, unamused smile. ‘Can we talk about it later?’

I folded my arms, and stared him down. No, later wasn’t going to be good enough. I’d brought a part-Yllanfalen associate into the middle of an Yllanfalen kingdom, and I had no idea what the political ramifications of that were likely to be. Was he a descendant of someone from Aylligranir? If so, the connection might not precisely please the people here. Was he descended from a scion of a rival kingdom, with whom relations were strained? That could be even worse.

Either way, we’d put ourselves in a difficult position. Rudeness didn’t begin to cover it; and what if the queen had seen it as an attempt to manipulate or influence her?

Jay needed to tell me stuff like this. Yes, it was personal, but the strictly personal could sometimes have a serious impact upon the professional. And like it or not, I was at present responsible for him.

He rubbed at the back of his neck, not looking at me. He was deeply embarrassed by it, and I wasn’t sure why. For all my annoyance, there was nothing actually shameful about his ancestry, and in his case it had clearly benefited him. He’d inherited some part of the legendary Yllanfalen talent for magick-wreathed music.

‘My grandmother,’ he said shortly. ‘Had an — unsanctioned relationship with one of the Yllanfalen. My father was the result.’

He said no more.

That would’ve been around the 1950s, I thought, or thereabouts. “Unsanctioned” could mean a lot of things, but all of them bad; had it caused a family scandal? Was that why Jay was ashamed of it?

‘Do you know who it was?’ I said.

He shook his head.

That explained why Jay’s mother might have hoped he’d be admitted to music school, though not why he’d been denied. Apparently blood links to the Yllanfalen didn’t necessarily count for much with them, either.

I felt a little bad for putting Jay on the spot like that, and offered him an apologetic smile. It was inconvenient — from a professional point of view — that the family didn’t know who his ancestor was; it meant I had no means with which to navigate the tricky political waters. Then again, it meant the Yllanfalen might not know, either, which eliminated most of the problems I’d been worried about.

‘It may be possible to find out,’ said Hylldirion, watching Jay. ‘Would you like to know?’

‘No,’ said Jay shortly, and added, ‘Thank you.’

Time to change the subject.

‘Anyway,’ I said breezily. ‘We came to consult you on two primary points, Lorekeeper, if we may.’

Hylldirion sat down again, wheezing softly. He waved a hand, gesturing us to take chairs at will. ‘I hope you have brought me an intriguing problem,’ he remarked. ‘It is a long time since I had a really new idea to dig into.’

That boded well. ‘One of them is a mere question of ancestry,’ I admitted. ‘There was an alchemist in the fourteenth century who may, I suspect, have had Yllanfalen blood herself. I don’t know how far back your records go?’

‘An alchemist?’ he said, and his gaze sharpened upon me. ‘What was the name?’

‘Mary Werewode. Alternatively her own descendant, Cicily Werewode, about a century and a half later.’

‘Werewode.’ Hylldirion nodded to himself, and went on nodding. I didn’t see what he did, but a fine golden quill pen whisked into the air and sailed off; after a moment I realised it had been caught up and carried away by someone I couldn’t see. A sprite, most likely. ‘Kindle will find out, if records there are.’

I made a mental note to beware of invisible sprites hovering about. We perhaps ought to have been a bit more discreet with some of the things we’d said about the queen.

Oops.

‘Thank you,’ I said hastily. ‘And the other thing was about alchemy itself. Specifically…’ I thought. Specifically what? Specifically, a quick and convenient answer to the complex question of how to produce the most valuable magickal substance known to man or fae? An easy, straightforward recipe for the kind of stuff some people would kill for, just lying on a shelf in the Lorekeeper’s library? Hah.

No.

‘We, um, wondered if your people might ever have investigated some of the old alchemical pursuits,’ I said cautiously.

Hylldirion’s eyes twinkled. ‘Lead into gold, and the elixir of immortality?’

‘No. Real alchemy. Magickal alchemy. In particular…’

‘Magickal silver,’ said Jay, growing impatient with my waffling. ‘Moonsilver, as you call it. Or skysilver.’

Hylldirion considered us both in silence, for a moment or two. ‘And what leads you to believe that such a thing was ever possible?’ he asked. ‘Surely all who remember the moonsilver know that it was pulled from the ground, like any other metal.’

‘Not quite any other metal,’ I said. ‘Some are now formed by amalgamation, of course.’

‘And you think that might be a way to make moonsilver?’ said the Lorekeeper. ‘Mix silver with — something, and there it is?’

‘No,’ I snapped. ‘Were it so simple, the world would be awash with the stuff. I have no idea how it might be contrived; I only know that some one or two ancient scholars heavily implied that they had done it.’

‘Including these Werewodes you spoke of,’ said the Lorekeeper.

‘Yes. Possibly.’

Hylldirion sat with steepled fingers, his expression unreadable. ‘I can see why the search has led you here.’

Was that a glimmer of contempt in his eyes? I bridled at the mere possibility.

‘We are not asking for the sake of personal gain,’ I said. ‘We aren’t treasure hunters, if that is what you imagine. We’re from the Society, and we’re trying to save magick. Moonsilver has the distinction of being peculiarly adept at absorbing magickal energy, and under the right conditions also amplifying it. As such, it is of great interest just now; both to the Society, and to Their Majesties of the Court at Mandridore.’

I hate name-dropping, but sometimes it’s necessary. And if there is one fae court that all the others take seriously, it’s Mandridore. Pomp, power and influence.

Hylldirion did not respond directly to anything I’d said. He was silent for a while longer, while his lively mind turned over who-knows-what ideas. Then he said: ‘I do not know what your sources might be, but one would do well to ask why the art has fallen so far out of favour — indeed, been all but forgotten altogether. If there is any validity to any of those old spells, why are they no longer practiced? Why are they not respected?’

‘We had asked ourselves those same questions,’ I allowed.

‘And what conclusions did you reach?’

‘Either that there is no validity to any of it, in which case we are destined for a great disappointment. Or that they were unusually adept at maintaining a strict secrecy.’

‘Why might they have worked so hard to maintain such a secrecy, do you think?’

I shrugged. ‘Most likely because alchemy has never been held in very high regard, and no serious scholar likes to be laughed at for their choice of subject.’

But Hylldirion shook his head. ‘No area of endeavour that can prove its worth ever remains a laughing-stock for long. If alchemy has anything to offer, why was it kept secret? Why is it still?’

‘Because,’ said Jay, ‘keeping it secret was more important than giving it to the world. Which means something that was done with it was — too effective.’

‘It may simply be that the alchemists of old were avaricious in the extreme,’ said the Lorekeeper, nodding and relaxing back into his chair. ‘After all, of what use would it be to turn lead into gold, if everyone could do it? Soon enough, gold would be as common as lead, and therefore as valueless, and the whole procedure rendered worthless.’

‘That could well apply to moonsilver,’ I said.

Hylldirion nodded. ‘It may also be that the procedure proved dangerous in some way, too much so to be worth it. Or that it was too difficult, or too expensive — yes, even if the product was moonsilver. It is a substance of great, but not infinite value.’

These objections I privately waved away. Danger we would risk, for the sake of so important a project, and no expense could possibly be spared considering the importance of the ultimate goal.

‘We consider ourselves duly warned,’ I said, with a slight smile.

Hylldirion smiled back. ‘It was my duty.’

‘We understand.’

‘We return, then, to the question of how so important a secret might have been kept for so long, even at the expense of attracting ridicule. Supposing such a secret exists.’

I couldn’t tell if he knew something, and was being cagey for effect, or whether this, too, was an attempt to warn us of impending disappointment.

Lorekeepers. They’re as addicted to mysteries as I am.

‘If there are books on the subject,’ I said, ‘they’ve never been found. At least, not to my knowledge.’

‘They might be hidden in some deep, dark pit somewhere,’ Hylldirion agreed. ‘An unusually impenetrable one, that somehow no one has got into in hundreds of years. That is a possibility.’

My thoughts flew to Farringale. Would it be worth another trip back, to scour the library for such a book? Could it be possible? It could take weeks on end to search all the books on all those shelves. Even with Mauf’s help, I couldn’t see it taking much less time. And what if there was nothing there? Weeks of subjection to the dangerously unstable magickal overflows of the place, and maybe nothing to show for it.

Not exactly Plan A material.

‘Alternatively?’ continued the Lorekeeper.

He’d asked a question. I had no idea what he was driving at. ‘Um,’ I said. ‘Perhaps nothing was written down?’

Jay, though, was shaking his head. ‘Scholars of every academic discipline write things down. They have to; nobody could remember the half of complex spells or lengthy research without written records, and then it could never be passed on.’

‘Perhaps they didn’t want to pass it on. Isn’t that the point?’

‘Not widely, perhaps,’ Jay said. ‘But to the select few? Nobody wants to feel that their life’s work will die when they do. They wrote down whatever they had, I’d bet a year’s salary on it.’

‘I am inclined to agree,’ said the Lorekeeper. He watched us with both faint amusement and a kind of eagerness, like a dedicated teacher painstakingly guiding a pair of befuddled students towards enlightenment.

He couldn’t just tell us whatever he knew?

Lorekeepers.

‘What possibilities remain?’ he prompted.

‘It was written down,’ said Jay, ‘but in such a way as to be incomprehensible to the majority.’

I gasped. ‘Hidden in plain sight! Like my chamber pot.’

Curse it.

Mum’s only recently installed upon the throne of Ygranyllon, and having required some days to recover from serious injury incurred during her inauguration as the queen (sort of), I hadn’t expected she would have matters so well in hand already as to have sent envoys to neighbouring kingdoms.

Way to go, Mum!

If only it didn’t leave us in hot water.

‘Erm,’ I said, and cast a frantic glance at Jay.

No help there; he was as stymied as I.

Ah well. Talking us out of (and into) various messes was sort of my specialty.

‘You aren’t wrong,’ I said. ‘I, er, didn’t know about the other envoys.’

The queen glanced behind us. I refused to be so weak as to turn around, but if I had, I’d bet you anything you like I’d have seen the door quietly opening again, and those two guards coming in.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘We did not mean to lie our way in. Only Flow seemed inclined to evict us, and we really needed to visit.’

I waited, ready any moment to be seized and ripped to bits. But nothing happened. Hopefully she did not imagine we were here to harm her. What manner of inept infiltrators would brazenly show up at her front door, and gab their way inside?

‘You are Delia’s daughter,’ said the queen. ‘The account I received of your arrival coincides with what I have heard. Why, then, are you here, if your mother did not send you?’

‘You’ve heard of me?!’

Faint amusement twinkled in her amber eyes. ‘The events that led to your mother’s installation as queen were… noteworthy. Such tales spread.’

I wondered what part in that Jay and I were said to have played, and decided not to ask. I could not tell if Queen Llirriallon approved of my mother’s ascension to royalty and authority, or whether she shared the opinions of those of her people who despised the prospect of a human ruler. Her composure was too good, her serenity untouched. I hoped, though, that the welcoming manner she had shown indicated the former. She’d already known, then, that we were no official envoy.

I realised, too late, that I had not answered her question.

Jay pre-empted me.

‘We, er, came out of no idle curiosity,’ said Jay. ‘If you know of us, you must know that we work for The Society for the Preservation of Magickal Heritage. We’re here because we are looking for something.’

Right. Honesty is the best policy, etc. I formed my signature sign to back up Jay’s words: the Society’s three crossed wands, and my own unicorn symbol superimposed over them (how very fitting that choice now seemed). ‘We were actually hoping to consult your archivist,’ I put in. I debated throwing the word “alchemy” straight in, but dismissed the notion. For one thing, running around asking about alchemy in any serious fashion tends to get a person labelled an eccentric, and I really didn’t need any extra help in that department. For another, I wasn’t sure what to make of her majesty of Aylligranir. If her people knew something to our benefit, would she be minded to share it, or hide it? I always prefer to speak to fellow scholars, when I can. They’re intrigued by tricky questions, and often as desirous of finding answers to an interesting puzzle as I am.

‘And any alchemists you may have at the court,’ said Jay, reaching totally different conclusions to mine.

Curse it.

‘Alchemists?’ echoed the queen, her brows going up. ‘A discredited art, no?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But nonetheless we have questions for anyone who might have kept it up—’

‘There is no such person here,’ said the queen, and that keen look was back in her eye. ‘What is it that you are looking for?’

Now Jay looked to me, and well he might. What could I possibly say? How top secret was Milady’s magickal-modulator project? She had welcomed a partnership with the Court at Mandridore; did that mean she was as happy to draw other fae courts into the scheme?

This was why I hadn’t chosen to show our hand. All the awkward questions that follow.

Fine, well. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And did not every fae court, and every magickal society, stand to gain if the Society could pull this off?

‘We’re after magickal silver,’ I said. ‘What you call moonsilver, or skysilver — at least, that’s what they were calling it in Ygranyllon. We need it in quantity, and as you must know there isn’t a great quantity of it to be had. So we’re following some rumours. It’s said here and there that the alchemists of the past may have sought to create it, and may have succeeded, but if they did they’ve been awfully quiet about it.’

‘Such a project, were it successful, must be very lucrative,’ said the queen, and I am sure I did not imagine the shade of disapproval in her tone.

‘Very,’ I said quickly. ‘But that isn’t why we want to make it.’

‘I think you had better tell me the rest,’ said the queen.

So we did. Not quite all of the rest, but a lot of it. I began with our first venture into lost Farringale, and ended with Torvaston’s abandoned scheme to create a solution via magickal means. ‘So if we are here as envoys,’ I concluded, ‘it is as members of the Society, not of my mother’s court. And we are seeking help. To save magick. For everyone.’

It wasn’t a bad speech, if I say so myself. Harder to say whether Queen Llirriallon was impressed by it or not; she sat very still, ruminating upon everything we had said, and I could not tell from her face what thoughts were passing through her mind.

Told all in a rush, the way Jay and I had just done, it sounded far-fetched. Crazy. Magickal parasites, lost royal houses, alternate Britains, mysteriously powerful artefacts and two ordinary magicians at the heart of it all: would she believe it? How much of everything we’d said did she already know?

At length, she spoke.

‘At court, we have a store of moonsilver.’

My heart leapt, and began to race. Giddy gods, could it be that easy? Would she give her kingdom’s store into the Society’s care?

‘It is not enough for your purpose, but perhaps some token of it may be of use to the Society. I am prepared to offer a loan, via the proper channels of course.’

Of course. She wouldn’t just let us waltz off with it, which was fair.

But if it was a loan, she did not intend for it to be used in the creation of any magickal modulator. So, then…?

She read my questions in my face, for she smiled a little, and rang the tiny, silvery bell that stood on a corner of her desk. ‘You wanted to speak to an archivist?’ she said, and a moment later the door swung open.

‘Please take Miss Vesper and Mr. Patel to see Hylldirion,’ she said to the green-clad official who entered. ‘He is our Lorekeeper,’ she said to Jay and I. ‘I believe you may find him useful to consult.’

Jay was laughing softly as we exited the queen of Aylligranir’s salon.

‘What?’ I hissed, trailing after our taciturn guide at a distance of a few feet. He’d barely acknowledged us, offering us the scantest of bows before turning his back and walking off. Apparently we were to follow or not, he neither knew nor cared.

‘Was that us being gently disposed of?’ said Jay.

‘The classic token-gesture-and-fob-off combo,’ I nodded. ‘She’s a master at it.’

On the face of it, Llirriallon the Gentle had been most obliging and helpful. But Jay and I hadn’t missed the fact that she had asked no questions about the modulator, or our quest to rebuild it.  She’d made no professions of solidarity, and offered us no real assistance. Just the loan of a small piece of unworked moonsilver, however that was supposed to help, and then dispatched us to pester her Lorekeeper with our questions.

And there’d been that gleam of something in her soft eyes that looked awfully like amusement.

I consoled myself by remembering what Val had said. The shining lights of history were often considered cranks in their own time. I had no real problem with being considered a crank. In fact, Milady rather specialised in being underestimated.

Still, it would’ve been nice to meet with more real assistance, here at an unusually intact Yllanfalen enclave.

A stray thought filtered in.

‘Jay,’ I said, in a different tone. ‘Did she know you?’ I was thinking of the way she’d stared at Jay, and repeated his surname. And the way everyone seemed to know who we were the moment we showed up, though that might just be because I was notorious for causing a ruckus, and Jay was getting famous by association. That, and for his shiny Waymastery skills.

Jay cast me a glance I can only term shifty. ‘Er, no.’

‘And now for the truth?’ Our green-clad guide walked on at a measured pace, either oblivious or uninterested, and he’d led us through so many twisty corridors I had hopelessly lost what passed for my bearings. Hopefully Jay had some idea of where we were.

With a sigh that expressed the utter futility of trying to fob me off, Jay said: ‘She doesn’t know me. She may know of my family.’

‘The Nottinghamshire Patels?’ That surprised me. What possible link could there be between Jay’s family and an Yllanfalen kingdom in Yorkshire?

‘My mother tried to get me admitted for music tutelage,’ Jay said. ‘She was quite persistent, I understand.’

My thoughts flew to Jay at the piano, and the ethereal music drawn forth by his clever fingers. Music tutelage, or musical magick? ‘Did she succeed?’

‘No. I was not invited to study here, or at any other Yllanfalen kingdom.’

Some piece was missing in this little history. Jay’s musical talents were inarguable, but few parents, however devoted, would have the gumption to importune the Yllanfalen for training. Not least because of its utter futility. These fae had never been especially welcoming of human visitors, however magickal they might be. Even with my links to a fellow Yllanfalen queen, I knew our time in Aylligranir was likely to prove brief; soon enough we would be politely encouraged to take ourselves off.

Why, then, had Mrs. Patel considered it worth the effort to try?

‘Is there some reason she thought they might—’ I began, but our guide at last stopped in the middle of another interminable corridor, opened a low door set into the pale stone wall, and bowed us through it. ‘At the queen’s pleasure, Lorekeeper,’ he said to whoever was inside.

I walked past him, and stepped into a room Val might literally have killed for. A library, naturally, and not, whatever my words might have suggested, the spectacular kind. Unlike much of the rest of the palace, this room had no soaring ceilings, no pillars and statuary, no starstone or gilding. Its proportions were surprisingly modest, but every inch of the space was turned to the practical purpose of close study. The books crowding the shelves of the many plain oak bookcases were well-used and well-loved, though also well-kept; reading desks and comfortable chairs were tucked into every cranny and corner; handsome glass cases hinted at rare and precious bookly treasures just waiting to spill their secrets. The library was well-stocked, lived-in and loved, and full of the personality of whoever had built it.

Which was, possibly, the gentleman who looked up from a gigantic tome, blinking in befuddled surprise at his unexpected guests. Our guide didn’t linger; within moments, the door closed behind us, and Jay and I were left to introduce ourselves to Hylldirion the Lorekeeper.

‘Please forgive the intrusion,’ I murmured, recognising the bemused, faraway look of a man whose mind was far from the room in which he sat. ‘Her Majesty sent us to enquire with you about—’

‘Ancestry records? Yes, yes.’ Hylldirion set aside his tome — a volume I longed to leaf through, it positively radiated secrets — and stood up. The process cost him some effort, for he looked at least a hundred years old and could easily have been thrice that. He was bald as an egg, his stooped frame clad in a simple blue robe, though his grey eyes held a bright alertness I myself would’ve envied on many an early morning.

‘Later, certainly,’ I said, for we did want to pursue the question of the Werewodes and their possible Yllanfalen ancestry. ‘But we particularly wanted to ask you about…’

I trailed off, realising that Hylldirion had no way of knowing about the Werewode part of our mission. We hadn’t mentioned that to anyone yet, not even the queen. How then had he known we would be interested in his lineage papers?

‘What—-’ I began, but he was looking at Jay, and Jay had an air of acute embarrassment shaded with irritation, and he was most definitely avoiding my eye.

Something slotted into place.

‘Wha,’ I breathed.

Jay’s expression turned stony, and an irritated muscle jumped in his jaw. ‘We aren’t here for that, sir,’ he said to the Lorekeeper, with slightly strained politeness.

‘Jay,’ I choked. ‘You’re— you can’t mean that you’re—’

It was Hylldirion who answered; Jay maintained his silence. ‘Possessed of a degree of Yllanfalen heritage? It’s as plain as a pikestaff.’  

‘As waiting rooms go,’ said Jay, ‘This one isn’t bad.’ He reposed himself upon the grass once more, shut his eyes, and apparently dozed off.

I stood watching him for a few minutes, undecided about whether or not to interrupt his nap. As opportunities for R&R went, the locale was ideal but the timing was pretty bad.

But he looked so comfortable lying stretched out in the verdure, with a tiny half-smile on his sun-bathed face, that I didn’t have the heart.

He didn’t seem to mind that he was exhausted, yet expected to soldier on; nor that Milady kept him hopping, week in, week out. He never complained. Either he loved the job that much, or he had one hell of a work ethic.

Which made me wonder, once again, about the Jay behind the workhorse façade. Though we’d been working together for some weeks now, I was aware that I still didn’t know him very well. There had hardly been the time to try.  The Jay I knew was tireless, unbelievably dedicated, magickally remarkable, and very self-contained. He’d occasionally got a little irritated with me (my fault, always), but his temper rarely frayed, he never panicked, and he hardly ever worried. A cool cucumber, you might say.

But nobody was like that all the time. Em Rogan had called him “controlled”, and she was right. Where was the real Jay, behind the top-of-the-class star student of the Hidden University? What did he care about, besides his studies and his mission with the Society? The only glimpses I’d really had into his inner world were disparate things like his dress sense (that jacket didn’t quite go with the image), the motorbike (ditto), and…

Nope, that was about it.

Might have something to do with the family, I mused. The only time I really saw him animated was when he talked about his siblings, of which there were at least three—

‘You’re staring at me,’ said Jay, and I realised with a start that his dark eyes were open.

‘Was not,’ I said automatically.

‘And you had that pensive look on your face.’

‘Pensive?’ I tried my best smile on him. ‘Wasn’t thinking anything, I swear.’

‘One might even say, inquisitive.’ Jay sat up with a slight groan, and brushed grass seeds out of his hair. ‘Whatever I’ve done to deserve such scrutiny, I beg mercy.’

‘I was just wondering,’ I began, but with a whoosh of magick — tasting like clear air after a thunderstorm, and smelling of white wine — our not-so-friendly local sprite was back.

She’d developed a smile.

‘My name is—’ she said, followed by several unpronounceable syllables I will not attempt to recreate. ‘It means flow of bright water in your tongue.’

‘…Is it all right if we call you that?’ I said.

‘Maybe just “Flow”,’ Jay amended.

Flow bowed her assent. ‘You are welcome in Aylligranir, Cordelia Vesper and Jay Patel,’ she announced. ‘Her Majesty is eager to meet the envoys of Queen Delia. If you will follow me?’

Her manner being far more gracious than before, I was somewhat surprised, and a shade uneasy. Obviously, our ruse had succeeded better than I had expected. Hopefully, anyway. That, or this was a counter-ruse, and upon accepting Flow’s gracious invitation we were to be thrown into a deep, dark dungeon.

And how was it that she knew our names? I didn’t remember telling her mine, let alone Jay’s.

‘Our fame has preceded us,’ I whispered to Jay, as Flow walked, stately and straight-backed, towards the sheer hillside.

‘Can’t decide if that’s a good thing or bad,’ Jay muttered.

Neither could I.

Instead of coming to an abrupt halt at the base of the emerald-green hill, Flow wavered like the water whose namesake she was, and vanished.

‘Um,’ said Jay. ‘What do we do?’

I eyed the impenetrable verdure, no less confused. ‘When in doubt, follow suit,’ I said, and walked after Flow, putting my feet, as best I could, exactly where she had stepped.

It’s hard to walk face-first into a slab of rock, so I shut my eyes.

No impact. No grazed nose. I took two steps, then three, then five, and when I still felt free-flowing air around my face I hazarded a glance.

‘Oh,’ I said, and stopped.

Flow had walked us into the middle of a city. Right into the middle: we stood in the centre of a wide street, paved in pale, silver-touched stone. To my left and right, and all around me, stupendous buildings soared. They were tall, they were graceful, they were pale and interesting, yet touched here and there with bright motes of colour. Starstone liberally glimmered, everywhere I looked. Pointed arches embraced grand, clear windows bordered in stained glass; engraved pilasters and carved friezes graced every façade.

I heard music: faint, ethereal, enticing. Faerie bells upon a summer breeze.

It reminded me, sharply, of the music I had twice heard Jay draw forth from a piano, or a spinet, and I looked keenly at him.

‘What?’ he said. ‘I can’t possibly be more interesting to look at than all of this.’

‘Nothing. Sorry.’ I needed to put a lid on my curiosity. Jay wasn’t a mystery to solve.

Flow, oblivious alike to our awed wonder and our conversation, floated away down the street. I hurried to catch up. There were not many other Yllanfallen abroad; our footsteps echoed in the quiet, and the distant music teased insistently at me.

Ahead of us loomed a structure of such size and splendour as to put all the rest to shame: a palace, in other words, set in gardens of such verdure, such ethereal beauty, I could have lived there forever.

And as such, I was obliged to stifle an intense desire to turn tail and run away.

We were here on one errand: find out what the Yllanfallen knew about magickal silver, or indeed about Mary or Cicily Werewode, if the two things proved to be connected. But in posing as envoys from my mother, we would now be obliged to be envoys from my mother. And who knew what seductive magick this deliriously gorgeous place would work on our senses while we were at it? Aylligranir was like Ygranyllon, only… better. More beautiful. Less wrecked.

I glanced behind me. Jay walked at my left elbow, and several feet behind both of us strolled a pair of Yllanfallen men. They looked innocuous enough at first glance, but something about their demeanour, the matching dark-blue raiment they wore, and the incidental fact that they were armed tipped me off. These were guards. Either Flow had summoned them to keep us in order, or they had fallen in with us once we’d passed through the palace gates.

So much for my stirrings of a plan to sneak away. Not that it would have availed me very much, this time; it’s not like Flow wouldn’t notice.

No, we would have to brazen it out.

Palaces are never of meagre proportions, and this one was a fair specimen of its kind, in being far too big and improbably convoluted. Once through the soaring double doors, another ten minutes’ walking had to be gone through before we at last arrived at an audience chamber. Presumably. Flow liked the palace; I judged this from the dancing gait she’d adopted once inside the pale, cool walls, and the way her sea-foam gown frisked around her legs. She stopped before a tall, narrow door of solid starstone, the stuff gleaming pale and faintly blue even at this early hour, and bestowed upon us a smile of such angelic exaltation I began to wonder who we were to meet. A queen, or a god?

She said nothing, however, only faded away, as she had before: and the starstone door swung slowly open.

No throne-room lay beyond. No grand, imposing chamber of any sort, in fact; more of a salon, sumptuously decorated but surprisingly comfortable. A carpet the colour of rose quartz covered a silvered floor. Matching, gossamer curtains framed the tall, slim window of clear glass overlooking a profusion of yellow rose bushes below. Velvet divans with plump, embroidered cushions and deep armchairs made up the furniture, surrounding a low table of silvery stone.

The room’s only occupant was a slim woman seated at a birchwood desk near the window, pen in hand, eyes fixed upon something faraway. Her black hair was bound back in a simple plait, with a ribbon threaded through, and she wore a loose jade-green robe. Her skin was the colour of amber-touched honey. She looked a little out of place in the pale, elegant room; her vivid colouring washed out the delicate tints of the furnishings. In contrast with her, everything looked a little faded.

She did not look up as we entered the salon, nor did she make any sign that she had noticed us.

I paused a moment, uncertain. Would Flow return? Were we not to be introduced? Even the guards did not seem disposed to assist, having taken up positions upon either side of the door — on the outside.

The door had decided no further visitors were required, and quietly closed itself behind us.

When a couple of minutes passed in silence, I finally cleared my throat. ‘Um, good morning. We—’

‘Oh!’ said the lady, and jumped. She looked at us in round-eyed surprise, and dropped her pen. ‘Oh,’ she said after a moment. ‘The envoys? I had quite lost myself in thought, hadn’t I? Please.’ She stood up, came towards us with an eager step, and shook my hand heartily, and then Jay’s. ‘Do tell me your names,’ she said. ‘I am sure I was told, but I am afraid I was only half listening, and have forgotten.’

I repressed an urge to steal a look at Jay. Was he as confused as I? Who exactly had we been delivered to meet? Flow had implied that the queen would receive us, but this vibrant, daydreaming woman surely could not be her.

‘Cordelia Vesper, my lady,’ I said, with a curtsey. I could have no idea of her title, supposing she possessed one, but it never hurts to be polite.

‘Delia’s daughter.’ It was not a question, more of a statement, and came with a considering look that took in everything about me, from my hair to my shoes.

‘Jay Patel,’ said Jay, with a trace of diffidence rather unlike him. Had the splendour of Aylligranir and its palace intimidated him? Surely not, after our sojourn at Mandridore.

‘Patel,’ repeated her ladyship — the queen? She was, if anything, as arrested by Jay’s name as by mine, and subjected him to a fresh scrutiny.

Which did not appear to surprise Jay, though it did discomfit him. He endured it in silence, though his jaw clenched.

‘Yes,’ she said at last, and with one last, keen look, she released Jay from the pressure of her regard, and looked once more at me.

Llirriallon the Gentle, my hat. Welcoming she may be, but something about her was beginning to scare me.

‘Now then, what has my sister-queen to say?’ said she, confirming once and for all her identity. Did they not do pomp and ceremony?

I straightened, as if that would help. ‘Erm. Her Majesty, Queen Delia of Ygranyllon, has sent us to— er, to convey her greetings and respects, and—’

‘But she has not, has she?’ interrupted Queen Llirriallon, gently enough, but the words stopped me dead.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I stammered.

‘Two envoys from Ygranyllon arrived not three days ago,’ said the queen calmly. ‘The business they arrived to transact is already in hand; therefore I cannot imagine why Delia would trouble to send another, and so soon.’